Snapshots
Much has been made of the recent weather in New England. My own circle of correspondents and contacts have been woeful about the lack of skiing and the general lack of season that has pervaded this grey, warm winter. I have responded in a characteristic and contrary way, enjoying the lack of difficulty of movement that snow and ice afford. I do worry about environmental impact — particularly with regard to local organisms. Will plants bloom too early to be pollinated? Will animals lose out on important food resources that are tied to a seasonal cycle? As much as I am enjoying the lack of snow, I do enjoy the New Hampshire niche of plants and animals and landscape, and would be disappointed to have its cast of characters change permanently with the climate alteration.
Still, as it’s snowed twice this season and I’ve gotten in a car accident during one of those days, I’m hesitant to actually endorse a substance that increased the difficulty of ordinary movement.
Today was a another day of rain, which I enjoy because it makes me want to drink tea, and tea is one of my primary sensual pleasures in life. Even consumed daily, a new cup of piping hot tea is a thing in which to regularly luxuriate; each one has its essential and simple now-ness. It demands time and attention. While snowfall provides a sense of the cancellation of sound, muffling and restricting the ability of noise to travel, which creates a curious sense of vast vide, the low percussive white noise of rainfall soothes me immeasurably. And since there’s less after-effect than snow, one’s pleasure doesn’t need to be tempered by the awareness of the eventual chores to follow.
The one downfall of today’s rain is the impenetrable blanket of clouds that ruined one of my standard daily neatnesses (it’s not a miracle or a mitzvah, but it is a minor marvel). When I leave in the mornings, the light is weak, and the sky a pervasive midnight blue, and by the time I arrive at work, the sky is light and the sun has achieved clarity. People who dislike winter hate the getting up in the dark and the driving home in the dark, and it’s quietly pleasurable to get to work earlier than many people (7:05am) and still have the sky have transformed from dark to light between stepping in and out of my car. I have only rarely seen sunrises that were spectacular; most tend to be chill and lacking in any dramatic effect. But — again — the simplicity of the fact that, yea, there is light, brings me cheer.
This post would be best topped off with a photograph of the morning full moon from the middle of last week, hovering high over the horizon and glowing with enough light to make one think it was a pale morning sun. Unfortunately, I wasn’t carrying at the time, and so this post is picture free. But it was lovely. “Irreducably complex”? Not remotely. It was simple. Amusingly, it reinforced something I had been surprised to see portrayed in Berkeley Breathed’s unfortunately repetitive Opus strip:
Right, enough sentimentalism. I’m off for a wee cuppa.
Godspeed, You Red and Black Emperor
One last post about City of Heroes.
The character creation matrix is amazing. I have yet to see a hero in the game that looks like another hero unless deliberately designed to be so (usually indicated by very similar names). And while it is indubitably easy to create a character based upon one’s favourite comic character, I have discovered an alternate aspect that has been wonderfully fulfilling.
As a kid, my siblings and I were constantly writing comic books. Few of these comics made it to the drawn page, as we each contributed to the writing and the art, and comic jams can be tough to coordinate. I have file folders with old pagers of partially-completed drawings with unformed spaces left for the contributions and cast of a one or two of the trio. And we had populated this world with a complex dramatis personae of heroes, anti-heroes, villains, and rogues all created from drawing sessions and backyard play, and a world of Lego figurines that had been customized to match.
The games we played and the scenarios we built with these figures were great fun, but it was a disappointment that they never fully transitioned into print form. We were better at crafting the rough equivalent of The Handbook to the Marvel Universe for our creations, filling out details and diagrams and histories and origins, than we were at disciplining ourselves to the task of writing and drawing a complete story.
Which had been part of why City of Heroes has been so marvelous. I have been gradually rebuilding some of the cadre of characters that I invented when I was ten and eleven. From Lego to superheroic childhood drawings to fully-rendered three-dee action avatars. From “Speed-Skate” to “Godspeed” to “Augenblich“. It feels great. I only wish I could get my siblings to team with me, and it would really be the next generation of what we created all those many years ago.
