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December 19th, 2009
nihilistic_kid
 | 05:17 pm - Note for forthcoming podcast
Drabblecast will be running joanierules.bloggermax.com as a podcast in less than two weeks.
For your information, the podcast will alter the following terms from the story to suit the presumed audience of Drabblecast.
"Kuntdrip, fuckyu Frog bitch" will now be "Vag-face, F-U frog bitch"
"Fucking cat" will now be "freakin' cat"
"cunt" will now be "dick"
Please mentally reinsert these words into the stream of the story as you listen to the podcast, which I will link to on the 30th of this month. Remember, that's cuntdrip, fuck you, fucking cunt. One more time: cundtrip, fuck you, fucking cunt. Please do not mess up the order of these terms when listening.
Thank you for your time and attention.
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nihilistic_kid
 | 09:35 am - Avatar
I sure was glad that one of the friends I saw Avatar with last night ordered an extra large popcorn, because I needed a puke bucket to sit through that movie.
Also, it was in 3D, which made me a little dizzy.
Avatar is a nineteen-hour long film about a stupid ex-Marine who is employed by one of those The Companys one often hears about in science fiction movies to infiltrate the native American Indian/blue panther population of a planet because all the good stuff—a propertyless mineral called unobtanium (haw haw, I write scripts and look at the Internet!)—is under their giant tree. The Marine, who was injured and without the use of his legs in his human body, is named Sully (because he is SULLYING a natural world) and there is a careful scientist named Grace (because she is not exploitive and horrible and can be said to live in a state of GRACE) and an old soldier in charge of blowing things up whose name I didn't catch, but it was probably something like Colonel McEarthrape. (Because he likes to RAPE the EARTH, even when he isn't on it!)
The central conceit of the movie is that Sully and others can "drive" avatars that look just like the Big Blue Indian inhabitants, and that way can communicate and ultimately gain the trust of the indigenous population. Sully doesn't know a word of the native language, doesn't know anything of the local flora or fauna, and has no experience in his new body (voted Sexiest Space Gay at Furcon 2154's art show!) but he's American! Fuck Yeah! So it all works out for him. Despite satellite and radio technology, The Company has no way of tracking the location of the avatars either...well, not in the first act. Later on, they flip the avatars on and off at precisely the right dramatic moment. "I came here to tell you—" *thud*
Avatar does represent a step forward in science fiction film in that it is only forty years behind science fiction literature rather than the usual fifty years. The filmmakers were clearly terribly worried that Stupid American audiences wouldn't get their opus—I'll sum it up for you right now, it's Dances With Ewoks—that they gave Sully an extended voice over explaining most everything occurring on-screen. The choice of Sam Worthington, whose Tony Danzaesque voice grates at the best of times, to do the voice over is just one of those things filmmakers do to show that they are just as stupid as the audience. So don't feel bad, youse guys, that you got laid off the week before Christmas and this cartoon cost $350,000,000 to make. ($75,000,000 alone was for Sigourney Weaver's Botox treatments. The woman was born in ninteen forty-nine, people! I believe the rest was spent on sleeveless T-shirts for Michelle Rodriguez. Which is strange, because I'm sure she has plenty at home.)
There are also lines like this: upon entering the bio lab, "This is the bio lab." A great predatory bird, we are told, is called Last Shadow. "Because it's the last shadow you'll ever see," Sully figures out and explains to the audience. "Gee, thanks Einstein," the audience responds. When there's a fight, people say, "Let's dance!" The stupid guy is told, "Don't do anything exceptionally stupid," by a smart person—sadly nobody followed this bit of advice. The Weasely Company Dude calls the natives "savages" because he didn't get either the HR or the PR department reports on Respecting Others, plus that way we'll know he's bad! McEarthrape says, "We'll fight terror with terror," I suppose because saying, "I'M EEEEEEVIL! EEEEVIL I TELL YOU AND I LOVE TO RAPE...THE EARTH!" would have been considered too realistically gritty. When I wandered into the lobby for a few minutes just to look at the carpeting and came back I was still able to predict every line of dialogue despite surely missing a very important tree or something. The natives have their own language too. It sounds like this: "Ook Ta Lo lo Shvan." Just to make sure acting was as difficult as possible. Also, they are Pernesque dragon riders!
