WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Attention, Shoppers!

Good news this year as the Wal-Mart Shopping Season revved into high gear on the Friday after the Macy's Day Parade: Although there were plenty of police-on-shopper beatings, shopper-on-shopper violence, and in-store tramplings, at least no one died this year, as did Jdimytai Damour, a Wal-Mart temp employee, when he was trampled to death by a bargain-frenzied crowd in 2008.  (Well, actually, Walter Vance of Charleston, West Virginia, did die in a Target store this year, but that was from a heart attack and at least it didn’t impede any of the other shoppers, who just stepped over him and continued scooping up those half-price Cars 2 videos.)

Shopping: The Most Dangerous Sport is a relatively new phenomenon, but now Scientists and Financial Experts have an explanation: It’s just a manifestation of The New Prosperity! Yes, Americans—especially Americans without jobs—are rethinking their options, and redefining their values, such as the importance they’ve placed on things like food, clothing, and shelter. “Let’s get off this hedonic treadmill!” they cry, as they go to live in a cardboard box outside Penn Station. Scientists at the Ministry of Prosperity say that if we just redefine our terms, everything will be fine. Poverty is Prosperity! War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Who wouldn’t pepper-spray another person for the chance to buy a $2 waffle iron?

 

 

Cyrillic Tiny-Voice Death Metal Techno

Sluggo sent me these, and that's all I know about 'em, except that they're amazing.

 

My RadioVision of the Great Icelandic DJ

Back in 2010 I posted the video for the Best Party's campaign song here on Beware of the Blog. The Party—which was started as a satire of regular Icelandic politics—actually won a majority in their local election, and their founder and chairman, Jon Gnarr, became mayor of Reykjavik. Now, through the magic of Benjamin Walker, and due to some mistake that no one can explain, I am to meet His Honorableness, Mayor Gnarr, and his chief strategist and campaign manager, Heida K. Helgadottir, when I introduce their keynote address on Saturday at the WFMU Radiovision Festival.

I became an Icelandophile when I worked at the dog magazine, whose offices were two blocks from Scandinavia House. I often went there for lunch at the AQ Café, and would check out their art exhibits and excellent film series. It was at Scandinavia House a few years ago that I saw the documentary Kurekar Nordursins, and became a huge fan of the great Icelandic radio DJ, the Cowboy of the North, Hallbjorn Hjartarson. The film records (in what feels like real time) the 1984 Icelandic Cowboy Festival, which took place in a tiny northern fishing village and seemed to consist of a lot of drinking, some music, and occasional attempts to ride shaggy little Icelandic ponies while drinking or singing, but mostly drinking. I was so inspired by it that I tracked down Cowboy DJ Hallbjorn and wrote to him, hoping I could get him as a guest on WFMU. I imagined gathering up donations of moldy country vinyl at the Record Fair and shipping it off to Skagastrond, Iceland, and becoming radio friends with this international superstar.

But then months passed, and I had given up before I finally got a reply. DJ Hallbjorn had to go to a great deal of trouble to find someone who could translate my email into Icelandic and then translate his reply into English to send to me. Of course, I had no idea he didn’t speak English. He plays all these American country-western songs on his radio station, so I just assumed … Plus, I’m American, which is also why I just assumed… Anyway, I felt bad for putting him to so much trouble, so I didn’t write again. But now, every year when the Record Fair comes around, I think of Hallbjorn Hjartarson and wish I could send him some Little Jimmy Dickens records.

And this year, tomorrow, I will get to meet real Icelandic People and ask them if they know Cowboy DJ Hallbjorn—it’s a very small country, plus he is extremely famous, so they might! I just hope Jon Gnarr and Heida K. Helgadottir speak English.

 

Try to Remember the Days of September

  

I skipped all the coverage of the 9/11 commemorations today. The message seems to be “Never forget,” but what is it that we’re supposed to remember?

I remember 9/11 very well: the immediate realization, when the second plane hit, that this was no accident, the WTF moment when we heard the Pentagon was burning. I remember trying to get to WFMU to do my first show afterwards, and being turned back by NJ State Patrol officers until I figured out an alternate way into Jersey City. I remember insisting that Sluggo and Dog Baxter go with me to the station, because I did not want to be separated from them again … just in case. I don’t remember exactly what I said on that first show, but I know that one longtime Listener was so upset by it that I had the archive deleted. So now I never will know for sure, but I can’t imagine I expressed anything except bewilderment and deep anxiety. 

I remember seeing TV news reports—with video—of the small plane coming from the west, hitting the west side of the second tower, the man with the British accent describing it to the female reporter as a small plane, like a Piper Cherokee or Dakota. I haven’t looked for that footage on the 9/11 Television News Archive because I suspect it’s not there.