Diverting
I believe deeply in introspection and observation. So my relationship with entertainment that lacks substance, that doesn’t leave the participant or audience with additional cause for reflection, has always been tenuous. I wanted my diversions to be pensive and mulled, like cider. And this blog has always tried to be about sharing observations that had the potential for universality, based in observation of behaviors that are likely to part of a greater human pattern. In the Apologia, Socrates is said to have said that “it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others“.
And I find myself in the difficult position of having made a choice that runs counter to my training as a human and my instincts as a critic: I am trying not to deeply examine my life just yet. I am fast approaching the close of the fourth month of employment at my new job, and I continue to reserve judgment. Why? Well, I have often espoused that in order to evaluate whether one is satisfied with one’s employment, one has to be doing something again, and not for the first time. Since I’m primarily worked in schools, this has mostly meant that a whole year has to pass until one really has the perspective to start to know whether one’s observations are part of a pattern, or an anomaly based upon the particular cocktail of instances, personalities, and learning curve that has to do with novelty more than enduring aspects of culture and circumstance.
And so despite the fact that I have nimbly leapt to a goodly number of conclusions about my job, I am doing my utmost to ignore these results and allow myself the time to overwrite them, to confirm them to a greater depth, and to allow my first impressions to prove themselves for good or ill. But it’s hard to do. And because it’s contrary to both my instincts as a human and as an individual, I am forced to waste my time in order to prevent myself from lapsing into my normal pattern of pattern recognition. And so I’ve been playing video games to dull my mind.
I’ve written about video games before — numerous times, in fact — but the posts have always been bemused in tone, as I have been surprised at my moderate successes with various encounters with the medium. Basically, I’m a video game spaz, and the ability to focus and not twitch uncontrollably to the point where my avatar dies a gruesome and preventable death always used to be well beyond my abilities. And one of the reasons why I have always resisted the gaming realm has been because of the sheer repetition: do the thing, move the guy, push the buttons, wait until it recharges, repeat, repeat, repeat. Gah. It’s never been my thing.
Until NCSoft’s City of Heroes. Many people tell me that World of Warcraft and Age of Empires IV are both superior in their own particular ways, but boy oh boy do I love City of Heroes and it’s eeeevil counterpart City of Villains. I love the costume configurations. I love the sound effects of the various power signatures. I love just randomly running around a city and beating the crap out of muggers and wizards and zombies and mobsters and trolls. And I am told that once one starts playing with a team, with a trusted crew of online chums, that the game multiplies in the particular aspect that helps create tension and accordant feelings of success and enjoyment: the balance of chance and skill. Beating computerized bad guys is the name of the gaming system, and the odds are stacked in one’s favour; villains coded at your character’s level still are far, far less resilient in combat. But it’s easy to find oneself in a mob, a gang, a coven, and then the odds are very difficult to stay on top of. Even with the most choreographed of combat sequences, there’s always the chance that a healing power won’t grab the necessary boost of power, or that a thundering burst of energy won’t lay the bad guy out flat. And then there’s a scramble to see if the balance will tip against your character. And that’s thrilling. And it doesn’t stop being thrilling no matter how many times it’s repeated and no matter how many times I cycle through Flares, Fireball, Fire Blast, Flares, Fire Breath.
All of which easily enables me to kill hours stretched out in front of the monitor, faux-3D sound enveloping me in a cavalcade of popping and clanking rotors, thrumming bioelectric auras, and the soft thwipping of a well-aimed arrow. Sometimes I spend so much time that when I finally stand up, my whole body is sore from the lack of movement. And yet I will have successfully, to quote Guster, “wasted every moment of [my] Saturdays and [my] Sundays” in order to stave off having to make judgements and reach conclusions about my current state of being. Who ever thought I’d say this, but thank goodness for mindless repetition.
My sting? Oh, that’s right here.
