I reviewed The Avengers for Out Of Order magazine, an independent publication at Yale. One of those friend-of-a-friend things. I’m still a little confused as to just why they asked me to do it, but hey. Watch a movie and write it up? I’m down.
You can check it over there.
Today as I was backing out of my parking space at the M.O., I found the reason for cupholders (my car is cupholderless; Germans do not drink and drive). At some point between shifting from reverse to drive, I felt the coffee cup gripped between my legs slowly tilt, and then I do not think I’ve ever felt such pain before in my life. It was basically a step away from Judgement. Compared to the nine circles of hell, this one would at least have been the third or fourth (fitting since those belong to Gluttony and Greed).
I hissed angry words under my breath while standing on the brake pedal and the accelerator simultaneously. The car revved in place. I’m sure that from the outside, it looked very unimpressive. Driving away, I gingerly held the cup between two fingers and contemplated rolling down the window and flinging the whole idiotic thing far away into the ditch, but it still held a decent amount of coffee (a Costa Rican blend) which I’d just paid for from my tab, so instead I sipped and tried to ignore the steaming region of hellfire which was the front of my pants.
But anyway. Another subject.
I am rather tired of seeing all those complaints in my social media feeds about models looking too good in magazines. Girls complaining about body image and being happy with your curves and crap. It’s all too-skinny-this and too-symmetrical-that and too-smooth-skin and too-nice-hair. I’ve seen more headlines connecting Photoshop with anorexia than I’ve seen headlines connecting the United States with America. Believe me, I understand what Photoshop can do. Photoshop has powers. Photoshop makes ugly people beautiful.
But wait. Just hold on a sec, people. When you populate my news feed with links like Seventeen Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls! – Sign the Petition, I am not convinced. You do realize, of course, that there are such things as spectrums. The people on the high end of the spectrum get paid to be models in magazines. The people lower down on the spectrum don’t. (It’s been 22 years and they still haven’t called me).
If I were to design a poster for, say, Waffle House, I’d have to take pictures of their waffles. Am I going to look under the oven and pull out that waffle Trisha kicked under there last week? No. I’m going to look for a perfect waffle fresh out of the waffle iron. Being picky about your subject is not dishonest or unrealistic or anything. It’s just…what you do.
And if it causes a girl somewhere to develop bulimia, I’d say we have a different issue at hand. To the random girl who commented “we are masterpieces!” underneath the Give Girls Images of Real Girls link, you’re missing the point and I’m sorry you are secretly unhappy with your image. I’d say that yes, things like digestive systems/tear ducts/brain stems are pretty masterpieceful, but in truth we ain’t all Cary Grants and Audrey Hepburns. Most of us are crusty waffles with some leakage around the edges.
If seeing attractive people on television and in magazines really bothers you that much, there are probably some fundamental issues to work through before you get upset at Vanity Fair showing pretty girls or GQ showing handsome guys. Pectorals like that? Must be photoshopped. We want more beer gut! Show average men! Facial stubble should never look that good!
From time to time I read or write or talk, like most folks. During these times I’m interacting with other humans either directly through what they say, or indirectly through what they’ve written. Common threads of ideas flow through and are expressed by everyone, and with a little practice it’s shockingly easy to trace these out.
We’re not very creative people, as a rule. I’d argue, actually, that we’re not truly creative at all (everything ever generated’s just a modification of something already existent) but that probably goes beyond the scope of this paragraph. We’ll suffice it to say that, as a rule, we don’t tend to be very creative people.
For much the same reasons that we don’t see a Mona Lisa or Whistler’s Mother or Girl With A Pearl Earring in every neighborhood “art” gallery, we don’t see many great ideas passed from one person to the next. But we do see Kinkade reprints hanging in 1 out of every 20 homes in America. And swirling around in the muddied minds of the people inhabiting those homes are ideas and thoughts, all of which bottom out at the same quality level of the Kinkades hung above their heads. They’re very common thoughts, yet I find them mostly abominable. Things like:
And these thoughts, along with hundreds of others, dominate the lives of millions of Americans who perhaps never quite realize that they’re being dominated by these thoughts.