Like the TV archive, lots of information is suddenly appearing on this 10th Anniversary: the Marine Major who was in the command bunker under the White House when Robotic Lord Vice-President Cheney gave the order to shoot down Flight 93. (But then the passengers crashed the plane, so they didn’t have to shoot it down after all. >Whew!<) The “eyewitness video of the Flight 93 crash site,” released only now that the anonymous videographer has died—shot from a hilltop 15 miles away and showing some smoke on the other side of faraway trees. The audio of all but a big missing 30-minute chunk of FAA and NORAD recordings made that morning. The FBI explaining that they simply forgot to tell anyone about the wealthy Saudi family who, shortly before 9/11, disappeared without a trace, leaving their luxury home and all their luxury belongings—except for a computer and the contents of a safe— after meetings with Mohammad Atta. Do you remember how no airplanes were allowed to fly for days after the attacks? Do you remember reports that President Bush made an exception for a planeload of wealthy Saudis who wanted to return home? Because I do. I remember that.

We are supposed to Never Forget, but there are also things we are never supposed to remember. The former “Freedom Tower” is now “One World Trade Center” because, says Chris Ward, director of the Port Authority, the name Freedom Tower would be likely to recall “painful memories of the 9/11 attacks.” So, never forget that we were attacked, but just make sure you remember those events in a way that’s not, you know, in any way uncomfortable for you. The Port Authority and Mayor Bloomberg are working hard to “rebrand” Ground Zero. It’s the World Trade Center now—and don’t you forget it. 

The Cerberus of September from David Zung on Vimeo.

 Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

Wars and Movies of Wars

Memorial Day brings cable channels full of war-movie marathons, but mostly these are not movies about war. War is the wholesale slaughter of those Other people you’ve come to believe are not even human, and is very tedious to watch. If the Viewer wants entertainment, then torture porn, where people are killed off one by one, is far superior. But of course Hollywood “war movies” are just character dramas in a war setting, so, you know, Pearl Harbor.

I have seen a couple of genuine war movies lately, though. The first, City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chen, depicts the massacre of 300,000 unarmed people and the rape of between 20,000 and 80,000 women by Japanese soldiers in the six weeks after the Chinese capital of Nanking was captured by the Japanese in 1937. I read Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, a few months ago, and it is truly shocking. The Japanese atrocities against the people of Nanking were so extreme that a Nazi party leader based in China petitioned Hitler to ask the Japanese government to stop the massacre. The Japanese atrocities against the people of Nanking were so extreme that after researching and writing their history, Iris Chang committed suicide.

City of Life and Death is an extremely beautiful black-and-white film of extremely ugly scenes. The film introduces specific historical characters, such as the Nazi German businessman John Rabe, who established a “safety zone” for Chinese civilians trapped in Nanking when the city fell. Chen tries to show the events from many points of view, including a rather sympathetic portrayal of a fictional Japanese soldier named Kadokawa. But that character gets mired in a clichéd love story involving a Japanese comfort woman that is unnecessary and detracts from the film. Still, in the depiction of unrelenting horror and tragedy bludgeoning helpless people into numb despair, City of Life and Death seems like a pretty accurate war movie.

Restrepo, which I saw last week at a screening that featured a Q-and-A with the film’s editor, is a documentary shot and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington over the course of a year they spent with an American platoon in northeast Afghanistan. Juan “Doc” Restrepo is the likable platoon medic who’s introduced in the first scenes of home video of him goofing around with the other guys being deployed. A few minutes into the film, after the platoon’s reached Afghanistan, one of the soldiers makes a remark in passing about “when Restrepo got killed,” and I was like, What? But yeah, he was one of the first two soldiers killed, and the others ended up naming the outpost they built after him: Operating Post (O.P.) Restrepo. (It reminded me of Forward Operating Base Tillman, named after Pat Tillman, who I learned about in the excellent book Where Men Win Glory.)

Restrepo is a 93-minute film constructed from 180 hours of raw footage brought back by Junger and Hetherington, who shot all of it themselves—no helmet-cam footage, they were really there. In one of the first scenes, Junger is riding in an armored vehicle that’s attacked—pretty harrowing. The Korengal Valley, where the platoon establishes O.P. Restrepo, was known as “the most dangerous place on earth” while they were there. Knowing that the U.S. has now pulled out of the valley, in spite of everything these soldiers went through, increases the sense of futility—for me, and for other viewers in the audience that night. But editor Michael Levine assured us that the Army loved the film, so who knows. Watching Restrepo, you can see that the soldiers are there because they believe they’re doing the right thing and fighting for their country (USA!), but Junger and Hetherington are there … to make a movie? Plus the soldiers have guns, but the only thing J&H are shooting is a video cam. Restrepo was nominated this year for a best-documentary Academy Award; Tim Hetherington went to Misrata to cover the Libyan civil war, and was killed there on April 20.