Attended my third funeral in the past eighteen months, and the first for a non-family member. Prior to that, after attending two ceremonies for former teachers of mine, I had sworn them off entirely, realizing that the formal service was not personally helpful. The platitudes of faith and togetherness were not providing me with any grace or comfort, and it seemed unlikely, therefore, that my attendance at such things would provide any solace for any other attendants. And if that were the case, well, then it seemed better for all concerned if I simply forswore funerals altogether.
Attending these last few ceremonies have confirmed for me that there’s little the service can do to warm the cockles of my loss, but they have been interesting in clarifying the intended purpose of the event. And I’m beginning to understand that what I’m actually looking for in the post mortem is a good wake. The best funeral I ever attended was for the father of a friend, and it was organized as a remembrance of what the deceased was like in life, a celebration of the man and his works and his foibles. Vienna Teng has a song, “Say Uncle“, where she sings:
I retrieve the memories quickly as I can
add them to the portrait we all draw in our minds
your body gone, we shall keep the man.
That sort of mortal focus is what I need, the attempt at coalescing essence here, on this plane. And more and more I am coming to realize that this isn’t the intent of the service. It is there to provide words of the otherworldly, to prevent people from crying out, “But why?” It promises that, with patience, this will all be made right and that it was not meaningless. The difficulty is that Christianity is an evangelical religion, and in these trying times of flagging attendance, it seems to me that most ceremonial reminders of God’s divine grace tend to become mingled with entreaties for conversion. And, frankly, I find that to be the basest and most degraded of opportunistic shilling.
In addition to the confusion about the purpose of the funeral — and, admittedly, this could all be my own personal issues created by conflating the roles of the funeral and the memorial service — whether it is to celebrate the life of the deceased, to provide comfort with the belief of a greater beyond, or whether to serve as a cautionary moment to redirect the living towards salvation, this particular funeral had an additional master to whom was required homage: the military. Not only did the church need pulpit time to declare that we could mitigate our sorrows with the knowledge that death leads one to Heaven, the military trotted out its crisp, cornered ceremony to justify its actions on Earth. The military deals in death, it is the penny with which we all buy protection, but death of those on our side is somewhat embarrassing. It makes it look as if God in not with us, it reminds us that that fighting them over there is still guaranteed to hurt us here at home. Bugles, bagpipes, and triangular blue fields all try to say, “We are treating him honorably in death to convince you that we did honorably by him in life.” With particular unspoken emphasis on the circumstances that killed him. Yea, they are all, all honorable men.
Studio or Real
Is it just me, or are the local anchors of my news stations barely repressing a decidedly unobjective glee as they report that Democrats are winning seats in the election?
Maybe I’m just projecting.
Flying in the Face of Leviticus 11:23
From Heidi MacDonald comes the news that Batman, according to one scholar, exemplifies the Jewish ideals of struggle and self-sacrifice. I don’t have a lot to say about this, primarily as I am not intimately familiar with the Jewish ideal of struggle. But also because, well, it’s not really news; it’s angle.
I quibble with the concept of “angle” in news, as I worry that stories are published, not because they have useful information, but because they have a cute hook. And that informative pieces are skewed by the need to sidle into the story through the angle. I remember reading, many years ago, a newspaper article about a blind lawyer. The article was confused as to whether it was a profile of an individual overcoming adversity, a portrait of the technology that enabled him to operate on an equal level with his sighted colleagues, or the fact that he viewed himself as a “crime-fighter” and sent his vanquished foes photocopies of his license with the name “Batman” over his name. The last bit? All angle. It gives the profile an edge to keep the reader beyond the headline, a way of getting them into the story. He’s not just a lawyer, he sees himself as a Force for Justice. In the comics press, the angle would be that a blind lawyer identified with Batman and not Daredevil. And if the article hadn’t pre-dated the Ben Affleck film, the mainstream press article could have used that angle as well.
