Archive for March 2007
Big Day for Talk Radio
On the same day Rush Limbaugh called 72% of Americans “blithering idiots,” Michael Savage called 9/11 the work of God:
SAVAGE: And God, who is the center of this monotheistic religion, has said, “Oh, you don’t worship me anymore? Oh, you don’t like me anymore? Oh, I don’t exist anymore? Really? All right, I’m going to show you boys in Hollywood and you girls in New York City that I do exist. But since you’re very hard-headed, stiff-necked people, and you don’t really believe that I exist because you’ve gotten away with everything you’ve done all your life without any repercussions, I’m going to show you I exist in a way that you can’t believe.” Down came the World Trade Center towers. That was God speaking.
It’s almost as if the right wing were finally completely unraveling.
20 Questions with Ron Moore
Do you already know who the fifth cylon of the final five is? If so, have you already left us some clues?
Street Level
I have a short article in the Indy this week about the new show at the Nasher, which is awesome, incidentally.
Voter Fraud Is a Fraud
Before and after every close election, politicians and pundits proclaim: The dead are voting, foreigners are voting, people are voting twice. On closer examination, though, most such allegations don’t pan out.
Which Philip K. Dick Story Are We In Today?
The blog of blogs. Feels like Ubik to me—but it always does.
Co-eds
Arts&Letters Daily links to the Atlantic Monthly’s review of College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now, about the history of women’s colleges, coeducation, and of course the sex.
If I Could Start Again
I was going to put up this infantile Kermit the Frog “Hurt” cover from MetaFilter, but then I looked at the Johnny Cash video and decided to put it up instead.
‘How Bush Helped the GOP Commit Suicide’
A new study shows that unless the Democrats self-destruct, they could walk into the White House in ’08 — and might hold it for years. At Salon. There’s more at Crooked Timber, which opines:
On the other hand, Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party’s success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.
And also:
I’ll end with one stat that ought to worry any Republicans who think sticking with the Rove strategy is a good idea. According to the Pew study, members of Gen Y (18-30) are about as likely to be atheists/agnostics (19 per cent) as Republicans (no age group breakdown, but it must be less than the 25 per cent for all voters given low party identification in this age group).
Monday Does Not Play Dice
* L.A. Times: ‘Novelists have been feeling downright apocalyptic — what’s behind all the gloom?’
* John Updatedike reviews a new biography of Albert Einstein.
His faith that a unified theory of all the fields exists went back to his childhood sense that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things,” a something that would evince itself in an encompassing theory of elegant simplicity. Isaacson tells us: “On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr”—the physicist Niels Bohr—“who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” God, sometimes identified as “the Almighty” or “the Old One” (der Alte) frequently cropped up in Einstein’s utterances, although, after a brief period of “deep religiousness” at the age of twelve, he firmly distanced himself from organized religion. In a collection of statements published in English as “The World As I See It,” there is this on “The Religiousness of Science”:
The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation.…His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire.
*The Children of Húrin is a new Tolkien story completed by Tolkien’s son. It’s more or less a sequel to The Silmarillion, so smart money is to stay away.
* How to get that first novel published. Well, get to it!
Get Rid of God
…in comics. Via Gravity Lens.
Over the last 30 years or so, we’ve ended up with this vast collection of comics, mostly horror comics or claiming to be, involving devils, demons, angels and God. For a long time, religion in comics was, um, sacrosanct, and what there tended to be of it was either winking “miracle” stories (very popular around Xmas) or transliterated into humanist terms – “good” beats “evil” – and it was all tied in with various other “pro-social” tenets: the policeman is always your friend, the government never lies to you, do whatever your parents tell you, anyone can grow up to be president, etc. Existence as a series of clear cut, reductionist morality tales. There are still a few people, mostly inside the business, who think that’s what comics should be. Blame Marvel for what’s come since, sort of. As the Comics Code weakened and “horror heroes” were seen to be the company’s new bread and butter in the ’70s (it didn’t quite work out that way, but at least the trend lasted long enough to give us “the world’s first Jewish monster hero,” since Jewish monsters were certainly what everyone had been clamoring for) Marvel steered clear of God (except for a literal deus ex machine cameo by Jesus) but, leaving devil stand-ins Mephisto for “godly” heroes like Thor and the Silver Surfer and Satannish (I guess he was only sort of like Satan) for Dr. Strange, invoked The Devil himself as a villain in GHOST RIDER. Which led to series starring the Prince Of Evil’s hitherto unsuspected half-human offspring, SON OF SATAN, and his more evil sister, Satana. Not that Marvel was the first publisher to go this route, not quite, but it was the highest profile.