Today I saw Went the Day Well? an Ealing Studio “unofficial propaganda” film by a one-named Brazilian director, made from a Graham Greene story, filmed in 1942 but set in a near-future England where the war is finally over, and it was pretty crazypants so probably not really a “war movie,” but I recommend it, especially for the performance of Muriel George as Mrs. Collins, my new hero.

 

 

 

Something's Wrong at the BBC, But I Don't Know What It Is.

I only know that it involves a clown, and fire, and numbers chalked on a wall.

 

War Horse, Unpleasant Horse, Grass Mud Horse, Zoo

On St. Patrick’s Day, Sluggo and I went to see War Horse at Lincoln Center, just because it was puppets and it was so incredibly expensive that it seemed like the sort of thing we should do for our 20^th wedding anniversary. We knew pretty much nothing about it, so it was a happy surprise when we found out it features South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company.

We’d seen their puppets in exhibits in 2006 at the World Financial Center and last year at the Katonah Art Museum, and we’ve always wanted to see them in action. They did not disappoint. The life-sized horse puppets were fantastic: not realistic, yet completely convincing. The puppetry was truly astonishing, not only capturing the lifelike movements of the horses at different ages, but actually imbuing each one with a distinct personality. The staging was great, the lighting was great, the music was great, the animation was great. The acting was a little shouty; I sort of expect that when I go to the thee-uh-tuh but, as Sluggo pointed out, everything’s mic’d, so why? But: The other thing we didn’t know until we got there was that the story is taken from a children’s book. The book is told from the point of view of the horse, but apparently no one could figure out how to do that onstage, so the show is just a straight narrative—linear and obvious. I can’t imagine who the audience is supposed to be: The battle scenes are probably too intense for little kids, but I think most adults are already aware that War Is Bad. So if you are dotty about puppets, you will want to see War Horse, and if you’re not, you won’t.

If you are really, truly dotty about puppets, you’ll want to join me this Wednesday at 6:30 at the New School to hear Basil Jones and Brian Kohler, Handspring Company’s founders, discuss a bunch of academicized stuff about puppetry with Dan Hurlin and Yvette Christianse. At least it’s free.

Grass Mud Horse is a Chinese dissident thing on the Interwebs. Apple won’t let you play Unpleasant Horse on your iPhone. And the poster for War Horse reminds me of the poster for the movie Zoo. 

Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.

 

The Poodle Wins Again (or not)

The Westminster Kennel Club dog show is today and tomorrow, but this year I won’t be there. Back before magazines ceased to exist, I worked as an editor at a dog magazine, and part of my job involved attending the Dog Writers of America awards dinner on Sunday night, and going to Westminster on Monday and Tuesday, and having Wednesday lunch at Sardi’s where the Best-in-Show winner was served a plate of steak. I am not kidding when I say that meeting Rufus, the colored Bull Terrier who won in 2006, was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me.

Westminster is the first dog show a lot of people go to, because it’s famous and on TV and in New York, but I bet it’s pretty confusing if you don’t know what’s going on. Basically all the individual breeds are judged during the day on Monday and Tuesday, and then the winners of each breed compete in their groups at night—Toy, Hound, Non-Sporting, and Herding groups on Monday night, and Terrier, Working, and Sporting on Tuesday night. The winners from each of the seven groups compete for Best in Show at the end of the night’s judging on Tuesday. So if you want to see, for example, a lot of Boston Terriers—the best breed there is, proudly owned by WFMU DJs X-Ray Burns and Bronwyn C.—you would go to Ring 5 at 1:15 on Monday, and there would be 24 little champions right there. Each breed is judged against a specific standard, but there is a definite element of subjective, figure-skating-type interpretation going on. The judges tend to say things like the winning dog “would not be denied” or that the dog had “the look of eagles.”

The dog-show world (or fancy, as they call it) is a very weird subculture, and the best way I can explain it is to say that Best in Show is one of the most realistic documentaries I’ve ever seen. There are a lot of crazypants rich ladies, secret eugenicists, and people with control issues left over from their tragic high-school careers in the fancy. But there are also some fantastically interesting people who really love dogs. It’s a subculture in which older women are revered and gay people are accepted warmly. Plus, David Frei is just the nicest, smartest, most charismatic guy around.

One of my genius ideas when I was at the dog magazine was that we should start a Fantasy Dog Show League. Dogs already accrue points as they win shows over the course of a year, and are ranked monthly, so it would be pretty easy to set something up. And for the past few years a Las Vegas sporting book has been posting odds on Westminster Best-in-Show. The Smooth Fox Terrier is this year’s favorite, at 6:1, but I’ll take the sucker bet: Boston Terrier, 75:1.

