strangetwn_god

Ok, I'm kidding about the pony. But that was the main thing that stuck out for me about the mega ratings-boosting CSI crossover in which Morpheus conducts his Odyssey through the world of human trafficking. Usually visiting people get reimbursed for cab fare or picked up by a worker assigned to escort duty. But nope, Morpheus gets ferried from the airport in a police helicopter every time.

Each location goes down the short list of CSI sins, and since there is a murder in every episode, that list is gruesome and short.

Miami: thou shalt not cut up bodies for disposal
NY: thou shalt not cut up bodies for organs
LV: thou shalt not covet your pimp's trick

New York though gets credit for topping the rest in pure silliness. Not only do you have Morpheus come out of the helicopter, but you have a meeting with a police informant held in a city park, for the entire purpose of getting Morpheus to comment on a war memorial. You have Morpheus cocking a shotgun. You have Morpheus hopping on a conveniently unlocked motorcycle to chase after a suspect. It's all very amusing and wanky.

I must admit, that I have this weird sort of thing about Nick Stokes. It comes from noticing that he never seems to get any character development love. We get entire seasons devoted to Grissom's intimacy issues, Warrick's gambling issues, Willows's daddy issues, Brass's family issues, and of course, Sarah as the perpetual victim. Heck, even the supporting cast seems to get more development than poor Nickie. Wendy and Hodges have nauseating sexual tension from season to season, while Nick got lucky once in the last decade. And let's not go into they way that every other episode reveals too much information about Super Dave's marital shenanigans.

It's not that nothing ever happens to Nick, it's just that anything that happens to Nick gets shoved into a scriptwriting limbo(*) where it never gets mentioned again. Nick's dramatic reveal of childhood sexual abuse goes nowhere and does nothing, while Sara's childhood abuse becomes almost a whole season of alcoholism and conflict with Eckley. Sara is sadistically tortured by a serial killer and (temporarily) leaves law enforcement. Nick is sadistically tortured by a serial killer and gets one flashback in the next episode. The painful development of the Sara/Grissom ship involved 8 years of innuendo and subtext. Nick gets a fling with a hooker who is murdered the next episode.

So of course, when CSI deals with the touchy issue of men who rape men, we don't get a hint that we've seen Nick have a personal reaction to a similar case before. We end up with a full episode of Minotaur China Shop treatment of how horrible it was that the kid was rape, and oh dear, doesn't that make him the prime suspect in our murder case. And on top of that, we have a transparently obvious love interest for Nick as well.

Ominous line from Morpheus: "For some men, violence is their sex."

Even more ominous line from Hodges: "I just want you to be happy."

Jump the shark moment: Greg, finding himself alone at the murder scene, declares that he's going to deliver an expository monologue explaining the clues by talking to himself.

(*) Nick's character development is apparently subletting a bedroom to Archie, who seems to be perpetually at a conference or on coffee break this season.

I'm trying to decided if Roland Emmerich's profoundly silly disaster movies end up supporting or undermining the wacky theories they are tied to. His previous effort after all was based on a book co-authored by conspiracy-radio guru Art Bell, and Whitney Streiber, the guy who popularized the concept of alien buggery. The Day After Tomorrow makes more sense when you realize it's a divinely revealed text from Streiber's Master of the Key.

But, 2012 is an extremely silly film, pulling out all the disaster-movie cliches and padding them out with CGI shots of buildings falling inexplicably sideways into people. The opening minutes of the film give us obvious foreshadowing as a toy boat in a puddle is capsized by a passing car. Then we have the requisite handwavium as particle physicists discuss how neutrinos from a solar storm are heating up the Earth's core like a microwave.

The rest of the film follows by rote. You have the strained family unit anchored by John Cusack and Amanda Peet, the smart problem-solver played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt as the gritty realist, and Danny Glover as the President and moral center of the story. Some of the best moments have Woody Harrelson as the gonzo pickle-munching prophet of doom. And of course, a whole cast of stereotypes that serve no purpose other than to die on-screen deaths: the adulterers, the materialistic stepfather, the selfish capitalist.

