"Earth" Review, Plus Bonus John Candy

The New Yorker film reviewer of 1930 ("J.C.M."), after pooh-pooing the trend toward larger-format films (so-called "three-dimensional films" that "fill the whole proscenium"), provides a great review of a movie that has always confused me: "Earth" by Alexander Dovzhenko (translated in this case as "Soil").

To conclude my memoirs on a lofty and dignified note, I should mention "Soil," a new Russian film. The picture is concerned with the favorite dramatic theme of the Soviet artists: the introduction of new methods of farming to the local wheatlands. Of more interest to these unusual people than the awakening of pure love or the dawn of passion is the coming of the tractor. I must say, too, that there are more persons in this town absorbed in this subject than one might suspect. Down there at that little Eighth Street house, where the picture has been shown, the crowd gets very excited, and there is applause, and even now and then a hiss... In "Soil," a silent picture, a caption was thrown on the screen, a comment of the older peasant as the tractor comes over the hilltop. "There is no God," he says at the sight, and this statement was suddenly met with applause by some of the guests. You will be happy to learn that at once the faithful downed the applause with pious hisses. The whole moment was very intense, and it was a great relief to everyone when the picture passed on to some closeups of apples seen from various angles.

I can certainly understand and appreciate most propaganda, but "Earth" left me totally confused. I couldn't figure out if it was a love song to the soil, a warning to farmers, or an outright parody. Maybe it was all three?

You can hardly say the same about "Hey Giorgy!" This was one of several hilarious SCTV spoofs of Russian television.

Giorgy! If he's not helping somebody, he's helping somebody else! Featuring a bevy of Eastern European immigrants waving at John Candy somewhere in North York.

Here's How to GET RID of Prohibition

As best as I can glean from the pages of The New Yorker, 1930 was the year of:

• Backgammon. All the department stores were selling deluxe sets and offering free lessons and tournaments.
  
• Tom Thumb golf. Suddenly there were courses everywhere. Rather than the low-rent "mini golf" of today, the fad was marketed to the Gay Young Things as an after-club pastime drunkenly played in evening gowns, tuxedos, and high heels. Much ado was made about the damage to the courses caused by high heels.
  
• Maybe this "depression" thing isn't going away?
  
• Even the staunchest defenders of prohibition are getting sick of it. Like, to the point where virtually everybody wants to somehow repeal it.

The most obvious sign of the anti-prohibition fever so far is this advertisement in the October 18, 1930 issue. It sums up everything I've been reading (click for a larger view).


Joseph S. Auerbach seems to have been a moderately well-known lawyer...well-known enough to have been publishing books before and after this one, at least.

The Volstead Act would not be repealed until 1933, so it will be interesting to see if this vocal opposition continues to swell, or if it will simply be viewed as a fait d'accompli in the laps of the lawyers.

Don't Tell That Guy Anything

Andy Prieboy has put a "musical sketchbook" online entitled "Don't Tell That Guy Anything," consisting of six rejected songs that were lying around on his hard drive. Besides being wonderfully eclectic and giving insight into his own songwriting process, they're great songs (and they're cheap!)

The first one I heard (and the one that still resonates the most for me) was "Thunderbird (V-8 Wonder of the Western World)," with a video created by Edwin Vacek here:



In his writeup about the song, Prieboy reveals interesting things about the music (it was an Apple Loops experiment) and the lyrics. I find the subject of passive destruction and unsolvable hypocrisy to be endlessly fascinating, so it's amazing to see somebody combine those things into a series of beautiful and concise words.

Bonus Wisdom of the Taxi Drivers

I love talking to taxi drivers, and I think they sense this because whenever I get into a taxi they take note of where I've been and then they ask me personal questions.

They also dispense wisdom from distant lands. Yesterday, when I caught a taxi outside the Belmont Medical Centre, the taxi driver instantly asked me if I was sick.

We started talking about pain and he said "When you have pain in some part, all of your soul is in that part! Everything is important where there is soul!" He then told me exactly what's wrong with North Americans: "Mortgages!"

He has a good point. He says that instead of spending twenty years saving enough money to make a huge payment on a house -- the way they do it in Turkey, apparently -- we put ourselves into immediate debt by buying a house that we can't afford. Our mortgages are so big that we live in perpetual fear of losing our jobs, and the threat of joblessness is held over our heads by our employees and our government. We don't dare step out of line lest we lose our earning power and therefore our beloved houses.

I don't totally agree. Some of us (most of us?) don't step out of line because we don't see a big enough reason to; we are not convinced that things are so bad and the alternatives are so good. He also admitted that other parts of the world are beginning to embrace the idea of big mortgages for early houses, as advertised by America-own companies on television...on television even in Turkey.

But I do see his point. The problem probably has more to do with us not SAVING money as opposed to going into extravagant debt. Even before I had a mortgage I was afraid of losing my earning power, entirely because I didn't have a financial safety net to land in (and I still don't).

To all Turkish taxi drivers: stick to your principles. Speak truth to power. Remember that Park Street is closed and you will waste my money by trying to drive through it.

Recently...

Many things have prevented me from blogging recently, not least my own laziness and ennui. My computer's hard drive totally died after my post about the importance of backups, requiring a trip to the repair shop (and then a total update of everything to Snow Leopard which does kick ass).

