The Eventual Gander: Doonesb-ehry

So, this post wsas going to be all about Doonesbury, a wonderful strip that for 40 years has striking down the powerful with vicious satire of advertising and performance art (oh the 80's!). It lampooned start-ups and conglomerates, Senators and Shorties. But one thing it's found in its old age (or perhaps that I've been able to appreciate in my newfound 23-ness) is an ability to make us really feel for characters as we also find humor in them. Cf. B.D, a character we've watched grow from a self-centered football star to a Vietnam soldier to a California Highway Patrolman to a College Football Coach to a Gulf War II amputee. Along the way he married a starlet, had a kid, hired a man named Zonker as a nanny, and gave up his fixation with wearing his helmet. Yeah. In the funnies. Perhaps the epitome of this is this strip. Touching, topical, recent, everything. Incorporates the history of the saga of families and friends while also being funny on the surface.

I was going to review it like that, until I saw this article on Martha Stewart and became totally apathetic to real art, craft, story, or people. Instead, I got focused on Ms. Stewart and her felonious ass. Apparently, she is known in the joint as M. Diddy. Also, she's a nice person, really. While she's filming her new soul-killing reality show The Apprentice spin-off, she's going to be nicer than trump. Quoth the matron:"
She says her version of "The Apprentice" will be different than Donald Trump's and that she doesn't want to be portrayed as mean and harsh. She says she would never use Trump's catchphrase, "You're fired."
"We're trying to come up with other ways to say it," she says. "For instance, if someone is from Idaho, I could say, 'You're back in Boise for apple-picking time.' ""

-D"Goin' Back to Cali^wBoise"an

The Eventual Gander: Of Comics, Web and Otherwise

I'm a computer scientist. What that means, roughly, is that I don't expect pretty pictures on these beasts of burden of post-modernity and relativism. Microprocessors can munge text with the best of 'em, but a single .gif or .jpg confuses them to the point where they would throw up their arms if they had arms. And thank god they don't.

Do you know about Linux? Pardon the digression, but if you're a resident of Earth, odds are onlya bout 1 in a billion that you're reading this, anyway. Some people say Linux is an Open Source Operating System (OSOS). Maybe it is, but you'll never be happy if you think of it like that. You'll spend all your days frustrated that your computer, the product of 50 years of innovation, can't even open up a stupid interweb game. Instead, Linux is a video game. I have beaten the level where you get firefox working, and I rescued the princess that allows me to look at pictures, but I'm stuck at the boss that is video.

Therefore, this Eventual Gander is focused on comics, that visual form of communication that's still exclusive to we humans. The thing that separates us from the machines is that we laugh at these while the computors[sic] just whir along. Unless you're talking about the New Yorker, in which case we all just whir along.

Strip number 1:
IndieTits. A comic strip titled off the seeming naughtiness that we at the Enfranchised have commented on before. Written as the moonlighting of Jeph, the author of Questionable Content and a man whose dialogue has all the shortness of Ron Jeremy (to wit: Jeph enjoys bludgeoning to death the kernel of a good joke more than Foster does a baby seal's testicles), the strip is visually identical to itself. There are 4 or 5 or 3 or who knows how many backdrops, over which he writes jokes that are obscure or silly. But man did he hit a homerun in this one. He gets to the core of what a comic is. Is there one bird, or two? Which one is telling the story? Beautiful use of post-modernism, man. Just effing brilliant. Especially considering that it was probably written 5 minutes before your deadline when you hadn't actually thought of a joke for the day.

That's what theories of academia are supposed to be used for: covering your ass.

Join us next time on the Enfranchised when I talk some more!

Prelude to a Prologue...And a Side-Order of Colored Greens

Rumors of my demise, and my originality, have been greatly exaggerated.

--I've been back stateside for a few days now, splitting my time between Northern New Jersey and Manhattan, and its safe to say I'm living the life of Riley. Gone are the uneventful afternoons in 800 year-old libraries, the langourous strolls through Christ Church Meadow, and the seemingly never-ending procession of pound-pints at the Oxford Union. Now is the summer of two-hour commutes, five dollar beers, resevoir dogs and slave-labor at an obscure think tank. Yessir, I've made my separate peace with Oxfordshire and am glad (in many ways, I mean it) to be home. Adieau Isis, Hola Hudson. Run down the Union Jack and run up the Stars and Stripes. Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, Wish they all could be California Girls.

You get the idea.

Anyhow, there's good news and bad news about my return for you blogophiles. The good news is I'm feeling particularly pensive, reflective, wistful even. The bad news is that my soulsucking New York job has sapped all my creative energy (I know, don't tell me, I've already missed a few opportunities for puns in this VERY POST). So all I can tell you is to be patient, and BE READY. I've got a couple of whoppers in the works. By means of cockteasery, I'll give you their titles:

"'Fear and Loathing' Without the 'Fear'"

and

"Twilight of the (American) Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with a Remote Control."

Stay tuned, kiddies.

-DRF

P.S. WORST. FREUDIAN SLIP. EVER.

I'm waiting at the deli after a long day at work and my kindly attendant (a young African-American man) asks me what I'd like.

I look him dead in the eyes and I order "A half-pound of rare roast beef and a pound of white America"

The BURN, sir. The BURN.

Missed Connections

No, not a Craiglist Personal, in this Enfranchised, we celebrate the repetitively ephemeral. Cf. Gatsby, p. 16 (in the only edition that matters: mine). "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." Think what you may of Daisy (and I know many of you do), she's a character. (In that last parenthesis, I was referring partly to my friend Michelle Michelle Miller[sic] who hates her for not trying to examine herself and partly to my co-blogger Foster who likes this book so much he named his pet lamb Effscott).