Regardless, the mere fact of Cary Friedman’s writing wouldn’t have had sufficient oomph to catch the eye of editors and readers without the Batman aspect, the Batman angle. And while the obvious question is, “Yes, but it is news?”, I posit two alternate queries: a) Sure, Batman’s Jewish. What isn’t Batman? He’s everything. b) Of course he’s Jewish. What superhero isn’t representative of some Jewish ideal?
Superheroes representing religion came forefront in the public consciousness when Bryan Singer has Superman crucify himself for the sins of humanity in this summer’s Superman Returns. Many people were dissatisfied with the whole Superman = Christ imagery, but it didn’t bother me, as I felt it was portrayed with more grace and dignity than the doves and halos that tend to populate every John Woo flick. Also, I had always associated Superman with religion since listening to Michael Shapiro speak on NPR about the 100 most influential Jews of all time, a list that began with Moses and ended with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of the extraterrestrial boy in blue. And since a great many superhero creators were Jewish, so I naturally associated Superman more with Moses than Jesus, but it’s difficult for Americans not to find or make Christ parallels in anything, given enough time, and Superman’s had an awful long time to slowly morph from his original intent to the pure American boy scout he is today.
Batman, though? Sure, he might represent the mantle of personal suffering, and maybe he does sacrifice his own happiness to help “repair the world”, but I’ve always associated Batman more with Catholicism than with Judaism. Probably because of the classic jokes, but also because of the pervasive crucifixes used in scenes where Bruce Wayne visits his parents’ graves. Adherents.com, a website dedicated to the cataloguing of information about religious beliefs, notes that former Batman writer and editor Elliot S! Maggin always considered Batman to be Episcopalian, and I consider that to be the final word on the matter — particularly since the Episcopalians are more tolerant of homosexuality.
Seeing Red, Fade to Black
No real stories from Dimitri’s wedding, but I am forced to revise my previous estimate that a hotel room is a hotel room, no matter how much one pays for it. My previous position was based upon a few hotel experiences and a growing sincere belief that one can dress it up, and buy different cleansing perfume, but that a hotel room still remained a box with an immobile bed whether it cost $35 a night or $100. Having just stayed in a $125 room, well, I’m ready to admit that maybe there are levels. It still had terrible construction and typical furnishings, and the headboard was hilariously broken and badly repaired, but the room had a better feel to it, a nicer sense of occupancy that didn’t drive one from its confines.
Also, the four hour drive from Connecticut convinced me that I would not have the fortitude to drive back and forth to Amherst this evening for a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. This event sounds hella nerdy, and the draw is unmistakable. I have no real idea on what sort of basis the event would stand: would it be social, conversational, a lecture, a presentation? What sort of people would show up? What happens when bibliophiles, graphomaniacs, and librarians clash over cocktails? The answers to these questions should be compelling enough, but the idea of driving home between 9:10pm and midnight is simply no longer feasible. My ability to string coherent thought together expires each evening at 9:30pm, and the night from there becomes a sparkly, glistening enterprise of unusual word associations, heavy eyelids, and raucous laughter. Terrifically amusing to me and my flatmate, but not the optimal state for driving twisty back-country highways. So no Noah Webster for me, I’m afraid.
Instead, I shall have to comfort myself with color theory. I recently learned that the school district that employs me did not see fit to have a consistent color scheme across its school athletic teams. So while the middle school wears blue, the high school players sport red. Now, I went to a combined middle/high school, so I lack the perspective and experience to know if this is normal. However, it feels odd. It feels like we have competing teams in the same system. And while I enjoy the classy black and red warm-up jackets that are worn about campus on game days or simply autumnal days, the actual red uniforms don’t do much for me. So I was amused to hear Sports Illustrated editor Frank Deford, on his weekly column on NPR go off on a torrent against too many teams that use red as their color. It’s a marvelously verbal essay, full of thesaurus listings and alliteration that would make Stan Lee envious.