UPDATE 2/15: Okay, so I lose. But also, the Poodle did NOT win the Non-Sporting Group, a Chinese Shar Pei named Miss Jayne Hathaway won, which was a major upset. In fact, the Shar Pei was 110:1 to win Best in Show—even less likely than the dog that should have won the group (i.e., the Boston Terrier).

The New Rules of Sustainability

When I was younger, living sustainably was called “being poor.” You lived in a small space and shared resources with other people—sometimes unknowingly, like that incident with my bath towel—and bought stuff used, and patched things up, and made do. Not that you couldn’t have a perfectly fine life, being poor in New York; I remember an article from the Village Voice, back when people would pay for a copy of it ... Aww, crap! I’m starting to sound like Andy Rooney! …  Anyway, I believe the author used the term “privileged poor” to refer to people who made, like, $20,000 a year as entry-level writers or p.r. assistants, and who ate for free by going to press parties, and dressed for free with swag from designer photo shoots, and took awesome free vacations by convincing someone they were travel writers, etc. But now the term “privileged poor” is mostly used to refer to rich kids who go play artist in Williamsburg for a while, kinda like those jerks in La Boheme. Plus, nobody’s giving away all that free stuff anymore.

Sluggo and I tend to describe our deal as “sustainable living,” and I can give you the whole spiel about why we don’t replace the 85-year-old falling-apart wooden windows in our house (“heat loss blah blah manufacture new blah carbon blah footprint”) or why we bathe out of a plastic bucket like it’s a choice. But really we're just broke. Sluggo just finished reading a book by a guy who went to live in hole, which he thinks sounds pretty good. Of course, this was a hole the guy built himself, not a hole that he just found, like the one Sluggo’s friend D. lived in, which was a caved-in sidewalk next to a building on the Lower East Side where D. went to live after a knife fight with his dad. Apparently, the trick with living sustainably is to live in an intentional hole.

The main problem with living sustainably is that you have to learn all the rules, and sometimes the old rules are replaced by new ones. For years, I’ve been refusing to buy those bags of chemicals that people put on their slippery winter sidewalks; instead, I buy plain kitty litter, because I learned that it was the Good Environmental Thing and also would not eat away your 85-year-old brick front steps. But then today here comes our fine County Government with their free Stormwater Rules refrigerator magnet that says, “Salt before it snows and never use cat litter or sand to melt ice.” So the rules have changed! But why? How come cat litter was Good, and now it is Bad? Or was cat litter always Bad, and kitty litter is still okay? (I don't think there is a difference.) Or what happened? And what am I gonna do with the 10-pound bag of kitty litter that Sluggo just bought? I can think of only one way to recycle it, and we don’t have a cat.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

Random Reading

My Grammy Carlton always said, “You can never have too many books!” and sometimes we owned as many as 20 all at once, including the Bible and a volume called The Library of Universal Knowledge (the Practical Self-Educator). Since I intended to know everything when I grew up, I began working my way through the Great Books on a recommended reading list I found somewhere. It was a good list, in that I read some books I would never have considered, or even known existed—Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars, for instance. It was good to have a plan and a focus, although I didn’t understand that my list wasn’t THE list; I didn’t realize that the list of books considered great would change over time, and that Saint-Exupery might not be the immutable cultural touchstone I assumed he was.

Before I found the List, I went to our little local library to browse and check out any book that interested me. But once I had my Plan I went to the library only to order certain books, or pick up books, or put books on hold. It’s only lately that I’ve rediscovered the joys of random reading. I have three main sources for books nowadays, and have very little, if any, control over what is available to me. I get books from the “new” shelf at our small public library, from the “take-one-leave-one” at the train station café, and from a friend of mine who sends me discarded review copies from her job.

The “new” shelf at our library features recent acquisitions from the county library system. This means that most of the books won’t actually end up in our library, although we’ll be able to order them later, if we want to go to the trouble. I usually don’t. Sometimes the selection seems like a total hodgepodge, and sometimes it’s like the autobiography of one of the librarians. Suddenly there are several books about couples therapy and divorce mediation; after a few months, those are replaced with a bunch of books about menopause and cooking for one. But occasionally there is a book that makes you wonder how it slipped through: I found The History of White People on the New shelf, and was very glad for that. Author Nell Painter is a historian who retired from Princeton, and while she obviously means this book to be an accessible introduction to some concepts from whiteness studies, I suspect the major points I took away are a little too glib. But here’s what I got out of it: The whole concept of “race” was made up by 18^th-Century Germans and there’s no science to support it, IQ tests are crap, anarchist beliefs were a sign of racial inferiority, and my ancestors weren’t considered white until fairly recently. Except for the annoying way illustrations are cited in the text, The History of White People is a good read and feeds my confirmation bias pretty well.

