Being an Account of the Curious Mishaps of Greg

So let's talk about Watchmen.

( The Setup, or How I Never Really Learned to Stop Worrying or Love Anything. )

( The Review: Here There Be Spoilers )

I should probably post something. I mean, hey, it's 2009 now! That's one more than 2008. You know what, let's kick it off like this: fuck 2008.

That's all the looking back I really want to do, but it's going to live in my head for a while, this past year, so, really, thinking a pat summation will bury it is hopelessly optimistic. Maybe 2008 was good for you, I don't know. Maybe it was filled with remarkable memories and thrilling encounters. For me, 2008 will go down as a year of regret, pain and doubt, unsalvageable to the very bitter end. There are things I lost last year that I probably won't ever get back, losses engineered by something dark and weak inside of me and the machinations of an unjust universe. It's been a year of paying deep for past mistakes. It left me very tired, and very adrift.

So fuck 2008. I'm glad it's gone. Let us move on, into this new era of prosperity and hope, and frigid winters, and global economic crises, and the disinterest of an apathetic world!

In something wrought by an ironic trickster god, my new year, in which Everything's Going To Go My Way, has mostly been agonising. That's not totally true - in it's two-and-a-half weeks, the year's been pretty solid, except for this monster cold I've had and the open wound on my back. There isn't really a story, there, about that last one, but basically there's a hole in my back that gets packed with a sterile gauze strip every day to ensure it heals properly. It is, to put it very, very mildly, uncomfortable. But it is a passing, physical misery, rather than a deep, soul-crushing one, so I count it as a win.

I'm sure I had something substantial and specific to talk about, but I'm only able to come up with tiny, fleeting things. So that's what you're going to get. Hey. At least it's free.

It turns out my sister writes some wicked good fan fiction. I didn't know this, as she is like a spy. You can check her stuff out here.

I've been reading Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth. It's about rival gangs of werewolves in L.A., written like a Raymond Chandler graphic novel. It is also an epic poem. I mean, that right there sounds like about the worst pitch you could make for a first book. But Barlow makes it work, and makes it work very well - Sharp Teeth is tightly written, moves to a quick beat, and jumps between the banal and the beautiful with a gymnast's ease. It has all the grit and glamour of the best noir and the mythology of the best genre work, grounded in a knowing, familiar language that, nonetheless, is able to transcend its trappings.

It's worth pointing out that it's not even really poetry - there isn't a rhythm, and, while it could be shoehorned into the nebulous definition of "free verse," it's really just a matter of formatting. Line breaks where appropriate. But that serves to demonstrate the way a writer can dictate the way a reader moves through a book, a form of authorial control. If the book looked like prose, it might very well have felt weighty or confusing. But, because it moves like poetry, it allows Barlow and his readers a freedom to shift perspective and to engage in flights of fancy and language that nearly separate from the story at hand, but never really leave the book's orbit.

I recommend it, I guess, is the bottom line.

I can't stop listening to "The Rake's Song" by The Decemberists. It's the first off their not-yet-released new album The Hazards of Love (which, apparently, will be a rock opera featuring something like six vocalists, each voicing different characters). It's infectious and energetic and locked into a pounding percussion that marks the start of a stylistic departure for the band. And it's dark in the way only The Decemberists seem to be able to manage, sneaking child murder into a pop song. You can get it as a free download from their site.

I was debating about applying to Clarion this year. I was wait-listed last year, (which was nice, actually - I would've killed to be there, but at least it was an almost instead of a not-at-all) and I'm not really familiar with any of the instructors this year (Holly Black's the only name I immediately recognized, and I haven't read any of her stuff). But then Gaiman put up a post about how you should go to Clarion regardless of who the instructors are because it's Clarion, and this might be my last year to try it (at least for a few years) and fuck it, I'll find the money, so here I go again, I guess. I only mention it, really, because I figure there might be someone reading this who'd be interested, as well. Check out the site, if you have no idea what I'm talking about.

I made the mistake of starting a game in Fallout 3 a few days ago, and it has taken an eagle's grip on my mind. It combines several things that I've been craving - post-apocalyptica, a '50s aesthetic, and an expansive RPG world. Plus, I get to shoot at things in cinematic slow-motion. Why do anything else?