It was the first to face the logistical problems of inserting concrete Judeo-Christian figures (as opposed to standard Judeo-Christian mores) into what was until then pretty much a liberal humanist (even pantheonic) fictional universe. It was never a comfortable fit. It’s the curse of theology that you can insert God without inserting the Devil, but not the other way around: you stick Old Nick in there, you’re automatically talking about the Big Guy In The Sky as well. Later companies were mostly able to dodge Marvel’s problem mainly by dodging the whole liberal humanist thing altogether, pumping out story after story of humanity beset, knowingly or otherwise, in a war between angelic and demonic forces. Throw in a popular perception by the late ’90s that “grim’n’gritty” is where it’s at, and suddenly there are slews of comics embodying the Chaos! Comics approach: the demonic forces are the protagonists, or, more often, a usually highly buxom demonic protagonist rebelling against Satan or a stand-in as Satan rebelled against all that’s good and holy. Demonic protagonists are exceptionally useful when the focus is on guts and bloodshed, and it’s in this context that issues of creative freedom are shallowly, probably unwittingly, reflected in what amounts to tales of Luciferian rebellion.
The Fifth Seal
From a class, an interesting article about the Waco disaster, arguing that there were other ways the stand-off might have ended.
If Saturday Were a Sandwich
* Slate profiles the gone-much-too-soon Show (with Ze Frank), with links to some classics. I’m still very sad to see it go; whatever it is, I hope his next project is as visible (and as awesome) as The Show was.
* The Guardian’s done a rather poor impersonation of Wired’s incredible Hemingway-inspired six-word-story thing. Will Self’s did make me laugh: “Pain, unutterable pain, stertorous exhalation. Death.”
* America’s prisons are broken.
* A brief history of virginity.
* Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
* Via MeFi, pre-suicide video from the Heaven’s Gate cultists. Lucky for me these popped up when they did; they’ve given me a great topic for one of my final papers.
* Salon talks to Ron Moore about the upcoming season finale of Battlestar Galactica.
What’s an example where that process really worked well for you?
In this season’s finale, I decided on the fly to give Laura her cancer back. It’s been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while. When we cured her cancer in the second season, I knew I didn’t want that to be a permanent thing. I knew at some point I wanted to bring it back, because we’d changed her character in a way I wasn’t happy with. But it wasn’t until I was sitting down doing a rewrite of the finale that I decided this is the moment, let’s do it. Tigh losing his eye was done in the same way. I was writing the teaser for the season opener and I decided on the fly that Tigh’s lost an eye. That became a huge thing for the character and shifted a lot of things in the show. It just worked.
And when did this method not work so well?
We’d developed a whole story line this season about a colony called the Sagitarions, and they were going to be an issue in the trial of [former president] Gaius Baltar. During the missing year on New Caprica, when Baltar was president, a massacre had taken place among the people from this one colony that had isolated themselves from the rest of the people. It was this long intricate back story built into a lot of the previous episodes of the show and it just didn’t work. And I basically decided to throw it out while I was writing the finale, on the spur of the moment. We then had to go back into previous episodes and take that out, reshooting and re-editing. Some of those episodes suffered from that decision. It was important because it saved the finale and made it much stronger, but certain episodes in the second half of the third season are weaker as a result of that.
I don’t know how much the Sagitarion thing really mattered, but he’s right overall: the second half of this season has been quite disappointing. For whatever reason the switch from mini-season to regular-sized season seems not to have agreed with them—and I think not having the whole thing planned out from the beginning is finally starting to catch up with the creators. But I still have some cautious hope for the future; if the spoilers I’ve seen for tomorrow’s episode are true, the creators are still not afraid to completely overturn everything we thought we knew.
* Also in Salon: talkin’ copyright with Jonathan Lethem.
Gerry Canavan 