The real problems never seem to pass through people’s minds, at least not to the extent that they should. People smile far too often, for every single picture they’re in, to further the facade that everything’s right in their world. People hug far too often, not to show affection…but to further the facade that everything’s right in their world. People laugh during movies even during the mediocrely funny parts, so as to not destroy their facade that everything’s right in their world.
And if they complain, they complain about one of the things pre-approved to complain about…things they know others will identify with, like student debt or foreign policy or the 1% or the other party.
These same people, living in this world of idealistic perfection, will never confront anything or anyone. Distasteful subjects are ignored instead of discussed, as if they didn’t exist right next door. Unpleasant realities are smoothed over, even something as universally present as death. Have you noticed that nobody dies anymore? They pass away, or they’re no longer with us, or they went to be with their maker, or they’re in a better place. No one bites the dust. It’s hygienic and swift, and the proof is treated with formaldehyde and buried neatly away in a hermetically sealed vault.
Wake up and smell the roses.
I know that the roses have thorns, unlike the bottle of synthetic perfume you’ve been sniffing, but in the end roses are much more real.
It is okay to think outside the box, to criticize, to make a different decision, or to say a Kinkade is a bad painting. It’s okay to be disappointed by things that no one else finds disappointing. It’s okay to wake up from your drugged slumber for once. Wake up and smell the roses.
Normally, I can’t stand reading Christian books. They’re not good.
I’m generalizing, of course, because there are at least a couple dozen good Christian books out there. We can forget nearly everything written by the Puritans, because they used 600 pages to describe what a good magazine copywriter could summarize in a paragraph. We can forget the millions of books penned by American evangelicals since the invention of the paperback, because every single one recycles content from the previous. When it boils down to it we literally have a couple dozen good ones. Half of these are by C.S. Lewis and the rest are scattered here and there by various fringe authors.
But back to my drift. Normally I can’t stand reading Christian books, for much the same reason I can’t stand reading pulp fiction (interesting comparison choice?) but every once in a while a good one comes through.
I’m always surprised when the good one is also popular. Blue Like Jazz was very good and very popular. Even though I wasn’t completely in line with it, it was still a good book and I’d much rather take a good book with which I slightly disagree than take a bad book with which I completely agree.
And so a friend told me that Crazy Love was free on the Kindle a few weeks ago, and I zapped it from the airwaves and read it. The book is incredibly popular in Christian circles, and so I wasn’t expecting much (maybe that’s why I was so pleased). I was expecting another Prayer of Jabez or The Shack or Redeeming Love or How 7 Relevant Prayers Can Endow You With Super Archangel Powers or something.
On the contrary, it was all right. Francis Chan smooths no corners. He quotes some fairly aggressive Sproul (since when was that okay for 97% of America?) He doesn’t make any half-baked excuses for sovereignty, or world suffering, or sin.
I didn’t agree with everything he says, but the good thing about rational discourse is that I don’t have to agree with everything. It’s still a good book. He discusses poverty and wealth in a way which, though understandable, is a little misplaced and misguided. It’s almost Piper-ish, which is basically let’s give away everything and live in a popup camper down by the RV park.
I’m very happy about the book. Next is Erasing Hell and then Forgotten God. Stay tuned.
I’ve been not-regularly-blogging for some time now, which is actually a very good thing because it means that other productive things have been occupying my hours. Blogging costs money (about 1.5 coffees/post, which at $2.75 a cappuccino works out to around $4.13/post) and other things don’t cost money. So, what’s been happening? You mean besides floating in a sea of ineptitude and constant vicissitude? Total world chaos and societal downfall is what’s happening, along with the moral bankruptcy of civilization and the decline of the Western world!
On the upside, some good music is still coming out, and the latest episodes of The Office have been pretty good. Despite what people say, America’s still really great at some things. Like entertainment. We’re great. I mean like really great.
When I’m an old man, likely living in the smoldering ruins of a post-apocalyptic Midwest, I won’t be proud of the cornerstones of American society. I won’t be proud of democracy, evangelicalism, Founding Fathers, military veterans, libraries, American cars, academia, the interstate highway system, foreign aid, or cowboys.
I’m going to be proud of albums and TV shows. Blitzen Trapper’s Black River Killer. Manchester Orchestra’s Mean Everything To Nothing. Silversun Pickups’ Swoon. The Killers’ Hot Fuss. And The Office, and 24, and Saturday Night Live, and The Walking Dead.
