Backwards City

Gerry Canavan Has Moved Again

2009-11-17T09:36:00.001-05:00

If you're looking for Gerry Canavan's blog, I've moved again:

NEW URL: http://gerrycanavan.com
NEW RSS: http://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/feed/

Publishing Now That Publishing Is Collapsing

2009-10-09T15:22:00.005-04:00

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
--James Joyce

Sure-- there's no money in publishing and there's not even anywhere to publish these days. So what's a writer to do when s/he needs the instant gratification of acceptance? Microblogging could be the last bastion of the publishing world. If anyone's still reading this, there's some great Twitter accounts out there. First, there's Creative Non-Fiction Tweets, which is pretty much like Six Word Stories 2.0. Next, check out 5Seven5, which is 1.) run by me and 2.) perfectly happy to retweet the haikus of all you weeaboos out there. If you're looking for someplace to showcase your work (and perhaps point a potential agent-- PROTIP: they're not impressed with the dick jokes and 2006 pictures of you in a Borat costume), I highly recommend our friends at 18 Digits, the kings of Gainesville web design. Happy microblogging, kiddos! Remember the first rule of writing-- it's not nearly as annoying when you do it.

The Distance to the Moon

2008-12-02T21:59:00.004-05:00

If you've felt lost by the recent spate of shoot-'em-up video games (and by "recent," I mean since, like, ever), I highly recommend I Wish I Were the Moon, a charming Flash game inspired by Italo Calvino's "The Distance to the Moon," the first story in Cosmicomics.

(Oh, and in case you got here through a false positive, if you're actually wondering, the distance to the moon is 382,500 kilometers. Sorry about the confusion.)

Writing Is Just Boxers and Lunches and Philosophy

2008-11-29T18:49:00.006-05:00

“'Someone at The New Yorker recently gave me a tip on someone who’s a boxer and a philosopher—that came from a lunch!'”
--Norton editor Bob Weil, in a recent Observer interview about expense-account-lunch cutbacks in the wake of a rapidly declining print market.

Does This Mean I Can Stop Pretending to Like Prince Now?

2008-11-17T13:08:00.005-05:00

Really? Really. Because that's who we needed to be the moral arbiter in this situation. Prince. Because when he's not too busy making velveteen canvas prints of his own face, he's become a Jehovah's Witness and likes to knock on people's doors to talk to them about the rapture. [Via The New Yorker]
Update (11/18/08): Perez Hilton claims Prince was misquoted? Um... it's Prince and Perez Hilton claiming that The New Yorker is sloppy? Whatevs.

Um... Did Anyone Else Catch This Today?

2008-10-30T15:27:00.002-04:00

Today at The Onion AV Club, Nathan Rabin's review of The Rocketeer just comes completely unraveled, starting at the very beginning:

But The Man couldn't control our daydreams, so filmgoers continued to fantasize in the dark. Moviegoing is simultaneously a communal and anonymous endeavor. Lusting after the same handful of beauties binds filmgoers together. Drooling over Marilyn Monroe united fathers and sons, beatniks and squares, Americans and people who wish they were American on account of America being so awesome. USA! USA! USA! (Sorry 'bout getting jingoistic there. A little-known provision of the Patriot Act dictates that the phrase "USA! USA! USA!" must appear at least twice in all ongoing online columns lasting more than 120 entries.)

And it goes on like that for almost 600 words. Either Nathan Rabin is doing something very, very cool, or else he's bat-fucking insane and is just an imagined thumbs up away from strapping on some dread extensions and doing a one-man show of improvised slam poetry based on interviews with Howard Zinn and Russ Meyer.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace, 2/21/62-9/12/08

2008-09-14T14:16:00.003-04:00

[Skip to 23:18 for DFW]
"Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back."
--William Gass, The Doomed in Their Sinking

"Non-Mac" Is the New PC

2008-09-12T11:48:00.004-04:00

Got it? Let's get this meme started. I want to see it everywhere, from on the new 90210 show to the Times (London) Book section.

I'm pretty sure this is how language works. Someone travels and hears something and starts using that word or dialect or starts cooking curries or other recipes or something and then everyone uses it. I might be wrong but I think I'm right. Bloggers are the new sailors.

An Exercise in Disambiguation

2008-07-17T14:15:00.008-04:00

Dear Internet,

Did you know that if you, innocent as a lamb in snow, are looking for sliding doors for your home, and you Google "sliding doors," you are confronted with a page dealing not with doors that slide, but rather Sliding Doors, a 1998 filmic abortion in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays two different characters in a feat of acting echoed only by Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap, Jean-Claude Van Damme in Double Impact and Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me?

The plot of Sliding Doors, in case you have yet to be blinded by the almost magical amount of failure that this film exudes on a TBS Saturday afternoon, is this: Gwyneth Paltrow is for some reason in London. Why? Because it's classy, like the Queen, Earl Grey tea and Pete Doherty. Here the plot splits and in one version of the story, Paltrow catches her train (called the "tube" because Londoners have speech impediments) and catches her boyfriend cheating on her with Jeanne Tripplehorne because Tripplehorne is a talented actress who has never had anything to do with Coldplay. In the other version, the tube doors close and Paltrow misses her train and misses catching her boyfriend in coitus with Jeanne Tripplehorne-- hence the stabbingly obvious title, Sliding Doors. Anyway, the plots are separated because in one Paltrow is a brunette and in the other she's blonde, which is the most subtle distinction since evil Spock had a goatee. This film has all the romance and mystery of a frat keg laced with roofies.

Thus, I propose this to you, the internet, my angel of justice-- we make actual sliding doors outrank the movie Sliding Doors. If you blog at all, please sign this petition and add a post to your blog linking http://www.foldingslidingdoors.com/ to the key words "Sliding Doors." Why have I chosen Spaceslide? Because like the film, it's based in London, but unlike the film, it never dated Ben Affleck or wore the most offensive fucking fat suit this side of Martin Lawrence for Shallow Hal.

Plus, unlike the film, http://www.foldingslidingdoors.com/ does not make me want to blind myself and Oedipus-like, wander the countryside rather than experience the circumstances the world has thrust upon me, hoping for a violent death for which only the fates may be held accountable. Please make this happen for the sake of accuracy and aesthetics everywhere. Films like this are the reason I drink.

Finally, you can sign my petition here.

Sincerely,
Christian

And With That...

2008-03-20T18:40:00.004-04:00

And with that, I have some sad news. Backwards City Review is suspending operation as of its 7th issue, which is now back from the printer and being mailed out shortly. There'll be more details forthcoming, but for now let me say, on behalf of all the editors, past, past, and future, it's been a lot of fun, and thanks.

Green Man in Suburbia Released!

2008-03-20T18:36:00.003-04:00

We know it's been slow around here. But we've got good news: the second Backwards City Chapbook has finally been released! The book is Marcia L. Hurlow's Green Man in Suburbia, which you can order directly from Amazon.

Marcia L. Hurlow is a native of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, and a professor of English and journalism at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. Green Man in Suburbia is her fifth collection of poems, and if I say so myself, it's clearly the best.

It's a fantastic collection, and we're all very excited about it.

Sorry About the Break...

2007-12-05T11:33:00.000-05:00

Our reading period was particularly intense, but I promise to post more regularly now.

For now, please enjoy From Lowest to Highest: the levels of greatness a fiction writer can achieve in America, from The Stranger.

A sample:

PONY ON A PONY FARM OF A CHILD OF A BILLIONAIRE: Joy Williams/Mary Robison/Frederick Barthelme/Ann Beattie

Considered "important" and "serious" by most critics, writers, and journalists, but are held back from further greatness by an inability to make grand pronouncements using sociological, political, or psychological terms in an earnest tone that conveys "I am very smart and this is my serious literature." Held back also because they sometimes publish in smaller magazines, some of which don't even contain advertisements from Knopf or American Airlines; because some of their e-mail addresses can be found on the internet; and because they would never consider writing from the perspective of someone in a terrible event that they did not experience. Occasionally mentioned by Used Honda Civics in "Great" Condition (see below) to prove a generalization wrong. Do not make enough money from their books to not have teaching jobs. Too godless and without rhetoric to win a major award or be satisfactorily written about by the important literary critics of our time.

Backwards City 666

2007-10-09T01:41:00.000-04:00

Excerpts from the latest and greatest issue of Backwards City are now up at backwardscity.net. We're extremely, extremely proud of it, even if it does contain the most prominent printing error we've ever managed; we feel it's sort of fitting. (Really, it's not all that prominent, just in one of the contributors' notes—but it eats us up inside. We're perfectionists. It's the OCD that keeps us going.)

Subscribers' issues are going in the mail tomorrow and should be in your hot hands in a few days. While you're waiting, enjoy comics from T. Motley and xkcd, fiction from Fiction Award winner B.J. Hollars and Michael Shannon, and poetry from Mary Grimm, Tim Lockridge, David Shumate, and Charlie Clark.

And when it's time to get maudlin, begin to mourn with the original editors' farewell.

No Love for L'Amour

2007-10-07T04:34:00.000-04:00

From today's New York Times Magazine interview with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa:

NYTM: Did you ever meet President Reagan?
MVL: Once. I said to him, Mr. President, I admire many things that you do, but I cannot accept that for you the most important American writer is Louis L’Amour. How is this possible?

Uh... maybe because Reagan owned more horses than books.

But Where Do I Get My JT Leroy Money?

2007-10-01T14:12:00.001-04:00

Today's the last day to file a class-action claim against James Frey. If you bought A Million Little Pieces on or before January 26, 2006, you're entitled to some money. Go here to file before midnight and get some.

If you feel guilty, don't-- you can always use your cut to buy Frey's new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, for which he was reportedly paid one milllion dollars.

The score thus far:
James Frey: 1,000,000
Truth: 0

Update: The Smoking Gun (which originally broke the whole escapade) has the fiscal information here.

