Hooky

January 21st, 2012

It took too long this year for winter to kick in. Even though it was good for the general positive vibes, 50+ degree days in January, in Chicago, are not natural. I was starting to suspect that we were all going to pay a terrible price for those few weeks of temperate balminess. So when it snowed and froze and dipped down into the teens I felt a surge of winter warmth that I haven’t experienced in years. And now everything is coated in a fresh, white blanket, beautiful and muffled, the gas-powered snow blowers long finished, our boiler pumping heat through our domestic circulatory system. I’m looking outside, thinking of making snow angels, building igloos and marching across barren powder landscapes.

And it reminds me of the first time I played hooky.

I started school as a smart kid. Smart and angry. My parents told me that I topped off my kindergarten IQ, highest in the class, which is sort of impressive, even though I generally think that the IQ is half-hogwash. I think I was one of those young kids who became bored with things and decided to act out, so I assaulted both classmates and my teacher during that first year of schooling. It was my kindergarden teacher’s first year, and I was her first problem student. At one point, I kicked her and she attempted to chase me down as I crawled under all the tables. Another day, someone, perhaps the principal, dragged me out as I kicked and screamed. I don’t remember much, if any, of this, but the stories persist. So my mom would run into my kindergarten teacher every few years and, many decades later, she still remembers me, perhaps touching one of her kicked shins. It is always important to make a lasting impression upon your teachers.

My parents decided to keep me in the current track, and declined an offer for me to skip ahead into the second grade. I was still a wild child, still acting out, but, throughout those first couple years of elementary school, I was more or less disciplined into shape. This isn’t meant as an indictment against corporal punishment. I was rambunctious and prone to demonstrative rabble rousing, and the discipline generally worked. It didn’t take long for me to become a bit less vocal, more shy and mild mannered. I also became less ambitious, and I think my brain leveled out until I was generally average. By third grade, I was just another idiot. The mental growth spurt was over.

I believe that I was in third grade when I played hooky. It involved a test. I had either neglected to study, or I simply didn’t understand the material. Perhaps it was a spelling test, or maybe a little math. Whatever a typical eight-year-old in the mid-70s was supposed to know. I could handle some of the more creative aspects of school, but tests always messed with me. I had terrible recall, and couldn’t focus on studying enough to figure out how to embed that information into my brain. Really, tests troubled me all the way up into college, and then, mid-way through my undergraduate education, I somehow cracked the code and figured out how to ace just about anything. It was a very dramatic and empowering intellectual blossoming. But back in third grade, I was far from such self-actualization. I was lost in the murky woods, alone and confused and overall ill-equipped for the limitless array of escalating challenges and expectations. I just wanted to play with my Legos and Hot Wheels.

So I wasn’t ready for the test. And it wasn’t the first test I was about to bomb. I was already on the list, on the bump, treading over thin, opaque ice. This was essentially the same as a classic school nightmare. We all have them, even now. You have a test in a class that you didn’t even know you were taking. And everything is riding on that test, and you now have maybe five minutes to cram in a textbook full of material that you have no hope of ever comprehending. That was the exact feeling that pressed into my eight-year-old brain. So I came up with a plan.

Instead of focusing on whatever test material, I envisioned the general layout of my neighborhood. The bus stop was a block or so away from my house. About two blocks further was our local park. Beyond the grassy sprawl, a few suburban blocks led to a cluster of shops, including the drug store. There lies the perimeter of my hooky map.

That morning I dressed, ate breakfast, and headed out to school, just another day. As I approached the bus stop, I hid behind a hedge and waited. Once the bus had scooped up the waiting kids, I strolled over to the stop and surveyed my freedom. Yes, all I had to do was wander about the town, explore anything that struck my fancy, and return to the bus stop in the afternoon. Then I would hide in the bushes, wait for the return bus, and head on home. I didn’t consider that someone might call the house looking for me. People disappeared from class all the time, and the teacher never went to any great effort to single them out. I would simply release myself from the obligations of society, just for one day.

One thing to add: This happened to be one of the coldest days of the year.

Yes, this was in the middle of the winter. I was bundled up in my brown puffy coat, hood tied tight over my head, encumbered only by my Ranger Rick backpack and gigantic moon boots. And it was cold. Really freaking cold. I stood there at the bus stop for ten or fifteen minutes, ducking into a hedge with each approaching car. The cars tread slow over icy streets, so I could see them with enough warning. Standing there wasn’t going to work, as my body was starting to cool down, my spit cold within my mouth. So I waddled to the park. Stage One.

The park was silent and abandoned, a featureless topography of white. I followed the hidden path as if I was a lunar explorer, each step massive and lugubrious. The park basin spanned several blocks, crossing a little frozen creek and lifeless tennis courts, from the kiddie playground up and around and over to the advanced playground, then, finally, off to the other end, to the street. It took forever, and even in the misery of the cold and desolation, I was satisfied that this crossing would consume a solid chunk of time. If I ran out of things to do, I could simply circumambulate the park until the afternoon. By the time I reached the exit, some of the streets had been plowed, so I was able to walk with relative ease and haste. I navigated the familiar path to the drug store, ready to move into Stage Two.

Much of my family lived close. My grandma and uncle were just a few blocks down, equidistant from the park and the drug store. Her home was open and active, with various aunts, uncles and friends dropping by throughout any given day. It was a safe haven for me and the rest of my cousins. Everyone loved her house, her dog Rocky and cat Bernie. It was the hub of our family. So I had to stay away from the conduits that fed into that node. Even though grandma was the type of person who might have played along and kept my secret, I couldn’t chance it, couldn’t drop by for a casual mid-winter hooky visit. Even if I knew she would certainly make me cocoa while I hunkered down with Rocky and read Dr. Seuss books.

I strolled into the drug store with a pocket full of lunch money. It would have made sense to spend that cash as it was intended, to find something half-way nutritious. It would also have made sense to just study for the damned test and get on the freaking bus. I ended up blowing most of it on candy. A Charleston Chew. Some Tootsie Rolls. Maybe some other chocolatey item like a Mars bar. I loitered as long as I could without attracting attention, then reduced my horde to loose change. I’m rather certain that this was the one drug store cashier who never charged tax. No one ever asked why she rang everything up at face value. We just assumed she wasn’t paying attention, as those older registers probably required an extra button to tally the tax. It was always a golden moment to stroll into the drug store and find her there, hunched behind the counter, knowing that we could get the most sugar-bang for our quarters and dimes.

It is only now, this very moment, that I realize, after accumulating a half-life of experience, that she was probably just pocketing that money, stealing from the till. Or maybe she wasn’t, maybe it was an honest mistake. Back in those days, my definitions of honesty were not yet distorted. These days, I’m not really certain what it means to be truly honest, or if it is even possible. Really, that day I played hooky marked my first overt divergence from honesty.

The no-tax lady never questioned my obvious hooky-playing. I was simply a paying customer, perhaps sent over by my grandma to pick up a few essential items. No-tax always minded her own business. She was the Ron Swanson of drug store cashiers.