The take-one-leave-one (the "tolo”) is a large bookshelf at one of our local coffee shops. You can take any book you see there, and keep it for as long as you like—forever, if you want—as long as you replace it with another book you don’t want. It seems as if a good number of people in our village work in publishing, so there are often some pretty interesting books at the tolo. That’s where I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an 800-page historical fantasy about Napoleonic-era English magic (or, you know, magicke). I did read the whole thing, and concluded that author Susanna Clarke can write, but she can’t tell a story to save her life. A reader who hangs around for 800 pages wants a well-constructed plot. When I took Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I replaced it with Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (which I’d bought and read after my latest disfiguring face-cancer surgery). But after I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I put it back on the tolo.

My friend A., who works at a great metropolitan newspaper, has access to the book reviewers’ discards, and often sends me little packages of books. This is not quite random, since she has an idea of the types of things I like to read, but it is actually more random than the New shelf or the tolo since I have no say in the books that she picks for me. Recently she’s sent me The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum. It’s a history of forensic medicine in New York City in the early 20^th Century, featuring New York’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, and toxicologist Alexander Gettler. It’s like a true crime-science thriller-history mash-up, and thoroughly enjoyable. Good science, good writing, good story—a good book!

Although I’ve come to prefer getting books for free via random reading, I do sometimes break down and buy something I’m especially interested in. This week I bought and am reading Molecular Gastronomy and The Black Swan. I’m not far enough along to review them yet, but I think I want to marry Nassim Taleb.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

 

Putin’s Pets vs. The Putin Pals

Listeners to Thunk Tank know that we’ve progressed pretty far with our Putin fan fiction project. Besides the regular “Salutin’ Putin” feature, we’ve done an entire Salutin’ Putin show and also interviewed Sam Derse, the guy who does Vladimir Putin Action Comics. We’ve even started a Saturday morning cartoon spin-off called The Putin Pals, featuring all Putin’s animal companions. Or at least all the ones we’ve made up so far. But it turns out Putin has many, many animal friends in his so-called “reality” as well.

Just yesterday, at the signing ceremony for an agreement between Russia and Bulgaria for the construction of the Bulgarian section of the South Stream gas transit pipeline—a gazillion-mile–long pipe between Novorosiysk and Greece and Italy and Austria—Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Borisov gave Putin a big, adorable, fuzzy puppy. Putin, you know, kissed it, and made the facial expression he believes best expresses “happy.”

The best thing about the RIA Novosti coverage of the puppy presentation was that it listed all the animals Putin already owns. It reminded me of that DirectTV commercial with the Russian guy who talks like a cheezburger cat: “Opulence. I has it.” So now here is a quiz for you, with two lists: one of Putin’s pets, the animals he actually owns, and the other a list of The Putin Pals, his animal companions in the sparkly world of bare-chested awesomeness. Can you tell which is which?

I:  Big, black Labrador Retriever (“Koni”); Siberian tiger (“Mashenka”); miniature horse (“Vadik”); Poodle (“Tosya”); goat (“Skazka”); Persian gazelle (“Vlada”).

II: Big, black Labrador Retriever (“Red Eye”); Siberian tiger (“Murder Cat”); dwarf horse (“Rasputin”); Octopus (“Paul I”); goat (“Black Ops”); war bear (“Snowy”).

Oh, and the best thing about the fuzzy new puppy: The pup’s a Karakachan, an old Bulgarian breed, and will grow up to be a 120-pound, snarling guard dog. Perfect.

 

Rogue Taxidermy and the End of History

 Here’s what I’m excited about today: End of History Ale! Okay, it’s English ale, and I believe it’s 110 proof (!) and it comes in dead-animal bottles, and there’s only 12 bottles made (seven stoats, four squirrels, and a hare) and it costs $762/ bottle, so probably I shall never have one. But I am no Janey-come-lately to the world of rogue taxidermy—far from it! As a child I became enamored of the jackalope, beast of lore and legend and Wyoming roadside attraction rest stops, and I began collecting jackalope postcards at a very early age.

By the time I finished college and moved to New York, I’d amassed a nice little collection of several dozen jackalope cards from various states. Then some guy I was dating had a birthday and I didn’t have  enough money to buy him a present and I wanted to give him something really, really nice. So I gave him my entire jackalope postcard collection.  He totally hated them, and then we broke up, and he never even gave them back. BUT: Here is the happy ending! When I told Sluggo that story, he got me my very own jackalope— a REAL one! Look! Here’s the picture!

Now I have a small collection of actual rogue taxidermy: my baby-alligator-and-some-kind-of-shell candy dish; my handbag-made-from-an-actual-armidillo (with garnet   eyes!); the fish that I can’t even begin to explain ... In fact, the armidillo handbag won second place at the first annual Carnivorous Nights taxidermy contest, hosted by Union Hall’s Secret Science Club and curated by WFMU’s own Dorian Devins, plus authors Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson. (Buy their book!)