We can’t build cars that last beyond 10,000 miles, but darn it all, we can still pump out some killer media.
So with that, enjoy this song.
Gold On The Ceiling – The Black Keys
So I’d been trying to convince Jed, ever since he bought an ’87 Toyota Corolla, that I needed to sharpie it. It was white, it was old, and if anyone would ever let someone else draw all over his car, it would be Jed. So finally he let me, but he wanted it politically themed in order to justify the ridiculousness of drawing freehand Sharpie art all over his car.
Five hours & four sharpies later:
Then, a couple hours & a clearcoat after that:
Then, we social-media’d it up. We created a Facebook page that you should probably like, and I tweeted the pictures at a few libertarian news accounts. Within a few hours I’d been retweeted dozens of times and gained dozens of followers…and eventually the Daily Paul picked it up.
There, people said things like:
I want this drawn on my gun
or
They see me rollin’, they hatin’
or
the best part is that’s Mitt Romney’s car
or
I wonder how much Romney would have to pay for something similar
Don’t get me wrong. These books were all right. They were fun. They were dystopian. They were quick and enjoyable. They were good…but not great.
In these three books (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay) North America is a dystopian society divided into districts controlled by the government. Children are annually drawn from the districts to fight in the Games, essentially gladiators in a higher-tech Coliseum. And as the books go on, it gets more complicated and more people die and stuff like that. Cool!
Contrary to some reviews I’ve read, I really didn’t have an issue with the books morally. One person said that he was disappointed with the lack of remorse or guilt on the part of the Games participants, and that therefore the books support a poor moral backdrop. I disagree; they’re gladiators in a totally dystopian and amoral society. Of course they don’t have much remorse (which, if the reviewer had read the other two books, I think he would have actually found some). They’re survivors after an apocalypse. It’s a nasty place. It’s quite like modern day America.
So that doesn’t bother me. And really, nothing about the books really bothers me, but if anything were to bother me it’d just be the quality of the books. These are works of popular fiction, and thus they join the shelves of a lot of other stuff by Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Stephen King. All good stuff, but not great stuff. It is what it is. They get turned into movies. They sell merchandise. I’m fine with this…as long as the books are taken for what they are.
Sure, they’re infinitely better than Twilight, but they fall flat beneath Harry Potter, for example, which I steadfastly believe will be considered a classic in a hundred years. They’re not innovative. For those who think they are, I would like to refer you to a host of apocalyptic/dystopian literature that The Hunger Games borrows from, including Lucifer’s Hammer, 1984, A Canticle For Leibowitz, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Ender’s Game, The Children of Men…
The Hunger Games is modular. Formulaic. Scripted. There’s the typical love triangle. There’s good vs. evil. There’s archetypes like the old drunk, the fawning Barbie doll, the iron ruler, etc etc. To support this formulaic and clichéd structure, there’s a lot of crutches that Suzanne Collins puts into place. Let me address a few of these crutches.
Vocabulary. She comes up with words like “propo” to stand for propaganda PSAs, or the word “muttation” to describe a…mutated mutt? Really, this is weak. Don’t get me started on names of things. Instead of calling a poisonous berry hemlock, she calls it nightlock. To come up with a good name for mute slaves, she gets all down in her Latin and calls them Avox. Get it? Avox? No vox? No vocals?
Names. Katniss, Gale, Cinna, Snow, Cato, Pollux, Finnick? It’s so stinkin’ Star Wars-esque! Surely something survived the apocalypse. If people got through it with their language skills, reproductive abilities, and survival instincts intact I am absolutely sure that common first names like John or Tim or Jessica would still be intact.
Improbability. Some of the things she describes are definitely sprung from the imagination of someone wearing mom pants, the type that try to hide the milkshake muffin top. Explain to me again why there were booby traps in the Capitol, like exploding flower pots? Explain to me again why an entire street in the Capitol is booby-hinged, so people fall down into a dark pit full of animals?
Combat Scenarios. I feel like Mother Teresa could have written better combat scenarios. They’re muddy, very mom-pants, very confusing, and at the end of the fight scenes all you know is that some people are dead and some people are alive. Plus, the heroine is using a bow. So while cruise missiles and hovercraft are dropping left and right, Katniss is pulling a Legolas and running around shooting arrows.