I returned to the streets of Park Forest, Illinois with warm feet and candy in my pockets. The hooky was progressing exactly as planned, so it was time for Stage Three, the consuming of the loot. I returned to the park, but stopped myself before simply marching in. There were my footprints from the initial traversal, sharp and obvious against the otherwise unadulterated snowscape. It was cold enough that the snow had generally frozen over. On one hand, I was assured that no one else had entered the park. But I realized that I was essentially leaving a trail anywhere I went. This was a covert operation, and I needed to maintain some control over my discoverability. So I stepped into each of my footprints, backtracking across the park, one slow step at a time as my moon boots plunked into each waiting hole. The big-kid playground, with all the cool stuff, was right down there, visible from the road, but it took me another ten minutes just to move that hundred or so feet. Good. More time chewed up, inching toward the afternoon, when the bus would come and I could finally escape that cold.

I broke off from the path and into the playground. Then I situated myself in the metal box at the top of the corkscrew slide. It was the lookout tower, and a wind shield. I woofed down my stiffening Charleston Chew, masticating it into a warm putty. I chewed the Tootsie Rolls and stashed the Mars bar for later, rations that would surely be needed during the coming hours. Then I waited, imagining myself as a sentry, a spy, observing the random traffic, the wind through the barren trees, the snow-crusted playground and, off in the distance, that frozen creek. I slid down, over and over, pushing the snow away to expose the smooth, shiny metal surface of the slide. Sometimes you had to queue up to climb the steps and plunge down the corkscrew. It was immensely popular. It was rare that anyone had the chance to camp out in the lookout tower, and that usually involved some sort of battle or encroachment. That day, I could slide as much as I wanted to. The entire park was mine, from the tower to the yellow flying saucer to the swinging tire. The merry-go-round. The swings. I could do it all, and I did. And it was great.

Then it wasn’t. Most of the sugar had burned through, and I was growing colder. I counted my change, just a few cents, really, not enough to warrant a return trip to the warmth of the drug store. Then I realized that the change would give me away. I wasn’t supposed to come home with change. My lunch money was exact. I had to eliminate the evidence. So I sat at the bottom of the corkscrew slide and pitched pennies and dimes into the snow, each one to a different vector, noting the tiny pocks they created in the homogenous surface. When I finished, I was alone, no longer interested in my playground, generally finished with my stash and liberated of cash. There was nothing to do but freeze in silence. I waddled off into the park, stopping a few times to make perfect snow angels along my carefully retraced foot path.

By the time I made it back to the bus stop, I had warmed up a little from all of that exercise, but that was it. I had no place to go, and hours to wait. I folded into myself and sank into a hedge, sprouting up every now and then to rub my shivering mittens together. Cars cruised by, but none of them noticed me. I was the spy in the hedge, hiding in plain sight. Then a familiar vehicle came around the bend. It was my Aunt Kathy, certainly on her way to my grandma’s house. I loved my Aunt Kathy. She was boisterous and omnipresent, a fixture over at grandma’s. As she drove by, I succumbed to instinct. I waved. I didn’t jump up and down and flag down a rescue. This was just the standard one-handed wave, the flag of recognition. She drove on past, and I thought that maybe she saw me, maybe she waved back with the same uncontrollable reaction. I didn’t even feel stupid for waving. I felt happy. There was my Aunt Kathy, and I waved.

I felt stupid when she stopped down the street and backed up until her car was right near me, and she rolled down the passenger window with an astonished “Jimmy?” I didn’t run, didn’t even play it off. I just pushed my aching, frozen legs forward, toward her car, got in, and let her drive me back to my house while I wiped the accumulated snot from my face. The hooky was officially over, but I wasn’t scared. I didn’t care about the test or whatever trouble I was about to get into. I was about to be warm and safe. Maybe I could eat that Mars bar. And, ultimately, I think everyone was just so confused as to why I would subject myself to such a ridiculous excursion that I don’t recall any admonishment or even punishment. My own folly was punishment enough, I suppose.

So when I look out over the fresh snow and think of snow angels, I also think of that bleak isolation, of pitching pennies into the cold and poisoning the trust of my parents. I think of waving to Aunt Kathy and finally escaping my frigid hooky.

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Sharing the Warmth on the Elevator to Hell (or: Altruism Through Self-absorption)

December 28th, 2011

Mixed into the holiday season chaos of consumerism and event-coordination is an oddly persistent, thin, shimmering warble of Good Will. I felt it somewhere beneath the silky choruses of copious Christmas songs, hidden within the standard-holiday-palate advertisements on busses and trains and buildings, and overtly glowing out from the influx of cards materializing in our mailbox. There has been plenty of typical capitalism-gone-wild mania, sure, but there is also this notion that now, during the darkest days of the year, we should come together as human beings and support each other, take the time to tip your hat and smile, recognize that we’re all on the same team.

So every year I wrestle with this nagging notion that I should make some effort to be a better person. And it seems so simple and innocent. Stop judging people. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Put forth the effort of kindness. It’s a great plan, a wonderful theory. And, for me, it always fails.

I am a grump. I believe that people will always look out for their best interests, often at the cost of just about everyone else, so it requires effort for people to be anything other than selfish children. But plenty of folks really do put in that effort, and, for some of them, kindness seems to be a genuine part of their self-interests. So how do I tap into that? How do I stop assuming that everyone is an idiot?

Drugs help. Coffee. Aspirin. Sugar. Anything to remove the edge. Insult and judgment is a sparkly, low-hanging fruit. As with anything suspiciously “too easy,” throwing an insult to someone, using that person as an illustration of some greater absurdity, is ultimately a quick burn-through of empty calories. It feels great to spew out the venom, and might even make you feel witty for all of three seconds, but then it’s vapor, and then it’s nothing. So you have to keep going, keep spewing, all the while internally recognizing that you are just as absurd, and your cleverness is temporary and insubstantial. Cutting people down, laying judgment, just makes me feel worse about myself.

And that makes me lay into people even more. At the root, judgment is an expression of self-doubt. You require juxtaposition simply to solidify your own persona. It’s like making Jello without putting it into the refrigerator. You require this other thing, the mold, constantly. Without the leverage of this other person’s faults, your own definition becomes unmade and just drips out over the counter. So you keep using other people to make yourself feel defined. You do this to feel the intimation of definition, to trick yourself into believing that it enough. More vapor.

So my simple effort of “kindness” requires something quite different. I have to change the way I feel about myself. If I don’t need to leverage my warped perceptions of other people’s shortcomings, then those “obvious” faults flip around and become shared traits. We are all flawed, and the flaws can be glorious.

“I resolve to love myself.”

If I read that, I would want to hit that person in the eyeball. Maybe you should resolve to get over yourself and move on, idiot. Ha ha. But there’s the nagging truth, tucked away, hidden in the mirror reflection of those words. When I am feeling good about my work, my life, my family, I just don’t take the time to pay attention to other people’s weirdness. It’s all there, of course. Quirks and sickness. But it generally becomes inconsequential to my own well being.

So I resolve to recognize the things that make me feel content. There. Nothing crazy or monumental, and no pressure to completely overhaul the way I interface with the world. I might very well continue scrutinizing everyone around me, assuming the worst. But, just as a start, as a step in the right direction, I need to take notice of the moments when I’m feeling happy and normal. And you should, too. Document them in such a way that you aren’t simply counting blessings. The goal is to figure out where to invest yourself. To recognize those actions and moments that deliver the greatest payback, and begin steering your efforts toward those things. The good will and kindness might follow, but, for now, stop pretending that you are exempt from the human condition and the ubiquitous folly.