This misfortune was immediately followed by a five-day heatwave. Despite my perverse resistance to installing my window air conditioner -- and therefore many nights spent sweating buckets into my sodden bedding -- I learned two things about humans and heat:

1. When people who live in an extremely HUMID area -- like those of us in Southern Ontario -- complain about 35-degree temperatures that feel like 42-degrees due to the humidity, people who live in DRY areas say -- repeatedly and disdainfully -- "Ha! It's that hot here ALL SUMMER!" To which I can only say: try going out in that heat with a wet towel wrapped around your nose and mouth.
2. When people complain about the devastating heat, a subset of other people say "Ha! In the winter you complain about the cold, now you complain about the heat! You just like complaining!" This is like saying "You complained that you were thirsty, so you'd better not complain when I throw you in the pool and drown you!" However illogical it is to complain about the weather -- since nobody you complain to can actually change it -- it is NOT illogical to complain about temperature extremes.

I only mention this because people say these things all the time, and it's tiresome.

Anyway, I'm also living with a cat who is a bit like the Tazmanian Devil, only more hyperactive and noisy. She is a fearless destroyer of bookshelves. She has learned that the best way to send me leaping out of bed in the morning is to sharpen her claws on my mattress, which I imagine her doing with a big grin on her face.

As of this morning, Muffet is forbidden from entering my bedroom. This is difficult because I haven't lived with closed doors for over ten years, and also because I don't think she'll adapt quickly or quietly to this change. Her favourite window is in my bedroom, and so is the sock drawer. I foresee many challenging nights ahead.

Third obstacle: constant pain in my shoulders. Sometimes it's barely there, and other times it feels like my biceps and shoulders are being held together by old rusty rivets made out of bubbling lava.

When I told my family doctor that I was on a three-year waiting list to see a shoulder specialist, he had a fit of furious Irish passion and booked me for a series of examinations. Yesterday a delicate lady held an ultrasound paddle to my shoulders and we viewed the inside of my pathology: wavy lines of bone and fat surrounding ominous black holes of encysted fluid.

Then I crossed the hall to get some X-rays done. It was a much more respectable operation than the last place I went to, though it ALSO had a cupboard which emitted terrifying scrabbling sounds.

Most interesting was the woman who took the X-rays. She was brusque and businesslike, but every time she prepared to take another picture she'd say "Hold your breath!" in an incongruous sing-song way, like the way you'd speak to a mischievous child. I felt weird, standing there in my lead girdle, with this extremely professional lady buzzing around who would suddenly disappear into a booth and sing out -- as though she were offering me a popsicle -- "Hold your breath!"

In other news, I have joined the board for the condo corporation, which is a story I'll tell someday. I also joined the board for the Open Ears festival. I have added "The Toronto G-20" to the list of topics which must not be discussed in friendly company. I walked past my old apartment and saw that the vegetation grew back but the junker cars remain. I read "Babbitt" by Sinclair Lewis, "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham, and a beautiful book about undeciphered ancient scripts by Andrew Robinson. If I go on any sort of vacation this year it will hopefully be to Easter Island, because I want to see what their discos are like.

"Survivors 1975," Season One and a Bit

I had extremely low expectations of "Survivors," mainly because it was created by Terry Nation.

I associate Nation with some of the most plodding and formulaic Doctor Who scripts, usually involving some combination of killer virus, invisible monster, deep chasm, and cowardly-character-makes-brave-sacrifice. Nation's hack jobs for Doctor Who were notorious; the show's producers had a running joke about him just selling them the same Dalek script over and over again.

So when I heard that Nation had created a television series about -- you guessed it -- a killer virus, I just HAD to find out how the invisible monster fit in. But I'm sad to say that "Survivors" is anything but formulaic or plodding...in fact, for the first half, it's absolutely brilliant.

These are not your typical Terry Nation characters; they are complex, understated, and always interesting to watch. Sure there's a funny little Welsh tramp that you can laugh at...but then comes episode nine, "Law and Order," which is the first of two truly harrowing treatments of the "survival" theme: what do you do with a funny little Welsh tramp who isn't so funny anymore?

This theme is pretty simple: when almost everybody in the world dies suddenly, and the diverse survivors have to...well, survive...how do they live through the first few days when they can no longer rely on anybody else, let alone the creature comforts they've known since birth? How do they cope with their shock and grief? How do they find each other? What sort of communities can they form, and how do those communities relate to other groups who disagree with their philosophy? Who the hell knows how to make coal, and what will they do when the tea runs out?

That's the basis of season one, but it's so much more than that, because all of this is approached in a quiet way: no music, no big moments, no flash or spectacle. By contrasting the 1975 series with the new 2008 remake, the Outland Institute explains what is so wonderful and refreshing about this approach, compared to the way it would be (and is) done today. The 1975 series is has an almost documentary style, complete with atmospheric filmed outdoor footage.

Until halfway through the season, however, when things go downhill a bit. First of all, this was the transition period when the BBC was switching from film to "O.B." for their program inserts, and the outdoors look far less "real" when they start using videotape.

This is made worse by the simultaneous arrival (in episode seven) of Hana Maria Pravda, a woman who stands out from the otherwise excellent cast by turning all of her scenes into overwrought babooshka-stereotype cartoons. Combine her with the quietest bunch of cheerfully-prancing "feral dogs" -- especially in one scene when she must actually be ATTACKED by them -- and you get the first glimmers that things are going downhill.

And they do. The plots become more heavy-handed and deliberate, each episode involving the destruction of yet another hard-won and essential social advancement due to the stupidity of others, often the stupidity of the children whose sole purpose is Get Into Trouble or Get Others Into Trouble.

I also have to mention what I refer to as "The Tritovore Technique" (using convenient accidents to get rid of characters who would be too burdensome to keep around) and "The Lucy Saxon Technique" (using secondary characters to kill villains because the primary characters are too principled to do it themselves), which become more and more obvious as the show goes on.

I thought I'd give up after watching the first season, but the second season -- following a truly ridiculous Tritovore-style character-purge of last-season's dross -- has introduced Ruth, a character who harkens back to the complicated and interesting survivors of old. And the second story of the season ("Greater Love") is, once again, unpredictable and beautiful and terrible.

