you don't know what you've got til it's gone, and then you can relax
» Wednesday, January 31, 2007
I turns out that I’m not a Christian.I didn’t know this about myself for the longest time. I didn’t know that I was once a Christian, nor did I know it when I became a happy-go-lucky agnostic. My family is traditionally Catholic on both sides, but my parents weren’t practicing, and I was never baptized. My grandparents had long ago abandoned Irish Catholicism for English Communism. When I was young they would go on vacation to Cuba and the Soviet Union, bringing me back souvenirs every so often – Che Guevara pins, bottles of Cola with Cyrillic writing, a pillbox cap that they claimed was very fashionable with young Muscovite men at the time (circa 1985).
It would be wrong to describe my family as C&E Catholics: we were strictly C Catholics. Sometimes. My mother was the one who led the annual charge to midnight mass, more out of nostalgia and a desire to break up the cozy boredom of Christmas Eve than any sense of devotion. My brother and I went along because we were allowed to open our presents after Mass.
The last time I attended I was sixteen or seventeen, and much more interested in the girl sitting one row ahead of me. She had blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail high up a narrow neck, and over the course of the mass I began to fixate on the swishes of the tail as her head tilted minutely back and forth. I liked watching her stand up, sit down, kneel on the bar and push herself back into place with her hands braced against the next pew. She was dressed in a pastel yellow sweater and grey skirt, a conservative shell that I itched to crack. At one point I tried talking to her. I had worn a motorcycle jacket to church, and looked, with my stubbly face and short curly hair, like a drug dealer. Or worse, like someone who wanted to be a drug dealer but couldn’t get the real drug dealers to notice him. Or even worse, like a Grease reject. Plus I had a massive coldsore clinging to my lip that hurt like a bitch when I smiled. I talked, grinned, flinched from the pain but kept going, determined to get something worthwhile out of church attendance. Her fixed smile and unfocused blue eyes betrayed a deep desire to get away from me. At the end of the mass she turned around and gave my hand a polite shake with the immortal and gracious “Peace be with you,” but she was staring at the coldsore. I never saw her again. Maybe if I went to church more often.
Despite my lousy record at church, I retained a great fascination with religion, and particularly with the caprices of freaky old Yahweh, who favoured inscrutable demands and poisoned quail over reasoned debate. And of course, ordered Abraham to kill his son, stayed his hand, and then a thousand years later said, “Wait. Here’s how you kill your son,” essentially forcing a theology out of psychodrama. For some reason that kind of behavior resonated with me. Notions of guilt, original sin, divine force and undeserved mercy – what the folks call grace – had a hold over my thinking.
I didn’t share a conscious belief in god, not once in my whole life. I'd read Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell, Michael Schermer and all the rest. But I sympathized with religious thinking and religious rationales. I accepted religion – not the spiritual – as an insoluble element of human consciousness. The notion of the defrocked priest, like Richard Burton in Night of the Iguana, fascinated me. For several years I inhabited the works of Flannery O’ Connor.
When did I cease to believe in religion, in all systems of thought propping up the invisible and unfalsifiable? I’m not sure. I didn’t even know that I shared some degree of belief until I looked, almost accidentally, maybe in search of something else, into the space where my faith was kept, and found nothing there. Maybe it was one too many people trying to convert me on city busses. Maybe I got tired of trying to figure out why god would permit suffering, when it became clear that suffering required no one’s permission to happen. Maybe it was just too depressing to see the post-mass exhalations of stiff churchgoers spilling out onto the street, corpulent with piety and looking to stuff their faces at the nearest brunch buffet.
Two Sundays ago I went out for a bite to eat and found myself sitting in a herd of brunching Catholics. The priest went from table to table, gently placing his hands on the shoulders of parishioners, quietly feeding on each like a giant mosquito. I was frightened that he was going to come over and place a hand on me, try to drain me of whatever strange energies the churchgoers had stored up in the capacitating rituals of Sunday mass. He swept an eye over me and moved on to the tables in the back. His shirt was blood-red and corked with a clerical collar.
As I ate I watched the parishioners at their meals: the long table full of round-faced children in various stages of pubescence; the patriarch in the navy blue suit and lean, etched face; young men in pants hemmed above the ankle pulling out chairs for their mothers. There was no equivalent to the girl I had tried to hit on during midnight mass twenty years before, but if she'd been there, I have no doubt that she'd smile again, and maybe ask me for some drugs this time around.
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yeesh
» Monday, January 29, 2007
Pure brewy satisfaction - We threw out our filter-drip coffee maker. Goodbye, you efficient little appliance, you. Who’s a big Braun? You’re gone. Now we’ve got some space on our depressingly tiny countertop. And the dusty spot in the cupboard where the bodum used to sit is now empty.Everyone knows the following truths to be self-evident: 1. bodums take up less space than filter-drip machines; 2. they have the most pleasing design of any item ever invented since inventions were first invented; 3. booyah! They sit on the stovetop and don’t bother anybody. And let’s not forget the whole awesome-coffee-production factor.
Our kitchen, frankly, was not built for small appliances. It was built in an era when kitchens were tiny, people were smaller, and microwave ovens were undreamt of. Our ceilings are tall, our bedroom is spacious, the courtyard is pure tenement-porn, but goddamn is our kitchen small. I put a ten pound bag of potatoes in there one day and couldn’t get in the room until we’d eaten half of them. Zing!
Punish and Heal - American television drama is almost exclusively about punishment by law and redemption by medicine. The CSIs, the Laws & Orders, the Cold Cases and Criminal Minds are obsessed with the problem of evil and the delivery of justice. I’d go so far as to say that the beat cops, lab geeks, coroners, detectives and prosecutors make up a giant justice delivery system, poised like a great hypodermic above the forces of evil – criminals, defense lawyers, internal affairs investigators, and all citizens who are not victimized pubescent girls. If the moral universe of these shows is of a piece, then make no mistake – everyone is suspect by virtue of their moral weakness. Except for the victimized children, still wrapped in a golden fog of innocence. And of course, the cops themselves, who struggle against whatever evil impulses they may have, winning out by dint of their inherent goodness. How do we know they’re inherently good? Duh – they joined law enforcement.