P.S. Avoid Frey's new novel and instead buy one of the J.T. Leroy-inspired raccoon penis bone necklaces. (Carefully cast out of silver to avoid any cruelty to raccoons. Now if only we could get some made as pewter charms.

You Write Like a Terrorist

2007-09-29T11:03:00.004-04:00

The National Science Foundation extols its new Dark Web project, "which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web."

This is where the Dark Web project comes in. Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, [Hsinchun] Chen and his team [Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona} can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving massive amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.

How, exactly do they plan on analyzing the data?

One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.

Robot literary critics fighting terrorists? Computer-assisted identification of anonymous authors has been used before, though on a much smaller scale. Don Foster, Shakespeare scholar and "literary forensics" pioneer, developed the field in the 1980s, when he confirmed that the previously unattributed 1612 "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter" signed only "W.S." was indeed William Shakespeare. In 1996, Foster identified journalist Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, a political satire of the Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. (If you insist, you can read all about it in Foster's Author Unknown.)

The problem is that Foster uses computers only for the "search" feature of electronic texts. There's no algorithm that simply finds a match. Foster caught Klein by (among other things) his use of "tarmac-hopping," a compound that appeared nowhere else but in the journalism and fiction of Joe Klein. Just pick any distinctive phrase (even if it is innocuous), like "Italian restaurant, London" and run it through a search engine. You won't find many matches but the ones that do pop up will be notable.

The NSF may be over-hyping the Dark Web system. The University of Arizona's website only promises that Dark Web "will include tools supporting search, browse, and analysis capabilities."

It is certainly possible to identify writers by their use of certain words-- David Foster Wallace's use of "ontological" or Hunter Thompson's use of "atavistic" pop into my mind almost immediately. (Any others? Leave them in the comments.) But could a computer do the necessary parsing to positively identify a writer's style?

Alienating Labor Pains

2007-09-27T13:06:00.001-04:00

The world is flat-- and grossly exploitative.

We’ve all taken notice of America’s great quest of more for less, and using whatever means necessary to achieve it. And the word "outsourcing" just makes it seem so fancy and great, right? As you gently pry a red train with lead-based paint out of your child’s hands, maybe you could deign to ponder, “Where, exactly, is the line? And do we care about crossing it as long as we get what we want at a lower cost?”

Perhaps misunderstanding Marx's alienation of labor, we now have the outsourcing of surrogate mothers in India. Now, customer service and tech support-- those are familiar to anyone who's owned a Dell or even thought about Thomas Friedman's mustache (pictured at right), but human wombs? The cost of surrogacy averages about $70,000 in the US but is a fraction of that in India-- just $12,000, which includes medical expenses and the surrogate's fee.

On one hand this seems pretty exploitive, but the $5,000-7,000 surrogate's fee is nearly ten years earned income in rural India. Confined by a patriarchy and a lack of employment options, surrogacy offers uneducated Indian women a chance to have their own money and a future for themselves and their families that probably wouldn’t happen otherwise. When asked if she felt exploited, surrogate mother Sofia Vohra responded, “Crushing glass for 15 hours a day making $25 a month is exploitation. The baby’s parents have given me a chance to make good marriages for my daughters. That’s a big weight off my mind.”

These surrogates are virtual recluses during the pregnancy, as surrogacy is considered risque in rural India-- many villagers don't understand that the process doesn't involve sex and so consider the practice akin to prostitution-- and there is a risk of the entire family being shunned. Further, a large percentage of Indian women are required to sign documents that grant them no paternal rights, unlike in the US, where a surrogate has a small window of time to stake a claim. This puts the biological parents' minds at ease, but also gives backing to the stance that these women, most of whom are illiterate, are being somewhat duped.

Estimated to be a $445-million-a-year business, surrogacy in India is expanding as fast as these women’s waistlines, and parties on both sides of the ocean seem to be reaping the benefits. Even so, is this blatant economic exploitation? In utero imperialism? Or simply a mutually profitable business arrangement?

Comics Are Gay, But They Hate Themselves For It

2007-09-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

Remember when bullies would beat you up and call you a fag for reading superhero comics? It turns out they should have read those comics-- they would have enjoyed all the sadistic gay bashing.

Perry Moore, author of the young-adult novel Hero (a superhero story about a gay teenager, which you can buy here), has compiled a list,Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero Anyway?: A history of gays in comic books, of the fates of about 75 gay comic-book heroes and villains. The list is meticulous, occasionally hilarious (such as "The Hulk's Near Rape" at the hands of predatory gay men in a YMCA shower) and often harrowing-- in short, fascinating and definitely worth checking out. Here's a short excerpt:

BLOKE
First openly gay member of Marvel’s X-Force/X-Statix. Killed on his first mission.

ELECTRO
This longtime Spiderman nemesis recently discovered his predilection for homosexuality as a result of a lengthy stint in prison. Sought out a shape-changing prostitute to satisfy his new desires.

EL EXTRANO
Gay magician member of superteam New Guardians. His name means “The Strange One.” Embodied numerous, offensive gay stereotypes. Attacked by an “AIDS vampire.” Forgotten after series was cancelled.

NORTHSTAR
1st gay male hero to come out in the Marvel Comics Universe, thus making him their most prominent gay hero. Between February 16 and March 9, 2005, Northstar is killed in three different realities, during the most prominent of which, the X-Men’s most popular hero, Wolverine (star of the X-Men movies), impales him through the chest with his metal claws. Marvel’s most prominent gay hero is later resurrected as a murderous zombie assassin.

FREEDOM RING
Hailed by Marvel Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada as the new example of Marvel’s open policy toward gays in their books as “the star of Marvel Team-Up.” Quesada went on to say, “We’ve had more gay and lesbian characters appearing in Marvel comics than ever before.” Marvel Team-Up #24, three weeks after Quesada’s comments, features Freedom Ring, his finger sliced off and then graphically killed with 28 spikes impaling him, including one through the groin and protruding from his anus. Series cancelled with issue #25.

The Submissions, They Have Reopened

2007-09-07T07:54:00.000-04:00

Fiction and poetry submissions are back open at backwardscity.net. Check back here soon for a redesign to befit Backwards City #7, excerpts, as well as all-new! all-different! blogging (just as soon as we get that pesky revolution under control).

On Language, vol. 2

2007-08-06T11:23:00.001-04:00

Matt Damon visits the "Hard-Rocking" Cafe

Safire's back from vacation and as usual, every sentence is just a bevel of shit you never cared about. Like the difference between "chief strategist" and "senior political adviser." Hint: It's entirely semantic but somehow still important, kind of like the difference between "certified bachelor on the prowl" and a plain old "registered sexual predator."

But that just left me with mild boredom rather than full-blown embarrassment. Luckily, I quickly found Still Searching, But With Darker Eyes, Manohla Dargis' review of The Bourne Ultimatum. "Jaw clenched, brow knotted, body tight as a secret, Matt Damon hurtles through 'The Bourne Ultimatum' like a missile," reads the first line, and the review proceeds accordingly, its 5th grade sycophancy finally bursting with "[The director] knows how to do his job, and there's no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene." (Italics mine.)

Like catching your Uncle Steve masturbating, you want to just back away slowly, but unfortunately, the Gray Lady just decided to go ahead and seriously print "hard-rocking" as both (1) serious criticism and (2) a hyphenate. Why?

"Hard-rocking" first graced the pages of the New York Times on September 12, 1980, describing a John Lennon recording session. It was first used in a movie review three years later, on September 23, 1983 in Janet Maslin's review of the New Jersey rock epic, Eddie and the Cruisers, which still employed the phrase in a musical context.

The phrase wasn't made completely devoid of meaning until March 4, 2001, when writer Dan Neil asserted that "It isn't hard to spot a cultural trend in the hard-rocking commercials for the Nissan Frontier," which makes Neil the first in the cultural trend of using "hard-rocking" to mean "establishmentarian" and "literally commercial."

"Hard-rocking" at the Times doesn't have to involve music and can be anything abrasive or just attempting a mysterious "cool." (e.g. "Your Uncle Steve's hard-rocking Matt Damon jag-off session.") So just go ahead and use "hard-rocking" to mean any fucking thing you want. Really, everything rock-related is going to die anyway with the coming birth of this Rosemary's baby/chupacabra creature from Nicole Richie and Emo posterboy Joel Madden. Just keep rock-harding until then. Or whatevs.

With Great Prizes Come Great Responsibility (or not so much)

2007-08-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

Congrats to all the BCR Contest Winners. But Backwards City isn't the only place handing out prizes these days. Why, just look at the United States and their new poet laureate in this NY Times Blog "On Paper." The article muses on the political stance of the new PL, Charles Simic, and speculates that his past public statements might make him a more vocal critic of the Bush administration. Though I have great respect for Simic's work and his political views, I think this overestimates the esteem and influence of the position of poet laureate.
There has been a serious decline in literary reading in the United States in recent years. In 2004 the National Endowment for the Arts released a survey entitled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. The gloomy title suggests that the findings are not good. What is somewhat shocking is how bad the results actually are. Between 1982 and 2002 the United States saw a ten percent decline in readers of literature, or nearly 20 million readers. This decline occurred despite a growing population. In the current cultural climate fewer than half of Americans actually read literature.
Of this half, most are readers of short stories or novels, which were read by 45.1 percent or 93 million adults in the previous year. Poetry was read by 12.1 percent or 25 million people. With so few readers, Can Poetry Matter? To get a little Reading Rainbow about it, what do you think (5 Bonus Points to the first post "acknowledging" a Shelley quotation)?

Victory Is Theirs!

2007-08-01T16:12:00.000-04:00

Backwards City Review is pleased to announce the winners of its 2007 fiction and poetry contests!