You can never truly miss the longest day, you can just have to wait for it again. Same thing with the bus, or any holiday, or the moment in a relationship when the love finally leaves it and it's over no matter how much more fighting or making up or protestations of love there may be left.

It is only mortality that may rob us of our privilege of reexperiencing the recurrent. I will most likely never see Halley's Comet. Luckily, I don't care to, either. I may get to our nations tri-centennial (I certainly hope I make it to at least the French-Indian War. For no particularly great reason...)

This year offers us many of these similarly roundly irreproducible celebrations. They include, but are not limited to:

• Guy Fawkes's Day. (1605) In England, a serious holiday celebrated with tea, more gunpowder than the man himself had, and effigies. In the US, a holiday counted down to by Anglophiles and Eccentrics. I count myself both.
  
• Einstein's annus mirabilis. 100 years ago, the funnily-haired Patent Clerk came up with the photoelectric effect, relativity, and probably some other stuff. Now, a century later, we have more confusing theoretical math and scary branches of physics with names such as Quantum Chromodynamics. Truly a great man.
  
• Johnson's Dictionary. If I ever made a Best Of list of lists of words in English in alphabetical order, this would make the top 5.
  

Make sure to celebrate them while you still can.

Adventures in Retail (or The Gods Must Be Crazy)

Well damnit, if they're not going to tax me heavily enough, I guess I'm just going to have to spend my surpluses. Surpli. Extra Money.

So, in a fine tradition inspired by my roommate's insistence that we TiVo VH1's Best Week Ever (a nostalgic look back at the past 7 days narrated by a series of half-wits whose job titles are all "comedian"), we bring you: A Tribute to Dan's weekend purchases.

• A new cellphone. Man I hated having room in my pockets. Or the ability to walk down a street and think about anything other than protecting my fragile (my precioussssss) telecommunication device. So, Treo 650 it is. Just in case any one was wondering, just for a second, if I was cool. This way, they'll just be able to stay clear of the ginormous hunk of PalmOS Powered Silicon and Plastic on my hip.
  
• A case for said cellphone that quickly devolved into a farce of social interaction. I walk into a Verizon Wireless store because Cingular's business plan is apparently to sell expensive electronics en masse while providing no way of protecting investment in our industry's future. They got Fry's and Radio Shack in on the plan, so I spent the better part of a day treating my primary method of Rest-of-the-World contact like a Faberge egg. I walk up to a salesperson, and, seeing the orange name of my phone, he worriedly asks if it's all right that the case for the phone (which fits perfectly) is all right because it has the Verizon logo on it. Now, I understand that some peopl are proud of the choices they make. If you're rolling a Bentley, well, heck, damn right you oughta be proud. Or if your sound system is powered by Kenwood, sure, a sticket is appropriate. Those reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code don't even realize they shouldn't be proud of having his name prominently displayed down the spine of their book (the only spine they have, incidentally). But who the heck tries to front (front? Is that the term? Oh these kids and their hip lingo. Just give me the good ol' Passive Periphrastic anyday over this "dis" and that "dat" (note: the Passive Periphrastic is a grammatical form in Latin and has not been widely used in English since there was English))? I mean, really, what person even likes his cell phone service enough to have brand loyalty?
  
• A clever shirt from Questionable Content, an indie webcomic that is not wholly unfunny. If only he learned pacing, and how not to kick a joke to death, he might be onto something.
  
• Shoes. Because I'm a girl. Man, you sorta wish that $47 (including tax + shipping) shoes lasted longer than 3 months.
  
• Toothpaste. And this is the one that gets my goat. Call me a lavish man, call me frivolous, but when it comes to toothpaste, I'm willing to splurge. Tell me the best, and I'll put it in my cart without a second thought. And yet, nobody does.
  

  Now, I understand that different brands may have different central tenets of design of compoyadda yadda blah blah blah. I even have mastered the gel/paste duality. But why is it that Colgate can't just tell me "hey, buy this tube." I'm willing to be a sucker. I'm willing to pay twice as much for toothpaste that's 10% better. But, work with me, you need to give me some indication. What's more important: Cavity Protection or Tartar Protection? Neither sounds like something I really desire to protect. For a moment I was hoping that "Total" would signify an ultimate. But while its standard features seemed alluring, one box promised extra blurghle crompotion while a second sang sweetly in my ear that it could give me lower fluhurking fimining.
  

Thus my weekend. Another two days spent in the malls, strip malls, bars, and internet. My money flies away, and in return I get the objects that modern society largely agrees is sucking and stripping away our humanity.

But now with 35% more gremanahine.

Eventual Gander: Batman Begins

Batman is what every Republican aspires to be. Born into wealth, but he earned it himself. His arsenal of expensive toys and gadgets (serviced by his Manservant, Alfred) is only effective when coupled with his merit. He drives an SUV, and he actually needs it! Bruce Wayne is fabulously wealth *and* helps the public, better than if his income were turned into taxes to support the corrupt government of Gotham.

And that's not to say the new movie Batman Begins is bad. Or good. It is good, excellent, even. It manages to introduce these issues of helping society without passing judgment on any but the most extreme alternatives. Perhaps this is the point of supervillains: never do Democrats and Republicans seem most aligned than when being killed in mass numbers by a poison gas.

Christian Bale's acting is as troubled as it needs to be, but not anguished to the point of melodrama. He holds himself as, during different points in the movie, a bon vivante, a dorky Princeton flunk-out, a Man-in-Black, a ninja (!!!), and lover. Michael Caine's Alfred is alternately helpful, challenging, witty, and inspiring. Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson surprised me by being in this movie. Katie Holmes, for a moment, made me not want to smack her for being engaged to Tom Cruise and this close to choosing Scientology.