Here's to Ruth and Jenny and Greg and the rest of the survivors. May their wheat ripen, may their sheep multiply, may their babies survive and their horses never go lame. And may they never suffer the indignity of a crappy remake.

Oh, well that already happened.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "French Flit"

When I say repeatedly that the early New Yorker magazine didn't usually tackle serious subjects, I was obviously lying, because here is Dr. Seuss referencing the London Naval Treaty.

Okay, okay, the magazine HAD mentioned the treaty in the past, but only in the context of goofy wordplay or in "The Wayward Press," their semi-regular column about what OTHER periodicals were printing. Written by Guy Fawkes, this was a bitchy take-down of New York's newspapers, often criticizing inaccuracies, inconsistencies between papers, yellow journalism, or -- Fawkes' personal beef -- the misleading elevation of minor, trivial occurrences into headline-breaking NEWS!!!

So although The New Yorker never REALLY covered the London Naval Treaty, their treatment of it probably reflected the mood of the people at the time: that it was a blustery piece of diplomacy which never seemed to end and which would ultimately achieve nothing.

I particularly remember Fawkes' article about it, where he took newspapers to task for sending hordes of reporters over to London where they...sat around and did nothing. The conference was so long and clandestine that the London-based reporters would send back stories about the weather or about the niece of some minor figurehead learning to ride a horse, but the papers would trumpet this stuff as NEWS!!!!!!

Anyway, Dr. Seuss doesn't seem to be taking these issues on in his cartoon. He's just drawing funny Frenchmen. Bless him.

Creepy Pedro Reviews "District 9"

It should not surprise you that, when I accidentally touched the grease of a Hollywood Scriptwriter's typewriter, I began to transform into a Hollywood Scriptwriter myself.

This first manifested as a paunchy sadness. My doctor, instead of giving me Milk of Magnesia and a poultice for my bedsores, hit me on the head and wrapped me in a bag, and the next thing I knew I was in Peter Jackson's torture chamber, screaming.

"I have an idea for a blockbuster movie, but I'm unable to to nail it down, you see," said Mr. Jackson, reclining on a settee with his hairy feet sticking out. "I have stolen a disused Hollywood Scriptwriter's Typewriter from George Lucas' secret museum, but neither my Faceless Spouse nor I can make it operate." And there I saw the Faceless Spouse herself, gnashing and twisting.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?" I cried. "WHERE IS MY WIFE?"

Mr. Jackson applauded. "That's excellent! Your transformation into a Hollywood Scriptwriter is almost complete! We need you to operate the Hollywood Scriptwriter's Typewriter in order to ensure the success of our new movie. We want it to be about rampaging aliens that get all shot up. Other than this we do not know."

"I WILL NOT COOPERATE!" I shouted, but when Peter Jackson shocked me with an energy weapon attached to his belly, I told him that he needed to write a socially-relevant story with a strong character arc.

"Social commentary can be complicated and taxing to the audience," said Peter Jackson.

"Not if there are enough guns," I explained patiently, and both Peter and his Faceless Spouse applauded.

"We'll say it's all very maverick and visionary, and not a Hollywood action film at all!" said Peter, laughing. "If anybody gets bored, we'll say it's simply entertainment and not a social commentary!" His Faceless Spouse seemed to enjoy Peter's joke, and as a reward she shambled forth to push gruel into his wet, questing maw. This, I saw, was the source of their twisted bond: the gruel with flecks of meat, the laughing faces, the cynical horror.

Suddenly contemplative, Mr. Jackson stopped eating and pushed his Faceless Spouse aside. "But wait. I can't think of a single socially-relevant topic that hasn't been explored ad-nauseum."

"Xenophobic discrimination," I said.

"Is that good or bad?" asked Peter, and after a few additional shocks due to my predictable non-compliance, I typed out the first draft of a movie which would explain to viewers that xenophobic discrimination is both bad and pervasive. After reading it, Peter put down the script and said "That's really enlightening," and his Faceless Spouse gibbered mindlessly as though hungry for sex.

"But..." said Peter, turning over slightly like a sleek and largely immobile seal, revealing the engorged suckers which hung from his buttocks. "But...if we're going to convince the audience of such an audacious moral idea, we need to make them CARE about the goopy aliens. They must feel EMPATHY. Here's my guy from Weta Digital," and for the next three hours I endured a featurette about the design and implementation of the alien creatures. "After we film the man in the green suit, we digitally erase the wires and begin the sound design," said the guy from Weta Digital.

"STOP IT!" I screamed. "DETACH ME FROM THIS MACHINE! SHUT HIM UP!"

"Not until you give us a hook to hang the audience's sympathy on."

"LET ME GO! YOU CANNOT DO THIS! THERE ARE LAWS!"

"Not in Middle Earth," he snarled, and he barraged me with electrical zaps from his bellygun. "Give us what we want or I'll blast your stinking willawalla to the billabong!"

"DESIGN A CUTE ALIEN BABY WITH WET EYES!" I screamed, and then everybody exploded, and now Peter Jackson is rich, and I'm just sitting around and folding these fucking flowers.

"God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton

The New Yorker panned this book, but it sounded so interesting that I couldn't resist finding a copy: "God's Country: A Short History" by Ralph Barton, published in 1929. As you can see by the tag list for this post, it contains elements of pretty much everything I talk about in this blog.

Barton was a popular '20s cartoonist and caricaturist, and he seemed to be trying to establish himself as a writer before his manic-depression prompted his suicide in 1931. I'm not surprised that he killed himself two years after writing this book. "God's Country" is a bitter thing indeed.

