Alternate 1985

So supporting gay rights tramples on freedom of religion, eh?

2012-01-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

How about this as a general rule, just to make things easy for everybody:

When religious liberty (e.g., the right to believe that homosexuality is a sin) conflicts with personal liberty (e.g., the right to adopt), personal liberty always takes priority.

Why? Because your right not to have your sensibilities offended is less important than everyone else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Period.

(Oh...and in cases like this one, where what "religious liberty" really boils down to is whether or not you're being funded by the government, I'm just going to suggest that you go right ahead and fuck yourselves. OK? Thanks for reading!)

destroying the almanac

2011-10-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

[of potential interest only to people who already know and enjoy this blog; all others please click here]

(via)

So here's the thing. I know there's a small group of people who like this blog, and that means a lot to me—I'm grateful to you, seriously. In fact I'm grateful to Alt85 itself, which I think played a big role in my getting where I am today as a writer.* But maybe the two most important things about this blog, to me, were that it was (1) a place for an unpublished, unproduced writer to have a voice and (2) an anonymous outlet for me to speak without censoring myself—and now I (1) no longer need that place (am no longer combating George McFly syndrome) and (2) seem to be on my way to no longer being quite so anonymous. Relatedly (and unrelatedly) I no longer feel so comfortable shitting on other people's work. I feel totally comfortable shitting on things that are evil, but if I see a TV show or a movie that I think is merely stupid?† Especially now that I know plenty of people who work on shows and write movies, it just seems sort of uncool to make a point of publicly criticizing someone's writing (yes, even Michael Chabon's).

And it's not so much that Alt85 is all about shitting on other people's work as it is that Alt85 is all about speaking my mind without censoring it. Somehow continuing it with limits on what I'm allowing myself to discuss seems to run against the original spirit of the thing—not to mention that, to be honest, there are certain explosive (or at least provocative and unpopular) things I've said on here that I don't especially need linked to my name. Part of me wants to take some of that stuff down, in fact, but I think at least I'd better say, "Good while it lasted," and move on.

Will Alt85 return? Not unlikely. Will it find new life in another form elsewhere? Un-unlikelier still. In the meantime, read a goddamned book—or at least watch some good television.

Of course, if any of you should like to beg for more Alt85, the great Short Round will now hear your pleas.

xoxo
C3PO

The source of all our problems.

* I've gone pro, y'all!
† NOTE: Possibly an invalid distinction. I've just started thinking, vaguely Arendt-style, that maybe most evil is a kind of stupidity...?

You shut the hell up! I'm a professional comedy writer!

2011-07-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

"Why no Alt85," you ask? Because I got a job. You want me to get fired? I'm surprised at you. After all these years together!

(I will say this: I love my job, which I guess makes me one of the luckiest human beings...who's ever lived?? [Cue meteor and/or loathing of reader. Cut to me having just gotten laid off after 1½ weeks at work, then me drinking Listerine and crying in my bathtub. At least you like me again!] I do keep sort of waiting to wake up in a gel pod and realize I'm just being used for electricity by malevolent robots.)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Movies I Don't Remember, @atrubens [see also], and my innumerable porn blogs should continue apace.* And here's a picture of a sign I thought was funny:

"towed a vehicles owner expense"—sounds like some throwaway
line in a Shakespeare play that you're like, "Ehhh...I don't really
have to bother unpacking that one, I don't think. Moving on..."

* apace: wrong word?

QUICK PSA: Comma placement matters, kids!

2011-06-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

From I forget where—Cynopsis or something: "Star is writing the script starring Goldie Hawn as a woman, who after her husband has a mid-life crisis at the age of 65 and leaves her, struggles with being single again for the first time in 35 years."

There should almost certainly be a comma after script, and I'm not sure you can really say of a script that it stars anyone—but that, I'll acknowledge, is really just nitpicking.

What goes beyond nitpicking* is the comma after woman. What they want is a comma after who: Goldie Hawn is "a woman who struggles with being single again," and she does so "after her husband has a mid-life crisis at the age of 65 and leaves her." The problem with putting the comma after woman is not only that the sentence becomes nonsense when it hits the word struggles, but also that the thrust of its meaning now appears to be that Goldie Hawn plays a woman: "Star is writing the script starring Goldie Hawn as a woman." OK, I'm hooked! Go on!

When Martin Lawrence or Tyler Perry plays a woman, that may be remarkable. Goldie Hawn, not so much. (The difference, if you're wondering, is that she's white.)

This fall, watch this talented young man in
his most challenging role yet: a woman?!?!

* It is still nitpicking.

Appreciation Fest / Review Sliders™

2011-06-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

A smash hit on Broadway!

The Book of Mormon [SPOILER ALERT, I suppose]
There's only so much I can not love a major Broadway musical (Tony Award-winning, even!) featuring a "Hakuna Matata"–style song about fucking God "in His cunt."* Hasa Diga Eebowai, everybody!

Who would do such a thing to Tom Hanks?!

Punching Tom Hanks
Although the writer, Kevin Seccia, "is an improbable mix of the blandest aspects of at least two lamentable cultures" (Andy Richter), this book is just crammed full of brilliant comedy writing the way you cram a goose full of— OK, I'm just going to stop myself right there because I'm not going to stop eating foie gras and I need to compartmentalize.

the great Jon Benjamin

Jon Benjamin Has a Van
I've watched to the first commercial break of the first episode of Jon Benjamin Has a Van, and I have decided that this is my favorite television show. I am not entirely serious, but much less so joking.

When I was 13 I loved Wolverine.
Twenty years later, I love Magneto.
(When I'm 43 I'll probably love Forge or something.†)

X-Men: First Class
Best X-Men movie ever? Certainly the best-ever fifth movie in a series. [I said as much to Lauren Donner, and she said thanks! So FUCK YOU!] I loved the X-Men between the ages of 11 and 14, let's say, and I think this movie captured what was great about the comics better than any of the other movies did. The only rival is the second one. (Magneto's escape scene in that one is about as good as anything ever.‡)

In conclusion, here's a picture of Los Angeles:

* As a friend pointed out recently, there's something wonderfully liberating about writing God's personal pronouns with lowercase Hs. Just as calling Jesus "Jesus Christ" is not a neutral thing but in fact an endorsement of Christian theology ("Christ" being not a name but a title, meaning Messiah), capitalizing the H in "His" is a sign of respect, not a grammatical rule. So, for the record, I'd like to note that if I ever capitalize that H, nine times out of ten it's for the comedic effect (the comedy of acting respectful when you're not being: e.g.).

† 43-year-old me is an idiot.

‡ Including the Beatles and fellatio.

Follow me, whether or not you want to live.

2011-06-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

fav/RT/print for your fridge

Let's imagine for a second that you wanted to know what my best "tweets" were—keeping in mind that my Twitter "feed" comprises nothing but jokes.* (Who would want to know that, you ask? Let me ask you a different question: Who wouldn't want to know? The answer to that question is Nazis.†)

Here are a few ways you could try:

A democratically determined "best of"!
A democratically determined "best lately"!
What I hand-picked back in January!
What I hand-picked todayish, steering clear or clearish of the above! [No clicking required—thank God, am I right??—just see just below. I mean, merely see directly below. Man, you're tough.]

How soon after saving the Goon Docks do you think the Goonies were like, "Fuck this town, I hate it here"? A month? A week? Couple of days?
-3/4/11

Live every day like it's a rambling story you're telling, decades later, to a bored and unhappy grandchild.
-3/24/11

"Ephphatha!" -Jesus (and I'm pretty sure also one of the creatures in the Mos Eisley cantina?)
-5/25/11

I liked the Velvet Underground Babies because you never saw Andy Warhol, only his stockinged feet.
-4/19/11

Lots of funny things can happen, but the funniest is when someone gets his head stuck in something & says, "Hey, who turned out the lights?"
-4/4/11

What's the movie where Schwarzenegger looks in his window & sees another Schwarzenegger having dinner with his wife & he's like "AUURRRGH"?
-3/10/11

Even if something really valuable is learned, a high-school basketball team winning a game is still less interesting than a werewolf. Sorry.
-2/3/11

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Cereal #awfulcereal (a bunch of letters, probably, with marshmallow blinking eyes)
1/26/11

Who would win in a fight, God or Mike Tyson? Because God is omnipotent, but Mike Tyson exists.
12/21/10

"Hey! You kids knock it off!" -possible campaign to end gang violence
5/13/11

I bet Prince was pretty pissed off when he first heard the name "The Fresh Prince."
4/14/11

It's like 55°F here in L.A., and I just saw a girl dressed like she was on the ice planet of Hoth.
3/21/11

"Ask child why jaw fall off...child say, 'I don't know.' BRAINS!!!!" (zombie Bill Cosby)
3/9/11

God-shaped hole. Holland Tunnel. Super Mario warp pipe. Undertow. Happy parentheses. Endnotes. Muppetmouth. Moggy. Lurve. #newslangforvagina
2/23/11

Every once in a while I get all super-objective and breasts just look ridiculous to me. (This happens for about two seconds every 10 years.)
2/3/11

"I see...an Owen Wilson-nosed girl with a late-'60s haircut performing cunnilingus in the '69' position." #rorschachblot
1/28/11

This hold music is too sexy.
1/22/11

Spider-Man: You Don't Have to Put on the Red Light
12/23/10

Reads bottom to top (say the bottomwords‡).

* Jokes I'm pretty sure I wrote!

† I defy you to argue that Nazis would in fact want to know. QED, jerks!

‡ "Bottomwords" is an offensive slur for "footnotes." [Dude...I should totally tweet that!]

You ask the impossible.

2011-06-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

A restroom at a restaurant or bar (I forget).

OK. It would be very easy for me to get hung up on the suggestion that customers might want to clean the area after using it (if they're talking about wiping your pee off the toilet seat, then yes—although how about not peeing on the toilet seat?—but doesn't it sort of sound like they're suggesting you kind of actually...clean the bathroom for them? I mean, yes, that would be "kind," for sure, to say the least...), but that's not why I called this meeting.

What really caught my attention was the third bullet point, or rather the juxtaposition of the second and third. One: please clean this area after each usage! Two: it is not possible to clean after each usage!

I understand what they're saying. We all probably get what they're saying. But it sure as hell sounds like they're saying something like—

IMPORTANT!

Please be sure to wash your hands before returning to work!
Washing your hands before returning to work is impossible!

If I'm not misremembering, my ex-wife's* favorite moment in those redubbed G.I. Joe PSAs that were going around about 10 years ago [seven?] was: "Give him the stick! Don't give him the stick!" A similar thing, really.

* IMPORTANT NOTE: I have never been married.

You leave me little choice.

2011-06-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

[My favorite part about this is that, even if you accept that what is meant here is just that the road to the left is one way (whereas, to the right, it's necessarily two way), it still makes no sense: why in the world would you need a sign telling you that you can't go right, to the left of you? Q.v.]

"To be like" or "to be, like." That is the question.

2011-06-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was a kid and would read people's commentary on kidspeak—you know, those condescending pieces, ranging from the hysterically outraged to the satirically scholarly, in which old people tell other old people that today's youth are in the process of savagely murdering the English language—it has always seemed to me that folks have fundamentally misunderstood the mechanics of "like" in the recounting of dialogue.

People above the age of, like, 50 seem to think that there is only one young-person "like": the "like" I just used, earlier in this sentence (which is, admittedly, almost entirely a kind of verbal tic, communicative waste*)—hence the egregious misconception that young people use the verb to be as a synonym for the verb to say.

I suspect that most older people would see no particular difference between the following two sample sentences:

I was like, "Oh...my...God." (Right!)
I was, like, "Oh...my...God." (Wrong!)

In the first sentence, the substitute for (roughly) to say is not to be but rather to be like. In the second sentence, the substitute is indeed to be, the word like, sandwiched between commas, being an expendable aside, that "verbal tic" mentioned above. I'm going to go ahead and say that nobody talks like sentence #2.

People do talk like this: "I was, like, so angry." That sentence is grammatically similar to sentence #2 but grammatically dissimilar to sentence #1: it is not what young people are doing when they are reporting on something they said. Young people are things (and therefore, yes, "are, like" things), but they aren't what they say; they "are like" what they say. To be like has come to be a (slangy, yes) verb of its own.

I say "like" too much (a bad habit I picked up in middle school, actually rather deliberately at the time)—but I never, ever use the verb "to be" to report something that someone said. "I was, 'Oh my God!'" seems to me about as nonsensical as I gather all of this seems to older people—and/but I wonder whether that's why it seems so nonsensical to them, that they don't see the difference between "was like" and "was, like."

Nor is this usage of to be like an arbitrary thing, some kind of idiotic nonsense muscling its way into common usage. When I say, "I was like," and then quote myself, I am in fact using like in a rather standard way, just in a less-standard (but of course increasingly standard) context: I really am telling you what I was like. What I say is not what I am, but it is, arguably, a kind of descriptive information—particularly since (and this is pretty important) dialogue reported with "I was like" is most appropriately taken to be non-verbatim (see first footnote because it's similar reasoning).

The clearest way to follow me (if you don't already) might be to think of this analogous example:

"I was like, 'Arrrrgh!'" (or, "I was like..." [makes cartoonishly frustrated face])

Essentially, in this context, what you are doing is an impression of yourself. Is this, when you think about it, substantively different from a sentence like, "I was like a crazy person"? Below you can see a kind of evolutionary chart:

SPEAKER: I was like a crazy person!
SPEAKER: I was like— (Does impression of a crazy person)
SPEAKER: I was like (in character, as a crazy person), "God damn it!!!"
SPEAKER: I was like, "God damn it!!!"†

Can you see how that "like" is not just verbal waste, and how that last sentence communicates something slightly but significantly different from "I said, 'God damn it!!!'"?

The sentence, "I was, like, 'God damn it!!!'"—with the like set apart by commas—would communicate something rather different: it would mean that the speaker was "God damn it!!!" (or was more or less "God damn it!!!"), which makes no sense at all.

Fortunately, nobody talks like that.‡

This is different. (via)
P.S. Is "stop saying like" someone's name (q.v.)?

BONUS QUESTION: I frequently trip myself up by beginning a sentence with, "I'll either or both..." The shortest answer may be that you can't really start a sentence that way, but come on. Why not? Anyway, here's the problem I run into: if, let's say, the two things in question (of which I'll do one or both) are singing and dancing, then do I say, "I'll either or both sing and dance" or "I'll either or both sing or dance"? Maybe "I'll either or both sing and/or dance"? Problem there is that the either comes first, then the both, so wouldn't it sort of have to be, "I'll either or both sing or/and dance"?
Then I realized that, just as a verb will always agree with the subject closest to it in an or situation, so must the following conjunction almost certainly agree: in other words, when you say "either or both," what follows is going to behave as if you're only talking about the both.
I'm satisfied with that.

* Almost but not quite entirely because it communicates a certain kind of doubt. "People above the age of, like, 50" is different from "People above the age of 50" because the former is saying, "I'm not quite sure what the age cut-off is, but I'm going to call it 50, with the understanding that this is a casual guess and entirely open to revision or correction."

† Note, too, that all this actually provides us with a more subtle range of possibilities. Just as (as you, I hope, learned in school) one can say either, "I said, 'You need to get out of here,'" or, "I said that he needed to get out of here," with the one suggesting a direct quote and the other suggesting a general sense of what was said [Cf.], the was like constructions allow for another level of nonverbatim reporting that is really quite useful.

‡ I think people do say, "I was all..." However, that's a parallel construction to "I was like" and works the same way: again, the verb to be is not the operative grammatical thing going on.

overheard in my apartment

2011-06-02T13:16:00.000-07:00

[I found this in my drafts folder from April 2009, back when I lived in NoNo in New York. I'm hitting "post" on this without tinkering around with the content.]

My neighbor likes to sit in her window and smoke and talk on the phone, such that I can hear her conversations clearly when I'm in my apartment with my window closed...sometimes even when I have music playing. I let her know a little while back that she was sharing her conversations with her neighbors, and she evidently didn't give a shit, so I decided I might as well get something out of this annoyance: I think I'm going to start transcribing snippets of her conversations and see whether it's of any entertainment value. I'm hoping she'll say something intensely personal and embarrassing: if you make people listen to your private conversations, well, then they aren't private anymore, hon.

So let's see, here:

[a Saturday afternoon]

NEIGHBOR: Um, that's kind of awesome. Well, that's really really awesome. It's so, it's so, like, mature. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. [Pause, followed by insincere laughter.] Yeah, but that was cultivated! Yeah! Seriously, every time you do, he's gonna think you're his fucking best friend. Yeah, exactly. So funny. Oh, my God. [Laughter, possibly sincere.] No, she could yell out "Michael Jackson"!

[A little later that same afternoon]

NEIGHBOR: Trust me when I tell you, because I've been where you are: do not lose any more weight because you will look worse. No, but, OK, [name inaudible] weighs 195? Yeah, you've got weight up there, but that's your skull. At my birthday, you looked liked you had the most angular... Hm. Wait, one more thing before you get off the phone.. . [Inaudible.] What? Why not? No, Josh Brolin, dude. Not Josh Cohen. Josh Brolin. Honestly, why would I? That's not important, people have sex with Josh all the time. But Josh Brolin... The thing is, he is [inaudible]. [Pause.] I love you. Tell Tyler to stop cheating on me. Ask him, ask him, ask him if Julia wasn't [inaudible]... [Laughter.]

[a Thursday afternoon]

No, that whole town in Mexico where it started. That little boy. [pause] [Inaudible] with Dan because said he had a sex addiction...? [Laughter.] [Radio silence for a while after she leaves her window. She returns to share her conversation with all her neighbors.] Well, you can do that. I'm still going to [inaudible], though. It's not even that, just don't disrespect her. [Pause] I got on the guest list, plus one. So I may embarrass myself... [Pause] Oh my god, are they those African looking ones...? Oh my God, I need those shoes! Wait until you see them, it's a match made in Heaven.

[a Tuesday night]

I hate umbrellas? And my first panic attack ever?—was when I was in this place where there were all these umbrellas?—and I was like, "Oh my God, somebody's going to lose a fucking eye!"

Who invented the high five? [UPDATED x2]

2011-05-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

(via this, via that)

So when I posted this, just recently, I originally included a screenshot [since removed, for reasons that will become clear momentarily] showing that some guy on Twitter (with way more followers than I have) had posted a word-for-word, verbatim, identical version* of a tweet I had written three months earlier (reprinted here, too)—and had more "favs" and "retweets" for it than I did, by the way, which was a little annoying, but whatever: that's neither here nor there. Actually, the person in question had pretty clearly written plenty of original stuff, too, and I didn't assume he had deliberately stolen it: I assumed that he had seen it, that he had forgotten that he had seen it, and that he then had thought it was something he had thought of himself.

Here's the thing: after I put it up, I thought, "Word-for-word identical jokes seem unlikely, especially in relatively quick succession, but what is likelier than our having come up with it independently is that we both are unknowingly copying a third party." Since I'm terrified of inadvertently being a hypocrite, I poked around Google more carefully [NOTE: I gather, by comparison, that I'm actually somehow a terrible Googler] and found this—a slightly different wording of the same joke from less than a week before mine. Now, I don't follow this other guy on Twitter, nor do I follow any of the people who retweeted that tweet, so I think it's less likely that I saw his than that I saw whatever he saw...but it makes no difference at all. I swear that I did not knowingly copy that joke—I thought I thought of it on my own—but (a) I can't very well take much credit for it knowing that someone else on the same platform made the same joke days earlier, and especially (b) I can't give anyone else shit for having "stolen" "my" joke. And...honestly, it pains me to bring this up, pain really being the right word, but this actually even happened once before, to my knowledge. Can it really be that I'm Robin Williamsing (or Carlos Menciaing) without even realizing it? [UPDATE: Incredible relief! I actually made that same joke myself before the other guy (who follows me) did! A little embarrassing that I'm making the same joke repeatedly, but at least that's one less piece of evidence that I'm a goddamned thief.]

I'm not really exaggerating when I say this is terrifying to me. It's the sort of thing that can paralyze you and make you never try to make a joke again, for fear of unwitting plagiarism. I think I can come around to a place where I'm like, "Dude: you're being too much a purist about this. You're treating originality as some kind of holy, sacred thing. Embrace imperfection. You can't be held responsible for that which is outside of your control" (In this place I think I'm going to get to, I'm kind of a hippie, huh?) But in the meantime—fuck.

My nightmare is the thing that kept Paul McCartney from finishing "Yesterday" for a long time: he was convinced he must have heard the melody somewhere before. But maybe the real moral of that story isn't that, "Nope, he really did just make it up himself, turns out!" but rather that maybe there is something out there with at least a similar melody that was actually what gave him the idea, and the connection just wasn't clear enough that anybody ever complained. [No, probably he just wrote a killer melody. By the way, I tweeted something about an element of that story and, six(?) days later, they did something about that same thing on Jimmy Fallon.† Does that mean somebody read my tweet and was inspired, since McCartney was going on there? Does it mean that the Fallon writers and I both were reminded of that story by something else that was "out there" around the same time? Or—well, totally independent thoughts about the same not particularly obscure story about the most famous band of all time aren't exactly an unthinkable explanation. IMPORTANT NOTE: I'm not saying Fallon ripped me off. I mean, if somebody wants to send me a check, I won't tear it up or anything. But I don't really think that, because—see this whole post.]