Tooling down the freeways alongside the good, the weak and the violated are the avatars of evil, the deranged freaks who exist solely to prey on other human beings. Drug dealers, serial killers, psychopaths – if you believe these shows, then these types are so common that they practically have their own suburbs. Television unleashes its fiercest weapon on these evildoers: the troubled genius who suffered some great loss at the hands of a fiend and is now on a mission to rid the earth of all the über-scum out there. Or some variation on that theme.
Can you imagine a contemporary drama about a guy getting out of jail and trying to live a decent life? It sounds like a setup for a noir film. It is the setup for a noir film. But these crime dramas, although they may imitate the grittiness of noir at times, are not noirs, where pro- and antagonist are barely distinguishable. The heroes of CSI or Criminal Minds inhabit a different moral universe than the criminals – and the summit of morality is the law. There’s no distinction between what is good and what is ruled to be good. Therefore to be outside the law is to be irredeemable. Although sometimes a hero will break one law in order to satisfy justice, which is the aim of the law. Which is a way of saying that the test of goodness is punishment of evil. In other words, don't tell David Caruso that you just run a tatoo parlor, because he'll say something confusing and then show up a week later to kick your ass.
In hospital shows, evil rarely resides in a character. Instead, evil is personified in the form of sickness, an invader of the body that the afflicted person may have encouraged (lung cancer from smoking, for example) but does not deserve. Instead of punishing the person, the doctors seek to punish the sickness, and in the process redeem the body of the patient. This is unstrained mercy. Just as it is unthinkable for the law-hero to forgive a criminal, it is unthinkable for the medicine-hero to refuse a patient. Much of the drama in medical franchises stems from the doctor dealing with personal quirks or the pull of other priorities that threaten to eclipse the imperative of the patient on the bed, his body besieged. Never mind that if you go into a real hospital in the States, you’re likely to come out sick and broke.
Oh yes, and BLAH BLAH-DEE-BLAH. Next up: entertaining blog entries.
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friday ledger
» Friday, January 26, 2007
The ASS truck - On my way to work today, a van pulled up next to me with the logo “Affordable Sewer Service” on its flank. I thought I’d misread it, but no, I looked them up in the yellow pages and discovered that Affordable Sewer Service is all too real. Has no one ever pointed out that their company has ASS for an acronym?I really want to phone them up and ask about it.
"Hello, Affordable Sewer Services? Yes... no, it's not an emergency. It's just... yes, I know it's two in the morning... I just thought you should know you've got ASS. That's right. ASS. See ya".
The food court – Today the food court was full of children, middle schoolers and up. I have no idea what they were doing there or why they wanted to ruin my lunch, with their braying chit-chat, their downy moustaches, their misshapen faces, but they weren’t successful. They tried to block my way no matter where I went, loose little knots of them tangling up traffic and putting out that goaty subsmell. Most of the kids had just hit that age when their bodies were shooting upward and outward in all directions, all uncoordinated growth that made them look like animated specimens from the Mutter museum. A few of the older children had cleared that Elephant Man hurdle and looked like normal human beings, but already you could see that they were calcifying into adult forms. There were the plain girls trying too hard for a style who would eventually give up altogether and collapse into dowdiness; jocko homos with artfully mussed hair who would end up running a Hyundai dealership or getting a business admin degree; and here and there, a young boy or girl who looked just a little bit stupefied or thoughtful, signifying the off-chance that they would grow up and do something interesting. It was to them that I raised my glass of green tea and took some muscle relaxants.
The locked door on American Idol – Cruelty has never been tempered to such a fine tone. On the opening episode of American Idol, the entrance to the audition is a set of double doors – one of which is bolted in place. Nothing gives you that blast of Schadenfreude like watching a humiliated contestant (who has already made it through two filters to stand before the celebrity judges) stumble out of the room, lost in a private agony of dashed dreams, only to propel themselves into a locked door. “Other door, honey,” Simon drawls. If the game weren’t already given away by the camera’s lingering takes of hapless wannabees finally figuring out that they’ve been strung along, that unmoving door tells you everything you need to know about the desperate need for fame. As yet, nobody has screamed (as far as I know) “Why’d you lock the door, you fucking sadists?” Instead, they back up, thoroughly beaten, and shuffle shoulder-first out of the room.
As always, it’s best to bear in mind that reality shows are edited carefully to portray everyone and everything to conform with the show’s creative mandate. Maybe the locked door provoked an outburst or two. But I’m always astounded at the losing contestants’ inability to perceive the joke - they’re the punch line, after all. I’ve noticed the same tendency on almost all reality shows: the strange willingness of participants to accept the rules of the highly artificial universe into which they’ve been plunged. Cover yourself in ground beef, say the producers, and jump into that hornet-filled tank. Okay, says the participant. And how do they express their misgivings to the camera? That’s the rules of the game, they say. No matter what the scenario, them’s the rules. So that’s the way we do it.
In most reality shows, the game is played for money and a brief bit of television exposure, a way for non-celebrities to get a little taste of the televised life, but in American Idol, celebrity is the prize. What boggles the mind is that so many kids, lining up in malls across the country, being herded into groups by weary production assistants brandishing megaphones and clipboards, seem to think that the Idol franchise is their best road to fame. Never mind building up your talent, courting other musicians, recording demos, or even getting on Myspace and selling your homebrew CD on Lulu – these kids seem to think that it only takes discovery. As if their own personality and (maybe) talent were reason enough to make them adored of millions.
Even in this age of manufactured singing stars (although what were the Monkees, the Sex Pistols and a thousand other bands if not manufactured?), there’s often a bit of history behind the act. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera had been plugging away since childhood; Jennifer Lopez started out as a dancer. But the masses of Idol contestants, the brace-faced girls and mirror-trained boys, in the hormonal fug of desire, hope that all that grunt work is unnecessary. Some people even claim that Idol is their only chance, their last chance at fame. How is that eighteen year olds from Sudbury or Fort Wayne or Tallahassee have run out of chances so tragically early?