It's a satirical, absurd history of the United States, beginning with Christopher Columbus and ending with a bizarre dystopia in which women have taken over the government, radio advertisers have inadvertently caused widespread looting and domestic terror, and poison gas has destroyed everybody except for eight criminals who -- following the intentions of the pilgrims from the beginning of the book -- set out to wreck everything all over again.

Oooo, it's nasty. Barton has equal loathing for Democrats and Republicans (known in the book as "Uniboodlists" and "Multiboodlists" for reasons I didn't understand), Presidents ("Misters"), businessmen ("Interests"), newspapers (who dictate "Public Opinion"), and the everyday citizens who allow the aforementioned to get away with everything they do, over and over again, throughout the entire history of democracy.

Is there anybody Barton doesn't hate? He appears to have sympathy for Native Americans, he finds few unpleasant things to say about Abraham Lincoln, and he goes out of his way to avoid lampooning African Americans, but for the most part "God's Country" is a relentless, snarky skewering of EVERYBODY. And that means you too, reader. And me.

You can imagine how tedious such a book can be. It's especially tedious to somebody (like me) who doesn't know the finer points of every President -- errr, Mister -- in American history. Barton goes through them all, giving them the names of monarchs ("St. Abraham," "Franklin the Debonaire") to highlight one going theme throughout the book: the American obsession with electing "jus' plain folk" who are -- in actual fact -- part of the social elite who have been carefully groomed to appear otherwise.

This obsession is one element of the book that still holds true today (see Palin, Sarah). Another element is the reliance on FEAR to manipulate public opinion, as formented by business requirements and amplified by the newspapers. We sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the disgusting collusion of politics, business, and media is a relatively new phenomenon. "God's Country" will tell you different.

After 250 pages of spot-on satire, Barton comes to women's suffrage and temperance activism. I can only assume that he really, really didn't like women, as the book tips from "cutting satire" to "cruel stereotype" in the space of a few pages, detailing a world where women with "blacksnake whips" run around emasculating everybody and turning them into "ex-males." They conceive arbitrary rules and devise irrational schemes to enforce them, finally bringing about the downfall of the already-tottering country. It's ludicrous and leaves a bad impression, and is probably one of the reasons The New Yorker reviewer panned it.

But there are great moments, especially near the end when everything goes completely off the rails. The businessmen are discovered to have retreated into a secret society with its own language ("Six huh pcent a fi million dollas is thutty million dollas. Fiscal.") and in a mysterious desert pilgrimage they invent golf. This presentation of Big Business as a totally self-interested, self-contained, and illogical cabal is ominous in light of the subsequent financial collapse.

When the new breed of radio announcers start to amuse themselves by shouting demands like "Desire to see a prize fight!" and "Long to see a movie about Arabs!", the book provides an amazing insight into '20s popular culture. It's like reading a Readers Digest Condensed Version of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1929:

[They were] soon being ordered to deodorize, to smear mud on their faces, to hate New York, to play Mah Jong, to do cross-word puzzles, to ask each other questions, to bathe in violet rays, to develop personalities, to practice numerology, to adore the Russians, the negroes and aviators, to eat Eskimo Pie, to throw bits of paper out the window, to have themselves psychoanalyzed, to engage in Marathon contests, to eat liver and to perform a thousand other like obediences.

When "God's Country" is good, it's very, very good, but most of it is the 1920s brand of screwball, sledgehammer burlesque that leaves me exhausted, alternating with some surprisingly dry historical dissection.

More importantly, however, it is a clear expression of the immense disgust that an intelligent, educated, creative, and mentally-tortured man had for all the things he saw in the world around him. If he'd had a more balanced view of human nature then "God's Country" would be an easier book to read, but it never would have been written in the first place.

The Drys Go Happily to Hell, Plus Cat Joke

In March, 1930, after ten years of expensive prohibition "enforcement" that did little except make bootleggers rich, Americans loudly debated whether to reform the Volstead act. It was obvious that people of all social stripes were still drinking almost as much booze as they had been previously, and it was obvious to most people that prohibition encouraged outright graft and corruption to the point where people just assumed that every cop (and government official) was on the payroll of crime syndicates.

But still the "Drys" held on. Powerful voting blocs had not yet reached the point of "repeal," simply asking for "reform." Magazines like The New Yorker had a field day with this whole debate, as often happens when opposing views become totally strident, polarized, pointless, and out of touch with reality.

So March 29, 1930 brings the first really great New Yorker cover that I've seen so far, drawn by Rea Irvin, probably the most constant contributor to the magazine since its inception. Just look at the happy grin of the "Wet" good-time girl falling to hell, and the awful drabness of the "Dry."

(As always, click for a bigger version)

I'm confused about the cat, though. Was this from some temperance meme of the day, or was the "Dry" a caricature of a notable cat-loving person, or did Irvin add it simply to add balance and humour to the cover?

We'll never know, but I DID find this great cat joke:

Amie Semple McPherson was an old time evangelist who was known for her dramatic sermons. Once she sent a little kid up into the choir loft and told him to release a dove out of its cage on cue.

So she was preaching away and said, "And the Lord will send a dove of peace..."

And the kid yelled out, "The cat just ate the dove. Should I throw down the cat?"

Tama Janowitz, "They Is Us"

Too often when I review a book I say "It wouldn't qualify for the Oprah Book Club!" Besides making a backhanded swipe at Oprah -- that'll teach her! -- I suppose my point is that there are books that sell and there are books that don't. One group is not necessarily any better than the other, but I think that Oprah's picks -- and the books displayed at the front of the book store -- are homogenized, straightforward, uncomplicated, safe, and somehow "established." Other than political screeds, olde-timey classics, get-rich-quick books, or that new brand of "blink and you'll miss it" sociology, those are the Books That Sell.