Anyway, just goes to underline that I don't think Bridesmaids can fairly be given shit for the "Hold On" thing [see again]. Just, again—if you liked that scene in Bridesmaids and have any inclination to look down on the other movie, think twice, is all. That's all I was fucking saying! (And if someone said exactly the same thing already, well...then fuck me, I guess.)

(via this, via that)

[UPDATE: Not to imply that all this is relative and there are no clear-cut, open-shut cases. This, for example, cannot be possibly accidental (Cf.): the high-five thing is a pretty simple joke that more than one person could arrive at, but the verbatim recreation, punctuation and all, of a complex thought where the humor derives primarily in the phrasing...? That motherfucker cut-and-pasted, beyond a shadow of a doubt. The good news is, he'll spend eternity burning in Hell. So...]

* Redundant. –ed.

† Interesting grammar question: when you referred to the old Tonight Show as "Johnny Carson," was that an abbreviation of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson? I submit that, no, it isn't: it's almost more a kind of synecdoche or metonymy (you could kind of go either way). As such, no italics! I DECREE!

That Wilson Phillips joke. [UPDATED]

2011-05-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

[Googled this before hitting "PUBLISH POST" and found it's already been covered. But what the hell.]

Oh, my God. I rewatched Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (yes), and it's true: the Wilson Phillips scene in Bridesmaids and the Wilson Phillips scene in Harold and Kumar? INADEQUATELY DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER. I mean, sure, you could make similar jokes about more or less the same thing, but what was funny about the thing in Bridesmaids is not substantively different from what is funny about the thing in Harold and Kumar: more than one of what you could call the intricate moving parts of what you could call this comedic mechanism are flat-out identical.

I want to be totally clear about this here: I am not saying any of this to shit on Bridesmaids, which I really think is an excellent and not-overrated comedy. Frankly, I've become slightly less of a purist about how OK it is for a comedian to do another version of something funny that another comedian has already done. Joke theft is not OK, but this is just short of that, I think—really it's no more and no less than just different excellent comedians doing a version of the same joke (minus part of the original, honestly)—and in fact all I really want here is for people who went nuts over how brilliant a comedy Bridesmaids is to respect Harold and Kumar and not treat it like comedy junk food. (Is that unfair? Am I wrong to think that a certain important kind of Bridesmaids triumphalist would view Bridesmaids as somehow superior to Harold and Kumar? I could be totally wrong about this.)

Anyway: Like the comedy in Bridesmaids? Respect the comedy in Harold and Kumar, because obviously the Bridesmaids people do. PEACE OUT.

[see also]

Hey, everybody: words have spellings!

2011-05-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

I may be wrong about this, but—in this ad, the joke, which at first I thought might be spiritually related to that dumb "Good afternoont!" business on Tyler Perry posters lately (not actually "dumb": I just haven't seen the movies and don't get the reference*), is pretty clearly that they're replacing the last syllable of November with the sound people make when they're cold. Right? Since this is a movie about penguins?

Only thing: "BURR"? Again, maybe I'm just not getting the joke†—I really wanted to see the first one and haven't gotten the chance yet!‡—but the correct spelling of the sound you make when you're cold is not burr but brrr.

Yes: "the correct spelling." I say "the correct spelling" because (a) I have lived in this society, speaking English, for decades, and read, and therefore have a working knowledge of the standard spelling of many of our English words, and (b) I confirmed this in the dictionary:

Apple's dictionary widget (Oxford American Dictionaries)

Also, Google (those refrigerator guys know what's up)

OED, QED!

Again, maybe the "burr" in "Novemburr" isn't even supposed to be an "I'm cold" sound and I'm attacking what is essentially an intellectual mirage. But at this point I don't care because now I want to talk about a larger issue (which actually I think I probably have complained about before):

Thinking that because a word is slang or "casual" it can be spelled however the hell you want drives me nuts. Partly I think it drives me nuts because in a somewhat counterintuitive or circuitous way it registers as snobbery: somehow these are not "real" words (intellectually congruous offenses—to this, not as much to each other—here and the first full ¶ here). It also drives me nuts because... well, there's like a 10–15% chance that I'm just making this up, but I'm pretty sure that the dictionary is something that first came about as an attempt to standardize the spellings of things, and this sort of thing (also, yea for yeah, ya'll for y'all, gonna' for gonna, etc.) feels like devolution, a backsliding. If there's one thing that does not need democratization, it's spelling. If there's two things, it's spelling and, like, car parts. If my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, I don't want the mechanic to be like, "Shit, this is one of those Southern California cars. I have no clue how to fix it." And if I want to communicate with another English speaker, I don't want to be like, "Well, I know what this word means to me, but Lord knows how you're using it!"

[Or—I don't know. I guess that's a kind of rationalization, or ex post facto reasoning. The real source of my frustration is probably that, in this world, I think the question of the objective versus the subjective, the absolute versus the relative, order versus chaos, is an important one, since I feel like it's in the pre-med program to the medical school of ethics and morality. And so the willy-nilly blurring of objective–subjective lines probably provokes an overreaction in me.
I mean, frankly, most things are relative, I think—or at least incredibly difficult to nail down as absolute. As such, when you find things that are absolute—usually a function of defined terms, such as, "If we agree that two parallel lines BY DEFINITION can never under any circumstance meet, then it is in fact objectively wrong (and not a matter of opinion) to say that two parallel lines are maybe going to meet"—I'm touchy about acting like it's anybody's guess. In other words, trash the starting point—say, "Well, I don't agree that two parallel lines ever meet!"—but don't agree to that and then act like it doesn't make a difference.
I feel like when a major motion picture is coming out, a big-budget Hollywood release, there's some reason to treat spelling as a settled, agreed-upon issue,§ some reason to say, "OK, in the English-speaking America, spelling has been more or less standardized, so, where standardized, let's stick to the standards." Acting like there is no standard spelling of slang words registers to me as a kind of backdoor assault on the very concept on shared language and, in turn, on whatever chance we have in this godless world for morality.
OK, I may be overreaching just a little. It may just be that I feel about misspellings the way a lot of Americans might feel if they heard me say, "Wait, how many rounds are there in a basedball match?"**]

* Still dumb.

† Although I did just Google "happy feet burr" and all that came up was that Ty Burr of EW.com gave the DVD an "A-."

‡ No.

§ Unless the spelling is being changed to make a joke or something, obviously: I'm not objecting to the "misspelling" of November because the whole joke is to alter the last syllable. But I defy you to explain to me how (if it's true that burr = brrr, which, again, I'm not sure it is, but if it is) Novemburr as opposed to Novembrrr is itself a kind of joke. [I wouldn't object as much to "Novemberrr," even. Why the U? A conscious choice, you really think? Or just ignorance? AGAIN: Maybe there's some "burr" joke I'm missing. BUT IF NOT...]

** I went to a basedball match the other day! True story! It actually got really amazing at the end: the local group was down 3-0 at the tail end of the ninth round, but then they scored one point, and there was this amazing moment when the score was 3-1, with one fault left to them, two warnings, I think three throw-error credits, and all the mats "laden" with "dodgers"!! Then the swinger missed a ball the thrower threw, and the visiting group won the tournament.

movies I liked much better after seeing them more than once [UPDATED]

2011-05-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

(a partial list off the top of my head)

I'm gonna shoot! I'm gonna shoot!

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

Wet Hot American Summer*

Hot Tub Time Machine (watched it again yesterday!)

The Big Lebowski

MacGruber
Waiting for Guffman

every movie written by Charlie Kaufman†

NOTE: All of these movies are comedies! What in the world does that tell us? [Sometimes I think what it tells us is that good comedy can sometimes not "work" the first time around because we're "reading" it based on our assumptions of what kind of comedy it's going to be and kind of have to get used to the new style before being able to "get" it? Like, specifically in every one of these movies—except the Charlie Kaufman ones, which now that I think of it are also a totally different kind of comedy and might not belong in the same category—I remember that certain jokes struck me as specifically stilted and DOA the first time I watched them and then weirdly much more alive and hilarious on subsequent viewings: what the hell is that about, if not that I essentially wasn't ready for those jokes the first time around and my mind needed to grow to accept them?? or something? Note, too, that some of my favorite television comedies have taken some time for me to get into (although of course that may actually just have been because they took a little while to "get their legs" [maybe not an actual expression]).]

Must be some kind of...hot tub time machine.

* This one I remember actually walking out of the theater and saying, "I bet I'm going to like this more if or when I watch it a second time." I guess I already told that story.

† I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind immediately and have not yet rewathced Synecdoche, N.Y. Adaptation I was specifically annoyed by, Human Nature I liked isolated parts of but thought overall was a disaster, and Being John Malkovich I thought was about ⅔ good and ⅓ disastrous. (At first! At first, I'm saying. Fucking pay attention.)

Rapture, Westboro, and such

2011-05-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

This man did his Bible math wrong, is all.

One quick thought: when everyone joins together in mocking a particular religious belief, at first I enjoy it because I'm like, "Yes! We all recognize how crazy this nonsense is!" but then I remember that, statistically speaking, most of these people must think that this nonsense is crazy only because it isn't their nonsense. (PET PEEVE: People who are like, "Oh, man, these Jesus freaks with all their 'Praise Jesus' craziness—what a bunch of wackos! Anyway, as I was saying... I was having a hard time figuring out what to do with my career until God spoke to me and showed me that what He really wants me to do is...")

As I've asked here before (about those Westboro Baptist cretins*), is the belief that the world is going to end on a particular day actually substantively more ridiculous than any other religious belief? If God exists and has a consciousness and a will and does things—does whatever He wants—is it really so absurd and unthinkable that He might hate gay people or choose to destroy the Universe on a particular day? Seriously. Why is that so laughable? Once we accept that God is real, are we really so certain that our preachers and our interpretation of an ancient text are necessarily righter than anyone else's?†

The reason why Harold Camping's May 21 prediction was so ludicrous is not that he was reading the Bible wrong; it's that predicting anything based on reading the Bible is NUTS.

The general response to the Rapture thing was like a bunch of people watching a screaming homeless person on the street and then shaking their heads like, "Radio signals beamed from the C.I.A. into your brain? God, I'm glad I have it together enough to know that the U.N. is beaming signals into my fillings. Poor crazy bastard."

The mentally ill are allowed to raise families.

* BONUS NOTE: Did you know that, etymologically, cretin comes from Christian? True story!

† Or, for that matter, than an all-powerful being with a history of wiping people out might not decide, "To hell with the preachers and the ancient text," and just do whatever He fucking pleases, even if we are reading the Bible right? We're talking about an all-powerful superbeing. Presumably all-powerful superbeings can change and/or break rules if they feel like it.

Movies I Don't Remember

2011-05-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

Is there anyone out there who likes Alt85 and isn't aware of Movies I Don't Remember? That theoretical person ought to go check it out! What follows, in a weird cross-promotional* move, is an alphabetical list of all current entries, with two more to be added every week.† (In fact, here's a special sneak preview, as a special gift to Alt85 readers:‡ coming tomorrow, May 23, at 12 midnight Pacific time [q.v.], is the phenomenal Phenomenon!).

Amistad

Andromeda Strain, The

Annie

Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend

Batman & Robin

Beautiful Mind, A

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Biloxi Blues

Black Hole, The

Boys from Brazil, The

Braveheart

Brighton Beach Memoirs

Die Hard with a Vengeance

Die Harder

Donnie Brasco

Drugstore Cowboy

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor

French Connection, The

Ghostbusters (April Fools post)

Gods Must Be Crazy!, The

Golden Child, The

Gosford Park

Grease

Harry and the Hendersons

Heat

Hideaway

House of Mirth

Hunt for Red October, The

In & Out

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The

Kindergarten Cop

Last Action Hero, The

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Major League

Matrix Revolutions, The

Maxx, The

Minority Report

Money Pit, The

Mouse That Roared, The

Porky's (most popular post—on account, I think, of the butt)

Santa Claus: The Movie

Scent of a Woman, The

School Ties

Sesame Street: the Movie

Superman IV: The Quest for Peace

Three Days of the Condor

Three Fugitives

Three Men and a Little Lady

We're No Angels (1989)

[Please let me know if any of the links go to the wrong place, and I'll fix 'em forthwith!]

* No.
† To the site, not to this list. This list will be out of date almost immediately. Stay on top of it!
‡ What a shitty gift.

Appreciation Fest

2011-05-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

Things I've been pleased by, lately:

Superjail
I always forget to watch this, but when I remember I am never disappointed. I'm inclined to say that it is simply "an entertainment" of a richness that it's tough to explain—some cross between Sergio Aragonés' old stuff for Mad* (or Groo), the paintings of Heironymus Bosch, and the druggie-nightmare-comedy of I want to say Liquid Television or something.† Oh, and elements of what made reading "real" comic books so good: the twins and Jailbot are incredible characters that (on an adventure level rather than an emotional level) I care about, very roughly in the same category as Dark Phoenix and Wolverine. Amazing things happen on this show. If you haven't seen it—and if what I've said above doesn't make you go, "Wait, why is any of that supposed to be appealing?"—then run, don't walk.

Community
The double paintball finale was my favorite movie of the year.

Parks and Recreation
Is it getting better and better or am I just getting more and more into it? Ron Swanson: obviously. But Andy and April? When they got together, I think I just assumed, without consciously thinking about it, that that was going to be a pain in the ass. Instead, we have probably the best-ever television couple, now. Is that right? I think it's right. They love each other so totally and so stupidly.
I haven't seen the last few episodes yet, SHUT UP ABOUT THEM.

Bridesmaids
Women are funny.‡

Looking a little like Louis CK. (Please, dude. No turtlenecks.)

Jeffrey Eugenides' story in the Jun. 7 New Yorker
Liked it. I've liked—or rather thought of myself as liking—Eugenides ever since I think 1997, when I read the baster story (I think called "Baster"?) that that Jason Bateman jizz movie was based on. But what else of his have I read? I read Middlesex when it came out and felt about it the same way I felt about The Corrections, that it was pretty unambiguously enjoyable from start to finish but then, in the end, turned out to lack what I always think of (thanks to Zappa) as "conceptual continuity": that there's no particular reason it ended where it ended and not 100 pages earlier or 300 pages later.§ The Virgin Suicides my ex-wife** and I read to each other in 2003, taking turns while the other was driving, in a days-long trek from California to Texas, and I think I liked it but don't really remember: after all, I was taking turns reading it out loud during a car trip with a girl. I mean, come on.

Unrelated.

* I can speak only to the old stuff, but the new stuff is probably great, too, who fucking knows.

† Although, to be totally honest, I don't quite remember what that show was like—or was it less a show than a kind of subnetwork, like Adult Swim is? See, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

‡ I have much more to say about this (e.g., "Best comedy I've seen in the theater in years?" and all sorts of discussion about the hype and the politics and their irrelevance), but I kind of like leaving it at that. Cf.

§ I often have this problem with contemporary novels. I blame creative-writing programs.

** I have never been married.

Alt85 totally blows, now. [UPDATED]

2011-05-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

a room in my dream home (via)

Dude, check the fucking roster or whatever it's called—the "Blog Archive." Nine posts in April, five posts in March...as I write this, 39 in 4½ months. In 2010* it was 230! In 2009 it was 350! Gone from up around once a day all the way down to a creaky, dregsy once a week! Oh, I could offer excuses, but you don't care why. (You also don't care that, most of you. Most of you—if I'm reading Google Analytics right—are here because you were looking for gay sex and came upon this.† Sorry to disappoint!)

I will say this, though, while I've got you here: I'm reading three books, right now. Three! At once! That's fucking nuts! There's something wrong with me! I recognize that this is normal for most people, to have several books that they're theoretically in the middle of reading at any one time, but it is not normal for me. In fact, I see it as a corollary(?) to my not reading at all. I'm reading Tina Fey's book when I go out, Michael Showalter's book when I'm on the toilet, and David Foster Wallace's book when—well, I don't know when. Never? I'm 182 pages into it, but I read all that when I was in New York City a while ago. In New York City I read; in Los Angeles, not so much.‡ The good news, at least, is that I'm happy about all three books: back when I read like a motherfucker, being happy with whatever book I was reading made me like my life more even when I wasn't reading—that part, at least, is true still today.

OK, but that had nothing to do with anything. Here's something that does have to do with anything: whether it's that Alt85 has actually gotten worse or just that it has gotten sparser, the effect is the same, at least for me—because turning out a blog post almost every day took the pressure off to make sure each one was "OK" (see George McFly syndrome), which freed me up in a way that I think made the whole thing better. I mean, people seemed to like it. I can't imagine anyone likes it now—especially since the only thing that tends to motivate me now to shit out an Alt85 post is something that annoys me, which means Alt85 has become a grouchfest. Or was that always true? Or is this false modesty? Or should you shut your House of Pie hole?

God, I decided a while back not to do this kind of shit anymore, this "Whither Alt85?" spacewaste. Oh, well. Maybe I'll get back "on it" and make this blog good again. (But I sort of said that about the Factoids, and where did that get anyone?) Anyway, in the meantime (or forevermore), here's a 95% unrelated photograph of Samuel Beckett with his cats.§

(via)

* Pronounced "twenty ten," remember.
† That's not fair. Some of you were looking for "Sasha Grey anal."
‡ A bit of a trick, there: a lot of that shit I read on the airplane there and back. But still.
§ IMPORTANT UPDATE: One of those cats is a dog. Classic Beckett!

war cat [UPDATED]

2011-05-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Has everybody seen this? I've felt a little out of the Internet loop lately, so apologies if I'm the guy who's like, "Hey, check out this hilarious double-rainbow video," but just in case—

The New York Times had a little thing about how some fucking religious misogynist douchebag–morons (who won't publish pictures of women for "moral" reasons) simply erased Hillary Clinton and Background Girl from that amazing Osama bin Laden war-room photo that by now probably everyone has seen. However, the person who threw the thing up (Krugman, I guess?) used, to illustrate the change, an also altered version of the original photo. Check it out:

(click to enlarge and spot what's wrong)

(Thanks to "dheck" in Ohio, whose comment on the Times web site called my attention it it. Also, BIATRIS.)

[UPDATE: Noticed that the Slate link given is very specifically a joke "Cats of War" feature—so Krugman's being either a little playful or very careless.]

the winning caption

2011-05-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Here's the winning caption for this New Yorker caption contest:

Ha! That is some good, topical stuff: smokers really are being pushed out of a lot of places, and you can't smoke on hardly any commercial flights anymore, these days, have you noticed?

Also, you know you're on to something, comedywise, when the joke you're making was also made in a major ad campaign 17 years ago:

(click to enlarge this advertisement from 1994)

Remember that one? I do! That's how you know the joke has legs: it's been made before, a long time ago, by a big corporation. Kudos, New Yorker!* Keep on bringing us that good, tried-and-true comedy!

* Not Pignata's fault. (As I've said before, if a hospital held a raffle and let some random person perform open-heart surgery, it would be the hospital's fault when the patient died; similarly, you don't blame the citizenry for not being comedy writers: you blame a supposedly high-quality publication for opening its comedy writing up to the citizenry.)

my extra arm: some (jumbled) thoughts

2011-05-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

AAAAA, fuck, no! We were wrong to play God! (via)

I read this in the May 2011 issue of Harper's:

Test subjects experienced fear when they were given a third, prosthetic arm and researchers threatened that arm with a knife.

Thoughts:

1. Even when I become conscious of the fact I am only dreaming, still I'm afraid of knives when threatened by a dream assailant. But that's neither here nor there.

2. I read somewhere (who knows, maybe Harper's) that when people carry big things, we have a tendency to incorporate those things into our sense of our own bodies. I'm phrasing this poorly. What I mean to say is that we don't intellectually keep track of where the objects are so much as we treat the objects as extensions of ourselves; that's how we navigate with them. And aren't cats' whiskers designed to give them a sense of whether they can fit through narrow spaces (the whiskers presumably extending beyond their heads' widths to approximate the width of their torsos, maybe)? These ideas seem at least tangentially relevant.

3. When Zaphod Beeblebrox finds out that he had done something to his own brain and then had actually branded his brain with his initials, I submit that what's intellectually stimulating about this idea is not what I think of (in my probably wrongheaded conception) as a Cartesian mind-body split, wherein we are essentially separated from ourselves, but rather what I think of (again, probably wrongly, and here because of Harold Bloom) as a deeply Hebrew "whole-man" conception of the human experience, wherein the human brain, mind, consciousness, etc. are all—in ways both nitpicky and profound—part of us, along with our hair and toes: what's cool about that Zaphod plot twist isn't that Zaphod is multiple people but that his personhood is, you could say, deeper than we had previously conceived it to be...? (Although of course he also has literally two heads.)