POETRY

Winner
Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman, “Kimberly Cutout”

Finalists
Jill Beauchesne, “Armistice Day”
Woody Loverude, “Covenant”
Lynne Potts, “Whole Worlds Had Already Happened”

FICTION

Winner
B.J. Hollars, “Conservation Status of Least Concern”

Finalists
Joe Oestreich, “Trouble Doll”
Kelcey Parker, “Lent”
Mike Young, “Burk’s Nub”

The winners and selected finalists will appear in Backwards City #6, arriving in your mailbox this fall

Keep watching backwardscity.net for information on the winner of our second chapbook contest, as well as deadlines and addresses for next year’s writing contests!

Regular submissions reopen on Sep. 1. Thank you, as always, for your support of Backwards City.

On Language: Don't Dis Like

2007-07-15T14:54:00.000-04:00

Safire's, like, on vacation or something this week, but Patricia T. O'Connor fills in with a column on "like." Specifically, how like can introduce a quotation ("'She's like, 'What unusual shoes you're wearing?''") or paraphrase one ("''She's like, my shoes are weird!'") Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain, an associate professor at the University of Alberta says of like, "'It's innovative, it serves a particular function and it does specific things that you can't do with other quotatives.'"

O'Connor summarizes:

So is the new like proper English? Well, the latest editions of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary now include it as a usage heard in informal speech. That's not a ringing endorsement, but it's not a condemnation, either.

Which isn't bad, as she explains: "Yet part of the resistance to like may be its youthful rep." After all, "rep" to mean "reputation" (freely used by O'Connor and printed by the New York Times) isn't even listed in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Merriam's Webster's lists it as "slang."

But how long will it be before like finds its way into the news section of the New York Times? My guess? Give it a year or so. After all, "dissing" first appeared as a quote-marked novelty ["Dissing (verb: to insult, from disrespect)"] in a 6/2/90 article headlined "How to Stop Dis From Escalating Into Bif and Bam." Yet on 9/9/91, the Times was dropping the D-bomb like they was from the old school: "Connors cared so much about winning, about himself, that he willed himself into the semifinals, even to the point of dissing a chair umpire one nasty evening." The subject of the article? Tennis, actually. Recently, a 3/2/07 article read: "A year later Zarin Mehta, the orchestra's president and executive director, is blithely dissing that lone CD release." The latest hip-hop feud? Hells, no. The article was about the New York Philharmonic's three-year recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon.

Word up-- keep it real.

Amber is the Color of Security

2007-07-12T13:19:00.000-04:00

It’s summer and you want to relax, but work’s a grind and your old lady is always nagging you about the litter box or the living room curtains. All this tension and heat are driving you to drink. A vacation seems like the perfect solution, and the 21st century American airport is arguably the best part of the trip. All this anti-terror campaigning now leaves American travelers safely wrapped in an amber security blanket as soon as they book the flight.

So its not 1947 and you’re not Howard Hughes-- no worries, Traveler, aviation’s heyday is just now burgeoning. Why, this border-control legislation has created the highest demand for US passports in the history of travel! Now, more Americans than ever are desperate to get out of the country-- and all will find they can do so with dignity and safety. After waiting six months to receive one’s $200 expedited passport and removing all nail files, safety pins, and contact lens solution from their carry-ons, it’s off to the airport. After several anxious sidelong glances at your line-mates and that suspicious fanny-pack left on the self-check-in kiosk, your tickets are collected, your passports stamped, and your boarding passes neatly tucked into an envelope bearing your gate’s number-- you’re now off to Security! Upon arrival to the security-ensuring area, you are safely felt up, patted down, interrogated further, and are shuffled half-dressed and shoeless through an x-ray machine. If you happen to be entering the US as a foreign traveler, you are invited to take some cozy photos and shake hands with a few security-ensuring machines that scan your iris and fingerprint you. No matter where you are from, you are encouraged to eat well and be merry in flight. There’s no better way to be awoken in transit than by an announcement urging you to scarf down your delicious home-made mozzarella and tomato lunch sandwiches at 7:45 in the morning so as not to incur a $500 fine when you’ve returned to the good ol’ US of A. We would'nt want any terrorists bringing their secret family recipes oversees, corrupting our refined American palates with their noxious flavors and tedious preparations. Surrounded by all these threats, yet shielded from them at every turn in American air travel will leave you feeling at first anxious, then superior, and ultimately, safe.

Your luggage is similarly cared for by American airport personnel, allowing you to travel worry and hassle-free about the globe. The bags, checked or carried, are treated with the same respect and care you gave them while packing them up at home. For example, airport staff at all points of transportation carefully inspect your luggage by X-ray and by hand for dangerous items such as battery-operated vibrators that have shifted and turned themselves on during ground transport or birth control pills and anti-depressants, to ensure that these items are legal and yours. Once you have explained your lifestyle and psychological defects to the baggage handlers and strangers around you, your luggage is oh-so-carefully placed on a personal cart and gently conveyed to its own secure corner of the plane’s holding area. If delayed or altogether misplaced, your luggage will be lovingly shrink-wrapped, plastic locked, and heavily tagged/taped minutes before you recieve them once again, proving that international airport staff and travelers have not been tampering with your belongings for 11 days, 16 hours and twenty-seven minutes. The bonus? You will also not be able to open the luggage you have been without for your entire trip because airport staff know that the temptation to put on something clean or charge your phone on the spot would be too great and that ultimately, you would rather do this in the privacy of your own home, two hours later. Forget that three-toed Brazilian sloth dead from an overdose of heroin in your American Tourister roller bag; just let it remind you of how badly you have always wanted to visit Sao Paulo.

While your carry-ons are inspected at seemingly random times in random airports for your protection, these searches are in place to remind you of what might be harmful to you and your fellow passengers. Without the weary, hungover, 18-year-old bag inspector pushing around the contents of you duffel bag while looking at your tits, you might expose your fellow travelers to dangerous fumes emanating from your mentholated lip balm or the annoyance of your over-exuberant Vitamin-watered self. It’s best to leave these liquids and gels packaged securely in ziplock baggies which are then placed on a card table, in a large heap of similarly packaged items out in the middle of your gate’s ramp, guarded by no one.

I can’t speak for everyone, but when I travel by air in the USA, I feel like I’m observing the world through amber-colored glasses. But should you ever feel your security is the least bit threatened, your airport will be happy to furnish you with a shiny steak knife just before you get on the plane, conveniently concealed- I mean, wrapped- in a clean white napkin bearing the TGIFridays’ logo.

Airport Entymology

2007-07-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

Recently, I had the good fortune to spend some time away from Backwards City. I chose to spend most of this time in international airports. After carefully studying the lifeforms that congregate in these hubs, I have prepared my observations of various species, categorized by their dominant emotion:

Indignant Rage:
When airport stewardess (see Lonely Malaise) asks child-sized shape to stop rubbing his pelvis on the seat beside him, child-sized shape will respond with indignant rage. Features include *bulging eyes *arrogant disbelief *ruddy cheeks *profanity

Lonely Malaise:
The most common airport species, this hearty breed is often seen smoking outside the terminal (in designated areas). When disheveled businessman (see Impotent Disdain) asks to switch his aisle seat, uniform-clad shape will respond with a blank stare and explain that the flight is very full, because it is booked to capacity, which makes it very full. Features include *bright make-up *eerie, unwavering smile *divorce(s)

Impotent Disdain:
Just sort of sits there and rolls its corpulent eyes. Features include *Americans *bad ties *bourbon *sweat stains (one hopes)

Look for upcoming travel writing involving more airport culture in imminent posts.

You Know, Fiddy Got a Point

2007-07-04T13:53:00.001-04:00

From an interview with 50 Cent in Spin, July 2007:

Are you worried about the state of the music industry and that hip-hop record sales are down 30 percent from the time of your last record? You know what's interesting to me? If we're selling 30 percent less records, then really, what's the problem that people have with us? Why isn't the violence down? If we're that fucking' influential, you know what I'm saying?

Violence should be down 30 percent?
Yeah, why isn't the violence down 30 percent? Ask that question in your article. I'd like to know the answer to that!

Eschatology and Archeoastronomy!

2007-07-02T15:23:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine featured an On Language column that had absolutely nothing to do with language, a Neal Pollack article (about feeding his son hot dogs) that was so boring it made Adam Gopnik look like Hunter Thompson and an interview with Wesley Clark that featured the questions "Why do Americans eat hot dogs on July 4?" and "Do you think the Founding Fathers ate hot dogs?"

In short, the only thing that kept me from killing myself was this assurance that I was going to die anyway, probably in 2012. Yes, the Times decided to do a six-page glossy spread on Mayan eschatology. It even features soundbites from Anthony Aveni, an Colgate professor and archeoastronomer (if you don't know what that is, go here). Maybe next week there'll be an article about phrenology featuring two cryptozoologists.

Besides sounding like Da Vinci Code fan fiction (with sentences like "Jenkins was the first to reveal a major flaw in the synchronization between Arguelles's Dreamspell and the Mayan day count, and he has been involved in an extensive, long-distance feud with Calleman since 2001 over their differing approaches to interpreting the Maya and over Calleman's belief that the end time will be in 2011, not 2012.") there was something else that bugged me about the article. It was a quote from the archeoastronomer: "Jenkins and Calleman and Arguelles are the Gnostics of our time. They're seeking higher knowledge. They look for knowledge framed in mystery. And there aren't many mysteries left, because science has decoded most of them."

It's kind of silly to think that science has solved most of the mysteries of the universe. Just look at the What We Don't Know from the February 2007 issue of Wired. The article was edited by John Hodgman (who also edits the Times Magazine's Funny Pages) and presents 40 different dilemmas that science has so far been unable to answer, ranging from "Why do we sleep?" to "Is the universe actually made of information?" Basically, this post is a long-winded way to say that you should check out the Wired article and everything else John Hodgman does.

The New Transformer's Movie Reviewed!!!

2007-06-29T18:53:00.000-04:00

Actually, let's not talk about that.