Anyway, Sully meets an Indian princess who senses his pure heart because some dandelion fluff falls on him. She takes him home and everyone inexplicably agrees to teach this young and extremely stupid warrior all the ways of their clan. These secret ways involve traversing video game landscapes and carefully looking at leaves because, as they explain in every title at the metaphysical bookstore at the end of my block here in Berkeley, Everything Is Connected. (Sully had never heard such a thing!) Then there is some furry CGI sex—the audience laughed—and the stupid stupid Indians wake up all surprised that the bulldozers are coming to tear down their Home Tree.
Our little Keeblers, you see, just don't comprehend the "sky people" despite having learned English and such. Like those primitive but noble American Indians, they are childlike and foolish as they try to use their arrows against attack copters (which only works in the third act, not the second), but they have a great wisdom and thus Sully decides to become their leader. His battle plan is, as of course it must be, GO FOR IT! Then it's a nine-hour long battle of Endor. Also, Michelle Rodriguez dies. I knew that was going to happen because she was in the movie.
Much has been made of Avatar's stunning visual sense, generally from people who never flipped through an issue of Heavy Metal in their lives. The night exteriors look more like those black light posters people used to hang in their dorm rooms in the 1970s. You know, back before the invention of fun in 1987. Everything's glowing because, as it turns out, Everything Is Connected. Despite the many native clans (Horse clans! Just like Indians! Clans that live by the sea! Just like Indians! Clans that live in a single giant tree! Just like...oh.) banding together under the leadership of Vinny Barbarino and all the hardware The Company has its command, the war is settled by a one-on-one karate fight between McEarthrape (in one of those robosuits from Aliens) and Sully. Just like King Philip's War in American history actually. Too bad nobody taught King Philip karate, eh, eh? Sucker!
Anyway, there's a second magic tree and it is made out of that fiberoptic stuff and it is also God and so all the CGI creatures we saw in the first act come back and kill all the helicopters and stuff and Sully gets permanently avatared and gets to have blue furry sex with Uhura from Star Trek forever. The funny thing is that the filmmakers probably thought they were making a kick-ass movie about the depredations of capitalism (you know, like the BUDGET of this monster!) and the horrors of genocide, but they really just made one about how Hollywood liberals are the most obnoxious assholes in the world. Anyway, I hope everyone involved in his movie contracts mouth cancer so they can no longer say things like, "Yes, I agree to work on Avatar II: Avat Tarrer" except for Michelle Rodriguez, whose lips I'll protect from free radicals by covering them with my lips always and forever.
I suppose I'll mention a few positives. An early scene in zero-G is interesting. The crazy CGI spaceships and labs are treated as everyday objects—indeed we don't get our first character telling us to be impressed by going, "wwwoooww" until the scientists show up at some floating mountains. (It's a "flux vortex"! A what? A SHUT UP JUST SHUT UP AND LOOK AT THE FLOATING MOUNTAINS!) There's a bit in the second act where we see Sully in his wheelchair and they CGIed his legs to look a bit skinnier then they had before—he's not been exercising at all because he is spending too much time in his avatar body. They then ruin this subtle and clever bit of filmmaking by having him put on shaving cream while staring forlornly into a broken mirror.
Avatar is as stupid as Transformers 2 and for those with a brain in their heads is twice as offensive. I'm not easily offended; I even think the White Guy Becomes An Indian thing can be done well on rare occasions—Howard Waldrop's Them Bones comes to mind—but this movie was just awful. How awful? I left as soon as the credits started to roll, but even as I ran for the lobby I heard a snippet of lyrics from the end credits theme. Here's the first verse:
Walking through a dream, I see you
My light and darkness breathing hope of new life
Now I live through you and you through me, enchanted
I pray in my heart that this dream never ends
Now imagine your school days, and someone handing you these lyrics in the form of a note. And when you open up the note to read it, they start crying because they just love you so much and wanted to share their feelings for you through poetry. Wouldn't it be better if aliens just came down and killed us all? See, I knew you'd see what I mean.
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December 18th, 2009
December 17th, 2009
nihilistic_kid
 | 09:27 am - Killing in the Name of...Christmas!