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The Permanent Excuse

December 11th, 2011

Now, ah, where was I? A blog entry explaining why I stopped writing blog entries. Typically self-referential to the point of self-negation. Excuses are always easy. There are enough seemingly random elements in our highly patterned lives that you can create an excuse for just about any display of ineptitude. A simple rearranging of events so as to paint certain occurrences as insurmountable, like a boulder on a train track. The truth, though, is that all excuses are transparent lies. The fact is that something else, perhaps the thing outlined in the excuse, perhaps some other unsaid happening, has trumped the thing that you were supposed to do. The excuse is designed to deflect the obvious nature of the trump, to create a complex skein of thwarting fate.

The dog ate my homework.

Yes, that’s pretty rock-solid. Sure, you could have anticipated the homework-consuming nature of said domestic companion, but the mongrel could very well have played its strategy close to the vest, displaying no inclination to woof down (I know, that’s just how it came out) anything other than kibbles and/or bits. So yes, that’s a fine description of an actual event. But that is not a valid excuse. You could have taken the time to re-do that homework, and, if you really completed it in the first place, the second go would probably take much less time. So you should have punished the dog and finished the damned homework.

I was in meetings all day.

Oh yes, plenty of meetings, no time to think or reply to an email or attend to anything other than meetings, meetings, meetings. I have had those days, but, really, there have probably been one or two of them per year. I’m talking about a day where you get to work and go straight to a meeting, and then have back-to-back meetings scheduled up until the moment you go home. Generally, “all day” means that you had a truly disgusting dose of meetings, perhaps two or three of them in a row, and by the time you’re back in your office, ready to either decompress or situate yourself before the plunge forward, the last thing you want to do is reply to my freaking email. In fact, most replies to emails take only a few minutes. But that requires some sort of focused reading of the email, followed by a direct response, while that email is still in your head. It could consume a total of five focused minutes. But it was probably more important to check the rest of the email, perhaps click over to the news and make sure society hasn’t imploded, and just chill out for a few minutes. I get that. The meetings-all-day excuse is often employed far after the fact, some time during the following day or later. It’s a weak excuse. If something is a priority, you find a way to make it happen, and a reply to an email is one of the easiest tasks in modern communication. You were in meetings all day, though, so you deserve a little time off. Just speak the truth, though, and say that the email wasn’t a priority.

I wrote a novel instead of writing this blog.

Yeah, well, that’s it. I started writing this novel back in February, and I finished the first draft at the end of November. Of course, I wrote plenty of Facebook and Twitter updates. I wrote emails, read books, even played a few video games (purely research – honest, the novel includes quite a bit of Frogger, Time Pilot and Galaga). So perhaps I should use one of those other activities as my excuse. I haven’t updated this blog because I was busy playing Frogger. It’s just as valid an excuse as the novel, the dog or the meetings.

Here’s the truth behind it:

My brain assumes that there are a limited amount of things I can do. I frequently feel that I have too much on my plate. So what if I removed a few things from that plate? How about I stop using Facebook and Twitter. Okay, that frees up some plate space, right? No. I will always have too much on my plate, even if there is only one thing. I leverage the expendable item in order to complete the rest of the tasks. So there will always be one item that gets ignored, creating this little air bubble, a space to regroup and tackle the rest of crap.

Here’s an example.

Back when I was an undergrad, I used to get really excited about the Spring term. Spring is birth and life and the flowering of intellect. In the midst of the oppressive grind of the Fall and Winter, I selected my array of Spring courses with hope and verve. Yes, I took that Ancient Literature class, but I also needed to take Calculus and the two Psychology courses. And just add on that other one, too, the Philosophy class, because it looks so cool and they only teach that one in the Spring and, well, yes, that’s a full plate, a really full plate, but what the hell. Go for it. And the first few weeks of the Spring term would be so great, such an eclectic mix. Oh, I have to write two papers at once. Okay, just hang in there. Oh, Calculus is hard. Hmm, okay. A third paper is slightly overlapping the other two, plus more of that math, okay, okay, and, um . . . oh, I had to read ALL of those chapters? Ugh, and Aeschylus. Where’s the coffee? No, okay, I can just skim over this one and catch up later. Skim over . . . Calculus? Jesus, no. But wait, I think I skipped that Philosophy class last week, so I had better use that time to read about Kant. Ugh. Aeschylus, buddy, you’re just not happening.

So I dropped Ancient Literature about three or four weeks into the semester, and the remaining classes just clicked into place. The teacher seemed a bit disappointed, yet understanding. Yes, he understood that I was full of shit and I just used his class as leverage to position my focus onto all of my other classes. What an insult! And I did this every semester for five years. Fill up the plate, then brush something off the plate.

This blog didn’t go away. Not in my mind. I worked through many entries during 2011, from rants to testimonials to motivational heart-stories. Sometimes I would even plan on writing this stuff. After I did something else. When I was in the right mood and wasn’t too tired. Definitely this next week. Meanwhile, I wrote a novel. It’s only a draft, and there is a lot of rewriting and editing ahead, but it’s a full 125K-word story, the real deal. Oh yeah, I also have a two-year-old son. How could I forget to mention that?! The baby is the perfect excuse. People who don’t have kids usually feel that they can’t really judge you. They assume that parents get no sleep, have zero free time, and are basically socially eviscerated. And the rest of them, the ones who are also parents, always sympathize, harkening back to those hell months before the baby could sleep solid through the night, or the tantrum days, sick spells, or whatever child-fueled sinkhole of the moment. The kid-card is a good one, folks.

But the blog had to remain active in my mind. It had to be viable, just out of reach. For most of 2011, the blog was the superfluous item on my plate. Without the blog, I would have had to select another item to ignore while I worked on the book, posted on Facebook, etc. I’m making no apologies. Without this blog, I would have ignored my son, skirted my fatherly duties and folded completely into self-absorption. The blog has saved my marriage, saved my little boy, and enabled me to write a book. The blog is the bootstrap by which I pulled myself into a more productive work year, accomplishing a major programming project and edging into a higher degree of professional communication. The blog has kept me from drinking away my worries or flying off the handle when confronting pesky neighbors. In effect, the blog has kept me out of prison and off the streets.

So remember this. It’s okay to blow something off. Sometimes it is even necessary, so that you can direct your focus onto the things that really matter in life. It would be best if that object of leverage was not a person, a pet or your job (because too many people do actually blow off their kids and friends and spouses and responsibilities). If possible, your object of leverage should be of minimal sentience. This isn’t meant as an overt insult to any truly sentient blog readers out there. Well, okay, it’s going to directly insult someone. Screw it.

The question remains: What the heck did I blow off in order to write this blog entry? What’s that faint warble I’ve been hearing for the past hour or so?

Posted in Pseudo-wisdom | 3 Comments »

Pissing in the Kool-Aid

January 8th, 2011

During the past twenty years or so, I have had a personal vision. We all have our quixotic fantasies, details of particular utopias unfolding during the course of the occasional shower. Mine involves a restaurant. Imagine an eatery where you are treated like cheap, stinking trash. Some aborted crumb from a Lou Reed verse. Ignored, abused, flat-out insulted. Yet the food is so completely delicious, so narcotically irresistible, that you come back, again and again, enduring all manner of vicious attack, wanton hatred and caustic rebuff. Anything, just to have a little more panacea.

I would own this restaurant, and I would be a terrible, terrible person. But customers would have no choice but to play by my rules. They might hate themselves for participating in such degradation, but that would never stop them from returning, from embedding themselves into the culture of my culinary hypnotism. The product would be irresistibly delicious.