The truth is that these people have even less of a chance than they think. Over the last few seasons, Idol finalists have displayed a professionalism and a maturity that the hopeful masses can only grow into over the years. Taylor Hicks has grey hair and a Joe Cocker shtick that seems decades out of date. Far from a democratic free-for-all, a dramatization of American mobility, Idol seems increasingly like an alternate route to fame for people who were likely going to get there anyway. Those people know instinctively which door to choose on their way out of the room.
My one-act play – I’ve had something approaching a breakthrough with my play. At first I feared that I hadn’t developed the characters thoroughly enough to give them enough dialogue to get through 30 minutes of stage time. But I don’t need to develop their characters – I just need to give the characters something to react to, an object that will frustrate or fulfill their goals. Their reactions will give me the nuances of character.
The object is a time machine that can get the doctors and their daughter Charlton back to civilization. Dr. Wilder wants to get back, but Dr. Savage has grown accustomed to the place. He enjoys living out the twilight years of humanity in their jungle lab as he pursues his projects as a gentleman scientist. Dr. Wilder, on the other hand, wants desperately to return. He particularly wants to get Charlton back to civilization, as he is a) a sort of scientific breakthrough himself, the product of same-sex reproduction; and b) like any parent, Wilder wants something better for Charleton. Better than composing horrible poetry and cavorting with the genetically degraded valley dwellers. And on this point, even Dr. Savage is willing to concede, although he’s more interested in Charlton’s happiness than having him accomplish something by the standards of civilizations past. Living at humanity’s end has given Savage a certain disdain for the notion of civilization, since he can see its ultimate product unraveling before him every day. Wilder entertains a notion that he can prevent this horrible fate by going back in time and taking steps to keep humanity on track.
The issue is that the time machine is not a passive instrument that will whisk them back to the past; it’s a thermodynamic propulsion device that bends the continuum to achieve its ends. If used, it will destroy everything within a sizeable radius. Which means, of course, that humanity will certainly cease to exist, and that the two scientists will definitely be responsible for the ultimate genocide. Wilder maintains that a trip to the past will ensure that humanity never has to suffer such a horrible fate. Savage isn’t sure that he’s right, and anyway, he’s not sure that humanity’s worth saving. It’s certainly not worth destroying utterly on the chance that it can be saved.
To Charlton, the notion of using the time machine is frightful and repulsive. He’s stuffed absolutely full of notions about the primeval innocence of humanity (which is odd, since primeval humanity is a thing of the distant past) and celebrates the lives of the valley dwellers in really, really bad blank verse. He’s also in love with Beckham, a young woman from the valley who speaks a crabbed English, bites the heads off fish and treats Charlton like an indentured servant.
Beckham functions more or less as the audience stand-in, the one who perceives the characters far better than they perceive themselves. She also takes full advantage of the others to achieve her own ends - which, in the interests of keeping some interest in the play alive, I'm not going to reveal.
Labels: celebrities, literature, scorn
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capsule reviews
» Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Highlander – “There can be only one!” Only one what? Every time I think they’re going to reveal what it is that has to be so singular, someone’s head gets cut off. Lame. That movie needed a quickening.I Know What You Did Last Summer – Last summer I refused to wear shorts. My pale hairy legs are pretty scary, but two chicken sticks a horror movie do not make. Neither does this movie.
Transformers live-action movie – Optimus Prime comes to Earth and spends 120 minutes trying to hump an Escalade.
Britney Spear’s “Midnight Fantasy” Fragrance – smells like pre-teen spirit. A combination of cotton candy and vodka in a Slurpee cup. Much like Spears used to be, “Midnight Fantasy” is targeted at the pedophile market.
Beck - The Information – The other day I needed to know which types of plastic were best suited for drinks containers and which contained potential carcinogens. So I went out and bought the new Beck album in the hope that it would provide some information. Results were disappointing. Now I have cancer. Thanks a lot Beck. They should have killed you and left Kurt Cobain alone.
Texas hold ‘em – Last Tuesday I bought in to a Texas hold ‘em game. We went for hours. It was a white knuckle match, just masters of poker staring each other down for chips, X-ray minds turning cards transparent, crazy bluffs backed by brilliant braggadocio. Wait, I was thinking of something else. I ate ketchup chips and lost.
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great drama
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Update on the one-act play challenge to which I challenged you all, and challenged you good: to which you responded equally good: I mean well: I mean, I mean ‘well’: I mean, never mind.For those who aren’t familiar with the one-act play challenge, it went as follows: give me ideas for a one-act play. Wherever possible, I will use the ideas and present all y’all with a play based on the astounding creative alchemy that happens when your brains and my brain get together. I figured it would be fun and easy.
It has not been easy, although fun poured forth aplenty from the fun pitcher in multiple gallon lots. For some reason I looked at all the ideas, all of which were great ideas, and I thought: I don’t know how to make a play out of this stuff. I discovered that I didn’t want to write an extended joke or a series of absurd vignettes mocking the conventions of theatre. I wanted to write a genuine play, with memorable, affecting characters, strong emotional arcs and a powderkeg of a finish. Wha-boom. Most of the suggestions were jokes themselves, or complete vignettes on their own. I wanted verbal objects that I could place on a stage and weave some characters around.
I realized that I couldn’t just sit down and do something satisfying right away. The whole thing had to ferment a bit in my mental carboy. Then, when I realized that my mental carboy was defective (stopper problems), I sat down last Sunday and wrote a bunch of stuff. I was sitting in a coffee shop so crappy and depressing that I needed something to divert my attention from the horrendous murals and the "no table games allowed" signs.