I stumbled on this article from the Guardian FilmBlog about why The Sopranos and The Wire haven't had a bigger influence on film in the past few years (I'd argue in part that the people really being influenced by the shows might not have made their way into the game, but, then, what do I know?). It's a good read, and it underlines something I've been thinking about television over the past few years. I was, at one point, as I've mentioned before, ready to give up on television - the one show I was regularly following, Angel, had been cancelled, and I was willing to dive headfirst into books and movies and forget the small screen. But then there came the rise of DVD box sets and the so-called golden age of American TV drama, and now I probably watch too many TV shows to bear mentioning.

The thing, though, that shows like The Sopranos and The Wire demonstrate, is that television can do things that no other medium can do, and that's tell big, complex stories. Movies, for all their grandeur and huge budgets and giant press and staff and et cetera, are still rarely more than two hours long. The biggest undertaking that I can think of, as a single narrative, is the LotR trilogy, and that just cracks ten hours, in the extended versions. The Wire clocks it at around 60 hours. The Sopranos is longer.

This is more or less what the aforementioned article's about, but it's worth mentioning again - the scope of television shows allow for more nuance and characterization, more mythology and world-building, than any movie is capable of achieving. It's not a matter of quality, as "no medium is inherently better than any other," (which is, I think, a Michael Chabon quote) it's simply a matter of scale. Shows like The Wire make a case for television on an artistic level, and that's some defining shit. These are the shows we'll look back on and say, they changed the game. They gave us proof that TV's something real, something worth it.

(On an only tangentially related note, I finally watched the Tarantino-directed episodes of CSI, a show which I've watched but kind of hate, and I really enjoyed them. Mike, I think you had something to say about them at some point, but I don't remember what it was.)

And, finally, this is the coolest article you'll read about suicide, Porsche, and hacking the financial system.

"The heart is a bloody thing."
- Toby Barlow, Sharp Teeth

I'm here again to talk about video games, but this time as a furious reactionary rather than, I dunno, some guy in a basement. I'm hoping, however, that some of the five of you that still read this journal will find interest here, because it's about Final Fantasy, and I know you've played Final Fantasy. Don't fucking lie about it.

( The narrative of a video game is the emotional imperative for you, the player, to continue playing the game. )

(Wow, that was much, much longer than I expected it to be. But y'know what? Fuck it. That felt good. It's been too long since I sat down and tore something apart. Let's do this again.)

Neil Gaiman's got a great credo up on his blog on why defending freedom of speech sometimes means defending the indefensible, and why that's an important thing:

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

Because then, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

You should really read the whole thing.

The thing with me and The Office was that I knew I'd probably enjoy it. Everyone kept telling me I would, what I'd seen I'd liked, the cast looked great. I'm not a sitcom guy, usually, which is part of why I wasn't watching it, and it's not that there's anything particularly wrong with the sitcom format, (although, as Clay Shirky explains, sitcoms are the gin of the 20th century) it's that I'd been soured on it by years of shows that trotted out the same tired premises in the same tired ways. Yeah, I'd seen Arrested Development, but that had been dashed on the rocks like a tender baby seal.

The main reason, though, that I wasn't watching The Office was because nobody would fucking shut up about it.

( ...I have a deep-rooted suspicion that everyone I know is trying to fuck me over all of the time, and also that they're zombies... )

* * * * *

I saw Quantum of Solace last night.

( ...they're just trying to kill time until somebody shoots at somebody else. )

"Another girl
with her finger on the world
singing to you what you wanna hear."
- Another Way to Die, Jack White & Alicia Keys

... I just wanted to put it in words somewhere.

Damn, they look good.

You've probably heard about this. As the Hater points out, it's not funny. It's mostly sad, for everyone involved.

I was thinking about it, though, specifically about the aide or aides who took the call, and I wonder - with the GOP scrambling for whatever they can get, this close to the election, what kind of environment must these aides be in? And what kind of blame gets thrown around, after the fact? Palin's spokesperson wisely brushed the whole thing off, but imagine being the kid who took that call. Imagine how much must be happening that close to a Vice Presidential candidate who's been such a fucking, like, liability. I'd guess it'd be pretty fucking easy to get a random call and make the assumption that someone, somewhere had screened it already and it was legit.

That prank call isn't even worth the sad, slow head shake if it means some poor kid lost their job over it.

I finished Gears of War last night, and I had some thoughts about it that will not interest you, unless you're interested in Gears of War. I know most of my recent posts ("recent" here being a relative term - the past few months are very recent when considered in geologic time) have had very specific targets, and I apologize. Some day, I will write a wide-reaching post that will bring you all up to speed on my life, and also prove and disprove the existence of God. It'll have something about chocolate, too, or bunnies, I don't know. A post for all peoples.

