Chickens by the Car, Bizarre
I’m not one to delight in other people’s misery. Not ordinary people anyway. CEOs of corporations, politicians… for these people who have thrust themselves into the capitalist limelight, I have nothing but schadenfreude, and I am so hot right now for Tom DeLay to go to prison. But decent, ordinary folk get a variety of sufferings thrust upon them, and I wish it otherwise. Chris MacLaren’s blog entry about a neighbor’s burning house reminded me vividly of driving through Saratoga on my way to 9 Derby Drive and passing a house on fire. It was beautiful. The flames were spilling out of the front door and pouring along the roof of the porch. There the air currents caught them and pulled them back into the second story window, creating a swooping column of fire that curved and roared and pulsed like the most dangerous crazy straw imaginable. But even as I was awestruck by the spectacle, I knew that this was someone’s everything that was being destroyed, and I couldn’t, in good conscience, rubberneck just for the breathtaking physics and colors.
The other day, the house that is diagonally across the street from my window had emptied its contents out onto the lawn. I don’t know if the property was foreclosed or condemned or the tenants evicted… I can but speculate, but it didn’t look like the occupants were simply moving, and so it’s likely that the circumstances were unhappy.
However, as a result of the evacuation of this property, there is now a pair of vagabond chickens wandering the yard. And because they are feeling the liberty of suddenly being free range, they often leave the yard and explore the adjacent street and parking lot and the yards of the neighboring houses. I have long held the philosophy that any movie that has a shot of chickens running amok in a dusty road is going to be awesome, or at least that moment will make me more predisposed to ignore other glaring flaws. In any case, the occasional view of chickens nonchalantly meandering through traffic has increased the joy I feel while idly gazing out of my tiny kitchen. And while this probably doesn’t improve the circumstances of the previous owners of these chickens any, it feels good take some irrational, cackling cheerfulness out of the results of their misfortune. That probably makes me a terrible person.
(I have subsequently communed with and photographed these chickens, and I was hoping to have the photos developed and up for this post, but the likelihood of me actually getting this film to the pharmacy or even to SnapFish with any due speed is heartily unlikely. Don’t “stay tuned” or anything, but I will edit this post to include visual documentation at some point. EDIT: Which has, clearly, been done.)
In Space, No One Can Hear Your Engine Cavitation
Went to go see the Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science yesterday. I’ve been in Star Wars mode of late, really enjoying my nostalgic connection with the films. I dug out my Star Wars Lego sets from a couple of years back and reassembled them, noticing again how well designed they were and how old school the design was. Much of Lego’s current output relies heavily on the large, structural pre-fab elements that remove any resonance from the traditional term “Lego brick”. They are vastly un-brick-like. Rumours persist that this is because Lego had to design new and different building elements once their copyright on the traditional nubby blocks expired, and so in order to prevent their kits from falling into commercial obsolescence they have engaged in a number of marketing and licensing deals, and have increasingly built kits using their non-rectangular “bricks”. Whether this is completely accurate, it is one of the seeming failings of the upcoming Batman line of Lego kits, which seem flimsy and chi-chi, without the solidity of the classic kits. Amusingly, to further justify the bitterness of the prequel-hatahs, the Star Wars original trilogy Lego kits are largely designed like the kits that would have been their contemporaries in the 1980s.
I had been to a Star Wars museum exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in 1998, and so I anticipated that this exhibit would be similarly enjoyable. However, except for the presence of an AT-ST, a jawa, an actual full-sized set-model of Luke’s Episode IV landspeeder, and some jedi outfits, there was little in this exhibit that I hadn’t seen before. Some artifacts and props were totally unfamiliar, and upon closer examination, I discovered that they were part of the world of design that underlay Episode III. How sad that I was so underwhelmed by the prequels that by the time it came to Revenge I wasn’t even paying attention to the world-building and prop and costume design that LucasArts has always done so well. Although, it must be said, the original trilogy was designed with the aim in mind that the used objects would have been well and truly used, that little would look clean or pristine. And the new films were designed at the apex of a civilization, with curves and opulence. And, frankly, I found it less interesting. The way in which an object wears and is distressed gives it a sense of history and tangibility. It makes it look less like a prop and more like a tool. And the little crater marks and dents on the Falcon and the landspeeder make them more interesting than any lovely Naboo creation.
One other thought on the exhibit: the gift shop had a number of t-shirts and hats and the like featuring the visage and color scheme of Darth Vader. Most of these were accompanied by various logos that spelled out “Vader” or “Sith” in gangland fonts reminiscent of tags and tattoos and tribal markings. And while this was relatively cool, I am totally bemused at the idea that The Empire, an ultimate expression of a monolithic Establishment, could be successfully sold as teen-friendly rebellious street-wear. S’all I’m sayin’.