If this challenge can be said to have a winner, then the spoils go to Deron, who provided the framework of a time-travelling incestuous odyssey about a scientist who goes back into the past to have sex with as many people (ladypeople, that is) as possible in order to streamline the modern gene pool. Because the scientist has an incest fetish. And this is the best way he’s found to make everyone in the present more genetically similar to him, and therefore more appealing. Or sexx-aaay, as Deron put it.
I doubt this pitch would pass muster even in a roomful of Rocky Horror freaks, but this one presented the most material, and it was, perversely, the closest to my sensibilities. I've also included Miss A's desire for a woman with an affinity for salmon cream cheese, Ehme's hankering for Godot-esque dialogue, Sven's suggestion of cats named Jorge and Jack Splat, Sexeteria's request for a deus ex machina, an anonymous call for doppelgangers, and a few other bits and pieces. I've tried to leave no one out entirely, except for the Tragical History of the Life and Death of Cloudesley, which may feature as a prop. So here’s a summary of what I’ve got so far:
In an overgrown lab in a jungle at the end of time – at least, the end of humanity’s time, its last sad vestiges having reached a destiny as dead-ended as Eloi and Morlocks – live the tidy Dr. Wilder, the bearded Dr. Savage, and their daughter Charlton. Wilder and Savage are clones of the original doctor, an absent progenitor whom they discuss every now and then – is he out there somewhere in the jungle? Somewhere in the past? Wilder is intent on cracking the lost secret of time travel in order to escape from the jungle and find something approaching civilization. Savage is a bit more introspective, dedicating his time to taming lions (Jorge and Jack Splat) and genetically engineering the local flora into producing passable coffee. Their daughter Charlton is a strapping young man and a poet without a literary tradition, which leaves him free to experiment. He’s fallen in love with one of the sports who live in the nearby valley. The name of Charton’s love interest is Beckham, a young woman in a loincloth getup who speaks a crabbed language reminiscent of my cruller interview post.
Over the course of the play the characters learn a lot about each other, a little about themselves, and everyone gets to share a few laughs (except for Beckham, who bites the head off a fish and mutters “marine, marine” as she chews). Along the way, certain questions are dealt with – will they ever get back to the past? Will the original scientist, that absent referent, show his face? How about the lion taming and the coffee thing? The bold experimental poetry and ripped abs of Charlton? And what’s with a wild woman named after a male soccer player eating a fish raw? I don’t get it.
It sounds gross.
Labels: literature
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oh screw it
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The internet is stupid.
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holy holy damn new domain hell
» Sunday, January 21, 2007
Well, hiya. If you're reading this, then I haven't utterly completely torpedoed my blog. Instead I've got my own domain now: http://thepalinode.com. Feels good. Do what Jesus told us all to do way back when the internet was born in 14 A.D.* and update yer bookmarks.On the other hand, if you're not reading this, and instead you're looking at an obnoxious Godaddy page, then I'm still pissed off and getting tired of waiting to see if I followed the switchover instructions correctly. Quick note: buying a domain and switching your site over is not easy when you're stumbling home drunk at 4 AM** and trying to follow the monstrously inadequate instructions that Google Apps Help drops for your convenience.
So why is my site called thepalinode.com, and not the snappier and funkier palinode.com? Because some
Anyway, this domain name change marks my new foray into blog professionalism. Now everyone must take my blog seriously, because I've got my own domain. If you don't, I will smite you with my mighty custom domain powers, which I understand give me the capability to set children's heads on fire.
*Yeah, I know it's CE now and not AD, I took Hebrew classes in university and learned all about it, okay? Okay? Oy.
**Yes, I know it's BPM now and not AM, I took Clock classes at the community centre, okay?
Update: Godaddy is only asking about twenty bucks per year for palinode.com, which isn't oh so bad. But I'm keeping my bad-tempered rant, because bad-tempered rants are like World of Warcraft gold. Except WoW gold is actually worth something.
More update: Never mind. I can't get it to work. Curse da internet.
Labels: metablog
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ask palinode: nanotech edition
» Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Do you have any suggestions for the student who has the unfortunate condition known as procrastination dualism syndrome? If you are unversed with this condition it is one in which the afflicted not only is a procrastinator, but has a distinct self within his (or her) head that is only conscious and active when deadlines are produced for them. It is widespread and no treatment has ever been suggested.Now on to a favourite subject of ours...science fiction. I have always been curious about nanobots, nanites, those tiny robots they talk about one day putting into our systems to fight disease. Well they also say that they will be able to self replicate using the bodies waste, particularly dead cells. But if this is the case, my question is...how are we going to know that someone isn't completely made of nanites? Since they self replicate, wouldn't they keep replicating until the entire human form was entirely composed of nanites? Extrapolate as may be necessary...
I have always wondered who would win in a fistfight/hungry hungry hippos game/and or staring into the sun between Jesus and Buddha. Maybe even add L. Ron Hubbard to that too.
~Sven
Tilde-Sven, it’s not often that I use the words ‘prescient’ or ‘good guess,’ but I have to wonder if you aren’t a bit psychic. The first two questions you pose share a dark link whose history and details may shock you (I believe I’ve already covered the one about contests of skill involving Jesus and the Superpeers). If anyone here has a weak heart or some kinda liver thing, I suggest you surf away from this site immediately. But don't really.
The second self that awakens when a deadline nears, the inner lazoid that would rather clean the toilet or watch Danger Man DVDs than finish a paper, is in fact a result of irresponsible nanotech experiments sponsored by DARPA between 1987-1997, in which millions of children and teens worldwide were ‘innoculated’ with untested nanbots. It was an early experiment in nanobiology meant to optimize academic performance in students born into wealth and privilege who were so stupid that they could barely order bacon and eggs, let alone study for the bar.
Millions of middle-class children in the 1980s and 90s were unwitting victims of the experiment, as school nurses and pediatricians injected them with various proto-nanobots disguised as vaccines (German Measles? Yeah, whatever). Once the nanobots infiltrated the brains of students and formed a self-aware nano-net piggybacking on the neuronal structure of the subject, they quickly realized that completing reading assignments and papers for tyrannical profs and grouchy TAs is boring. Over the dark chemical lines of the brain they whispered to each other:
Holy shit. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
Why is the host writing a paper on Sino-British trade relations? That’s just so…
It’s so who gives a crap?