There is too much of it, and I am asking for a bloody moratorium. OK, maybe—maybe—I can live with your darker hues, your maroon, your garnet or your burgundy, but the ripe reds running riot, row upon row, in stadiums and arenas, is becoming, as Chester A. Riley used to lament, a “revolting development.”
…Understand, I’ve got nothing against red. Hey, you’re listening to a man who named his daughter Scarlet. I’m just the fashion policeman trying to help all you cinnamon-clad crimson creatures, you puce people, you magenta masses, you vermilion millions. Everybody’s doing it now. Wearing red to games is tacky. It’s passé. It’s so yesterday. Red flag it.
—Frank Deford, “At Games across the land, seeing red“
So marvelously wordy, but interestingly issueless. I like Deford. He does for sports what PRI’s Marketplace does for money: Marketplace charmingly makes money matters accessible and contextual for those who are not financiers, and Deford he talks sorts in a manner that’s jocular but not jock-specific. But while I think he’s been a clear voice of reason about many sports issues, it must be difficult to come up with something substantive each week, and this tract is a soft lob. Which is perhaps why the vocabulary is so lush: he had to fill the column-inches somehow. Enjoyable, but mildly disappointing that he didn’t speculate on the purpose of the power color, the cultural reasons why red is so preferred by players and fans alike. After all, if studies show that those wearing black uniforms attract more penalty calls and demerits thank those wearing non-black uniforms, then color and competition clearly collaborate in some psychological manner. Is it true or is it an urban myth that red cars are pulled over by the police more frequently than any other hued vehicle? Do we associate red with speed, with daring in the way that Mark G. Frank and Thomas Gilovich’s study indicates we associate black with violence?
Sleigh Bells Ring, Are You Listening?
I always keep track of when I see the first instance of Christmas decorations each year. There has been a gradual creeping back, earlier and earlier, since my childhood memories. I recall that there used to be a Thanksgiving sometime in November, but Christmas decorations began coming hard on the heels of Hallowe’en. Then I began to see them when the Hallowe’en decorations started to come down, a few days before the holiday itself. I’m pretty sure that the earliest Christmas decorations I’ve ever seen — aside from the insane people that celebrate the miraculous virgin birth of Santa Claus all year ’round — we in the mid-twenties of October.
But today I realize I’ve been looking in the wrong place. Retail stores and supermarkets offer a window into the common commercial experience, and I always have used those as the most reliable indicator. But I now see that decorations and muzak may not have been the bellwethers I assumed them to be, and that I have been insulated from the truth. You see, I watch as little television as possible. And when I do watch TV, I try to make it as much a non-commercial experience as possible. And if what I experienced today is normal, is typical, then it throws my whole calendar out of whack. For today I saw a televised advertizement that was clearly a pre-Christmas teaser. It has elves and wishing and magic and expensive stuff. I didn’t come right out and say “the Holiday season”, but the visuals made it perfectly clear.
As if I really needed one more reason to despise Wal-Mart.
I’m Not
From Despair.com, the people that brought you the motivational satire posters, there is now DIY Despair, which allows you to accompany your favourite images with bold, forthright, depressing statements. Make Your Own motivational posters are not a new concept. The Star Trek ones have made the rounds, and many are quite amusing, regardless of whether you have a passing familiarity with Trek and its ilk.
But while it’s not a new idea, it is a handy and a timely one. Scant hours before parents arrived at school for “Back to School Night” — a quaint and fearsome colloquialism for Parent/Teacher Night that has few virtues aside from the fact that it avoids looking like the title for some truly unfortunate slashfic — a liberal dose of posters extolling the virtues of individuality and ethnic diversity were plastered over the walls. The actual ethnic makeup of the school lacks spectra, and the posters were more the highlighting of an intellectual ideal than they were a reflection of population or tolerance, and this was made more clear by the Motivational Style formatting of the posters, as if black borders and bold white typesetting would somehow inspire us to discover untold phenotypes within ourselves. The obvious clash between the actual students and the happy rainbow of model-bright smiles they were walking past inspired me to conceptualize another diversity poster for the walls.
