Ornery World

In Which I Explain How Magic Works.

2011-12-07T09:36:00.002+13:00

Filament Magazine's Music Issue is now available, in which you can read my essay about music, occultism and human consciousness in ancient and recent history. Karen D Tregaskin's illustrations are so good I am half-seriously considering having one tattooed upon my flesh.

Marina in New Zealand

2011-10-27T16:22:00.002+13:00

While interviewing Marina Abramović for Filament last year, we chatted about some stuff that didn't really fit into the article. A lot of it centered around her visit to New Zealand in 1981 for the performance of a one-off work in Christchurch (RIP Christchurch). I've decided to "publish" this "piece" "here" so you can enjoy some more of this fascinating woman's thoughts.

Performance artist Marina Abramović just finished a mammoth three-month show at New York's MoMA gallery in which she was joined by international stars like Lady Gaga and James Franco. But when I interviewed her, what she really wanted to talk about was her time in New Zealand.

The first question Marina Abramović asks when I telephone her New York country house is whether I'm calling from Christchurch. The 64-year old, self-described “grandmother of performance art,” left her homeland in the former Yugoslavia in 1976. But hers is still a thick Slavic accent, not unlike that of the snake-handling matriarch played by Angelina Jolie in Oliver Stone's Alexander.

It turns out Christchurch is the only place in New Zealand she's been. She and her then-partner, Uwe Laysiepen (commonly known by the performance name of Ulay), came here in 1981 for a one-off performance organized by local artist Andrew Drummond.

“It's a piece that's almost unknown,” she says. “A work called Witnessing. Ulay was sitting on the floor and I was standing and pointing one finger in his direction. The natural light was becoming darker over the four hours of the piece. My feet were on a pedestal and they had to lift me down because I was completely cramped. It was a very strange piece.”

It's strange within the context of her work mainly because it doesn't involve the artist putting herself in extreme pain or danger. Abramović's work explores the limits of the human mind and body. She creates illuminating experiences for herself and her audience by putting herself through physical and mental endurance tests. Highlights of her career have included stabbing herself in the hand with twenty knives as part of a traditional Balkan soldiers' game, cutting a star into her flesh, and ingesting drugs intended for catatonic patients, making a performance out of the seizures the drugs induced.

So while standing on a platform for four hours may not be as much fun as the exploits of, say, Andy Warhol's Factory or the Dada movement, for her it probably counts as a working holiday.

“It was a bit of a trip,” she says. Once she got here, she found that she was only six hours from the South Pole. “I wanted to go on an expedition. But I only wanted to go at the time when there was ten hours of sunset. They wanted to sign me for six months.”

“I'm sure if you found the right person,” I say, “you could strong-arm them.”

“That's true,” she agrees. “Another thing is that every person I knew in New Zealand saw at least one UFO. I think there's a landing area there. I was in Christchurch for ten days and didn't see one. I'll have to come back for that.”

“I don't know anyone in New Zealand who thinks they've seen a UFO,” I say, then immediately feel bad because this makes it sound like I think she's wrong or crazy.

“Come on!” she exclaims. “Everyone I talked to there saw at least one UFO. Or at least, they told me they did.”

“Obviously,” I say, “You're mixing with the right crowds and I'm not. I'd love to find someone who's seen a UFO.” I think this is a good way of qualifying my earlier objection.

“The other thing that happened,” she goes on, “was a crazy situation.” She tells me about the farm she was staying in in Canterbury. “One morning I woke up and walked up the hill. There were hundreds of sheep giving birth, all at the same time. The sun was coming up and it was like one massive birth. I'll never forget seeing that in New Zealand. It was the most beautiful thing.”

“That seems like exactly the sort of thing that should happen when you come here,” I tell her. Themes of rebirth and renewal are constant in Marina Abramović's work. In the 1990s she performed a work involving scrubbing the flesh off 6,000 pounds of cow bones, an intentionally impossible attempt to render them pure (the piece, Balkan Baroque, was her comment on the Bosnian civil war). Another saw her reinvent herself by trading places with an Amsterdam prostitute for four hours: the woman took Abramović's place at a gallery opening, while the artist sat in the brothel window.

Her latest work at the New York MoMA, The Artist is Present, saw her sit motionless opposite visitors, one at a time. The piece went on for seven hours, every weekday for three months. “People haven't talked about this,” she says, “Because it's not something you're supposed to talk about. But that piece was really about giving unconditional love to complete strangers.”

“You mean treating each audience member as individuals?” I ask.

“At the moment he was in that chair,” she explains, “Every visitor was a unique universe. That's new to audiences. They've never been treated in that way.”

Many of her visitors have been the New York art crowd, but she says many more would never step into a gallery usually. Part of the appeal is the famous sitters on the guest list. “Lady Gaga came to see the show and talked about me on Larry King Live and YouTube interviews. She reaches fourteen year olds who'd never care about performance art. They become this whole new audience, which is a completely new thing for me.”

Another guest was Hollywood actor James Franco, a performance art devotee himself. Franco recently claimed that his recurring role on the soap opera General Hospital was an elaborate work of performance art. I ask Abramovic what she thinks of this use of the medium.

“That was such a mixed-up issue,” she says. “In the 70s, people would just do some stupid gesture and say, 'I'm doing performance art,' and this attitude is still here today. But James Franco studied performance at NYU. He did a dissertation on my work. We've talked a lot. He says as an actor, he reaches a wall so many times because he's trying to be someone you're not. Performance art deals with truly being what you are, and he wanted to incorporate that into his acting.”

The intersection of performance art with superstars like Gaga and Franco is new for her. Abramović considers her fame to have come quite late – her Christchurch trip may have been big news among the cognoscenti, but most New Zealanders probably didn't even know who she was. She suspects that her late breakthrough to mass-media stardom was a good thing.

“Look at me. Recognition came very late. That's very good, because then you don't get stuck on how great you are. When it happens at 25, you're young and you don't know who you are.” She laughs. “Then you die of an overdose at 41.”

And then you'd never get to see a UFO.

The Gears of War post, now with less reading

2011-10-18T13:55:00.004+13:00

Here's a video of a thing I wrote about Gears of War. Some people said they'd like to see it in film form, which was convenient as I myself felt that way also. This is definitely the best video about an okay videogame you're likely to see today.

In Which I Weigh In on Ayn Rand (spoiler: she's a dick).

2011-08-19T13:24:00.004+12:00

I'm a bit late to this party, but here's a quickie from me about Objectivism and seasteading in which I make the subtext of every joke made over the last week about either topic achingly concrete. And now, your bonus blog-only Tom's Thoughts.

It occurred to me while watching Brad Pitt's performance in The Tree of Life (really, the most like Terranigma any film has ever been, which is to say singularly astounding) that Objectivism has undergone basically the ideal character arc over the past ten years. I remember in the early '00s when Pitt was running his mouth off about how great it would be to make a movie of The Fountainhead, and how the whole idea of Rand and Objectivism were this secretive badge of pride that certain public figures would wear poking out from under their lapels. The notion seemed imbued with a terrible sort of grandeur -- a gilded villainy that at least commanded a presence, even if it looked a bit scuffed and chipped up close.

But the past ten years have been rubbish for Objectivism as a cultural element. It now just seems a dirty, shameful, shabby sort of thing, a spite-faced lizard of a woman scurrying in the shadows of skyscrapers, her long coat stinking of stale cigarettes and ridiculous fumbling half-hearted attempts at humanness. Today more people, so the news reports and bestseller lists tell us, are looking into Rand and her work than ever -- but the larger the movement grows, the more malformed and cancerous it reveals itself to be, shiny-faced jackasses braying buzzwords as they stockpile increasingly useless cachet and preside over the darkest Age of Grimness since the Seventies were burned at Comiskey Park, a frustratingly inauspicious 35 days before I was born. The first Atlas Shrugged movie, presented Twilight- or Harry Potter-like in multiple momentous epic installments, had direct-to-video sloppiness written all over it and went largely unnoticed even despite the promotion of what we're assured is the most powerful political force since cocaine, the Tea Party movement -- surely the least self-aware group of people in the history of ostensible mental competence, not to mention the least glamorous assemblage of ruiners since the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Objectivism has got what it needs -- for a lot of people, preferably some of them owning property and mostly-clean clothes, to rally around it -- but it has lost what it wants, which is for the glamorous and respectable to extol its virtues. Which is the perfect position, from an audience standpoint, for a character to arrive at. Of course Objectivists will tell you that they neither want nor care for your respect or disregard; but then, why do they make so goddamn many speeches about it?

In Which Everything is Mentioned.

2011-08-13T16:21:00.003+12:00

My article on the past 30 years' Touchstones of Gaming - in which I survey the culture, politics and media (also video games) of every year since 1980 - is now up on Gamesradar. If you want an article which mentions the Falklands War, Waco siege, Lost, Bobbitt Trial, Elvis Presley, Doom and Ronald Reagan's relationship to Princess Toadstool, it is your lucky day! Of all the things I've written about games, this is the one most geared toward people who don't give a shit about games (well, apart from this, anyway).

Bonus blog content: I'd have said the touchstone of this year was Modern Warfare 3, whose heartfelt paean to the terrible euphoria of techno-militarism - not to mention embroilment in unending corporate, legal and political skirmishes - perfectly represents an age of corporatized war without end pushing us ever closer to the brink of extremely cinematic Armageddon. LA Noire is all very well, but I don't see the publisher of that game (whoever it is) starring in a Brad Pitt movie.

Corganwatch: A Big Fat Nothing

2011-07-02T13:44:00.005+12:00

I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing
Oh, if only I'd seen that the joke was on me.
- Gibb/Gibb/Gibb, I Started a Joke

"God's joke" was how Billy Corgan famously described the origin of his band's name throughout the days of the original lineup: rather than new-wavers The Marked or synth-rockers Star Children[1], the band - operating under the assumption that this wouldn't last, thrashing out (excellent) Sabbath-meets-Reznor mechanistic psych-outs like Nothing and Everything for halfhearted audiences sporting no more confidence in the venture's lasting potential than Corgan/Iha themselves - figured if they were going to do something stupid, they might as well have a stupid name while they were about it. Thus, Smashing Pumpkins.

God, of course, was joking on the sly: if we can posit Billy Corgan as an incarnation of the two-faced god Janus (and let's see you tell me we can't), then one face must be that of the inspired genius, the other the dullard crippled by self-doubt and lashing out at anyone nearby: himself, Courtney Love, the press, fans, Courtney Love, Courtney Love. And so it was that Corgan's daemon became hoodwinked by his demons: the wind changed, and that shrugging, don't-worry-I-don't-mean-this jest would become frozen on his face for the next twenty years as "Smashing Pumpkins" became... Smashing Pumpkins.

Billy Corgan is at pains to establish that his thread winds inexorably through the tapestry of rock music in and after the 1990s; what he fails to acknowledge is that a large part of his influence is to add to rock's meme-pool one of the most generous infusions of that self-doubting essence. The oeuvre of Corgan at his peak may not have the visceral self-immolation of his most obvious counterpart, Kurt Cobain, but - in interviews and in tracks like Ugly or Tales of a Scorched Earth - it's tempered with a wry, almost twee brand of self-abasement that's less solipsistic than his contemporaries', and thus more engaging. The result is a deadly self-destructive streak with the cuddly, approachable palette of a Wes Anderson flick. And also probably Hinder's Better Than Me, thank you so very fucking much.

For years, Corgan would deny the literal interpretation of the name, accepting the appellation's sigilization of bittersweet divine mockery, its codifying of the universe's fickle silliness, even its connotations of Halloween boogedy-boo, toddling down the street in a Cool Britannia costume (this latter manifesting itself as the band became The Smashing Pumpkins, by which point the world was a vampire and Corgan a slapheaded superhero who only came out at night). But one thing the band did not go in for was the actual smashing of pumpkins: when one Australian fan asked Corgan during a radio phone-in whether any pumpkins were harmed during the making of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Corgan sneered, "that's the stupidest question ever asked. For asking that question you get a big fat nothing."

It is, of course, beneath Corganwatch to play the game of hoists and petards [2]. One day the literality of "Smashing Pumpkins" may be off-limits; the next it may be used to sell records. That is fine and good. A free pass from Corganwatch! However, it's worth noting that, in finally acknowledging after all this time that, you know what, the words "smashing pumpkins" do actually conjure the image of pumpkins being smashed, one might observe a resurgence of Corgan's long-dormant (and entirely unreasonably so, because holy fuck, have you seen this shit? There are no words) self-abasing urge.