4. MOST IMPORTANTLY (to me), a few months ago it hit me that I had always pretty much thought of myself as being a pussy* for having strong emotional reactions to the termination of valued romantic relationships, but that this (the belief that the feelings were silly) was wrong because, when you form an intense connection to another human being, that connection is real: your personhoods grow together: insofar as your sense of self and consciousness have any reality at all, those things become literally connected to this other person (or, even if you want to be cynical about it, at least to your awareness or sense of that other person). As such, a break-up means a kind of tearing or rending of something that is as much a part of you [see "whole-man" idea above] as your appendages, and arguably a more important part of you, because you could lose all your limbs and still be a man,† but if you lose your sense of self, your memories, your personality—your soul, you could say—then haven't you in the most meaningful sense lost yourself?‡
Anyway, this robot-arm thing got me thinking: in a way, isn't it perhaps the case that when you love someone, the reason why you would risk all to protect that person§—or why you experience injury to that person as injury to yourself (and death of that person as perhaps even worse than your own death—maybe because you don't when you die then have to live with your own death?)—is that you experience that person as part of you? This certainly fits with my theory (I think oddly never laid out in full "in these pages" but referenced [at the end of a footnote, jeez!] here) that, yes, romantic love can be said to be all about sex, and sex can be said to be all about reproduction, but reproduction itself is the mortal's version of immortality—and whereas the way asexual reproduction works is that a lifeform splits into duplicates of itself, we sexual beings have to find other beings to reproduce with, which means that on a certain level what we're doing when selecting mates is selecting people to become one with, in our immortal futures—we're saying, "I want your genes to mix with my genes in my offspring, i.e., in my genetic continuation"—which sort of circles back around to making love meaningful, no?)...
So, yeah, anyway I'm just trying to say that maybe not wanting a scientist to stab us in our robot arm has something to do with our ability to connect to things outside of ourselves, which also has an awful lot to do with love.

Didn't find the robot-middle-finger screenshot I wanted;
will settle for No. 5 figuring out what death is.

* FOR THE RECORD: I am not happy with this word (in context) and pretty much disapprove of this usage; however, as is often the case (q.v.), there is a kind of conflict of interest between my ethics and politics on the one hand and my aesthetics and, say, expressiveness on the other? The writer in me will not give up the word "retarded," for example; the you could say human being in me (although I think that's unfair) stands fully behind the movement to wipe out the casual, comedic use of that word. (Natasha Leggero, I think it was, observed that now everybody still says "gay" and "retarded" but now just follows it up immediately with an, "I've been meaning to stop using that word.)

† "Man" for "human being" here because it feels aesthetically appropriate, a reference to a kind of discourse, but PLEASE SEE ABOVE FOOTNOTE.

‡ Why all the italics???

§ See intro to Nicholson Baker article in same Harper's.

"So these guys are like the ghost of Licensed to Ill future." [UDPATED]

2011-04-21T19:44:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed the new Beastie Boys super-video (starring Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, John C. Reilly, Jack Black, and Will Ferrell as the Beastie Boys). Much enjoyment. I even enjoy the fact that they put it on TV and not in the Internet,* like we were in the 20th century.

Not much to report other than that...

[UPDATE: Available online! Watch in good health!]

* As of now, as far as I can tell, only the preview is available—even for purchase!—and that's fucking crazy. It's 2011!

Human beings say the darnedest things.

2011-04-21T15:18:00.000-07:00

Saw this when I was in New York:

Yes, yes, tossed salad. I'm more interested in the smooties.

a valuable contribution

2011-04-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

I sometimes have trouble deciding how I feel about mustaches drawn by vandals: I have a tendency to assume, without thinking, that any given instance of mustache-drawing has to be be an ironic, self-aware* meta-joke—a deliberate cliché—but then I also almost always do realize that I'm almost certainly wrong about that, and so I am left confused.

This is good, though:

Someone has drawn a mustache onto the face of someone who already has a [crappy] mustache. Well played, and thank you!

* Is this redundant in context?

soulless impostor

2011-04-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

So I saw this here—and anyway, what follows is a list of examples of a computer's impression of the way I tweet (see here and/or here):

Pouring rain, as usual. My stomach made a scientist?! Awesome!!! How hungry are prone to be very foul?
Finally started by the time machine I'd go for a pun on Facebook: lotsa laffs.
I saw that, forgot it, and we used a dream and midnight was the stone-throwing stuff in the word fart.
Personal advances in the steps. The product-placement joke just cut-and-pasted from our fingers, 3) James.
[This one is almost amazingly great but gets thrown off at the end by that rogue quotation mark:] Fuck you, assembled strangers! YOU KNOW...a swarm of Frogger. Listened to somebody else to pass" Ire?
I didn't want us touching ourselves, He wouldn't he and Clark Kent to cover up corpses and recently I!
SHOCKING: Whoopee-cushion promotional materials never understood that: why jaw—what you KNOCK IT OFF!
Is it a sentence, but then there's bad. You know, I think I'll leave it up that exist, Ireland didn't!
What's the e-mail. Some things can happen, but one thing you might sneeze out your penis inside their. [This one, too, is mangled by gibberish at the end, but I do like the idea of sneezing your penis out of something.]
This seems like 55°F here knows now because we say it's got Superman actually send a MIXED tape?
You have to say a matter of shits are retarded? That's what we cry. Who do that! [Might be my favorite.]
I remember some STDs around here?! Q: How soon after saving the ceiling?
I'm not far from AA.com: Wow! Maui & poo-o-o. Just realized I've never understood that: why we cry.
Turns out the award for my own ass like in Auschwitz in a hipster band seems like a year now, and you!
You die in New York's quite an acquired taste! I found me! RUN FOR IT, MARTY!!!

And this last one is pretty spectacular but speaks poorly of my character—as a human being, I mean:

If I saw a mystery farter? Slam your penis inside their vaginas. And once you're religious, bless you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the computer has left the building!

Damn it, Denby!

2011-04-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

"OK, let's go through it again and see if we can
lay it out in a way that The New Yorker can follow."

I don't know how I'm still surprised by this shit...but so I saw Source Code last night, and then I read The New Yorker's review, and—anyway, check this out:

Colter's job is to locate and defuse the first bomb, then find the terrorist before he reaches the city [to detonate the second bomb]. But the explosions have already happened.* Colter has been sent back in time—just a few hours back, to eight minutes before the initial explosion—to stop them from happening.

None of this merits a spoiler-alert warning, by the way, unless you're a real purist: all of it concerns plot points revealed in the first few minutes (and in the trailer), plot points that should count as premise, not plot.

And it's wrong.

In case you haven't seen this movie, let me just tell you—one of the explosions has happened already, the other has not. So the sentence Denby italicizes (why, by the way?) is inaccurate. Also, defusing the bomb is not Colter's mission.

These would be much less significant mistakes if not for the fact that the question of whether it's possible for Colter to alter anything that has already happened (his is, in fact, very strictly and explicitly a fact-finding mission, with the aim of preventing only the second explosion, which has not yet happened) is absolutely central to the story. You might even go so far as to say that it is the story.

That Denby thinks that both explosions have already happened (and especially that he thinks Colter's job is to stop them both) suggests that the prominent film reviewer sat through the movie in a weird daze of total incomprehension—a glazed-eyed, open-jawed, empty-headed stupor. It would be like if he reviewed Back to the Future and suggested that Marty McFly had gone back in time in order to make sure his parents went to the dance together. It betrays a incredible level of inattention to the story. No wonder Denby has a tendency to reject all sci-fi stories out of hand as "ridiculous"† (see also): he doesn't understand them—literally does not understand the stories, cannot follow them!

I'M JUST SAYING.

On the other hand, I totally don't remember
this scene, so maybe I shouldn't talk.

* Emphasis his.
† His word choice, from the same review: "How, you ask, is it possible that this movie isn't ridiculous?"

Hilarity ensues!

2011-04-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

(click to enlarge)

Pale King, possessives, and more! [IMMEDIATELY UPDATED]

2011-04-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

Remember: good literature is art! (via)

Pale King
When you're like me, a new book by one of your favorite writers is exciting in the same way the new Radiohead album is exciting to a Radiohead fan (music is probably actually a closer analogy than film: when a new Coen Bros. movie is coming out, say, you go to the theater, watch it, and it's done within a couple of hours, whereas your average novel can take days at least to read if you're not on vacation, and an album you're going to listen to repeatedly over a period of, I don't know, weeks?); anyway, I've been looking forward to this new David Foster Wallace novel for a while now—unfinished, posthumous, sure, but David Fucking Foster Wallace*—and...well, actually, I guess I don't have all that much to say about it other than the fact that I've read a few pages of it and I'm enjoying it. Maybe it'll even get me reading again, by which I mean it'll get me in the habit of reading in a way that will "stick" even after this book is done.
   Oh, I remember what I wanted to say about this. The first seven words turned on a part of my brain that hasn't been especially active lately and reminded me that David Foster Wallace was a writer the way few writers today—including writers of literary fiction—are writers: a writer the way Shakespeare and James Joyce were writers, writers whose prose possesses (for want of a better way of putting this) all the superpowers of poetry. Another way to put that is that it's art. But here, look:
   "Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs..."
   Do you see what he did? He went from using an metaphor as an adjective to modify a literal noun to—"in the same breath," "seamlessly," "effortlessly"—using a literal noun as an adjective to modify "its own" metaphor! Flannel plains, blacktop graphs. I'm not going to spend time discussing why I think that's awesome (partly because, yes, its awesomeness is a matter of opinion), but the level of literary involvement, the care with words and thoughtfulness, is hard to deny.
   NOTE: This may be inappropriate to comment so lightly upon as I'm about to do, but identifying too closely with the art and intellect of a brilliant writer who killed himself does make me nervous—and not just because suicide itself comes up explicitly in his writing (has already, in the first few pages). On the other hand, does listening to Nirvana and Elliott Smith or reading Virginia Woolf make me commit suicide? Yes, it does—without fail. So I'd better be careful.

Possessives
You write "twenty dollars" as "$20" (not "20$," yeesh), but how do you write "twenty dollars' worth"? A lot of us (by which I mean a lot of the people who'd even understand what I'm talking about in the first place, let alone care) would probably write, "$20's worth," but that unpacks into "twenty dollars's worth," no? The rightest answer is probably "$20' worth" (since "$20" "expands" into "twenty dollars," and there you've got that apostrophe just waiting at the end of it), but, boy, does that look wrong.
   Maybe the answer is that, in "$20," what you're looking at isn't the number 20 with a dollar sign standing in for the word "dollars"† but rather a single, three-character symbol, "$20," standing on its own as a whole and indivisible symbol for "twenty dollars"—such that adding an -'s would indeed turn "twenty dollars" into "twenty dollars'" (please note that apostrophe camouflaged like an octopus among the quotes) and not "twenty dollars's"...?
   THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Also...

We've been over this before, but "loooooooveeee" would be pronounced with at least two syllables and would rhyme, roughly, with this:

(click to enlarge appropriately OED-sized type)

Again: IMPORTANT. Get your shit together, Rihanna!

An early version of Twitter.

* INSTA-UPDATE: I hit "publish" and immediately had second thoughts: would "David Foster Fucking Wallace" be better?—for reasons of comedy, euphony, etc.

† Hence the "20$" error, which would make a lot of sense if not for the almost dizzying levels of ignorance and obliviousness to the world around you required.

April 2

2011-04-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

(via)

I'm not writing this late at night; I'm writing it Friday morning—I've just scheduled this thing to post at 12 a.m., April 2, which is the way I do Movies I Don't Remember, too (shit's more or less on auto-pilot through April). [Speaking of 12 a.m., I love the Arclight, but when you go see one of their "midnight" screenings (like actually at 12:05 a.m.), they do the date wrong. I once called and spoke to a customer-service person and had a conversation like this:

ME: So when it says "12:05 a.m. Tuesday," is that early morning Tuesday or early morning Wednesday?

HER: Well...?

ME: I mean, I bought tickets to this show, and I'm trying to figure out when to go. I mean, I want to know whether I'm going at the end of Monday night or the end of Tuesday night.

HER: End of Tuesday night.

ME: OK, yeah, that's what I thought it might mean, But—just so you know—if it says "12:05 a.m. Tuesday," that means five minutes after the midnight that happens at the end of Monday. After 11:59 p.m. Tuesday comes 12:00 a.m. Wednesday. What you've got on your web site right now is actually wrong.

HER: (pause) OK.

She doesn't care! Of course she doesn't care! And I'll cop to it:* I was being pretty ridiculous in trying to talk to her about it. But what was ridiculous about what I was doing is just that I should have known she wouldn't care. Two things are true here: (1) what's going on on the Arclight's web site is false advertising—they're doing it wrong, and (2) nobody fucking cares. So, OK. Moving on.]

Anyway, I don't really have anything to say: I just didn't want my April Fools' Day post to be the first thing that comes up. [NOTE: This kind of thinking also not infrequently fuels my tweeting.†] No, I have not become a believer. (Can you imagine??) And, no, Ghostbusters is not a movie I don't remember. [That was fun to do, that one—mainly because it sort of ended up being a chance to parody my own blog—but it also felt weird and sort of bad, like telling your toddler you've never seen her before in your life.] April Fools'! I wasn't sure where the apostrophe went in "April Fools'," so I looked it up. [Also, I was glad just now that in the U.S. commas go inside quotes because in "'April Fools''" you can lose track of all the punctuation, whereas "'April Fools','" is—wait, quoting commas is weird and feels wrong—probably is wrong. Note, too, that I'm quoting quotation marks. Oh, man. We have fun.]

So, anyway, yep: nothing to see here. How's everybody doing today? April, huh? April already. How about that.

#FF me!‡

* I don't like this expresion or really quite know what it means.
† See also.
‡ No longer Friday (see first sentence).

big annoucnement / growing up

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

a representation of the Holy Spirit, part of the Trinity

I think on a certain level I always knew that God was guiding me, but stubbornly, defiantly, I've denied it for most of my life. What is it about our culture—maybe most of all the urban, "sophisticated" areas and centers of higher learning—that fuels the perversity of atheism? Because that's what it is, in the end: perverse. Essentially I've been a kind of pervert, maybe even worse than the sexual perverts I've wasted so time and energy apologizing for (because sexual perverts, for all their faults and confusion, can still believe in God!).

Even on this blog I've gone on about my supposed atheism. Just the other day I wrote, "I don't know absolutely that there's no Hell you go to if you don't believe, but I am willing to bet my everlasting soul on it. (In fact, if you offered me a deal where if I'm right you buy an ice-cream cone for some deserving child and if I lost I'd go to Hell for eternity, I'd take you up on it—because why not give that kid some ice cream?)" I'll tell you what I thought I was doing when I said that: I thought I was being candid, honest, reasonable, unsuperstitious. Here's another thing I wrote: "I was just thinking that it probably makes the most sense to think about world religion not in terms of theology or sociology or even anthropology, but rather in terms of epidemiology. Once we start treating 'memes' as a kind of living thing, it's not too big of a jump to see religion as an incredibly successful parasite..."

What's funny, looking back on these and other such offensive rants, is: why did I care so much? Why...if not because I knew that God was real! (My old answer, I know, would have been that I care because "the truth matters" and "appealing lies just get in the way of truth," but that's just a lot of noise, and it's drowned out by the perfectly silent, all-deafening, beautifully soundless ROAR of God's word!)

All I had to do (all you have to do!) was surrender, give up on all these human concerns—like what I "have good reason to believe" and all these quibbling intellectual concepts that I thought explained belief in God more convincingly than the very real, glorious truth of God's actual existence! (Do we need more proof than that?? God Himself is the ultimate proof!!!!) I mean, honestly, what's likelier: that human beings made up an all-powerful being who created and controls all and holds the answer to all unanswered questions, or that we know He's real because we feel Him!!! Can't you feel Him?

That's not a rhetorical question: you do feel Him, whether or not you know you do, because HE IS EVERYWHERE.

I'm going to have to make some big changes in my life now—for one thing, politically: a lot of the politicians and political causes I've held so dear make the most sense if you don't concern yourself too much with the literal word of the Bible. But God is real, and His word is real, and the Bible is His word—so you can do all the theological-intellectual acrobatics you want, like God meant this and didn't mean this, but in the end, He is very clear about some of the things He does and doesn't want us to do! And what am I going to do, vote against God? Seems like a pretty stupid idea to me!

Anyway, this has been brewing a while, but today is the day that I "come out": today, April 1, I publicly acknowledge that God is real, God is good, and God is king!

Read the Bible!!!!

an inspirational quote

new or newish in the 2010s, a partial list

2011-03-30T15:20:00.000-07:00

(via)

Now when we invite people to do things, we do it in an e-mail*—doing it over the phone has become very uncommon—and there is almost never any call to provide directions: in the age of Google Maps, "3100 Los Feliz Boulevard" is more than enough information.
I used to have physical photo albums with physical photos in them and also some framed photos. When I moved to my new apartment, I took an old wallet-sized photo of my parents from the early 1980s—wallet-sized for an actual wallet, back when I used to have actual photographs in my wallet, years ago—and put it in a wallet-sized refrigerator-magnet frame and put it on my refrigerator. This felt almost old-fashioned.
I don't know too many people who watch TV shows when they air. I do watch Community, Parks & Rec, and 30 Rock on Thursday night when I can, but how often do I watch them early enough in the evening that it isn't possible to fast-forward through the commercials? Never?

That's all for now. I'm supposed to be working.

(via)

* I hit "Publish Post" and then realized "in an e-mail" probably itself pegs me as an old man. Kids today are texting and IMing and shit, aren't they? Kids.

Something I've done a few times that really makes people mad, but they are wrong and I am right.

2011-03-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

In order to explain this point, I'm going to do something I've never done before on Alt85 (to the best of my recollection): I'm going to draw some pictures.

Here is something that happens sometimes on roads—

(viewed from above)

—a left-turn lane. [What I failed to include in my drawing (Christ, I've blown it already) is the dotted white line that separates lanes you're allowed to move between—as opposed to double yellow lines, which of course you are not allowed to cross because what's on the other side of them is what we call "the oncoming lane."]

So the story here is: if you're cruising along the right side of the double yellow line, driving "up," and you want to make a left turn (at the intersection I also might have wanted to include in the drawing, but that we'll instead just assume, at the very top of the drawing) you get into that left-turn lane and either turn or wait to turn—like so:

Green blobs are law-abiding cars.

However, in Los Angeles, the norm seems to be a blithe and absolute disregard for the presence (or at least the meaning) of those double yellow lines. Particularly if traffic is backed up enough that a motorist will have to wait before changing into that turn lane, but even if not, cars will get over well in advance of the turn lane, getting into the turn lane before the turn lane technically exists—like so:

Red blobs are scofflaws.

Now, as discussed on a number of occasions—here, for instance—I don't really care about your breaking the law, per se. Due to a particular weakness of my character, it does bother me some if it appears that you're breaking the law and you think you aren't (see here for a more in-depth discussion of this personality flaw), but that's something I try to move past—and it's my problem, not yours. In short, cross whatever double yellow lines you want; just don't come crying to me if you get ticketed for it. (Why would you come crying to me about that? What a weird way to put it.) I don't really care what you do as long as you don't hurt anybody.

The real problem arises in a situation like this one:

The blue blob is my car. My car is not blue.

Every once in a while—like maybe two or three times since I moved to L.A. a year ago—this happens: I need to turn left, I approach the turn lane, and there's already a line of cars in the oncoming lane that have crossed a double yellow line and are now waiting (motionless: this would be at a red light) to cross the double yellow line again and enter the turn lane.

I repeat; I don't care how you've chosen to deal with the turn lane, and I don't care that you're breaking the law. However, now I have to figure out what to do about getting into that turn lane because (remember) I need to turn left. My two main choices are these:

cross the double yellow line and wait behind the cars that are already queued up in the oncoming lane, or
turn into the turn lane where I'm supposed to, effectively cutting off the other cars.

I'll tell you what: there are reasons why I'd do something flagrantly illegal, and one of those reasons is not because a bunch of other morons are already doing it and will be annoyed by my doing it the right way. I am going to enter that turn lane exactly where that turn lane begins:

The red blobs feel that they are being cut off and are angry.
OR—uh-oh, paramecia!

Oh, boy, do those cars get mad! From their perspective, here's what's happening: they are waiting responsibly in line and some selfish asshole is just driving up to the front and cutting them all off! Here's the problem: what's actually happening is that they are sitting in the oncoming lane for no compelling reason. They're not even allowed to cross that double yellow line and proceed! Essentially they're driving the wrong way down the street. Again, I don't care where you are or where you're going, but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to go out of my way to accommodate you while you do it. No, I'm sorry, a correction: I'll accommodate you as long as I don't have to break the law myself in order to do it.