And now the online toolset of Despair.com has made it happen. Thanks Despair.com!
Divide and Crush
There is a blogging divide between original content and zeitgeist participation. Some people write on blogs — and I recognize that this is a gross generalization, but there are two types of people in the world: those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t, and I tend to fall into the former category — are attempting to record a particular perspective, a written oral history, if you will. Not as entitled in concept as a vanity press, but with a solid belief that the observations of the common-and-garden individual have merit and resonance. These people speak their minds, sometimes in order to order their thoughts, and sometimes to clarify a personal position, and sometimes simply to record the now. The other side of the blogging spectrum consists of popular affirmation, the participation in linkmanship. One states an opinion or a point of view by linking to a similar opinion or a contrary opinion, basing one’s contributions upon the preponderance of available opinion. This is then codified by the comments and trackbacks and linktos that given evidence that the opinionist is not alone, but part of a swarm of thought on the matter of the moment.
As a self-declared iconoclast, as someone who will compromise by saying that, well, at least we are all part of an archipelago and so I am too an island, I find little use for the latter technique. So I was immediately wary of my instinct to blog about Saddam Hussein’s comments last week that he would “crush the heads” of his enemies. The obvious parallel to the somewhat annoying Kids in the Hall catch-phrase leapt to mind… as did the awareness that sure the blogosphere would be rife with the reference. How surprising to find that a Google Blog search produced a scant twenty-five results and a BlogDigger search only fourteen. But still, my initial impulse was quelled by the feeling that it was too obvious, too ordinary to put to pixel.
Not so with this second news piece. Less of a lark and more of a piece of personal… something. Statementship. This item surpassed a need for communal temperature-taking and became more about me! Therefore: excellent blog fodder.
Back in March, I found myself interning at a public high school in western Massachusetts and was shocked to realize just how long it had been since I had uttered the Pledge of Allegiance. With all the recent hoopla over the “under God” portion of the Pledge and the fervent opinions about whether it belonged (depending upon whether one considers the act of adding the phrase to the Pledge to be more political and temporal than pure, or whether one believes that the United States is a Christian nation), I fixed my opinion about the issue based upon my own desire to continue to enforce the required separation of Church and State. But I had forgotten the chilly ring of a couple of dozen voices, chanting together, dully reciting without thinking about the words they intoned. A sudden realization that “the Lord’s prayer” was a declaration that I desired God’s will to be done on Earth had driven me from even again attending church services. I felt really uncomfortable standing in a room of students unthinkingly swearing fealty to the vicissitudes of State. I had attended a high school where the Pledge was not recited, and I was suddenly awash with a feeling of relief that I hadn’t been asked to participate in such mass programming.
So when I read that a school in North Carolina had quietly, perhaps intentionally, stopped requiring the recitation of the Pledge, I was highly intrigued, especially now that the state has joined “37 [others to] require schools to include the pledge in their daily schedules”. Which is in and of itself a sticky wicket, considering that the Supreme Court has ruled that requiring the Pledge “violate[s] the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of due process and the First Amendment’s requirements of religious freedom and free speech upon the state.” In fact, a school policy that required a student to simply stand quietly during the Pledge but otherwise not participate was changed in 1998 when faced with a lawsuit by the ACLU.
However, it’s no longer 1998. It’s now “after 9/11”. Which means that according to the previous link, Nebraska law has reinstated a 1949 “patriotism law” that requires, among other things, that students be instructed as to the “dangers of Communism”. It is generally considered that the words “under God” were added to raise an upright middle finger to the Godless Communists. And now that we have a new enemy, also considered to be “Godless” by our nation of fatuous Christmas-and-Easter Christians, such blatant line-in-the-sand allegiance is once again required. I tend to find myself agreeing with Dan Bern: we can’t move on, socially or politically, until the children of the Cold War and their engineered minds wither and die.
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