And what has caused all of this fondness for the creative works of a man I had largely disavowed? Star Wars: Jedi Academy. I am now up to level three, and the difficulty level has progressed to the point where my ass is being handed to me by Sith on a regular basis. With the most recent upgrade to my powers, I had the option of sticking with one lightsaber and being able to wield it as strong levels, or to use two sabers simultaneously, or to use a Darth Maul-stylee dual-bladed weapon. Frankly, the hilt designs on the dual-saber were all terrible, but after fighting a bunch of Sith apprentices, I was keen on the idea of being able to see more than one color laser-blade while zooping about the maps. However, the fact that I can’t seem to defend myself with two blades, thus causing me to die shrieking every couple of minutes is causing me to seriously consider jumping back to a previous save point so that I can stick with one supah-strong blade.
But while working valiantly to get to my current stalemate, I was having a really good time. Despite the fact that I needed to consult the walkthrough about four out of every five missions at some seemingly impassible point — a mark of shame, as it clearly indicates that I could never buy a video game on its release date, as I would hit some intractable puzzle and have to wait a few weeks until someone else had taken the time to map everything out… how demoralizing — the gameplay and the action have been incredibly compelling. Wired magazine mirrored my opinions to a T recently when they pointed out that the best movies George Lucas has released lately have been Star Wars video games. The blend of sound effects and soundtrack, and the complex action sequences are exactly what I want out of a Star Wars film, and i have the ability to skip past the lame dialogue. These are the adventures I would have played in my backyard in 1980, with gun-shaped sticks and the occasional Mattel product. And that is a most satisfying nostalgia, far more fulfilling than trying to justify the failing vision of a once-inventive director.
Brothelversary
Just when I’ve finally gotten rid of the enormous bandwidth suck and lag time that was my January 1st book cover spectacular, I spring the following on you. Oh, well. Happy birthday anyway, Brothel. You’ve caused me to seriously injure eternity in a manner which none can calculate. May you continue not to set off firewalls with your title, and may you have more than nine members in the future. Many happy returns of the day.
Central Dogma
Many, many, manymany people have written about the recent New York ComicCon. They were, mostly, people who were in attendance, and therefore had something interesting to say. I wasn’t, so I’ve waited for the furor to die down somewhat before I felt it was safe to comment upon something that I really don’t have much experience in. That and, well, I had already blogged this week, and I find it hard to break the habit of storing up entires for those long, cold stretches when one really doesn’t have much to add to the global commentary.
Publisher’s Weekly does a — shock! — weekly newsletter about the comic book scene, and they covered a conference of librarians at the NYCC to discuss the issues surrounding coded and overt depiction of sexuality in manga. Manga is hot in bookstores these days, and so it’s also hot in libraries. And because it’s hot. many publishers have jumped on the bandwagon and purchased the U.S. reprint rights to all sorts of speed-lined, zip-a-tone garbage that is well and truly thought of as ephemeral if not disposable in its country of origin. And librarians, despite the fact that they claim to be experts in evaluating sources and resources, are apparently all higglety-pigglety about being able to distinguish which manga is actually worth reading, and which manga might cause the average parent to transform into a short, stumpy, superdeformed caricature of steaming wrath.
So, the article says, librarians would like ratings on manga. They acknowledge that some manga is rated already, but what they’d really prefer are the kind of ratings that the MPAA has been supplying recently — the kind where the reader is also provided with a laundry list of all the purile reasons why someone might want to go see this particular flick. (I’m being snide, of course, but mostly about the MPAA.) Certain librarians at this panel did feel like the ratings were insufficient in allowing them to anticipate content. And one interesting and accurate point was that even initial readings may not be an accurate gague of future content: “A manga series will start out clean and age-appropriate and later in the series will develop more mature themes.” Of course, due to the delay between domestic publication and U.S. publication, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see if a particular series has turned blue in Japan before volume one is printer over here.
But that’s not really the key point of why I bring up this whole sundry tale. Librarians aren’t supposed to want ratings. According to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This has, in fact, been specifically interpreted to indicate that it would be unethical for a librarian to not stock or to deny the circulation of Rated-R films to youth. “Policies that set minimum age limits for access to any nonprint materials or information technology, with or without parental permission, abridge library use for minors.” Whoops. Guess you weren’t supposed to ask for that. No wonder the PW article described her as “hesitant”. BURN THE HERETIC! BUUUURRRNNN HEEEERRRRR!!!
Of course, the real reason why this pinged my radar is because I think that particular proscription of the Library Bill of Rights is the best self-defeating statement since “All generalizations are false”. If the ALA make a dogmatic statement of doctrine stating that libraries aren’t allowed to follow dogma or doctrine, then they are obligated not to select or proscribe materials based upon the Library Bill of Rights. Whoops, again.
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