( ...chainsaw-machine-gun porn... )

Cindy McCain Claims She's Just Like Any Other Female Human. (Courtesy of The Onion.)

An equation, demonstrating the problem with the film Max Payne (which, I should point out in advance, I haven't seen).

The Max Payne Movie = Max Payne the Video Game - the fun part where you're playing it + Mark Whalberg + Director John Moore + Winged Norse horsemen or something

Max Payne the Video Game = (The Matrix - anything resembling intelligence, philosophy, or originality + 8(bullet time)) + (film noir - intelligence - wit - intelligence again) + the fun part where you're playing it

Mark Whalberg = x(good), where x is determined by whether or not he is the star. If he's in a supporting role with a good cast, x is positive. If he's the star, x is very negative. Here, x is negative, oh, let's say 1000.

Director John Moore = one of those hyper slick music-video-style action directors - originality + he's the guy who did The Omen remake + seriously, Winged Norse horsemen?

Winged Norse horsemen = what the fuck.

This has been this week's edition of "Greg Hasn't Done Math in, like Six Years."

"You shine like the steel of my knife."
- Red Moon, The Walkmen

A couple of things tonight, and I'll try to keep it short.

Jon Scalzi has an incredible analysis of video game criticism up on his blog, a reprint from 2006, that I recommend to anyone interested in video games, criticism, or the study of entertainment media. Yes. That's nerdy. I get it.

Feel free to skip this next paragraph or so if you don't care about video games, or, specifically, the Final Fantasy Tactics franchise.

( This is the part you can skip )

One last thing, and this is expanded from that last post I did, and specifically the part about external factors affecting music: does anyone else associate certain songs or albums or artists with a specific atmosphere, or time, or place?

I'll give you one of my examples: the first time I listened to Stars Set Yourself on Fire was a May 2-4 weekend a few years back. I was in a turbulent place emotionally (a place that, in some ways, I haven't been able really to find my way back from since), and I was out walking, and I get to the top of this hill behind my house, and I turn around, and start up "Your Ex-Lover is Dead," and five fireworks displays, six maybe, that I can see out across the city are going off at once in this twilit glow, and there are these coloured explosions in time to the music, and -

And now that album resonates most strongly with me in the summer, just before nightfall.

Any songs that work best for you at the right time, the right place?

"And the articulation
In our elbows and knees
Makes us buckle as we couple in endless increase
As the audience admires."
- Sawdust & Diamonds, Joanna Newsom

Tell me if this is something you understand.

I have a strange, fluid relationship with some books. I suppose the same can be said for any narrative or piece of art: my feelings about it change drastically over the course of my consumption. Some things I feel the same about, more or less from start to finish, and others will win me over or fall apart partway through. But some stories, and it seems to happen more often with books, are all ups and downs.

( I go on for a bit. )

"It's chipped you away inside, and drawn all your blinds,
Conceal it all from sight."
- Tonight, TV on the Radio

That worked. A post was posted. The people rejoiced. I've been told a festival was thrown in Peru. It may or may not have had anything to do with this blog. I'm thinking may.

To continue blogging, because I might as well, a collection of thoughts and considerations:

In the stupor that is pre-premiere, post-strike television, you get stuff like The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which, tragically, ran in the room next to this one while I was trying to write. It's like Juno, except on teevee, slathered in Christians, and not at all funny. Whoever created this thing has not forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. They simply never were a teenager, and so have crafted teenager-shaped stereotypes that say things like, "I believe in abstinence," as a how's-it-going. It's basically what The OC might have been if it had been written by Mormons or something. Or, more accurately, the creator of Seventh Heaven, who is, in reality, Secret Life's creator. It made me want to shoot things.

I forsook Heroes something like two episodes into its second season, and have not been the least inclined to return, until they started running ads for this third season. Every time they're on, the comic book geek inside of me bellows and paws at the air.

I don't know how interesting anyone reading this finds the American election, but Teresa of Making Light had this to say about the GOP's pouting at the media's treatment of McCain-running-mate Sarah Palin:

What I’m about to say won’t come as news to anyone, but I’ll say it all the same: the far right is a whining bunch of sissies who can’t stand up to one little breath of a suggestion of a hundredth of the abuse they habitually dish out. This goes a long way toward explaining why nobody likes them and they can’t get laid for free.