No More Heroes (Faux Rage)

2007-06-27T10:43:00.000-04:00

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s Backwards City's vulnerable youth population was entranced by one gerund, shouted at the top of one's pixie stick dusted vocal chords: WRESTLING!

(Side Note: Throwing pixie sticks on a bonfire is a vaguely dangerous stunt also associated with this epoch.)

Though many of us have since lost the urge to see a freakishly large man (King Kong Bundy) battle his weight in midgets (plus Hillbilly Jim!), the titans of old claim a lonely corner within our mental hall of heroes. Now that it is firmly within our grasp to perm a mullet, grow a mustache, and don a pair of neon green tights the mystery of yesterday's heroes has waned.

This has especially been the case as of late, with the recent murder/suicide of Canadian! (almost every article I've read has stressed this a great deal) wrestler Chris Benoit and his wife and child. Mr. Benoit is only the most recent example of how life tends to disintegrate rapidly when one treads the lonely path of steroids, painkillers, hair gel, and faux rage. This is perhaps the only instance where the BCR blog will employ a quotation from Fox Sports, hosted on MSN. In any case, look for your former favorite idol and hang your head for the days when an atomic elbow to your brother's throat was still in the realm of good fun and was never followed by any legal action.

*Ravishing Rick Rude — Died at 40 of an apparent heart attack in 1999, a bottle of prescription pills for his bad back at his side. The autopsy report said he died of "mixed medications." Rude was an admitted user of anabolic steroids.

*Louis Mucciolo, a.k.a, Louie Spicolli — Died in 1998 at age 27 when he suffocated on his own vomit after ingesting massive amounts of Soma and alcohol. Investigators also found an empty vial of testosterone, pain pills and an anti-anxiety drug at the scene.

*Brian Pillman — An admitted user of steroids, he died of a heart attack at age 35 in 1997 on the morning of WWF's In Your House: Badd Blood pay-per-view event.

* Rick "the Renegade" Williams — Died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 33 after being released from his World Championship Wrestling contract in 1999.

* "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig — Found dead of a cocaine overdose at age 44 in his motel room on April 10, 2003, the morning of a match. Hennig's father maintained that steroids and painkillers contributed to his death.

* Rodney "Yokozuna" Anoa'i — Died of a heart attack in 2002 at 34.

* Davey Boy Smith, "The British Bulldog" — Died of a heart attack at age 39 on May 17, 2002. An autopsy report indicated that past steroid use had likely played a part in his death.

* Michael "Road Warrior Hawk" Hegstrand — An admitted steroid user, he died of a heart attack at age 46 in 2003.

* Michael Lockwood, "Crash Holly" — In 2003, at the age of 32, he choked to death on his own vomit after ingesting 90 painkiller pills.

* Jerry Tuite, "The Wall" a.k.a. "Malice" — Died at age 36 in 2003 of an apparent heart attack in his hotel room.

* Raymond "Hercules" Hernandez — Dead of heart failure in 2004 at age 47.

* Ray "The Big Boss Man" Traylor — Found dead of a heart attack in 2004 at age 42.

* Eddie Guerrero — After a long battle with painkillers, he was found dead of a heart attack by his nephew in his hotel room at age 38. The first person his nephew reportedly called was Guerrero's best friend, Chris Benoit.

* Chris Candido — Died in 2005 at age 33 from a blood clot after breaking his tibia and fibula and dislocating his ankle in a pay-per-view event.

* Owen Hart — Fell to his death at age 34 in 1999 when the rigging that was lowering him into the ring malfunctioned.

Update: Bam Bam Bigelow died on January 19, 2007 from a mixture of cocaine and benzodiazepenes. I'd like to imagine he's currently fighting a no-holds-barred cage match with Yokozuna in Wrestler-Heaven, like some sort of scripted version of a modern Ragnarok.

JT Leroy and Other Literary Frauds

2007-06-21T17:05:00.000-04:00

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
--Jeremiah 17:9

The New York Times has an article today about the ongoing civil trial of Laura Albert, otherwise known as JT Leroy. (If you don't know the backstory of JT Leroy, check out Stephen Beachy's Who is the Real JT Leroy?, published in the 10/17/05 issue of New York, which pretty much sums up the whole ugly affair.)

The Times mentions that Albert used a fake Southern accent to impersonate Leroy over the phone (sometimes to other authors, including Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill and Mary Karr), including in an 11/26/01 interview on NPR's Fresh Air. (The interview is supposed to be archived here, but curiously reads: "Due to an agreement with the guest, the audio for this interview is unavailable.")

I immediately thought of Anthony Godby Johnson, another literary hoax whose plot parallels JT Leroy. Anthony, the sexually abused and AIDS-afflicted child, was the creation of a middle-aged woman (she went by Vicki Johnson-- her real name was either Vicki Fraginals or Joanne Victoria Fraginals-Zackheim) who wrote his "autobiography," A Rock and a Hard Place: One boy's triumphant story. Vicki also liked to talk on the phone-- her chats with (and subsequent discovery of fraud by) author Armistead Maupin led to his (very cool) 2000 novel, The Night Listener.

The James Frey case fits in here too, as does Stephen Glass, The New Republic fabulist who later saw his story hit the big screen in 2003's Shattered Glass. (As did Clifford Irving, who produced a fabricated biography of Howard Hughes, in the recently released Richard Gere movie The Hoax, though Irving insists, in this New Yorker article, that his hoax was "for the adventure" and so entirely different.)

Binjamin Wilkomirski, in his 1996 "autobiography" Fragments (which is actually a well-written book and a pleasure to read), describes his childhood as a holocaust survivor. The only problem is that Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Grosjean, a gentile Swiss orphan who was adopted by a wealthy couple in Zurich. To bolster his story, Grosjean relied on the testimony of Laura Grabowski, a holocaust survivor who claimed to have known him from internment camps. The only problem was that Grabowski too was a fraud. Grabowski (nee Lauren Rose Willson, also a gentile) hadn't gone so far as to author a book about her experience as a childhood survivor of the Holocaust, but had written (under the name Lauren Stratford) Satan's Underground, a 1988 memoir detailing her experience as a survivor of Satantic ritual abuse. Oi vey.

It's not that literary hoaxes don't have their basis in the canon. Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liasons Dangereuses (1782) is ostensibly a collection of real letters (rather than an epistolary novel) published by an invented editor as a moral tale for the public. Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816) purports to be a diary that Constant has found and edited. The same is true of Mikhail Lermentov's A Hero of Our Time (1839). In the introduction to 1862's The House of the Dead (also titled Memoirs From the House of the Dead or simply House of the Dead), Dostoyevsky claims that the book is actually found document, not authored but only edited by himself. (If you can think of any other books whose writers deny authorship, let me know in the comments.)

The difference seems to be one of ego. While de Laclos, Constant, Lermentov and Dostoyevsky deny authorship of the work, the hoaxers claim so much authorship that they try to become their characters. But this is an entirely sympathetic view. Rather than pathology, it's probably simply mercenary-- non-fiction consistently outsells fiction. A Million Little Pieces would never have been picked for Oprah's Book Club had it been published as fiction. Pushing aside literary games of identity and authorship, these modern hoaxers are playing only for the money.

Border Control in American Music and Feist’s Entry Through Art

2007-06-19T15:39:00.000-04:00

Canadian singer/songwriter Leslie Feist recently explained in an NPR interview at the 9:30 Club in Washington that entering America as a musician is made possible only by passing through "two enormous iron doors: ... [one in] New York and [one in] California."

She also links her songwriting process to influences that range from the writings of Toni Morrison and Paul Auster to Joni Mitchell and indigo blue. The color.

In terms of temporality, I can see Morrison’s influence in song lyrics such as The Park and in the musical construction of Mitchell’s "Blue," but fail to see the connection between these New York artists and the iron door that Feist claims New York represents to international artists. Any thoughts?

At Least I’m Not a Killer-- Scientific equivocations I offer my loved ones, Vol. 1

2007-06-14T18:06:00.000-04:00

Neuroscience researchers at the University of Iowa have traced emotional and moral reactions to an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Two groups (one with damaged VPCs and one comprised of those with intact forebrains) were asked to respond to hypothetical moral dilemmas.

In situations involving no personal knowledge, subjects in both groups responded similarly. For example, nearly all the respondents would choose to sacrifice one stranger to save three. However, when asked if they would smother their own child to save a group of people, those with intact forebrains said no. Those with damaged VPCs produced the almost pathologically utilitarian response of yes.

“The findings show that our natural aversion to harming others emerges from two previously documented systems in our brain-- one emotional and one rational,” says the June/July 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind. “Scientists do not yet understand how the two systems interact or how one supersedes the other when they dictate contradictory courses of action.

‘This study doesn’t mean that people who lack social emotions are dangerous,’ says Michael Koenigs, then at the University of Iowa, a member of the research team. ‘They tend to show little empathy and guilt, but they are not killers.’”

P.S. Don’t forget to enter our contest. Thanks.

It's a Contest

2007-06-12T18:59:00.000-04:00

That’s right—we’re having a cutesy little contest. Why? Because we want to get our readers more involved and judging from the confused reaction to the new editors’ blog posts, we figured a small bribe couldn’t hurt.

What’s the contest? We want new slogans for the Backwards City Review. The problem is that we don’t know how to make them. If we did, we could all take metropolitan advertising jobs as the “creative” types at our respective firms (i.e. wacky tie patterns and fake pot plants in our cubicles). So we want you to provide them.

We’re looking for something short, pithy and kind of ambiguously clever. It could be a tidy bit of chiasmus like “Ask not what you can do for your country…” or bluntly utilitarian like “We will bury your grandchildren.” So send us your tired, your poor, your huddled missives and you can win some cool swag.