What separates this from the classics is the cast of millions of computer-generated faces that get crushed, roasted, exploded, and drowned. It's a movie that lives and dies by the Rule of Cool and doesn't make a lick of sense otherwise. It's a movie that skimps on human drama and character in favor of car chases through collapsing buildings and slow-motion explosions of Yellowstone.

It's a film that strikes me as half-assed in many respects. A chunk of the film takes place in Chinese-occupied Tibet, while giving a handwave to the issues of occupation and declining to give the aging Buddhist lama a proper name. The Russians or Ukrainians (the film isn't clear which) are greedy and newly rich. The African-American jazz man still has a room just off the kitchen.

But hey, as long as we have aircraft carriers crashing into Washington, DC, it's all cool.

Lessons learned from CSI:

If your neocortex is destroyed, you'll at least eat your cheereos before your die.

Bachelor parties are a bad idea. Your best friends get stoned, and end up killing a guy over a stolen Matisse. And your future father-in-law is likely to kidnap you and stick you in the middle of the ocean in a dingy.

Meanwhile, it's the New York gang's turn to get preachy over the economic crisis. We find that Hawks lost his home due to bad investments, and of course, the lab tech is into the fetish of the month, "sloshing." In another year, they'll give up the pretense of linking strip clubs and fetish events into the plotl, and just spend five minutes in Act II showing gratuitous choreographed pole dancing and dry humping in lingerie.

Since I'm a glutton for punishment I'm trying NaNoWriMo again. So far, I'm only 600 words behind. But found a cool toy that makes word clouds from text. Here is the second half of Chapter 2.

From nano2009

Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I put Flash Gordon on the netflix list. Conan the Barbarian is something I watch on a regular basis for the thrill of watching the future Governator of California act stoned and punch out a camel. But in many ways Flash Gordon is a prototype for Conan featuring:

• An obsession with pulp science fiction ubermenschen
• Absurdly lurid set design
• An overabundance of women in diaphanous harem wear
• Casting dictated by having a bunch of people just look good on screen
• A plot that doesn't make a lick of sense
• Bombastic music

The magic of Dino De Laurentis is that you never can quite separate the intentional camp from the crap.  It's always hard to tell when Richard O'Brien makes an appearance. It's got Queen on the soundtrack, Oompa Loompas in Ming's court, a painfully garish color palette, and Max Von Sydow on the throne. It's got a climax in which a phallic rocket crashes into a hole. And it's hilarious. 

When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect to see a zebra. Unless it's CSI.

You know what has more wank than the usual CSI morality play?

When they try to tackle complex issues like the latest economic meltdown, racism, or food production!

So of course, the Miami show has gotten positively preachy. We have an episode about a fund manager who swindled away millions of dollars from investors during the crash. He's graphically murdered by an airplane salesman. The best thing about this episode were the thuggish and charming aircraft repo men.

In the next episode they switch tracks to talking about cow shit on your salad. Which isn't that bad if you ignore the repeated reminders that they are investing labor and lab time for something completely out of their jurisdiction. The problem is that tracking cow shit evidently isn't enough to fill an episode, so when a second victim drops, we get zebras in the form of frankenfoods.

But in this case, the technobabble doesn't make sense. To make more money, big agribusiness cloned a bacterial gene into corn to make it more digestable. This gene just happens to magically transform into a completely different gene from a completely different species to create instant botulism.

Now granted, I'm a highly biased person who has a long-standing regional hate against Monstanto for manufacturing the chemical brew that turned my hometown into a Superfund site. But this voodoo genetics isn't even wrong. I did some genetic engineering in my misspent youth, and it just doesn't work that way. It's like saying that a gene for white hair in cats suddenly becomes a gene for snake venom.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, we have zebras in the form of the poor misunderstood officer who totally was not guilty of racial bias in shooting a fellow officer in the back. Because he was half-blind and reacting too quickly to events. The episode closes with the ham-fisted rhetorical question, "Who is the bad guy here?" The people writing this episode, my friend.

You hear one of those dysfunctional-relationship songs you loved when you were 20, and start thinking "dump the motherfucker already?" And, "was I really that stupid?"

Concrete Blonde, "Joey"

And for some alternative stuff, Leonard Cohen.