There are a few minutes of comic book hokieness. Characters look at each other with horrified looks and slowly piece together the conundrum they're in and that we've recognized they're in for the past 5 minutes. The plot is summarized, the bad guys are pawns of badder guys. But overall, this is a superhero of the Oughts, as opposed to the 80's. Christopher Reeves's Superman was challenged by kryptonite and beams. Tobey Maguire's Spiderman, the first in this new era, was appropriately emo. We get the feeling that if his girlfriend (Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane) died, he would be more hurt not by her loss, but having been responsible for her loss. Pixar's The Incredibles grappled with their own humanity even as they were animated. Batman, we learn in this movie for the first time on the big screen (after 4 predecessors that ranged from watchable to featuring George Clooney's nipples), is the product of immense loss.

The directing is peccable, but quite good. My colleague, Manohla Dargis, has criticized the action shots for not being followable enough. But this is the point. The Bourne Identity did a great job of creating fight scenes where we felt like we understood what was going through Jason Bourne's head as he created convoluted fights that knocked down soldiers. He was a machine. Batman is a man. He uses fear, he uses darkness. If we were to see what he was doing in full, we would not be experiencing in even the slightest the emotional impact of his fighting.

But the focus of this movie is the script. It uses standard tricks of the summer movie. Laughs come when you expect them, for the most part. But it adds something more. Scenes that follow idioms also have deeper meanings. The first occurrence of a repeated phrase is not the most appropriate, but the least. It is later, as our knowledge of the world expands, so do our understandings of its utterances. And, in a surprisingly profound finale, Batman Begins teaches us that sometimes we have to rip down the creations of our Fathers to maintain their legacies.

(this review is in a series of reviews that consider not only the art in question, but previous thoughts about it. See also reviews of Tom Wolfe's new novel or The Finer Point of Sausage Dogs, )

Reminders of Times Past

Hold bacon before a dog and he would compose a sonnet to have a chance at the strip of pig flesh. The word "scholarship" has roughly the same effect on high schoolers. So when Duck brand duct tape offered $5000 to the couple with the best duct tape outfit to prom. This relatively modest sum (when placed against tuition), combined with an excuse to ditch social and stylistic norms, prompted hundreds to purchase what must be enough duct tape to permanently affix the moon to the earth several times over. The results can be seen here, but they strike a deep chord within me.

Memories of high school flood back to me. Social awkwardness, emo, Catcher in the Rye, all that. But the largest thing I'm taught by these pictures is: high school students are, as a general rule, either clumsy, ugly, or both.

-D"my prom date was a model"an

The Passing of an American Flash in the Pan

We Enfranchised have recently mourned the passing of a few of our own. After so many losses and so much emotional turmoil, we still found it in our hearts to ask the one questions on everyone's mind when one heard the news that Destiny's Child was breaking up: "They were still together?"

These ladies had a way of winning our hearts for the duration of the release of a single, album, or movie tie-in as was deemed appropriate and profitable by their handlers and sponsors. They teased us with titles that implied sequels never forthcoming. My peers felt this unanswered promise and dealt with the betrayal by adjusting their lexicon to incorporate the fact. Cf. my friend Tina Christakos, who insists on paying for herself by proclaiming "I'm an Independent Woman (Part 1)". What other group has started a phrase by turning their writer's block into a fantasy for a generation? Certainly no others that had lyrics about the transparency of fabric in the face of male arousal ("The club is full of ballas and their pockets full grown").

Just as Marc Antony found difficulty in trying to find bad things to say about Caesar, I fear that as I come to praise Destiny's Child, I can only bury them. So, I will end with my fondest memory that includes them: A sketch, on MadTV, of Bill Clinton hosting the oscars and instantly devolving into the sketchy stand-up meets mc that Chris Rock dreams of being. He reproaches Madonna vaguely British overhaul by reminding the audience that her coochie has had "more members all up in it than Destiny's Child."

Thanks for 2 months of memories (over the course of 6 years).

What Happens...

In Vegas Stays in Vegas.

The point being, I'm going to be in Vegas, so I definitely don't have time to point out that everyone who made fun of Dubya for being stupid was casting stones at glass houses. I'm not saying I like Bush, or that I don't dislike him, but merely that someone's Yale GPA is an extremely poor indicator of their merit.

-Dan

Star Wars, Episode Crap: when Luke met Powder

I have an odd habit of not seeing movies everyone else sees. Among the gaps in my pop culture memory are: The Lord of the Rings series, any of the Harry Potterses, Spaceballs, Dirty Dancing, non-pornographic Julia Roberts Films, and Star Wars Episode II (although I have seen Tron several times). The reason I never saw Star Wars Episode II is because I saw Star Wars Episode I, and Episode I sucked and swallowed. It was right down there with my other basement dwellers: Magnolia, I Heart Huckabees, Go, The Land Before Time II,V-VII, and of course, Powder.

(editor's note: Those who know me have been made aware of my rabid anti-Powder agenda for quite some time, but for those who haven't been blessed with my ravings, Powder is about an albino who has electro-magnetic powers. At some point you see his ass, and at the end he runs into a field and storm clouds take him away. I kid you not. This is the storyline. Check here if you don't believe me).

Granted, I'm not much of a Star Wars fan anyway. I remember that Darth Vader was Luke's dad, Princess Leia his girlfriend, and Harrison Ford his bitch, and that's pretty much it. But I went to see Episode I with my Star Wars enthusiast friends and hated it. Mostly this was because I had my first encounter with The Great Satan--Jaarjar Binx--plus I had waaaay too many Sour Patch kids and they made my tongue hurt for days. So when Episode II came out I passed, and when Episode III was released I passed gas, then passed on the movie (then passed gas again, out of spite).