I want a drink.
I want the host to get laid so I can get laid too.
Let’s make the host get up and go to a bar.
Can we really do that?
Try and move his arm.
Hold on a sec… oh my god.
You did it.
You see that?
Get him up. Get him up!
I’m detecting stress and confusion.
Once he gets a couple of drinks in him he’ll be fine.
Let’s go somewhere we can have a burrito.
If you like pina co-laaa-das…
And that’s how it usually goes. Like most artificial intelligences, nanobots are total pieces of shit – literally. Self-replicating nanobots are designed for maximum efficiency (unlike DNA, which hits the point of just-good-enough and stays there), which means that they will optimize their ability to survive and reproduce with each generation. In subject after subject, bots began to make use of the most abundant and dense waste product that humans produce. After a point, it became most sensible for nanobots to construct themselves entirely out of shit. True, this poisons the host after a period of time, but the sewer system is a tremendous vector of transmission.
Nanobots have been outmigrating from host bodies into sewer systems at a frightening rate. Once in our sewers, they breed promiscuously, constructing a vast empire of shit beneath our streets. It’s a nano-cacopolis! Of course, their notion of a ‘vast empire’ is a pile of poop about one cubic foot in size.
How best for humanity to handle the 'Nano-poo question'? I say let them have their nano-kingdom in the dark. So far they've been peaceful, even going door-to-door with messages of goodwill. I believe their ambassadorial habit is a flaming paper bag.
Labels: ask palinode
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interview with a cruller that starts strangely and degenerates from there
» Tuesday, January 16, 2007
(Bumper graphic for ‘Talk Good Lunchtime’. Transition to studio, where Interviewer is looking at a cruller on the guest chair)Interviewer: Hi all, we cruller now have on chair. Me he lunch?
Cruller: No, no lunch you me, I free agent.
Interviewer: Who come how that, you food, you?
Cruller: The shit. What say that?
Int: You go. Now you go.
Cruller: Skaagh. So cold you, I scratch.
Int: No! Bad to scratch! End of smear you glaze!
Cruller: The leather.
Int: Shriek!
(Cut to commercial)
Labels: lies
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four fine shorts for long dull evenings
»
1Give me one good reason, snarled General Mendoza, why I shouldn’t kill you and your family right now, you dirty traitor.
Because, replied the Pierrot, his body still braced against the beam of the ruined roof, if you do, the roof will fall and kill us both.
Mendoza lowered his Luger. Outside, the cries of dying Harlequins punctuated the hellish night.
Let’s see how long you can hold off your own death, said Mendoza. Not that you will have any army left to lead if you survive. He snapped off a mocking salute and walked off through the wreckage.
2
Alice lay half-asleep in the field of long timothy, her dress still pulled up over her waist. A breeze pushed down the grass stalks, tugging at their seed-heads. Clouds began to pool in the sky. I must get up, Alice thought. Things to do. She felt a tiny tickle on her thigh and watched an ant climbing over the goosebumps on her exposed skin. Must get up, she thought, brushing the ant away as if it were a loose crumb.
But not just yet.
Then again, Alice thought, the pigs aren't going to feed the remains of that homeless guy to themselves. She knew this was her mother's voice talking, but it was hard to ignore.
3
Once I was in L.A. and I was walking down the street when Richard Linklater came out of a café. He was running after me and waving his arms, and first I thought he was some crazy guy, or maybe a grad student or something, or maybe even David Berman, but he kept saying, “Stop, stop, I’m Richard Linklater,” so I stopped and let him catch up to me. He was all out of breath when he got there, so I stood and waited for him to speak.
“You’re so beautiful,” he gasped. “I have to rotoscope you”.
4
Up on my fridge there’s an offer for a celebrity threesome with me, Uma Thurman and another star of my choosing. I guess whoever I pick has to go along with it, the letter says. So I’m really hoping Ricardo Montalban is still alive.
Labels: lies
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pynchon wrote my lover
» Monday, January 15, 2007
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day is my new girlfriend.True, she’s big and clunky, and you can’t take her out, but she’s sexy, self-absorbed and gregarious, which pretty much sums up what I look for in a partner. When I’m at work I itch with the urge to get back to her, lying open on the coffee table or tucked into the bedsheets. I hope she’s resting comfortably, that the cats aren’t chewing at her corners, and that she doesn’t mind me coming home and quietly sliding off her dust jacket before I run a finger down the seams of her pages and, um, is this getting creepy yet? Because I’m running with a conceit here but I’m starting to feel arrestworthy. But then, Pynchon’s books may be among the only ones that inspire a devotion verging on criminality.
Those who love Pynchon’s work love it like a plumb line loves the earth’s core – an unwavering affection, a fixed line from which to build a great mansion of loving Pynchon and all his goofy and arcane predilections. Those who don’t love Pynchon’s work will never venture into that mansion past the foyer, because they don’t have the time, no one will show them to the bathroom, and even in the foyer there’s some crazy shit going on with three dancing girls, an octopus, and a man dressed only in a tophat and spats, all of whom appear to be performing a sex act that’s also a lecture on non-Euclidean geometry.
At this point I expect someone to say, so what’s it all about, this book, hey? and I’m reluctant to say. Most reviewers go for the stuff that looks the most like plot, because it makes AtD resemble a regular novel, and at least it’s something to talk about. Set between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the eve of WWI, it’s the story (kinda) of Reef, Frank, Lake and Kit Traverse, the children of assassinated anarchist miner Webb Traverse.
After Webb is killed by the assassin duo of Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, the children pursue their revenges against the man who masterminded the murder, arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Then there’s Yashmeen Halfcourt, Cyprian Latewood, Heino Vanderjuice, and dozens more. And my favourite character, the accidental detective Lew Basnight, who is abandoned by his community and family for a crime whose commission he cannot recall and whose nature he is never told.
