[ week 32 | 46 ]
Suck this through your skinny pipe.
Saturday, 09.53
There’s a half-stalled meditation inspired by last week’s trip to San Diego on comics and sex and the use of simple (though not simplistic) cartoons as gateways and avatars and icons, proxies to let you dip a toe in someplace rich and strange, nightlights in that good night, but like I said it’s half-stalled and there’s gardening to do and a basement to clean and really I ought to be finishing up the damn re-design for Ruthie’s and learning how to use Movable Type and there’s half a hundred other things littering the to-do list and yet I want to kick something into the air to get you thinking about it all, so: first, maybe I’ll quote Grant Morrison, why not:
I finally figured out what my agenda is with The Invisibles, and with the superhero stuff as well. Within a year, we’ll see man’s first contact with a fictional reality. That’s what the magic’s all about. Fiction and reality are going to become interchangeable. It will happen very slowly, but the first thing I’m going to try and do is change places with King Mob. I’ll be in the comic, and he’ll come out the comic. It’s a technology; one of the things we can do with the comics universe is go into it. I realise now you can go into any comic or any piece of fiction wearing a Fiction Suit. This is pioneering stuff, we are now astronauts entering fiction as a dimension. I can go into the comics world wearing a Superman body amd walk around and tell them stuff like what’s going to happen on page sixteen if I want. I thought, what if you treated that reality as being its own real autonomous world? In the same way that those hyperbeings could get me out, can I get anyone out of there?
Which quote I bagged from Bryant Durrell over at Population: One, and you should take it as seriously as you like.
But more to the point and digging deeper: it’s three and a half megabytes and it’s 40,000-some-odd pixels wide (if you were to print it out at 72 dpi, it’d be some 46 feet long) and it’s unabashedly full of that mid-’90s neo-hippie techno-utopian vibe with the whales and the sex and the mysticism and the psychedelia but let’s admit it—properly done, that mid-’90s neo-hippie techno-utopian vibe is, well (yes!) cool. And we can get into an argument about the essentially reductive and even fascistic nature of utopia some other time because right now I think it’s more important to take a tip from Kim Stanley Robinson and think not necessarily of the best possible world but realize that it’s important from time to time to think of one that’s better in one way or another than the one we’re in now and figure out what it is we might have to do to get a little closer and then maybe go out and do it. —Remember when the future was so bright we had to wear shades?
So. Turning on a couple of brightly colored lights in the gathering gloom, I give you Patrick Farley’s first run at Delta Thrives. Go, click on the link, make some coffee, squeeze a significant other, wash some dishes, organize your Daytimer, and then come back when it’s finished downloading and read an entry from Delta Aziza Nguyen’s blog, sent surging through our skinny little data pipes from a brighter place.
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Gentleman pervert.
Wednesday, 20.44
There was this preview playing endlessly in some art house or another in Shaker Heights, maybe? Or maybe Boston. Lots of clips of this guy Dirk Bogarde in his earlier roles, trying to convince us unwashed ignorant Yanks he was a stellar actor, no, really; certainly, the clips were persuasive—this guy had eyes that made you shiver, you know? Good darkness.
Too bad the movie they were pimping had one of the more off-puttingly unfortunate titles in recent memory. (They tried re-releasing it under These Foolish Things, apparently. Better, but.)
Anyway. Salon’s got a pretty good appreciation of him and his career. Even if one more guy who liked guys and girls is summed up as “gay, despite”—and even if Cintra Wilson claims a bizarre ability to tell when an actor is playing against his or her sexual preference. (Oy.)
But I think I maybe like the idea of some Bogarde and Pinter and Fox. Maybe this weekend—
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Steam engine time.
Wednesday, 20.27
A day later, and here’s Plastic with some more links on the summer of missing girls that aren’t.
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The summer of missing girls.
Tuesday, 23.37
This is an old meme, of course—not that this is the summer of missing girls, no; we all know this isn’t, not really. That’s what’s an old meme. The idea that this is just hype, a kick in the ratings, a desultory wave of a distracting hand by a showman too tired to really try too hard to fool us anymore. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. There’s no more a rise in child kidnappings than there was a rise in shark attacks last year, and you know that thing about coconuts killing more people than sharks that people tried to use to debunk the whole shark attack thing? That’s a lie, too.
Still, Salon appears to be the first major media outlet to cry bullshit and let slip the dogs of righteous indignation. (I say “appears” because, uh. I never got around to buying that Premium membership. Heh. Um. Anyway. I trust them, more than not, and their findings synch up with my gut, so if someone out there does read the whole article and finds something screwy with methodology or conclusions, tickle me, would you?) —And it’s far more than Connie Chung callously cashing in on the big-eyed death masks of our waifish desaparecidos; Bill “Lying Sack of Shit” O’Reilly cries out for tough mandatory sentencing on any crime that “harms” minors, haplessly tossing around the statistic that 725,000 kids go missing every year without noting how many of those are found again very soon thereafter and how many of those are runaways and how many of those reports are collateral damage in custody battles; he does admit a paragraph above that it’s just 100 kids who are abducted by strangers every year, which is a distortion: it’s 100 kids over the past few years. (Elsewhere, he insists that people reasonably suspected of being pedophiles have no right to an aggressive defense—a terrifying one-two punch with those draconian mandatory sentences. —Forgive me; I’m linking to another Plastic thread on that one because Town Hall.com isn’t coming up tonight and I have no idea what’s up and no stomach to go searching for O’Reilly’s editorials elsewhere. Try the link yourself through the Plastic piece, see if they’re back up.)
So this isn’t a story—not when for every one of those 100 kids we must protect from predators as rare as unicorns, there’s hundreds of kids in danger from their very own families (one of the top reasons why kids run away from home and end up on that list of 725,000) and hundreds more already hard at work in the life. If O’Reilly and Chung and Bush and their noxious ilk really gave a flying fuck about The Kids and not ratings and ad revenues and distracting the front pages from Enron and WorldCom and national security fuckups—well, there’s a lot more direct action they could take than spewing peppy vitriol in the name of our quiet speechless meek dead blond white girly desaparecidos. They could fight the nasty laws New York State thinks will help these street kids and they could raise money for aid and intervention and they could get out in the street and do the hard-as-fuck hopelessly endless person-to-person grinding grudging work that is the only thing that ever helps any of us when we’re down and out—but none of that is as sexy as a backdrop of the beautiful lost face of the latest Jon Benet.
Because you have to ask yourself: why now? Why, after the winter of Catholic priests and the spring of Judith Levine are we having the summer of missing girls? What are we trying to tell ourselves? What unpleasantness are we trying to paper over with this old, comfortable horror, this Red Riding Hood and Big Bad Wolf writ postmodern? What truth are we not looking at by jacking up these hysterical lies at the expense of desperately grieving families? And why, why on earth did Sarah Roberts leave her dogs in the car and drop a water bottle and break a necklace and run off with some friends to Seattle—and why were the cops so pantingly eager to assume the very worst?