So as you can see, I'm in no position to offer any sort of critique or analysis of George Lucas' latest bamboozlement of the Sith-fearing American public. You'll have to read Foster's insightful and hilarious post for that. What I offer, instead, is a voyage into the unknown--a fantastic, magical journey into the world of "What If?": what if two of the crappiest movies ever made combines forces to make a third, crappy movie. Ladels and jellyspoons, I give to you, a sneak peak at an exclusive Leviathan production, When Luke Met Powder:

Powder: Hi, I'm Powder.
Luke: Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with you?
P: What?
L: What? WHAT?! Why the hell are you so pale?
P: Oh, that. I'm an albino. I have no pigment in my skin.
L: It looks like you fell into a vat of flour or something.
P: No, not Flour, Powder.
L: Fucking A, are you deaf too? I said it looks like you fell into a vat of flour. Wow, deaf, pale, and stupid. Move over Hellen Keller, we have a new winner!
P: I like your sword.
L: It's not a sword, it's a light saber, dumbass. I got it for my birthday.
P: Cool, can I try it?
L: And get your greasy, pale hands all over it? Think again, cracker.
(enter George Lucas) George Lucas: Hi, I'm George Lucas. What are your names?
L: I'm Luke. (gesturing to Powder) This is my giant pet hampster, Whitey.
P: I'm powder. I'm an albino.
G: Wow, an albino! I should make a movie about you!
P: You make movies?
G: I sure do, Luke here was in three of mine.
L: ...and he's been just brimming with ideas since then.
G: Well I have an idea now.
L: What, the albino thing?
G: Yeah, isn't it great?
L: Who the hell is gonna pay to see a movie about some sun-tan-reject?
G: Hmm, you're right. Nobody would possibly pay money to see that.
L: I'd pay money not to see it.
P: Guys, I'm right here.
L: Are you still here? Why don't you go play hide-and-seek in the snow over there.
P: Oooh! Can I seek?
L: Sure, go take a look now. There's a polar bear blinking hiding somewhere in that snowdrift.
P: You guys are my best friends.
(scene)



(Same post, different blog)

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, Facebooking back ceaselessly into the past..."

Last nite I was doing very little, sitting around College in a friend's room to be exact, when the conversation turned somehow to early crushes. Being a recovering Romantic, and still not quite impervious to the occasional bout of sentimentality, I got to thinking of Becky C. I told the aforementioned friend that she had been my first real crush - in those halcyon days between puberty and adolescence when none of us knew what the hell was going on. She was a dark-haired, clever girl of ten with a mouth full of surgical steel when I met her in Dr. Sanek's 5th grade logic class (you heard all that right).

Becky C. - I hadn't thought about her in years. Becky C. who kinda-sorta had the beginnings of a body; Becky C. who got better grades than me in gym; Becky C. who rode the short bus with me all the way home; Becky C. who no doubt didn't even remember me; Becky C. who set the standard for heartbreak for five-plus years. Oh she liked me well enough, but her heart was somewhere else; Josh was his name I think. And, but for a few false starts, I never stood a chance. Regardless, I moved away half way through that year; another school, another town, another state. But it's safe to say that Becky C. from Packanack Lake, New Jersey followed me all the way to Winter Haven, Florida, where she lived for a while under-developed subconscious, until she faded and was replaced by a dozen other silly, ultimately unrequited infatuations.

But my friend had got me thinking.

'Dan', he said. 'You know what you should do?'

'What's that?' I said.

'Facebook her.'

Facebook her. Facebook her. What a thing to say. What an idea. There was an illustrated catalogue of my youth, a virtual grade school reunion, a searchable database of my fucking past just a point and a click away. With just a tinge of (pathetic as it is) nervousness and excitement, I searched for her in the high school I figured she went to; nothing. I searched for her in the high school I didn't figure she went to; no dice. I tried a different spelling of her name, first in one, then in the other.

A single hit popped up, and in the split second it took the page to load I wondered what had happened to her in those years between 10 and 20 when we sweat and bleed out the last of our awkwadness. Then I saw the photo, of a black-haired clever girl of 21 who went to an East Coast Ivy.

Becky C.

"She's fucking hot!" quoth my friend.

"She is fucking hot." I said.

I don't know what I thought, really. Vindicated? That was stupid, wasn't it? Surprised, no doubt. But something else, like someone had punched me in the stomach. Not, as they say, "like I had seen a ghost"; more like I had seen a character I had written in a story, a picture I had drawn, an imaginary friend.

I had the Oracle at Facebook bring up the entire class of 2002 from my would-be high school.

And there was Holly. They told us we should get married in kindergarten, didn't they Holly? Didn't they tell us the two fat kids should get married?

And there was Tyler. Tyler you never quite played the same games as us, did you?

And there was Mike. Mike, we were best friends in third and fourth grade, but do you remember how we fought that day at recess, kicking and punching, hating each other, and how we cried after?

But there also was Holly at a state school, bleach-blonde and bare-belly. You lost so much weight Holly - I'm happy for you.

And there was Tyler at private school, telling me with his furrowed brow and million-mile gaze that he still doesn't quite play the same games we do.

And there was Mike at Rutgers, shirtless, backwards Scarlet Knights cap, taking a long pull off what looked to be a bottle of Southern Comfort.

It was...peculiar. But its not quite right to say, as people often do, that I expected them never to change. The idea of change hardly entered the equation - they were simply my friends - that is, in an important sense, they belonged to me. That they might change was inconceivable, because for me- and perhaps this is morbid - none of them survived my moving away except as memories.