Character Nondevelopment. It’s written in first person…yet somehow you never figure out what she’s thinking. And nobody changes. Peeta stays limp and blonde. Gale stays tough and distant. Katniss stays cold and hard. It’s flat. Extremely flat. And you never really like anybody or figure anybody out.
So.
Did I enjoy the books? Yeah. The first one was fun, the second passable, the third blah. That’s it.
Should millions of teenage girls wring their hands in anticipation during the Games? Nope. Teenage girl, you should watch Gladiator, where Russell Crowe slashes off heads left and right.
Should millions of teenage girls shake their heads in amazement as they read of the technological wonders of the Capitol? Nope. Teenage girl, you should watch Blade Runner, where there’s an entire sci-fi cityscape…complete with hovercrafts and robots and Harrison Ford and pyramids.
Should millions of teenage girls cry themselves to sleep at night because Katniss doesn’t love Peeta or Gale enough? Nope. Teenage girl, you should read The Count of Monte Cristo, where you will then cry yourself into a silly little coma because Mercedes doesn’t ever love Edmond Dantes enough.
The Hunger Games is for passable fun.
Let’s rate it on a scale of beers. If on one end of the spectrum you have Guinness Draught from the tap, and on the other end you have Schlitz in a can, then The Hunger Games is a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy. It’s cheap, fast, and fun. And that’s about it.
A vacuole is a type of biological mass…sort of like a self-contained organism…a cell, or amoeba, or something like that. Something small, wet, and jiggly.
I once read an old space western in which time vacuoles existed (the book was Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman for those curious…I highly recommend it) and I’m pretty sure that they actually do exist. In the symbolic sense, of course.
1982 was a special time for vacuoles to form. Rifts in the grid of the space-time-matter-continuum, permanently stuck in 1982. These include a few places in the far reaches of the American Southwest, a few small villages in Eastern Europe, the entire state of Alabama, and a few specific nooks scattered across the rest of the world.
Last year I found one of these ’82 time vacuoles in the basement of an old house in South Charlotte. For a nightmarish 7 weeks I lived in 1982. I’m fine with basements in general, but this one was nightmarishly 1982. It smelled of old clothes and mildew, and there were hardly any windows, and there was moldy yellow carpet and moldy wooden paneling and spiders and roaches and silverfish. The water heater did not work for the first three weeks, so I would wake up in the dark and stumble into the bathroom, turn on the shower, try to wash all the spiders down the drain, and jump into the frigid cold water, and then I would book my tail out of that place while I could, and I’d wait until as late as possible before I came back to it, preferably after nightfall so the darkness-during-daytime didn’t bother me too much. When it rained it would pour, and once in the middle of the night when the landlords were in Tennessee for a week I woke with a literal scream because it was storming outside and the ceiling decided to dump gallons of water all over me and my bed, and I tried to grab towels and t-shirts and stuff them into the corners to stave off the water, and finally I had to run upstairs and stuff more towels into the threshold of a sliding door above my room, and I spent the rest of the night avoiding the drips and listening to water rush down inside the walls all around me. I didn’t even unload all of my belongings from my car. I only brought in what was absolutely necessary to survive, like shampoo, deodorant, shoes, and my guitars. I drove around for months with my coats, tools, books, and electric piano still in my trunk, where they had a much better life.
This was not a place of Molly Ringwald starring in John Hughes films, or Ferrari Testarossas driving through Chicago.
This was a place of polyester jackets and light blue jeans and the Chevrolet Celebrity and Birmingham, Alabama.
Sometimes I worry about 2042, three decades into the future. Think about it. There will be 2012 vacuoles. There will be Justin Bieber, Hyundais, Snuggies, North Face, and Jersey Shore. Yes, of course in this 2012 vacuole there will also be good things like Zooey Deschanel, Porsches, Polo Ralph Lauren, and The Walking Dead. But still.
Biebs? Snooki? Party Rock Anthem? Pumped Up Kicks? America in general?
We’ll have to answer for this.
I would like to take this moment to alert you of a major catastrophe. On behalf of every driver in America, I would like to declare a state of emergency on the roads.