Like what? First prize is a one-year subscription to the Backwards City Review. Second prize is a signed copy of Michael Parker’s acclaimed novel Hello Down There. Both are extremely cool. Even if you don’t like them, everyone likes getting mail. You can write your slogans in the comments of this post. We’ll all pick our favorites, argue about them over drinks, pick the winners and then collapse in a fitful and editorial bale of having done no real creative work ourselves. After we announce the slogans we like best, the winners can send us their mailing addresses so we can get their books to them.

So send us your entries and participate in our first online contest. We know it hurts the first time but you’re special and we love you and we think you’re worth it. Thank you.

{Show them treasure, keep them busy}

2007-06-03T21:00:00.000-04:00

Citizens:

Informant Google has developed a program for reconnoitering neighboring city-states called "Street View." Look up any city and click on the highlighted streets to see what it looked like when the imaging truck rolled through town. The dossier of surveilled cities is currently limited to our largest neighbors, but in time we will extend our sight into every corner of this land.

An unintended side effect could be the prefiguration of these cityscapes (issue explored further in Walker Percy's white paper "The Loss of the Creature"). But no matter. We must keep tabs on our neighbors for the foreseeable future to ensure the revolution may continue apace.

Wee-hour watch

2007-05-31T03:33:00.000-04:00

Something is shuffling down the boardwalk.

Acrid smells like burning grease.

Earlier, a pair of men wearing powdered wigs finished their cigarillos and parted ways.

I'm standing in the spot they had occupied. One pair of feet head north, towards the business district. The other pair trail across the street and into a laundromat.

If any of this is true, perhaps the mandated medications doled out to me are thinning. Still, I may well be dreaming this, or else hallucinating. Backwards City looks green at this time of night.

Spider Druqz

2007-05-28T18:25:00.001-04:00

In more science news, Backwards City Department of Arachnid Research in conjunction with the "country" of Canada, has found interesting results in its newest research. Backwards City: Our Science is Realer than your Science.

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Spooky Action at a Distance

2007-05-28T17:35:00.001-04:00

Official Release: Backwards City Office of Information

Non-state-sanctioned scientists in Backwards City have been spreading propaganda in the name of insurgent political actors. Be aware, citizens, that this pseudo-science will not stand. In the case of linked particles, it has been "proven" by these scientists that a change in the state of one particle will result in the instanteous change of state to its brother-particle, even when the particles are separated by many miles. This is nonsense. Information cannot not travel faster than the speed of light. Please be aware that any persons or parties discussing this theory will be arrested under penalty of penetrative death.

Spooky Action at a Distance does not exist. Citizens are advised to put this nonsense out of their minds.

*Do NOT CLICK

The Marginalia of the Backwards City Walls

2007-05-23T17:07:00.000-04:00

Graffiti (Considered Possibly Revolutionary, Deemed Certainly Dangerous by the BCPD) Found in the Green District of the Backwards City

Note: These were recorded by an unknown Romani historian in a Wal-Mart-purchased notebook emblazoned with the Roman visage of a pre-plastic-surgery Ashley Simpson, just days prior to the Backwards City Counsel-Council ordered palimpsest-conceit of 5/13/07. These slogans have since been banned (under punishment of penetrative death) by order of the Hon. Drummond Drumberrt, Mayor of Backwards City (formerly Backwards City Chancellor of the Cloacal Exchequer), and the order is closely enforced by the Special Forces of the Backwards City Police Department, who were trained by close viewings of secreted advertisements for the fetishizingly carnivorous Hardee’s ½ pound “Thick Burgers” and all-male snuff films, combined with frequent caged combat involving (“only” as the official BC documents read) mammals and prisoners, and a daily nutritional supplement of a pill of which the advertising reads only “Steroids for the Soul!” On the manicured lawn of the BCPD Academy there is a recently sculpted (commissioned on 9/11/06 and constructed with lasers rather than chisels) marble statue of a maddened Hon. Drummond Drumberrt (modeled on the Greek figure of the doubting and authoritarian Adeimantus) standing ultimately living, if not argumentatively victorious, above the corpse of Socrates. The inscription reads: “’It looks, then, as if we shall have to control story-tellers on this topic too. We must ask the poets to stop giving their gloomy account of the after-life, which is both untrue and unsuitable to produce a fighting spirit, and make them speak more favorably of it.’ [Plato, “Education: The First Stage].” The City Backwards ruling edict, hence emblazoned in proud Gothic lettering (with all according serifs) in palimpsestic lieu of all Possibly Revolutionary and Certainly Dangerous graffiti is taken out of context from the same (heavily redacted in the City that is Backwards) text: “’It will be for the rulers of our city, then, to use falsehood in dealing with citizen or enemy for the good of the State; no one else must do so.;” [Ibid.]

The list of banned slogans is as follows:

Never stopping is not fast enough.

Crying gets us wet.

Always looking back so we don’t have to see what we hit next.

Running through the river when it starts to rain.

Don’t you want oblivion?

Empty hearts and broken bottles.

Hell is loveless and sober.

Love means never having to say it’s too loud.

Hearts on sleeves and guns on hips, with steeled eyes and toes-- these are miles my legs may cover.

Magic is a sin but sin is magic.

Penetrative Death

2007-05-23T13:02:00.001-04:00

Seditious Materials:

The following materials have been deemed seditious. Any citizens of Backwards City found to possess, view, or otherwise entertain these materials will face penetrative death.

Comic Sedition - do NOT CLICK*

Artistic Sedition - do NOT CLICK*

Rhythmic Sedition - do NOT CLICK*

* Again, the penetrative death.

Report of Policings (Classified)

2007-05-20T11:46:00.000-04:00

May 20, 2007

Backwards City Politzei

Report of Suspicious Activities Witnessed:

10:00 am:
Arab with eyepatch and no facial hair purchased five cups of macchiato at Cafe Alreves. Arab met with two albino women, dressed all in black. Arab left the vicinity. Payment for the drinks was left upon the table. Solid gold bar, approximately 30 cm in length.

11:00 am:
Attempted to follow suspicious man to next destination. Dead end alleyway off Hind Street. Suspect vanished. Translucent liquid, best described as plasma, was the only trace of him.

11:20 am:
Became afflicted with incapicitating headache. Returned to station for medical attention. Much trouble finding the station. The street signs are different? Do not remember "Fore Street" but seemed unable to leave it. Walked four blocks only to find "Fore Street" again. Full of vacant lots. Windy, strange green tinge to the sky.

12:30 pm: Arrived at station. Fell asleep in sickbay. Awoke to sound of wind and found I had somehow been transported back to "Fore Street." Stood, realizing I was in one of the vacant lots. Broken bottles. Plastic bags. Empty boxes. Black dog stared silently across the way. On a personal note, sirs, I am becoming worried.

Trouble in the City Square

2007-05-16T10:59:00.000-04:00

A Found Letter:

Dearest Uncle,

The night shift at the factory is becoming a great burden for me. Ever since I moved to Backwards City and started at the Gearbone Foundry, I have rarely had a moment where I felt fully alive. There is a constant soreness in my muscles and a scratching in my throat. But these I accept as a badge, the ache of any worker trying to buy his bread and send monies home to his family. In fact, when I grew up on the farm, I often carried these pains upon me, and they seemed to be filled with an echo of sweetness. No, the pains now are different, and the thrum of the factory bleeds through my skull even when I am not there. The worst is what is happening to my eyes; I see flashes of light and color, and images seem to me more jagged and distorted. The statue of the Magistrate in the City Square, which seemed to me at first the very pinnacle of progress and civilization, now looks like a jagged old stone, indistinct, faceless, colorless. As I was walking through the Square to work just last night (and this, dearest Uncle, you must never share with a living soul) I seemed to see a most impossible sight. The crows that circle the statue were, how do I say this without the implication of my own lunacy; they all flew forwards uncle. All of them, circling headfirst, and splitting the air with their beaks. I felt terrified and ecstatic. Something is happening. Happening to me, and, dare I even write it, happening to all of Backwards City...

Yrs in Blood,
Nephew Vladimir

The Revolution Will be Blogged

2007-05-15T14:59:00.000-04:00

Dear Whathaveyou:

Oh people, the dogs of the poor in these Backwards ghettos have stopped their mewling. No barking. Something's afoot. Certainly-- afoot. Make no mistake, we are coming with gears and wrenches, devices O'plenty. If you are reading this, we admit we've left the underground radio controls and committed ourselves to future deeds with you in mind. We may be labeled, festooned, done up as "Editors," but this formality is set in place to divert our most serious intention. Vanguard, hazardous operations of aesthetic kinetics, we wish to impart our world on your heads. Backwards City is stirring. Continue checking this frequency on Sundays and Wednesdays for communiques. [End dictation]

0900 Hours, Backwards City Refinery, Block 18-B

Strange Things Are Afoot

2007-05-14T23:51:00.000-04:00

The big announcement is here, and it's this: I'm leaving Backwards City. All the founding editors are; the younger generation has risen up and is taking over, as it always does. We've been driven out. We're hiding in the hinterlands. We're an editorial board in exile.

Backwards City #6 will be our last issue; #7 and on will be all theirs.

In the coming days, they'll start to introduce themselves. Rest assured, they are awesome.

Part of giving up Backwards City means giving up this blog. But I'm not giving up blogging altogether; I'm going to keep on doing something like the same old thing at gerrycanavan.blogspot.com, which I hope you'll all add to your regular rotation.

But stick around here, too. Strange and wonderful things start happening at noon tomorrow.

This Is Not the Big Announcement Either

2007-05-14T17:00:00.000-04:00

...but if you've been waiting to enter our writing contest, wait no more! The postmark deadline is tomorrow!

This Is Not the Big Announcement

2007-05-14T16:49:00.000-04:00

...it's the blogiversary post of the year. There were a lot of different directions I might have gone with this one—but in the end I have to go with The Show (with Ze Frank). Even though it started slightly before May '06, there's no question Ze was the best of the Web just about every day this year.

Man, I miss The Show.