I picked up Dies the Fire after hearing S. M. Sterling talk at a robust and brainy panel discussion and Dragoncon. I had wanted to pick up his Nantucket series that plucked the entire island of Nantucket out of time, but Barnes and Noble didn't have the first volume in stock.

Lovers of "hard" science fiction will probably be frustrated with the entire premise. Simultaneously to the disappearance of Nantucket, electrical, explosive, and steam technology over the entire planet Earth instantly stops working. No explanation and mechanism is given in the novel, and the token engineer/scientist of the novel blames "Alien Space Bats" in a brilliant call-out to fandoms of alternate history. Of course, I've long been of the opinion that most science fiction involves an Alien Space Bat somewhere in the plot.

A bit harder of a leap for me is the concept that the Wiccans and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism will inherit the Earth, or at least a large chunk of the American Northwest. I'm not convinced that chain and scale armor is really superior to the modern armor used by police and military forces. Perhaps more importantly, if there is anything the modern military understands well, it's logistics and support. Granted, one protagonist is a ex-marine who transforms a group of refugees into a fighting force, but people with similar skills would be living in most cities.

But the first novel in the series follows the parallel development of ex-marine Mike Harvel and Wiccan High Priestess Juniper MacKenzie from refugees to charismatic feudal political leaders. Along the way, the book touches on themes of leadership and mythology. While MacKenzie rather quickly leverages the shared common ideology of her coven into a farming collective, Harvel rather reluctantly accepts the romantic notions of a Tolkien fanatic to become the legendary Lord Bear. There are certainly historical referents for both. Along the way there is a ton of swashbuckling swordplay.

It's a fun read assuming you can put your disbelief on hold on key parts. And I like the way that Sterling plays coy about the existence of magic within the world.

Doing a lot more reading again.

The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold was picked up on one of my failed quests to find a local bookstore that's reasonably science-fiction friendly. It's a bit of an odd duck that keeps defying expectations. Dar Redwing Hickory is a Lakewalker, a career monster-hunter in a far post-apocalyptic future that rather deliberately looks like the early American frontier. Fawn is the plucky farmer runaway with a bun in the oven. It starts off as if it might be a Fantasy-Romance, but then gets rid of the sexual tension midway through the first volume with the obligatory "I never knew it could be like that" sex scene. From there it morphs into something very different, an exploration of inter-cultural marriage and conflict. Later on, we have another theme of Dar discovering his gifts as a mid-life career switcher. Each of the four volumes has its own monster, but the monsters take a back seat to the intercultural dynamics of trying to find new solutions for the monster problem.

At least one of the delights of this series is the setting. As with many post-apoc fantasy novels the apocalypse is set in the mythic past, with little more than scattered remains of cities and interstates as reminders of the current-day. Both Famer and Lakewalker culture are somewhat idealized views of the past. The Farmers and River folk are based off the American frontier of the early 19th century, with Daniel Boone's flatboat cited as a key source. The Lakewalkers are a bit more original: semi-nomadic mages and monster-hunters. It certainly is an alternative to the pseudo-medieval views of many fantasies. It's a good, light read.

What we learned from CSI this week, and some personal stuff:

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Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize, NASA bombs the moon, and Marge Simpson poses for playboy.

Well, this is becoming a weekly thing.

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Discovered this via youtube, you so rarely hear female vocalists hit that low of a register. Monique Ortiz's tenor is really distinctive.

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So this is shaping up to be the literary fail of the month. The Lambda Literary Foundation announced that among the criteria they will consider for giving out their awards to advance LGBT* literature is self-identification as LGBT*. Heterosexual-identified cisgendered people need not apply. This of course has pissed off a gaggle of writers of gay romance who have given the predictable whines that the contest should be open to anyone who chooses to write about homosexuality. Which, multiple notable winners of the past have, in fact, identified as straight. 

Most of my annoyance comes from the entitlement that insists that the Lambda awards should be an even playing field, while ignoring the fact that the publishing industry currently is not, and works about LGBT* people are crowding out works by LGBT* people, both on the bookshelves and in the critical buzz. As far as I can tell, booksellers are not responding to the current abundance of MM romance and erotica by expanding shelf space, they are doing so by dropping gay studies, history, biography, and other fiction by LGBT* people. 