Well, folks, this personal vision does, in fact, exist. In a way. It is called Apple Computer.

Apple has evolved from an education stalwart, to desktop innovator, to convoluted boutique contraption, to sleek, sexy sex-a-tronic sex-a-ma-jig. Before the iMac, I never considered owning a Mac, as they were simply too expensive for anyone other than a serious graphic designer. Then, during my temporary relocation away from the Midwest, I advised my parents to buy a then-new dinosaur-egg G3 iMac, believing it to be the simplest entry into personal computing. It turned out to be just as potentially crappy as any PC system, “intuitive” only to people who had already been using Macs for years. Buggy and sluggish. Once Apple dumped OS9, though, everything crystalized. They really did perfect the personal computer, resulting in beautifully designed, elegant, nearly indefatigable machines.

So I bought the Kool-Aid. Several times. I now have a few Macs, a few more up in the attic, and a smattering of iPods. Each machine has been a joy to use (except the one that stopped working after a system update, when Apple online support simply said “but it just works,” denying there was ever a problem, basically bricking the machine and forcing me to backtrack to an earlier OS, finally giving up all together . . . and buying a newer machine).

Meanwhile, I’m swimming in a numbing sea of trendiness. I know a person who wouldn’t touch a Mac back in 2002, was scared of the single-button mouse, considered Apple to be a fringe specialty computer that was nearly impossible to use. This person now owns two Macs, a few iPods and an iPhone. Why? Well, it seems rooted in Apple moving from selling desktop computers to selling “stuff.” They have become a go-to brand for people who define themselves through branding.

Apple has always fostered a cultish attitude about its products, but now it’s as cultish as owning a Wii or a Volkswagon. Can a “cult” actually exist around something I can pick up at Best Buy or an airport vending machine? People used to put Apple stickers on their cars, but now no one bothers. It is simply assumed that any hip person owns at least one Apple product. The cult mentality has flipped over to the stalwart PC creative-users, the people who refuse to trust Apple and don’t need a million hypnotized lemmings telling them what is “cool.” I completely empathize with those folks (I’m married to one), but I’m still buying Apple stuff, still chugging away. Lately, though, something has been different. A little off. As if a veil will be lifted, revealing supposed five-star dinners that are actually putrid, sculpted offal.

First: It’s all about beauty. I’m typing this on a relatively new Macbook Pro. As with all Apple products, it is incredibly well-designed. In fact, design trumps all for Apple. The guts of this computer aren’t particularly fantastic. Jobs claims that they decided to put outdated CPUs in these particular machines in order to keep the form factor compact. So the design is more important than the computing power. Even then, when these things are unveiled at the press conference, mister Jobs acts as if they are the most amazing, revolutionary products ever (just as he had done for machines that are now considered to be beautiful, incredibly well-designed doorstops). He is the fearless leader. He is feeding us what we need. I obviously agree, as I bought one.

Second: Apple products are built to be replaced. The normal replacement cycle for a computer is around four to six years. Macs follow this, but Apple presents us with an additional axis of consideration: sex. A new Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPoop, whatever, is like a tiny little sun, radiating pure sex. You buy one of these things and you feel completely fulfilled, as if you just found Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. This feeling sustains for around six months, sometimes close to a year. Then Apple pushes out their next wave of sexy stuff, and that beautiful machine seems like last year’s left-over hooker. Still sexy, but no longer fresh, no longer sparkling. Two years in, and you’re really feeling anxious, ready to upgrade, trade it all in for that rush of specialness, the omnipresent glow. If you can last for three years, you basically feel like you’re computing from a Mac ghetto, using a machine that feels outdated by a decade, smoking your way through a carton of stale Tareytons.

Apple has gone to great lengths to assuage consumer guilt over the constant impulse to upgrade. Their products have become increasingly recyclable. Note, these things are not expandable or extensible, as most PCs were throughout the 90s and early 2000s. No, they are simply made out of stuff that you can easily break down, so I won’t feel like an elitist asshole, upchucking techno-waste into landfills. It’s okay to want a new computer in less than two years. It’s okay to replace that iPhone, to get another iPod. Go ahead. You know you’ll feel great. Sex it up.

Third: The overhaul of language.

Some time around the advent of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, Apple broadcast a shift in user lexicon. Applications have become “apps.” Every time I hear the word, I want to kick someone in the head. No one specifically, just some random person. This is very dangerous. I should know exactly who I want to kick in the head. The term “app” just reeks of vacuous reduction, of consumerism, as if software is just a potato chip to be woofed down. Yet here I am, gaging on the Kool-Aid, and I, too, have used the word “app.” Apple gives us no other choice. These iPod programs are short and focused. They are ALL Apple-approved, too.

Really, “apps” are more like video game cartridges, discs, whatever. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft make tons of licensing money from third-party software creators, which is why they are able to sell their hardware at a loss (well, Sony and Microsoft – the Wii has always been sold at a profit). It is a closed system, and the end-users buy into it. That isn’t really a bad thing, and the iPhone works in the same manner. If a proposed app comes too close to a product that Apple already offers, it will not be approved and there will be no way for typical users to install it (how many Mail programs do you have on your iPhone?). Apple does not have this control over Mac programs, which are still considered “applications.” Anyone can create a Mac program and, as long as there are no intellectual property violations, distribute it (or just chance it and get sued).

That will be changing.

Apple has created an “app store” for the Mac, making it incredibly easy for people to purchase and install “apps” that are approved by Apple. This makes my stomach turn. I think there will still be the free market system of applications that will not be sold through the gated community of the app store, but they will become irrelevant. Consumers will drive up the demand for simple programs, and future versions of the OS will basically support only the apps. The app will become the mass-market paperback of the software world. Knuckleheads across the globe will be yammering “app” every other minute, exacerbating my impulse to kick random faces until it actually happens and I end up having to raise my family from behind bars.

This Apple-thing is not healthy.

And even as we are being formed into a generation of super-consumers, with instantly-replaceable computers and quick-fix apps, we are being told that we are the movers and shakers, the creative force, the ones who “think different.”

And even after this feeble attempt to piss in the Kool-Aid, I’m ready for another glass.

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Posted in rant | 4 Comments »

A few things I learned in 2010

January 1st, 2011
  • Babies cry for a reason.
  • Adults who act like babies are actively avoiding reason.
  • It’s okay to talk about the band Rush. The people who roll their eyes now look like grumps.
  • I know people who are more successful than I am. This is not a reflection of some failure on my part.
  • Obama is not what he promised.
  • If you stop aspiring to do something creative and just dive in and do it, you’ll wonder why you wasted so much time in that loop of planning, contemplation and thumb-twiddling.
  • Having a child exponentially expands your variant definitions of Love.
  • Facebook is essential, yet it has virtualized most of my friendships.
  • Both Dan Carlin and Kristin Hersh always deliver.
  • Make the effort to avoid saying snide and “witty” comments about people you know. It is worth it.
  • That said, highly dramatic people are absurdly comic.

Posted in Pseudo-wisdom | 1 Comment »

Nine years after 9/11

September 11th, 2010

Every year now I wonder how to react to this new national day of remembrance. Of course I think back to the vivid events of the day, of where I was, the orange and yellow Las Vegas daylight filling the hotel room as we closed the curtains to get a better view of the unbelievable images on the television. I remember the sick recognition as the towers fell, noting how all of those modern CGI action and disaster movies actually got it right. It was unreal, a movie, an effect, a thing on the television. More so, though, I remember the absolute uncertainty of that day, intermixed with fear and a sudden erosion in a social trust that none of us realized had been so fragile.