If the new Smashing Pumpkins have an element of cut-up randomness to them - a desperation to be back in the zeitgeist, tempered by a welcome willingness to perform crazy experiments with unorthodox release techniques and music of tragicomically variable quality - then we might start to suspect the identity of the hand moving the planchette. The paradox is this: Billy Corgan is trying to free himself from the dull and dying machinations of a musical economy that patently has no use for him, nor him for it, and that is fine, because Billy Corgan is a gnostic and a mystic and he wants very much to get somewhere and that Neoplatonic form ain't gonna idealize itself, buddy. But in throwing the bones and letting onesself and one's image be swept wherever the current takes one, one encounters the risk (indeed, the probability) that the current sweeping one up will be the strongest one; and if there's only one force in the world stronger than what Billy Corgan thinks of himself, it's what people think of Billy Corgan. Meaning the stronger his attempts to put aside ego and do whatever he's moved to do, the more likely he'll just do whatever people have been assuming he's doing for years now, which is to say, fronting a band which is all about the violent pulverization of squash.

The part where the whole thing is presented by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on the other hand, is obviously just Billy Corgan fucking with you.

[1] A nom de musique employed when the band were making the styles of music they'd swear didn't fit the brand of their day-job outfit, until The Chamberlin Incident forced an adoption of those exact styles: first for the extended mostly-covers version of the Bullet With Butterfly Wings EP, then with Adore and the sheepish, halfhearted pretense that this was where things were headed all along.

[2] During the Pumpkins' heyday, Metallica were widely quoted as having said they'd never do all the things they then turned around and did the shit out of; this in response to their release of the alt-inspired Load, unquestionably the best album of their career.

A Review of Gears of War 2, or, A Rare Treat for Fans of my Thoughts on Games.

2011-06-28T16:15:00.010+12:00

Marcus Fenix, Gears of War 2's Great Meat Face, would vindicate Eisenstein's Theory of Montage if his blank grimace were ever juxtaposed with anything other than wrenching horror.

Everyone knows that all men are bastards.

Everyone knows that the tragedy of men is that they have built a world which is constructed to function as their own monument and throne and nothing else; that they have fashioned a language which compels its users with every breath to exalt men as their rulers and dominators; and yet every man knows the falsehood of this world that he have made, and thus strives always to witness its destruction and escape to a place where primal guttural screams are the only language, glossal shrieks imparting voices from the core he has buried beneath layers of ink and marble and leather and steel.

Everyone knows men despise their own flesh for its constant betrayal, its refusal to stifle as they would stifle all feelings of pain or pleasure that make them cry like children or smile like women. If a man were truly happy he would have flesh of cold iron, but a man could never be truly happy for to be a man is to know the world's grimness and to distrust relief and sneer in the face of respite.

Everyone knows that men make countries to keep out those they hate most, which is everyone who will not bend to their rod; and that those that bend as they ask, these they hate the most also, for their uselessness and their servitude and their demands for protection and cries for appeasement and requests for men to feel, and a man hates to feel because it reminds him that he Is, which he hates. And everyone knows that men will always find someone to lie to, someone to kill and die so that men may keep their countries; because if they had not, then others would rape their sisters before they themselves had had the chance.

Everyone knows men love war, because in war, the mistrusted and hated flesh is rent by metal, ground in the dirt, burned by fire and blistered yellow and crackling by scouring chemicals. In war, the chaos of the Abyss calls to men and shreds flesh from broken spirit until all that remains is grinning death, a final sneer for a world that deified and exalted and found no true use for them save fulfilling minor roles in a plan they constructed so long ago they have forgotten its purpose, only that its method is to dominate all things, and to this they must cling. Men are never unhappy to go to war; men are only unhappy that no war ever embodies the glorious promise of war itself, which is a maelstrom of blood and steel and bile and iron and stink and cry and fire and roar and red and black and drowning, enough to obliterate that deepest most hated truth, which is that they are still themselves, torn from all things and cold and alone.

Everyone knows that men hate to speak; so when they do, they will speak from a pool of their language which they have set aside for themselves, to be used only by men (never children or women) and specially chosen because all words and all combinations of those words mean nothing except I am a man and I will fuck you to death and hate every minute of it.

Everyone knows that men hate that which is natural and real, for it is the domain of women and children. For a man to enjoy something he did not build himself – crafted it to be false, made it ugly with his rough hands to show he cared not for it as would a woman – would imply that he had not ground enough children beneath his boot to afford the luxury of false things.

Everyone knows men hate all that is not of themselves; the alien, the sinister, the demonic and angelic alike; the nigger, the smiling wetback, the faggot, the whore, the arab, the bearded yid, the kraut, the commie, the wop and the wog, the retard, the socialist and the fascist, the good ole boy, the backwoods fuckwit, the cunt-lapping effete, the greased and grunting troll, the stupid bitch, the stinking hairy dyke, the acid-perfumed castrating harridan, the line-browed pornography-loving european moron, the haaji, the papist, the holy-roller, the atheist, the beaten prisoner, the glowering tormentor: there is no one that men cannot name so that they will hate them. Men know that there is only one thing which is holy and that is the mother, and all these Other would fuck her and dirty her before man could take his rightful place inside her.

Everyone knows that all men think their own mother a diseased and festering whore to be routed and exterminated so they may dwell at last alone and no one may question their pain and their hatred.

Everyone knows that all men hate ultimately themselves for they can see no way out of this, for it is what their fathers taught them, and their fathers are always war, because like war, a father's love is never complete and is always thus hate because it must be love or hate and they are still alone so it cannot be love. Everyone knows that men thus are born in pain and hate, and men are pain and hate is men, and this is truth, the only true thing that will live forever.

Eight point five.

In Which You Learn More Than You Thought.

2011-04-22T22:28:00.004+12:00

If you start reading my guide to tough dilemmas in videogames, you may well end up knowing more about ethics or Quantum Uncertainty than you expected! Then again you may not, it's a big field.

Tom's New Zealand: Atlantis

2011-03-06T15:30:00.002+13:00

The earthquake filled our house with dust. As soon as the first jolt struck, rooms were filled by walls as old cinderblocks shed their mortar and shifted atop one another. The outside came rushing in. Sunshine first peeked then glared through holes in the walls and roof: piled bricks, poor and arbitrary boundaries.

An aunt was at work at the chemists' in Redcliffs, glass shelves hurling last season's perfumes across the room: unbridled Obsession, dangerous Euphoria. She doesn't remember being knocked off her feet: only that one second she was standing; the next, sprawled over the counter. A portly regular hurled himself atop her as a shield from the onslaught of expired Eternity and unwelcome Escape.

The hip-for-the-kidz facade of my little brother's school leapt from the building's cold and sullen hulk in an undisguised attempt on his life. Joe was too fast for the depredations of this unmasked engine of obliteration, and that instant became a microcosm of his young life: peak experience wrung from another moment escaping smiling-faced and lethal education's attempts at a Saturnine morning tea.

A neighbor was working in an office block overlooking the Square before the jolt threw him toward the Cathedral, plate-glass all that kept him from falling five stories, allowing him the spectacle of the Cathedral's spire spiraling down into the quadrangle. He rushed from the building and started running.

My girlfriend Hilary was thrown from a treadmill at the University's rec center. All the lights went out and she was herded from the pitch-black building. Ushered into clear daylight and a free-standing campus, she was presented by no sign that this was anything more than a slightly larger aftershock. She quickly became annoyed at the center's refusal to allow her back into the building to get her things. “Are you alright?” I asked from within her phone from within her locker from within the evacuated center.

The Port Hills were doing jumping jacks, leaping two feet in the air and spraying geologic dandruff. A boulder the size of a van effortlessly bisected one building on the section and careened down the hill demanding shelter in another. Cast out and sent onto the watercourse that forms the main artery through the property, the mighty stone would be unable to find satisfaction: seeking to end its journey in our spa pool, the huge rock instead upended the entire tub and came to a stop just short of the deck. Hard to avoid some measure of sympathy for even so destructive and burdensome a beast.

“I'll protect you!” yelled the fat man atop my aunt. “I've been wanting to do this for years!” She felt his hot breath on her neck as boulders rolled down the suburb's eponymous crags, disparate rocks becoming One and Free.

“I can't find my father,” our friend Ashley told Joe, “but there's too many people hurt. I can't leave to look for him.” He spent the afternoon pulling bodies living and dead from the wreckage of the Colombo Run: by his estimate, he retrieved two corpses for every survivor.

Our neighbor ran until he reached Hagley Park. There oblivious strollers, seeing his suit, took him for a visiting businessman and urged him to be calm, that a little shake was normal here in Christchurch. “You don't understand,” he told them, “I've just seen the Cathedral come down.”

“I've seen a lot of dead people,” Joe told me as he walked up the driveway. He walked past a bus crumpled by falling masonry, dimly registering crushed human forms inside. He saw an old man being tended to by emergency services; the man's face had been half knocked from his head. Walking down Colombo Street and through Sydenham, Joe saw streets lined with the body-bags and hastily blanketed corpses that, mere weeks earlier, Ngapuhi kaumatua Gray Theodore had prophesied for Wellington.

The fat man got off my aunt. They haven't spoken since.

Ashley found his father.

Hilary still doesn't have her phone.

Joe, fed up with living in so notoriously seismic a city, took advantage of compassionate airfares and booked a holiday in San Francisco.

Christchurch, never again a solid physical place, now becomes forever alive and frozen at the moment of destruction: the immaterial arena surrounded (as a friend beautifully reminds us) by Baxter's “mountains crouch[ing] like tigers.”

A place where shyster priest Arthur Worthington once pointed through the glass of a shattered lamp toward true reality; where boulders rain like dark karakea onto the beach at Tuawera, onto which a vengeful magician once conjured a poison whale against his enemies. A place of narratives and experiences, of memories and quake moments, streets forever trod by those who'll never tell their stories.

Tom's New Zealand: A Conversation with a Lion

2011-03-06T15:12:00.002+13:00

“There is no reason that can make sense of this event. No words that can spare our pain. We are witnessing the havoc caused by a violent and ruthless act of nature.
...
I am a proud son of Christchurch. I was raised there. I got my first job there. My sister lived there. My mother died there. I know what a wonderful place it is. But my connection to Christchurch is no rare thing. All New Zealanders have a piece of our heart in Christchurch.
...
Christchurch, today is the day your great comeback begins. Though your buildings are broken, your streets awash, and your hearts are aching, your great spirit will overcome. While nature has taken much from you, it cannot take your survivor's spirit.”

- John Key, 23 February 2011

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

To personify a location (as your current author is as guilty as anyone else of doing) is as tempting as it is impossible. “Christchurch” only exists because we say it does; the place itself, tight shingle and steadfast rock, doesn't think of itself as Christchurch or as Canterbury or as anyone's home. The earth didn't shake because of anything we did upon its surface: it just moved because that's what the earth does. Not to spite us but in spite of us.

Druidic architects once stirred human blood into their foundational cement; more recent builders laid Bibles or other objects of human significance into the cornerstones of their constructions. Reminders of a universal principle of building: that when we lay down foundations – whether for a shack, highrise or city itself – we extend our own human meaning down into the earth, idea and narrative mixing awkwardly with clay and loam.

It was easy enough to incorporate September's shiverings into the Christchurch narrative. Seismic trembles rocketed up through the strata even as primal sparks rang out through sleeping brains, touching off reptilian fight-or-flight synapse patterns. Following immediately were early-mammal poetic-conscious nodes, rushing to make sense of the event, fit it into a narrative: tight faux-English grid and village-green suburbs tested by a dormant strain of Antipodean rim-of-fire wildness. Earth's Fury. Why didn't They warn us?

City and story alike were cracked but repairable. Look back or move forward? Either seemed feasible options for a populace never averse to a bit of hard work.

But this time, it's clear the graft hasn't taken. Blood and Bible alike sit dead in the soil, neither swallowed nor spat back. The land doesn't want to reject or revise our story. It simply doesn't care.

No longer can we feel we've sunken our awareness of place and community into the earth: the only place Christchurch truly exists, it's become clear, is in our minds (or hearts, if you prefer). We might all agree upon what Christchurch is or isn't (or better yet, we might disagree passionately); if nothing else, we all agree that it's there. But there's one party that reserves judgement on even that most basic fact, and that's the location in question.