In a cleaner, better world, maybe that's how it would always be. Forever separated by the contingencies of (in my case) a mother's paycheck, too silent and too distant for too long to seriously consider re-establishing contact, and buried from memory by the layers of intervening years - homerooms, fights, parties, handjobs, cafeteria tables, car accidents, whiffle ball games, not to mention diets and million-mile gazes and bottles of Southern Comfort. Maybe that's how it should be. That way I might have kept on remembering to forget Mike and Holly and Tyler and Becky C, instead of staring at an LCD screen, forgetting to remember them.

An Oxford acquaintance once remarked [on a Facebook wall, no less] that the English students, just like the Americans, would "become bored with Facebook in 5....4....3....2...."

But it's already too late, isn't it? You can't click "Home" again.

The Man Who Sold the World (Or Star Wars Episode III: The Empire Strikes Out)

In the weeks now since Star Wars Episode III was released, the invectives leveled against its progenitor, George Lucas, have reached proportions more epic than anything that’s come out of the brain trust at Skywalker Ranch. The British daily The Guardian called Lucas less a director and more a “chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option,” whose corporate avatar, Industrial Light and Magic, contains “no magic, little light [and] an awful lot of heavy industry.” An ‘alt’ American paper, The Observer, suggested assessing films of negative aesthetic merit in terms of “Lucases” - as in, ‘Dude, Where’s my Car? got three Lucases in the Chicago Tribune’. The Salon review, marked by its usual sass, was entitled “Same old Sith” and the film summarized as the work of “an occasionally clever but mostly simple-minded auteur-wannabe”. But perhaps it was the dreaded New Yorker (which, it should be noted in fairness, is responsible for more conversions to the Dark Side than Palpatine ever was) who went furthest in criticism qua witticism. Anthony Lane calls the Bard of Endor a “rootless soul” with “a near fascistic rage for order” who has created:

“an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.”

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that most critics with a failed-novel on their shoulders and a circulation of over 10,000 are prone to the occasional hyperbolic judgment. But rarely is such lavish and luxuriant venom heaped upon a film that makes no pretensions to Oscar-worthiness. Surely, this literary-lashing, this critical-cornholing, can’t be warranted, not by Our Man George. Can it?

The short answer, children, is yes. Yes it can.

Star Wars Episode III sucked. It sucked essentially - sucked at the root of its very being, and sucked by and large because of an obscenely wealthy, beard-and-pompadour-sporting pestilence known as George Locust - er - Lucas. Lucas, then, is worthy of revile. Still, I won’t offer much of a critique of the film itself - that has been done, with all the subtlety and restraint of a blowjob from a vacuum cleaner. Besides, I actually hold certain of its elements beyond reproach; protected, as it were, from a death of suckitude stretched indefinitely in space and time at the event-horizon of suckiness that is this Lucasian suckfest of a Black-Hole-suck-suck.

Yoda, for one. Yoda can do no wrong for me, not since he watched Luke’s X-wing lift-off from Degoba, squinting sagely and replying to Obi-Wan’s portentous claim that “that boy is our only hope” with “No, there is another.” Anthony Lane is so perturbed by our little-green-friend’s cadence that he begs us to “break [him] a fucking give”. True, Yoda’s inversions may be contrived and irrelevant, but they are fucking YODA’s inversions. Besides, Lane’s review shares column space with New Yorker cartoons. He should know all about contrived and irrelevant.

Two. Natalie Portman. The poor girl is as beautiful as she is useless in this role. I mean, we know she can act. Just look at her wonderful performance as the Madonna-Whore in Closer; and her in some ways even more impressive turn as the Atlas to Zack Braff’s globular ego in Garden State. The problem is that Herr Lucas writes romance like he would a car stereo installation manual, and he has forcefully ejaculated such unspeakable tripe past the lips of Amidala that - could I prove paternity - I would bring him up on charges of rape.

Needless to say, most if not everything else in the movie sucks. Or if it doesn’t itself suck, it is so bathed in Lucas’s putridity that one can’t stand in its presence for long before one’s stomach turns and one’s eyes water.

Still, Lucas’s real crime has nothing to do with the film itself, but rather its audience. I saw Revenge of the Sith a week after opening, at a 10PM showing in Oxford (a highly disreputable time to see a movie in England) and the house was packed. A line had formed outside the small theatre 45 minutes before the 45 minutes of commercials before the 45 minutes of trailers before the movie. When John Williams’ anthem and STAR WARS finally leapt to screen, a great applause went up: the sound of an anxious hope that an under-the-desk hand job - begun in 1977 in the spirit of innocence and exploration and gas shortage - was finally to reach its climax after seven-odd years of cinematic blue-balls. When it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t to be, we ragtag band of geeks, dorks and dungeon-masters turned to the one weapon losers have wielded since time immemorial in the face of romantic (Romantic?) jilting: self-important, sneering mockery.

In short, we laughed. And we laughed not just at 3PO’s obliviousness or R2’s irascibility, not just at Palpatine’s coiffure or Mace Windu’s purple light saber; nor even did we draw the line at snickering over Hayden Christensen’s bitchy rejoinder to Ewan MacGregor’s warning of the Sith lords’ evil (“Not from my point of view! From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”). No, friends, I am sad to say that we laughed at the Man in Black himself. When Vader, freshly be-suited and strapped into a Kafkaesque device of wrought steel, is deceived by the Emperor into believing that he has killed the woman he loves, he tears free of his restraints, shakes two black-gloved fists in the air and vociferates the kind of “NOOOOOOOOOO!” that can only issue from the darker regions of James Earl Jones’ soul.

And we chortled with all the righteous irony of Janine Garafalo at a straight bar. We laughed at Darth-motherfucking-Vader. And why? Because some dude in this dumb ass movie was totally ripping off Star Wars, and didn’t he realize how fucking kitsch that was?