In the past week, I’ve seen:
We all know that the most dangerous groups of drivers in America are
The world is a dangerous place, people.
10:30pm
John and I arrive in my car at Midnight Oil and order coffee. They don’t serve decaf after a certain time because no one buys it (when else would you, though?) so he gets a hot chocolate and…I get normal coffee. The caffeine will turn out to be a good idea.
10:45pm
Ellis gets off work and drives the Jeep to Midnight Oil. Stu arrives as well. We stand around, drink, use the facilities, and then pile in the Jeep and head for Walmart. We’re driving topless (the Jeep, not us) so it’s a little brisk and windy.
11:00pm
At Walmart, we buy a large blue bean bag, because the back of the Jeep tends to be hard on the tailbone. We stick it in the Jeep, head back to Midnight Oil, and pick up Kenzie and Liz. Obviously, Midnight Oil is the hub of all activity in Searcy.
11:30pm
We head out from Midnight Oil, and we do not bring along any of the tools that I keep in my trunk. We drive a couple miles out to the edge of Searcy.
11:45pm
For several intense minutes, we blast through powerline trails, ford through massive puddles of mud, and slide through underbrush. Ellis drives, Stu rides shotgun, the girls are nestled in the middle, and John and I ride holding on to the rollbar. Ellis makes sure to hit every square inch of mud.
12:00am
After fording two creeks, we come upon a steep incline. We pile out, run up, and watch Ellis tackle the hill. He tackles it, makes it up, and suddenly the steering column is rendered useless. We open the hood and peer around. We can’t do anything. The tools are back in the Benz. Miles back.
12:15am
We start making the trek back to Searcy. Do we have cell service? Yes. Do we have phones? Yes, 6 of them to be exact. Do we call? Of course not. We walk two miles back to Midnight Oil. In the process we personally ford two creeks. Kenzie’s ballet flats are soaked.
12:45am
Back at my car, we make sure we’ve got tools, and we pile in, roll down the windows, turn on Van Halen, and drive back as close to the Jeep as possible, but there’s still about a quarter mile of woods to tread through. We cart in the tools, ford the two creeks again, and start work.
1:15am
We’ve been bashing on things for a while. I give John my fingerless leather gloves which he says make him feel tougher.
1:30am
Still bashing.
1:45am
Still bashing. The girls are no longer watching. They’re in the Jeep, eating my Tic-Tacs.
2:30am
We decide we need bigger tools. So we trek back out again, fording the two creeks of course, and get in my car and drive. John turns the radio to some country music station. Normally I’d protest, but it somehow fits.
3:00am
Guys, did you know that this late, the gas stations in Searcy are closed? And I need one that sells diesel. And I need diesel. We finally find one out on Hwy 367 and I fill up and we head towards the house to get tools.
3:15am
We gather the tools up, and the girls insist on sticking this out with us, but request some sweaters. So I grab a couple, and we head back.
3:30am
On the way back to town, the fog is dense and we’re all pretty tired. John’s riding shotgun. And we both stare ahead in horror. A man is stumbling around on the side of the road, wearing one boot and no pants. We start yelling in fright. I turn around, we pass him again. I turn back towards Searcy, again, and he’s still there stumbling around half-naked in the dark. We all scream a little bit and keep on driving. I turn on Pink Floyd.
4:00am
We make the trek back in, and this time we’ve got the cordless drill and a hammer. We slave away until we fix the steering column, hallelujah, and we can once again drive around. We pile in and drive out of the woods. And it’s almost morning, so we unanimously decide that Waffle House is next on the menu.
4:30am
We eat at Waffle House. The girl mopping the floor keeps on talking to me, but I can’t understand a word she says. Something about shifts, laundry, and hairdressers. I eat a Texas Bacon Biscuit With Egg. It’s John’s birthday, so he puts a few quarters into the jukebox and plays country songs. I make sure to select a Skynyrd song, the only acceptable hybrid between country and rock.
5:15am
Ellis heads for home in the Jeep. I drop off Stu, Kenzie, and Liz at Midnight Oil and then head way out west to drop off John. And head home, and listen to more Pink Floyd.
6:00am
The sky is growing gray in the east. Bedtime.