Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
According to secret Vatican documents recently released wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII attempted a "long distance" exorcism of Hitler which failed to have any effect.
Hey, it looks like the DVDs of the (sigh) last season of the best television comedy of all time came out today. Amazon can get you what you want. Still no word on that movie...
I asked him what he had meant, exactly, when he spoke at the recording session of abandoning “finger-pointing” songs, and he took a sip of wine, leaned forward, and said, “I looked around and saw all these people pointing fingers at the bomb. But the bomb is getting boring, because what’s wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. What’s wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesn’t let them really speak, so they just add their confusion to the mess. I mean, they have some kind of vested interest in the way things are now. Me, I’m cool.” He smiled.
“Peter Pan in Scarlet” is a kind of last-gasp attempt to cash in on Great Ormond Street’s copyright, which runs out in 2007. “We thought we would make the most of it while we can,” Ms. De Poortere said. “After 2007 it will have so many sequels. At least this is commissioned with our approval, and we will benefit from the income.”
...
“Now there’s the new ‘Peter Pan in Scarlet,’ the official sequel, so you find out what really happened to Peter with the official voice and sanctioning of the estate,” he said.
The New Yorker tackles Duke's lacrosse rape scandal. On a completely unrelated, lighter note, it's also got a great Louis Menand review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews.
* And in the Huffington PostGeorge Effing Saunders has short, fabulistic piece about 9/11.
This thing was done to us. We have to do something. We have to strike back.
We resolved to do so. You could feel it in the air: Purpose, direction--flags appeared on car antennas, people's eyes got brighter. The cats got the spring back in their step and suddenly mice were no longer safe. Water began doing what water is supposed to do--seismologists detected the sound of thousands of first waves slapping down over thousands of restored waterfalls. The leaves changed, gloriously as I remember it, feeling to us like the miracle that leaf-change actually is. We thought: Wow, orange trees, red trees, yellow freaking trees, we are, all of us, alive again, alive still.
One night around that time, lying in bed, kids asleep, wife asleep, wind outside blowing through the trees forming, blessedly, no words at all--I realized that in our relief and excitement, no one had asked--of the wind, the swingsets, the ocean, the highway--no one had asked what, suddenly, seemed to me a few reasonable questions:
Strike back against whom? And where? And how? And to what end?
I thought about waking my wife. But it was late and we had to work next day, and I thought: the 'who' and the 'where' and the 'how' and the 'to what end?'--that is not now, that is later, that is yet to be decided, by the people who decide such things, people who are, like us, of good will, only more powerful, and know things we don't, and will proceed with discretion, in the full measure of time.
But when I woke next morning, it had already begun.
The U.S. economy of the decades to come will center on farming, not high-tech, or "information," or "services," or space travel, or tourism, or finance. All other activities will be secondary to food production, which will require much more human labor. Places that are unsuited for local farming will obviously suffer... To put it simply, Americans have been eating oil and natural gas for the past century, at an ever-accelerating pace. Without the massive "inputs" of cheap gasoline and diesel fuel for machines, irrigation, and trucking, or petroleum-based herbicides and pesticides, or fertilizers made out of natural gas, Americans will be compelled to radically reoganize the way food is produced, or starve.
I've just finished reading The Long Emergency, which should suffice to convince you that we are in for a radical revision of the way we live in the next few decades.
The world is now using 27 billion barrels of oil a year. If every last drop of the remaining 1 trillion barrels could be extracted at current cost ratios and current rates of production -- which is extremely unlikely -- the entire endowment would only last another thirty-seven years.
Kunstler makes short work of the miracles -- hydropower, solar power, hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear power -- which won't be coming to save us, and convincingly demonstrates that a world which held approximately one billion people at the start of the oil age simply won't be able to sustain the six and a half billion people we now having walking around, even if the environment weren't collapsing around our ears, which it is.
In short, things are fixing to get incredibly ugly.
The book was excerpted in Rolling Stone not too long ago; I know I've linked to it before. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever -- and then read this book.
I forgot to link to it, but I had an interview/book review in the Indy last week about The City Is a Rising Tide by UNCW's Rebecca Lee (both the book and its author are great). And this week I have a hard-hitting exposé on the game of carrom, which is featured on the cover entirely because of Derek Anderson's excellent photograph.