Awesome.

There's this park out behind my house, and sometimes I walk out there in the middle of the night and sit at the top of the slide at the top of the hill. I listen to music or don't, and think, and watch the lights of Toronto in the distance, or the stars, or the way the wind plays with the sand on the ground below. Once, a few months ago, I was halfway up the tiny ladder when I saw that there was already a person there, asleep, curled up in a sleeping bag and hoody on the little wooden playground bridge. The sleeper was young, but I couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl. And even now I wonder what they were doing there, what had driven them to that bridge in the night. It's a question maybe I'll always be asking myself.

And, because mundane_toilet can apparently get away with ending his posts with poetry, here is an excerpt from Stanley Kunitz's "The Testing-Tree" to hail the end of summer:

In the haze of afternoon,
while the air flowed saffron,
I played my game for keeps--
for love, for poetry,
and for eternal life--
after the trials of summer.

Alright. Let's see if this doesn't become Half-Finished LJ Entry Number 8. I've got a good feeling about this one. It's got real drive. Moxie.

I've been meaning to write about something, if only to prove that I still can. Two Minutes has become almost reflexive, something I do in a short space of time because I have to, which is probably a good thing, means I'm growing as a writer, whatever, but writing-in-general has not been a thing of late. I suppose I haven't had a schedule conducive to serious creation, but most of the blame can probably be laid on the vasty, hollow ruins that were my mind and heart.

Maybe if I keep this short, nothing will break down.

I recently read - I guess this was a couple of weeks ago, now - China Mieville's collection of short stories, Looking for Jake. I've written about Mieville here before, and I wholeheartedly recommend him, and will continue to do so, over and over again. He's an astonishing writer, a brilliant stylist and imagineer, best known for his Bas-Lag novels (Perdito Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council). The Bas-Lag books are usually classed as New Weird, a young and still only roughly defined literary movement of urban fantasy/SF, and this is how I knew Mieville - as a maker of strange, alien, worlds, melting pots where dashes of steampunk and sci-fi coalesced with fantasy and horror into something gritty and strange and haunting. And good. They're very good.

Looking for Jake came as something of a surprise. With the exception of one story set in Bas-Lag (the urban fable "Jack"), most of the stories are set in modern London. Certainly they are fantasy and horror stories - "Familiar," for instance, is about a witch's familiar run amok on the shores of the Thames - but, rather than starting from whole cloth, Mieville fashions his strangely compelling and frightening worlds out of the stuff of Western civilization.

Part of what I find so compelling about Mieville's novels is the sheer abundance of creation. They are packed full with ideas, brilliant to bizarre, and he's able to build sublime setpieces upon even the most implausible and disgusting foundations. How about a race of beings whose bodies are human, heads are giant bugs, and who create sculptures out of digested paste? It's vile, it's unappealing, and in Perdito Street Station, Mieville uses khepri sculpture as the centrepiece of a heartwrenching denouement.

So it would be understandably jarring to watch this master inventor shift from the ever-changing and impossible landscape of Bas-Lag to the mean streets of London. But it's not. Mieville is just as at home working within the (relative) confines of the modern day as he is in a world of his own devising.

I don't know if I'm being clear. We can break it down like this, and this might be more applicable to the world of fantasy/SF/weird, but I think, to some extent, it works for all fiction: there are stories, or, indeed, whole schools of fiction, that posit implausible or flatly impossible realities, where the things that happen probably wouldn't, in real life. That doesn't get in the way of some kind of artistic truth, or a cracking story, or anything. It's just that we're dealing with forces not of this world. There are other stories that are grounded in the rules - physical, spiritual, emotional, whatever - of the place where we, the readers, live. Really good (and rare) writers can meld the two, and make imaginary spheres that we almost expect to occur - they make us believe that we could turn the corner and stumble into a completely different real.

In Looking for Jake, Mieville finds the dread and the magic and the mystery that could be lurking just under the surface of the lives we live everyday. Absolutely he's employing his formidable imagination, but he's using it to subvert the places and things that we take for granted. "Different Skies" will make you fear windows; "Reports of Certain Events in London" finds danger and mystery in the very streets of London. "The Tain," a post-apocalyptic epic novella, has practically ruined mirrors for me. "Details" is about how everything, everywhere, could be hiding monsters.