I'm 100% sure that you, reading this, might disagree. "He shouldn't do that!" you might be saying. "He should just get in line like everyone else!" Here's the thing, though: you're an idiot.

xoxo
Gossip Girl

the happy nihilist

2011-03-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tsunami[?]*)

Holy MacKeral (pilot)

So how about this radiation plume that's supposed to hit Southern California tomorrow afternoon, huh? Looks like it poses no serious health risk—gonna lose its lethal power en route, they say—and in any case it's nothing compared to what's going on in Japan (where it's coming from). Speaking of which, I've had mixed feelings about the way everyone's been going on with their lives post-tsunami.† On the one hand, it's ludicrous that such a disaster gets a day or two's attention and then fades away—particularly when a catastrophe at least as large as the first is ongoing and possibly about to blow up (literally). On the other hand, aren't the people who are going on with their lives sort of the sane ones? And I don't mean callously sane, either: as long as there's nothing much to be done, how much sense does it make to spend your time worrying? I'm playing devil's advocate, here, but I'm playing it seriously. On Dec. 31, 2004, I quoted Nabokov in my journal—

He could perfectly well understand sensitive and intelligent thinkers not being able to sleep because of an earthquake in China; but, being what he was, he could not understand why these same people did not feel exactly the same spasm of rebellious grief when thinking of some similar calamity that had happened as many years ago as there were miles to China.

—and then went on to say, "I think that Nabokov is right. At the risk of sounding callous and flippant, I quote Monty Python: 'Things explode every day.'" As I understand Nabokov, he's saying that (unless you can help the people suffering, or know the people suffering) the suffering in Japan in 2011 is only accidentally more relevant to you, now, than the suffering in Pompeii in 79: in both cases, human beings are experiencing unimaginable catastrophe and dying in unthinkable numbers—and in both cases, you're not there. And as I understand my younger self's appropriation of Monty Python, there are people right now, in your own region and all around the world, dying of horrible illnesses and in accidents, being murdered and tortured and abused in ways as horrible as anything you can conceive of...so if the only difference is our awareness of it, then...

Then I don't know what. But what I'm trying to say is, is the fact that Japan has been replaced by Rebecca Black on Twitter a sign that people are fools and monsters, or is it a sign of a totally reasonable human capacity to go on with life? As I almost tweeted the other day, "Is the idea here that if we stop making jokes on Twitter, the tsunami has won?"

[To be totally clear, I'm not comfortable with this blasé response (or lack of response). I do think it's a sign of superficiality, stupidity, and moral numbness. I'm just not sure I'm right about that. Maybe the religious folks are right, and we should just read the Bible?]

I've written before—here and possibly elsewhere—about my maybe counterintuitive sense that nihilism permits a more upbeat attitude toward life. And I don't mean in an ignorance-is-bliss way: quite the opposite. I'm talking about confronting the harsh, bleak realities of the universe as a way of accepting and moving past them—or not even moving past them: taking a certain kind of solace in them. This is, I suppose, related to what I said the other day about the importance of a sense of irony, but what it comes down to is the idea that, yes, everybody dies, and, yes, chaos is real and catastrophe happens, but here we still are, human beings, fragile and confused and totally on our own, with only each other to support us, no God, no absolutes...which means it is what we make it, maybe? Which means...

Well, I'm not going to exert too much intellectual effort trying to articulate this idea right now, partly because my brain is tired (more from disuse than from exhaustion, but either way) and partly because what I really sat down here to do was to give a few relevant examples of this attitude—both expressions of it and inspiration for it. But really all I've got is three things, one of which I wrote and one of which I can't find. Here they are:

Twitter (see also)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: point here isn't the cover—or at least not the front cover. Back in my old life, when I had a million books, few of which were in boxes, I could have grabbed this thing off the shelf and looked at (or even scanned) the back cover, but now I can say only from memory that one of the ways in which this book blew my mind was that its back-cover synopsis said something like, "About the end of the world and happy-go-lucky days that followed." The end of the world and the happy-go-lucky days that followed! I read that when I was something like eight years old. That kind of thing influences (warps?) a young mind. The idea that the worst possible thing that could happen—the end of the world—was only the beginning of a cheerful adventure? That the destruction of the planet and the annihilation of the human race was the premise for a zany comedy?

You're going to die. So am I. All of us are.‡ If that seems unacceptable, then we've got a problem. Personally, I'm unwilling to deal with it by making up or believing lies about it. When my grandfather found out he had a month or so to live, it was like he woke up: he was more alive for those last weeks than he had been in years. That's my model. We're alive, and the fact that we're going to die makes that fact more meaningful, not less.

I think that's what I'm trying to say.

* Ugh. On so many levels: ugh. (I'm ughing myself.)
† Everyone...their. Et tu, Shorty?
‡ A Facebook friend posted an amazing video of his little son singing "Do You Realize??" in the bathtub: "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" Beautiful/hilarious/bizarre.

don't read this one: it's boring and cranky [UPDATED/EVISCERATED]

2011-03-12T00:30:00.000-08:00

portrait of the artist as a new father

[REDACTED*]

What's my deal today?! Grouchtown U.S.A.! Maybe something about the ocean rising up and wiping out entire towns and killing people just puts me in a shitty mood.†

Alternate 1985
From now on, Alt85 will publish only hardcore pornography. Enjoy!

Let's get this party started.

* I didn't like this entry so I just fucking deleted it. There was a crazy extended sex metaphor in there, too, in which I compared maintaining my movie blog to trying to make a woman come. Now you don't get to read that. HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW??
† "Plagues and famine and pestilence / always seem to get me down..." –Yankovic, "Weird Al"

Oh, hello. [UPDATED]

2011-03-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not here. This isn't happening.

I was on a grand jury in 2009, and they actually showed a training video in which Sam Waterston looks up from a book he's reading and is like, "I didn't see you there," before explaining how grand juries work. Do people have no sense of irony? [ANSWER: Yes, they don't.]

Hi. This blog has been pretty still lately. Just wanted to take a second to say that it will be back. I've just been spread pretty thin lately. (I'm sorry, OK?! Jesus!) In the meantime, my movie blog will be updated three times a week, on the regs, and on Twitter I basically can't fucking shut up (see also Favstar), so you can check that out if you're starved for Alt85ish dickholery.

God bless you, and God bless the United States.

Don't touch that dial! (via)

[UPDATE: It occurs to me that this blog contains a higher and higher percent of apology/explanation posts like this one. Someday, like the woodsman replacing lopped-off body parts with tin, that's all Alt85 will be: one big "We'll be back soon, promise!" Maybe that should be the new (third) subhead/slogan—that or just, "Sorry!"*]

* Or, "Now the second result when you Google 'blowjob 1985'!"

So You're Operating a Front: Helpful Tips

2011-02-24T21:20:00.000-08:00

photo altered to obscure phone number*

Curtains in the window? Not recommended. If you want to pretend you're selling tropical fish, you might want to consider an aquarium in the window—maybe even with tropical fish in it? At least put some photographs up, something passersby can look at. Specifically preventing them from looking in, having your window display essentially be a window disguise, risks arousing suspicion: the opposite of your goal.

The name, too, is important. Let's say your tropical-fish store is a front for a drug-smuggling business, or a brothel—whatever your thing is, doesn't matter. The problem with a name like "Koran" is that it in post-9/11 America there's this suspicion of Muslims that turns anything that sounds like a reference to Islam into kind of a red flag—again, the opposite of our goal. So a curtained establishment with a big, red "KORAN" sign is not exactly flying under the radar, even if you do put the words "TROPICAL FISH" up there, too.

On the other hand, if this is in fact the headquarters for a terrorist cell, then you score points both for boldness and possibly even for a kind of double fake-out, the "so obvious it can't possibly be so" gambit. So:

FINAL GRADE: C-

* ...because I am kidding. (Is this joke OK? I DON'T KNOW.)

terra incognita-nada*

2011-02-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

Google has a web browser, and their web browser has an "Incognito" mode, and when you open a new Incognito window, a warning comes up. The first three items on the list are pretty unremarkable, but after that it gets pretty amazing pretty fast:

(click to enlarge if you can't read it, Granny)

I know Google's international and has had issues with totalitarian censorship of one form or another, so the thing about secret agents actually does make sense (although it rings crazy† here). But "People standing behind you"—that's got to be a joke, right? Either way, I like it.

* Clever wordplay from song lyrics I wrote in 1995 or 1996, when I was an idiot.
† I like "rings crazy."

irony is not a mustache

2011-02-21T11:28:00.000-08:00

(quasicounterillustration via)

Morality is a kind of irony.

This is a thought that occurred to me the other day when thinking about whether it's true (as I feel it is) that a "healthy sense of irony" is indispensable: I jumped from, "Yes, because it's a prerequisite for true moral thought," to a full-on equation of the two things, morality and irony.

Now, this was partly a kind of intellectual game I was getting off on, but I also think there's truth to it. Irony, in its purest sense (or at least its original, literary sense, having to with dissembling*), is the saying of one thing while meaning another—or, maybe to get more to the heart of it, the existence of a level of understanding separate from the most literal. Isn't morality ironic in the sense that you're looking at an action or a situation and thinking about more than just the facts of it, that you're thinking about a meaning, a sense, separate from what you might (in the analogy I'm trying to make) call its "literal meaning"?

When teaching English, I felt I should be able to define poetry, and what I decided was that poetry is defined by—powered by—an almost somehow magical distance (sometimes awesomely huge, sometimes stunning small) between the words being said and their meaning: poetry means something more than what it is most literally saying. So poetry, too, sort of hinges on irony. I want to be totally clear here that I'm not talking about hipster irony or the "cool" irony of post-Gen X advertisements: I'm talking about irony as a sense that can be reproduced or caricatured as a tool or trick but that is actually a human capacity, the ability to think about things beyond the surface, to see a space between the signifier and the signified.

Another example: are things beautiful? Can a woman be beautiful to me in a way that means anything more than the facts of a chemical response in my brain, of instincts and cultural influences, of genes and psychology? Can her beauty have any sense beyond the most basic situation of one organism responding a certain way to another organism? If so, isn't it so in the same way, in which we're able to see a meaning beyond the most literal? In this sense, isn't love, too, a kind of irony?

I'm referring to a human ability to see the difference between the statistics and the story. It's stereo, it's binocular vision: the ability to perceive depth. Two ears, two eyes, and—most importantly of all—two perceptions of the same reality, superimposed over each other, with the resulting ability to process these perceptions, bring them into focus, and transform them into a morally three-dimensional picture. Without irony, we have no depth perception.

Or, I don't know, maybe that's all a load of crap.

(a load of crap, via)

* Not to be confused with Number Five's dreaded disassembling.

Appreciation Fest: Harper's [UPDATED]

2011-02-20T18:15:00.000-08:00

Totally, ridiculously unrelated. (via)

[Full disclosure: I'm friends with someone involved in the production of Harper's magazine. However, I was friends with this person—and this person was so involved—for years before the feelings I'm about to express kicked in, which actually happened just a few issues ago. Oh, and I also once did a few days' work for (and got drunk in the presence of) Lewis Lapham, but he was at Lapham's Quarterly already by then, sharing an office with The Nation, and I'd be (pleasantly) startled if he had any idea who I am.]

Harper's is a magazine I thought I liked and wanted to like. I got a subscription in 2004 or so, around the same time that I got my subscription to The New York Review of Books—which, when my father recommended it to the relatively politically liberal son of a quite politically conservative family friend, the quite politically conservative family friend made me laugh by saying, "Oh, good. Why don't you just tell him to subscribe to Pravda?"—and neither magazine lived up to my expectations. Both were intelligent and ~~often~~ occasionally very interesting; both, in the end, would tend to wind up in recycling with very few pages actually read.

Boring. They were boring.

But Harper's I picked up again a little while ago, and somehow it's gotten really good. I know there was a big shake-up over there, and in no way do I mean to suggest (nor do I believe) that boring people left: on the contrary, my (uninformed) guess is that the shake-up was profound enough that it just freed the editors and contributors up to try new things in a way that would have been less permissible (and maybe even just actually a bad idea) back when things were running more smoothly. Again, this is me talking out of my ass (and has nothing to do with anything I've heard from my friend over there, see bracketed and italicized "disclosure" above). What I do know is that suddenly I'm not just reading the "findings" and 50–75% of the "readings," skimming the "index," and flipping through the articles to see whether there are any I'm willing to plow through, anymore; now I'm reading the whole damned magazine because it's damned interesting.

So my message to anyone out there who, like me, used to think, "I like Harper's in theory but don't really want to read it," allow me to share the good news: Harper's has gotten awesome. Indeed it's gotten better even than what I used to expect from it because it's funny now. Actually, I'll put it this way: if you like Alt85 at all, you'll probably like Harper's even better.

You know you love me!
XOXO
Gossip Girl

====================

^ Remember when people used to do shit like this, like in e-mails or old-school web sites? If you don't, you should probably see a neurologist because that was like 10 years ago. Unless you're a teenager, in which case scram, get off my lawn. Damn kids.

Here are a few random things from the second-to-last issue of Harper's that I copied down because I liked them and wanted to share them as examples of interesting shit those motherfuckers publish:

Houellebecq said: "The question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky."

What?? Amazing! I thought Platform was great and fucking hated The Elementary Particles, but this quotation might push my Houellebecq tolerance back into the black. P.S. I want my novels to address that question, too!

From the "findings":

Studies of cell-phone records revealed that college-age women call their fathers half as often and talk for only half as long when they are ovulating.* The researchers said that this may help avoid inbreeding.

The excessive cleanliness of modern life may encourage depression by killing off beneficial bacteria.

Neurotic newlyweds who have sex frequently as are happy as non-neurotic couples.

Particle physicists were optimistic about the possibility of creating something out of nothing, because nothing is actually something.

Amazing! And the current issue, which I was just reading in the bath† and have read every amazing word of up to page 19 so far, has juxtaposed a sampling of questions from the All Souls College examinations ("described as the hardest exam in the world") and a sampling of questions from the senator-shooting lunatic Jared Loughner's online message-board personality; either on its own would be amazing, but putting the two next to each other adds a whole other level of meaning. Here are a few of the All Souls College questions (which I sort of want to answer):

Is dark energy more interesting than dark matter?
What do extremes in dress and personal adornment signify?
Are universal human rights a form of cultural imperialism?
What can we learn from Las Vegas?‡
Is "women's writing" a distinct category?
What difference should it make to feminism whether gender differences are natural or socially constructed?
How many people should there be?
Is nothing sacred?

And here are two of Jared Loughner's questions:

Would you put a child's pair of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles underwear on your girlfriend?
Why Rape!!!!

Anyway, clearly I don't have too much of a point to make and already made it a long while ago: I like this magazine. Please note that it has changed, and it is awesome.

[UPDATE: OK, so I actually did end up skimming or skipping one or two things in the latest (Mar. 2011) issue, but that's all made up for by a few amazing "findings"—e.g., "The sexual arousal of men is dampened by sniffing the tears of a woman"—and by the footnote explaining that "effin' b" (which someone is quoted as saying) means "Fucking bitch," a beautifully responsible–mischievous clarification that of course I love, q.v., q.v.]

(via)

* Just realized that I feel about ovulating roughly the same way I used to feel about periods when I was a kid (q.v.); the more things change, the more they stay the ridiculous same.
† I felt like the tweet there (that I linked to in the word bath) came out a little wrong: should have had an or in there, maybe, to avoid the possible ambiguity or misunderstanding that all conditions, rather than any, needed to be met before taking a bath. Ruins the joke, sort of, no?
‡ Sort of did try to answer this one once, incoherently.

MEN

2011-02-13T00:51:00.000-08:00

This sign looks like it's suggesting some sort of progression—maybe a variation on Benjamin Button syndrome or a prediction of the course of future human evolution (a super slowed-down 2001 kind of a thing?). Either that, or it's trying to supplant this easy-to-understand diagram:

Humanity in a nutshell, for aliens—seriously: the idea is that aliens
would be able to make sense of this. I can't make sense of it.

The problem with this ad is it isn't specific enough.

2011-02-12T10:50:00.000-08:00

"Fuck this ad" isn't quite right. Maybe I need a new label: "Let's have a little fun at this ad's expense"?

My big question is: whom is this ad addressing? Particularly when it starts off which such a confrontational rhetorical question as "Are you kidding yourself?" it's hard for me not to raise an eyebrow at that opening factual claim: "You're the same age as your dad when he had a heart attack." They're really spinning the roulette wheel on this one, aren't they?

Percentage of readers whose fathers have died of heart attacks, percentage of those people who happen to be the same age as their fathers were when they died (or even within a few years of that age)—I don't have the figures and have no intention of looking them up, but this is a pretty small target audience, isn't it? Oh: and percentage of these people whose fathers' heart attacks were not only definitely related to cholesterol but were also pretty clearly the result of the fathers' not having done enough to lower their high cholesterol.* (Sort of accusatory about these peoples' dads, isn't it? Jesus, have a little respect for the dead.)

I'd like it better if this ad were like,

You're the same age as your dad when he had a heart attack. Like him, you still haven't lowered your high cholesterol enough. You're wearing the same hooded sweatshirt he was wearing when he died and standing in front of his old pick-up truck that you inherited from him, right in his driveway. Which is where he died. Seriously, what's wrong with you? Do you want to die? Is that what's going on? Don't give us that look! You're no better than your damnfool old man! You're dead! Do you hear us? DEAD!

Ask your doctor about Lipitor.

* Their low cholesterol levels were A-OK, though, so at least there was that.

parenthood [UPDATE]

2011-02-07T12:15:00.000-08:00

To be honest, I didn't get Modern Family, at first. People I respected said it was hilarious, and I trusted them enough to figure it was possible I'd get into it if I gave it another chance (and I did: I think it might have been the Valentine's Day episode that conclusively won me over, and now I think the show's just great), but before that happened, I saw this scene and just loved it—in fact it may still be my favorite-ever Modern Family moment:

[UPDATE: Looks like the link might be dead, here. If not, enjoy! But if so, know that it's the scene in which Phil, Haley, and Alex are all crying in the car.]

thoughts about porn

2011-02-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

(via)

A friend directed me to this interesting article about the effect porn has on men and, more specifically, on the sex they have. Lots of thought-provoking, sometimes troubling shit in this article.

I think that porn surely can shape men's sexual expectations in a fucked-up way (particularly if they're fucked up already, which probably a [slim] majority of all human beings of both sexes totally are), and the scariest part of the article, for me, because it made a lot of sense, was this piece:

...scientists speculate that a dopamine-oxytocin combo is released in the brain during orgasm, acting as a "biochemical love potion," as behavioral therapist Andrea Kuszewski calls it. It's the reason after having sex with someone, you're probably more inclined to form an emotional attachment. But you don't have to actually have sex in order to get those neurotransmitters firing. When you watch porn, "you're bonding with it," Kuszewski says.

Falling in love with the Internet is a terrifying prospect, as in fact I kind of discussed in a very early Alt85 post, here—and indeed there are all sorts of ways in which porn, particularly some pretty nasty porn that I know exists out there, is a little creepy, to say the outrageously mild least. That said, I'm going to spend the rest of this post in a devil's-advocate role, focusing on the porno-positives (or at least not-as-negatives).

Some thoughts:

"concerns about delayed ejaculation" – I have a little bit of a problem with an article mentioning this without also at least noting in passing that a lot of men are very concerned with the opposite problem. Delayed ejaculation isn't necessarily a terrible thing—and on (believe it or not) a philosophical and in a certain sense even ethical level, I feel like the problem with premature ejaculation is (relevantly to the issue at hand) that there's some value in getting off on not the mere fact of sexual contact, but sexual contact that actually gets you off—and also, importantly, some value in learning to be gotten off by more than the mere fact of sexual contact. This is a little bit like what Ferris Bueller says about worrying that Cameron "is gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she's gonna treat him like shit...'cause you can't respect somebody who kisses your ass." In other words, not being an automatic ejaculation machine but having to work at it isn't clearly a problem in my mind.*
"switching gears from porn's fireworks and whiz-bangs to the comparatively mundane calm of ordinary sex" – With the above in mind, I'll note, too, that one thing I wonder when reading this article is whether it isn't just true that some sex isn't all that great (that part isn't what I'm wondering because it's just definitely 100% true and not up for serious debate) and that porn, or anyway some porn, is just showing a kind of exciting sex that makes people realize how not exciting the sex they're having actually is. [Not all babies are cute. Not all sex is amazing.] And since I'm not an ignorance-is-bliss kind of guy, part of me is inclined to think that learning the difference between that which really turns you on and that which merely is sexual—like going from literal starvation to a place where your needs are being met so that you can start thinking about which pizza is the best pizza in town—cannot be an entirely bad thing, even if it does highlight some holes [bad word choice! gonna leave it!] in your sex life. Especially since not everybody actually likes sex as much as society insists that everybody does, is it really such a self-evidently terrible thing if people start to realize, "OK, so 'best sex ever' just happens not to be one of the items on the list of why we like each other and want to be together"? If it's a dealbreaker, it's a dealbreaker, and if it isn't, it isn't, but it is so.
Fuck novelty. I'm starting a new bullet just to break it up, but really continuing on the same point: yes, when you have sex for the first time, or for the first time in a while, or when you have sex with a new person for the first time, there can be a novelty involved ("Hey, look what you and I are doing!") that wears off eventually. And it should wear off! And if the novelty turns out to have been the only good thing about the sex, well, then, the sex wasn't that great. Does the sex have to be great? I honestly don't know; I wonder about that sometimes. But I do know that if a relationship is founded on a lie, that's a problem: if the sex you're having isn't all that exciting, pretending it is doesn't do anybody any good. And if porn makes you realize that it isn't, I'm not sure I'm ready to file that away under "things about porn that are bad for you."