"They Is Us" by Tama Janowitz is NOT an Oprah pick. Like many of my favourite books it lacks the basic qualifications, alienating the reader almost from the first page. It's nasty and messy and horrific and strange, and no matter how big the "By the Author of Slaves of New York" sticker is on the cover I still don't think it's a "Book That Sells."

That isn't a bad thing but I think it's a shame.

I really wonder who Tama Janowitz's readership is. Who are her fans, and why do they like her books so much? I can only state why *I* do: I can relate to her characters, I never know what's going to happen in the next chapter, I appreciate the unconventional structure of the plots, I love her dialog, and -- most significantly -- even though her novels rarely have "a point" they leave a nebulous impression of "truth" that could not survive point-form distillation into a "Blink"-style sociology splurge. Her novels tell me something about people and the world and the way that we feel about each other, and those are very important topics indeed.

By writing about the world as it really is, through the eyes of people as they really are, the resulting "reality" seems -- paradoxically -- like utter fantasy. George Saunders takes this approach as well, though he usually ramps up the absurd satire by setting his stories in a future where things are even MORE like they are today.

Does Janowitz's readership enjoy the writing of George Saunders? If so, then I think they'll naturally embrace "They Is Us," as it takes a similar approach. The book is set sometime in the American future when all food is grown from the same handful of cell cultures, hologrammatic televisions permit infomercial hosts to step into your house and jump on your bed, and the dying people in the old folks home are...us. Tattooed, pierced, forced into activity by a condescending instructor who shrieks the lyrics of "Hollaback Girl" at them.

These "in the future" elements of the book are ingenious but I wonder if they are entirely necessary for any writer. As I said, Janowitz's presentation of everyday life in the CURRENT era is satire enough; the politics of consumption, patriotism, entertainment, and war are so NATURALLY surreal that there is little need to jump forward in time to show us where we're going. The astute reader, tragically, already suspects.

But many "future" elements of "They Is Us" work perfectly, especially in service of the humour and horror. Everybody is suffering from bizarre diseases and parasites, with enormous worms coming out of their noses and "stickers" burrowing through their internal organs. Science has taught everybody to worship "The Intelligent Designer." A genetic engineering company called "Bermese Pythion" has developed a series of tragic hybrids, including cockroaches that glow in the dark and sway gently to music in the dirty kitchen corners.

My favourite character is "Breakfast," a constipated talking dog who shuffles occasionally through the plot, saying things that perfectly epitomize the novel's horror-humour:

The dog keeps talking about sex, muttering, "Let's fock."

It always seems to happen just as Julie is dozing off, or is having a nice dream... It drives her nuts, that little weird voice, "Come on, leetle mommy, let's fock --" She grabs him by the scruff of his neck and says, "Breakfast, you've got to cut it out! What's wrong with you, you never used to be like this."

"I sorry," he says. "I sorry. I can't help..."

The horror-humour of "They Is Us" is pure Janowitz in many ways. The protagonists are -- in my eyes -- a riff on the family from "By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee," transposed into America's doomed future. But instead of finding eventual success and happiness -- or at least not failing too terribly at any given moment -- they fall prey to the increasing darkness of Janowitz's writing.

While her books have always had some element of grotesque and tragic horror in them, before "A Certain Age" this tendency was tempered with humour. "They Is Us" is still very funny, but sometimes the author stops grinning, and the contrast is a terrible shock. There is nothing funny about the fates of Tahnee and Dyllis, and it's at these moments -- I fear -- when some of Janowitz's readership might feel betrayed.

The other potential pitfall in the book is its curious presentation of time. Reading a Janowitz novel has always been like riding a ramshackle bulldozer through a blasted landscape, driven by an authoress who you don't entirely trust. There is very little "rising action - climax - denouement" going on; instead, things happen episodically to the protagonist, they gradually accumulate until something HAS to happen, and then...well, maybe something DOES happen, or maybe it just doesn't. This is a bit disorienting and it makes it difficult to construct a timeline in your head; you're often wondering "How long ago did that last thing happen in the book?"

"They Is Us" goes further. It's written in present tense, which gives a strange timelessness to the events. It also follows several different protagonists who do things independently in different places. And -- most importantly, though it isn't obvious at first -- the characters have serious issues with time perception themselves due to any number of "future America" problems, including mysterious diseases and an ominously underplayed "hole through the earth."

In "They Is Us" this is a plot point -- and it certainly pays off in the end -- but it can get a bit frustrating in the middle. I was frequently distracted, wondering if certain events had really happened and -- if not -- whether *I* had missed something, or if one or more of the narrators were unreliable, or if Janowitz had done some sloppy editing, or if -- as I suspect is the case -- the "future America" is simply disconnected from time perception altogether.

It is, after all, a world where traffic jams last forever, every day is a different season, clothes go instantly out of style, and depression-era hobos appear (without explanation) in the late 21st century. In this world, the only sure indication that time is passing is the President giving us another update about his approaching wedding (meanwhile hawking cheap junk on the shopping channel).

The beautiful, unexpected ending of the book has "time" as its central pivot...so yes, this can only be intentional. But it IS difficult to follow if you worry too much about it.

This is an awkward book. Sometimes it's repetitive, and some of the characters -- Bocar for instance -- didn't interest me at all, so their moments of exposition left me cold and a little bored. "They Is Us" can also get buried under its own ideas, slowing down to a crawl to explain something that would be better only hinted at. This is a potential problem in any book that deals with an unfamiliar reality.