In a week or so I should have an interview with the editor behind New Stories from the South -- in which, it can never be said enough, will appear Chris Bachelder's fantastic story from Backwards City #2.
...was talk about situations like the one described in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, about one man's obsessive quest to expose plagiarism in his department at Ohio State.
There was also a lot of listening to rules about how not to experiment on humans, which are entirely irrelevant to my discipline. But I've since blocked all those many hours out.
* Jonathan Lethem profiles Bob Dylan next month in Rolling Stone. The Web site has an excerpt.
* Bruce Schneier is the latest person to attempt to restore some rationality to our discussions about terrorism. [+/-]
Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn't engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn't write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn't use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we'd reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It's time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation -- and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership.
* Grant Morrison talks Batman with Newsarama. [+/-]
GM: The very rough timeline I have in my head runs as follows - 19 year old Bruce Wayne returns from his journey around the world and becomes the (1930s style) Dark Avenger Gothic Vigilante Batman for his first year of adventures. Then, aged 20, he meets Robin and his whole outlook changes - now he has responsibilities, he becomes less reckless, now he has a partner, he lightens up and learns to have fun again for the first time since his parents died. The police stop chasing him, the Joker stops killing and becomes a playful crime clown, and Gotham is bright and crazy like Vegas. Batman's having the time of his life in his early 20's, fighting colorful villains and monsters with his irrepressible young pal.
But by the time he's in his mid-20s things are starting to go wrong - the first Robin leaves to go to college and hang out with the Teen Titans. Batman enjoys a period as a swinging bachelor for a couple of years but it's not long before the hammerblows start to fall - in rapid succession, the now-homicidal Joker kills Jason Todd, the new Robin, and maims Barbara (Batgirl ) Gordon, Bane breaks Batman's back, then Gotham is devastated by earthquakes, plagues and urban warfare, the Joker kills Jim Gordon's beloved wife, Jason Todd returns corrupted, and a betrayal by his superhero friends leads Batman to the creation of Brother Eye and leads him on to Infinite Crisis where Batman winds up pointing a gun at Alexander Luthor's head before deciding to leave Gotham for a year.
Thinking about it this way, the grim Batman of the last decade or so makes a whole lot of sense - the guy went from cool, assured crimefighter to shattered ***-up, barely clinging on with his fingernails. His mission, his life and his sanity had all gone off the rails. His confidence was shot. After a few years of relentless pain, bad luck and betrayal like Batman's had, any normal man would be canceling the papers, pulling the blinds, then pulling the trigger. We had to address the effect of these tragedies and then move him beyond them.
Apologies for the slow blogging this week. I've been busy. Luckily, my classes start on Monday, after which time I'll never be busy again.
* Rethinking the collapse of Easter Island. Terry Hunt argues in American Scientist, contra Diamond, that rats (not people, though in fairness people introduced the rats) deforested the island, which furthermore may never have been all that populated to begin with.
I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a television programme.
I suspect this advice may not be strictly applicable to graduate students.
The broken Tom K comic preview page has been fixed. You can find it here. It's really very good; to read the rest of "100,000 Miles," which you certainly will want to, you've got to order a copy.
Also, while I'm talking more about BCR 4, I'd like to quietly plug the photos Jaimee took for the winners' pages in the magazine, which I think are just fantastic. You can find ghostly turquoise versions of them by reloading the index page a couple times. (She also made our current parody logo, at left. Like Barry Zuckercorn and Haruki Murakami and Tom K, she's very good.)
We just sent Backwards City #4 off to the printer, which is why everything suddenly looks so nice and aquamarine around here. (Also why I hardly got any sleep last night.)
Regular blogging will resume tomorrow. Today I want to highlight a few of the writers and artists in the upcoming issue of Backwards City, called "our best issue" just the other day by no less a personage than Don Ezra Cruz. (Many of these wonderful people have wonderful Web sites and blogs, which you can find under the "Our Writers" tab on the linkbar.)
To tide you over until the print issue arrives, I've put some excerpts up at the usual place, and I hope you'll take a look:
Insomniacs will attest that I've spent the last few hours creating a new template to go along with our upcoming fourth issue (excerpts of which are now available at the also-redesigned backwardscity.net -- I'll talk a lot more about this tomorrow).
