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.
The New Yorker has a sprawling profile of Will Wright, creator of Simcity and The Sims, and a new game called Spore. This is a supremely engaging article that basically relates the history of video games from coin-ops to the present.
I know I said I wasn't blogging, but this is just too good to pass up.
Yorra challenged FLATFISH, a reasonable move given the word and its score, but it was in the official word list, so he lost his turn. Cresta exchanged tiles on three of his next four turns, while Yorra bingoed again, this time with SCAMsTER. (The lowercase letter represents one of the game's two blank tiles.) Yorra told me he had no idea whether the word was legitimate. (It is.) SCAMsTER was simply the first possible bingo he saw. That put another letter, the R, in a triple-triple lane. Cresta, who held I, O, Q, U, and X, recognized he was three-quarters of the way toward a really huge triple-triple: QUIXOTRY. (He had studied words starting with Q.) He exchanged two letters from his rack in hopes of drawing the needed T and Y. From Cresta's vantage, 57 tiles were unseen, including three T's and one Y. The probability of pulling one of each was 532 to 1.
Cresta beat the odds. And when Yorra didn't block the open R—because he played his fourth bingo, UNDERDOG, for 72 points—Cresta laid down his 365-point QUIXOTRY (a quixotic action or thought).
Just watched Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong original of The Departed. Not only do I continue to fail to understand the point of remakes, but I especially don't understand why you'd remake a movie just to make it worse.
Elsewhere in the Netflix rodeo:
Nacho Libre was briefly the worst movie I'd ever seen, with precisely one redeeming moment ("I hate all the orphans in the world!"). Then I saw Ripley's Game. Corpse Bride was just bizarre, and The Breakup sucks too.
But on the plus side: Saved! was much, much better than expected, and Weekend is quite good too, in that nice Goddardian sort of way.
1. Don't produce "real" time and space: your audience is in a movie theatre, in comfortable chairs.
2. Don't produce the surface of things: have a real subject and a real analysis -- or at least an intelligent proposition – that is larger than the subject of the film. If you forget to think about this before starting to shoot, find it in the editing room, and then put it in the film, somehow.
3. Don’t produce freak shows of the oppressed, the different, the criminal, the primitive. Please don't use your compassion as an excuse for social pornography. Leave the poor freaks alone.
4. Don’t produce awe for the rich, the famous, the talented, the highly successful: they are always everywhere and we feel bad enough about ourselves already. The chance to envy, or hate them, in the cinema doesn't help anybody.
5. Don’t make films that celebrate "the old ways" and mourn their loss. Haven’t you yourself enjoyed change? How are the "old ways" people different from you?
6. Keep an eye on your own middle-class bias, and on your audience's: don’t make a film that feeds it. Remember that you are producing human consciousness in people who are very susceptible to suggestion... and alone in the dark.
7. Don't address an audience of "rational animals": we have not yet evolved beyond the primitive urges of hatred, violence, and exploitation of the poor and the weak.
8. Try not to exploit your social actors: just being seen in your film is not enough compensation for the use of their bodies, voices and experience.
9. Whatever you do, don't make "history". If you can't help yourself, try to remember that you’re just telling a story -- and at the very least, find a way to acknowledge your authorship.
10. Watch that music: what's it doing? who is it conning?
'Ultimately, Genre Discrimination Is Not Good for Anyone'
Virginia Heffernan, victim of a hate crime only last night at the hands of Michael Showalter, reviews the first couple episodes of season three of Battlestar Allegorica. (Spoilers, of course.)
Elsewhere in the Times, Richard Ford talks the greatest state in the union, New Jersey. (Thanks, J.T. and Steve!)
At Patrick Egan's wise urging Jaimee and I took the long drive to Raleigh tonight to see Michael "Levon" Ian Black and Michael "Doug" Showalter do some stand-up. Both are hilarious: I found Ian Black more polished, but Showalter made me laugh harder.
All links go to YouTube, which has many, many clips. YouTube may be God. But I'll tell you who isn't God: the incredibly annoying, slightly drunk girl on the stool next to me, whose astounding narcissism made everyone, especially her poor, sad sack of a boyfriend, uncomfortable and sad.
Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.
A The American cartoonists are very well known in France. Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Joe Sacco. The idea that I had of comics before I made my own was like everybody else's; that reading them was for adolescents and kids. But when I read "Maus" I thought, "Oh my God, you can do that also."
Q So no superheroes, huh?
A Not really. The problem with superhero comics is that most of the characters are men so there is no way that I can identify. And the woman always have big breasts and long legs. The only character that can be a little bit seducing is Catwoman, but she's so mean. And then you have Wonder Woman, but you don't believe with these big breasts she can go and make justice in the world.
Look, super-mega-rock-and-roll gods and superstars are just regular dudes like you guys. We punch the clock, we put on the pants, and then we blow people's minds. That's how we make a living. And then these pirates come and they steal all our internets. I don't know how they do it. But these pirates can bust into our entertainer's homes, make us walk the plank, steal our rocking tunes, and leave us broke. And you know what that means. No cash, no inspiration. No inspiration, no rocket sauce. No rocket sauce, no kickass rock-and-roll. Or movies.