But despite (or maybe because of) all this messiness, it may in fact be the most complete and meaningful Janowitz novel that I have ever read. I mentioned earlier that her books make me feel like I've learned something about the world and the people in it. After all the goofy set-pieces, clever ideas, apparent filler, and general confusion of "They Is Us," the final chapters slam down with a sense of truth that reverberates backwards through the pages, giving purpose to everything that came before.

That might be "too little too late" for some, but not for me. It's not my favourite Tama Janowitz novel but it's probably the one that deserves the closest reading, and I think she's on to something here. I'm not talking about the politics of the book, I'm just talking about the mood: it's correct. It's beautiful and ugly and funny and tragic. It's awkward. That's life, then, now, and always.

Random Observations About the Young People's Library of Entertainment and Amusement

I am now firmly mired in the "Patriotism and War" section of "The Young People's Library of Entertainment and Amusement." I previously mentioned some general impressions of this 1903 child-indoctrination book. Here are more specific examples.

First, if I never read another "baby talk" poem, it will be too soon. Here's the first stanza from "Lulu's Complaint," by an uncredited author.

I'se a poor 'ittle sorrowful baby,
For B'idget is 'way down 'tairs:
My titten has scratched my fin'er,
And Dolly won't say her p'ayers.

Also included in the "Little Folks' Speaker" section is "The Spanish War Alphabet" by A. C. Needham. Here are some of the letters taught to little folks:

C is for Cuba, a tight little isle;
To get which we may have to fight quite a while.

F is for Freedom, which means a great deal
When your neck has been under a vile Spanish heel.

G is for Germany, whose rude employees
Should learn better manners; be taught to say please.

I's for Insurgents, who holler for aid;
Then eat up the rations and loaf in the shade.

J is for Jones, Davy Jones, if you will,
Whose lockers we've twice had occasion to fill.

William Hearst would have been pleased!

The modern reader will probably enjoy B. Taylor's "Grandpa's Aversion To Slang." Here are some choice lines.

It wasn't so long when I was young--
We used plain language then;
We didn't speak of "them galoots,"
Meanin' boys or men.

When speaking of the nice hand-write
Of Joe, or Tom, or Bill,
We did it plain--we didn't say,
"He slings a nasty quill."

An' when we saw a girl we liked,
Who never failed to please,
We called her pretty, neat and good,
But not "about the cheese."

Well, when we met a good old friend
We hadn't lately seen,
We greeted him, but didn't say,
"Hello, you old sardine!"

The "pathetic selections" are real gems and guaranteed to make your children hate the world. There are the child-death sagas of "Poor Little Jim," "Limpy Tim," "The Dying Boy," "Nobody's Child," and "In the Bottom Drawer," in which abused children get taken away by angels and the narrator feels really bad. Then there are the wife-death epics of "To Mary in Heaven," "The Singer's Climax," and "The Gambler's Wife." If you're really lucky, for extra pathos, these stories are told by people who -- at the last line -- suddenly jump into the air and then die. That's just how it was in 1903! And also God's way of culling bad poets.

The "Humorous and Dialectic" section taught me the following lessons.

1. Black people use long words, but always incorrectly. They are lazy except when they're playing games. They are always, always, ALWAYS stealing "watermillion."
2. German people are hard-working, but they're far too rigid in their behaviour. They complain a lot about petty problems.
3. Irish people are delightful and stupid and they know their place. Then they get in a fight.

When not making fun of ethnic minorities, the "humorous" selections are usually stories about funny things that children do in church. But then there's a little ditty called "An Apostrophe to Aguinaldo." How dare the people of the Philippines resist American occupation of their territory! Especially not when treated with such respect, as in these excerpts.

Say, Aguinaldo,
You little measly
Malay moke,
What's the matter with you?
...
What you need, Aggie,
Is civilizing.
And goldarn
Your yaller percoon-skin,
We'll civilize you
Dead or alive.
You'd better
Fall in to the
Procession of Progress
And go marching on to glory,
Before you fall
Into a hole in the ground.
Understand?
That's us--
U. S.

Even considering all the dead child and watermillion poems, this is by far the most disturbing thing in the book. So far.

Torchwood Season 3

I thought that Torchwood season one was generally bad, and that season two was downright terrible, but I've stuck with the series because it has potential. I felt that if the writers would only recognize the strengths of the premise -- and brutally stomp out all of the self-introduced weaknesses -- they'd end up with something truly great.

Usually my prayers go unanswered, but season three of Torchwood is absolutely amazing. They've darkened the tone, chucked the juvenile sexuality, trimmed off the extraneous character complications, and written within the budget. It is five episodes of perfectly-maintained suspense, anxiety, and outright horror. The aliens -- known as the "456" -- are the most terrifying creatures I've seen since...well, Alien.

In true Russell T. Davies style, however, the focus of the show -- and the REAL monsters -- are the buerocrats and functionaries who serve to represent humanity at its worst. It's bad enough that the 456 exist...what makes it TRULY bad are the petty foibles of those we expect to protect us.

If you've never watched Torchwood, go out and rent season three. Skip seasons one and two entirely; don't worry, you'll catch on quick enough. You might squirm when John Barrowman does his obligatory crying, but this time around it's kept to a tolerable level, and he really DOES have something to cry about.



PS: Actually this was very similar in tone and theme to a 1998 British mini-series called "Invasion: Earth." You might even accuse Davies of (perhaps unconsciously) copying it. Still, the particulars are different enough to make both series' distinct AND worth watching.

The Emancipated '80s

Some days, to pass the time, I read back issues of '80s computer magazines. It's a nerdy pursuit but sometimes I run across something interesting.