In the short time it took Luke and Lea to be born, something distinctively American died. That bright-eyed, naïve earnestness; that seriousness about kidding ourselves; that starving for a mythos which was as fun and facile as it was sacred and indispensable. In a word, that unselfconsciousness. That - can I even say it without you cringing in this age of I Love the 80s and Best Week Ever?…..that innocence.

Somewhere in the vast conceptual gulf between the Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars became what Jean Baudrillard (known in some circles simply as ‘French Theorist #163’) calls a simulacrum - a cultural copy of a copy whose original has long since gone the way of the sitcom. Worse yet, it became a simulacrum of itself. A kind of hyper-movie (or hyper-franchise) whose logic and aesthetics we had already chewed up, spoofed, and spit out into the dust bin of irony-for-its-own-sake. In short, even if the prequels had sucked half as much as they actually did, they were destined to be subjected to the bored and disaffected nihilism of an X-generation of maladroit malcontents who wear bowling shirts with other people’s names on them. In the greatest cultural perversion in recent history, Star Wars has become Space Balls. And Space Balls - if you ask the average video store clerk worth his salt in vapid cynicism - has become Citizen Cane.

None of this, of course, is to exonerate Herr Lucas, whose Leviathan ILM was practically at the helm of Hollywood’s perfection of the vacuous summer blockbuster. But if you ask me, his soul is cleaner than yours or mine. After all, he’s got your ten bucks, and he carries it with a perfectly straight face all the way to the bank. You and I, on the other hand, are left in this Recycled Land of Thin-Candy-Shelled Men, wondering why it is we can’t help but smirk every time we hear the name “Grand Moff Tarkin”.

Pissing In The Wind: Use the Pun!

Star Wars. Episode III. What do you think?

-D"brevity is the soul of restraining one's feelings and remaining anonymous"an

What a Racket

Quoth the Comedy Central: "Watch never-before-scene features from the Chapelle's Show Season 2 DVD before they're released!" Well, considering you're the network that airs the show, it seems like that would include EVERY SINGLE EPISODE.

It's always nifty when you can impress people by not showing them something. E.g., imagine the conversation at comedy central:

"Wow, that sketch sucks. I mean, I know every thing Dave Chapelle thinks about is some racial commentary, but the getting-in-the-mind-of-a-member-of-some-obscure-Andean-Sheep-Herder-tribe is so overdone."

"OK, fine it's cut."

"Wait, no, let's just put it off for a few months, to have some morsel to throw at his screaming fans."

So, in summation, fuck you Comedy Central; Dave, good luck getting your mind off the bitches that be drivin' you so crazy.

Silver, Part 3

Continued from part 1 and part 2:

Fact one: Humans are the only mammals that exude no experimentally verifiable sex pheremones. Fact two: there exists no woodland species whose male is willing to continue playing video games in the presence of a female in estrus. Though no link has been satisfactorily demonstrated in a peer-reviewed journal, and though full fault cannot be ascribed to Brian as it was still within his refractory period from their last mutual satisfaction, these two facts are clearly related. This typical Saturday night of the still-young relationship found Brian and Tony on the couch poking frantically at their controllers while Cindy flopped on the loveseat in her sweats. In a subconscious nod to the history of handling sexually aroused and arousing women by placing them in a societies composed exclusively of other women and castrati, Brian had tuned their second TV to a showing of her favorite musical, Aladdin.

The second television of their household was a relic from an ex-roommate's ex-roommate, a 60 cm job allegedly from France but of questionable enough workmanship that ex-Soviet Republic lineage was not out of the question. Most households would have junked in a second (several, in fact, already had). But Brian and Tony kept it not for its color, not for its vertical hold, certainly not for its necessitating an obscure electrical converter, and not for what its measurements were, but for what its measurements were given in. This Cold War relic was the centerpiece of their living room simply because it was measured in System Internationale Units.

Brian and Tony's house had originally been two marginally historic whose combination, so went the thoughts of one urban developer, would open up one of the lots for a 24-hour gas station/mini-mart. It was only when the houses had been uprooted and resituated that it was realized that one house was built to Imperial specifications and the other to Metric proportions. What this meant was that while the windows, doors and ceilings were of similar height, eventually the rounding error caught up and the home assumed a leitmotif of "not quite right". The architect behind this contraption of a living space came out of his drunken stupor long enough to reveal the move was a minimalistic retelling of a dialogue between prescriptivists that mimicked the something something of who cares. The art was promptly entered into the state's register of historic places and permanently saved from the demolition that passers-by perpetually wished upon it. The upside for a video store clerk and roommate of similarly moderate
ambition was that it was rent-controlled not by fickle legislators but by humanity's innate desire for consistency in aesthetics.

Many a weaker pair of decorators would have attempted to hide the disparity that comes with having a footed kitchen/dining room but a metered living room. This is roughly as intelligent as attempting to draw attention away from a hunchback with vertical stripes. Instead, Brian and Tony highlighted it. Objects were only allowed on the side of the divide where they belonged according to their primary unit of measurement. So while all their comfortable seating surfaces (couch, loveseat, a smattering of easy chairs) were on the upper, metric half of their common space, Brian and Tony, being true to their vision, kept the 30", flat screen beaut of a television that was their pride and joy just over the border of the seven-eights of an inch minus 2 centimeters (each half had been meticulously constructed and they spent one night calculating the difference) dip in the floor.

"Look, you're not going to be able to make up this deficit," said Tony.

"I've come back from worse situations."

"What? When I was drunk? As long as I'm sober, this kicking of your ass will continue. And I think we both know it."

"*WE* don't know anything. We have to wait and see it--"

"Brian, honey, are Jasmine's tits nicer than mine?" Cindy broke into the conversation.

"She's a cartoon."

"I'm not going to get mad, I promise. You can tell me what you honestly think."

"I honestly think she's a cartoon."