Again, I'm playing devil's advocate, here. Obviously the idea that porn just shows people good sex is highly debatable. That that is in some cases true, I will argue vehemently; that it's always true or true even in a majority of cases, I wouldn't even begin to suggest. But I'm really only talking about those some cases, here, cases in which porn isn't creating fantasies for people but just showing them something legitimately great that they hadn't realized was out there. (I might in fact be inclined to argue that these some cases are the only cases that healthy, not-misogynistic men are likely to be into, but that's very dangerous territory—partly because I'm increasingly under the opinion that I'm a freakish anomaly in my sexual attitudes—so I'll limit myself only to saying that the men in the article who say they think of themselves as having date nights with Sasha Grey or who actually say shit like, "I love when Kasey [Kox] is fully clothed and smiling at me from her bed" [emphasis mine] are dingbats and cuckoo-birds.)

(via)

Best two parts of the article:

"I was with a girl who seemed to be in an arms race with porn... She had this imaginary Soviet Union she kept trying to out-fuck." Yes. "Women are turning up the dial" and maybe trying to keep up with porn. Women, please don't do this. Do not act. If you're enjoying it, be as vocal as want—vocal can be great, but only if it's your thing. Don't do some porn star's thing. Do your thing. [I think there's only so far you can blame porn for this: there will always be things out there that make people insecure—is imitating the way a porn star has sex inherently different or worse than imitating the way a regular actress flirts?—and the important part maybe isn't removing the cause for insecurity but overcoming the insecurity (and maybe removing assholes from your life, if you're actually getting pressure to be someone other than who you are).]
The Ghostbusters metaphor! Actually, I have nothing to say about it because the point it's making is exactly the same point the "Soviet Union" comment is making (and my commentary would be merely to reiterate that "acting like a porn queen" makes sense if and only if porn queens are essentially doing an impression of what you're actually naturally sort of like)—I just really liked the metaphor.† [NOTE: Someone once angrily told me, when we broke up, that she had faked every orgasm. And I was like, "Um...yeah, I know. That was my least favorite part about sex with you!" (I didn't say that out loud. I'm not a total asshole.) She was fake-orgasming; I was fake-believing. Ladies, please don't fake. I know it's well meaning—I saw a great explanation/apology for it on Parenthood—but it's a mistake, and it's distancing, and it ruins sex. If you don't come, you don't come. Nobody expects you to be what you aren't—or at least no one you should be going to bed with does.]

In conclusion, porn is probably fucked up, but what matters in the end—as with alcohol—isn't the thing itself, or even its consumption, but rather who consumes it how and why.

Filth. (via)

* I might even go so far as to say that, in a world in which sex isn't only about the launching of sperm toward an egg, I'm not sure why men actually have to come every time they have sex—but that's a side note and not actually the point I'm making.

† Including it here in case the link dies / so you don't have to click it:

"Remember Ghostbusters? How in love Bill Murray was with Dana, the Sigourney Weaver character? [NOTE: I'd say "excited about," not "in love with," but that's not so important.] He feels lucky to even get her to agree to a date with him [NOTE: "excited about getting" more than "lucky to even get," but whatever, moving on], but then when he shows up at her door, she's possessed by demons, floating four feet above her bed, begging him to fuck her brains out. And he's completely rattled by it and can't get out of there fast enough. [NOTE: Wrong, but close enough.] Well, that's what it's like when your girlfriend suddenly starts acting like a porn queen. You're like, 'Baby, where'd you go? I just want my girlfriend back.'"

unconnected thoughts

2011-01-28T12:15:00.000-08:00

1. A character flaw.
I'm self-employed at the moment and have no money-making work to do today (only, you know, the work that actually matters and defines me and gives meaning to my life), and I woke up after 10 a.m., and the place I was planning to go to today to write is closed, so—and there's the problem, the fact that this seems like a "so" to me—I'm in grave danger of doing nothing today. The combination of a plan derailed and a late wake-up (itself a kind of plan derailed: I don't really feel comfortable waking up after 9 a.m.) triggers some very unattractive part of my personality (related indirectly but not too distantly to my nuclear escape plan) that says, "See this towel? THROW IT IN." Anyway, a valued friend taught me to view blogging as writing (which, at least on the most basic level, it literally is), so doing this here right now is a good step toward turning this day into a day instead of a lost calendar square. (I was about to say something like, "Yeah, but, on the other hand, really the only reason I'm writing all this is to shove the last few shitty posts under the carpet or, more appropriately [metaphorwise], shove them down out of sight" [q.v.], but then that's another character flaw: the refusal to give myself credit for anything and instead to attribute all to selfish, impure, or embarrassing motives. Gee whiz, what a doofus.)

2. Appreciation fest (TV).
Here is a partial list, without commentary, of things I've been enjoying lately: (a) TiVo, (b) The Onion News Network on IFC, (c) Portlandia on IFC, and (d) Funny or Die Presents on HBO. It is not impossible that all four of these things will factor into my evening. It is impossible that any will factor in without the first. Well, nearly impossible. The world is wide and rich with possibility.

3. Appreciation fest (film).
I watched Jackie Brown last night, which I didn't remember, and it's good! Is it the last Tarantino movie set in a non-heightened reality? (Some writers I know have lately used the term "heightened reality" in my presence, but actually I'm not 100% sure where to fix the lower border of "heightening," so the above question may be supremely ignorant—or at least jargonistically off base.) Put it this way: Jackie Brown is more in the Reservoir Dogs vein than the Pulp Fiction vein, and I hadn't even quite thought about it enough to note that those were two separate veins. It's certainly in a different section of the bookstore from Kill Bill!
I'll tell you one interesting thought I had* while watching it, and it's that on some level it was registering as a Coen Bros. film. Then I started thinking, "Huh, in a way True Grit was kind of weirdly a Tarantino film. And isn't Inglourious Basterds sort of Coensy?" (Boy was I stoned!)
Anyway, I liked it. I think Tarantino makes good movies. SORRY.

4. A thought about Tarantino.
I think that, in a very different variation on my feelings about Sofia Coppola's movies (haven't seen the most recent one, not in a rush to), I like Tarantino's style and storytelling more than his philosophy? Like, specifically, I think he has what you might call (annoyingly) an amazing eye and an amazing ear, and he sees things about people and the world (and cinema) and puts those things into his movie really well, like a real artist, but the conclusions he seems to draw about them—his sense of the value of things, and the sense behind things, and the lessons to be drawn from things—are a little... well, are less to my liking. So just about any time a character says anything that appears to resemble a moral (and this goes double for Sofia, by the way), excluding obvious ironic morals, or any time you start to get a sense of an actual world view or something the movie actually seems to be saying...
I haven't actually thought about this at all. I should think before shooting off my mouth. Is that the expression? "Shooting off one's mouth"? No I'm not going to look it up right now.

6. Relatedly, how I decided I needed to watch Sex and the City (if ever stuck watching it) in order to enjoy it.
In a Pierre Menard-y feat of creative interpretation, I need to assert to myself that Carrie Bradshaw is supposed to be a detestable idiot. As long as we're not supposed to treat her voiceover as the actual voice of the show—as long as we're not supposed to accept her and her insights as thoughtful, appealing, or valid—then I'm in. Have her be like a Kenny Powers figure, or a Humbert Humbert: lovable in important ways but essentially ridiculous, contemptible, and/or hateful.
Otherwise...yeesh.

5. ...
Maybe I'll go for a walk today.

* Interesting, eh? Well, that's presumptuous. –ed.

What's wrong with the New Yorker movie reviews (nutshell edition)

2011-01-27T19:15:00.000-08:00

David Denby's finally taken off his human-being mask:

Well, I'm sorry to put it this way, but "The Green Hornet" is what you get when someone who dropped out of high school to do standup comedy, then spent a decade in movies and television, conceives a Hollywood "passion project."

WHOA.

Introducing a comment with, "Well, I'm sorry, but," functions, rhetorically, like a get-out-of-jail-free card (or one of those Super Mario stars): "I'm just being honest, here, saying what's what without worrying about what's polite or socially acceptable, so don't jump all over me!"—and generally I'm sympathetic to the kind of risky truth-speaking that often follows such an introduction and skeptical of the censorship it acknowledges and defies. (In fact, I'm very willing to accept that The Green Hornet is a piece of shit [haven't seen it], and honestly I'm even willing to imagine that Seth Rogen is a fucking idiot—although, to be clear, I don't actually assume that, and I like him in his movies and in Freaks & Geeks).

But you know what? What Denby's saying here is just pure, out-and-out snobbery, and snobbery at its worst. This is what people incorrectly and unfairly assume of The New Yorker and its readership, the kind of insufferable elitism that people imagine is going on (but isn't really going on, come on!!). But right here, in that moment, it is, isn't it? I mean, what else is David Denby talking about?

The Green Hornet is what you get when someone drops of out of high school to pursue stand-up comedy and then goes into movies and television? I'm sorry, David—what kind of person are you saying that is? A moron? Is that it? Someone somehow unsuited for making movies, as evidenced by his—what, his inadequate education? So, what, movies are to be made only by the right sort of person—i.e., college graduates? Look, I went to a good college, I'm in favor of higher education, I believe in "high art" and "high literature" and all that jazz [although I'm agnostic when it comes to actual jazz], but Jesus Christ, dude, do you really think you have to go to college to be able to make art? Are you (among other things) fucking insane?

That's the worst part. The worst is over. But the review does go on, illuminatingly, to say, "Doesn't it ever occur to filmmakers and studio executives that some people, even younger members of the audience, might want to leave adolescence behind, rather than endlessly repeat it?"

What kind of fucking movie do you fucking expect The Green fucking Hornet to be?!

Pardon me. But, I mean, seriously! The sheer contempt for the under-educated, for stand-up comedians, and for film and television (and this from a movie reviewer!) is matched only by the wholesale pig-headed rejection of an entire mode of entertainment and movie enjoyment (again: a movie reviewer!).

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, when the revolution comes, The New Yorker's film reviewers should be the first ones against the wall.*

Take a look at this lousy prole!

* IMPORTANT NOTE: Please do not kill The New Yorker's film reviewers.

"It's not like Wagner was making pottery." [UPDATED]

2011-01-27T14:30:00.000-08:00

My "imaginary friend" read that last post, and we had the following discussion over e-mail (please note that he is both Jewish and a lover of Wagner):

G (11:34 a.m. PST): I don't remember that conversation at all.

Sex and violence are linked. What are we going to do with that? (Not rhetorical.) (That said, I don't need an answer.)
What's wrong with people who want to be humiliated, tied up, etc.? (Not rhetorical.) (Still don't need an answer.)
What do you do with beautiful Nazi music?

R (11:41 a.m. PST):

I think the most (maybe only) important thing in this regard is action. It is bad if someone kills someone else, for example, and better if he does not. (The rest is relevant as a kind of predictor and interesting as an ethical-moral-intellectual issue but otherwise maybe more or less insignificant...?) Small doses of things that in larger doses can kill you can be harmless, enjoyable, or even healthy. You have to get cut open to have life-saving surgery. Etc.
Depends what you mean by "wrong." I do believe that they'd probably be happier people if they worked out whatever issues are probably leading to these desires, and I do believe that happier is in a sense (maybe the only meaningful sense) "better." Oh, and it depends what you mean by "etc.": humiliated & tied up is fine, but carved up maybe not so fine? I realize that this only scratches the surface of an unsolicited answer to your nonrhetorical question.
That I think is slightly different because no one is harmed or was harmed by the music itself or its composition or anything like that. Take child pornography: a picture taken years ago of an underage person maybe does not directly harm anyone in itself, but it's connected to a crime and to likely harm in the way that a poem written by a child molester is not...?

G (11:59 a.m. PST): Music that was used to rouse the masses to kill Jews or to inspire anti-Semitism (Wagner, whatever all those Nazi war songs are that are now every Ivy League college's school song).
   Maybe the people who want to be humiliated are doing "better" than those who have not yet come to terms with their repressed whatevers, which means they're having to sublimate in other (harmful) ways....

R (12:14 p.m. PST): Come on, was Wagner really "used" "to rouse the masses" "to kill Jews"? (In spite of the "Come on," that's not a rhetorical question, either.) Is that why Wagner wrote it?
   Totally agree with the other point. I meant that people who want it are probably worse off than people who don't want it.

G (12:41 p.m. PST): Some argue Wagner was a rabid anti-semite and that his works are way antiSemitic. Hitler LOVED them. In one famous performance the crowning scene of the ubermensch in the opera involved the crowning of Hitler in the audience. It's pretty politically charged art.

R (12:42 p.m. PST): Not the same as art designed with anti-Semitism specifically in mind. Pictures of mountains taken by a child-pornography afficionado who is known to have revered Roman Polanski are not themselves child pornography.

G (1:08 p.m. PST): It's not like Wagner was making pottery. He was (some argue) writing about a socio-political worldview that valued one race over the other. It's arguably specifically antiSemitic. Google Wagner Ring Cycle Jews Antisemitism or something like that.
   I think it's all up to the viewer. Though there is something uncomfortable about valuing the product of a bad guy, regardless.

R (1:12 p.m. PST): What, so anti-Semitic pottery would be OK?

[No reply. I WIN.]

G (Jan. 28, 4:03 p.m. PST): You did not win. You cannot win. It would be like a cat "winning" anything.

women, photography, pornography, and darkest reality [UPDATED]

2011-01-27T10:57:00.000-08:00

I was going to include some pictures in this post and then got ethically conflicted and decided against it. Some of them are reasonably nice pictures of reasonably beautiful girls who look cool and relaxed, and the pictures have that '70s-'80s fetishism in them that American Apparel has helped turned into a very hip aesthetic—and since they seem "real," the pictures, they are in a lot of ways very appealing. But there's one problem: they were put online by the Orange County DA's office to help in the investigation and further prosecution of the man who took the pictures, Rodney Alcala, former Dating Game winner and convicted rapist and murderer of women (q.v.).

To make matters worse, part of the reason these pictures went public is that the DA has some reason to be concerned that Alcala may have murdered some of these very women. So, yes, the pictures are "real"—these are "real girls," just like in the early American Apparel ads and in amateur pornography, women who said to some guy, "Yeah, OK, you can take my picture"—but it's not impossible that what this "real guy" did after taking pictures of these "real girls" is sexually assault them, and just regular assault them, too.

Casts a whole new light on those American Apparel ads. Or but does it, really? That's why I'm writing.

Cute and just having fun. Or...?
[Photo credit: NOT Alcala, to be clear.]

I have at least two friends, both women,* who are in the pornography-is-inherently-violent-or-at-least-malignantly-exploitative camp, and I have always strongly disagreed, but this kind of thing makes me think twice. As I alluded to above (and discussed another side of here), the only kind of pornography I've ever gotten much enjoyment out of—or, say, the main way in which I've ever gotten much enjoyment out of any pornography—focuses on the reality of it, in one way or another: either (a) these aren't actors but are instead "real people," and, whether they're doing what they're doing because they're a couple who just decided to document their regular couple activities† or because they're getting a sexual kick out of a kind of kinky exhibitionism (or both), what we're looking at is "real sex" [not to be confused with HBO's Real Sex –ed.] and not some kind of tacky baloney, or, less often, (b) you remember that the performers performing are, themselves, "real people" actually ("really") engaging in "real sex" for a camera, for whatever reason. My feeling, in response to the porn-is-basically-rape philosophy, is that, no, obviously not: I'm willing to accept that there's some fucked-up shit out there, but some of it is self-evidently consensual and fun and, for want of a better words, kind of nice, or at least playful.

These pictures make me think twice because they remind me that you don't know the context, that you can't judge from a snapshot what was going on in a person's mind even at the moment, let alone surrounding that moment—let alone what was going on in the photographer's mind (which specific point, though, I'd still tend to say doesn't matter per se), or what was about to go on in physical reality due to the sociopathic photographer's actions. And let's forget murder for a second and stick with the less-extreme still-extremes: all of a sudden it's a little harder for me to insist that all's well in the American Apparel ads (particularly at least the early ads, which I'm given to understand were actually Dov Charney photographing girls he'd taken home with him, in his bed?) because the fact that the girls seem to be having a fine sexy time does not mean that they were not coerced or raped. I mean—duh, I guess.

Sexy pals just hanging around having a nice time....right?
[AGAIN: not Alcala.]

On the other hand, to be clear, it certainly doesn't mean that they were. My head was starting to go in the direction of saying, "Oh, my God, my friends were right: pornography is inherently violent!"—but then, no, I have a tendency to pendulum-swing sometimes and go too far. It's not that these pictures reveal anything evil in all similar pictures; it's that they take away a sense of confidence in the other pictures, that they remind you that we have no way of knowing that nothing evil is going on in them. There's a variety of porn that isn't up my alley, some pretty heavy BDSM‡ and "humiliation" stuff—women tied up, etc.—that seem always to include one "after" shot of the woman smiling in a bathrobe, just to let you know that this whole thing was a game. Putting aside the question of whether that proves anything (a valid question), what if the opposite is going on in other porn? What's the left-out picture at the end showing the woman who's seemed happy the whole time now clearly unhappy? What I'm saying is that this rapist-murderer's photography doesn't show that pornography is rape, but it does show that we don't know that rape isn't going on.

(I'm saying it doesn't show that there's rape going on in porn, but, to be totally intellectually honest, I have to at least note the possibility that there is some deep-seated psychological–aesthetic [or ethical–aesthetic–metaphysical] affinity involved, here: that maybe these kinds of pictures are inherently leering in a way that can be taken as evidence that— No, but even there I wind up in the same place [if only because plenty of women like to be leered at and objectified, in moderation and in the proper setting]: the problem with such a situation is not that it's evidence of rape, just that rape could be there, and that the women's seeming OK with it [and their enjoying being objectified, too, for that matter] in no way suggests that they're going to continue to be OK with it in the next [missing] slide.)

So back to the pictures in question. Here we know that the guy taking the pictures was a rapist and murderer of women, and there's even some fear that he might have been raping and murdering women after taking pictures of them, so we have every reason to believe that these pictures are, at least, pictures of women who, without knowing it, were in at least some degree of danger. The reason I didn't put them up is that I know (this part we know) that some people are going to specifically be turned on by that element of it—that some people don't want their "humiliation" porn to turn out to be consensual—and I don't want to be party to that. But the question, maybe, is: if you see a picture of an attractive woman in a relaxed and intimate setting, and knowledge of the context suddenly casts that picture in a terrible light—is it bad to still enjoy the picture?

I think the answer—or rather my answer—is that once you know something, you can't unknow it, and then you have to do with that knowledge, and with that picture, what (not to get all Obi-Wan Kenobi on you or anything) you feel is right. I guess what I want to do with that picture is acknowledge it, think about it, comment on it, not share it, and then let it sink back into the Internet depths where it belongs.

But would it be wrong for you to like it—morally wrong? I'm not talking about getting off on the rape-and-murder element (an interesting ethical question in itself, I suppose, but one I'm not interested in examining because, fair or unfair, I have a pretty strong emotional reaction to that and just feel like it's fucked up). I mean is it OK for you to like the picture in itself, out of context, once you've been filled in on the context—just to think, "That chick is hot"? If you like it, if you think that, does that make you a bad person in any way?

As one of my dearest, smartest friends would probably say,† I think you're all right.

(...although another thing that would be consistent with his character would be to add, with a shrug, "Or not.")

[UPDATE: The conversation continues here.]

* Women! Am I right?

† I recently had a conversation with my "imaginary friend," who gives advice that is (a) really good and (b) usually some variation on "It doesn't matter," and basically I expressed (at moderate length) the concern that almost all seemingly "real," homemade pornography must be either (a) fake and therefore manipulative or (b) real but probably stolen or leaked against the wishes of at least one person involved, probably the woman, and therefore essentially immoral; my friend said, "Huh...that's interesting. [brief pause] I think you're all right."

‡ Full-disclosure: I wrote this as "BSDM" and had to Google it to figure out what was wrong. Maybe an unfair Freudian slip?

three quarters of the way there!

2011-01-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

(via)

"Three quarters of the way there"? Creepy. What's "there"? At 1,000 posts, this blog just stops. Or maybe Alt85 is kind of an apocalypse egg timer, and you'll be reading the last post as the world crumbles and burns around you? Anyway, that last dumb post about the Pod F. Tompkast was my 750th, and I figure it's about time for another recap.