Maybe my favourite story in the collection, "Ball Room," plumbs the unfathomable dread in the children's section in an Ikea store, and may be the most frightening short story I've ever read (tied, perhaps, with Gene Wolfe's "A Sob in the Dark").

So. Read China Mieveille.

... If I wrap this up now, I may have actually pulled off a post. Let's do this.

I totally suck at this.

If anyone is in Toronto tonight, (Monday, August 4) come to a reading of my play, Inevitable, performed by and hosted by Nine Fifty-Eight at Rancho Relaxo in Toronto at 8. It's at 300 College St. (corner of College and Spadina) and it's free. E-mail me for details.

I saw The Dark Knight last night.

At some point, I may attempt to articulate it. But I can break it down this way:

Fuck Jack Nicholson. Fuck Michael Keaton, and Kilmer and Clooney. Fuck Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher. Basically, fuck everyone who had anything to do with Batman on film before Nolan.

All hail The Dark Knight.

This is one of the greatest videos I have ever seen. (If it's a little jerky, you can turn off HD.)

Today was an awful day, and now I can't sleep. I was going to make a post earlier (until all plans derailed in flame) that would've had a critical bent, and I would have talked about things like Evil Dead (awesome) and The Wire (so awesome) and even Wall*E (fucking awesome) but instead I think maybe you should see this.

Christopher Hitchens, noted atheist and kinda douchebag, has, in the past, been an enthusiastic supporter of Bush's war in Iraq, and has objected to the media characterizing waterboarding as "torture". A Vanity Fair editor challenged him to undergo the procedure himself. Hitchens accepted.

And now he considers waterboarding torture.

You should watch the video of his experience. There's a kind of abstraction in the dialogue about torture. We haven't been tortured; we can't really know what it's like, and our capability to imagine ourselves into the role of the torturee is largely informed by film and television, and it's lessened for it. Pain isn't usually dramatic, or significant. It's only pain.

Waterboarding is simple, almost mundane, and for that all the more terrifying. If a healthy man, in a controlled environment, with two methods of escape, has nightmares after a few seconds, imagine, try to imagine, what it might be like for somebody who was asked to give up information that they might not have. Imagine being asked to betray friends or family.

Imagine, if you can, just how sick things have gotten.

Edit to add: you can also read Hitchens personal account of the experience.

Things I saw tonight:

1. Evil Dead: The Musical.

2. A man, decked out in uniform and bullet proof vest, jumping into the side door of a Brink's truck, singing the theme to Mission: Impossible.

That is all.

I posted this over on Two Minutes, but figured I could put it up here, as well:

Meet Olga Nunes. She's something of a marvel. I first became familiar with her work as NeilGaiman.com's once and future WebElf, a magical, elusive creature who made the site tick. When her identity was revealed to the world, it came out that she is also an amazing singer-songwriter, and I've been listening to the stuff on her Myspace for months. Of course, this whole time I've been reading the Fabulist, a wicked-cool blog whose contributors scour the internet and bring back wonderful little bits of music and art and, um, toast. It only came clear to me yesterday that Olga, WebElf was also Olga-from-Fabulist, the founder and editor-in-chief.

Here's the point: Olga, loosely inspired by Two Minutes, has started her own tiny creative project called the Minute Minute Month. Like Chasing Concordia, she's writing a one-minute-roughly song three days a week. The first six are already up on her site, and they're superb.

Go. Listen. Love.

But that's not all! Olga's project inspired some of her friends, and now even more tiny creations are flitting about the web. Belinda Casas and Elaine Doyle have started writing 600 character stories three days a week, and Glenn Davidson is doing a sketch every couple of days on draft:exclusion. Two very cool projects that you need to see.

(Belinda reminded me, in a comment, that I should point you to Waterstone's What's Your Story? contest, where you can write your own 600 character stories on cool little story cards for the chance to win fabulous prizes (I think). You can also read tiny stories written by a bunch of cool writers, among them detective stories by Tom Stoppard and Neil Gaiman, and J.K. Rowling's unprequel to Harry Potter. Belinda's got a story up in the gallery called "Suspended." Mine's in there, too; it's called "Vanisher.")

And I suppose now is as good a time as any to point (once again) to Brendan Adkin's Ommatidia/Anacrusis, my inspiration for Two Minutes.

So there you have it - the mini-revolution has begun. Olga tells me she'll be posting on Fabulist, as well, which makes me absurdly, almost indecently excited.

I should put up a proper blog post, and I will. Soon my pets.