Nothing Can Stop It

2007-05-14T15:11:00.000-04:00

Check back tonight for a big announcement...

Behold, the Final Blogiversary!

2007-05-14T14:51:00.000-04:00

MARCH (in which taking four graduate seminars made it difficult to blog)
How to Draw the World
Stairway to Gilligan's Island
Totally 100% Trend
Tower Defense
2007 Backwards City Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Star Wars Analogies
The 100-Year-Photo Blog
Which Philip K. Dick Story Are We In Today?

APRIL (in which my hero died, and I'm still not over it)
MSona Lisa
Kurt Is in Heaven Now
Super Masochist Brothers (now solved!)
What If the Beatles Were Irish?
Capitalism as Religion
Meta-Free-Phor-All
In the Year 2000
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

MAY (what we're looking at now)
Pulp Muppets
Everything Grindhouse
Historicism in The Shining
Etymologic!

2007iversary!

2007-05-14T14:39:00.000-04:00

JANUARY (which was quite unseasonably warm)
So You Want to Book Screech
Barry Hannah on Noir
How to Paint Like Picasso
xkcd
North Korean Propaganda Posters
The Beatles Rooftop Concert

FEBRUARY (which was cold as hell)
Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce and Beckett
Time to Drop Out of Grad School Zen
Tek Jensen Time Travels
Guilty Pleasures of Literary Greats
Passion in an Era of Decafeinated Belief
You're Going to Die
Dylan Hears a Who (defunct/defunked)
An American Self-Portrait

Disaster for the Small Presses

2007-05-14T14:21:00.000-04:00

With the latest price increase, the Post Office has effectively done away with Media Mail—it's gone up 54 cents a magazine and is now only two cents less than regular parcel post, making it worthless. Small magazines and presses will be pretty hurt by this. I know it hurts us.

More blogiversary to come this afternoon...

End of 2006iversary

2007-05-14T12:10:00.000-04:00

NOVEMBER (From a purely electoral standpoint the best November of the 21st Century)
Woody Allen Interviews Billy Graham
Freedom
Who Would Superman Vote For?
This Is What the Revolution Looks Like
This Is Not a Work of Fiction. The Isle of Flowers Actually Exists. God Does Not Exist.'
'Galactus Is Coming!'
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
Borat: The Memo

DECEMBER (In which I wrote a lot of papers and also lost my mind, possibly not in that order)
Hide Your Children
Metaphilm
The World's Most Dangerous Roads
All About George Washington
James Brown Loves You
Gerald Ford Died Today...
The Future
A Tourist Map of Gotham

It's Been a Musical Sort of Blogiversary

2007-05-14T11:45:00.000-04:00

I guess it really has been the year of YouTube.

SEPTEMBER (I was feeling a bit apocalyptic in September...)
Skeletal Structures of Cartoon Characters
Charlie Brown Has Never Knowingly Taken Steroids
Great Moments in Sentence Construction
Katamari Damacy: A Critique
The First Level of Super Mario 3, Rendered in Lego
The Office Values
Mr. Rogers Once Played Donkey Kong

OCTOBER (...but October was all right)
Escheriffic
The Nietzsche Family Circus
The Art of Tommy Kane
Warning Signs of the Future
Geek Social Fallacies
'If We Are to Estimate Nature as Dynamically Sublime, It Must Be Represented as a Source of Fear'
Okay, I Admit It, I Still Like Weird Al
For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn
Kill the Documentary as We Know It

Julyiversary, Augustiversary

2007-05-14T11:11:00.000-04:00

I spent nearly all of July driving back and forth between Greensboro and Durham, and nearly all of August trying and failing to make myself well-read for grad school. Let's take a look.

JULY (in which I'm still blogging significantly too much about the World Cup)
Brucewards City
'Three Things: 1. I Don't Want See Him in That Suit, 2. I Don't Want to See Him Fly, and 3. He's Got to Fight a Giant Spider in the Third Act'
25 Great Calvin & Hobbes Strips
Batman: The Musical
Perhaps the Greatest Music Video of All Time
The Star Wars Theme on a Banjo

AUGUST (the start of grad school, the end of everything)
It's Not Unusual
Ma Nah Ma Nah
The Release of Backwards City #4!
A Tattoo He Will Never, Ever Regret
Just Imagine: Stan Lee Creating The Watchmen
22 Panels That Always Work (Sometimes)

Return of the Blogiversary!

2007-05-14T10:42:00.000-04:00

Any trilogy falls apart in the third act, which brings us today to Blogiversary 3, a stroll down memory lane in the third year of Backwards City...this time with a firm, manageable limit of five links a month.

In a year in which this ceased more than ever to be a group blog, we'll start, as we always do, with May, following the final post of Blogiversary 2, last year's post of the year.

MAY (in which I still had a hangover from the last Blogiversary)
Renaissance Superheroes
Jack Bauer Kill Count
Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics
An All-Ukelele Cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Ceci N'est Pas Une Homage

JUNE (in which I seem to have blogged way too much about both the World Cup and Superman, sorry about that)
Stephen Colbert's Commencement Address at Knox College
Tim Burton's Superman
I ♥ 80s Music
Urville
Way Too Many Superman Links
David Foster Wallace Visits the Adult Movie Awards

That was six links. Six is a type of five.

Am I the Only One

2007-05-13T22:26:00.000-04:00

...who found that a pretty lackluster Sopranos? Obviously, [The Event] was major—but for the climax of nearly a decade of narrative possibility, the episode struck me as basically perfunctory. I'm not complaining about the contrivance of [The Event] itself, though obviously I wasn't very happy about that either. Rather, what most troubles me about the episode is the lack of continuity with seven years of history; all these events seemed to be happening in complete isolation, rather than at the tail end of the long and detailed story we've been watching all this time.

I don't know; it really left me cold.

That so much of such a crucial episode focused on a random character we'd never seen before didn't help matters.

Since rewatching the first half of season six I've become a fan of the Kevin Finnerty arc, so I was glad for the callback in the final instant of the episode—but exactly what sort of epiphany is Tony meant to have had in this peyote-fueled daze? What did he suddenly "get," and what does it have to do with [The Event]?

After five weeks of confidence in Chase's ability to end this series, I'm suddenly very worried.

Juxtapose

2007-05-13T10:53:00.000-04:00

The Chronicle takes a look at the life of Goethe, while The Independent takes down Don DeLillo's Falling Man, sharing my misgivings about the last few DeLillo novels I've read:

Then there's the dialogue. At some point since Underworld, and indeed for large stretches of that, DeLillo's characters started to speak like characters in a Don DeLillo novel, ie like no one else on earth. The effect is carried to extremes here, with almost every character disgorging stale profundities in what sounds like a comedy Mitteleuropean accent. "To feel dangerously alive, this was a quality you associated with your father," says Leanne's mother. "Wood and graphite. Materials from the earth. We respect this about a pencil," Leanne controversially informs her son. So it goes on.

Mass Culture, by the Numbers

2007-05-13T00:37:00.000-04:00

Some depressing statistics from this month's Harper's Index:

* Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000
* Number of these that sold fewer that 99 copies: 1,123,000
* Number that sold more than 100,000: 483

Something's gone wrong.

There's also a shrill-but-sobering polemic from Garret Keizer about the ways in which the politics of global warming tends to operate along the fantasy that the technocratic status quo we currently enjoy can somehow be indefinitely maintained at no biospheric or human-ethical cost—taking particular aim at carbon offsets, as well as how environmental rhetoric can crowd out issues of poverty and distributive justice. It's not online yet, but here's a quote from the end that gets both the point and the tone across:

It is not enough to acknowledge that global warming exists; we also need to ask what global warming means. Surely one thing it means is that a culture that has as its highest aim the avoidance of anything remotely resembling physical work must change its life. If you want an inconvenient truth, there it is: that the very notion of convenience upon which our civilization rests is a lie that is killing us. And if you want to see how quickly green can turn yellow, make mention of that abundant, renewable fuel source whose chief emission is human sweat.

...To put that as succinctly as possible, the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close. The game of finding someone else in some convenient misery to fight our wars, pull our rickshaws, and serve as the offset for our every filthy indulgence is just about up. It is either Earth for all of us or hell for most of us. Those are the terms, those have always been the terms, and any approach to climate change that begins on those terms can count me as a loyal partisan. Otherwise, don't expect me to get overly excited as to which side of a golf-course heart attack shows the affluent, the educated, the suburban, and the wired a world much hotter than the one they were banking on.

It's On Its Way

2007-05-12T00:51:00.000-04:00

Chronic Myopia

2007-05-11T23:42:00.000-04:00

Timothy Garton Ash is thinking about the Stasi in The New York Review of Books, which this week also has Nicholas Kristof on poverty and yet another article on how Democrats should talk (because politics is about talking, never about doing, obviously).

28 Weeks Later

2007-05-11T16:26:00.000-04:00

The thing about 28 Weeks Later is that it isn't the movie they wanted to make. They wanted to make a movie called 28 Minutes Later about the initial Rage epidemic and the subsequent destruction of British society. But for some reason they felt this movie wouldn't fly—so instead they crafted a fairly implausible scenario in which Britain begins to be repopulated by the American military a scant six months after the initial outbreak, establishing that 15,000 British refugees are now living on a rebuilt Isle of Dogs in London in relative comfort, with running water and electricity. The epidemic is over, and they're all perfectly safe, except they aren't, and the whole thing goes to shit again.

Although 28 Weeks Later gropes for a Romeroesque politics with some early references to the Green Zone and other gestures towards the occupation of Iraq, it never really gets there—the film is mostly about running away from zombies. In that respect it's almost precisely as good as the first one. But all the same it feels as though an opportunity to up the ante has been missed.

And yes: they're making a 28 Months Later. Of course they are.