First, though, please note—

the new intro-to-Alt85 page, which I think does a ~~good~~ job of explaining what the hell is even going on here, here,
the new Facebook "like" buttons on all Alt85 blog posts (going back all the way to the very first)—so that if you have a Facebook account and you like something on here, you can click "like" to tell your friends (do it, tell your friends: I think they should know)—and
the new spin-off blogs, which you can find by checking out either my bare-bones "profile" or the intro-to-Alt85 page mentioned above.

And now, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO [a cliché]—your stats!

All-time top favorites, in descending order of popularity:

New favorites (since the last recap):

And might I give a shout-out to these blogs for sending readers my way?

Avoid This Job (hilarious and brilliant)
the New Shelton wet/dry† (eclectic, thought-provoking, sexy pictures sometimes)
Gothamist (full disclosure: I don't really know this blog—I'm a jerk, sorry)

Thank you thank you.

Headfoot is not dead. (It just smells bad.)

* You might want to skip the end of this with the videos-as-sound-files. Embarrassing.
† She's why people read "on not reading" (I forgot when I wrote the last recap).

Appreciation Fest: The Pod F. Tompkast

2011-01-17T18:16:00.000-08:00

I've listened now to almost every episode of Paul F. Tompkins's podcast, and probably the first important thing to note is: first podcast I've ever listened to! Never had any interest in listening to a podcast until I figured, "Meh"—not exactly meh, more like maybe geh?—"odds are I'd enjoy a thing like this," because, as I believe I've mentioned, pretty much everything this guy says is funny. He just sits there talking and what comes out makes me laugh. So: first podcast, and maybe only podcast, unless Louis C.K. starts a podcast or someone I trust not only tells me but insists, repeatedly over time, that if I like The Pod F. Tompkast, I'll love the [some other podcast]. But basically: not interested. Not interested, because I'm not trying to be listening to no podcasts. I just want to hear Paul F. Tompkins ramble hilariously.

There is one downside to all of this, and it's that lately, since beginning to listen to this thing, I've started talking like him, and when I say "like him," I mean "like a poor man's him." Not just poor: conclusively impoverished. Not conclusively. Isn't there some grammatical distinction between having something done and having something finished being done? I mean impoverished like exhausted finally of all funds. Let's say deeply in debt. I hear myself sort of doing a Paul F. Tompkins thing and it hurts me because it's so bad. And I can't stop myself. I sit back and watch myself doing this thing, committing this crime, and it's how I sometimes imagine (surely incorrectly) violent criminals must feel as they're murdering people: very nearly an out-of-body experience, like a dream, in which you say (quietly, weakly), "No, wait, don't do that," but you might as well be talking to a movie. That can't be how it happens: I bet violent criminals in a very basic sense don't really care. I am the Head of the Psychology Department at Oxford University.

I say all of this to communicate and simultaneously illustrate this basic point: the horrible but uncontrollable imitation—like a 12th-generation copy of a tape cassette, horribly degraded. Remember all the failed Ripley clones in Alien: Resurrection (not actually sure whether there's a colon in there, not gonna check) or the increasingly grotesque time-travel reproductions of Quinn and whoever the other guy was in that time-travel episode of Sealab 2021 (might be a colon in there, actually)?

Anyway, he's funny, and everyone should listen to his podcast. And if you don't think he's funny, you really aren't going to think I'm funny. Because I'm less funny. Fuck you, he's a professional comedian, the comparison is unreasonable.

In conclusion, this entire blog post is shameful and humiliating, but IT GOES TO SHOW, is all I'm saying.

Paul F. Tompkins is gonna knock you out. Mama said knock you out.
Paul F. Tompkins is gonna knock you out. Mama said knock you out!

straight man, guy with Hitler mustache

2011-01-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

Straight man
Guy with Hitler mustache

[Scene 1 – I don't know. Intelligentsia?]

STRAIGHT MAN: Dude, what the fuck? Is that a Hitler mustache?

GUY WITH HITLER MUSTACHE: No, dude, it's a Chaplin mustache! I'm takin' back the mustache!

STRAIGHT MAN: Oh, all right, I get it. Cool!

[Scene 2 – Intelligentsia again, let's say.]

STRAIGHT MAN: Wait a minute. You named your kid Adolf?

GUY WITH HITLER MUSTACHE: Yeah, man. After Adolph Marx! Harpo. Dude, think about it: it used to be just a name! We're gonna let that asshole ruin a name forever? Take back the name!

STRAIGHT MAN: Oh...OK, OK... I guess that's...OK...

[Scene 3 – Fuckin' Intelligentsia, why not.]

STRAIGHT MAN: What the hell, dude? What's this I hear about you committing genocide?

GUY WITH HITLER MUSTACHE: Ohhh, I see the— No, dude, not like Hitler. Like Pol Pot.

[music, bow, exit, return, bow, exit, curtains, lights]

Is this OK?

on and of Twitter [UPDATED x3]

2011-01-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

abstract representation of content (via)

On Sunday I was standing on the sidewalk—actually off the sidewalk, partway up the path to my building—checking my e-mail on my phone, and an old guy who was passing by angrily shouted, without looking at me but clearly for my benefit, "Oh, I'm so sorry I forgot mine at home! I can't go anywhere without it!"

Now, he was clearly demented, so in that sense "all bets are off," but his old-man rage about my being on a phone (not in his way and not talking at all, let alone loudly: guilty only of using a cell phone at all) struck me as not only crazy but also just fundamentally cranky—an obvious thing for me to say, sure, even to the point of being stupid, but I bring it up for a reason. And when I told this story soon afterwards to a friend—prefacing it, I think, with, "I was just satirized by an elderly lunatic"—she made the excellent point that his criticism was not only crazy and cranky but also woefully out of date: "about ten years too late," I think she said. We all have cell phones now. Believe me, I know that the mere fact of something's being universal doesn't make it right—but getting suddenly explosively outraged by a rather benign instance of something so thoroughly ubiquitous is a little...off? [UPDATE: Just realized, the next morning, that I've essentially set myself up here for someone to say, "What, you mean like this entire blog?" Anyway, just wanted to swoop in here and say it first so you can't.]

I intended to segue into a discussion about what's good about Twitter, but I've lost interest. Hate Twitter if you want to; I like it. But do ask yourself whether what you hate is Twitter itself or some regurgitated anti-Twitter sentiment you've been parroting since 2008. Pretty much everyone I "follow" is a comedian, some even professionally, and every time I go on there I am exposed to comedy, some of it even top notch, first rate, grade A, and/or state of the art. Because of that, somewhere along the line I got in the habit of using my own Twitter account to work on comedy writing, or a certain kind of comedy writing. I don't think I'm great at it, but I also don't think I'm godawful at it—and some of what I've done I'm pretty happy with.

Anyway, because the worst thing about Twitter is its search and browsing functions (or rather the total lack thereof), I thought I'd take a second here—at least as much for my own entertainment as for yours—to gather together a big handful of my own "tweets" that would otherwise probably never again be read by anyone. File this under "self-indulgence." Here goes, in no order:

Who invented the high five? I'd like to shake his hand.
–Oct. 30 [Hmm.]

I was just trying to remember what we did before the Internet, and then I was like, "Oh, right: magnetic poetry."

–Aug. 22

Who would win in a fight, God or Mecha-God?
–Dec. 10

"Life is for fags." #BigotedSuicideNotes
–Jul. 5

Why are robots always like, "I AM A ROBOT"? Why do they always say that? It's like, dude, no offense, we know you're a robot.
–Aug. 12

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more, braw. #JustAddBraw
–Nov. 10

DID YOU KNOW...If you took a human being's blood vessels and straightened them out in a line on a flat surface, that guy would be so pissed!
–Sep. 6

The Godfather Pt. II: The Legend of Curly's Gold #MakeEverySequelTheLegendOfCurlysGold
–Nov. 4

Where was E.T. shitting? In the closet with the stuffed animals, I bet.
–Jan. 7

Dear 12-year-old me: I am a famous writer and am married to the girl from French in Action. And yes, I have adamantium bones. #timetravelfun
–Sep. 18

"Bung-hole." -William Shakespeare
–Nov. 10

[UPDATE: see also, maybe]

If you like any of these, follow me. Think of my tweets as a kind of mini-Alt85. Or, if you don't like Alt85, don't think of them that way. But do please go fuck yourself.

secret moral (via)

humor and the limits of irony

2011-01-11T00:31:00.000-08:00

(or, Why I Didn't Tweet This Tweet)

not available at twitter.com/atrubens

I thought this was sort of funny but then imagined a bereaved mother reading it and it got less funny. And I don't mean that theoretically: I mean that it would actually be not funny if an actual bereaved mother actually read it—because babies die all the time. A careless Google search yields a worldwide infant mortality rate of 41 deaths per 1,000 live births and a birth rate of 490,000 per day... So here's another good joke: "You know who loves dead-baby jokes? God. He makes them 20,090 times a day."

Of course—or I hope of course—what you might call the "informational content" of these jokes by no means makes light of infant mortality. Rather the opposite, in fact: the only reason any of it is funny (if indeed it is) is that infant mortality—and not just infant mortality, but mortality in general, most specifically the death of a person's child, at any age—is incredibly terrible, such that the joke is not a wordplay joke or a "Get it??" joke but rather a kind of maybe you could call it "character-driven humor," in which the horrible moral obliviousness of the speaker is itself the source of the comedy. Put it another way: for the joke to "work," the audience must all be in agreement that there are few things less funny than a bereaved mother.

But therein lies the problem, right? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you agree with me that this joke is not actually poking fun of bereaved mothers. (It isn't.) Even so, it still is a joke about bereaved mothers, right? I submit that the main reason not to poke fun at bereaved mothers (if we were for some reason called upon to provide a reason) is probably the negative effect such a thing might have upon the feelings of actual bereaved mothers (or fathers or people close to either), the pain it might inflict upon them, deliberately or not. And if a joke "incorrectly" has a such an effect or inflicts such pain—"incorrectly" the way niggardly (which is not a racist word and has even less to do with any racial slur than the word cigarette has to do with female Smurfs*) offended people in DC and got somebody fired ten years back or whenever that was—well, isn't that maybe just as bad? If you've upset someone, does your intent matter? Or let's say this, more to the point: does your intent matter if you're aware in advance of the discomfort or pain you might cause?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm asking sincerely. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Or maybe it is but it's not really our responsibility. Part of me does thing that "insensitive" humor plays an important role in our society—even a little bit like the way apparently America's children are worse off for not eating dirt all the time (our precious immune systems all weak from underexposure to microorganisms, sick for being too sanitary).

How about rape jokes? Are all rape jokes—I mean all humor in any way addressing the concept of rape or even including the word rape—automatically unacceptable? I've tended to think, "No, of course not, as long as you're not actually in any way coming out pro-rape," but then I remember that a lot of people have been raped, and I get to imagining a rape joke's being told in front of someone who maybe was raped, unbeknownst to the comedian. Does that seem good to me? Does it seem comfortable? Am I OK with it? No. But then is that the proper way to judge whether the joke itself is OK? And what is "OK"? Is it maybe OK not to be OK?

Really I have no answer to any of this, except that I don't think there is a correct answer. I do know that I thought my joke was funny and didn't post it. But then I did post it, sort of, here. And fretted about it. And here we are.

[Q.v. super gay.]

[IMPORTANT NOTE: Let me underline that I am not saying that the repressed tweet was a good or particularly funny joke. I mean, my point here isn't the question of whether I should be keeping a piece of comic gold to myself for moral reasons: I'm talking much more generally about whether some things can be addressed comedically at all, regardless of success or the lack thereof. I wouldn't want you to reject this entire thought process out of hand just because you didn't think the joke was funny. Let's all try and keep our underpants on, OK?]

* Smurves? [No. –ed.]

Sometimes I can even remember her name.

2011-01-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

I heard this morning that Barry Hannah died—a while ago, too. (I was busy last March. I forgive myself.) The person who told me is also the person who first told me about Barry Hannah, more than a decade ago—so it's like she brought him in and out of the world. Except that that's what's good about art, right? Immortal?

Anyway, this reminded me of a story I wrote in 2001 that was sheer Barry Hannah mimicry.
Except then I pulled it up on my computer and realized that, no, it's sheer Denis Johnson mimicry, or, more specifically, Jesus' Son mimicry—the writing of a 23-year-old who wants to write like Jesus' Son (and never, ever rewrites: essentially improv-writes): put-on world-weariness and obliterated self-awareness. No, not put-on: aspirational. I wished I had this attitude—like Annie when she's pretending to be the Texan girl at the bar (sort of). Anyway, I think it's largely artificial, but it comes from a sincere place, in a roundabout way. The end is—let's just say, to be generous—a homage* to the end of "Emergency," the story that made me read Jesus' Son in the first place. I learned this morning that I thought mimicry had a K in it.

Hannah and Johnson go together, somewhat, in my mind, although they're also different. Hannah in my mind is maybe the missing link between Flannery O'Connor and Johnson, although if that implies an evolution or progression or hierarchy of talent or value, then no, not that.

Read Barry Hannah: Airships or Captain Maximus if you can get your hands on it. Make him immortal. Here's my bullshit, just for the fuck of it.

José

by young me

   That motherfucker Mick made a comment, and, next thing I knew, we were in a shack. A shack. I'm talking dirt ground—not dirt on the ground, but dirt ground—and this chorus of whimpering dogs on the other side of the wall. I blacked out, and then I was alone in the grass, and I couldn't open my eyes. They didn't hurt, my eyes, but they didn't want to open, as if I'd forgotten how to open them or the lids had gone AWOL. Of course if they'd gone AWOL I'd have had trouble closing them, not opening them. But anyway I couldn't see, and the grass was wet so I figured it had to be dawn or dog piss. There were other possibilities. The dogs had quit howling, if I was even in the same town anymore. I called out for Bobby and there was no answer. Then I called out for Alan, and nothing, so I lay there a second more and tried to gauge. In Platoon they tell Charlie Sheen, "If you get separated, don't call out; we'll find you." That might not be verbatim. So it occurred to me, shit, I just called out. I mean, I wasn't in Vietnam, but we did get beaten up and thrown in a shack: it's not as if we were tucked in safe in the nursery, either. I didn't call for Mick. I lay there with my cheek in the wet grass and my eyes closed and my legs heavy and somehow very comfortable, like when you're half-awake and not sure yet which half.
   Later on I was in a bar, still blind, heating like a kettle over the abuse from this fucker who had to have looked like Philip Seymour Hoffman, the film actor. I base that on his voice, although this guy didn't exactly sound like Philip Seymour Hoffman. He could have looked like anyone; I don't know. I saw with my arms—sometimes with the side of my face. I saw the bar. Hoffman poured beer in my mustache, sideways, so I swung at him spluttering and fell on the sawdust. There was sawdust on the floor. For some time after that I'd find some in my hair. Sawdust in my hair, in my mustache. Someone helped me up; it could have been the same guy. At that point I'd pretty much resigned myself to death. I picked at something on my arm and felt it in my side, so I stopped picking.
   Sex came in the form of Maddy Bodkin. I recognized the lips and the tongue on my earlobe before she said a word. She didn't ask about my eyes. She just led me to a mattress and climbed on me, and my lids came unstuck just as I let go inside her, a double miracle, triple. Her T-shirt was soggy—sweat, probably—and I could see most of a tit. It seemed sluttish. But I hadn't seen her in years and she still wanted to do me straight off, and that's flattering; it's the sort of thing that makes you feel good. I crawled out of that room with a smile where a face should be, spending so little on thought that it was news to me later when Bobby told me she's a whore. A room in a bar, my old college fuck-buddy. Who knew? I was just happy to see again.
   No one out there in the bar looked like the film actor, so I just broke a bottle and waved it around at everyone equal. That was mainly for kicks. The thing I was starting to think about was Alan and Bobby, and whether, where, and how.
   I've been told I look like an old photograph. Some say Civil War soldier. Some say Marcel Proust. Even before the mustache grew, I used to get that. It's why I grew the mustache. I sweat beer. When I was twelve I was mauled by a tiger. I lived. Now I was outside this bar, on the coast of a little island of electric light, dumb bugs popping in a deathtrap cage of glowing blue in my right peripheral, and me falling like the orbiting space shuttle: walking fast and going nowhere. There was darkness on all sides and darkness within. Even with my eyes working I could hardly see. For a quarter minute I thought about God. Then a pretty girl walked out of the bar and into the dark, and I thought about her. Her ass occupied another realm. It was an idea.
   I had to go somewhere. Moving was easier than thinking, so I stuck with that. I cut a path through the dark and didn't hear much more than I saw. I lapped the dregs, and it's then I realized: my brain was trying to shut down. I'd sensed it for days, months, weeks. I hadn't known it for what it was, but now I could see it, feel it, break under it. Someone had given up for me. I eked out, but at the same time undermined my eke. It was Maddy Bodkin. I'd given her too much. When I'd come, part of me must have said, "The End." Too much of me must have; part of everyone always does. This was before I knew she was a whore, remember. If I'd known that, it would have been all over right then. That "End" would have unfolded lazily in terminal cursive, spooling out like to overflow a petri dish. I'd have been startled awake too late. Hollering. "End" flowing into my maw till I quit. Quit.
   Car headlights cut up the dark real good. It was a C-section: Buster birthed me. How do you like that for a metaphor? I didn't know Buster's name till he told me.
   "I'm Buster. I'm with the U.S. Postal Service."
   We were in a U.S. Postal Service mail truck. The pretty girl with the ideal ass was in the back, sitting on the floor. Buster stared in front of him as he drove as if there were a road there.
   "Emma's in the back."
   "Emily," said the girl.
   "Emily. So, pal. Where can I take you?" A baseball bat rolled around on the floor of the thing. Photos scattered everywhere. We were in outer space.
   "Home," I said.
   "Hey-o," said Buster.
   "Hey-o," said I.
   "What about the mail?" said Emily.
   "It's there," said Buster.
   "I don't think Buster's a mailman anymore," I said, and I said it with confidence. I enjoyed saying it; no one in the mail truck knew who I was or how I talked. "Are you, Buster."
   Buster just smiled.
   "Fine," said Emily. "So then who's going to deliver all this mail? People sent this mail. They paid for it. Who's going to take it where it's supposed to go?"
   There was no road. There was indistinct movement under the headlights, but definitely no road. Outer space, it was outer space. I twisted around to look at the girl bouncing around in the back among the bags and boxes.
   "I will," I said.

* One of my favorite books, Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, suggests that it is "a silly...pretension to omit the /h/ sound" in homage, but so now basically I'm not comfortable with either pronunciation and have to throw footnotes in when choosing between a and an.

Appreciation Fest: Blue Valentine

2011-01-04T23:49:00.000-08:00

Oh, this looks like a nice little love story!

Thoughts:

I saw this movie alone. Here's one love story that's better to watch that way—alone, single, the works—because then at the end of it you feel like you've come out ahead. I can't even imagine watching this while involved seriously with a woman; in fact I can nearly guarantee that this movie will speed the end of any number of relationships. People are breaking up right now, as you're reading this, because they went to go see this movie last night. [In conclusion, Blue Valentine would not, I should think, be an excellent date movie.]
You could almost treat this is a kind of post-bus Graduate sequel. Almost. If the make-out king had knocked Elaine up?
Is Grizzly Bear / Department of Eagles the world's very most perfectly suited doomed-tenderness soundtrack, or does it just feel so perfect because it was sort of the soundtrack to a particular doomed tenderness in my own history? Anybody?
I think the whole NC-17 rating thing has got to have been a Catfish-style marketing ploy to lure in audiences that otherwise wouldn't have come—because a sex movie this was not. (I don't actually think that. I think America's insane. All love stories should have sex scenes like this, and it's outrageous that they don't. Sex is huge. What is wrong with this culture that sex has been relegated to pornography?)
There were times during the course of the movie when I felt like I was in love (which calls to mind the subtly amazing dialogue near the beginning about feeling like you know someone and not actually knowing that person—because if the love I think I'm feeling is an illusion...*).
I started at one point to think that the movie's big failure was that we never saw quite how they got from (happy) point A to (miserable) point B, but then I came to view that as a deliberate and brilliant omission, to leave out the middle—and way more depressing that way, too, somehow.
Jumping back and forth between super happy scenes (somewhat counterintuitively,† I'm going to pick the scene in which he goes down on her or, more specifically, the moment right afterwards when they're done) and scenes of marital disintegration is a great way to make super happy scenes painful to watch. It's almost a little unfair.
Depressing is the wrong word. Maybe despairing. No: hopeless. I'm not sure it actually made me depressed, but it did sort of make me lose hope.
On the other hand: ice cream and orgasms.

I'm not sure that this was in the movie. Discuss.

* See also George Saunders's story in a recent New Yorker, the story about the love drugs. I had mixed feelings about the ending but otherwise dug it. I don't say "dug." Or, I don't know, do I, maybe?

† This is counterintuitive only because of our Puritanical blinders.