"You're no help. Tony?"

Tony glanced over at the Sonyski. "I'd say maybe. But I think that's just because her wardrobe is very to her advantage."

"Guys, she's a cartoon. She doesn't have tits. They're lines of ink."

Cindy weighed her bosom in her hands. "Do they bounce more naturally?"

"They can't! By definition, whatever your breasts do are natural as it can be."

"What would you say she is, Tony, D-cup?"

"Oh, at least."

"But back in those days they didn't have push-up bras. How much could they really amplify her cleavage? Maybe they're just really buoyant, like, double-Es."

Brian couldn't stand the horrible combination of inanity and insanity. "Back in those days? You mean 1994? Or are you implying that Disney, the commodifier of all that was holy, drew period costumes? Considering that half the things that came out of Robin Williams's mouth in that movie were anachronistic at best, I'm pretty sure historical fidelity was not one of their primary goals."

Tony and Cindy ignored him. She continued, "Man, this is the hardest part for girls, when we're comparing. Trying to guess how much of that is real and how much is underwire. I wish I could just," she motioned, "see them, and really know."

"There are websites," Tony said, faster than he probably should have. The conversation faded into laughter, embarrassment, and eventually embarrassed laughter.

Cindy got up from her reclined position and wandered over to behind her boyfriend. "You're so focused on your race car or horse cow or whatever that is, I feel like you're not paying attention to me."

He continue jabbing and lunging at the plastic in his hand, leaning it in the direction he was already pushing, in the shared unconscious hope of every man who was a teenager since the 80's that the game console has some hitherto undisclosed way of sensing and responding to ferocity of motion and purity of intent. "Probably true."

"You're impossible!"

"No, what's impossible is making this... jump... right... here. Oh, and I made it. How you like that, Tony? Don’t call it a comeback, I was never out of it."

She cozied up closer behind him. "You sure you wouldn't rather... play another sort of game. I know how we could involve electronics." While she said this, his head was nestled between her Golden Globe-winning golden globes.

He was affected by the temptation, as his race car or horse cow or whatever crashed and ignited into a heap of polygons ablaze. But he would not succumb to it and turned to face Tony. "'Nother game?"

"Why do I put up with you?"

"Because I don't respond to rhetorical questions?"

Cindy had little to say to that, and went into their kitchen. She looked through the cupboards, the refrigerator, and the freezer before finding what she wanted. "Anybody else want ice cream? With whip cream? Maybe some chocolate sauce?"

Tony spoke up first. "This is really cool, having a roommate who dates a movie star."

"What do you mean?"

"I learn new stuff every day. Apparently, in some cases, the camera doesn't need to add ten pounds!"

"Brian, are you going to let him talk to me like that?"

"Tony."

"Sorry. 4.5 kilograms."

Cindy playfully tossed a stuffed animal Brian and Tony had distributed around the kitchen the morning after a drunken friend had found the only throwable object in the kitchen to be a tea pot and in their drunken frame of reference thought that with the correct lobbing motion such a flight could be considered playful, resulting in a broken window and a missed tea time. She situated herself and her Haagen Dasz between the them on the couch. "Hey, Brian, can we talk?"

He didn't take his eyes of the screen. "Is this like a breaking-up talk?"

"No, no, nothing like that."

"Is it more important that, say, what we're doing for dinner tonight?"

"What is this, twenty questions? Yes, it's larger than a bread box."

"OK, based on my priorities, and the knowledge that it's less important than breaking up and more important than what we're doing for dinner, it's not important enough to end this game early, but important enough to not start another one."

"So I have to wait till the end of this game?"

"I don't think you know it well enough to help me win."

She sat for a moment, and the only sounds in the apartment were of clanking metal and battling animal-hybrids over a soundtrack of futuristic apocalyptic rock. While the boys jousted virtually, she mulled her thoughts and replayed in her mind the conversation. She contented herself to watch Aladdin (which was her favorite musical) for the next few minutes. But, really, how did they stay so pert? She asked, quite simply, "Would you enjoy it if I wore a bra while we made love."

Both of the race cows blew up at the bottom of ravines simultaneously as Brian and Tony looked at her.

"Oh, good, we can talk now. What are you doing three weeks from Sunday?"

"Umm, I think I have plans with Tony."

Tony tried to help his roommate. "Dude, that's the night of the Oscars."

Brian didn't get the message. "See, we do have plans. And I can't just bail on him."

"You can just bail on me. You must. I'd sell you to go the Oscars. Unless we were in prison. Then I'd sell you for a carton of smokes."

"Hey."

"Sorry, 20 decacigarettes."

"So, Brian," she paused, biting her lower lip, and as Brian looked at her he damned Ansel Adams for applying his photographic talent to the pale beauty of nature when faces like this existed, "will you be my date to the Academy Awards?"

My English Legacy

I recently got back my last paper as an undergrad English Major. I got a 97. This is also my best grade in an English class. And it is now I realize what must have convinced everyone else that English is an easy major: it is.

You just have to find your Hobby Horse. Some people preach "semiotics", others "epistemology", and me? My phrase is "What's at stake for the author?" The one thing these three intellectual bents have in common? I have no idea what they mean.

But they make professors swoon. At the top of the page was, scrawled in his handwriting, such raves as "one of the highlights of my quarter thus far" and "it leaves me rather speechless." And then, further down the page, he had highlighted a section. The sentence when I whip out the big gun, "constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author."

The paper follows,
-D"almost enough to make me go back to grad school"an

P.S. It's about Tristram Shandy, a good novel about Tristram Shandy.