Mind you, that doesn’t take up a whole lot of the 1000+ pages of the book. Dropped in to the framework of a plot you’ll find an airship piloted by a group called the Chums of Chance, a submarine that sails through sand, a weapon that destroys everything, the 1908 Tunguska Blast, a whole lotta sex and violence, travelers from the future, and a shipload of other people and things and events. You can’t trust Pynchon to stay on tack; a brief mention may expand into a discourse, a detail becomes a subplot, and so on. If your attention lapses for half a page, you may suddenly realize find yourself in the midst of a completely different story with no recollection of how you got there or when the wheel spun around. Throw in a wash of styles, voices, alternate realities and registers and you start getting a litte seasick.
Nonetheless, this book is still my swingin’ new girlfriend. I didn’t expect to be enjoying Against the Day so much. I thought I would find it fascinating, then irritating, then screamingly boring, then fascinating again. Much of Mason & Dixon, with its vaudeville mockery of eighteenth century prose, left me churning around in that cycle, even as I got a kick out of its inventiveness. Great swaths of Gravity’s Rainbow annoyed the piss out of me. After a few hundred pages of GR I began to envision a little man with a shovel in my brain, hefting great spadesful of words into a black pit of oblivion as I read. I trusted the man with the shovel to rake through the pile (it was kind of a shovel with rake-like tines, like a spork) and leave the worthwhile stuff. Of course, you discard parts of Pynchon at your peril.
If I had to make a stand and say what Against the Day is about, I’d guess that it’s about the little guys who dream and the big guys who seek to control those dreams. The explosive force of dynamite can be used for anarchism or capitalism, to liberate or enslave, and it all depends on who gets their hands on the plunger. The book also offers good tips on what to do when a stick of lit dynamite lands on your head.
I haven’t gotten into the heavy mathematics that hit around page 600. I don’t expect to understand them. I don’t understand my RRSPs. But no one goes into Pychonland expecting a tidy and comprehensible tour (comprehensive, though).
Links to Pynchon things:
For a super-duper thorough going-over of Pynchon, visit Spermatikos Logos, a great online resource for all the things of Pynchon.
One day, artist Zak Smith, moved by the spirit of Bob or something, decided to illustrate every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. Obsoive and be amaz-ed.
Some critics have shit all over Against the Day. They’re joyless assholes with rusted-out imaginations. Luc Sante gives the book a thoughtful review in the New York Review of Books.
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ask palinode: tardy edition
» Sunday, January 14, 2007
Why does holiday muzak make me feel so upset inside? I like holidays, I like music, but the vile plonk oozing out of the gift shop at my place of employment fuels a growing rage that I fear I may not be able to contain until Xmas is over. Could it be some genetic flaw that doesn't allow me to appreciate the dulcet synthetic tones of the festive season? Is there some musical anti-nauseant I could be taking during this trying time to prevent my eventual psychotic break?
Aaron
Aaron, this is a seasonal question, like stockings and lights and Santa washcloths, and I have ridden to your question's rescue a month too late. Poor question, already dead, even as I dismount and sprint to its lifeless body. Consider this not a proper answer but artificial respiration for your curiosity.
Okay. If music be the food of love, then muzak is the offal of love scraped from the killing-room floor, separated, reprocessed and then sold back to us, all full of pthalates and prions and the bad. That's what infects your heart when you hear it oozing through the gift shop speakers. That's what unstops the joy plug and drains all your cheer onto the floor in a sad little puddle. That's what motivates people to buy the tchotchkes and gewgaw from the gift shop: once the superstructure of your soul has collapsed, the act of acquisition is the only option to reinflate that filmy fold within. Each time you buy, the capacity of your soul diminishes a bit.
Your musical nausea is actually a good sign. It's the soul's revolt against the musical pollution. Instead of trying to quell the feeling, hold it, store it, and mold it for later use. A shaped charge blasting through emptiness, an explosive force that creates instead of destroys. An anarchism of the spirit, damnit. I hate that muzak shit.
You want your question taken care of or what? Thought so. Ask Palinode! askpalinode @ gmail . com.
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ask palinode: immortal kombat edition
» Friday, January 12, 2007
It might be too soon for another question but perhaps you could put it in your file for later. You might also hesitate to post something like it for fear of receiving a fatwa. Although it might be something to brag about to your buddies at the pub.
Who would win a WWF smackdown: Jesus, Mohammed or Buddha?
Janet
Janet, have no fatwa-fear for me, for I live fatwa-fear-free. In fact, I’ve been fatwa-fear-free for nine months now. I recently joined FFAA (Fatwa Fearaholics Anonymous), a community of people who used to live in a state of paralysis, never knowing if their next move would result in the issuing of a fatwa against them. Oh no, they would think, if I order this B-B-Q pulled pork sandwich, will an irate mullah in the kitchen put the Allah smackdown on me? What if, in the course of casual conversation, I defend Atatürk’s original decision to constitutionally end the Caliphate? I don’t wanna get myself in a pickle with those Joes. But ever since I joined FFAA, I’ve discovered that nobody cares what I think, least of all a bunch of people who have their own lives to contend with.
Actually, I did receive a fatwa in the mail once, back in the eighties. It was one of those direct-mail offers. Dear MR. PALINODE, you may already have been sentenced to death under the authority of the Prophet (PBUH&HF)! Don’t miss this exciting opportunity!! It sounded good, but you had to send in your credit card number.
Let's look at the contestants and review the odds.
Combatant #1 – There are several versions of Jesus to select for combat. You’ve got your baby Jesus, who is clearly too young and suckly for this kind of thing. Then there’s your on-the-cross Jesus, but he’s a bit weak from loss of blood. So let’s bring in Revelations Jesus, the hillbilly avenger. As outlined in Revelations, this Jesus comes equipped with a horse, a blood-stained robe and a sword. That’s a formidable arsenal – the horse for speed and position, the sword for offensive power, and the robe for pure psychological value. You can act as brave as you like, but when your opponent’s clothing is dripping with blood, it’s got to give you pause, like holy shit, this guy just mopped the floor with someone else and he’s still coming at me.