You know, I thought the whole Facebook stunt to propel Rage Against The Machine's 1992 song "Killing in the Name Of" to the top of the UK's pop chart by Christmas was really lame. Then I heard the likely alternative:
One, it's a cover of a Hannah Montana song. Two, it's about hope and trying hard. Three, as my friend pointed out, it sounds like something they would sing on South Park except it isn't funny at all. Four OH MY GOD. Five, you know that in eighteen years or so this song is going to be dusted off by Internet nerds and they'll call it ElderRolling, and I'll be old then and I want to keep from having to hear this song in my mid-50s in my cyberjack implant.
So, to the peoples of the United Kingdom, HOW CAN I HELP YOU? HOW CAN I HELP YOU WITH THE UPHILL BATTLE! HOW CAN HELP YOU WITH THE CLIIIIIIIIIIIIIMB...oh God it's already starting! Quick, tell me what to do?!
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December 16th, 2009
December 15th, 2009
nihilistic_kid
| 10:38 pm - There have been a lot of dumb threads on the topic of short stories and $$ lately
...but this one is the donkey-ass dumbest, and that is despite the intervention of several intelligent and thoughtful participants.
Is it the holidays? Does Christmas lower IQ? Is it the "public option" being tossed into the shredder? Blood flow to the brain slows down in cold weather? What?
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docbrite
 | 04:19 pm - U.S. Out Of New Orleans?
I've just wasted the last hour notifying various file-sharing sites to remove illegally posted copies of my books. I'm not even going to say what I think about so-called fans who use these slimeball sites to steal work from writers, except this. I hate to give these sites any publicity at all, but I will say that other writers should check scribd.com and 4shared.com for stolen work.
A few days ago I tweeted the statement, "I think art about New Orleans, especially post-K, should be made by New Orleanians. #thereisaidit" I define New Orleanians as people living in the greater New Orleans area long-term as well as devoted exiles. I do NOT include jet-setters who own New Orleans homes that stand empty 90% of the time or those who left the city post-K and don't want to return.
But my Twitter statement still makes me antsy, because in general, I don't believe in using the word "should" around art at all. I've always been deeply suspicious of any statement beginning "Artists (writers, whatever) should..." that doesn't end "...do the best work they're capable of, full stop."
As well, I had made a hero's exception for Josh Neufeld, author of A.D.: After the Deluge, and a friend e-mailed to ask why. My friend wrote, "I bought that damned book because I thought he was a New Orleanian. Boy was I pissed when I got it and found out he was a New Yorker. I think it's a good book but if I had known he was a New Yorker living in New York I never would have bought it, to be quite honest. If he's giving profits from the book to the people who need it most, I'll feel ok about it, but I feel kind of like a duped schmuck as it is!"
I replied, "Neufeld = honorary New Orleanian because he did major, major rescue work down here after the levees failed, Like, lifesaving work. He has also put together a great A.D. website with tons of Katrina info & resources; http://www.smithmag.net/afterthedeluge/ . I couldn't find any indication that he had donated proceeds to us, but I'm kinda OK with that. I know how much it costs to research & make a book, and graphic novels sell even worse than regular books. Most likely there are no 'proceeds.' He also financed his own book tour, & I noticed that many of his signing events were also benefits for Common Ground & other local charities, so that's good."
But I realized that if I believe Josh Neufeld could get it right, there must be other non-New Orleanians out there who can get it right too. And for me, at least these days, that's what is most important in art about New Orleans: getting it right. Even before the storm, so much of it didn't. And if you haven't lived or spent major chunks of time here since the levees failed, you do not know what it was like those first couple of years. You can't research it. You can't imagine it from the footage you saw on TV. You might think you can, your heart might break for us and you might try to tell people why we still matter and if so I thank you, but you don't know the stenches, the tears, the daily assaults on the mind and spirit. You can never know these things if you weren't here. And you should be glad.
So I'm trying to at least modify my "should." It's hard to come up with another pithy line, though. Art about New Orleans, especially post-K, is less likely to suck and be offensive if made by New Orleanians? Art about New Orleans, especially post-K, has virtually no chance of getting it right if not made by New Orleanians? I don't know. Artists will, and should, make art about the things that grab them by the throat and won't let go. So if what happened to us after the federal levees failed does that to you, then by all means, go with it. At least your heart will be in the right place, and that will show even if you don't know the Ninth Ward from the Lower Ninth Ward. But if you decide -- as many already seem to have done -- that "Hey! Post-Katrina New Orleans would be a really cool, edgy place to set this!", then may God have mercy on your soul, because New Orleans will not.