I'm not 100% satisfied with the way it looks just yet, but I'm incredibly tired, and I've got orientation in the morning, so this will have to do for now.
3. Each resident of Dot-town carries a red or blue dot on his (or her) forehead, but if he ever figures out what color it is he kills himself. Each day the residents gather; one day a stranger comes and tells them something -- anything -- non-trivial about the number of blue dots. Prove that eventually every resident kills himself.
Partly in preparation for the forthcoming, incredibly ill-conceived sixth sequel, but mostly just because I don't know that I've ever sat through all five Rocky movies in order in any condensed span of time, we rented all five from Netflix this week.
In addition to cataloguing a startling amount of discontinuity between the sequels -- alongside the famous rapid aging of Rocky's son, there's also the very perplexing matter of Rocky's bad eye -- my primary discovery from this important critical investigation was the unexpected and unmitigated awfulness of Rocky IV.
Among other things, I'd completely forgotten about Paulie's robot.
This is the kind of challenge that may frame this issue best. What are we really willing to do when such an opportunity comes between our professional aspirations and our personal values? Through the glass of history, we are able to make such issues seem overly simple and clear; however, when faced with these decisions in real life it’s hard to not feel more conflicted.
Ask yourself honestly. What will you say if McDonald’s, big oil, or a major clothing-label that employs sweat-shop labour comes knocking? It’s easy to answer quickly; but really, think about this one. Pretend that work has been a little slow over the past months and your household expenses are getting pinched as a result. Let’s up the ante a bit to make it interesting. Let’s make believe that this client is willing to hand-over full creative control, will impose no budgetary limitations on the printing of the effort, and will make available funds that ensure that you will not have to take on any other work for the year. Is it still as easy a call?
For no good resaon, I lifted my years-long ban -- inaugurated after my one attempt to rent it was stymied -- on the movie Gerry tonight. The results were...mixed. The thing is, the film sort of sucks.
The "New Chronology" is radically shorter than the conventional chronology, because all of ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian history is "folded" onto the Middle Ages, and Antiquity and the Dark Ages are eliminated. According to Fomenko, the history of humankind goes only as far back as AD 800, we have almost no information about events between AD 800-1000, and most historical events we know took place in AD 1000-1500. These views are entirely rejected by mainstream scholarship. However, some mainstream researchers have offered revised chronologies of Classical and Biblical history which do shorten the timeline of ancient history by eliminating various "dark ages." However, none of these revisionist chronologies are as radical as Fomenko's: the events which are traditionally assumed to have happened in the centuries before AD 1 are still thought to have happened thousands of years ago, not hundreds of years ago as in Fomenko's timeline.
It's taken me an uncharacteristically long time to get through Haruki Murakami's excellent (though meandering) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Part of it has to do with real-life interruptions that have persistently prevented me from reading the book start-to-finish as I would have liked -- and part of it has to do with the book itself, which is so large thematically that at times it's almost too much to take in.
I didn't find this book to be an easy read, necessarily, but it was worth the effort in the end.
The thing people need to understand about Haruki Murakami is that he's a genius.
'Actually, Dumbass, All I Have to Do Is Keep the Reader's Attention for Twenty Pages, by Whatever Means Necessary'
There's a nice and long interview with George Saunders up at Guernica. It's a good read. Click the [+/-] for a lengthy excerpt.
Guernica: Is 'science fiction' a label you embrace or shy away from?
George Saunders: I'm happy with it. I didn't really read a lot of it when I was young. But I had a big moment with --well, I watched a lot of Star Trek. I didn't really like it at the time but I think I absorbed it. And there was one moment in Star Wars, when the first one came out in 1560 or whenever it was, I remember being in the theater and there's that one scene where the ships fly over your head and you can see that they're all kind of junked up on the bottom. They're all scraped up and there's like rust and everything.