...and possibly the series finale. Either way, last night's Battlestar Galactica was not to be missed. The last four episodes, taken as a whole, are easily among the best in the show's run -- and next week's, "Collaborators", looks like a winner too. My only reservation about "Exodus" is that I wish we had been able to spend more time with the occupation storyline before getting back to business as usual -- they left a lot of interesting material on the table.
And of course my other reservation is my ever-present reservation about this show, that it's always about to nosedive into a bunch of pseudomystical nonsense about gods and demons and psychic prophecies. So far RDM has been able to keep on the right side of the line, but I worry for the future.
Terry Eagleton hatesThe God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.
Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.
This is indeed the basic paradox I want to argue and to deepen in the following remarks: that it is what is good about the film that is bad about it, and what is bad about it that on the contrary rather good in many ways...
Fredric Jameson wrote that about Dog Day Afternoon in a very interesting essay you can read here, if you have a university IP -- and it seems to me that these words apply quite well to The Departed, which I saw tonight, and which is quite hard to make sense of aesthetically. It is, you can be sure, either a brilliant movie with some truly glaring flaws or a rather bad movie with moments of artistic genius.
If I decide which it is I'll be sure to let you know.
Within a period of six years, Ted Hughes faced the sudden deaths of four people dear to him. In February 1963 his estranged wife, Sylvia Plath, gassed herself in her kitchen following his affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. He was just 32 when he found himself in sole charge of their children, Frieda, who was three, and Nicholas, barely one year old. Six years later, in March 1969, Wevill killed herself and Shura, their four-year-old daughter. At that time, his mother Edith appeared to be getting on well after an operation on her knee, but Hughes was afraid that the news might affect her recovery. In the following weeks he shunned his parents, and did not visit, phone or write to them. When his father asked Olwyn, Hughes's sister, what the matter was, she told him but made him vow to keep it a secret. But he could not keep silent and told his wife. Edith suffered a thrombosis, lapsed into a coma and died three days later. Ted was certain that Wevill's suicide was the final blow.
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.
Ford Madox Ford called Marzials "the handsomest, the wittiest, the most brilliant and the most charming of poets". Yet one of Marzials's claims to fugitive fame is authorship of reputedly the worst poem ever written. Called "A Tragedy", it begins: "Death! / Plop. / The barges down in the river flop. / Flop, plop," and it ends, "I can dare, I can dare! / And let myself all run away with my head, / And stop. / Drop / Dead. / Plop, flop. / Plop."
In an interview with the editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times, embattled Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has equated the war in Iraq with J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." According to the paper, Santorum said that the United States has avoided terrorist attacks at home over the past five years because the "Eye of Mordor" has been focused on Iraq instead.
"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said. "It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States."
'Nutty Professors: The History of Academic Charisma'
Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience. You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; or running a seminar, hoping to find the question that will make people talk even though it’s spring and no one has done the reading; or sitting in a department meeting as your colleagues act out their various professional identities, the Russian historians spreading gloom, the Germanists accidentally taking Poland, the Asianists grumbling about Western ignorance and lack of civility, and the Americanists expressing surprise at the idea that the world has other continents. Suddenly, you find yourself wondering, like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, how you can possibly be doing this. Why, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring? Why, when most of our graduate students are going to work as teachers, do we make them spend years grinding out massive, specialized dissertations, which, when revised and published, may reach a readership that numbers in the high two figures?
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders. (via MeFi)
Fidel: The Untold Story is definitely worth watching, though I imagine some people will be made a bit uncomfortable by the almost entirely sympathetic take on Castro. (The movie isn't really unfair; it's just very flattering.)
Jaimee and I both thought Thank You for Smoking had a lot of potential it didn't quite live up to -- but it's got some funny moments.
And Film Geek is an even-more low-budget Napoleon Dynamite, going for the same level of comedic awkwardness but not pulling it off half as well. It isn't terrible, per se, but it certainly isn't good either. At best, it's merely agreeable.
But it seems to me the big "why" questions are, why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?
It's not a question that deserves an answer.
Well, I think most people would say those questions are central to the way we think about our lives. Those are the big existential questions, but they are also questions that go beyond science.
If you mean, what is the purpose of the existence of the universe, then I'm saying that is quite simply begging the question. If you happen to be religious, you think that's a meaningful question. But the mere fact that you can phrase it as an English sentence doesn't mean it deserves an answer. Those of us who don't believe in a god will say that is as illegitimate as the question, why are unicorns hollow? It just shouldn't be put. It's not a proper question to put. It doesn't deserve an answer.