Straight women as writers of MM romance and erotica are certainly edgy and progressive. They seem to spend as much time telling us how edgy and progressive they are as they do writing fiction. Meanwhile, the mainstream media seems absolutely smitten with the whole phenomena, making it much more covered than gay and lesbian authors, and straight people who dare to write gay and lesbian characters get showered with praise for it. Rowling gets showered with praise for outing characters after publication. And I see scant little sign that MM romance, erotica, fanfic, and yaoi for women (and incidentally men) are literary gateway drug to works by gay men and women. Some have argued that the increasing presence of this genre benefits gay men. Well, FF porn and erotica is over 150 years old, and has shown few signs of elevating the general opinion of lesbian women. I like good escapist erotica and relationship fantasy like anyone else. I got over the idea that it was political activism sometime last century.

The flagship, of course, is Brokeback Mountain, but is it really so great as to be the definitive work of the decade about same-sex relationships? It's not terribly progressive. The protagonists live deeply in the desperate closet, often unable to engage in emotional intimacy with each other. It covers the same ground as Torch Song Trilogy did two decades earlier, with less humor, and lacking the still radical statement that the refusal to embrace same-sex relationships justifies and enables anti-gay violence. Brokeback is a good, even great story, but surely there are other stories that need to be told. And while Proux does deserve praise for writing very well outside of her experience, it's not particularly novel in its depiction of same-sex relationships. Unfortunately, TTT is no longer in print in stage play form.

The LLF isn't saying that straight people shouldn't write about gay issues, it's not saying that people who write about gay issues are bad. It's not saying that those works shouldn't be published, sold, or bought. It is saying as an advocacy organization that it's spending its funds promoting LGBT* writers. And who qualifies as an LGBT* writer? Anyone who chooses to submit a work for publication. And things certainly could have been better had it done so from the start, but it's more than reasonable to do so now.

So, what's worse than the violent shooting death of a supporting character?

Putting a main character in a wheelchair evidently. Oh, how can I snark the season premiere of CSI: NY? Let me count the ways.

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If you were last seen fleeing the scene of a shootout between Russian mafia and police officers, you'll wake up in the hospital surrounded by all your friends.

Which just goes to show, television law works differently when cops are a suspect, except when it doesn't.

About 5 or 6 years ago, I attended a klezmer show presented by a campus Jewish organization which, among other comic skits, put God in the center of a divorce trial as an abusive and neglectful spouse. Since then the theological puzzle of the creator's relationship with its creation has been something of a philosophical sudoku of mine. It's something I find safe to indulge in now and then as I don't believe in a creator and have no vested interest in the outcome. But it's something that pops into my head in regards to Shane Acker's 9.

The story centers around nine sentient ragdolls and is an expansion of Acker's original 11-minute short that won him an Academy nomination. The dolls are survivors of an apocalypse, along with more malevolent mechanical monstrosities that hunt them down. The extended film starts as a mystery yarn as 9, the last to awaken, discovers his place in the universe, but becomes something more of a classic science fiction adventure story. But along the way it's a creation myth that evokes Genesis, Exodus, and the golem legend.

Although a lot of reviews criticize it for being a rehash of Terminator (and a dozen other stories of humanity threatened by science gone one step too far), but I really think that 9 explores the issue of philosophical responsibility of creator to created in a way that those stories do not. The conundrum in the Terminator stories centers on how do you avoid inventing what would replace us, where the moral conflict of 9 centers on how do you give your creations moral sensibility. And from the view of the ragdolls, how do you act as moral agents in a world where your gods are dead and were flawed to start with?  In the end, the protagonist 9 is a Moses figure who has his burning-bush moment and leads his people out of fear, but it's a considerably more complex presentation of that story compared to, as an example, Tron.

But the whole thing wouldn't work at all if it were not brilliantly realized on a technical level. The character animation and voice talent is brilliant and flawless, balanced against truly creepy monsters that are evocative of Jann Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. The whole realization of the world the characters inhabit is incredibly detailed, and the choice to have an extended introduction without dialogue pulls you into the more horrifying aspects of the setting. It's a brilliant animated film, and a great science fiction film.