And something about that--I can't really explain it but that moment--was when in a certain way the genre science fiction just fell away from me, because I thought, "Oh yeah, no matter how advanced we get--whether we have robotic cars or whatever--we're still gonna fuck everything up with our human-ness." Like if we have holograms, we're gonna use them for porn. If you have a guy with a chip in his head, he's gonna be used for marketing. So that was a moment for me when I thought it's all science fiction. I mean, think about the concept of the i-pod. You know ten years ago that was unthinkable. So now we have these i-pods, and even old farts like me have i-pods. Yet, maybe I've got REO Speedwagon on there. So--
Guernica: [laughs, long time]
George Saunders: I don't see a real distinction between science fiction and fiction; it's all the same-- Guernica: In a lot of the interviews with you that I looked at, the interviewers or maybe reviewers were trying to get a handle on whether your stories about the near future were hopeful or 'dark'--this was the word many used. I have my take, but obviously now I'm more interested in your take. Is the future bright or is it the dents on the bottom of the Millenium Falcon--or worse?
George Saunders: Honestly, what I'm coming to think is yes. When I was younger--and this is just egotism--I thought that I of course, being me, had been born at the precise moment in human history when things would deflect one way or the other. Either we would all be saved or all be damned. Guernica: You mean that's not true? George Saunders: [laughs] So, no, then at 47 you say, "I'm gonna be dead, and it's gonna keep going. It's gonna be just as fucked up and beautiful as it is now." And depending on where you are and who you are, it's either absolute nirvana or it's the worst hell imaginable. And you could even be in the same house. And so I think one of the sort of sad but mostly liberating things you realize is that it has always been thus. And it's not gonna change in our lifetimes. And the exhilarating part for me is to think, Gee, if that's true, then the world as I'm experiencing it right this minute in my kitchen in Syracuse, New York, is exactly the same basic apparatus as Shakespeare experienced or Jesus experienced or Buddha experienced or whoever, that there's a kind of liveliness, a kind of vitality in every moment, that I think is very exciting and also scary.
It's not the case that we're gonna cure all our problems. But it's also not the case that all our pleasure will ever vanish. I think at the very last minute of the world, after we've global-warmed ourselves, and it's 400 degress and only the elite can live in these little refrigerators with plasma TVs, the people who are burning to death outside are gonna kind of be reaching for the hand of the person next to them or having a memory of childhood or finding some way of knowing pleasure in that. So I think in a way it's sort of a hopeful vision. The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed...
Bernadine Evaristo argues in the Independent that British poetry is stagnating due to a lack of diversity:
The published poetry scene actually needs an injection of alternative histories, cultures and stories. Haven't we had enough of the same old same old: my childhood memories; my mildly dysfunctional parents; my repressed grandparents; Greek myths; my last lover; my new lover; my love of nature; more Greek myths; my holidays in foreign lands.
Moniza Alvi, one of Britain's most established poets, told me: "Poetry that reflects a changing Britain is still badly represented in the mainstream. We are deprived of black and Asian voices who would bring fresh air to British poetry. I do believe this is beginning to change. The space now given to poetry in translation in the Poetry Society's journal Poetry Review is a welcome indication of this."
This argument seems a bit light to me -- I'm not sure ethnicity features into how boring a person's poetry is.
I've been thinking a lot about war and peace today.
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Mahatma Gandhi
As everyone else in the world has already observed, New York Magazine is considering the question. I like Bernard-Henri Lévy's answer the best.
If 9/11 had not happened? America would be swimming in happiness. Kerry would be president. We would get to airports at the last minute, and the paranoia proportion would be lower. Iran’s voice would be less important. Daniel Pearl would still be alive. Francis Fukuyama would have beaten Samuel Huntington, who would be seen almost everywhere for the crypto-fascist that he is. History would be over. The week would have seven Sundays. Writers would be writing novels; philosophers, philosophy. Wall Street would be touching the sky. Gas would be $20 a barrel. Castro would still be the devil. Oliver Stone would have made a movie about a still-reigning Saddam Hussein. The superrich would be cooler, and more concerned with poverty in poor countries. I would have written my second volume on “forgotten wars.” I wouldn’t have had to shorten my vacation in Saint Paul de Vence to do a story about Israel at war. Palestinians would have a state. Moderate Muslims would control the Islamic extremists. America would be less religious (God help us!), France less anti-American (“these Yankee bastards are fighting back too hard, endangering world peace”). But it’s all a contradiction in terms. Because 9/11 did happen.