Rooster mistaken for the Judge

2011-01-04T09:34:00.000-08:00

I complain a lot about The New Yorker's movie reviews. Example number umpty-ump* of their smug intellectual laziness comes in their recent review of True Grit: "The joke—the Coens' touch of sardonic black humor—is that, La Boeuf's scruples aside, the proper talk merely decorates the savage moral incoherence of the West. Here, if you want someone punished, you shoot him; if an Indian child is sitting anywhere in the vicinity, you kick him out of the way."

All well and good, except that the children Rooster kicks he kicks because he catches them torturing a mule: they have it tied so it can't get away and are poking it with sticks, and Rooster cuts the animal free and then kicks both kids off the porch they were torturing the thing from (in a way more humiliating than physically injurious, we might also note).

Rooster cut the rope with his dirk knife and the mule breathed easy again. The grateful beast wandered off shaking his head about. A cypress stump served for a step up to the porch. Rooster went up first and walked over to the two boys and kicked them off into the mud with the flat at his boot. "Call that sport, do you?" said he. They were two mighty surprised boys.

[Yes, this is from the novel, and the novel and its adaptation are not one, but in this case, minus the dialogue, the adaptation is faithful and direct.†]

The difference between this—what actually happens in the movie—and Denby's idea that characters are just kicking Indian children they happen to come across, like something out of Blood Meridian...it's not only a glaring misreading (or at least misrepresentation), but also a relevant one, because it makes the crucial difference between "savage moral incoherence" (made worse by the evil coherence of racism) and a kind of untamed, impolite, rough-around-the-edges morality—the morality of a man who, when it comes down to it, won't let a Texas Ranger sadistically beat a little girl, for example. Rather like what I claimed about the drunken fight in Iron Man 2 [see second footnote here], The New Yorker treats as gratuitous a scene that actually establishes something, and something essential to the plot: in this case, Rooster Cogburn's foggy and tenuous but real relationship to questions of right and wrong. And that's the kind of reliably condescending inattention that drives me nuts about this supposedly high-caliber magazine's film reviews. Pay attention, Denby! Focus a little less on coming up with snide remarks and a little more on watching the movie, Lane!

In conclusion, this blog should be called Short Round's Cheers and Jeers, or, truer to the feel of the current name, Alternating Rants and Raves.

* Or would that be umpty-umpt?
† Also, the book identifies the boys as one white, one Indian—would have to see the movie again to verify how the Coens went on that.

Ever wonder what she's thinking, fellas?

2011-01-03T04:07:00.000-08:00

This might have fallen under "helpful citizens," in that I do have a soft spot for sophomoric graffiti, but the idea that this might, even conceivably, as a joke, be what Natalie Hershlag's character is thinking (and if you have no idea what the this refers to, then please click to enlarge) strikes me as very nearly sociopathic and probably sort of crypto-misogynistic. The counterargument might be that this woman is an actress (and that this is probably a photo shoot rather than a still and therefore even more artificial), so her smile of course isn't genuine—but still, the dialogue seems to me to show a total disregard for content-of-image and emotional cues (à la caption contest) at best, and very likely a deep-seated distrust of, or disregard for, a woman's internal life. And sophomoric graffiti is ruined for me by the sense that it's motivated not by mischief but by nastiness and/or stupidity.

On the other hand (not to be confused with "the counterargument"), the idea that Ashton Kutcher's character's sort of happy–surprised look could be in response to his sort of understanding that she's smiling an "I wish he had a black dick" smile, if we're to accept that that's what she's smiling—well, that whimsical flight of fancy [redundant?] maybe flips the problem and makes the whole thing perfectly charming (and bizarre). Look at his face and assert to yourself that he's thinking, "Wait a minute: you're wishing I had a black dick!"—that that's what his expression is saying. Now that's [very slightly] funny!

Questions? Concerns?

2010-12-30T13:42:00.000-08:00

New to Alt85? Hungry for more Alt85 content, like Woody Allen boiling the cotton at the top of the pill bottle for extra aspirin, or like me in early 2005 playing Knights of the Old Republic because I couldn't wait for the Star Wars prequel I knew was going to disappoint me? Just bored and willing to click any link if given the gentlest prodding?

I've made a new attempt to introduce/explain/ease the Alt85 experience (replacing this craptastic gesture), and you can see it by clicking on "a user's guide" either on the right-hand side of the screen here or right back over there where I just said it earlier on in this very sentence.

And now you've got everything you need to take on the whole world. Let's do this thing!

ready to roll (via)

Appreciation Fest: True Grit by the Coen Bros.

2010-12-30T13:28:00.000-08:00

Rooster Cogburn looks again.

Here's another in what's shaping up into sort of a series of excited "Great job!" posts. When I saw True Grit, my reaction was basically, "OK, not bad" (or, as Patton Oswalt said, "That'll do, TRUE GRIT. That'll do"—which I think is basically the same sentiment, although I may have misread it). But when I saw it again...

Maybe a quarter of the way through, I said to myself, "I am liking this three, maybe four times more than I liked it the first time around"—and I enjoyed thinking that this might in fact actually be quantifiable, in a not meaningless (although of course very rough) sense—but then, before I could get much further in calculating how much more I liked it, I realized, "Whoops: I just love it. This is just a great movie."

The experience is almost identical to the experience I had with The Big Lebowski, which, the first time around, I thought had amazing and enjoyable parts and aspects but was, overall, not good—didn't "work" as a movie, I think was my verdict. Then I saw it again and loved it, and every time since I've loved it even more. True Grit went in my mind from being fine to being excellent. With The Big Lebowski, my theory always was that the plot is just weird enough and just subversive enough, of our expectations, that the movie is somewhat baffling and frustrating the first time through and actually feels sloppy, whereas once you know what's going to happen, you can focus on what in the movie actually matters, at which point the whole thing is basically just genius all around (narrative included). That might have been going on with True Grit, too—indeed I'm sure it was—but there's another element to it, probably more important, that I think can go back and apply to (and illuminate) my Big Lebowski experience, as well:

First time in, I watched True Grit in this way: focusing primarily on the events, on the wittiness of the story and the dialogue, and on the writing as aesthetic, you could say. Second time in, I watched it this way: focusing primarily on the characters, on the relationships between them, and on the writing as storytelling. And not only does the movie work better on those levels, but it actually works rather wonderfully on those levels: it was almost as if it didn't even occur to me, the first time through, to see these characters as real people or the story as a real story, almost as if I just expected the whole thing to be a cartoon and didn't think to look below the surface. "Almost as if." I believe that's what it was.

[SIDE NOTE: Another element to it was the adaptation question. I think there are two main ways to judge an adaptation: based on faithfulness (by which metric Kubrick's version of The Shining is only so-so) and based on what you might call success...but of course my choice of words here makes it pretty stupidly obvious what my bias has become. Adaptation is a work of translation, and translation is so much an act of reimagining that you might even see it—as someone I follow on Twitter (but whose tweets are I think "protected") recently said—as a form of fan fiction. I don't think True Grit is as true to the novel as it could have been, or as at first I understood it as being. But once it's freed up from that actually somewhat arbitrary restriction and is allowed just to be a good movie based on the novel, then you start to see how great it is on its own terms. And only Stephen King and his most zealous fans could really find too much fault with Kubrick's version of The Shining because no one but them could care that much about the sanctity of the original text. Based on is the operative concept. These movies are based on the books: they're not trying to be the books magically transformed into motion-picture form. To be clear: in fact I think True Grit is a relatively faithful adaptation, but I don't think it's as successful on that level as it is elsewhere.]

BAD GUMP (see below)

Three fairly arbitrarily selected thoughts about the movie, this second, passionate go-round [SPOILER ALERT]:

Tom Chaney, as portrayed by Brand Walsh, is Forrest Gump without the goodness-of-heart. Take Forrest, dump him in the Wild West, mistreat him as a child and give him no values, and what have you got? Basically a dangerous monster who's at the same time a deeply pathetic and sorry figure.
When Rooster shoots the horse, that is the only moment of Mattie Ross's childhood. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? Among other things, it's the only moment in which the two characters' relationship is plainly that of an adult and a child.
The line about how LaBoeuf "spills the banks of English" is, I immediately thought, flat-out Shakespearean. I don't mean that as praise, even: we treat Shakespeare as somehow more than human, but it's just that he was a very, very good writer—and, more to the point here, a very good writer with a particular sensibility, and what I'm saying isn't that "spills the banks of English" is transcendence poetic genius but that it is—well, just what I said: Shakespearean. You could see it in Hamlet. Whatever, I don't have to prove myself to you: when I Googled it to make sure I had the words right, I found some British person saying it was Shakespearean. (A British person! Q.E.D., motherfuckers!)

[Actually, that last point ends up being less about True Grit appreciation than it is about something interesting to me in itself: what is it about the style of the line that reminds me and that other guy of Shakespeare? Actually what I said right after seeing the movie again was that line was "on the same level of writing, or in the same category, as James Joyce or William Shakespeare." Joyce, too, hit that sometimes. You understand that I'm not exactly talking about genius so much as I am about feel—or maybe quality of prose? That—that feel or quality—is fascinating to me. Exciting, too. Good writing, man! You go!]

Anyway, I went from "meh" to out-and-out loving this movie. I'll see it again, you can bet, and—without actually thinking about it at all—I'm inclined to say that this is one of the Coens' top five. I'm delighted by it. The Super Coen Bros. have rescued the princess.

Remember this scene? Great scene!!

mixed messages

2010-12-27T22:54:00.000-08:00

Two ads on the same wall of the same subway car:

(Please click to enlarge.)

It's really just the juxtaposition I wanted to note, but here are a couple of other little notes:

The first of the two ads—the one that suggests that snoring might be something you can put up with, not the one that suggests that snoring can kill you—appears to have been paid for by a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The other ad, let me note, earns a "fuck this ad" label for listing dire consequences of snoring that—unless I'm mistaken—are in fact things that can result (but won't necessarily result) not from snoring itself, but from the sleep deprivation that can be caused (but won't necessarily be caused) by sleep apnea, which, by the way, is not synonymous with snoring, as the sentence structure asserts, but is instead one thing of which some snoring might be (but isn't necessarily) symptomatic.

In other words, the way snoring might kill you is a distant causal chain beginning with a possible association that the ad treats as definitionally necessary. In short, the Madison Sleep Center ad people are manipulators and liars. Sounds like the kind of folks I want handling my health care!

Remember kids: don't get body snatched.

2010-12-27T21:04:00.000-08:00

[Ho, boy—this is a dense one.]

The pod-person scream is one of the great innovations of the 1978 Body Snatchers remake. Another—and here I'm comparing it to the original Jack Finney novel, not to the 1956 film starring RJ Fletcher, although only because I don't adequately remember that first film—is the fact that at no point in this story does the main character even begin to consider that being replaced by a pod person means anything for the original human being other than death.

The impression I get (slash, fantasy I have) while reading the novel, which explicitly discusses the pod people as a kind of interstellar parasite, is that the original idea must have been an organism that essentially possesses the human host and takes control of it, but that Jack Finney had the excellent idea that actually seeing replacement humans growing was so creepy that it had to be included. Trouble is, those replacement humans screw up the also-excellent (and otherwise very compelling) question of whether, at a certain point, you might as well just give up fighting and go along with the invasion.

In the novel, the narrator says, "the idea of sleep, of just dropping my problems and letting go; letting sleep pour through me, and then waking up, feeling just the same as I did now, still Miles Bennell—it was shocking to realize how terribly tempting the idea was" (the main objection he has seeming to be that he doesn't want to lose his humanity, which amounts mainly to his no longer experiencing fear, hatred, or love). What's shocking to me is that he doesn't question for a second the idea that he will wake up. In the 1978 movie, it's made explicitly clear (as is already fairly clear in the logic of the novel) that the old you shrivels up and crumble into dust, and a new you, grown from a pod, would rise up and start acting like you. In what meaningful sense you, then, are waking up as that new pod I have trouble fathoming.

This is only a minor modification of this question, but that question became renewedly interesting to me when I not only was reminded that intelligent people disagree about it, but also discovered that a (disagreeing, intelligent) friend and I each thought the other was the one who was indulging in magical thinking and who clearly believed in a soul.

I found this fascinating because while I can imagine someone taking the opposite side from mine—saying that, yes, if a duplicate of you were created, so perfectly that its brain was an exact replica of yours, right down to every synapse and electrical charge, such that that new "you" had exactly your memories and personality and emotions and consciousness, then that new you would be you, not just in some kind of theoretical, "for all intents and purposes" sense, but in every sense (and that if I said, "I'll give you $5 if you get in this machine that will build a new you and disintegrate the old you," there would be no reason for you not to get in the machine because why turn down $5)—while I don't think it's crazy to believe that, my impulse was certainly to assume that this was because the person believing that must think that some incorporeal essence must jump from one body to the other, some consciousness-as-magical-force: a soul, in short. And yet here was my friend saying that I was the one who seemed to think there was some magical soul and that he was the one being reasonable and materialistic.

My position, the truth of which to me seems crystal clear and sharply defined like HD, is that creating a new you—no matter how perfect the duplication, and whether it's a pod person or a clone or the "teleported" you—has no bearing whatsoever on the original you because the original you is an organism, and whatever happens elsewhere, whatever other identical organisms you create, if you disintegrate the original organism, then that organism dies. And I believe that consciousness is something going on in an organism's brain, and if that brain dies, the consciousness dies. And I believe that if I create a duplicate of something, then those two things might be identical, might be indistinguishable from each other, but they are still two distinct things, not a single thing, and the existence or nonexistence of the one does not in itself determine the existence or nonexistence of the other.

To me, all the above is fairly concerete, materialistic, and logically sound: really all I'm saying is that consciousness is a nonmagical property of a physical object, and there is no magical connection between that physical object and any duplicates, no matter how perfect. So how am I the one believing in magic?

My friend, it seemed to me—if he did not believe that some kind of soul would jump from one body to the other—must believe one of two things: either

consciousness is so incidental, so meaningless, that our experience of experiencing things is itself an illusion, and there is literally no difference, for anyone, including us, between our experiencing them and an identical mind experiencing them—which to me seems like an instance of the philosophical-theoretical crowding out material reality, a sort of exaggerated hyper-objectivity that can lead a person to take into account everyone but himself—or, similarly but much more reasonably (in my view),
maybe in some way that's hard for me to wrap my mind around and hard for me to believe, consciousness, while a function of the purely physical, isn't for any particular reason bound to one place—not in a magical way, whereby something is in any sense moving around, but just in that all it is is a collection of concepts that, when thrown together, equal your consciousness, equaling it 100%, such that what it is for you to feel something would be there as well...?

Anyway, I feel like I ended up coming to a kind of resolution, and it lies in the idea—some kind of quantum-physics thing, maybe even the, I know, much-misidentified Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—that you can know either the identity of something or the position of that thing but never both at once...and frankly I (a) don't really understand that idea, (b) don't necessarily accept it on faith, and indeed (c) tend to think it might be one of those things where pure intellectual theory passes for a description of physical reality in a way that's effectively baloney...but I also know that very smart people think this is true and don't assume I know more than they do, and anyway, whether it's true or not is actually irrelevant because it was the concept that actually got through to me:

Oftentimes, I find, when two rational and intelligent people cannot find common ground on a disagreement, it's either because (a) they're not really having the same conversation—a question of the defining of terms—or because (b) the question being asked is fundamentally flawed.

In a very different context, I recently used this metaphor when giving a friend advice: "You know in high school when you'd be laboring way too long on some Math problem for homework, like the whole assignment was supposed to take 45 minutes and you'd already spent 20 minutes on this one question with nine more questions to go—and it turned out that you were on the wrong page of the textbook: like you were in 11th grade and you were trying to solve a 12th-grade problem? In that case, the answer you were looking for was: 'I'm looking at the wrong question.'"

I think that the reason why my friend and I disagreed—and the reason why each of us thought the other was basing his argument on some sense of a magical soul—was that the question is based on a fundamental impossibility. And I don't mean an impossibility like we lack the technology: I mean an impossibility like this is something that literally cannot be in any sense.

A "you" so exactly you that it really was you couldn't be an alien simulating your body but with new motivation and knowledge and slightly altered personality. Nor could that new you really be in a different place—because if a duplicate you were created right next to you and the original you immediately ceased to be, with consciousness continuing uninterrupted, then the new you would have a vision jump and would not in fact be the same you. The trouble with the "What if the machine malfunctioned and both of you were alive at the same time?" objection is that, in that case, the two of you would not truly be the same. And can two objects not only be identical but exist in the same place at the same time? At a certain point, is the identical-vs.-same distinction I mentioned above no longer a semantic problem but actually flat out meaningless?

If it is not the same, it is not the same. If it is the same, it is the same.

Maybe my friend thought I was being magical in my thinking because he was like, "How can you say that two things that are the same are not the same unless some magical property resides in one of them?"—while I was thinking, "How can you think that two things are the same when they are not the same unless some magical property is transferred from one to the other?"

You are an organism. There is one of you. If you die, you die, whether or not something that looks and acts like you shows up, and even if it thinks it's you. But if it is you, then (a) you're probably not dead, and (b) what the hell are we talking about?

This seems satisfactory to me now but probably will make no sense to me if I reread it. BUT WILL THAT ME REREADING IT REALLY BE ME??*

This mist isn't going to be you no matter what shape it takes.

* Yes.

the very end of A Serious Man by the Coen Bros. [SPOILER ALERT]

2010-12-23T23:03:00.000-08:00

[Maybe this blog will turn into a huge appreciation fest, like my ecstatic Community Christmas special ravings or my Sgt. Pepper "live-blog." Probably better than the fight-picking stuff I sometimes wind up putting up here. Well, here's a gesture in the "yay!" direction.]

This in a goy's mouth, Gottlieb!

The moment that Larry changes his student's grade, his phone rings with bad news from his doctor, a tornado bears down on his son, and...blackout. Basically, our beleaguered antihero makes his choice, and then, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, movie's over. I love it. Love it! I think it's brilliant, and I think it's hilarious. I explained my position on the subject to my imaginary friend "Gottlieb" a while back, but he forgot what I said. Here it is again.

1. Text messages

"Gottlieb": Ari and i just watched a serious man again. He'd never seen it. You told me what it's about. Remind me. He changed the grade, did a wrong, and damned himself?

S.R.: Yes, but the key to THAT is that of course it's a kind of parody or satire. We'll tawk.

"Gottlieb": I don't understand and it angers me. There should be an epilogue. I am American. I need to be spoon fed.

S.R.: On one level it's a very basic morality story: will he give in to temptation and abandon God? That story is profoundly complicated by the fact that WE and IT do not in fact believe -- essentially it's an atheist movie, I think -- which takes what on a very straightforward level FUNCTIONS as a morality tale and turns it into dark comedy. When "God punishes him," I think we're to understand on the most literal-available level that that's not REALLY true...or it's true in reality of the plot, but we and the movie don't really believe it. Why am I texting all this to you and not e-mailing?

"Gottlieb": So it's a put on? I see.

S.R.: I wouldn't exactly call it that. He is punished by God. But that's like a red-herring moral. We'll talk.

"Gottlieb": I don't understand it. I don't want to talk. I want the answer.

E-mails

S.R.: It's the moral/comic equivalent of the scary-movie gesture of, "See? There's nothing under your bed. Now try to let Mommy and Daddy get a little slee-AAAAAAAAA!!!"
The whole movie is a dark-comic exploration of the ABSURDITY of the world or of this religion's ridiculous attempts to explain it, and we DO care whether he holds on to his principles but aren't sure we're right that it makes any difference (you should like this: nihilism vs value), and that in the end his decision is met with IMMEDIATE, concrete, "Old Testament" retribution is a hilarious, arguably absurdist joke: after all this moral subtlety and ambiguity and probable meaninglessness, it turns out that, yes, God is watching you with his finger on the holy trigger?
Funny. It's funny.

"Gottlieb": I said to ari as he was changing the grade, "does anyone care that he's changing the grade? I mean, after all this, are we supposed to be ambivalent about this?"

S.R. I think where I was/am when he starts to change the grade—and where I believe the Coen Bros. want you to be—is somewhere in this constellation:

he probably shouldn't do this
but that's a moral thing and morality is probably bunk
and also, real, practical good will come of this as opposed to something on the level of mere principle
except that he's surrendering something inside of himself, which is probably a bad thing, no matter how silly or not silly the principle
although you could also see it as a positive step, his transcending this ridiculous, very small, simpleminded religion (in the version he knows of it)
all of which adds up, wherever you fall in that question, to the whole thing's being really a personal, psychological, existential thing rather than anything to do with religion or God—

—at which point God smites him. That's what I call a punchline!

Comedy!

[NOTE REGARDING THE SPOILER: Am I doing exactly what I said never to do here? Yes and no. No because it isn't in the theaters anymore and I said, "SPOILER ALERT." Yes because, yes, I am.]

grammar at the Arclight

2010-12-23T00:23:00.000-08:00

Spider-Man, turn off the weird coincidences!