The earth doesn't move out of malice or covetousness. The earth simply moves. Any attempts to ascribe human meaning would be like trying to have a conversation with a lion.

Tom's New Zealand: The Terrible Distar

2011-03-06T13:44:00.001+13:00

“To All The Famlies of The Loved One's

Lost and injured in this terrible distar

of The BIG Earth Quake that hit

Christchurch

Our Love, Thoughts & Prayer are with

you all

M & T.P.”

We found this message, written with golden ink inside a card depicting a cherub: blue butterfly wings on a field of grey clouds. The card had been slipped into a ziplock bag and taped to a beautiful bouquet of bright flowers, and the whole bundle had been left at the foot of Ashburton's East Street Fountain.

Ashburton sits an hour south of Christchurch down State Highway One. Often referred to as “Ash Vegas” for its overabundance of pokie machines and gambling pubs, the town's known for its elderly and farming populations. Until recently, the town sign read: “Welcome to Ashburton. Blessed is the Nation whose GOD is the LORD.” Even motoring works differently here: a place where many older drivers will drive around the block rather than negotiate a right-hand turn.

Ashburton is packed. The town's McDonald's, which offers not just familiar tastes but the elusive and essential wi-fi, has been close to standing room only since Tuesday. Across the road, a chemist tells me they've been flat out for the past few days. I ask if she's noticed an influx of city slickers around town and she gives me a sly wink.

Like sidewalk gawkers from an old movie, TV screens in restaurants, bars and electronics stores in Ashburton convey the latest earthquake news to gathered throngs. Even when there's no new information, there's a sense that it would be disrespectful not to watch. Many have family or friends in Christchurch; many more, ostensibly, live there themselves. Christchurch, once the place that you went when you outgrew Ashburton, has become the place you run from when it shows every sign of not wanting you there any more.

Corganwatch: The Name of the Pose

2011-02-13T12:48:00.005+13:00

When I was in primary school, the principal for several years was a woman named Claire Coburn. She was an ebullient woman given to joining the younger children in games, which disgusted us older children but which they seemed to enjoy. After about two years, she gathered the school's pupils before her and announced that we had shown great maturity in her time with us, and that she was now ready to be called by her true name: Claire Cockburn.

If you like the idea of concept albums but don't couldn't eat a whole one, you could do far worse than the Thirty-Three EP. Six songs where only the title track is filler, the disc starts with Billy Corgan singing from the perspective of a very human Christ contemplating His own crucifixion and only gets more navelgazey from there. Positioning itself as a series of transitional moments which, laid end to end, form a graceful coda to the Mellon Collie era (and, it was widely assumed at the time, the Smashing Pumpkins project itself), the EP's work in the manipulation of time, personal identity and musical character cannot be underestimated. Which is pretty good for a disc you could listen to in the time it took to get ready for your supermarket job (if you were me when the record came out).

While Thirty-Three itself may be fairly second-rate as actual songs go (divorced from the album, its attempt to infuse the Twilight to Starlight half of the record with playful Beatles silliness just becomes doubly cloying), it does its work in establishing the EP's elegiac tone. Again, if you start with the notion that Billy Corgan is going to be portraying Jesus in His final days (besides the obvious, the title refers to Corgan's age at the imminent Millennium), it's fairly easy to work out where things might be going. Four songs, each themed for a different member of the band[1], explore themes of transition, finality and reconciliation before the twee-as-you-please My Blue Heaven rolls elegant end credits[2].

The Airplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right) is Corgan's bitter farewell to Jimmy Chamberlin, a "fragile heart so cursed" whose broken promises caused the heartache that would drive Corgan through the doldrums between the death of Jonathan Melvoin and the eventual Machina (it's also, if this needs restating, one of the best songs Corgan has ever written).

Transformer is Billy's attempt to get inside the head of a D'Arcy who obviously no longer had much time for the band; while it paints a fairly charming picture of the bassist, its thesis seems to be that D'Arcy doesn't exist except as a member of the Smashing Pumpkins, and that as such, it sure must be awful hard for her to be growing dissatisfied with the venture[4]. The Bells is James Iha's nice little song about going back to church; shortly following the song's release, he would express public concern about Billy becoming friends with Marilyn Manson.

The other song is the second explicitly Billy-themed riff on departure and reconciliation, The Last Song[5]. What transforms The Last Song from an okay song by Billy Corgan during the Mellon Collie era (which is to say, one of the hundred-odd best songs of the mid-to-late 90s) into a truly meaningful entry into the Pumpkins canon is the singer's choice of backup musician. If you're going to sing a song about how you've done good work and now it's time to go home, that is fine; if you're going to end an era marked by songs about how hard your parents made your life, and you're going to do it with a song where jazz guitarist William Corgan Sr [6] underscores your homeward walk with quietly assured soloing that's a bit like your own licks, just a little older and sweeter... well, it is unlikely that the reader will require an in-depth explanation of why this is relevant.

"William Corgan," then, becomes a sort of magical True Name, a seldom-invoked reference to who the singer "truly is" when all the hurlyburly's done and the Father has been Reconciled With. Last week, Billy announced that "William Corgan" would henceforth be the name he would be working under. Corgan had made peace with who he truly was and where he truly came from, and was ready to start garnering the same direct, unadulterated adoration bestowed on Johnny Cougar or D'Arcy Wretzky.

The Thirty-Three EP is probably, next to his other work of the era, the closest in musical tone to Corgan's current album, Teargarden by Kaleidoscope. A recent entry into that project had the respect to address me without being so forward as to call me Thomas; so I guess I have to be, for the time being, in favor.

Claire Cockburn left the school not too long after making her announcement, and we laughed at her a great deal. We were, after all, kids; but come on, it was a pretty silly speech to make.

[1] Billy gets two songs, either (a) because he's Billy or (b) because Thirty-Three isn't really a Billy song so much as a Billy-as-Christ song, which is basically just (a) writ large.
[2] The song's elegance is marred only by a Samuel-L-Jackson-in-a-Marvel-movie peek at that rising star of the Adore era, the "Melancholic Elmer Fudd" style of singing that Billy would inexplicably drop into otherwise good [3] songs.
[3] Obviously I am joking about Annie-Dog being otherwise good.
[4] Apparently being a spunky girl defined by the Smashing Pumpkins is a prerequisite: new bassist Nicole Fiorentino first appeared on the cover of Siamese Dream. No Smashing Pumpkins bassist has ever had a penis.
[5] Which is always positioned before several other songs, to make sure you know that it's not actually the last song, not in that way anyway.
[6] Biggest prior public accomplishment: turning down a spot in a band who would later hire Ted Nugent.

In Which I am Speculatively Pessimistic.

2011-01-29T15:15:00.002+13:00

My list of "The Worst Games You Never Played" includes Star Fox 2, because I just ain't give a fuck. For Twitter devotees, this is the one where I had an ethical crisis as to how to phrase a joke about prison sex.

Oh, My Stars!

2011-01-16T15:28:00.004+13:00

As someone who uses a veneration of the psychology of C.G. Jung, the linguistics of Owen Barfield and the poetic sensibilities of W.B. Yeats to mask all manner of dismissive ambiguities in my scientific worldview, horoscopes are problematic for me. Basically I think they are a very, very stupid thing. The idea that a magical man could come from the sky and do only good, freeing the world with his own sacrifice, I basically have no problem with; the notion that a prince sat under a tree until he knew everything, I can get behind; the notion that an arrogant boy was cursed with an elephant's head, and now smiles from the æther upon travelers who take the time to offer him a coin or two, I have been known to actively buy into.

In these examples (or those of werewolves, or heaven, or magnets), we're talking about events that took place in a time of poetic consciousness in which the bicameral mind hadn't, in some cases, entirely finished combining into the single powerful beige box we now use for all our knowledge-manipulation needs. To say that these events are worthy of "belief" in the post-Enlightenment[1] sense that we say that, say, the Moon Landing is worthy of our "belief," we have to adopt a bead-dangling hairy-person position of attempting to fit poetic pegs into a prosaic hole, which just makes everyone look silly. Asking the scientific community to accept propositions without providing the falsifiable proof that that community rightly demands is like asking me to admit that Two and a Half Men is an excellent show just because you like it.

It's simply not appropriate to place statements made from a poetic-conscious perspective, or the truths they express, on a prosaic scale of truth-to-falsehood. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, tell the inhabitants of a laboratory or lecture-hall that prosaic consciousness is an unwieldy and inappropriate position from which to interrogate some positions, and they will brand you an irritating postmodernist, and they'll be right; but then again, you get to suspect that these are people who don't really know what postmodernism is.

Anyway, so I have no problem believing (in whatever sense) in these sorts of things; however, I simply cannot be prevailed upon to believe in astrology as it's popularly understood. The idea that there are stars in the sky? Certainly. The notion of a "Saturnine" temperament? No problem. But the suggestion that the former might play some part in creating the latter? Oh come on now.

I think this is because astrology, as it's publicly understood, doesn't hesitate to attempt to place itself within a causal, rationalist worldview; but the way it does so is ridiculous and laughable and stinks of cheap hairdressers' waiting-rooms. IF you were born in August, THEN you will be extroverted and showy; and if you're not, then surely INWARDLY you must sometimes feel like you are not expressing yourself as openly as you might be; and (1) what a nakedly transparent piece of cold-reading this all is, while (2) why would that be, exactly? Might it be the desire to prove that your presence on this earth is anything but an incidental side-effect of too much holiday wine? No, no, it's just the stars, don't question the stars. Go fuck yourself.

This makes astrology the intellectual equivalent of the fundamentalist zealot who insists that not only is their dogma "true," but that it's "true" in a concrete, shade-of-the-tree, nails-in-the-palms sense, as if that were an appropriate level on which to interrogate such positions. Such an insistence isn't just impossible to discuss usefully, it's also almost as boring as those who insist on the utter meaningless emptiness of the universe as ultimate, inviolable truth. Which is to say: very boring.

This week, a mischievous scientist has pointed out that, if astrology were to hold itself to any sort of scientific standards, it would have to admit a new astrological sign: Ophiuchus, the snake-wrangling Healer sign. (Famous Ophiuchuses would include the snake-handling Britney Spears and God's frickin' gift to humanity, Ian Somerhalder).

The parody may be more apt than intended: the snake often denotes self-awareness, that force whose ascent has given rise to all the immensely beneficial and evolution-advancing developments since antiquity, but whose era is also marked by the fracturing of a shared awareness, a painful maturation that separates consciousness from the All.

To wrestle the snake, like Ophiuchus, could then denote a refusal to submit to the ego's will toward separation from All That Is: a quixotic attempt to to navigate back into Steiner's womblike Old Moon Consciousness[2], or the brave surge forward into Jean Gebser's "double consciousness," that posited future age in which all earlier phases in the evolution of awareness come together to form an ultimate sort of "super-awareness." To wrestle the snake would be to take charge of the direction our ego is leading us, to forge a way forward into the future of human awareness with a Healer's eye toward bandaging the wounds left by years of rigidly perspectival existential separatism.

Whereas the astrological position seems to be more one of, "get fucked, we're not writing an extra paragraph for the newspapers every week."

Astrology was originally intended, of course, as a science. The first astrologers were scientists of the poetic-consciousness age, many of them (we ought to presume) every bit as rigorous as those of our own prosaic[3] time. Their tools were different, so their conclusions are often incompatible with our own science (which has, on the whole, far better tools and more time in which to use them); when consciousness evolved, astrology progressed into what we now know as astronomy and continued to serve as a useful and fascinating scientific field.

If people were serious about astrology, then, they might well say, "thanks, modern science: it appears we have once again proved useful to one another." The resultant discussion of what exactly astrology means to those who half-heartedly follow it might provide some useful insights into just how rational we've become nowadays, or expose an area in which logical positivism has yet to satisfy millions of people.

However, this hasn't happened; which means that, if I want to make space on my belief-shelf for the potentially useful Ophiuchus, I have to hide that shelf not just from visiting logical positivists, but also from any hairy bead-dangling friends I might allow into my sphere of discussion.

No, I think I'll stick with my lengthy library of The Complete And Annotated Why Astrology Is Stupid.