Back when I did a show called Truckstop Teaparty on WFMU, I once did a weekly special feature with all the instructions of how to stuff an owl to give to your mom for Mother’s Day. And in 2001, I interviewed a 14-year-old homeschooled taxidermist named Amy Ritchie on the first incarnation of the Thunk Tank program, and you can hear the archive from this page.  And don’t forget the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, ’cause, you know, I never do.

 I’m just trying to explain why I think drinking high-octane ale out of a stoat is an appealing idea. And what is a stoat, anyway? I believe it’s British for “ermine.”

But knowing our fine American tradition of rogue taxidermy, I couldn’t believe we don’t have dead-animal bottles of our own. So I went looking, but found something even more useful, which is, of course, the deer-anus bottle opener which you are gonna need when you want to pop the top on that stoat. 

Thanks, Taxidermy Tube and good ol’ American ingenuity!

Sing Along with God

 Scientists and Experts have been doing some serious thinking at the Large Hadron Collider (aka That Thing That's Going to Create the Black Hole into Which We Will All be Sucked). First they thought about the Higgs bosun particle (aka the "God Particle," and that's what the physicists themselves call it, I am not making that up). Higgs bosun is a theoretical sub-atomic particle that physicists think may be the one thing that gives all other particles their mass. After they thought up Higgs bosun, the Scientists and Experts brought in Dr. Lily Asquith, who is a particle physicist specializing in sonification, the conversion of scientific data into sound. Dr. Asquith thought about what kinds of energy might be emitted if a Higgs bosun particle (which might exist!) were to be created during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (and if creating it did not cause the Earth to be sucked into itself), and then she made the so-far-theoretical data into sounds: The Music of the Spheres! 

What does the God Particle sound like? You can listen to it here, in an article from BBC News, but mostly it sounds like the parts of Fabio's shows where I walk away and do something else for a while. Yet many ancient religions incorporate specific holy sounds and tones, and one of the software engineers who is working with Dr. Asquith says that the Scientists and Experts who have listened to the song of the Higgs bosun have had "something akin to a religious experience." Indeed, whenever I think of what they're doing at the Large Hadron Collider, I say a little prayer.

Politics in the I-countries

Israel and Iceland both in the news this morning: Israel for sending masked commandos to attack and kill aid workers on ships in international waters, Iceland for the victory of the Best Party in local elections in Reykjavik. Only one has a campaign song, though.

Red Dead Redemption and the Q*bert Problem

 Last night I played Red Dead Redemption, which is a fancy cinematic video game about Ye Olde West and outlaws and gunfights and whatnot. There are horses. It's pretty amazing, in the way that all these new games are. I've watched a friend play Heavy Rain and Alan Wake, and watching him play was sort of like watching a crap   old movie on TV—you could sort of just sit through it, and it wasn't terrible, it just is what it is. We could carry on a conversation and drink beer while he was playing, and I didn't mind not playing the games myself. But then last night I was at one of those target-shooting pigroasts I go to, and I got a chance to actually play RDR, so I did, and here's my problem:

 Remember Q*bert? Yeah, probably not. Q*bert was an arcade game back in the early 1980s, before you were born. Q*bert was this little character like a ball with eyes and legs and a tube for a nose, and the point of the game was to jump him all over a pyramid of cubes (whilst avoiding snakes!) and when you turned all the cubes a different color, then you got some more cubes to jump on. But if you just took Q*bert to the edge of the pyramid and jumped him off, he would fall, making an awesome bombs-away kind of noise, and then there was a very satisfying SPLAT when he landed wherever he landed, somewhere down below and out of sight. I never got past level one of Q*bert because I loved to hear him splat, and I would put in my quarter and jump him to the edge of the pyramid and send him over the edge, over and over again, until I realized how many quarters I was wasting and then went off to play, like, Tempest or something. 

 With Red Dead Redemption, I have the Q*bert Problem. I'm tearing along in a horse-drawn wagon race on a twisty mountain road, and I realize I can just drive the damned wagon over the edge of a cliff and watch my character fly out and the horse fall and the wagon split apart ... And then I'm back in the wagon race, and there's a different cliff to fall off of, and this time everything lands in a river. It is really astonishing that someone figured out all the possible scenarios for wagons going off cliffs in this one race, and animated each one differently—I mean, it really is amazing. I know that crashing off the cliff isn't supposed to be the point of the game, but if they only had John Marston make that Q*bert noise when I sent him off the edge, Red Dead Redemption would be the best game ever.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

I Saw Robogeisha, and It Was ...

 fine. It was fine, or even good, and pretty funny. But you know how it is when you want something, and think about it, and anticipate it, and fantasize about it ...mmmmmmm....and then you get it, and it's just not that big a deal anymore? Well, I have been living in a Robogeisha frenzy since I first posted the link to the trailer on Twitter, back last July 7, and I have searched online for info about the release in Japan, and how FUNmation had picked up the rights to distribute it here, and when they were going to do that (this fall—October, or November is what I heard tonight), and then I saw that the Japan Society was having a special New York premiere tonight and I called them and they only had eight tickets left and I bought two of them. And I made my pal/partner/whatever-the-hell-he-is JB buy two of the last six, and then we spent, like, the entire past week getting ourselves good and worked up about seeing Robogeisha. 