'Historicism in The Shining'

2007-05-11T10:21:00.000-04:00

One of the books I've been working my way through so far this summer is Jameson's Signatures of the Visible, his book on film, which is brilliant, of course. I found what's probably my favorite essay from the book online, on Kubrick in general and The Shining in particular (written in 1981). Here's a taste:

If you believe that such production must always presuppose the sustaining existence, behind it, of a community (whether identified or not, whether conscious of itself or on the contrary about to achieve such consciousness by means of the very cultural expression which testifies, ex post facto, to its having been there in the first place), then it is clear why "Jack" has nothing to say: even the family unit of which he is a part has been reduced to a kind of stark isolation, the coexistence of three random individuals who henceforth represent nothing beyond themselves, and those very relations with each other thus called (violently) in question. Meanwhile, whatever possibility this particular family might have had, in the social space of the city, of developing some collective solidarity with other people of similar marginalized circumstances is henceforth itself foreclosed by the absolute isolation of the great hotel in winter. Only the telepathic fellow ship of the child, as it strikes a link with the motif of the black community, offers some fantasmatic figure or larger social relation ships.

It is however precisely in such a situation that the drive towards community, the longing for collectivity, the envy of other, achieved collectivities, emerges with all force of a return of the repressed: and this is finally, I think, what The Shining is all about. Where to search for this "knowable community," to which, even excluded, the fantasy of collective relations might attach itself? It is surely not to be found in the managerial bureaucracy of the hotel itself, as multinational and standardized as a bedroom community or a motel chain; nor can it any longer take seriously the departing vacationers of the current holiday season, on their way home to their own privatized dwelling places. It only has one direction to go, into the past; and this is the moment at which Kubrick's rewriting of his novelistic original takes on its power as an articulated and intelligible symbolic act.

(Thanks to the Kubrick Site for putting this up)

Top Forty Foreign Films of All Time

2007-05-11T10:19:00.000-04:00

...as chosen by Guardian readers.

Zwartboek

2007-05-10T23:24:00.000-04:00

Also in R. Vu news: Black Book, the Paul Verhoeven movie he pushed for us to see tonight, turned out to be quite good. The movie takes place in Holland during the Nazi Occupation, focusing on the various compromises one Jewish woman makes in her role as part of the Resistance. Visually, the film is perfectly realized, and even the movie's flaws (mostly clustering around ludicrous plot twists and infinite double-crosses) were in their own way perversely enjoyable. I don't think I've ever seen a movie pack so much content into its final ten seconds—there's a plot twist and then a lovely thematic reversal in the very last instant.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly detailed page on the film, if you're interested. How would have guessed the maker of Robocop, Total Recall, and Hollow Man had this in there?

Empire (No, Not That One)

2007-05-10T23:10:00.000-04:00

I took Matt Yglesias's advice and bought Mark Waid's Empire, perhaps the definitive supervillain story. (Imagine a world in which Dr. Doom wins. That's basically the situation here.) I'm a bit surprised it isn't better known—it's a hell of a good read, just a cut below classics like Watchman or The Dark Knight Returns.

It's been a good week for comics; yesterday I borrowed a bunch of trade paperbacks from R. Vu and dove in. First up was Batman: Year One, which was also excellent.

Someday I'll probably read a real book again. For now I'm not sweating it.

'The Attacks Themselves Seemed So DeLillo-esque'

2007-05-10T23:05:00.000-04:00

Salon reviews Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel, Falling Man.

Something's Coming

2007-05-10T10:56:00.000-04:00

The Mechanism

2007-05-10T01:37:00.000-04:00

Also in this week's New Yorker: An article about the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism.

'I Originally Set Out to Try and Save the World, but Now I’m Not Sure I Like It Enough'

2007-05-10T01:34:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker profiles pop graffiti artist Banksy.

The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema

2007-05-09T11:44:00.000-04:00

Click here, via MetaFilter. Here's the entry from Goodfellas.

Jeanette Winterson Loves Venice

2007-05-09T11:41:00.000-04:00

So do I.

Netflix Rodeo!: Only Good Movies Edition

2007-05-09T11:19:00.000-04:00

* Longtime readers know that I'm not much of a "law and order" guy, but one thing that does tend to flip the "Oh my god, hang them all" switch in my reptilian brain is listening to a pedophile brag about what he's done. Which is what makes Deliver Us From Evil so completely disturbing. The central figure in this documentary about the Catholic Church's long cover-up of pedophile priests is now walking free in Ireland, allowing him to speak frankly to the camera about his past. He occasionally gestures towards guilt and periodically makes brief references to the fact that he's destroyed many lives—but by and large he seems totally self-involved and unrepentant. This is an incredibly shocking and heart-wrenching film, probably doubly so if you grew up Catholic.

* Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? is also quite good, I think—it's something of an art history mystery concerning the discovery of a possible Pollock by a dumpster-diving truck driver in a thrift store in Texas. As is usual in these sorts of things, the academic establishment comes off quite badly, completely ignoring all manner of scientific and forensic evidence in favor of their gut feelings about what a Pollock looks like.

* Inside Deep Throat is also pretty interesting, though it's only been a few days and I can hardly remember anything from the movie that I didn't know before I watched it. (Except that Deep Throat had a plot. I had no idea!) If nothing else it's worth seeing for yourself just how far we've backslid into puritanism over the last thirty years—not that Deep Throat is some lost feminist treasure, but simply that our cultural attitudes towards sex remain completely #$&%ed up.

* Notes on a Scandal and The Queen, two worthy movies from Oscar season, have just come out on DVD. Blood Diamond was good too, and just about our last best hope of ever getting people to stop buying diamonds. The prize, though, surely goes to Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, which is genuinely excellent.

Science Fiction... of the Mundane!

2007-05-08T16:41:00.000-04:00

Mundane science fiction is a sub-section of science fiction. It focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written. Via this Metafilter thread about various science-fiction improbabilities.

The Devil Went to Devon, It Felt Like the Fourth Degree / He Said, 'Is It Hot in Here, or Is It Only Me?'

2007-05-08T00:12:00.000-04:00

Presenting Spinal Tap's new single for the Life Earth benefit, "Warmer Than Hell."

There's Just One Week Left in the Backwards City Contest!

2007-05-07T22:18:00.000-04:00

2007 Fiction Contest (Top Prize: $500 and publication in Backwards City #6)
2007 Poetry Contest (Top Prize: $500 and publication in Backwards City #6)
2007 Poetry Chapbook Contest (Top Prize: $300 and twenty-five copies of your printed chapbook)

The deadline for all contests is May 15, 2007. Good luck!

Mandaeans

2007-05-07T21:20:00.001-04:00

They believe somewhere in the north, beyond the pole, is a world that is the double of this world, called Msunia Kusta. Every living Mandaean has a double there, and all the Mandaeans of the past live there, with plenty of food and music and cool breezes. No one ever speaks there, for everyone knows what everyone else wants to say.

One of the highlights of this month's Harper's is Eliot Weinberger's article on Mandaeism, a relatively obscure Semitic sect from southern Iraq. You can read the article online, but only if you already have a subscription (which you should, because it gives you access to the magazine's entire 150-year history).

Do You Think That Your Fathers Are Watching? That They Weigh You in Their Ledgerbook? There Is No Book and Your Fathers Are Dead in the Ground

2007-05-07T18:42:00.000-04:00

In the last few years the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction has been very hit and miss, sometimes being awarded to excellent novels and just as often being awarded to very bad ones. This was a banner year for the Pulitzer, as well as for Oprah's Book Club: Cormac McCarthy's The Road is fantastic, keying into precisely the mix of premillennial anxiety and nihilistic angst that seems to best characterize the Bush years. For about twenty pages I wondered why it was a novel rather than a short story—then I stopped wondering. It's very good.

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all the stores of food have given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

Game, Game, Game, and Again Game

2007-05-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the most bizarre Flash experience on the Web.

Just When I Thought I Was Out

2007-05-06T22:54:00.000-04:00

This season of The Sopranos has been by and large exceptional, with only last week's episode being especially weak. If I have a complaint, it's the usual one, which is that it's taken Chase far too long to get to where we now are. Both the AJ and the Chris plotlines from tonight's episode could have happened at any time over the last few years; they're only happening now because this is when production considerations have dictated the show must end.

Also, that murder was really sloppy, and [SPOILER] was a known business associate of [SPOILER] and had been seen giving him public beatings on at least two other occasions. Additionally, given the Hollywood rag-sheet angle, I think this is one murder that would definitely be in the news. I hope it's followed up on; I'd like to see this be the incident that leads to a wrap-up of [SPOILER]'s storyline, and possibly even give direction to the end of the show as a whole.

5/5/07

2007-05-06T11:30:00.000-04:00

Aerial pictures of Greenburg, Kansas, the small town destroyed by a direct hit from a tornado yesterday. Via MeFi. Given the damage it's amazing that only nine people died.

Verbotomy!

2007-05-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

Verbotomy is about creating words. Every day we create a new definition and matching cartoon. Your challenge is to create a word -- a verboticism -- that matches the definition. After you create your verboticism, you can vote for other authors's words to help select the winning verboticism for the definition.

Everything Grindhouse

2007-05-05T22:25:00.000-04:00

Posters for all sorts of movies in the Grindhouse style. Via a lot of places, including MetaFilter.

Etymologic!

2007-05-05T13:45:00.000-04:00

The toughest word game on the Web.

Sam Raimi Knew There Was Only One Way to Get Out of Doing Spider-Man 4

2007-05-04T21:55:00.000-04:00

That's my theory, anyway. I haven't seen any review so far that does justice to just how bad Spider-Man 3 is. (Anthony Lane, of course, comes closest. He's right: the Sandman's creation is just about the movie's only good scene.)

Most of the problem is with Raimi's script, not with his directing—though there are definitely some very odd choices on that front as well.

With too many characters to cram into the movie and too many special-effects sequences to navigate aimlessly between, Raimi has no choice but to turn to random coincidence over and over again to drive the engine of his plot. The result is a muddled and astoundingly dull disaster, certainly the worst major superhero movie since Batman & Robin, if not Superman III.