The North American computer scene was pretty stoic. Lots of horny kids owned computers, but the magazines themselves tried to maintain a certain respectability, writing in a fact-based journalistic style in an attempt inform and edify. "Creative Computing" was downright dry and businesslike in its approach, whereas even the less formal magazines kept their childish shenanigans to a minimum.

Then there was Crash.

Published in England and devoted to the ZX Spectrum, Crash Magazine was a swill of pre-adolescent humour, faux hipness, and over-the-top gore. Add Oliver Frey's strangely homoerotic cover art and you have an untinted window into the minds of repressed British childhood during the middle '80s. It's boring and annoying and repetative, yes, but it's a type of sensationalistic weirdness that I've never been exposed to before.

"Tip pages" were very popular in these magazines. Readers would write in with advice for beating the games, or programming cheats, or maps of the sprawling levels which typified Spectrum games. Crash's tip page was nothing special until -- in 1986 -- the previous tip page compiler stepped aside and he was replaced with...A GIRL!

Hannah Smith's hiring was presented initially as some form of female emancipation: women could be smart and clever and competitive just like men! But some of the spotty readers wrote in to say typical '80s things like "Women should go back to where they belong and stop taking men's jobs," as though being the self-styled "girlie tipster" for Crash Magazine was a high-paying position of executive power.

What's most bizarre, however -- and what, in retrospect, was very typical of the '80s reaction to female empowerment -- was how other readers (and the editors) would simultaneously defend and DEGRADE women. All the male readers said things like "Get out of your chauvinist caves, you idiots! This is the '80s! Hannah Smith is great and she's GORGEOUS! Please give her my PHONE NUMBER!" The female readers said "Just because we're weak and frilly doesn't mean we can't do a man's job!" And the editors...

...well, the editors printed covers like this:


...and they wrote articles about how sweaty she got during aerobics, and they tried to set up a jello-wrestling contest with another female writer...

...all while defending her right to be a member of the team.

I'm not saying that England was particularly sexist at the time -- they had Benny Hill, sure, but they also had Margaret Thatcher. Reading these magazines, I'm remembering that this was how female emancipation was treated by the average person in the mid '80s: "Sure women should have the freedom to do whatever they want...as long as they do it in my pants!" There are still lots of people who have that attitude, surely, but you don't see NEARLY so many of them, and they CERTAINLY don't have a mainstream high-profile forum for their views (not without being viewed as crackpots, at least).

This leads me to Benny Hill. I've been watching his 1982 specials today and comparing them to both his older '60s programs and to today's television shows. They're creepy because Hill had gotten older while his female talent got younger (and more scantily clad), and 95% of the jokes involved Hill and his cronies trying to squeeze some woman's bum...

...but what's weird is that Hill almost always suffers HUMILIATION for this. The women outwit him, or he suffers some sort of punishment for his actions, and we (the viewer) are left respecting THEM and laughing at HIM (while still chuckling at his impotent horny buffoonery).

What's my point? I only have an inkling of one. It seems to me that as sexualized and marginalized as the Hill's Angels and Hannah Smiths were, they DID embody a sort of privilege and power as long as they remained at arm's length. By being intelligent and beautiful they had control of the scripted, imaginary situations they were put in. They were very much the superwomen...fetishized goddesses on pedestals.

When I do drag I'm very aware of this aspect of idealized femininity, so I see the attraction to it, and I also see the benefit of it...

...but it all DOES fall apart when reality enters the picture. The average woman on the street is NOT one of Hill's Angels, and NO women live inside his television scripts. The REAL world is a dangerous place for the desired female, and its one where that element of sexual power tends to wane as the years go by.

So it's certainly good that today's Hannah Smiths are not so routinely dismissed as "girlie tipsters" (though it does seem to me that many women would embrace that type of diminutive for themselves). Things have certainly changed publicly, and that's a good thing.

As for the rest of it, though...gender, sexuality, society, and politics are a terrible stew.

"Is Prohibition a Success?"

From the "Talk of the Town" section of the July 6, 1929 issue of The New Yorker, regarding "Fifty thousand dollars [being spent] for a publicity campaign to popularize prohibition."

One of the prohibition slogans for school use is "Is Prohibition a Success? Ask the Bankers, or Ask the Salvation Army, the Social Workers, the Mothers. Ask Everybody." In order that school children shouldn't be deceived about anything, we actually started out to ask some of these groups. We asked the bankers first. "Bankers," we said, "is prohibition a success?" There was no answer. All the bankers were out of town, attending the convention of the New York State Bankers' Association--in Toronto, Canada.

A Big Gay Storm is Brewing

It's Easter, and the National Organization for Marriage is rolling out a hilarious anti-gay scary-boo advertisement.



While getting ready to go out last night, it was almost as though Jesus himself were tickling the parody center of my brain. I was COMPELLED to make a response.



Note: You need to have been following the issue pretty closely to get the final gag. Close on the heels of American conservatives adopting "teabagging" as a method of protest, the National Organization for Marriage decided to shorten their "Two Million for Marriage" campaign to "2M4M."

Like, they live in such a bubble that they don't even double-check their acronyms against popular knowledge. They have terrible quality control of their memes.

As an Aside...

...watching Jim Cramer get PUMMELED on the Daily Show is simply too painful. Like, I can't finish. Once his voice starts shaking I get embarrassed and I turn it off.

If I ever lie and Jon Stewart catches me, I think I'd rather run away to Antarctica than appear on his show.

You're Going to "Go Galt?" Oh yes PLEASE!

I'm loving the way a bunch of right-wing pundits have been threatening lately to "Go Galt." At first I was worried that they were planning to move to the CITY of Galt -- which is just a few kilometers away -- but when I found out they were getting all Rand-happy I could only laugh with glee.