Within the constellation of allied hobbies and subcultures collectively known as geekdom, one finds many social groups bent under a crushing burden of dysfunction, social drama, and general interpersonal wack-ness. It is my opinion that many of these never-ending crises are sparked off by an assortment of pernicious social fallacies -- ideas about human interaction which spur their holders to do terrible and stupid things to themselves and to each other.
I suffered from a pretty bad case of #1 in my younger days, and like everyone else I've been to my share of bad parties caused by the collision of #4 and #5. (Via this rather absurdly dramatic AskMe)
Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.
"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet? Via MeFi.
In The New York Review of Books, Searle has a new article on consciousness, while Joyce Carol Oates has a long profile on Margaret Atwood. Check both out.
In honor of two days before Hannah Arendt's 100th birthday, A&L Daily has twolinks to Arendt-flavored articles. I read a boatload ofOrigins of Totalitarianism this weekend for my "war and imperialism" course and I can confirm: it's really sharp.
I obviously can't vouch for this study's accuracy -- and like most of you I'm skeptical of this number only because it's so much higher than all the previous claims -- but the Wall Street Journalreports:
A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.
...The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as "cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death certificates for 92% of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.
The Daily Kos thread points out that proportionally this is the equivalent of 7 million Americans dead as a result of foreign invasion.
So many people. It seems impossible.
Paul Bolton, a public-health researcher at Boston University who has reviewed the study, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on. "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark," he said.
...The study's lead researchers, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins, have done studies in the Congo, Rwanda and other war zones. "This is a standard methodology that the U.S. government and others have encouraged groups to use in developing countries," said Mr. Burnham, who defended the study as "a scientifically extremely strong paper."
This week's New Yorker tries to get inside the heads of two of the world's great evil masterminds: Rupert Murdoch and architect Frank Gehry. Longtime readers know I'm not kidding about the Gehry thing either; he ruined Case Western's beatific pretty alright campus with this monstrosity.
...but there are a lot of excellent sites for your amusement at Good Experience Games right now. I enjoyed RaidenX the most, because I played those games in my misspent youth, and also because the purple powerup is unstoppable.
Watched TV, mostly. What they say about The Wire is true; it's an amazing show that's only gotten better with age. I can now speak with authority on this because I've watched allthreeseasons over the last few weeks. Although the first two were excellent, for my money the third season (the famous "Hamsterdam" plotline) is heads and tails above the rest -- the finest season of television since the first season of The Sopranos. Get started on it if you haven't.
The season premiere of Battlestar Galactica was this weekend, and it too was excellent, among the best episodes that show has ever produced. The Television Without Pity forums has all the moral ambiguities covered. I only wish we were going to spend more time on this plotline before getting back to the search for Earth.
This week's New Yorker contains at least three excellent pieces, but fools that they are they've only put one on their Web site: Joyce Carol Oates's story "Landfill." For Mark Singer's amazing profile of a perpetually escaping convict and Milan Kundera's intriguing thoughts on "What Is a Novelist?" you'll have to buy the print issue -- though your pal the Rake will give you just a little taste of the Kundera for free.
This week's issue also contains one of the most striking New Yorker cartoons in years. Despite the complicated legal and ethical questions surrounding the unpaid electronic reproduction of another person's work, I've scanned it in.
Chris at Cynical-C just finished reading Battle Royale, a very enjoyable book which I read a century ago during infinite jury duty in 2004. By coincidence, I watched the also very excellent, incredibly violent movie version this morning as my first official act of fall break.
I think if I had any aptitude for Japanese it would be worth writing my dissertation about. But alas.
If you live in central North Carolina you should keep an eye on the massive chemical fire now burning in Apex. Depending on what happens with the wind other towns may be evacuated too.
"We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing, because it's too expensive and it's too risky."
Say what you will about George Lucas, the man knows what people want.
I'm looking for the sort of game you can fire up in a browser and play mindlessly for 5 minutes or however long, which I use as a way to clear my head after thinking about complicated things.
Now you can watch the first act of the third seeaon premiere at scifi.com. To get to the episode, click on "Battlestar Galactica: Watch a Full Episode & More" and scroll down to "First Look." Thanks for AICN for the info.
What you're reading at this very moment is the 5000th Backwards City post. We've been doing this blog since May 2004, which if you do the math means that somebody (I point no fingers) spends a lot of time on this blog.
Our fourth issue just went out, and the fifth issue is already in the pipeline. What that means, among other things, is that we're spending a lot of money.
If your subscription just ran out, we hope you'll resubscribe for another year. If you've never subscribed, we hope you'll start.
And if you've just inherited a million bucks, we hope you'll consider giving a little bit to us. We're officially a nonprofit organization now, which means you can deduct any money you donate to us from your taxable income at the end of the year. If you do have funds to spare, our address is on the Web site, and there's a Paypal link below.
I assure you, we're a very good cause.
We couldn't have made it to #4 or to 5000 without the support of our readers, both financial and otherwise, so we're very grateful. We hope you'll stick around. And thanks.
If you live in central North Carolina you should keep an eye on 