As I was sitting in my seat the Arclight the other night at about midnight,* this guy came up to me—I don't know how old, older than me ["than I." –ed.]—and, I swear to God, he said to me, "Hey, can I ask you a grammar question?" I said, "I gotta tell you, you're asking the right guy," which is frankly obnoxious, uncharacteristically so, but, seriously, what are the odds? How many people in the Arclight at that moment knew and cared as much about grammar as I do? I mean, I'm a freak when it comes to grammar. His answer was, "Well, you're reading a book." And I was, fine, but what he didn't know was that it was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so that hardly means anything. (Sample prose: "Becky has a fine, beautifully fleshed skeleton.")

Anyway, what this guy wanted to know was whether a shitload of Toyotas were in the parking lot or a shitload of Toyotas was in the parking lot. I told him that there are group nouns that technically ought to be singular but are treated as plural—they might be "collective nouns" (terminology's always been my grammatical Achilles heel, as I've mentioned here before)—such that really you could go either way: although group is singular, a group of men can be treated as plural.

And I remembered right (of course). Here's what the wonderful Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which this weird event I'm describing just finally inspired me to get out of a box, almost a year after moving—one of my favorite books, note, in my "A" box) has to say about it:

Apart from the desire for consistency, there is little "right" and "wrong" on this subject: collective nouns take sometimes a singular and sometimes a plural verb. The trend in AmE [American English] is to regard the collective noun as expressing a unit; hence, the singular is the usual form... Just the opposite habit generally obtains in BrE [British English]... In the days after the American Revolution, not surprisingly, American practice was closer to the prevailing British practice... The reversal in practice has become so firmly established in AmE that it is hardly wrong to say that with certain collective nouns, singular verbs are preferred. But you can't be doctrinaire on this point of usage.

Sure enough, a minute after telling this guy that you could go either way (and therefore helping no one with the bet), I then actually got up and walked over to where he and his friends were sitting to say, "I'd actually probably go with 'There is a shitload'" (much to the delight of his friends, who I gather had put their money on the singular). I also noted that shitload's being slang sort of throws the whole thing off—or rather at least makes the concept of a "right" answer that much sillier.

[An interesting side note† is that, indeed, what the guy asked was not whether you'd say "a shitload of Toyotas is," as I reported at first, but rather whether you'd say, "is a shitload of Toyotas"—which is worth noting just because in fact I think I'd go with the singular for the one and the plural for the other: there is a shitload of Toyotas in the parking lot, but a shitload of Toyotas are in the parking lot. And I suppose this would suggest that the choice is largely aesthetic.‡]

In conclusion, I am a particular species of weirdo nerd.

"They tell me you are a man with true grammatical grit."

FOOTNOTES [I've been trying to do this less, but what are ya gonna do?]
* True Grit—enjoyed it but didn't love it. (Actually I sort of wished I hadn't read the book because there were bits that were really funny in the book and I bet would have been really funny in the movie, too, if I hadn't already known the joke in advance.)
† That I think this is interesting (and I really do!) just drives home my point about how frankly bizarre it is that this total stranger chose me to ask his grammar question out of everybody there.
‡ You might instead argue that a lot of number-agreement problems come from just this sort of thing, thinking the noun closest to the verb is the subject when instead it's the object of a preposition, and that maybe all this really proves is that it's hippie bullshit to say that "shitload are" ever is acceptable. But come on. (And if you really did call that "hippie bullshit," then I think you and I should just drop the argument and have a good laugh and maybe hug each other because, let's both be honest, that's pretty adorable.)

Amazon gets it backwards.

2010-12-20T17:49:00.000-08:00

This is not offensive:

the official cover art

This is offensive:

the Amazon download version's cover art

"I just watched the Community Christmas special A THIRD TIME."

2010-12-19T22:57:00.000-08:00

[This e-mail correspondence continues.]

S.R.: It's basically perfect. I've become fanatic about it: they're going to have to tase me (LIKE THEY TASE ABED IN THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTMAS EPISODE). How about how amazing it is, the combination of the way Abed is "driving" the fantasy and trying to bring his friends into it (going along with the psychiatric role-play only because he realizes it will work perfectly for his needs) because he needs for various reasons (basic character, upsetting news from his mom) to think of what's going on as if it were a Christmas special, AND the show's decision to depict this by treating it as if it IS a Christmas special? That's basically what's going on: the way the show chose to tell the story about a character's desperate but brilliant attempt to Christmas-special his life is to let him have what he wants. And of course they're not really in stop-motion, except that of course yes they are because, in fact, quite literally, that is what's going on in the episode as it was shot...
   But in the end the real kicker is that the feelings I have about it are the feelings I would have (if uncritically and uncynically open to it) while watching a "real" Christmas special: I am sincerely thrilled by the triumph of goodness in the end and everybody's coming around and learning a lesson about the spirit of Christmas.
   I am kidding about none of this.
   Oh, and as far as funny, what about when they're singing about what Christmas is (and please NOTE that everything they sing is in fact a pretty true and real stab at what Christmas actually is to people*) and when it's Shirley's turn, she goes, in full black-woman gospel-belter mode, "And for a huge percentage of this god-fearing planet it's about the birth of Jesus Christ!"

W.R.: Seriously why don't you marry the community Christmas special. Take it out to a nice dinner and open doors for it. Then, about a year into your marriage, go to Ikea with the community Christmas special and get some cute new bookshelves. And then in the car on the way home you two can laugh and laugh about how funny the Swedish names are. After that you should fingerbang your wife, The community christmas special, and talk about how you don't do that as much as you did when you started dating. Then you should lobby congress to see if you could marry the community Christmas special somehow again. And the clerk on the phone will ask you, "do you mean you want to renew your vows?" And really politely you should say no to that guy and explain that what you really want is a second, additional marriage to your life partner, your wife, the community Christmas special. There may be some confusion at this point, because the clerk cant see any real benefits to this second, redundant marriage. You should awknowledge to the clerk and to the supervisor (who you'll inevitably also speak to) that you realize that what you want is not currently legal but you are willing to take this matter all the way to the supreme court just because of how much you love your wife. Then the clerk, Earl, will probably attend to some other affairs before he catches the 9:41 train out of shittown.

[I like my friends.]

* This clip is not long for this world, so enjoy it while it lasts.

something new

2010-12-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

"Allow me to break the ice."

Rejoice!—for the era of the Alt85 spin-off blog has finally come. For a while there, as some die-hard lunatics may recall, I was under pressure to start a Fuck This Ad blog—and if it was dumb that the main reason I didn't was that I didn't want to call it anything other than "Fuck This Ad" and was told that I basically couldn't call it "Fuck This Ad," then, very well, it was dumb.* Anyway, I don't do that stuff as much anymore because I'm not on subways and subway platforms and walking past bills on post-no-bills constructions sites as much anymore, so that day has passed. But now I've done it another way:† behold the glory of—

Movies I Don't Remember

—where I try, from memory, to summarize movies I've seen but don't actually remember. (And I don't cheat: there are pictures, but I find those only after writing the text.) This is good fun for me, and other humans seem to enjoy it pretty well, too, so check in and check often. [At first there will be some material on there that some of you may have seen before, but that will fairly quickly be washed away by a flood of fresh, new idiocy.]

I've also started another spin-off blog for the auto-bioey fans: Special Factoids [this link may not work yet, depending on when you're clicking on it]. Special Factoids, I hasten to note, is not for everyone: essentially it's a Mezzanine-influenced exercise in making (rather, trying to make) the obsessively, exhaustively, nakedly, ludicrously autobiographical [a noun, in context] interesting, or at least readable—and how successful it is will be up to you (and to HISTORY!) to determine.

I have innumerable blogs. You don't know the half of 'em. My Internet presence is like ice-nine.

* It was.
† Unclear.

our secular Satan

2010-12-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

It's big now to condemn Hitler references. Counterargument: the greatest trick fascism ever pulled was convincing the world it died with the Nazis.

They're so cute when they're little.

[This rather humorless piece I started in Jun. 2005 and never finished...very possibly because of its grimness; I don't remember. (I also don't remember the specific context, but the gist is pretty well self-evident.) I have mixed feelings about posting it, but it's something I often want to express, so what the hell. GO GO GADGET DEVIL'S ADVOCATE!]

To Jon Stewart, in Defense of Comparing People to Hitler

Most Hitler references do indeed demean both the argument and, as you joked, Hitler himself (in the sense of his importance as a historical lesson). But to come out against Hitler references across the board is to come out against learning from history.

There are two contexts in which comparing a person to Hitler or a group to the Nazis can be worthwhile.

First, in a political–philosophical context, Hitler can be used quite sanely and appropriately to point out the flaw in an argument or position. In philosophical discourse, it's reasonable to jump to an extreme in order to test out a claim—because if something cannot function in extreme cases, it ought not to be taken for a general principle. For example, if I say one must never under any circumstance lie, you might ask me what I would do if I were hiding Jews in my basement and the Gestapo came to my door asking if I was hiding any Jews—that sort of thing. Similarly, if someone were to say that one must always support your president whether or not you agree with his policies, you might respond, "What if the president were Adolf Hitler?" The point in both cases is not that all lies betray Jews to genocide or that our current president is in fact Adolf Hitler, but rather that the suggested principle cannot hold up as a general rule.

Second, and more importantly, Hitler can be brought up as a historical reference point. Imagine a situation in which a political party did in fact threaten to turn our country into a totalitarian regime. Imagine, say, that a president running for reelection was under fire for scrapping the Bill of Rights and defended himself by pointing out that everything was running much more smoothly under his more authoritarian leadership than it had. Isn't it in fact a shame that any comparisons to Fascism and the trains running on time would surely be denounced as inappropriate? Unless we really believe that Hitler was a totally isolated incident in human history and that we never have to worry about such crimes again, how can we say that his name must never be raised in opposition to potential tyranny?

I think the confusion is due to the two biggest mistakes we make about Hitler. The first mistake is to think of him as the embodiment of evil. Certainly the man was evil if the word "evil" has any meaning at all, but people seem to have the tendency to think of him not as an evil person, but almost as evil in human form—our secular Satan. This rather simple-minded way of seeing things serves pretty well to prevent our citizenry from casually saying, "Hey, this Hitler guy seems pretty neat," but at the same time it makes it very hard for most of us to imagine how he might have come to power, why the Germans might have liked him, or indeed that such a thing ever actually happened in the real world—in other words, it makes it hard for us to be on the lookout for future Hitlers. As long as we see him as nothing but evil incarnate, we're totally blind to the ways someone who looks a little different from Hitler might end up doing just about the same thing. (You don't necessarily have to have that little mustache, for example.)

The second mistake is to equate the evil of Nazism with the evil of the Holocaust. Yes, the Holocaust was the Nazis' greatest crime. Yes, it is because of the Holocaust that they are most reviled. But far too often I find that people are in fact incapable of understanding why the Nazis might be incredibly bad news even aside from the "final solution." This careless thinking is particularly dangerous because it threatens to open a door through which fascism could enter our government so long as it wasn't anti-Semitic or racist. I'm Jewish myself, but I have no fear that an anti-Semitic uprising in the U.S. could lead to an American Holocaust; I can, however, imagine America's ceasing to be a democracy, and that's what scares me.

[UNFINISHED]

(See also.)

All your questions will be answered, one by one.

2010-12-14T18:40:00.000-08:00

the chicken

Q. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
A. The egg. Next question?

Seriously, though: unless you're a creationist, this one shouldn't be such a mystery to everyone. Chickens hatch from eggs, yes? Right. The question comes from the idea that, well, yes, but a chicken had to have laid that egg. Only problem there, though, is that whatever laid the egg with the first chicken in it has to have been ever so slightly pre-chicken, evolutionarily, yes? Because once that egg is laid, it's got its genes all set up in there—mutated slightly, is I gather how it would work, but not mutating, which means that any evolutionary change has to happen in between chicken and egg, not in between egg and chicken, which in turn means that if you're going to draw the evolutionary cut-off anywhere between chicken and evolutionary pre-chicken—anywhere at all in there—then that line is going to be drawn somewhere in between a chicken and an egg. So at a certain point there's an egg with no chicken before it.

Of course if you believe God created all animals in their current states at the beginning of time, then, sure, you might wonder whether God created an egg that hatched into a chicken or just created a chicken—but even then, that's not so much a brain-teaser as it is just a historical fact that you happen not to know. (Also, come on.)

So let's stop using this question as way of communicating total insoluble uncertainty—because really what it communicates is a question for which there is an answer if you think about it for 10 seconds.

the egg

This one goes out to all the princesses.

2010-12-14T11:13:00.000-08:00

"Me? Little normal old CGI preternaturally Disney-beautiful me?"

Watching Tangled yesterday afternoon, I found myself wondering what the effect is of our culture's tendency to show kids so many stories about young people who find out later in life that, all this time, they've actually been royalty: "Guess what: you're secretly a princess, and one day you'll be reunited with your real family—not these dumb assholes—and you'll rule the land!" Strip away the royalty element (or, more to the point, treat it as a species of metaphor), and what you've got is: "You are not just another dumb asshole, just another meaningless piece of dirt, just another person: you are more than that, better, and more important—the star of the whole damned narrative!"

I am far from the first person to note all that, of course. But I think I'm probably slightly less far from the first person to note this-here: I'm not entirely sure that all that is necessarily bad.

Traditionally, or at least for the past decade, I've taken for granted that the (as I understand it) relatively new tack of telling kids that they "can be anything" and "can do anything" is essentially misguided and effectively poisonous: see Alec Sulkin's take on the subject here. But then Alec Sulkin writes for Family Guy and dated Sarah Silverman and, according to Wikipedia, is about to get his own show on Fox, so things seem objectively to have worked out pretty OK for him, making that tweet not entirely a great example—or maybe it's a perfect example, just not of what we thought.

What I've started to wonder—and this is all still a question, I want to note: I've come to no conclusions about it—is whether teaching kids that they are way more important than any kid (even a prince or princess) might in fact be...good for their mental health? In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote that people "must believe that they are something more than they are in order to be capable of being what they are." And from the perspective of an atheist, it seems clear that the concept of God and the role of religion are effectively important insofar as they counterbalance the tendency for a sense of perspective to make us feel like nothing, to make us conclude that we just plain don't matter. From an atheist's perspective, believing in a God who loves you may just be a way of not succumbing to a sense of personal worthlessness.

So maybe being told stories, as a child, about children who are secretly royalty—and being told that you're special—really just ends up correcting for a pretty natural downward slant in our sense of selves once we realize that we're one in a billion (but literally, not in the good way where you're a stand-out, unique, spectacular one in a billion, but just—you know—one in a billion, like one grain of sand on the beach). Maybe we need to think of ourselves as important, not because we're kings and queens, but because we are important, at least as important as every other human being—including, I'd argue, kings and queens (although of course, yes, that depends what you mean by "important": I mean it more existentially and essentially and inherently)—and that's easy to forget.

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod Beeblebrox is placed in a device that is meant to overwhelm him with the inconceivable hugeness of the universe and his inconceivable smallness in it, and the point of the device is basically a kind of execution because everyone who goes into it is driven insane to the point of vegetative nonresponsiveness—but when they put him in it, he strolls back out afterwards in typically good spirits, and when they ask him, thunderstruck, what happened, he says something like, "It showed me what I already knew: that I'm the center of the universe."

And, now, I'm playing devil's advocate here and have been doing so throughout, but isn't part of the reason that's funny that—in a certain sense and from a certain point of view—it's always true?

Sam Rockwell was the best part of this movie, right? Am I remembering that right?

Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas

2010-12-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

I watched the Community Christmas special twice in 24 hours and loved it so much that I had a dream last night that I was becoming friends with Danny Pudi and he and I were playing around kid-style like Troy and Abed. Anyway, I gather (from the tepid response to a Facebook status update) that not everyone has had the same passionate response, so I include here, in its entirety, an attempt I made to explain what I loved about the thing. A very good friend had just texted me, "Literally watched it again this AM, based on your review. Upgraded to 'good'. Not sure I'll ever get to mindblown, but I also have bad taste!" (he's a joker), and this is—complete with any embarrassing typos or weird phrasing I may have made, because I'm not going back and proofreading or editing it—what I wrote right back via e-mail:

Here's what I liked about it.

Actually IS a Christmas special, while parodying Christmas specials.
Similarly, actually is [same], while commenting upon [same].
Does the ambiguous-reality/levels-of-reality thing, which I enjoy when done well, and
managed not to compromise the reality of the show in doing so, which is cool, but
did NOT rely entirely on the "this isn't actually happening" cop out because
what was "happening" in the "fantasy" was 100% straight-up a metaphor for what was actually happening in the reality on an emotional/intellectual level, such that
metaphor, fantasy, and reality were (a) perfect entwined, (b) perfectly in harmony, and (c) almost but not entirely indistinguishable from each other.
Oh, and it actually made my cynical heart feel Christmassy. The idea of the longest, darkest nights (i.e., winter) being the brightest and warmest is flat-out ingenious (and if the writers made that up instead of referencing something, they should win the Pulitzer Prize), but more generally, Abed's idea about Christmas meaning what it means to you made me realize what Christmas means to me: TV Christmas specials.

In short, all the craziness of the episode is entirely not gratuitous, the writing is brilliant, and the damned thing gave me an infusion of Christmas spirit like I haven't experienced since I was a wide-eyed credulous child watching cartoon characters ice skate and prance through fresh snow.

quiet orgy of appreciation

2010-12-10T13:57:00.000-08:00

Here are some things I'm excited about, in bold:

I got to see Patton Oswalt at the Aimee Mann Christmas Show last night at Largo, all of which was very good, but so that Patton Oswalt, man, I'll tell you—he's the comedian who most consistently over the years—ever since I first saw him on Dr. Katz in the '90s—has made me cry laughing, like with me literally dabbing away tears from my eyes and cheeks and even neck sometimes (highlights over the years including but certainly not limited to the Carvel ice-cream bit, the Alvin & the Chipmunks bit, and the Toronto open-mic bit). And Paul F. Tompkins, also at the thing last night, is a new favorite of mine, just so fucking funny all the fucking time—what the hell?—and specifically brilliant with the off-the-cuff hilarity: I've seen Dead Authors at UCB a number of times, and even when it isn't as good, he is always amazing (as H.G. Wells).

My focus at this thing, clearly, was the comedy, but I want also to comment on a particular stand-out surprise highlight, which shouldn't have been a surprise: Aimee Mann's husband, Michael Penn, who I had heard from reliable sources was an amazing songwriter but hadn't actually, you know, heard, turns out to be, yes, an amazing songwriter, and his first song, in particular, literally knocked my socks off: they just blasted off my feet, through my nice leather shoes, and through the air and onto the stage like some enthusiastic female fan's underpants. (That's not true, obviously: I'm sure no one there could have mistaken socks for women's underwear.)

Michael Penn*

I will confess to not having been over-familiar with Aimee Mann's music, and today I got ahold [I can't get it through my head that ahold is not a word, and this is because of the now-familiar English major's curse of knowing words that were words once and now can be found only in the OED] of I'm with Stupid, which I'm enjoying very much but which I don't like writing because the with needs to have a lowercase W but that looks weird in a three-word title. Anyway, because of this Christmas show, I wasn't able to watch the new Community, which is probably my favorite show at the moment—that or Friday Night Lights (I'm on season two, which I'm told is the worst and is still really good)—and the good news there is that I still get to: I'm seriously actively excited to watch that shit whenever I end up getting to, whenever that may be. I guess that's it. Oh, and hooray for girls! Sorry if that makes me gay, but whatever, I like 'em.

SMELL YA LATER

* FALSE

Yeah, Los Angeles!

2010-12-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

I was going to just have that be my whole commentary—"Yeah, Los Angeles!" (or possibly, "YEAH, Los Angeles," not so much for emphasis as to communicate the particular tone I heard when I said it in my head")—but I figure it's more in keeping with the spirit of this blog to take a moment to elaborate.

You could say that what I like about Sean Farrell's caption here is that it's kind of the opposite of the caption I laid into in my latest outburst, here: instead of essentially just identifying "the unusual thing" (and saying, "What is this chick, drunk?" by way of a joke), the toenails caption responds to the unusual thing in the cartoon by (1) making the eminently reasonable assumption that we've all noticed it—yes, he's on the ceiling, good, go on—and then (2) commenting on it by not commenting on it, by glaringly ignoring it and acting like it isn't especially unusual.

Is the result brilliant comedy? Nah. I didn't LOL or anything. But, to me, "Now that you're up there on the ceiling, I've noticed that your feet are nasty," is just on a whole different level of comedy from, "What are you doing up there on the ceiling?! What is going on?" (Actually, that would be pretty funny, but only because I wrote it to be self-parodying and it's therefore not a very good example—fuck me, I blew it.) I've actually always wanted a caption like this (see here and here), and here it is, and— Well, same sky, same ticking clock, and it looks like I still can't move shit around with my mind, so I guess it's back to the old living block* with me.

SEE YOU ALL IN HELL.

* Living block? –ed.