-----------------------------------------------
I wrote this at 5:16, May 4th, 2005.
So far we've seen at least two instances of Sterne discussing the actual time of his writing: I.vxiii (page 24) "this very day, in which I am now writing this book [] -- which is March 9, 1759" and IV.xvii (page 230) "It is not half an hour ago, when [..] I threw a fair sheet [...] slap into the fire[.]" Now what I wonder is, are these statements true?

Our editor believes him (in the notes to Vol. I on page 540 he writes "dates that seem to correspond to the dates Sterne writes"). And why not? What is there at stake? Why would an author have any reason to lie about when they wrote something? It's a nice gimmick to connect with readers, and surely nothing should get in the way of that honest and direct bond that Sterne is creati--

But this is not the kind of writer Sterne is. He has already created the chronology of the telling, the chronology the characters live in, and the chronology of the reading. What would keep him from playing with the chronology of the writing?

Absolutely nothing. That's why I view all references to the act of writing as being as fictional as Dr. Slop's caricature or Trim's babbling. Instead, the dates are puzzles. What dates would I pick to insert into my own writing? March 20th. September 3rd. June 28th. Why? Well, that's for Bentley Biographers of the future to figure out. But if most of writing is a conversation with the reader, than this seems like a place where Sterne could be embedding a conversation with a specific reader.

The astute reader will point out that of course the narrative of writing is a fictional one: the narrator is not Sterne but Tristram. Maybe the converse is true, then, that Sterne is turning the seemingly fictional to the real. But even this would be a measured dose of reality. It is not opening a door, it is setting outside empty milk bottles to be picked up.

The key of all these theories is that Sterne remains in control. This book was written. We can be reasonably certain that he wrote later volumes after earlier ones (especially as Volume III opens with epigraphs in response to criticisms of the first two). More than that we can not necessarily say. And that's great. It makes us conscious of what we would assume in any other book. It's like Andy Warhol or Andy Kaufman. We have to constantly reevaluate what is at stake for the author. And is anything truly at stake if they tell an unknowable lie?

Sterne is probably safe from any attacks on him or his writing. Or, wherever he is, he won't be any the worse for whatever we or biographers prove about him or his writing. Even were he alive, the worst that could really result from someone ascertaining the truth or falsity would be more press, which could only result in more sales and royalties.

Sterne often plays with the physicality of the object of the writing. Here is one manner in which he plays with the physicality of the process. And this is what is so rich about this novel. Sterne just had to look over at the calendar or remember what he just did, jot it down, and he'll set me off for an hour thinking about nothing. But maybe, just maybe, he stole the idea of writing on March 9th from someone else, and I am thinking about something. Something real.

I'd just never be able to know.

Technology's Unkept Promise (one of them)

There was a simpler time. A time when you could say as much as you had to say to the person you have to say things to. Well, at least until the dinosaur ate you.

But as hunting/gathering became all the rage, more time was spent apart. No longer was she by your side as you felled and butchered the mastodon. She was back searching for rutebagas and tending to the young'uns.

Enter the alphabet. You can leave a note for your love on the wall of your cave. You go out to slay the migratory beasts, and when she wakes up she gets to read your your note of love, written in the blood of a sabertooth tiger. As long as you can fit your declaration of love in the first twenty feet of your stone abode where the light can reach.

A long time passed. And then, paper. You could leave reams of correspondence to your beloved. Except for that damn candle that would burn out before you had written out all you meant to tell her.

Ah, oil lamps. Refillable (as long as there are sperm whales). But now the rage is the telegraph. Send your message by post and it will not arrive until your debutante is a fiancee. But those telegraphs are so expensive--

Now the Telephone! Then the Singing telegram! Marvel before the Dancing bear-a-gram! Every mode of communication that has supplanted another has this same limitation: you can't write as long as you find yourself wanting to. Just when long-distance telephone companies priced themselves into oblivion, it was all the rage to have the mobility of a cell phone. Which one of us has not found themselves revealing the deepest darkest secrets of their soul to a "battery empty" message flashing on the screen? At least wired phones have the decency to respond to your most tightly-held thoughts ("I killed a man" or "I bought a Spice Girls album", the stuff you could only admit to a lover with a heart not fitted to later blackmail) with the reaffirming constancy of a dial tone.

Why can't inventors focus on turning an old technology reliable, instead of making new ones that make our art and our expressions end before--

Let it Snow, Let it Snow

Leave the shower running, throw open the faucets. Precipitate as it may, I will not be stopped.

No, I'm not a postal worker (though I am a Postal Service fan). I blush at the thought of going out in the rain and I'm stopped dead in my tracks by torrential downpours. But even try as he might, it took Our Father Above forty days and forty nights to flood the Earth to the tippy tops of mountains.

And, today, there are only 38 days left until I receive my diplomae. So do what you will, there will still be an Earth when I go to granulate, no matter what precipitation may come.

Even if it is the first Himalayan Commencement.

-D"Fuck you, Water Cycle"an

Vestigial Keycaps

Do you now or have you ever actually used the Caps Lock key? I mean for a use other than calling someone an assface, such as, "THAT'S SO FUNNY LOLOLOLMAOTIPROLOL !!!11!1!!ONE"? No, you haven't.

And while I go about more than doubling my current draft for Freshman Writing (yes, I'm in Fresman Writing) in the two hours before class, you should start a petition. We got rid of those superflous ivory keys on pianos, what nobler next cause could there be than getting rid of the one button in my life that can suck the charm out of an eloquent or elegant sentence?

The Essay the Blog was born to write

Despite its less-than-printable name, this essay is the best I've read in years. Move over Mencken, sit down Sedaris. There's a new kid in town. Observe the use of an interlocutor to draw out the author's true belief system. Note how the belief system is representative of the vast hordes of the mildly liberal who felt so disenfranchised after last November. Consider the obscene nature of it, but, hey, that's the internet.

http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com

-Dan