Today, nine years later, I don’t remember what life was like on 9/10/01. I can recall events, people, feelings, but life, the intertwining of the personal and social, was abruptly redefined. It didn’t have to be. The fear did not have to persist. It was immediately leveraged by a government that was already failing just months into its first term. We were told to watch out, to beware of people who might be up to no good, to trust no one, to go shopping in the name of patriotism, to duct tape our windows. We went to war with an idea, even though we didn’t have any ideas of our own to battle that idea. Instead of taking the event as a slap in the face, as a moment to wake up and consider what it means to be an American citizen, to draft a vision statement for our society, instead of this we turned it into a fight, we gave in and defined ourselves through fear.

And we continue to do this.

Fear of those who are different. Fear of conservatives. Fear of liberals. Fear of an unknown future. Fear of strangers who are neighbors, our own citizens. Fear of the current definition of failure. Fear of ourselves.

This is not the lesson that I choose to take, not the way I choose to remember 9/11. Thousands of innocent people died that day, people who I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t know, working in offices. Those people had no choice in the matter. They were pure victims, and, honestly, they were no more patriotic than anyone else. In the midst of the disaster, though, there were other people who chose to risk and sacrifice their lives in order to help. They were in a profession defined by the will to help others. They were certainly patriots, as those jobs are focused on strengthening the fabric and infrastructure of our society. At the core, they were doing their jobs.

This is what those heroes did: they leveraged their own fear, accepted it, and moved ahead in order to do a job. Most of us do not have jobs that require the suspension of life-threatening fear. We do, however, live with other fears. Some fears are incredibly minor. I fear that I might be hit by a taxi as I cross the street. I do not simply stand at the corner, though, paralyzed. I work with that fear, contain it, use my better judgement, and get on with my task of walking. Other times, we fear the repercussions of confronting a person who holds some type of power over us. A boss or partner, a child or customer. For some people, we just don’t want to go there, don’t want to open the can of worms. That fear is not the same thing as respect. I respect some of my professional peers and superiors because they are smart and often have the ability to take control of situations, to think globally, to bring something new to the table. In return, I am treated with a similar respect. It doesn’t work that way when you fear someone. Fear is a form of disrespect, and it shows. It is an intoxicating invitation to power. Think of how you feel about someone who is, in some way, afraid of you. You either leverage that fear to manipulate that person, or you tolerate and never really take that person seriously.

The lesson that I choose to take from 9/11 is this: move past your fears and get to work. We all have a job to do. Yes, we have professions. But we also have a personal job, a mission, a reason for being in this society, on this planet. Maybe you are not in touch with that mission, but it is there, waiting for you, ready to connect with you. If I am to honor those who died on 9/11, I should learn from them, from the heroes who forged ahead and did a job. Of course I feel sadness for my fellow citizens who died. And I feel sadness for the erosion of our freedom (conducted under the new-speak moniker of “Freedom”). But I also think that I can make the effort to contain my daily fears, to put them in perspective, and to do what I am supposed to be doing. We all have great things to accomplish while we’re alive. Fear will always be there, but fear is not the mission.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Listen

March 19th, 2010

So it’s been just over four months. Fatherhood. The art of sleepwalking. The rapid realignment of personal priorities amidst the white noise of ultra-bandwidth screaming from tiny, hungry lungs. I’m about to cast a terrible, unrevocable jinx upon my long-term sense of well being by issuing the following claim: it actually hasn’t been as insanely difficult as I feared. Raising a baby is hard work, of course. Rebuilding a carburetor is hard work, too (does anyone actually remember those things in this age of anti-lock brakes and fuel injectors?). With enough work and focus, though, it can be done. And the results can be similar: you hope for a smoothly purring machine, yet there’s a chance that you’ll end up with a loud beast that spews black smoke out of its ass. Well, Simon’s spewing has been mainly from the front end, thankfully. You see, that very statement encapsulates much of this four-month experience. I am thankful that my son spews onto my shirt and pants. A year ago I would have shuddered over the thought of such rancorous expulsion, but, if anything, having a child is an ornate lesson in tolerance (and the redefining of what constitutes a “mess”).

There was one imminent change that I was truly dreading, though. The loss of personal time. I didn’t actually do much with my personal time. Watch television and movies. Think about oiling the chain on my bike. Make a sandwich. However, like any other misused and ignored freedom, from the Conan O’Brien show that I never watched to the Kiddieland amusement park that I never once visited, the threat of removal suddenly catapults “personal time” to the top of the worry list. My initial fear was that I would become nothing but a bare-bones consumer. Raise the child, go to work, watch a few television shows, mow the lawn. There would be no room for art, for creativity and reading. I believe that it is essential for any artist to be immersed in a particular medium. One doesn’t create from the barren precipice, overlooking the lands. One creates from within. It is obvious when a piece of art was created outside of its environment. We assume that canned, top-40 tripe was made by talentless hacks who wouldn’t know Lou Reed from Lou Rawls. That’s only a part of the picture, though. The good top-40 musicians are living in that world, speaking that language. When an outsider, or “alternative” musician attempts to create top-40 pop, it often ends up as limp, heartless crap. That’s because that musician wasn’t immersed in the proper environment. This is even more apparent with writers, and more basic.

There are two rules to writing. Really, just two, and they are very simple.

1. Read
2. Write

That’s it. Everything else is a refinement of one of those two rules. However, there are plenty of writers out there who skip the first rule. A fiction writer needs to read fiction. Good fiction. Immersing yourself in the art of your peers stimulates the parts of your brain that creates that art. Creativity generally follows the GIGO principle (“Garbage In, Garbage Out,” to you non-programmers out there): if you read nothing better than trashy novels you’ll probably end up writing nothing better than trashy novels. Additionally, the practice of the craft is often reliant on talent, and without some level of talent and even instinct, the art simply won’t go anywhere. However, if you stop reading, or only read a book every now and then, you really can’t hope to continue on the path of the writer. And if you truly enjoy writing, you must truly enjoy reading. Otherwise you wouldn’t even stand the act of reading your own work, which seems like a miserable way to live.

So I wasn’t too worried about losing the personal time to watch a movie or build a bookcase (those who know me just snorted at that one). I haven’t given up on writing fiction, though. Without the time to read stories, I certainly wouldn’t have the time or motivation to write them. And I’ve heard that lots of parents don’t have the time to read.

Enter: audiobooks.

Yes, books on tape. Books on CD. Books on iPod. I’ve had a few of these kicking around for years, but never gave the idea much thought. I always preferred my own inner voice to that of some orator, who’s inflections lend an additional layer of interpretation that isn’t always beneficial to the text. Also, reading and writing are very close to the math centers of my brain. I love the logical interlocking of words, phrases and paragraphs. There is a very real, visual pleasure in reading, in the beauty of patterns and flow, like the unfolding of a proof or an equation. Listening to a book requires visualizing both the words on the page and the unfolding images and feelings created by those words. It also requires constant mental tracking. A printed book will automatically pause when the reader drifts, but an audiobook will keep on hammering away, even if someone has passed out, chin to chest, drool to shirt. In general, an audiobook requires more concentration than its printed parent.