[1] I mean "Enlightenment" in reference to the grey-haired man who sat under a tree until he glimpsed the force that organizes the entire universe, not the bald boy who sat under a tree until he glimpsed the force that organizes the entire cosmos; however, I readily admit that when you put it like that, it's a pretty spurious distinction to make.
[2] For many of these thoughts about consciousness, I am indebted to Gary Lachman's book, A Secret History of Consciousness.
[3] "Prosaic" is meant here simply as an alternative to "poetic," rather than any sort of value-judgment of our own time as boring or staid. As any student of apocryphal Chinese curses will tell you, our own times are plenty interesting.

In Which I Teach You A Thing Or Two.

2010-12-18T16:33:00.002+13:00

As part of my project to enrich the world by having them think more about old videogames, here is an article about life lessons buried in old games. "I am enjoying this gentleman's contributions to this site," shares a commenter. I appreciate, as Jordan Luck would have it, your appreciation!

Also, a reminder: Filament 07 is in stores now. You can walk to the shop and buy pieces of paper on which are printed words I wrote, and you will enjoy doing it!

In Which I Befriend a Post-Human Sorceress.

2010-12-01T09:48:00.005+13:00

My interview and article about Marina Abramović is the top story in the latest issue of Filament. We spoke about art (obviously), her childhood in the Balkans (probably obviously), and the play Martin Crimp wrote about her (somewhat less, I like to think, than obviously).

You can see a preview of the first pages of the article here, but I can't stress highly enough that if you are a fan of anything, you ought to purchase your own copy of the magazine to keep and treasure for always.

In Which I Feign Geekiness.

2010-11-24T11:38:00.003+13:00

"This sot of list is why I love Gamesradar," effuses one commenter. What sort of list? Movies geeks love that should not become videogames, of course. Such a simple idea!

In Which Our Hero Grits His Teeth, Chomps a Cigar and Forgets to Shave

2010-11-19T09:45:00.002+13:00

I recently wrote for Gamesradar about times when videogames did the "gritty reboot" thing like as if they were The Punisher or some shit. You can read about it here.

Corganwatch: Malanachrony and the Inferiority Complex

2010-11-18T12:07:00.003+13:00

I[1] take Corganwatch seriously. I am subscribed to his mailing list. I have a Google News alert for his name, meaning that whenever the music blogs I read mention him, I get to read their news (which is usually about Jessica Simpson or the Rush documentary that he featured in briefly) twice. Sometimes, for my sins, I even check out his spirituality blog, though I can't do that at the moment because against all odds it is, at time of writing, down.

What this means is that I live my life in a bubble of Billy Corgan-related scuttlebutt, and sometimes it is easy to forget that the reason I do this is that nobody else in the world (not even Billy Corgan, if he so chooses) has to live their lives in this bubble. So when a Really Big Story about Billy Corgan breaks, it is tempting not to even bother relaying it - as obviously, I think from inside my bubble, everyone in the world has heard this story already and filed it in their "very important story" boxes between "there is a woman in New Zealand with a name similar to that of a woman in England" and "Steve Jobs does not know that his software has a 'Rip CD' button on it." It is easy to forget that out there in the world of regular people who don't think about whether Courtney Love ghost-wrote Disarm, there are plenty of people that don't know (though surely they would care!) that Billy Corgan recently talked some shit about Pavement via Twitter, that rare example of a nu-medium with which he is (regrettably) growing increasingly savvy.

Corgan's squabble with Pavement stems from some sort of notion that the band represent a corruption of "indie" ideals and "alternative" integrity. This speaks to the fervent strain of indie fever pulsing through the veins of Corgan 2.0.

The Billy Corgan from the era of a living Jonathan Melvoin, a fucking D'arcy/Iha and a giving-a-shit public wore his exclusion from the "indie" crowd on his sleeve[2]. He made no secret of running the band like a business or demanding professionalism and a high standard from himself and his bandmates (on the rare occasion that he let them play their instruments). When his contemporaries were hating on Rolling Stone and Big Music, Corgan was chumming up with soon-to-be Nevermind producer Butch Vig; in an era of Hal Hartleys and Whit Stilmans, Corgan was by no means a Tony Scott, but he was at least a David Fincher.

But when the reborn, reduced-capacity Smashing Pumpkins took to public stages, it was with the "indie" flag flying: Corgan seemed to think that being "alternative" justified any cockamamie decision or hurtful act of bitchiness he could muster. (He would later offer a variation on this theme, tweeting that "complaining is the inherent great right of a musician.") In Billy's scheme, "indie" meant "living in a universe where Billy Corgan is immune to criticism," so that anyone who didn't enter that space was less "real" or "authentic" than Billy Corgan, a man who by this time was also claiming that his petulant stage presence was a "persona" in the tradition of Ziggy Stardust.

Pressured (no doubt at gunpoint) to share a bill with Pavement, a band who typified the old-school notion of "indie cred" since when Billy Corgan was avoiding being lumped into such a milieu, there was only one option: rather than decrying Malkmus et al as "not indie," Billy had to rail against his fellow fuzz-toned Stipe-acolytes as "bad indie:" not pretenders but abusers. If Pavement were George W Bush, then Billy Corgan wasn't Al Gore, cheated out of the crown that was rightfully his: he was John Kerry, a well-meaning would-be in the right place at the wrong time, forced to watch that crown legitimately awarded to people who misused the mandate it conferred. If "indie rock," in Billy's scheme, was Courtney Love, then Pavement weren't a sub-par cast-off like Trent Reznor or a heroic burnout like Kurt Cobain: they were a manipulative, demeaning ogre. They were Billy Corgan.

The trouble with all this is that it belies a severely outdated model of the "indie"/"mainstream" divide. Corgan's model of the dichotomy, a binary that evidently influences so much of his thinking and creativity nowadays, is an ironic throwback to a time when such a paradigm was valid: ironic not because Billy Corgan did his best work at that time, but because while he was doing that work, he actively didn't give a shit about that division.

In the 1990s, we talked the fuck out of the "indie"/"mainstream" divide. The most public evidence of the discussion was the cinematic "indie boom" of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: a massive shift in public and industry perceptions of cinematic importance in which movies and studios that would once have been too gritty, too talky, too foreign or niche-oriented became, for a few brief shining years, the darlings of Big Cinema. This was the era not just of Tarantino and Spike Lee but of Merchant Ivory, Vincent Ward, Christine Vachon and Jane Hamsher and the Weinsteins and Jane Campion. "Indie" became a buzzword for young cinephiles eager to cut their teeth on fare they perceived as tailored personally to them, not dreamed up by committee in an LA highrise.

That was fine and good, but that discussion only went so far before it had to rub up against the awkward truth of the matter: everyone was indie now. By the late 90s, it had become fashionable to point out that it was fine and good to celebrate indie darlings like Welcome to the Dollhouse or Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it bore remembering that the "indie" label applied equally to Se7en (starring Brad Pitt and directed by the man behind Alien3), Scream (starring actors from Friends and Party of Five and directed by the man who launched the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) and Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (no qualification necessary).

By the time New Line Cinema swept the Oscars with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the fact that the movie was an "indie film" by an "indie studio" didn't even bear consideration. This was the new paradigm: the creation of Hollywood blockbusters was a service outsourced to independent contractors, the same as everything else.

Billy Corgan is not irrelevant (as he consciously wastes no opportunity to remind us), but he is woefully anachronistic (as he unconsciously see above). While Corgan 1.0 was bypassing the whole "indie" farrago in favor of selling shitloads of the exact records he wanted to make, his contemporaries were wrestling with the angel of authenticity and, more often than not, coming to conclusions that Corgan 2.0 would have deemed "inauthentic." By adopting a mythologized version of the "indie" mantle long after contemporaries like Pavement had outgrown that notion, he puts one in mind of the Vietnam draft-dodgers who grow fat and old, turn hawk, and defend unnecessary wars by bemoaning their lost opportunity to bond with their fellow men in the sacred crucible of the soldier's nobility. He got to avoid a messy fight from which there was no escape without getting your hands dirty, but in later life, he still gets to cling to an ideal under whose standard he never marched to begin with. It's hard to condemn a figure like that too harshly: it may be a delusion, but the fact remains that for him, the war never ended.

[1] Oh, what, you're going to complain about hubristic author insertion in a story about Billy fucking Corgan?
[2] Let us not pretend that I am the only person to talk this week about the amusing contradictions of this situation.

What Monsters Would Say: Sagami Bay Ningen

2010-10-15T22:08:00.001+13:00

"Robble robble!"

Corganwatch: Say What You Will About Billy Corgan, At Least He Isn't The Guy From Opshop

2010-10-11T16:06:00.001+13:00

Because come the fuck on.

What Monsters Would Say: Jack the Ripper

2010-09-25T23:49:00.003+12:00

"I suspect that you can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library."

I'm Still Here (Prematurely), or On Intention and Authenticity (Prematurely)

2010-09-19T12:08:00.003+12:00

Are You Aware of this new movie, I'm Still Here? It is a movie in which Joaquin Phoenix, the Rich Man's Balthazar Getty, has a nervous breakdown and tries to become a rapper. It is shot in a documentarian style by Phoenix's brother-in-law Casey Affleck and chronicles the last few years of Phoenix's life, in which he publicly grew a beard and subjected people to terrible rapping and rants about celebrity and altogether made an ass of himself.

I'm Still Here has a lot of people feeling very clever, because Affleck, in his capacity as director, has recently informed the public that Phoenix was not actually undergoing a mental breakdown while the movie was filmed. Well, Of Course, we are all saying, We Knew It Was Fake! What clever people we all are today!

In fact what we are saying, when we say, "I'm Still Here is fake just like I told you it was," is that we are quite old-fashioned when it comes to this lingering Romantic notion of "authenticity." It is a very old thing, this obsession with "realness," and while authors like the confoundingly interesting David Shields may invite us to get a little bit more adventurous about it all, for the most part it is a very creaky sort of paradigm through which we are still processing it.

When we say that a movie documenting its star's breakdown is "fake" because he did the things the movie says he did but not for the reasons given, are we saying that action is not enough, that intention is what counts? Because after all, the events documented in the movie (with the exception of some faked home-movie footage) really happened, regardless of the principals' reasons for doing them.

Is it our position that Joaquin Phoenix did not really give an embarrassing interview on Letterman because he was not actually flipping out at the time in the same way that, say, Crispin Glover would have been? Can we then say that Tom Hanks did not really get his teeth capped for The Bonfire of the Vanities because he was not doing it in the name of Tom Hanks' dental health, or that Klaus Kinski did not really drag a boat up a mountain because it happened in the wrong half of the 20th century?

Those seeking to explain Phoenix and Affleck's work often refer to the concept of "performance art," that same context that James Franco was so lampooned for placing his work on General Hospital within. The reason this often fails is that if someone does not like what someone else is doing, he will like it even less if she says that it is "art," because if he is meritocratic about art or insecure about his ability to understand culture, this implies (to him) that she believes there is an inherent nobility to her work which he did not get.

To call the movie "performance art" is valid, because it puts the notion of "fakeness" in its appropriately irrelevant place: nobody would call, say, Marina Abramovic's screaming until her lungs gave out "fake" because she was doing it in the name of a pre-planned artwork instead of because she was being chased by a monster or what have you.

But even if we can excuse a work by calling it art, this basic reliance on intentions is still bothersome, because the fact remains that the work was not allowed into the canon until we knew "why" it was done. This is a troublesome and dangerous distinction to make, not least because if we only allowed ourselves to enjoy things that were "good" in the way their creator intended them to be, we would become very bored very fast.

David Simon, the creator of my current favorite thing The Wire, likes to say that most entertainment in our time works within a Shakesperian model, whereby the focus is on the inner lives of characters' thoughts and emotions; whereas his television program worked within more of a framework of Greek tragedy, whereby protagonists' outward actions and the consequences of those actions are what matters. When we penalize someone like Joaquin Phoenix for doing something like I'm Still Here, we are faulting him for what we judge to be a duplicitous inner nature, whereas we might find more value in examining our notions of celebrity, narrative and performance and seeing where his actions fit within these contexts.

But then, I haven't seen the movie because I live in New Zealand, so I may be quite wrong about all of this. Just pretend I was talking about Wayne Anderson: Singer of Songs.