 Tonight was the night, but before we could see Robogeisha we had to sit through some very enthusiastic guys announcing the entire line-up of three upcoming film festivals. This made Sluggo uncomfortable and cross, which always makes me anxious, especially when he begins looking around at the rest of the audience and muttering about "bedwetting nerds," because I kind of am one and have always been afraid that someday he's going to notice that. And then we had to sit through a trailer for some upcoming film I don't remember anything about, and then we had to sit through a short called Vampire Frankenstein Girl that was awful and made us fear that Robogeisha was going to suck pretty hard. Luckily, it did not. 

Director Noboru Iguchi and special-effects genius Yoshihiro Nishimura have come up with a silly  , disgusting, funny, ultra-violent film that's fun to watch. The problem is that the Robogeisha trailer is absolutely The Awesomest Trailer Ever, but Robogeisha itself is not the Awesomest Movie Ever. So even though it is really good, and we are totally awesome for having seen the New York premiere, I still felt a slight sense of disappointment after it was over. I'm pretty sure this was just because of the way I'd hyped myself up for it, though, because the film was followed by another short feature called Scary Geisha Army: Welcome to Hell! (or maybe Geisha Cop!, hard to tell), a spin-off of Robogeisha that I knew nothing about and thoroughly enjoyed.

We skipped the live Skype interview with Iguchi after the films, and the alleged after-party, and headed home. So—Robogeisha. Yeah, you should definitely see it when it comes out this fall. 

You bedwetting nerd.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

My Life in the House of Death

On Friday, a close friend of a friend of mine died, suddenly and unexpectedly; he was 29 years old. Station Manager Ken’s father, David Freedman, died two weeks ago, at age 89. So I have been thinking about death a lot for the past few days, although it is something I often think about anyway. 

Our WFMU Listeners know that for many years I did a regular feature called “News of the Dead” on my shows, and some may know that I’m the writer of a graphic anthology called “The Big Book of Death,” and I’ve occasionally written death-related posts here on “Beware of the Blog.” All my life I have pondered death, and studied death, and tried to figure it out, because I grew up and spent the first half of my life in the House of Death.

 My mother got sick when I was 7, and that was when they began taking the tumors out of her brain. I have seen her medical records, and the main thing that struck me was the way the doctors described every tumor as some kind of fruit: a tumor the size of a grapefruit, a tumor the size of an orange, a tumor the size of “a small coconut.” The doctors all said she couldn’t possibly live more than a week or two, but she was in the hospital for years. And because my sister and I were too young to go visit her there, our dad stopped every week on our way home from church and we stood out on the lawn in front of the hospital in our good Sunday dresses and he pointed out her window and we waved at it, we waved at the window where our mother was. We were lucky we had health insurance, but there was some kind of clause in it so that every 18 months or so she had to leave the hospital and come home for a month before she could be readmitted. After a while, there wasn’t enough bone left in her skull to support a metal plate, so her head caved in on the left side. After a while, she couldn’t walk very well, but she tried, stumbling around and dragging her foot. After a while, she couldn’t really speak, she just made a noise that sounded like “Skoool … n’skoool … n’skooool.” It was like growing up with a zombie for a mother. I’ve been told they study her in medical schools, because she lived with less of a brain than anyone thought was possible. When I was 17, she finally died.

That was about the time my dad’s mysterious “diffuse degenerative disease of the brain” kicked in. It never was actually diagnosed, but sounds very much like what killed my grandpa before I was born, so: Probably genetic! That took care of my late adolescence and early adulthood, and then my sister began her death spiral—not nearly as graceful as the figure-skating move of the same name. And on and on it   went, through all my uncles and aunts and many of my cousins, and now here am I, the Last of the Carltons. From this vertiginous pinnacle I look down on my life and think about death, and without getting into my personal religious beliefs, such as my Unified Tamagotchi Theory, I can tell you the conclusions I’ve reached.

1. Death is natural, and therefore probably okay. Once you get born, you are definitely going to die: That’s the deal. So unless you want to start freaking out about what happened before you were born, you shouldn’t worry about what happens after you die, because it’s probably the same thing. Also, there’s no way it can be worse than going through puberty.