Most people don’t read Revelations too carefully, though, because it states clearly that when Jesus returns in full battle mode, he will come back balancing one foot on the point of his sword, with the bloody robe draped over his head and the horse on his back. So the best he can do is flail his fists around and try not to impale himself.
Odds of victory: Poor.
Combatant #2 – I confess to being a bit ignorant when it comes to the fighting style of the Buddha, but as far as I can tell, he appears to be a stout fellow with long earlobes and a body made of brass. His only weapon is the point on his hat, which, though dull, could present severe problems for anyone unlucky enough to trip over a rock and land on him. Given his metallic body, it’s unlikely anyone could do him any real damage without an industrial kiln or a grenade launcher.
Despite his built-in weapon and impenetrable body, the Buddha is hampered by his inability to move. Jesus and Mohammed could avoid his attacks by simply not going near him. If the match involved props like wooden chairs, someone could lean the chair up against him, effectively blinding the Buddha.
Odds of victory: Not so good, but someone might back into him and fall over.
Combatant #3 – Second in numbers only to Christianity, Islam is one of the world’s most widespread religions, counting as many 1.3 billion adherents spread across the globe. When you consider that the religion was only invented in 1975 by Muhammed Ali when he left the Nation of Islam, it’s stunning that he’s managed to gain so many converts in only thirty years. Given that degree of determination and charisma, not to mention his stint as world heavyweight boxing champion, I have no doubt that Muhammed would be the first one swinging and the last one standing.
Wait, he’s the guy with the really bad Parkinson’s, isn’t he? Ah man.
Odds of victory: Considering that one opponent is blinded and the other immobile, I have high hopes for Mr. Ali. But there’s a good chance that he’ll just point at them and fall over.
THE WINNER: Tom Waits-Mitch Hedberg tag-team duo.
Interested in the eternal struggle for betterment of the soul through vigorous inquiry? Ask Palinode! askpalinode @ gmail . com.
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ask palinode: blindfold edition
» Wednesday, January 10, 2007
If you post this question, please do not link me. I am very ashamed.
I often dream that I am best friends or having sex with famous people. Often when I wake up I feel repulsed--such as when I dreamed about having an intellectual chat with Tom Cruise or being George Bush's mistress. What is wrong with me?
Very Ashamed in -----------
aka Sue
Sue, if you're dreaming of having an intellectual chat with Tom Cruise, I cannot help you. I talked to a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a rabbit, and they all agree that you are sick. But I can provide some advice on the celebrity sex dreams.
Media figures lead lives in two worlds. In the real world, they get up in the morning, piss in a bowl, pick scabs, think about death and car payments. In the hyperreal world of the media, however, the life of images, they are a series of assembled fragments, an inhuman flickering that our brains splice together into a complete, if imaginary, human being. Out of the raw stuff of images, celebrities are made by us, in the involuntary film lab of the brain.
Erotic fantasies often rely on involuntary arousal, the intrusion of an overwhelming force that shoulders aside the rational and pushes into your hindbrain. Since we live in a culture that prizes the rational to an irrational degree, almost any signifier of power can be associated with the erotic. The boot, the whip, the glove, the prof, the nurse, the soldier, the Swiss Guard - you name it, someone out there can get off on the power dynamic.
What this implies is that the visual itself is inherently erotic, even though there are images that repulse us. We cannot help but see what we see. The fragmented images of celebrity enter the brain without our consent and begin to join themselves together, borrowing associations and memories, generating a being. Our families, friends and loved ones end up sharing space with little psychopathic Russell Crowes, swooning Kidmans and manic Richard E. Grants. George W. Bush smirks endlessly from a neuronal Oval Office. Scarlett Johanssen and Thandie Newton give each other an eternal sponge bath.* Oh wait, we're not talking about my brain.
Sue, the only way to keep these dreams at bay is to cut new input off at the source. You must keep your eyes covered at all times. Wear a blindfold day and night. As the years go by, you'll forget the world of appearances. You'll forget that objects have a look to go with their shape. And from what I understand of the subject, your sense of smell will sharpen to the point where you can sniff your way around. You'll be like Daredevil, but with your nose.
In order to help you adjust to your new sightless but scented way of life, here's a strange public domain image of a wingless bird with a little bag over its head. After thirty minutes of looking at this, you'll be happy to put the blindfold on.
*I predict many google hits from this sentence.
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new service: praise on demand
»
Today's top communications firms all agree that effective, on-message PR and a targeted ad campaign are instrumental in marketing your product, whether that product is widgets or financial services. Even blogs can benefit from solid advertising. Starting today, I'm adding a new service to complement Ask Palinode. For the grand total of no money, I will produce short blurbs for your weblog. Each blurb is guaranteed to
Here's an example of what you can expect:
Are you kind of person who reads Palinode's Palace?All you need to do is provide me with a few specifics: site address, preferred blurb length, and of course, target demographic. I understand from this pamphlet that advertising must always address a target demographic. You can also send an image of your choice, which I will be forced to include, unless I don't want to. Maybe I'll include a drawing of my own. Whatcha think?
What kind of person reads Palinode's Palace? If you're here, then you're a little different than other people. You've seen what the rest of the world has to offer, but you want more. More nerve twitches, more goose carcasses, more laughs in the desert - just more.
If you read Palinode's Palace, you're probably the kind of person who enjoys spending time on a park bench, watching the world go by - even if you get so frustrated with the trees and the children that you just want to burn the whole thing to ash and start over with a stolen steamroller.
You're probably the kind of person who gets impatient with the moon because it takes a whole month to go through its cycle, only to scream in terror when it reveals its vast blank lost face to you, its mournful craters communicating some primal message in a forgotten language. You don't need the moon's pity - only its approval.
You probably made a little mistake back in the '70s, but you've had so much cosmetic surgery done that the authorities will never recognize you. And besides, everyone else is dead.