Tom's New Zealand: A City Forsaken

2010-09-11T18:48:00.007+12:00

"Not the God, but a God, at least." That's how Bill Murray describes himself after discovering that he's trapped in a purgatorial parochiality in which time never changes and his ability to predict the next few minutes marks him as a minor superhuman. The people of New Zealand don't think themselves a God (much less the God), but they have some idea who knows what's coming next, and they have a fairly good reckoning that if they just keep in touch with this entity (who must be deific in the pantheonic sense, if not the monotheistic), she [1] will be right.

That God, of course, is the numinous and omniscient "They[2]." Like the God of the Israelites, the true name(s) of God must not be uttered; They are nameless and without number. And like the God of all those who follow Abraham, They can will events simply by speaking of them: for Them to say a thing is so is to make it so. If They say it is to rain, then the washing comes in; if They expect a popular swing to the Right, the Labour party had best start arresting terrorist suspects and promising tax cuts.

But Christchurch, a city deceptively faithful to They[3], is so haunted by the motif of the impassible cup that an immovable monument to same has been erected in the town square. And just as such a cup heralds questions of divine abandonment, so the people of Christchurch, this week, have had to ask whether they have been abandoned by They.

When the woofters and wowsers of Wellington and the Aucklanders of Auckland were replacing their bricks and tram-lines with cement and cables and terrifying children with hard-sell preparedness, They assured Christchurch that this was Political Correctness Gone Mad, the Softening of Society. Christchurch kept her stone buildings and her solid frontages and her thick steel rails and her fearless youth.

And so when They turned out to have overlooked Christchurch's place on the Pacific Ring of Fire, Christchurch's people were unsure what to say. Uneasy about channelling their newly-fickle patron deity, Christchurchians ran to the words of favored son Chris Knox: across the breadth of news coverage, there were only cliches to get across the feeling. Everyone buckled down for 48 hours of equally punishing aftershocks, They having assured them that this was coming.

A brief respite, granted when They turned out to have been wrong again, turned to despair as They's assurances that the worst aftershocks were over turned out to be a third time wrong. Christchurch, unlike its namesake, had no way of predicting that it would be spoken against three times, so this was particularly galling.

It is this abandonment that Christchurch finds the hardest to deal with. The physical nature of the damage, it has overcome ably: community centers overrun with donations and contributions, even the Council had to post a "please stop helping" message on their website. Cordons and curfews, geographic and chronological concessions to They, have been dutifully obeyed, that their patron may be appeased.

But the blow to Christchurch's spirit is harder to bandage. Usually a city with a proud (some might say ostentatious) tradition of stiff-upper-lip-service, Christchurch's town paper spent a week talking as if the crisis had been so severe that the questions facing townsfolk were far more serious than whether or not we'd still get to host the Rugby [4].

When the people of Christchurch speak, they speak of They; when they have questions, they have always known that They have the answers. In a city where They saw nothing coming, and where nobody is scared of a little hard work if only They would tell them how to make everything stone-solid once more, this is the hardest thing to stomach: the notion that the earth could shake, and They would have had nothing to say about it.

[1] While the God of epistemology and teleology is Janus-like and genderless, the personification of circumstances themselves is feminine.
[2] For foundational thoughts on the nature of They I am indebted to Bill Pearson's masterful essay on the New Zealand character, Fretful Sleepers, and to my friend Cheryl Bernstein for alerting me to its existence.
[3] The Christchurchian, deeply egalitarian in his politics, spirituality and day-to-day affairs, harbours a deep-set mistrust of any one entity with too much going for them. He appreciates the effort that must have gone into creating the Universe in a week, but hanging around to dictate a book about it smacks of skiting. Civic nomenclature aside, that goes double for His son.
[4] A question nevertheless so pressing that the Press was asking it within hours of the initial tremor.

Corganwatch: ¡¡¡El Mundo Es... VAMPIRO!!!

2010-08-27T23:24:00.000+12:00

Billy Corgan does a lot of contrived things: positioning himself as anti-establishment while contributing to a Michael Bay soundtrack, the whole "BFF with Marilyn Manson" period, his marriage, sustaining the career of Don Draper for twenty years before the drummer discovered his true calling as an ad executive.

Right??

Many of Corgan's contrivances smack of specious attempts to add depth to his "metaphysical poet covers prog-rock standards, adds distortion" persona, not least his insistence on reminding us that he likes wrestling at every opportunity he finds to do so. The trouble with Billy Corgan liking wrestling is not that Billy Corgan shouldn't like wrestling - everybody likes wrestling, even Werner Herzog - or that Billy Corgan shouldn't talk about how by the way, did you know Billy Corgan likes wrestling? After all, Billy Corgan has a long tradition of reminding us that he likes sports, be it via the medium of excellent, self-loathing b-side (a song written because the Bulls lost a game) or punching-above-your-weight diatribe.

The problem with Billy Corgan liking wrestling is that Billy Corgan obviously thinks that the mere act of Billy Corgan liking wrestling runs so counter to everything we think about Billy Corgan that he has just blown your little mind into a million pieces. This belies a fundamental lack of awareness of three things:

- How the culture views wrestling. Everyone likes wrestling, even Werner Herzog. What is not to like?

- How the culture views Billy Corgan. Billy Corgan seems to operate under the assumption that the culture has the exact two-dimensional rock-god-throwback perception of him that he spends much of his time projecting, meaning that for Billy Corgan to step outside this paradigm with a leftfield statement like "I like wrestling" will be a major blow to how we see Billy Corgan and, by extension, the universe. This is the same fallacy that led him to believe that we would all have to sit down and have a good hard think about our lives when we learned that two grown adults played a game of chess.

- How the culture views famous people. Billy Corgan consciously makes music and conducts himself in the manner of a person from a time when the famous and the regular were two different classes of people, and this is a nice effort and I'm glad someone's making it, because I for one rather miss that time. Why should I experience the Kantian concept of the Sublime on a daily basis through Twitter chats and Youtube replies and blog comments by awe-inspiringly talented famous people I admire? The Kantian concept of the Sublime is a tiring thing to have to do every day! However, the simple fact is that nowadays, we are all a little bit famous and famous people are all a little bit ordinary, so to find out that Billy Corgan the person likes something seemingly incongruous with Billy Corgan the persona ain't no thing, because we have TMZ and we know famous people go to the toilet now.

So all this being the case, Billy Corgan's insistence on reminding us that he likes wrestling is perhaps a little uncalled-for and probably not helping his case as much as, oh, say, hiring a fucking producer would do. However, if it is to extend to Corgan performing shows in Mexico containing a worked shoot, culminating in Corgan being forced to throw down against rampaging luchadores, what can you say? You can accuse Billy Corgan of not having thought his character out as well as we might like, but no one can accuse the good fellow of breaking kayfabe.

What Monsters Would Say: Yeti

2010-08-01T19:48:00.001+12:00

"Waddamagonnado?? Just when I think I'm down, they pull me back up. Fuhgeddabbaddit!"

Corganwatch: The Bodily Remains Such a Bore

2010-07-24T22:50:00.003+12:00

Character relations are defined under crisis, which is why Corganwatch will be avoiding the requisite chastisement of the anemic royal for slamming fans for being "stuck in 1993" (because apparently it's fine to dwell on 1996, when you erroneously believe your fate became irreparably soured, but heaven forbid people should dwell on the time you did your best thing).

No, with Lanky McThumbington having suffered an unexplained onstage collapse, which he's gamely shrugging off in the name of giving fans what they ~~will take and damn well like~~ want for the remainder of his tour, Corganwatch's best wishes are with the singer. May he either get well soon, or undergo an L Ron Hubbard-esque out-of-body experience in which all the world's knowledge is revealed to him and he becomes one with the divine (which, contrary to some evidence, obviously hasn't happened yet, because someone who was one with the divine would know that Billy Corgan needs to hire a producer).

Tom's New York: Empire, State of Mind

2010-07-16T17:31:00.004+12:00

The central metaphor of New York City is also the most cliched, obvious "you are now in New York" visual cue. New York is a city in which everything is sculpted from light, and in which light itself becomes visual language for human effort and prosperity and liberty; which is to say, if you want to imagine New York, imagine a proud, beautiful human, with rays of luminous promise streaming from her very noggin.

At midnight, downtown Manhattan is lit up damn near bright as day with neon and glowing LCDs and moving billboards, the crowds so dense it might as well be midday anywhere else. Times Square becomes the glowing center of the world, pulling life into its orbit like an anti-black hole. It's hard not to feel a little uneasy when the very light by which you see is paid for and delivered by huge mindshare-devouring multinational conglomerates, but hello, there's a reason they call it Times Square: it's because it's Times fucking Square.

In the daytime, New York becomes a monument to commerce and capitalism and 1920s pluck and luck and gumption and all those things that we enlightened folks know to be gilded promises, but damn if it doesn't nearly carry it off. Just as the rays of Liberty are mirrored in the Chrysler building's art-deco crown, so every towering shard of commerce and promise lining Park Avenue reflects every other, the light refracting and mingling until the effect is that of walking through a swimming soup of luminosity.

While Rockefeller Center's ridiculously overblown gold-everything can be processed only by its presence in 30 Rock's title sequence, placing the whole experience solidly in unreality (pity the poor folks who had to try and factor it into empirically existent phenomena!), directly underground lies a terrible cavern of ebon marble and light-sucking art-deco black majesty, like strolling through Ayn Rand's memory palace. Twenty minutes north is the 5th Avenue parkside, whose huge brownstone monoliths anchor Manhattan outside time itself.

When you destroy a part of New York City, light spouts from the wound, and when you bandage the gash up, New Yorkers, unable to stand in the shadow of the severed digit, develop split, twin shadows. The cretinous assholes who attacked New York city nine years ago died not realizing that, by hitting America where she keeps her New York, they weren't even making the right kind of point. America may contain its share of bigots or Eloi or bloated Orwellian drones, and certainly New York can't be without them, but the message of New York is only everything that is right about the American doctrine. To attack America on the basis of New York is like dissing rock music on the basis of Gimme Shelter, or saying poetry sucks because The Waste Land is too monumental. It's assaulting what you see as a fatally flawed entity based only on its most transcendentally correct elements. What a bunch of morons.

On Summer evenings, the sun slots perfectly into Manhattan's east-west groove, a thick syrup of golden light washing across the island before the neon takes over, fire escapes and entranceways becoming prisms and zoetropes, windows glinting, colors all set alight, a little sacred play of light to end the day. Is there a word that's the opposite of "lyrical"? May I perhaps nominate the name for this phenomenon, "Manhattanhenge"? A rare miss for the usually sparkling Neil deGrasse Tyson, who coined the term. Anyhow, to walk Central park or Chinatown or the East Village during this time is to know deeply and surely everything that is right about living in the Urban West, which is a fine way to build up an appetite for dinner.

After two weeks in New York - riding the subway to the wrong stop and emerging into air thick with sweet eastern spices and Mosque chants from tinny speakers, failing to decipher Cyrillic street signs in Little Russia (which is much more like The Living Daylights than Grand Theft Auto IV lets on), enjoying New York's New York pizza for its surprising lack of superiority to anywhere else's New York pizza - it's impossible not to remember that a thick layer of New York's gleaming patina comes at the cost of harsh mistreatment of vagrants and disenfranchised minorities and hardline enforcement of some fairly unsavory policies. It's spectacle, like a Broadway show or a dodgy comedy club or the M&Ms store; and the bit-players are compensated harshly for their fleeting traffic. Being in New York is hard work, and all the harder for the people without anything to do. The play and the venue aren't the same thing, of course, but this is why New York's so great, even at its worst: not only is it the world's grandest theater, but it puts on a hell of a show.

In Which Our Hero Has A Lot Of Suggestions.

2010-07-07T15:10:00.002+12:00

Two new articles of mine are up at GR this week: one where I strip-mine gaming history, Sheeda-like, to propose old games I want to play in 3d; and one where I propose genres that games should do more of, apparently forgetting that the final third of Metal Gear Solid 2 exists (can you blame me?).

Corganwatch: Strumming My Pain With His Fingers

2010-07-04T01:30:00.006+12:00

Billy Corgan and I have both been to LA, so Billy Corgan and I both know that LA is some rough stuff. When I went to LA, I tried to walk to Hollywood but took a wrong turn and ended up on Slauson. Which is basically like how when Billy Corgan went to LA, he tried to play a game with the audience but found that the people in LA are not telepathic with him so they don't know when he's decided the game is over.