2. Happiness is a choice. You can’t control most of what happens to you in your life, but you can control your attitude towards it. You can acknowledge that a situation sucks but choose to be cheerful anyway, without getting all panglossian about it.

3. Love FTW. I think this is the most important one. Remember 9/11, when there were all those answering-machine messages from people trapped in the World Trade towers, calling home to leave a final good-bye?   They all said the same thing: “I love you,” “I love you,” over and over: In the end, that’s the only thing that matters. I want to live my life so that if I were trapped between the fire and the open window, I would have someone in the world that I could call to say “I love you.”

I know that both my friend’s friend and Stn. Mgr. Ken’s dad were well-loved people, and I know their passing has ripped apart the lives of the ones they’ve left behind. But that tear will mend itself over time—maybe so closely woven that it’s almost invisible, or maybe with a big, awkward patch on it. Either way, life goes on—for which I am very grateful.

Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.

The Subversive Ukiyo-e of Utagawa Kuniyoshi

 It’s tempting to start this review with the whole life story of Yoshisaburō, later known as Utagawa Kuniyoshi, but you can read all that stuff on Wikipedia. And no images I can post can give you even a fraction of the experience of seeing his actual work, which you can do—and should do— until June 13 at the Japan Society. 

The show is basically works owned by a private collector, Arthur R. Miller, who’s donated the whole batch to the British Museum, so it may be our last chance to see all these in one place without flying through volcanic ash. The exhibit also includes some Kuniyoshi rarities from the Japan Society’s own collection. There are a few collateral pieces—pages from Kuniyoshi’s sketchbooks (!), original drawings from which the block carvers worked, and a vintage fireman’s coat with a Kuniyoshi image painted on the back that reminded me of those denim jackets with licensed characters like Yosemite Sam or Taz on them.

Ukiyo-e prints were inexpensive, mass-produced decorative images for folks who couldn’t afford paintings. Although most of Kuniyoshi’s prints were illustrations of popular stories or portraits of actors, he acquired a reputation as a subversive “political” artist whose real themes were hidden behind his ostensible subjects. Because of this, he was subjected to heavy censorship, which pushed him into creating works such as “Strange and Wondrous Immortal Turtles” (aka “Turtle Fun, Wonderful, Wonderful”)—a bunch of turtles with the heads of famous actors, heading for a cup of sake. WTF, right? But awesome just the same. Kuniyoshi's depictions of shadowy demons, spider   monsters, giant skeletons, and octopus samurai continue to influence manga artists today. 

I spent about two hours just walking through this show, and it wasn't enough. I'm going back to see it again and to buy the catalogue. Admission to the Japan Society gallery is free on Friday evenings from 6:00-9:00, and afterward you can walk down the street to Menchanko-Tei and have a nice bowl of chanpon and some watered-down sake. But whatever you do, see this show. Really. 

Thanks for reading my blogpost today, and may God bless.

My Imaginary Friends

I live in New York, and so I have no friends. Friends are people you actually speak to, people you see once in a while. This is not possible in New York, where everyone is busy, busy, busy and lives a 1-hour train ride away. I made a New Year's resolution once to spend more time with my friends, but since they hadn't resolved to spend more time with their friends, we still never saw each other. 

 The telephone stopped working when the answering machine was invented. I had a dear friend, John Fox, a writer, and when he died I wrote my newspaper column (Newspapers! Remember those?) about how all we ever really did was leave each other answering machine messages, and so, even though he was now dead, I could just go on leaving him messages and it wasn’t going to be much different than when he was alive.

Now there is email, there is Facebook. I have 8 email accounts: one for WFMU, one for freelance work, one for spam, two for pseudonymous comment postings on blogs, one in case I ever set up my website, one for local political activism, and one for “friends.” As of today, I have a total of 2,624   unread emails. I haven’t been on Facebook since March 16, so I have 19 friend requests, 16 messages, and 6 event reminders. Apparently I once signed up for Linked In—although I have no memory of doing that—and I have about a dozen folks clamoring to link up with me there. It’s overwhelming. There are so many people I should write back to that I can’t bring myself to write back to anyone.

I think this is why I like the radio, and the Twitter, and the blogpost: They are one-way communications. I sit here typing, “Here I am! Here I am! Over here!” with no expectation of response and no intention to reply.

Here I am, here I am: Not waving, but drowning.

Stop the Presses! Here's News of the Dead!

 Big news today, as Hank Williams was awarded the Pullitzer Prize! In 2010! Like, 57 years after he died! It is kind of inexplicable, except that the award comes from the same organization that gives prizes to that Big Gray Pack o' Lies, the New York Times, on a semi-regular basis. Anyway, congratulations to one of WFMU's favorite dead singer-songwriters!