During Simon’s first six weeks, I stayed at home, working with Rachel to establish new schedules and rhythms. I ended up taking the late shift for about a month or so, staying up nearly all night. As the crepuscular dissolved into the nocturnal, I found myself in the strange state of retaining a somewhat alert, active mind within the shell of a teetering, exhausted body. I couldn’t rock the baby and read at 3am simply because my eyes wouldn’t properly focus, eyelids often independently blinking in asynchronous disharmony. So I took a chance on a Stephen King audiobook, just to keep the wheels turning.

Soon I was “reading” at all hours. By the time I returned to work, I had both my typical train-commute book, along with the baby-feeding audiobook. Better yet, all of the quotidian lapses throughout the day, from making a sandwich to cleaning dishes to sorting laundry to shoveling the sidewalk to walking to the train, could easily be ensconced within an environment of literature and narrative. I kept the audiobooks somewhat simple, reading through the Harry Potter series, catching up on other Stephen King works (both good and mediocre). Then, remembering the GIGO effect, I branched into deeper territory, including a great re-reading of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Meanwhile, I have still been reading physical, printed books at a regular rate, usually during the commutes to work.

In effect, with the arrival of my son my rate of reading has increased. I’ve probably read more books during these four months than I did during the entire preceding year. And my story-generating cluster of neurons has been brightening, not only with new ideas, but also a better sense of composition and flow. One of the most effective methods of polishing and revising your writing is to read it aloud. If it doesn’t flow from your mouth, it’s probably awkward on the page. As regular readers of the Megablog know, I created a short video in 2009, featuring a story I had written earlier that summer. The story was simple enough to function pretty well on the page. However, I found that some combinations of words simply didn’t work in the oration. Being both the writer and orator, I had the luxury of rewriting my words to fit my mouth. Still, the experience of reading aloud, leveraging performance to convey nuance, gave me a heightened respect for audiobooks and professionals who read them. Then, when I started listening to audiobooks continuously, I noticed the differences between quality, professional orators and, well, stiff and lifeless “readers”.

Remember when the updated, early-2009 version of the Kindle was released? It included a text-to-speech feature that would automatically read content aloud, allowing disabled readers to have access to anything Kindle-readable. The Authors Guild staged a very public freak-out, claiming that this feature would erode the audiobook market. They seemed less concerned about the vast amount of disabled readers who would have a simple, portable tool for reading and buying books. It was all about the sanctity of the audiobook as a billion-dollar-per-year product. (Oddly, when I just looked up the Authors Guild website, the front page contains an “advocacy” article about the Guild being applauded by the White House over efforts to “ensure access to books for people with print disabilities” — I guess as long as that means produced audiobooks at twice or three times the price.) Not all authors agreed with the Guild, though. Neil Gaiman, who, along with Harlan Ellison, is one of the most talented readers of his own work, supported the text-to-speech feature. Wil “Shut Up, Wesley” Wheaton, actor cum über-blogger, took it a step further, claiming that text-to-speech doesn’t even come close to the experience of a quality audiobook. He effectively demonstrated this by providing both computerized and human-orated samples of the same passage. The comparison was clear: text-to-speech is a feature that couldn’t possibly be confused with an audiobook, which is a product.

Well, unless the audiobook is a piece of crap. This is the familiar controversy introduced with any innovation of digital distribution: content providers are raking in the cash by selling crap. Before the MP3 boom, consumers didn’t have many options for previewing music. You might hear a song on the radio and be titillated into buying an album, only to find that 80% of the tracks were pure slug slime. The entertainment industry went bananas over digital file sharing because the vacant crap that they were peddling was instantly devalued. Consumers could listen to it, judge it as crap, and simply chose to not buy it, to not get stung by a stinky purchase. Meanwhile, file sharing has been proven to have no effect on record sales, and sales of non-crap music have actually been boosted (at least for Canadians (Rush!)). I think that same fear generated the Authors Guild paranoia over text-to-speech functionality. If an audiobook is as robotically-read and lifeless as a text-to-speech reading, then, yes, there is a chance that this free feature would bite into the profits of that particular audiobook. But that’s because that audiobook wasn’t carefully produced and is a substandard product. The profit is undeserved. The result of all of this pissing and moaning from the Authors Guild was that Amazon allowed publishers to optionally cripple the text-to-speech feature. And some publishers have actually done it. Authors Guild (supposed advocate of access) wins, disabled readers lose.

My point is that there is an additional layer of consumer gambling when it comes to purchasing an audiobook. So, just as I do with print books, I have employed a variety of methods to borrow my audiobooks. Standout performances include Stephen King’s Under the Dome and the Jim Dale readings of Harry Potter. Just steer clear of abridgments. There is a uniquely sinking feeling that comes when, after listening to three hours of The Baroque Cycle, the narrator unexpectedly announces that “the following is a synopsis of pages 83 through 145.” Dammit! Also, as mentioned, the Neil Gaiman material is certainly worth purchasing, as is anything containing Harlan Ellison’s voice, even if it’s just one of his perfect, undiluted rants. If you haven’t watched that Ellison clip, give yourself a few minutes of enjoyment. Ellison draws flack because he’s often over-the-top cantankerous, but that is basically a byproduct of being both brutally honest and completely intolerant of the idiosyncrasies of stupidity. He always motivates me, both as a writer and a human being.

And now I have Harlan Ellison to blame for my latest ethical dilemma. As his voice is a mark of entertainment quality, I’ve sought out his various orations. While browsing through Tom’s media collection, I noticed the audiobook CDs of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. This book has been repeatedly recommended by a variety of friends, and the slickly produced audio version includes the voice talent of mister Ellison. So I borrowed it, imported it into the iPod and, eventually, incorporated it into my stream of audiobook immersion. I loved it. An instant, well-crafted classic. I immediately tracked down the excellent sequel, Speaker for the Dead (a paperback kindly lent from Jeremy). It is one of many Ender sequels, multi-volume franchising a common occurrence in science fiction and fantasy. As I started reading the third book (switching back to an audiobook version), I decided to check up on Orson Scott Card. This is a normal consumer activity. If you feel particularly thrilled by some piece of art or entertainment, you usually want to learn more about the creator. You want that added connection. Sometimes the person turns out to be a weirdo, and other times he or she is amazing and inspiring, drawing you even deeper into the art. Then there is Orson Scott Card.

I had heard various rumblings that Card was anti-gay, but I tried to ignore that as I started reading his works. If the prejudice started to surface in the literature, then I would certainly back off, as anti-gay is very much not a part of my belief system. However, the three books didn’t seem to be heading in that direction. They were, however, clearly heading into soap-box territory. He was already spending less time with plot and character, and more time working out complex ideas through long passages of dialog. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is a classic method, particularly in the harder genres of science fiction. Ender’s Game, though, wasn’t like that at all, with its purity of story and character. This illustrates my love/hate relationship with science fiction. My favorite literature includes characters and plots that stick with me, that become interwoven with my life. Most classic science fiction, though, features ideas, thought experiments and pontifications that sing out beyond the pages and words. With “harder” science fiction, characterization becomes secondary to the hyper-detailed, sometimes overly dry explanation of fantastic ideas. For me, this reads as an anesthetized brain-dump, often soulless. The Ender books weren’t nearly that sterile, but they were definitely dipping into the cold pool of monologue disguised as dialog. So I was already on the fence about reading my way through seven more books (Jeremy has promised that the fifth book, Ender’s Shadow, is an excellent rejuvenation of the franchise).