While Corgan's attempts at levity are applauded, his audience's inability to discern between strained jocularity and passive-aggressive irritation (which is pretty inexcusable, being as this is an audience that has paid money to see Billy Corgan) earned them an early end to the evening. The mob's refusal to silently contemplate the spectacle of a bald man teaching himself the ukulele before their very eyes, followed with their half-hearted attempts to salvage Corgan's dignity by sparing his cover of Love is the Sweetest Thing the mortified silence it was so quickly earning, surely qualifies as the worst response to an impending tragedy in the entire history of the Viper Room.

By leaving the stage early, Billy Corgan missed the evening's highlight: a tragic soul yelling after him, "We never left you, Billy!"

Corgan, a long-time pro-wrestling fan, at last has his own "It's still real to me, dammit!" And not a moment too soon.

Tom's New Zealand: The Despicable Mr Bennett

2010-07-01T19:38:00.003+12:00

To achieve the look of Joe Bennett, an actor spends three hours receiving a custom face-mask designed by monster-master Tom Savini.

"I watched the USA play Ghana. It was wonderful, partly because of the intensity of feeling, partly because of the Ghanaian names but mainly because the USA lost. Some of the Americans wept. That alone was worth getting up for."

- Joe Bennett is a popular Christchurch columnist, printed twice daily in the city's Press newspaper. His fans (a set which incudes all people in Christchurch, and some of the uglier dogs as well) are known to buy three copies of every issue of the paper in which he appears, lest they read the first and second copies so many times that their eyes literally suck up all the ink off the page. This scientific implausibility is just one of the myriad subjects of which Bennett's readers remain gloriously ignorant because he has not told them about it yet. With a tone as superciliously condescending toward absolutely everything on the planet, surely he must know all about it and be fixing to write about it one of these days!

Tom's America: LAX, Part Two

2010-06-24T16:19:00.002+12:00

Peter Medak's execrable 1999 horror movie, Species 2[1], concerns a spaceman who comes back to Earth and brings with him an unseen contagion that soon goes to work on changing the world around him. The alien in question mainly changes the world by making alive people not-alive, but I'm sure there's scope for more variety in such a premise; my secret expectation (or fear, depending on the specifics) is that I'll get back to New Zealand and somehow America will have followed me home. Light switches will flick down to turn on; pennies will exist; people will put the month before the day when writing down the date; those terrifying accordion-buses will roam New Zealand's streets like Hungry Hungry Caterpillars, and people will speak derisively of anyone who rides them, because riding the bus, why don't you just go lick a hobo's asshole?!

Sometimes the contagion I imagine myself carrying would be more irksome than anything else. I remain certain that when I get back to New Zealand, everyone will be tipping. I am not an American, and until I sit a test and marry an employer and become an American, I am going to bask in my right to say that tipping is a patronising affront to the very people beholden to it. And that while certainly I never(!)[2] make the choice to opt for Not Patronising those people by also Not Paying The Portion of Their Wage Their Employer Should be Covering (because that would be doubly patronising and also niggardly), the fact remains that on its best day, tipping is basically saying to someone, "Your employer and I have been talking, and he doesn't feel like paying you adequately, so here's a little sumpin sumpin seeings as I'm rolling in the benjis and all. Thirty percent? Oh, I'm touched that that should be so special to you; honestly, where I live we line our birdcages with thirty percent!" People all over America have weighed in on tipping for me, and there's something sweet and socially contractual and honor systemic about it, but really, I'd rather just eat somewhere where they know what minimum wage is (that is to say: an insult).

I have a very real fear that the deep vein of commercial smugness that I choose to dissociate with any notion I might have of Essential Americanism will be back in New Zealand waiting for me. That everyone in the country will "have me covered." That all slogans for all products will be Concise. Succinct. Smarmy. That the entire food industry of New Zealand will have discovered what American media have apparently known for some time now, which is that all food can be sold with warm lighting, a Dutch tilt, and a shot of the raw ingredients bouncing off a chopping board, splashing water as they go. Who knew it was so easy? America!

And I suppose if that smugness were to follow me home, the bizarre and unexpected decrepitude propping it with rickety scaffolding might as well come too. The run-down faded glamor of even the nicest areas, where everything's either Just Opened and absurdly new and flashy or Going Out Of Business Everything Must Go and closing up shop even before you walk in the door. The moneylenders in every temple, souvenir stands and chilly-bins of $1 water and desperate ticket-barkers anywhere people might conceivably like to be. The huge, massive, totally unavoidable homelessness every single where you go, brushing past the quietly heartbreaking hordes to dine in places where they have valets to move your cars five feet and everything in the restroom is motion-activated (seriously, America, how clean do you think you are, and how dirty do you think everyone around you is?). When homelessness is so widespread that the homed are pastiching the mannerisms of the homeless in order to rustle up beer money, maybe it's time to start taking stock of your priorities.

The N-word phenomenon, I would hope, would also come with me. When I first got to America I was amazed by how bone-deep the power of racial language really is; the notion of the power of words and perceptions to divide and conjure tensions was so palpable, I imagine it was as close as one can come to experiencing life in a universe where magic words actually exist. New Zealanders basically think this is silly[3], but people outside America could learn a thing or two from the way Americans cultivate their racial attitudes.

Not the attitudes themselves, necessarily: there are racists as all fuck in America (doy). I met an Arkansian fellow in Portland who shocked the room by dropping a few N-bombs, clarifying his position in a Pryor-caliber rant that rocketed incomprehensibly from "It's okay to say 'nigger' because 'nigger' means 'ignorant person'" to "please don't say 'cunt,' I have a mother and I find that offensive." (This differs from the Man of Portland's usual racial policy, of course: the MoP is very proud of his enlightened racial outlook, and one day he imagines he may meet a brown person, and that brown person will be very impressed also and probably invite him to a concert/reading, because this being the Man of Portland's fantasy, the brown person is Mos Def).

The most hateful racist, the most misguided racial doofus, and the most racially sensible American share one quality: they rightly believe their racial position to be an active part of their inner life; they enshrine this position, cultivate it actively, and recognize that it affects the way they interact with the world. This unspoken acknowledgment of the importance of one's racial dimension sets Americans apart from any other people I have met. Note that assigning weight to one's racial position is different from assigning weight to one's racial identity: while the latter is a great way to set one apart from other people and quickly develop a violent and misguided hatred thereof, the former is more of a shared acknowledgment that race is something worth talking about, which is a position that would improve both race relations and the general tone of conversation Down Under.

A Lengthy Diversion About Racism

Traveling California and Texas, I found myself surprised by how many Hispanic folks I found myself in the company of, and how utterly Latin-American - culturally, linguistically, visually - these folks all were. This obvious (is there a word that's like "obvious" only more so?) observation will not constitute news to any resident of those areas; but for someone who thinks, on some level, that they have a pretty good notion of what America is about, based on mass media depictions thereof[4], it is a surprise.

Now, if one sees America as a thing to be experienced in whatever form it takes and a thing of which one will never truly be an integral part, this surprise is neither here nor there; but if one were emotionally invested in the notion of America, and one had allowed oneself to osmose one's notions of America from the mass-media discourse (that is, if one were a human being living in the West after 1950), it is very easy to imagine oneself feeling gypped. That is to say, if one loved the America of American mythology so much that one could not get one's head around the America of American life, then it would be very easy to imagine one becoming angry at the people that one saw as populating the gulf between the two.

American racism (applicable equally to most any racial minority, with the exception of those who look exactly like Will Smith), seen in this light, becomes emotionally totally understandable (because resentment toward the gap between expectation and actuality is one of the most irreducible constants of human existence), and intellectually utterly foolhardy (because it is like saying, "I am surprised and violently angry that my Whopper does not look so appetizing when the Dutch tilt, warm lighting, and splashy chopping board are removed." Come on, what are you, a fucking moron?).

A Return To Our Theme

Obviously there are many things I would wish to infect New Zealanders with from America, besides a more grown-up attitude toward racial discourse. It would be lovely to come home and find that New Zealanders had conversations about which route to take, because that always makes life feel more like an episode of Seinfeld. It would be great to be able to find good Mexican food as easily as it is in America, and charming to find that the tradition of the American diner had been imported to New Zealand in a slightly less ersatz form than the two or three examples of same currently on show. It would be simply marvelous if New Zealanders, on my return, were as warm and welcoming and eager to show the best of their culture as Americans are. (It is entirely possible that this is the case; watch this space).

Maybe I'll even get home to find that the mortifyingly affected no-nonsense, strained working-class authenticity and obsession with "unpretentiousness" on which New Zealanders fall back as a cliche of self-definition has finally been cast aside, the country's queer shoulder finally put to the wheel. Maybe I'll get home to the teenage bedroom that is much of Kiwi culture and find that the country's pulled the curtains open, turned down the Linkin Park and decided to start having interesting conversations. Who knows? Maybe I'll never hear lazy half-assedness referred to lovingly as "#8 wire ingenuity" again. I'll get back to New Zealand and the majority of people will be as friendly and wry as the people in Seattle, who befriended me and wouldn't let me leave and kept subjecting me to day after day of conversations and hospitality and experiences and fascinating everyday life. People like the cool, savvy urbanites who live San Francisco like a tattoo on their soul, who I lived around and with for months and who offered a different glimpse of the city every other day, will be a dime a dozen. Everyone will be as positive and lively as the types who work so hard that they're able to live in New York and never forget how lucky that makes them. Maybe folks everywhere will be as engaged with the culture and excited about their place in it as the people that America just kept dropping into my life.

It's basically nice to be going home. But there are things I wish I didn't have to leave.

[1] I'm sure there's a non-awful alternative example, but all I'm coming up with are the turgid The Astronaut's Wife, the craptacular Flatliners, and the shitbiscuitulent Hideaway.
[2] Once. When I was snapped at by an old Chinese woman who yammered at me for twenty seconds, walked off, and came back with something that cost twice what I had ordered and contained none of the food components of the thing I ordered, I did not eat said food or tip said crone; I spent the evening mostly-frivolously hoping to avoid contraction of some sort of worst-karma-ever curse.
[3] By dismissing as ridiculous any ideas of regulating racially-charged speech, one not only refuses to accept most of the cultural fabric of the world one is living in, but also closes oneself off from rich veins of comedy in the realm of oversensitivity. A friend was once scolded in the supermarket for saying "collared greens," possibly because it sounds like "colored greens" or perhaps because it is associated with a stereotype; if one's anchor is cast too deeply in the waters of "all racial sensitivity is silly," one is unable to enjoy the nuance of this sort of thing.
[4] If Tom's America has a theme, it is that this is always, always, without exception, always a foolish assumption to make, except that there are exceptions.

Things that Look Like Stuff: Oliver Stone

2010-06-17T18:15:00.002+12:00

Mr. Stone appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last week, making the program look more like a one-panel funny-paper (and, by extension, less cloying and two-dimensional) than usual.

What Monsters Would Say: The Pachimon of London Bridge

2010-06-15T04:59:00.003+12:00

"Heeeeeeelp! I can't swiiiiiiiiim!!!"

(Friend of the show Bewarethefish pointed me to a wonderful repository of monsters spotted throughout the world. Delight in them!)

Agora, or On Being Oh So Fucking Clever

2010-06-09T15:38:00.000+12:00

As anyone who knows me at all knows, I loves me some vigilante cinema. I can't get enough of that violently unpleasant - creepily uncomfortable - righteously destructive one-two-three punch! Vigilante movies (and their cousins, slasher movies, Rambo movies, and everything about Mel Gibson) work by presenting a hero whose flaw is their disengagement with the world; this flaw unleashes a chaotic Nemesis that must first be tentatively confronted via random confrontation, before descending into an orgy of purifying fire through which our protagonist must pull his assailants, safe in the knowledge that only he will emerge unscathed. This is a perfect example of the vital potential of dumb, trashy cinema, with the side-benefit of confronting any reasonable viewer with an ideology so opposed to their own that a visceral dramatization of that ideology becomes doubly exciting for its dissonance with our own values. So: ordeal, catharsis, visceral challenges to audience ideology: good.

I mention this because Agora feels like it should be working in a similar way, but it gets stuck on Phase 1: Mistreatment. It's all penance, no catharsis. I've read favorable comparisons with The Passion of the Christ, which is inevitable, because (a) the movie tells the exact same story for the benefit of people without an investment in the original picture's protagonist; and (b) the movie is all about Christianity, and as such, it's pretty easy to compare it to notable items in the canon of Christian cinema, but there are no chariot races, so this is where we are.