Whatever the reasons, Camus' story line is ripe for geopolitical literary misinterpretation. The main character, Meursault, spends much of his life as the young George Bush did, engaging in escapades that demonstrate little drive or motivation. On a visit to the beach with friends, he gets into a fight with some Arabs. Later, he finds one of the Arabs and without much further provocation shoots him repeatedly. During the circus-trial that follows, and the long hours Meursault spends in jail, he is remorseless and unable to engage in contemplation. On the day of his execution, he has a flickering thought that he might have lived another life. But mostly he's excited about the day and hopes that everyone will cheer for his death.
Everyone knows hot dogs aren't exactly healthy for you, but in a new study chemists find they may contain DNA-mutating compounds that might boost one's risk for cancer.
"I'm Jeremiah, and I'm not talking about God being mad at us," novelist Kurt Vonnegut says with a straight face, gazing out the parlor windows of his Manhattan brownstone. "I'm talking about us killing the planet as a life-support system with gasoline. What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. We've become far too dependent on hydrocarbons, and it's going to suddenly dry up. You talk about the gluttonous Roaring Twenties. That was nothing. We're crazy, going crazy, about petroleum. It's a drug like crack cocaine. Of course, the lunatic fringe of Christianity is welcoming the end of the world as the rapture. So I'm Jeremiah. It's going to have to stop. I'm sorry."
Here's an online excerpt. Unfortunately, to read the whole interview you've got to get a copy of Rolling Stone, or at least have a father willing to send you the pages through the mail (thanks, Dad).
The article comes with a list of the "essential" Vonnegut novels, and I'm quite pleased that it's essentially my list: Cat's Cradle, Welcome to the Monkey House, Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Galápagos, and Bluebeard. Just give some love to The Sirens of Titan and maybe Timequake in there and I'm on board.
A crossover occurs when characters published by different companies or perceived as belonging to different fictional realities appear in a shared context. Great site via MeFi.
You Can't Spell 'Philip K. Dick' Without D-R-U-G-S
Many of Dick's writings contain such pharmaceutical themes, with their protagonists (usually cops) suffering catastrophic changes in perception, often brought about by exotic substances. These "reality shifts" generally lead to an understanding of the true nature of the universe - an effect that Dick, whose drug intake was as prolific as his fiction output, believed he had experienced personally. Via Gravity Lens.
Tonight he also watched Paradise Now, an Arabic-language film directed by Palestian director Hany Abu-Assad which seeks to get into the mindset of suicide bombers. It's also quite good.
Wikipedia has a solid run-down of all the people who feel this movie should not exist, including, sadly, its director ("If I could go back in time, I wouldn't do it again. It's not worth endangering your life for a movie.")
These are strange times and the fact that everyone claimed to see them coming in 2004 hasn't made them any easier to deal with. It occasionally feels as if magnetic flip is taking place, the process of polar reversal that happens every 300 millennia or so when north becomes south and south north, and birds fly into buildings and people with pacemakers keel over in the street. What can you do? For the past 10 years I have taken William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on holiday and for the first time, last week, I actually thought about reading it. (I didn't, obviously.) As multiple wars on multiple fronts drag on, you try to initiate a cycle of response that reminds you there are things to be grateful for; the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo going off without violence, for example, and Mel Gibson self-detonating. You reassure yourself that, as in all cycles of history, this one will come to an end, too. Then you remember that the man in charge of writing the ending is George Bush, and you have to start again. (Thanks to Ryan, who never takes my doomsday predictions seriously)
Terry Gilliam's next film now looks set to be The Owl In Daylight (not to be confused with Owl Stretching Time), blending a biopic of Phillip K. Dick with an adaptation of his last, unfinished work. And unlike competing Dick film Panasonic, this one seems ready to throw plenty of Valis into the mix.
The script is being written by Tony Grisoni and Gilliam, and Electric Shepherd Productions are expected to produce. Currently, it looks like Paul Giamatti will play PKD - this bit is old news and is cropping online in all manner of places.
The rapid spread of Western business practices in Japan has caused widespread mental illness and is responsible for a deepening demographic crisis, government officials say. Seems about right.