Back to the anti-gay thing. Card is universally active. Active writer. Active teacher. Active blogger. Active member of LDS. He isn’t just a tertiary mormon. The dude is a direct descendant of one of Bringham Young’s 55 wives. There was no polygamy or mormon ideas within those Ender books. At least nothing overt. Outside of the fiction, though, he has written some particularly closed-minded diatribes. For someone who denigrates the term homophobic, he is hypocritically and publicly afraid of the effect that gay marriage will have upon heterosexual marriage. The idea that gay marriage could destroy the entire concept of “normal” marriage, that it “marks the end of democracy in America,” is, at its heart, rooted in fear. Fear of homosexual relationships. A phobia of homosexuals. Therein lies the hypocrisy. What is marriage? For a person such as Card, who claims to be “protecting marriage from a fatal redefinition,” it must be defined in terms of procreation, as that is a primary distinguishing factor between heterosexuals and homosexuals. But what about heterosexual married couples who do not have children? Are they destroying the concept of marriage? There doesn’t seem to be a huge, religiously-driven backlash against those folks. So it seems to be about something more basic than procreation: sex. People who are afraid of homosexuals are not afraid of two men or women loving each other. They are afraid of the idea of two people of the same gender having sex with each other. That’s really what it comes down to. That’s what actually disgusts some people. I certainly don’t condone that viewpoint, but, if someone is disgusted by something, I can’t decree to that person that he or she is not legitimately feeling disgust. However, being gay is also a social position. It is an identity. Gender itself is not as simple as sex. If it was, then no one would mature beyond adolescence. Everyone would be constantly trying to do it with everyone else. There would be no nuance of gender and identity. And all heterosexual marriages would result in obscenely massive families. Regardless of one’s belief in the biological legitimacy of homosexuality, the sex/procreation argument against gay marriage is shallow. I am married. I have a child. I didn’t get married so that I could finally “do it”. I got married because I am in love with my life partner. Marriage is about love. It is about a lifetime commitment between two people. No one could possibly argue against that. The folks who leverage religion to spout anti-gay fear mongering are not doing a very good job at convincing me that this sex-centric view of marriage has done anything to solidify it as an institution. Love-based marriage, though, is solid. A marriage built upon love, relying on that love for sustenance, rarely results in divorce. I cannot assume that gay marriage is built upon sex, as there is no motivation for most gay people to marry in order to have sex. If a gay couple can already have sex, and cannot procreate, then why get married? Yes, it’s about love and permanence. Therefore, if both gay and heterosexual marriage is rooted in love, gay marriage is indistinguishable from heterosexual marriage.

What a can of worms! Even in the midst of such a hot issue, I can still read Orson Scott Card’s fiction, just as I can still appreciate films from Elia Kazan, and not assume Volkswagen drivers are closet Nazis. I might be more detached from the art, but I can still enjoy it. Card, though, has crossed the line. The “line,” in this case, is the distinction between personal, public expression and the action of overtly oppressing a specific group of people. No, his rants didn’t cross this line. He might have motivated the wing nuts who sustained Proposition 8 (the California bill effectively banning gay marriage), but, in my opinion, everyone has the right to speak up. Card crossed the line when he became a board member of the National Organization for Marriage. The NOM is the Jersey-based group that was instrumental in passing Proposition 8 in 2008. Take a moment to think about that. A group of people who, on the whole, did not live in California decided to influence the Constitution of that state. These people were so phobic of the idea of gay people even having the option of legal marriage that they decided to wage a national campaign against a particular state, fearing that California would be a corrupting anchor, dragging down the entire nation. Look, I think California is massive and fantastic, and I could certainly see myself living there, but this is not the United States of California. Cali is the most populous state in our country, and it carries 55 of the 538 Electoral College votes. That’s a bit over ten percent. That’s not going to sway the entire country (unless the country was already heading in a particular direction). In 2009, Orson Scott Card joined the NOM. He has moved into a position of national action, able to impose his views upon people who are not his neighbors. This is a guy who won’t even teach at a non-LDS university. I’m sure that Card is passionate about a particular belief in marriage, and sees himself as a responsible husband and father. I’m not going to insult those aspects of his values. However, he has used his fame and literary success to impose his sex/procreation-obssessed world view upon others. There are people in California who have been negatively affected by Card’s efforts, who have never cracked an Ender. And now, just thinking about this guy gives me visceral spasms of disgust.

Ugh. In the true spirit of GIGO, I have spent my allotment of scrivener’s energy on this blog, leaving little left over for the actual fiction-writing that I so revere. Who is a greater hypocrite, the man who spews anti-gay hypocrisy or the man who claims to be writing fiction but is actually spewing an anti-hypocratic diatribe? Um, it’s the anti-gay guy.

Some great writers have been terrible, destructive, abusive people. If I take a no-read stance on Card, does this mean that I need to research every writer, every artist, to be certain that I am not inadvertently supporting some agent of oppression? No. Reading is part of my personal enrichment. I have a healthy filter, allowing me to selectively separate the acts of the artist from the products of that person. I reserve judgment on future discoveries of authorial atrocities. We do not live in a world of absolutes. People try to shoehorn things into absolute categories because it makes those things easier to understand. Limit the variables, crunch it all down to talking points. And that’s why I’m neither a conservative nor a liberal, because both camps tend to blind themselves with dogma. For Card, his absolute is marriage, invariably rooted in this confusion of sex and procreation. He has so completely corrupted himself that I cannot think of him without thinking of his garbage, and I cannot separate the man from the product. So I will no longer listen to him.

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Posted in Politics, rant | 5 Comments »

The obligatory baby video

January 16th, 2010

(if video doesn’t embed, here’s the link)

I am just over two months into fatherhood, so it seemed like a good time to compile some footage and post a video. I think my parenting path is pretty typical at this point. You spend years looking at all the different families, noting all the things you’ll never do to your kids, all the stupid crap you’re never going to be a part of. Soon the idea of being “independent” and “against the grain” becomes self-justifying, and, after rejecting every aspect of parenting condemned as “typical”, you start to wonder what’s left. Is there a way to be a completely unique parent? A hipster parent? Pretty soon you’re acting like a self-righteous vegetarian, a holier-than-thou asshole. And when it comes down to it, when the kid is actually here and in front of you, all of that “never see me doing that” preaching gets flushed right down. I’m taking tons of photographs, shooting video, making ga-ga sounds, and happily curtailing most of my already-voluntarily-minimal social life. Why? Because he’s amazing, this little guy, and I love him. And I’m going into parenting the same way I go into anything else in life: do what feels right and try not to be an asshole about it.

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Posted in Photographic Evidence | 2 Comments »

3-D crap is still crap (in 3-D)

January 9th, 2010

I can pinpoint the moment when I lost my stomach for large concert venues, right down to the minute. It was June 28, 1997, 9:13pm, at Soldier Field, attending U2′s PopMart tour. It took less than two hours for U2 to unravel, dissect and anesthetize everything I had loved about live music, and by the time Monica and I left (cutting out before the encores), I decided to never, ever see another stadium concert (the exception is Rush, who transcend all the hocus pocus to reliably deliver on the Big Show, again and again). Too many people who I didn’t like and too much chaos, all of it just plain obscenely and oppressively gigantic. U2, consequently, has saved me hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in ticket sales. James Cameron, I’m afraid, has just accomplished the same feat for 3-D movies.