Obviously Agora wants very much to be Saying Something about the modern spiritual climate (without ever saying anything its target audience might disagree with in the slightest, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds like): in the first half, toothless asshole Christians smash up the Library of Alexandria for reasons never really clarified. The movie takes pains to separate the reason/faith debate from Pagan/Monotheist tensions, except when it's convenient to load your argument by conflating the two dichotomies. So we're not really sure why the Christians are smashing the library, other than everyone in this movie is an asshole except for Rachel Weisz, on which more anon. But the first half feels as long as a regular movie, partly because structure is for idiots and Agora is for smarts, but largely because it's a lot of ordeal and a lot of belaboring of the fairly self-evident point that "it is not good to destroy human knowledge."

After the initial assault on the Library, the picture takes a breather for a CG long-shot of Alexandria, dwelling on the city's remaining majesty, the fires of the city's famed lighthouse symbolizing the fire of knowledge that still yes I know this is so obvious as to be trite, but again, these are the tools the movie has given us to work with, so here we are. It's at this point that the movie's true aim becomes clear. It's not interested in being a parable about knowledge or politics and religion or any of the interesting things the story is ostensibly concerned with: it's a self-flagellating celebration of destruction in the guise of a wake, a hairshirt for intellectualism. Agora is so puffed-up and proud of its natural-philosophy chops, it can't even be bothered working out how to have a good narrative. You don't enjoy Agora because there's no catharsis to enjoy: instead you congratulate yourself on agreeing with its endlessly victimized, utterly flawless protagonist, as if those all around you were cheering on the swarthy, foreign-accented Christians and Jews (because it's also pretty racist, so bully for that) and only you were smart enough to feel a kinship with the way the heroine is the most perfect human being in the history of all people.

The second half expands on the movie's theme of "toothless asshole Christians are toothless assholes" with an hour or so of irrelevant back-and-forth between toothless asshole Christians, oily asshole Pagans, and undercharacterized asshole Jews, and then it needs an ending, so they decide to stone Weisz to death, though her only crime is that she spends the movie being utterly perfect and wise and knowledgeable and graceful and selfless, which in a movie is actually a pretty good reason to kill someone, because that is a boring character to have to spend an entire movie with! Also spoiler, one of the guys who has been in love with her all along (pretty much everyone except Rachel Weisz plays someone who has been in love with Rachel Weisz all along) strangles her before she can be stoned, and this plotline takes up far, far too much time.

Agora thinks it's presenting a timely parable about how little time society has for philosophical inquiry or reasoned debate. But in refusing to scrutinize in the slightest its protagonist or her ideals, it forces an interpretation that ends up sending a fairly bleak message about the perils of intellectual retreat from the world of action. If the movie wants to be examined as an allegory - and it wants this very, very much - what can we say about the condescending disregard with which its heroine treats everyone and everything around her, and where she ends up because of it? How about "if intellectualism is not informed by engagement with the human and political realities of the world around it, it might as well be compassionately strangled before it can be stoned to death for being such a condescending, functionally useless waste of time"? Sure, but anyone with any sense knows that already, whether or not they had to watch Agora to be reminded of it.

[EDIT: The politics of adaptation are for another day - perhaps the same day we all sit down and talk about whether video games are art! - but in short, fuck this movie.]

In Which I Am Adulterated.

2010-06-07T16:51:00.002+12:00

My feature on irritating sound effects in games is up on Gamesradar. How Sausage Is Made: this piece is more heavily edited than usual, possibly because my original version featured several jokes that were obscure even by my standards. Yum, sausage!

Tom's New York: On the Down Low

2010-06-06T16:48:00.004+12:00

"That trap-door," says my hostess for the day, "Some people say that's where the Mole People come and go." She's pointing at a small grate in an artificial rocky mound on the south end of Central Park, somewhere between the big silver Atlas at the foot of the park (Jack Donaghy got the gold one, a few blocks south) and the FAO Schwartz where you can see the staff recreate the famous "big piano" scene from Big[1], then try your own hand (foot) at same and realize just how rubbish you are at absolutely every skill necessary to play a big piano.

She tells me about how the Mole People live below the city of New York and have their own societies and mayors and electricity and running water (maybe this is where all the electricity and running water and organizational capacity from my hostel went!) and are the lords of the subterranean world, one that swallows regular humans who try to venture into it but where cave-dwelling people can survive and prosper. There are twelve levels to the subway; regular people, rather precisely, are said never to get below Level 4. (Maybe that's where the first mini-boss is).

Of course, the Mole People fiction is not unique to the world of non-fiction. Every subway trip I take, I'm reminded of Midnight Meat Train, an ill-advised feature-length adaptation of a one-joke Clive Barker short in which an ill-advised Bradley Cooper plays a photographer who becomes ill-advisedly obsessed with trailing Vinnie Jones into subways, believing the Marceau of the Soccer Hooligans to be a subway serial killer. Spoiler! He's right: Jones has been tricked into riding the subways for an eternity, bludgeoning people with a huge hammer and feeding them to a race of cave-dwelling demons on whose home New York is built and who demand appeasement in the form of ill-advised subway travelers. That's why (in a fascinating and unexplored implication) New York, within the movie's mythology, gets its power from a Faustian bargain written into the city's very topography, and also why (in a marginally interesting and underdeveloped subplot) the vegetarian Cooper develops an obsession with eating bloody steak as he gets closer to his quarry.

But you don't have to be spinning crazy extrapolations onto New York's subways for them to be one of the most evocative places in America. This is the chrome-and-graffiti cave that folks go into as a meek observer and emerge from as a fierce avenger: so says The Brave One, but it's just lifting a scene from Death Wish and/or the legend of Bernhard Goetz. "You don't look that bad," sneered Goetz in December 1984 as he stared down a would-be mugger he'd just shot on the subway, "Here's another." Then he shot the guy again at point blank. Bernhard Goetz looks nothing like Charles Bronson, but it's impossible to imagine that line being spoken by anyone else.

Once you leave daylight on the subway, everything blends. The oily musk of sweating steel is so thick you might as well be walking through gaseous metal. The reality of moving from A to B becomes a Jungian trek through the nether world. Subway-demons are on a continuum with Mole People bleeding into the real subjects of Dark Days seguing into the unfortunate on the next platform. The intricate grid of New York streets is reduced to an unfeasibly elegant single straight line. The only thing that parses the soot-black funk and off-white Victorian tiles and homeless and yuppies and iron maiden-like full-body turnstiles is the trains themselves, slicing through the dark with a mighty rush and reminding you what's what. And then you step out and you're in an entirely different place, as if there were any doubt that the whole thing were magic.

[1] In a movie about a little boy becoming a big man, why is the most famous scene the one which highlights the man character's smallness in a way that borders on surrealistic?

Prince of Persia, or On Going Backwards

2010-05-29T14:35:00.004+12:00

It's not that I disagree with Roger Ebert's assertion that games will never be art; it's that I think he has such a good point, phrased in such an incendiary and definition-debating way, that oh God I'm already bored with this sentence I hate this discussion so fucking much. Anyway, Prince of Persia is a videogame in perfectly-adequate-movie form, and as such its biggest problem is that the central device - a dagger that can control the flow of time - is designed to be an ingenious toy that players can interact with, so when you take away the control pad, the result is a movie where you spend most of your time frustrated with the characters for not using the thing correctly.

Other than that, the dagger is adapted fairly faithfully from the game, in that it can turn back time and give you a one-minute do-over as long as you only ever use it for incidental things that have no effect on the actual plot. Just as the makers of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within were savvy enough to include all sorts of wack-ass magical doodads but never let the characters use them in a way that could impact the actual happenings of the movie - just like in the games, wahey! - people in Prince of Persia never think to use the magic knife to prevent a beloved character's death, or prevent their own death, or not meet up with Alfred Molina's mortifying brownface comic-relief character.

One of the most charming things about the game version of The Sands of Time is its recurring use of the motif of storytelling as the power over time itself: the game's ludological employment of the chronotropic dagger is mirrored by frequent reminders that you're playing a story, and the storyteller himself can reverse time also. The movie admirably attempts to recreate this, but while some instances work, there's much clunky unintentional narrative time-bending going on too: at one point, the script jumps back to an earlier pivotal line to make sure we know what's going on, but that line was spoken less than a minute ago. Also, the entire plot is a heavy-handed attack on scheming politicians who would invade the Middle East in search of nonexistent contraband weaponry, because apparently the script thinks it is jumping back eight years to an era when this would be timely. I hope G. Gordon Liddy is sitting down, because the Prince of Persia: Warrior Within movie is really going to tear him a new one for that thing he did in the hotel that time, and not a moment too soon!

In conclusion, I cannot tell the difference between an actor who is having a ball re-enacting the glory days of matinee-idol bravado and an indie stalwart who is visibly embarrassed to be in a movie whose central theme is expressed as "the bond between brothers is the sword that defends a kingdom," so don't ask me whether Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is any good, but it isn't.

In Which Our Hero Pushes The Boundaries.

2010-05-29T14:33:00.002+12:00

I'm quite happy with this Gamesradar article about taboos in video games. Judging from the comments, so are many others. Maybe you will be also!

MacGruber, or On Intentions

2010-05-27T06:22:00.004+12:00

My favorite Saturday Night Live sketch is "The Danish Repertory Theater Presents: I Did It In My Style," an advert for a musical based on the life of Frank Sinatra made by people who had no idea what Frank Sinatra was and didn't have the budget or means to do anything about it, yet perplexingly made a musical about him anyway.

If you try to imagine MacGruber as The Danish Repertory Theater's version of a 1980s action movie - "we've seen the opening credits of one episode of MacGyver, so let's make a Cannon Picture!" - it's almost funny, but given that all the best lines have been given to the feller from laff riots like Breach and Anti-Trust, the movie appears to be working very hard to stop you from laughing. Everyone can succeed at something!

The very basic problem is that the action-comedy movie MacGruber simply is not as intentionally funny or exciting as the intentional action scenes and unintentional comedy of any given episode of MacGyver (though that's not really an apt comparison, as the picture works harder to satirize movies like Rambo and the work of Chuck Norris, but it all evens out because it's not as funny or exciting as those either); and in assuming that people will only laugh at something if it is intended as a joke, the makers of MacGruber have gravely underestimated their audience, who demonstrated their post-structuralist independence from the antiquated notion of authorial intention by seeing every other movie on release instead of MacGruber. People are smarter than you think. Particularly if you're an idiot.

In Which You Won't Believe What I'm Still Talking About.

2010-05-19T14:07:00.002+12:00

SPOILER: Kurt Cobain.

Corganwatch: Organ Versus Lov

2010-04-28T13:32:00.006+12:00

Billy Corgan and Courtney Love, seen here with a classy dude who knows when to shut his fucking mouth.

The other night I was explaining to my girlfriend that I'd once been bored enough to watch a movie called Reddy Versus Jaso on my dad's cable. (This first entailed explaining that this was in the days when plenty of people thought nothing of watching widescreen movies on square televisions, though the pan-and-scan process did horrible things to any sequence in which two figures were stood at either side of the screen, ie the defining shot of most Character Versus Character movies; to say nothing of what it does to the title sequences of said movies.)

A common problem with movies like Reddy Versus Jaso (or, for that matter, Lie Ersu Retado, but presumably not Amer Versus Kram) is that they present two equally repellent figures, both legendary and in their way commanding of awe, but both quite categorically To Be Stayed Away From; but due to the demands of narrative storytelling, both figures cannot be consistently vilified in equal measure, so the movie's drama invariably boils down to the protagonists (who are, disappointingly, never Reddy, Jaso, Lie or Redato but just boring old creatures of the Uman Bein variety) having to choose between the lesser of two evils. Which is a boring thing to make a story about!

Which is why it's actually quite boring that Billy Corgan has despoiled yet another modern invention by using Twitter to go off at Courtney Love.

Because being the protagonist of the line, "she eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak" is sort of classy; WHEREAS using Twitter to say to no-one in particular, "maybe you should go someone nice+live off your husband’s money, u know the money he made for writing all those great songs" is sort of tacky. Sort of!