Keep your happy memories of Doc Ock and stay home.

One More: Butler on Arendt

2007-05-04T11:00:00.000-04:00

You should check out Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's Jewish Writings in the London Review of Books.

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

Today This Blog Celebrates the Glorious Return of Actual Content

2007-05-04T10:24:00.000-04:00

* Instead of approaching the attack on the World Trade Center through parable, like Mr. Roth, or analogy, like Mr. Rushdie, or phantasmagoria, like Mr. Pynchon, Mr. DeLillo confronts it head-on, with graphic realism. The New York Sun reviews Falling Man, DeLillo's 9/11 novel, which I think we'll be hearing a lot about. (via A&L Daily)

* This very short article gestures towards the possible origin of symbolic language in ape communication. (via Bookninja)

* "2BR02B," an unanthologized story by Kurt Vonnegut, has found its way to Project Gutenberg. (Via MeFi)

* The Kugelmass Episodes has an interesting post up about contemporary problems in radicalization that will also help you catch up on all the big blog brouhaha surrounding Žižek and 300.

* In space, nobody can hear you scream: coping with sex and death on long space missions. (Via Gravity Lens)

* And just in case you've got work to do, Slither should nicely fill your time.

Ha!

2007-05-04T01:18:00.001-04:00

Done. Just finished this instant.

And They Said It Couldn't Be Done

2007-05-02T10:51:00.000-04:00

Two papers down, less than a third of one to go, and God willing I never have to think about Heaven's Gate again.

I Have Seen the Future

2007-05-01T10:25:00.000-04:00

...and it is called Pulp Muppets. Via MetaFilter.

The 3rd Annual Backwards City Contest Closes in Two Weeks!

2007-04-30T22:41:00.000-04:00

Submissions for Backwards City #6 are now officially closed. But our contest deadline is still two weeks away. Click below for all the details, and good luck!

2007 Fiction Contest (Top Prize: $500 and publication in Backwards City #6)
2007 Poetry Contest (Top Prize: $500 and publication in Backwards City #6)
2007 Poetry Chapbook Contest (Top Prize: $300 and twenty-five copies of your printed chapbook)

Whose Name Sounds Like a Small-Circulation Poetry Magazine

2007-04-30T19:24:00.000-04:00

Anthony Lane, who hates everything, hates Spider-Man 3. It's not like you won't see it anyway.

If “Spider-Man 3” is a shambles, that’s because it makes the rules up as it goes along. By the end, for instance, Sandman has become the size of an office block, each swinging fist as big as a truck, his personality reduced to brutishness. I half expected him to come after Spider-Man and Mary Jane carrying a gigantic bucket and spade. By what criterion did he grow so mountainous? Is he like a Transformer, or more like a genie? The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated. (Tolkien knew this better than anyone.) Some viewers will take the New Goblin, whose name sounds like a small-circulation poetry magazine, to be a vessel of unnatural forces, while others will see him, when he fires up his rocket-powered skateboard, as a rich kid with too many toys. That’s the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it’s running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying—or calculating—that some of them will fly.

Angel: Season Six

2007-04-29T19:01:00.000-04:00

On the heels of the massive success of the Buffy Season Eight comic, Joss Whedon will be putting out a twelve-issue miniseries of the storyline for the planned sixth season of Angel. I'm actually more excited about this than I am about Buffy Season Eight. It's a good time to be a huge nerd.

Thinking Through Why Massacres Happen

2007-04-29T16:30:00.000-04:00

Lenin's Tomb has a lengthy review of Mark Ames's Going Postal prompted by the Virginia Tech shootings. What he writes doesn't actually seem to have much to do with what happened in Virginia, based on what we've heard about it so far—but it does begin to explain why events like Columbine and workplace shootings happen.

As has been repeatedly pointed out, no successful profile of a typical school shooter has yet been devised. Good students, bad students, wealthy ones, poor ones, ones from stable familes, others from broken homes... there's no archetype. This is because, as Ames puts it, "It isn't the office or schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled - they can't be. It is the workplaces and schools that need to be profiled". Now, this bit is rather crucial. I quote verbatim from his list of characteristics to watch for:
complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;

antiseptic corridors and overhead fluourescent lights reminiscent of a mid-sized airports;

rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and

maximally stressed parents push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.
The second point, to avoid misunderstanding, is serious. The dispiriting, uglified surroundings provide an important experiential backdrop for the bullying and hypocrisy and stress. But of course, the main points here are the competitive social structure and the parents' eagerness to ensure children succeed within it. The school is a training ground for the workplace, inculcating the kind of discipline and habits that one will be constant throughout one's life. Most waking hours, at least five days a week, will be spent in competition with one's peers, and the assholes will always rise to the top if they weren't there to begin with. Bullying will be overlooked or tacitly condoned by people who sympathise with the bullies and find it difficult to manage their subordinates without them. They call it 'hazing', apparently, and its often meted out in a formal fashion along socioeconomic lines, sometimes by sororities and fraternities. It's defended as a bit of fun, or as a means to inculcate respect: on the contrary, it is often quite serious and generates fear and mistrust. Aside from the formal 'hazing', there are asshole teachers who will emotionally humiliate students in the name of discipline, and the usual ritual drudgery and idiocy that goes on the minutiae. Many of the most miserable, demeaning things that can happen at work can happen at school, and anyone who remembers their school years knows that it seems to matter a great deal more at that age, and it seems to last forever, even if its only a few years.

That this is an experience with at least some widespread purchase is evident in the subterranean sympathy for the mass murderers. The support of some young people wasn't restricted to Klebold and Karris. When Andy Williams, a lower middle class student attending an upper class college in the fading Republican town of Santee, decided to wipe out many of his classmates, within weeks there were attempted and actual 'copycat' massacres. So far from the Pump Up the Volume fantasy, these kids don't solve all their problems by learning to express themselves through pirate radio stations, and sincerely talking through all of their problems. They implode or explode. The implication of the phrase 'copycat' is that people really want to be like the hick serial killers and destroy their own lives in the process, so that someone who doesn't matter will say they were cool. That's a cheap and lazy excuse for analysis. But, precisely as the slave revolts in the workplace often involve explicit or implicit reference to previous revolts, the example of others provides an interpretive framework, and a 'way forward'.

Shorts

2007-04-29T16:29:00.000-04:00

New York Magazine has full video for five of their favorite shorts from the Tribeca Film Festival. Via MetaFilter.

Don't You Remember You Told Me You Loved Me Baby?

2007-04-29T00:56:00.000-04:00

Openly gay, experimental filmmaker Todd Haynes burst upon the scene two years after his graduation from Brown University with his now-infamous 43-minute cult treasure "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" (1987). Seizing upon the inspired gimmick of using Barbie and Ken dolls to sympathetically recount the story of the pop star's death from anorexia, he spent months making miniature dishes, chairs, costumes, Kleenex and Ex-Lax boxes, and Carpenters' records to create the film's intricate, doll-size mise-en-scene. The result was both audacious and accomplished as the dolls seemingly ceased to be dolls leaving the audience weeping for the tragic singer.

Banned in the United States, but apparently not on Google Video:

P.O.D.: Planetary Orbital Defense

2007-04-28T20:52:00.000-04:00

And just for Tim, who I know can't resist the siren song of Internet flash games no matter how many papers he has to write, here's P.O.D.: Planetary Orbital Defense. Via JayIsGames.

Welcome to the Dark Ages

2007-04-28T20:50:00.000-04:00

For a depressive like myself it's the Golden Age of Culture:

Some kind of dark alien parasite seems to be taking over vast swathes of the entertainment realm. Previously sunny and harmless areas of pop culture are gradually being cast into shadow, as if a giant pair of Ray-Bans is being lowered over the world. We've got dark sitcoms, dark reality TV, dark comedies, dark thrillers, dark genres of music, ultra-darker-than-black horror movies, and when a masked black-metal group from Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest, it's surely time to sound the dark alarm?

Via blucarbnpinwheel, always a ray of sunshine.

Okay, I Lied

2007-04-28T20:48:00.000-04:00

I had a surprisingly productive day, so here come some unexpected pre-Monday posts. First up: an amusing list of contronyms, words that are self-antonyms. (Thanks Steve)

Time Is Running Out! Zen

2007-04-27T14:08:00.000-04:00

Lighting one candle
  with another candle
    this spring evening.
      —Buson

No more posts from me until Monday.

What Smart People Think about My Favorite Game

2007-04-27T14:00:00.000-04:00

R. Vu sends some thoughts on Go vs. chess from Deleuze and Guattari:

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game?s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: "It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary?s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.
—A Thousand Plateaus, 352

If you're uninitiated, you can learn to play Go at the Interactive Way to Go, or here at Sensei's Library; you'd be a fool not to. I'm on the International Go Server using PandaEgg from time to time, though not as often as I would like—email me at gerry@backwardscity.net for my handle.

One Post to Rule Them All

2007-04-27T09:25:00.000-04:00

* Classic short stories.
* The Guardian on the rise of wrist-slitter fiction.
* Abridged classics are ~~an abomination~~ "great reads in half the time.”
* And, most importantly, this MetaFilter thread has 100% of your daily recommended allowance of funk.

Joyce on the Mind

2007-04-26T19:54:00.000-04:00

I stole this from Tim W.'s Facebook page. That guy loves James Joyce more than anyone.

"As an artist I am against every state. Of course I must recognize it, since indeed in all my dealings I come into contact with its institutions. The state is concentric, man is eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle. The monk, the bachelor, and the anarchist are in the same category. Naturally I cant approve of the act of the revolutionary who tosses a bomb in a theatre to destroy the king and his children. On the other hand, have those states behaved any better which have drowned the world in a blood-bath?" -Joyce, letter of 1918