What if Owen Wilson, America's resident goofy roué with the broken nose and the lazy nasal drawl, was the rudder keeping USS Anderson on course, steering its captain away from solipsism and ironic overload?
In honor of my next two years eagerly anticipating The Darjeeling Limited, a year-old article on the Wilson-Anderson writing partnership from Slate. Thanks to Jacob for reminding me of this.
Another really great movie many of you have probably already seen: Transamerica. I watched it this morning via Netflix and really enjoyed it. Felicity Huffman is fantastic in the lead as Bree, a preoperative transsexual a week from gender reassignment surgery who discovers she has a fifteen-year-old son. I can't believe she didn't win the Oscar.
While we were in New York, I mentioned Mail Order Wife to Patrick and Casey, and they replied by mentioning the recent, stunning Harper's article on mail-order brides. I don't know how I missed this when it first appeared in the magazine:
Again and again, my companions declared that they weren’t looking for a sex tour, and that neither were they simply looking for a servant to cook for them and clean their home—that it was a real companion they sought. Each consistently made a point of saying how intelligent their dates were, even if their outing had only lasted for half an hour and had taken place without a common language between them. One, a California contractor with a seething, hostile energy and the blue-eyed, mustachioed handsomeness of a 1970s porn star, summed it up thusly: “I don’t want someone that I’m going to run; I need somebody’s help. I need an opinion. I’m not out to pound a bunch of pussy. If that’s what I want, I’ll go down to the whorehouse.”
But what they really wanted, and what most imagined they would find in Ukraine, was a fusion of 1950s gender sensibilities with a twenty-first-century hypersexuality. Along with everything else, the men had heard that the women here were “wild,” “uninhibited,” that being with them was “a whole different ball game.” As always, Dan the Man had done his part to stoke this fantasy, peppering his talk of traditional values and wifely devotion with just the right amount of lasciviousness. “I’ve heard stories from all the guys who have been married to them, and they all say the same thing: they definitely are much, much, much more passionate, much more open-minded,” he told us at one point. “This guy, he’s been married for six, seven years and his wife is just as crazy, they have threesomes all the time.” The vision was Madonna and puttana rolled together, an American male desire shaped in equal parts by the Promise Keepers and Internet porn.
Hell on Earth Is a Registered Trademark of the MyLifeBits Corporation
In 1998 Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft, began digitally capturing his entire life for a project he calls MyLifeBits. First, he scanned his old photographs, research documents and notes. He began recording his meetings and phone calls and cataloguing his new photos and movies he saw. Every e-mail exchange he had was digitally archived, and he started using the company's prototype SenseCam, which he wears around his neck, to automatically snap photos throughout the day.
... is very enjoyable, definitely the best movie I've seen since The Squid and the Whale. It's indie and quirky in the fine tradition of Wes Anderson, without being in any way a Wes Anderson rip-off. And Steve Carrell (who knew?) is actually a pretty good actor. Go see it.
Wes Anderson's next movie has a title, as well as a writing team: Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Max Fischer Jason Schwartzman. Schwartzman and Adrien Brody will star alongside Owen Wilson.
When the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He's clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.
Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he's going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he'll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He'll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).
Because of these relatively larger surface areas, he'll be losing water at a proportionally larger rate, so he'll have to drink a lot, too. We see him drink once in the movie--he dips his hand into a puddle and sips from his cupped palm. The image is unremarkable and natural, but unfortunately wrong for his dimensions: at his size surface tension becomes a force comparable to gravity. More likely, he'd immerse his hand in the pool and withdraw it coated with a drop of water the size of his head. When he put his lips to the drop, the surface tension would force the drop down his throat whether or not he chooses to swallow.
We spent the day wandering museums in New York. The Gugenheim was easily today's winner: both the Jackson Pollock and Zaha Hadid exhibits are amazing. Afterwards we headed over to the Met, but we were tired, so we mostly looked at the Kara Walker Hurricane Katrina special exhibiton (ends August 6). This was also excellent.
Like nearly every other museum I visit, the Met also has an impressively huge Anselm Kiefer work, "Bohemia Lies by the Sea." I've been a big fan of Kiefer's ever since I first saw his massive painting "Lot's Wife," which is the single best piece in the Cleveland Museum of Art -- so it was nice to put another Kiefer notch in my belt.