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December 14th, 2009
docbrite
| 02:55 pm - Chris In Bibleland
Does anyone remember/can anyone track down the post I made here back in '05 or '06 about the (I thought) non-confrontational but brilliant way Chris handled the racist man who sold us a car in Bibleland during our exile? I wanted to show it to someone, but after looking through two months' worth of post-K posts, I can take no more.
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December 13th, 2009
docbrite
 | 01:30 am - Man Casserole
The recipe was friggin' awesome. I had two helpings after a week of no appetite. I revised it a bit and renamed it Man Casserole because it seems like a perfect thing for a lonely man to fix and eat up from ingredients he might have around, but it is great for all genders.
MAN CASSEROLE
Ingredients:
Pam
2-3 Yukon Gold or similar potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
6 strips of thick-cut bacon
3/4 cup chicken broth or water
Handful of sliced pickled jalapeno peppers, or to taste
1 cup grated sharp cheese
Preheat oven to 375. Spray 8" x 8" baking pan with Pam. Line with one layer of potatoes. Cut bacon slices in half crosswise and lay them over potatoes. Top bacon layer with another layer of potatoes. Scatter jalapenos over top, then pour liquid (chicken broth or water) over whole thing. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes. Then scatter about 1 cup of grated cheese (any hard, sharp kind will do, or even Pepper Jack in a pinch) over top and bake for 30 more minutes or until golden-brown and bubbly on top. Casserole is now ready to serve, but if you don't want to eat it yet, cover it with foil, turn off oven, and just leave it in there -- it will get even better. As long as you don't burn the cheese, I imagine it's pretty hard to overcook, though it will begin to decompose eventually.
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December 12th, 2009
docbrite
 | 06:30 pm - Go Away
I need privacy the way I need oxygen, books, or love. I look back on all the people I've severed from my life because in one way or another they violated my privacy, and I see a bunch of people who had warnings. I don't make any big secret of it. Approach with caution, courtesy, and respect, and I will afford you the same. Approach with entitlement, rudeness, or lack of welcome, and at best you will no longer exist to me; at worst you will meet my friend Big Steve. (Yeah, and I talk so tough and defend my privacy and my property and then I take to my bed in a three-day swoon. Big fucking man. Also, you ain't no nice guy.)
Obviously, none of this commentary is aimed at anyone here. That I know of.
I'm making a Desolation Casserole, my own invention:
1 layer thinly sliced potatoes
1 layer bacon strips, halved
1 more layer potatoes
Scatter of pickled jalapeno slices to taste
Bake at 375 for 45 minutes. Then scatter about 1 cup of grated cheese (any hard, sharp kind will do, or even Pepper Jack in a pinch) over top and bake for 15 more minutes. If cheese is golden-brown but potatoes don't seem soft enough, cover with foil and bake the crap out of it for a while longer. I can't vouch for this recipe because it isn't done yet, but as long as you don't burn the cheese, I imagine it's pretty hard to overcook.
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docbrite
| 05:14 pm - I'm A Twit
In case you haven't figured it out, I've been fighting off a bad depression for several weeks, and right now it pretty much has me where it wants me. I look at my neglected LJ and I feel sorry that I have so few words for the people who helped me, literally, through the failure of the federal levees and its aftermath. But words, even enough to make a blog entry, just feel so ... goddamn ... heavy right now. I'm still trying to struggle along with it, give you some content, make myself find something to say. But more often I find myself posting on Twitter, which people I respect have called inane, lazy, grunting. Maybe it is, maybe that's why I still have the energy for it. How much challenge can there be in 140 characters? Even I can handle that. If you miss me, and God knows I miss so many of you, come see me there:
http://twitter.com/docbrite
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docbrite
| 05:03 pm - I Am Dying to Bust A Cap on An Ass
I've spent the last few days (daze) chowing down on a big-ass plate of invasion of privacy sauced with chronic depression and garnished with screaming panic attacks. There were demands by resident crackheads/junkies/general parasites for money and food. When said demands were refused, there were intrusions onto my property and peepings through my windows. There were threats (by me) to shoot people if said intrusions and peepings were repeated. There was lack of backup by my partner. There were, perhaps most gallingly, accusations that I was "a good Christian lady." I think things have calmed down now, and if any perforated corpses happen to be found near my house, well, that's just life in the goddamn hood.