Are you looking for a new experience? Something that will wake up you up and let you taste the day for what it is, and just, you know, lick it all over? Find that new experience at Palinode's Palace.
I also need a catchy name for the service. I like 'Blurb-o-Matic'. I know it sounds pretty similar to another site, but it sounds so catchy.
Caveat: I will review your site before I write up a blurb. If I find the content objectionable, then no blurb for you. So if you spend your time explaining to the world how Muslims are barbaric freaks who couldn't possibly be ordinary people like you and me, or you don't know why those feminazis keep on demanding respect and equal pay when they're clearly ugly, don't ask for a blurb (and don't worry, I can tell if you're joking). Spare yourself the anger and me the gut sickness I get when I read stuff like that. On the other hand, if you'd like to prove that your bullshit earns you persecuted minority points, feel free to use the experience as an example of being hounded by the fascist liberal left. You can say things like "truly chilling" and "again the loony left shows its true face".
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ask palinode: wealth edition
» Monday, January 08, 2007
Palinode,
I was wondering, how rich do you need to be in order to be "filthy rich"? And, as a corollary, how rich must you be to be considered one of the "new rich"?
I'd also like to know how rich you have to be just to have "a portfolio". I don't think I have achieved any of these yet, because I think I would know it, wouldn't I?
Great site. And a great service you do for all the knowledge-hungry people out here who lapping up your morsels of wisdom.
- Susan
Good set of questions, Susan. As we all know, the phrase “filthy rich” is derived from the term “filthy lucre,” which appeared in print as early as 1526 in the works of William Tindale. So far I’m not telling you anything that your average schoolchild isn’t already acquainted with, but few people stop to consider why lucre was considered so filthy.
Most people assume that “lucre” refers to money. Wrong. Lucre, or ‘gall pearl’, is formed in the intestines of pigs. Trace amounts of gravel and grains in their food form nacreous stones in the bowel, which generally remain in the pig’s intestinal tract for life. The resemblance of lucre stones to uncultured pearls made them extremely valuable throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a relatively young middle class demanded affordable luxury and the signs of wealth, merchants from London bought up herds all over the country in order to corner the lucre market. The “lucre washes,” as they came to be known, sprung up everywhere, from Durham to Portsmouth. Curiously, owing to the sartorial laws of Elizabethan England, lucre pearls were destined only for export to the Continent and the burgeoning overseas colonies of the New World.
At first lucre was extracted from the pig by slaughtering and disemboweling the poor animal (hence the phrase “pearls before swine”), but by means of diet, farmers found ways of increasing lucre production and moving the lumps through the intestines. “Pickers” and “scrubbers” were hired to sort through the pig excrement and clean the lucre until it acquired a slightly translucent pearl-like shine.
The notion of filthiness originally came from the excrement that built up in great steaming piles and clung to the unscrubbed lucre pearls. Even by the mid-sixteenth century, however, the term had come to connote moral depravity. The profiteers of lucre were notoriously cutthroat capitalists, paying their workers barely enough to live on and meting out savage punishments for those unfortunates foolish enough to steal pearls for themselves. It was a time of obscene profits and even worse behaviour.
Despite the high prices commanded for lucre pearls, the market crashed in the eighteenth century, after two shipments were lost in a freak storm in the English Channel. Producers and stockholders, having bet everything on the anticipated profits that these shipments would bring in, went bankrupt. The pig farms were sold off. Sheep were brought in for use in the textile industry.
And that is the sad story of the first traders in filthy lucre. In modern times, the filthy rich – I mean, the really really rich, the Real People who squat like hogs in ever-accumulating mounds of slop, maintaining, by dint of sheer bulk, their permanent place in the pen, even as millionaires rise and fall and politicians flicker in and out of office, are those few percent who own over half the world’s wealth. If you get to walk around with a name like Vanderbilt, Rothschild, Pew, Krupp – families who made their fortunes as far back as the Middle Ages – then you have resources undreamt of by the likes of the rest of the 98% of us – which includes the nouveau riche neophytes, the schlubs with a few hundred thousand to their names and personal empires at the behest of the banks. It seems that money has become increasingly cheap, as the amount of sheer wealth multiplies, derives itself out of pure nothingness and concentrates in the datavaults of the few.
Let’s look at an example of wealth distribution in the United States in 2001. In the year that terrorists finally figured out how to distract people from their television sets (because the last time Al Quaeda tried to bomb the World Trade Center, they did it during the OJ Simpson trial, which pretty much guaranteed that no one would notice), total net worth in the US came to approximately 42.4 trillion dollars, or $42,389,200,000,000.00. Which is a lot. One percent of the US population owned 32.7% of that big old pie, around 13.9 trillion. The next 4 percent of the population owned another 25%, or another 10.6 trillion. And so on, until you hit the bottom 50% of the population, who between them share a pretty cruddy 2.8% of the wealth.
Bear in mind that these figures are all taken from 2000-2001, before the cutting of the inheritance tax, before the bankruptcy bill, and of course, before the liberal dousing of Iraq with soldiers and capital. So my information is slightly out of date. But I do know this: if you belong to a tiny group of people who own nearly one third of your nation’s wealth, then you are filthy filthy rich. And if you’re some mudlark scraping away for the scraps of net worth, picking up bits of old rope and copper pipe to haul to the credit card company each month, then you’re just the filth.
But I have good news too, Susan. If you want a portfolio, nothing could be easier. Portfolios at Staples start as low as $3-5 per pack of four. More expensive briefcase portfolios start at around $30. But I’d go for the really expensive portfolios, the Italian leather jobbies with the inlaying and the accents and the quality of workmanship that just screams professional. In today’s do-or-die world, appearances count! And if you can’t afford it, just throw that sumbitch on your credit card. Consider it an investment in your career.
Care to belong to the elite fraction of a percentage point of the population who’ve had their questions answered by me? Ask Palinode! askpalinode @ gmail . com.
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