[Please put on your 3-D glasses now. Ready?]

Yes, people, I have seen Avatar. I heard about it years ago, as Cameron was cooking up his secret weapon. I knew of the name, knew that he was filming it in 3-D, with computer and photography equipment that he was literally inventing. I imagined some souped-up, next generation Tron, the realization of William Gibson on the big screen (the sequel to Tron will, in fact, be in 3-D, by the way . . . it’s a Disney film, and Disney . . . well, read on). The 3-D idea, in particular, seemed outlandish and impossible. Then we had the flood. The last few years has seen a steady increase in 3-D feature films, most of them animated, the others concert footage. This broke open in 2009, spearheaded by Disney.

This instant batch of 3-D has been a big shot in the arm for theaters. I am a home theater enthusiast, and my personal set-up is basically a medium-screen, full featured theater. I have no reason to go out to the AMC, where every other jackass is whipping out a cell phone to text friends and family, emitting tiny, blinding blue-white display beacons that are far more distracting in a darkened auditorium than cellular conversation. I can eat whatever I want, pause everything, crank it up and turn it down, all from the comfort of my favorite chair, in the presence of people I know. I can’t, however, view anything in 3-D. So, if 3-D seems worth it, I get out to the theater and cough up the big bucks for a unique experience.

The movie studios, though, have long realized that the theater income is only part of the picture. The home market has presented ample opportunity to re-sell the entertainment. I own The Empire Strikes Back on VHS (three times), laserdisc and DVD. I’d probably own the Blu-ray, too, if they bothered to release it. It’s all part of the plan, though. Once the next format has sufficiently settled, they will release a better, sharper, snazzier version that I can once again purchase. For now, I can see two more markets coming up. 3-D is happening now. The next HD will be later. By the time this extended joke has played itself out, I will have payed hundreds of dollars to keep on watching Vader whack off sweaty Luke’s stupid hand and Yoda babble his “there-is-no-try” crap, on a small screen, in letterbox, in Prologic surround, in Dolby Digital surround, in HD projected onto a large screen, in lossless 7.1 surround, in 3-D, in 4320p UHDV with 22.2 surround and, finally, playing directly into my occipital lobe via a convenient jack on the back of my neck. There is no “try”, there is only “do”, again and again and again.

They have us because they know that we love the shiny stuff. Deeper than that, they know that we want these symbols of identity (see a previous Megablog post for more dirt on this idea). Apple Computer has perfected this, providing a perfect model for perpetual sales. Give the people the shiny new machine, and let them feel special for about six months or so. Then show them a shinier, newer machine. It shouldn’t take more than another year before that old-shiny machine looks dull. Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.
Buy, buy, buy.

I knew that the 3-D home market was getting prepped as soon as I saw the Disney Digital 3-D imprint. They weren’t just putting out the occasional 3-D flick. They were full-throttle churning, and this was destined to hit home. It makes sense. Get people to re-purchase all of their beloved movies. Better yet, get them to ditch their thousand-dollar televisions for a new batch of two-thousand-dollar televisions. They’ve been priming the pump for the last couple years, and now, at the 2010 CES, oh my gosh, there’s a slew of 3-D televisions! Sound the trumpets, launch the press kits, and force all the journalists to check their AP style manuals for “3D” vs. “3-D”!

Somewhere in the Dark Tower, the Crimson King is sitting on his throne, hands together, smile beaming. The pieces are all falling into place.

So now we have Avatar. This isn’t just a retro-fitted, 3-D-i-fied re-release. It was built to be an immersive experience, with real acting, a real story, true innovation. Let’s see how fast this thing can go.

Cameron was cooking this thing up long before the big wave of Disney marketing. The 3-D effects have been integral to the story from the moment it hit the page. The only times we have had such overt writing explicitly for 3-D was in the salad days of Jaws 3D and Friday the 13th, Part III. The new crop of 3-D films are generally viewed conventionally, with 3-D money shots dispersed throughout various scenes (okay, Friday the 13th, Part III was all about the pitchfork-in-your-face money shot). Avatar, though, is an environment. The 3-D is as constant as the patented Cameron breakneck action. It is a wondrous ride, a visual feast.

It also made me want scream my way out of the theater off and on, for two-and-a-half hours.

Cameron, with his supreme effort of absolute 3-D saturation, has finally shown me why 3-D stinks. These movies have a habit of sticking things right in your face. A forest scene will always have a stray branch poking you in the eye. A room full of people will include the back of some dude’s head, right there. Flying creatures and ships fly right at you, every time. In a conventional movie, there is usually enough depth of field for the viewer to decide where to focus. Depth is achieved when the viewer selectively focuses on something “far away”, and then back to something “close”. The viewer’s brain does some of the work, deciding that a particular swooping pan over a mountain range is breathtaking, or that the Millennium Falcon’s flight into the heart of the Bigger-Badder Death Star is hair-raising. 3-D movies remove that viewer participation. In an effort to further immerse viewers into a scene, the 3-D movie dictates the aspects of that scene that should stand out. The viewer, however, can’t escape. Yes, I’m in a room full of people and the back of this guy’s head is right there in my face. I got it. However, the head monopolizes the entire scene. If there is any additional depth of field, I wouldn’t know because I stuck behind this guy with the 3-D freakin’ head.

The experience becomes similar to standing on the floor of a General Admission concert. Unless you’re exceptionally tall, you’re going to spend most of the show jockeying for a clear view of the stage, with various heads obscuring your enjoyment on and off throughout the performance. Avatar was full of these moments. Get that fern out of my face, dammit! Hey! You! Bazooka! I’m more interested in the expression of the person holding you, but I can’t read that character’s face because your big fat bazooka mouth is hitting me in the forehead. Instead of expanding the depth of a movie, 3-D flattens it. There are the things that are right in front of you, and then there’s all the other stuff (that is, the actual movie) that is not worthy of your attention.

The effect simply grew more intense and insistent as the film progressed. Soon enough I felt as though my head was encased in a fish bowl. I felt as though I was wearing an astronaut suit, sitting there in my comfy chair, trying to enjoy this wild movie, even though I could feel the sides of the helmet tickling my hair. And my suit was probably running out of oxygen. Did they include some damned oxygen in those fancy glasses? Did anyone really care about me? Could someone- GET that branch out of my face, dammit! Argh!

I have, admittedly, only seen three of the Real3D films: Coraline, Up and Avatar. So far, Coraline was the only film that came close to doing it right. There were less things sticking in my face. There were things . . . out there. And I wasn’t being told that I had to look at them. All I had to do was pay attention to the story, regardless of the flourishes.

3-D has a long way to go. At this point, it is simply an occasionally nauseating gimmick. Eventually, someone will use it to make art, to truly explore the possibilities of telling a story within the depth of the z-axis. More importantly, 3-D computer displays will push the evolution of interface design. For now, though, we have things sticking in our eyeballs. And, of course, U2 is just as much a part of this as they were in the nauseation of stadium concerts. In the end, none of this is as exciting as watching Polyester with an Odorama card. Someday they will figure that out, and then I’ll be smelling Yoda.

[note: compared to many previous Megablog entries, the above yammering can, indeed, be considered "succinct"]

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Posted in rant | 3 Comments »

My New Year’s Resolution

January 4th, 2010

is to be succinct.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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