I read "Atlas Shrugged" while I was in University, sometime around 1992. I can't remember every detail of the book but I DO remember that it tried to build simple archetypes around complex human traits.

In Rand's world you were either a creator or a parasite. The creators were brilliant, inventive capitalists who forged their own way through the business world, sort of like Paul Bunyan with a briefcase. The parasites were dim-witted, simpering socialists who used government intervention in order to latch on to the creators, growing fat off the work of others.

When the creators in "Atlas Shrugged" decided to go on strike -- by disappearing to a secret compound -- they removed all the best minds from society and left the parasites to die.

One thousand libertarians reached the last page and ejaculated. The End.

One of the problems with Rand's outlook is that she equates self-interest with both brilliance and social health, as though the wealthiest capitalists were somehow both intelligent AND unreservedly good-for-all-of-us. She seemed to think that successful businesspeople must automatically be super-intelligent AND have an automatic benefit to society as a whole (and be gosh-darn handsome to boot).

Another of her oversights is the hilarious idea that businesspeople and industry tycoons are both "inventors" and "capable of existing all on their own."

Now, imagine all the corporate CEO's of all the banks decide to withdraw all their money and then start their own society. In Rand's world, these CEO's would suddenly be inventing amazing new gadgets and curing some REALLY cool tobacco, meanwhile magically providing each other with electricity and plumbing and food.

What's amusing about the rightwing bloggers threatening to "Go Galt" is that they actually seem to think that THEY are innovators TOO, and they don't seem to be aware of where their word processors, clothing, and panini bread actually comes from, let alone who carries their clubs at the automatically landscaped golf course.

So it's laughable enough to think that the richest people on earth could actually survive (let alone thrive) in total isolation, but it's downright HYSTERICAL to imagine these armchair pundits doing so.

I can't help wondering what these people will do when they reach Galt's Gulch, particularly until a brilliant investment banker invents the "static electricity motor." Who's going to cut Michelle Malkin's hair? What services can she offer to their little society, and what happens if Ann Coulter proves herself BETTER at offering those services? Who's going to build their church? Will we REALLY get to imagine Instapundit doing his weekly stint purifying sewage, and...hey, doesn't it all sound a bit like communism anyway?

Oh please! PLEASE go to Galt so we'll all realize how much we miss you while you're gone! Search engines will weep when they run out of "Islamofascist" hits, and CNN anchors will have to talk to blank video feeds. Would society fall apart? Would you bring about hell on earth? Perhaps heaven.

Coalition Crisis, Yarrgh

I have to admit I'm getting a real kick out of Canada's sudden "coalition crisis." It's not just that I'm hoping to see Stephen Harper get trounced, or that I believe it really IS time for Liberals and NDPs to join up and stop splitting the vote...I'm mainly excited because stuff like this doesn't HAPPEN very often in Canadian politics.

First off you've got Harper's lackey presenting a preliminary budget and an economic statement that is both ridiculous AND a punch in the progressive nose. Rather than nurse their sore noses and let Harper get away with it, the three opposition parties ganged up and utilized a totally bizarre -- but also totally legal -- parliamentary move which allows them to simply kick Harper out of power and replace him...with themselves!

As if that weren't fun enough, everybody's screaming at everybody else because this tricky maneuver requires the cooperation of the Bloc Québécois, the stinkiest party in Ottawa. Every few years it is necessary for somebody to cozy up with the Bloc, which prompts a firestorm of insults from everybody else: "Your party is in bed with the SEPARATISTS, and therefore you HATE CANADA!" What's amusing is that few people outside of the parliamentary chamber actually believe this rhetoric, especially since the people yelling those insults had no doubt cozied up to the Bloc just a year or two before. That's the case now, and it was also the case the last three times this happened.

It's hard not to view Canadian parliament as childish. They're no more cynical and immature than other governments, I'm sure, but they also tend to secretly WANT TO GET ALONG. So even when they scream and shout at each other, you know that deep down inside they hope it'll all blow over and they can all be friends.

But this time, it's like one of the babies in Parliament pushed the other babies down...and then they all pulled out GUNS! It's like, wow, you guys MEAN it this time! You really HATE each other! This is SO COOL!

I can say this with an air of amused detachment because I have no doubt that things will work out just fine. It's easy to get outraged about the microscopic elements of Canadian politics, but when I view it from a two- or three-year distance it all looks pretty much the same. That's good for unity, but bad for engagement.

I like it the way it is.

A Good Morning

We've gotten so used to instant-gratification that, when following a news story, we often expect a New Explosive Revelation at every click of the mouse. That's how I felt last night while pursuing the American election returns.

I'd click on CNN to see their somewhat unadventurous statistics, then I'd jump to MSNBC and FOX for the "out on a limb" predictions (which turned out to be correct). I'd then immediately go to Daily Kos and see which predictions they'd decided to pick up, and also get results about the house and senate races. Then I'd go to Townhall's blog and derive a certain glee from their glazed incomprehension and prophesies of conspiracy and doom...

...and by then enough time had passed for me to go back to CNN for the latest update. Repeat ad nauseum.

Sadly, after Pennsylvania was called there just weren't any big revelations until a few hours later. So I took a gravol and went to bed, and woke up this morning to a landslide Obama victory (and the defeat of most of the noxious ballot propositions). So nice to see Florida blue. In fact, every state I've ever visited ended up siding with Obama. He can thank me later for my inadvertent campaigning!

I followed this race much closer than I did the Canadian elections. Why? Because none of the leaders had a really good OR bad spark to them. I mistrust Stephen Harper, but I could only judge his opponents in varying degrees of amorphous apathy. You didn't have an Obama out there rallying the troops, and you also didn't have a Sarah Palin making a mockery of the whole situation.