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nihilistic_kid
 | 11:22 am - Don't get out of the car!!
SF writer Peter Watts reports being beaten and pepper-sprayed at the US/Canada border, then being charged with assaulting an officer.
This incident, which looks like the usual nastiness of the state coupled with the casual entitlement of someone who encounters the state though he did nothing wrong and knows it ("Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle..."), brings to mind this motivational poster:
Legal defense links are here.
And yes, I know everyone in the world posted this already, but I wanted to use the poster.
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nihilistic_kid
| 04:04 pm - How Interesting: A Tiny Story
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the rumors of a Harlan Ellison story in Realms of Fantasy weren't just rumors. With Ellison, until you're finished reading the story, it's a rumor. "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" is an apposite title for the piece, in more ways than one. From what I was able to piece together from Ellison's awkward online guestbook, the story was originally supposed to be part of an anthology celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Twilight Zone. I'm a pretty big Zonehead and the book managed to fly entirely under my radar except for Ellison's pulling his story from it, so it was probably for the best.
I understand that Ellison also submitted "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" to The New Yorker, which rejected it. This led to some fanboy fuming on the board but Ellison wisely quieted them down.
Then I guess Lapine met Ellison's price and here we go. Other Change of Hobbit didn't have the magazine yet so last night after work I stopped at a Borders and, amazingly, the store was not only not boarded up and full of crack addicts smoking in the dark amid empty shelves (give it till January), it actually had the magazine!
I almost vomited when I read what appeared to be the first few lines of the story: "Across the endless vista of human experience the voiceless whispers of remarkable stories rustle on the wind, and too many of them escape our understanding because we do not know the many languages that fill the silence."
That gibbering nonsense couldn't be from Ellison. It just couldn't. And indeed, it wasn't. Realms seems to have developed the horrid habit of putting introductions to stories below the author bylines:
(Btw, if you're wondering if the reason you can't really see the byline or the illustration credit because of your monitor, the answer is no. In real life the bylines are nearly impossible to see. I had to shift the magazine around quite a bit to get a clear look at that awful choice of yellow.)
Most of the introductions in this issue are more like "Love can fell even the mightiest of us" and are thus more obviously introductory. Not this one though. What sort of crazy lunatic thought that breathless bit of glurge was a good thing to put atop this story? What sort of crazy lunatic could even commit such nonsense to paper or pixels in the first place? It's the 21st century! We have science now! Pills! Leather restraints! We can end such nightmares, friends, if we all pull together and support the reinstitutionalization of the literary droolcup set.
Once I finally started reading "How Interesting: A Tiny Man", it...wasn't bad. It was good. Not "call your friends" awesome or "Time to take Ellison out back and shoot him" awful. A minor work. "How Interesting: A Tiny Story," really. In it, a man develops a tiny man. People find it interesting. A TV appearance ruins everything. That common thematic enemy of Ellison, the masses (this time in the form of everyone's favorite whipping boy, irrational Christians) come down against the tiny man. "Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved" is found sufficiently clever to be stated twice within the ~2000 word story. (I hope this all isn't venting about honking Connie Willis's boob.) The physical facts of the story—the creation of the man, who exactly wants what with him, how he and his maker flee, aren't really important. The narrative voice is simplified Ellison—the scientist as naif and curmudgeon at once. Kanye West is namechecked for some reason, but in the same sentence as Black Sabbath. That sort of thing.
Most interestingly, "How Interesting: a Tiny Man" offers two endings, though they are horrifically laid out as two short grafs in a sea of white space on a lonesome page of their own. One ending is the sort that gets stories rejected, though it can also be read for laughs. The second ending is more fittingly Ellisonian but indeed actually needed the first ending to help it along. Neither would have been sufficient alone, though I suppose I wished there was some narrative (as opposed to just thematic) reason why two endings were offered.
Ellison's biographical note reads in part that he'd "rather be a vertical has-been than a young never-was." Mission accomplished, maybe, but "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" was the best story in this issue of Realms. Sometimes too short is better than too long.
ETA: You can read this story and the whole issue via PDF here:
http://www.fantasticbooks.wilderpublications.com/rof-feb-2010-web.pdf
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December 10th, 2009
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