Alice in Wonderland Is Well Past the Age of Consent
The Onion's A.V. Club interviews Alan Moore about his controversial new graphic novel, Lost Girls.
AM: ...The thing about the underage characters… It all gets a bit silly when you're talking about characters that are made up. Alice In Wonderland is like 150, well past the age of consent. And we have a culture over here—and I'm sure in America as well—where we go in for an awful lot of pedophilic titillation, in magazines like Barely Legal, where we're told that these women are over 18, but just look young. But then we were told that about Traci Lords, weren't we? And anyway, it doesn't really matter that much, does it? The intent is still the same. Look at Britney Spears and her sexy schoolgirl imitation. What is that actually saying, and how many apparently normal men is it saying it to? We are sexualizing our children at an increasingly young age. Exposure to The Spice Girls seems to have doomed us to a Western world where every 10-year-old wants a belly-button ring and a "Porn Star" T-shirt. And we just think it's cute! "Ah, look at them! They're acting like little whores!"
It's an obvious, weird part of our sexual makeup, but one that we'd rather do anything than talk about. We have to put our hands up and admit to our complicity in the sexual problems we have. As for incest, yes, in real life, incest is very, very, very seldom an idyllic thing. It's much more often a monstrous thing that destroys people's lives. However, we're not talking about real life. We are talking about the human sexual imagination. Sigmund Freud, frankly, I've not got a great deal of time for, because I think he was a child-fixated cokehead, to be perfectly honest. But his is still the prevalent paradigm in our attitude to sexuality. And Freud said that all sexual desire was sublimated incest. I don't agree with that for a moment, but it does suggest that incest is one of the big players in the theater of our desires. So that has to be referred to.
Off to a wedding in fabulous New Brunswick, New Jersey, with stops in DC, PA, NYC, the Jersey Shore, and White Plains, NY. Lots of driving, but luckily we now have every episode of the Theme Time Radio Hour to keep us company.
Two of America's top authors, John Irving and Stephen King, made a plea to J.K. Rowling on Tuesday not to kill the fictional boy wizard Harry Potter in the final book of the series, but Rowling made no promises.
This must be some definition of "top" of which I was previously unaware.
The latest book I've been reading in my continuing efforts to remind myself how to think like a critical theorist is Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. Butler is probably the theorist I'd most recommend the non-theorist read -- particularly the non-theorist who is hostile to theory -- both to get a good handle on what's going on in gender theory and to maybe blow their minds a little bit. She's also a very crisp and clear, approachable writer, her notorious award for bad writing notwithstanding.
Undoing Gender is the followup to Gender Trouble, which is a well-known classic of theory essentially arguing that all the manifestations of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality we uncritically take for granted are merely elaborate performances we enact so that we don't have to confront what's non-normative inside ourselves.
I couldn't find an essay I wanted to link to, but here's a good Salon review of another recent book of hers, which I linked to back in the day. There are also two good semi-recent letters from her online at the London Review of Books, one eulogizing Jacques Derrida and another attacking the old canard that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
US carmakers and auto-mobile insurers are unshakably certain that vehicles protected by “transponder immobil-izers” can’t be driven without the proper keys – or, at least, that circumventing those transponder systems takes more sweat and money than most auto thieves are willing to expend. So car companies advertise their security systems as unbreakable, insurers and consumers believe these assertions, and then folks like Wassef find themselves engaged in all-out war when their cars vanish.
The insurance companies have good reason to be suspicious. They lose $14 billion to auto fraud every year in the US; by some measures, 20 percent of all stolen-car reports are trumped up. But when it comes to transponders, their faith is misplaced. Auto antitheft systems are usually secure for only a few years, until thieves crack the system. “The carmakers are calling these passive antitheft systems, but they’re not,” says Rob Painter, a Milwaukee-based forensic locksmith who has testified in dozens of auto insurance court cases, for both sides. “They are just theft deterrents. Tell me a car can’t be stolen and I’ll show you how to do it.”
Stephen Colbert gets himslf banned from Wikipedia for vandalizing entries on-air and encouraging his viewers to do the same. YouTube, of course, has the video.