And yes, lines like "Born of the airs and dues, my airs of madness do declare/That it's ok, it's love" paint an intriguingly oblique picture of a hapless victim of destructive love (Study question: Whose? Points for answering Study Question: 0); WHEREAS tweets like "if you can’t write your own songs maybe you should just be happy that you fooled someone into doing your work for you" just make a fellow want to point out that the username "@selfimportantchump" actually isn't taken yet.

And, for that matter! Performing extended half-hour live versions of Silverfuck dedicated to Courtney Love in which one descends into endless chants of "THAT FUCKING WHORE THAT FUCKING WHORE THAT FUCKING WHORE" is sort of artistic, maybe; WHEREAS using Twitter to tell NOBODY IN PARTICULAR things like "the world is aware of your lack of responsibility, as seen in the gov’t taking away your parental right. Only you could abandon such a beautiful, incredible child who is smarter than u, cooler than u, and better than u. Oops, did I say too much?" is just uncomfortable.

While hating on Courtney Love is still the #1 way for the closeted misogynists of the Grunge Era to vent their cunt-despising fury without anyone calling them on it, she is probably the Jaso or Redato of this equation, if only for the facts that (1) it's called a fucking @reply, it's what separates the general-broadcast message from the asshole-a-rific passive-aggressive snipe; and (2) Nobody's Daughter is pretty fucking great, whereas Teargarden by Kaleidyscope Vol. 1: Songs for a Sailor HOLY FUCK WHAT A TERRIBLE.

In which I talk about movies by writing about games.

2010-04-25T12:12:00.002+12:00

Gamesradar have two articles about movies with tangential mention of games in them also up this week. Here I am talking about filmmakers who've crossed over into games, and here's a piece about games with a love for cinema and an originality problem.

Tom's Texas: What you'd expect

2010-04-22T14:11:00.006+12:00

"I believe in God," says a woman on the bus whose cigarette I helped light, and who is now my BFF, "but why'd He have to go and create Lucifer? Why'd He have to do that?" she asks me. Her tone implies less the plaintive cry of the beleaguered theodicist and more the irritated tone of the DMV customer who just wants to renew her driver's license, but that jerk-ass Son of Perdition is always on the desk making shit tougher than it needs to be.

"Well," I say to her, "that's something of a perennial problem for theologians. It's called the Problem of Evil, and --"

"Yeah, I know that one," she says impatiently. "But listen, if you have three doors, and two of them have a goat behind them? And so you pick one -- go ahead, pick one..."

Suffice it to say she can not figure out the Monty Hall problem. I try to explain to her that it isn't about working the odds - we're not Rain Man here - but about demonstrating that intuition is sometimes at fault. "You flunk!" she yells. This from the person who took twice as long as she ought to to light a cigarette because she had to tell me about the guy who has demons in his house and can't get rid of them with Jesus because "He just hangs there!" so he buried a bunch of guns in the cemetery and one of these days is going to unleash hell on the soup kitchens and halfway houses of Austin, Texas.

All in all, the most surprising thing about Texas is how much it smells like potting mix. I wish I could tell you I had my expectations confounded, but if you went to Texas thinking that Texas was where the run-off from the American psyche pooled in a shallow drain, there to drip-dry in its own paranoia and genuine, unabating, somewhat terrifying weirdness, well, you'd be getting a bit needlessly dramatic, but then again, I wouldn't argue with you. The lead stories in the paper the day I get there are about how Juarez residents are getting bored of walking past crimescenes where innocent small-business owners have had their heads blown off, and how nobody's sure how to reduce the amount of prison-rape in Texas.

Every evening, all of Austin gathers by the riverbank to watch the bats. You have never seen this many bats in your entire life, I guarantee it. The largest urban bat colony in the world! You wait and watch the sun sink lower and lower into Lady Bird Lake - named, of course, for the wife of the world's creepiest stand-up marionette - and a subtle chirping slowly builds. As the sun's last melon-pink glow sinks beneath the horizon, a flitting cloud begins to zip from under Waugh Bridge, endless tiny squeaking little darts that sometimes zip close enough to remind you that they're not birds, sweetie. On the way back up to Commerce Street, I walk past a young guy on a park bench. I only catch a fragment of his fevered speech: "-- Son of Man and I know time's soon ending and I am sorry I'm truly sorry --"

The buses in Dallas have news tickers installed in them. While riding from Dealey Plaza out to Bachman Lake - which is basically Eastbourne with better and more readily-available Mexican food - you can catch up with the news of the day. On the day I was traveling, the news of the day was: "THE KFC CORPORATION HAVE ANNOUNCED A NEW SANDWICH MADE ENTIRELY OF CHICKEN FILLED WITH BACON. THE SANDWICH WILL GO ON SALE APRIL 12. AND NOW THE WEATHER."

Fueled with my knowledge of global affairs - or at least those portions of global affairs that look like the world's least charitable drawing of a vagina - I kept watching the ticker for other information. "THINGS TO BE HAPPY ABOUT," teased the ticker. "NO SCHEDULED APPOINTMENTS. LIBRARY READING TABLES."

At Dealey Plaza, an old man talks non-stop for twenty minutes about Woody Harrelson's father, Jack Kennedy banging Mariln Monroe, and the ass of a girl on the Grassy Knoll. This latter is the only thing that diverts him from his banter: "Fifteen gets you twenty," he repeats until he's sure I understand the subtext. At the end of his spiel, he becomes irate when I refuse to give him $20 for telling me that the Sixth Floor Museum doesn't give equal time to the theory that Lyndon Johnson had Kennedy killed. I offer him $5 for his engaging ramblings and tell him, "Good day to you, sir." He hunches over the fence of the Dealey Memorial and gazes balefully at the X in the street while turning my inadequate offering over in his hands: "How can I have a good day, Tom?" he sulks.

At a bookstore whose door opens onto the spot where one of Charles Whitman's victims was gunned down, the proprietor expounds on his theory that Whitman was a victim of mind control. He offers no evidence to support this theory, save for the fact that you can see the Clock Tower from the door of his shop, the implication being that he ought to know from Charles Whitman. He goes on to tell me that the ugliest building in Austin is a monument to child sacrifice.

Again: potting mix. Even the airport. Genuinely surprised.

What Monsters Would Say: Feejee Mermaid

2010-04-14T17:51:00.003+12:00

"Hmmmm... Decisions decisions. Double decaf mocha soy latte or venti grande caramel macchiato with cream? Hmmmm..."

(thanks to guest WMWSayer Beware the Fish)

Juggalos vs. The Enlightenment

2010-04-12T06:13:00.012+12:00

If we did not have to live our lives amid a fog of uncertainty about a whole range of matters that are actually of fundamental interest and importance to us, it would no longer be a human mode of existence that we would live. Instead we would become a being of another sort, perhaps angelic, perhaps machine-like, but certainly not human.
- Nicholas Rescher, Forbidden Knowledge

Fucking magnets, how do they work?
- Shaggy 2 Dope, Miracles

In Miracles, we find Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the Insane Clown Posse, giving an itemized list of things that provoke transcendental bliss. Things counted by Messrs. Jay and Dope in the category of "miraculous" include but are not limited to:

- Oceans spanning beyond one's sight;
- Long-necked giraffes, pet cats and dogs;
- Niagara Falls and the Pyramids;
- Water, fire, air and dirt;
- A pelican that tried to eat a cell phone.

The Posse are in awe of the world and the things in it, and they won't have this awe marginalized by petty human attempts to codify existence. In the piece's most widely-quoted lyric, Shaggy 2 Dope expresses open hostility toward those who would reduce the objects of his admiration to humanly quantifiable phenomenon:

Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed.

This pugnacious attitude toward the Enlightenment project of human elevation through scientific knowledge places the ICP on a timeline extending from Socrates' maxim of "I know only that I do not know," all the way through that celebrated stone in the stream of Enlightenment, John Keats, and his complaints of the "mathematizing of language"; his frequent barbed toasting "to Newton's health, and confusion to his mathematics."

But it echoes also wisdom from further abroad. In his Tao te Ching, the great Chinese scholar Lao Tzu counsels us:

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the mouth....
Therefore, the wise human attends to the belly, and not to what he sees. He rejects the latter and chooses the former.

- 12: Moderation

Tzu's advice can be interpreted as cautionary: our rapacious urge to categorize, to reduce an item to those properties which we can see, blinds us to the item's totality. Rather than pursue this fool's errand, better to attend to those earthy needs that one does not need scholarly learning to perceive.

"The Dark Carnival," the Insane Clown Posse's mythological conception of a realm of earthly delight and terror, functions as a world where this imperative is all: it is

your invitation
To witness that without explanation
Take a look at this fine creation
And enjoy it better with appreciation.

The Insane Clown Posse delight in acting as Ifrit-like persecutors of the sinful, and they here add the over-inquisitive to that mix: just as Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, proclaimed that:

Desire to know how and why, CURIOSITY… is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of carnal pleasure.

...So the Dark Carnival welcomes lesser sinners of the flesh - the angry, the carnally lustful - but turns away scientists. Those motherfuckers lie and get you pissed. Whereas, in proclaiming phenomena such as the sun, moon, childbirth and genetic lineage "shit that'll shock your eyelids," Violent J assumes for himself the mantle of Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, thinkers aware of their portée: mental or philosophic reach.

In proclaiming the miraculous provenance of the Milky Way, rivers, shooting stars and vicious weather, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope affirm their perfect placement in the hierarchy of all things as decreed by Montaigne, who ruled that "a man can only be what he is and can imagine only according to" this notion of portée, or philosophic limit.

"Our intelligence," argues Pascal, "occupies in the order of intelligible things the same place as our body in the extent of nature." Violent J reminds us that in this harmonious state, we need not dull our senses to appreciate our circumstances: "We don't have to be high to look in the sky / And know that's a miracle opened wide."

In embracing their portée, the Posse stake a claim to greater appreciation of the world's wonders. Their paradise is that "sweet soft pillow" offered to the "well-made head" by Montaigne's suggested attitudes of "ignorance and incuriousness." J and Dope profess rhapsody while surveying hot lava, snow, rain, fog, even UFOs and fucking shooting stars; this rhapsody can only come from careful study of Emily Dickinson's warning against too-close scrutiny, "lest interview annul a want / that image satisfies"[1].

And those who would deny miracles, extend beyond their portée? Their own goal - that of perfect knowledge - is not beyond them yet. "The truth you seek to fathom," counsels Peter Damian in Dante's Divine Comedy, " lies so deep in the abyss of the eternal law, it is cut off from every creature's sight." Or, as the Posse would caution: "That wicked shit! Who can survive Hell's Pit?"

[1] For this analysis of Dickinson, and for many of the quotes and attitudes expressed herein, I am indebted to Roger Shattuck's sublimely curmudgeonly Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.

A Short and Selective History of the Aesthetics of 9/11.

2010-04-09T12:06:00.006+12:00

September 11, 2001: September 11, 2001.

October 2001: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 is eventually released, after having been held back to remove the Twin Towers, lest the news media hear about a videogame that let you re-enact 9/11.

November 2001: 24 premieres. The series will become a key text in War on Terror media, and hence an important example of the 9/11 Aesthetic.

February 2002: Collateral Damage, a terrorist-centric thriller starring Cliff Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, is eventually released, after having been held back to recut the ending and preserve fragile worldwide sensibilities.

May 2002: Spider-Man, having notoriously used the 9/11 Towers in its teaser campaign, is eventually released, after having been held back to advertise with something less suggestive of 9/11 and add scenes in which New Yorkers band together to stop the Green Goblin (and, by extension, Al Quaeda).

December 2002: Gangs of New York, a movie about unwelcome foreigners fucking shit up in downtown Manhattan, ends with a timeline shot bridging the gap between the movie's events and (bizarrely) sometime around 9/10/01.

June 2004: Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's tiresomely polarizing documentary about the War on Terror, includes sly nods to the emerging 9/11 Aesthetic in between its sequences of rich people proving their complicity in the Military-Industrial exploitation of America's young poor by not wanting to talk to a man famous for making rich people look like shit on camera.

April 2006: United 93, a shakycam-heavy documentary-style reenactment of the events of 9/11, is released to general acclaim. The movie is instrumental in bringing The 9/11 Aesthetic to the mainstream, sidestepping charges of tastelessness by never actually showing the money shot.

June 2006: The Omen 2006 is released on time, its entire existence being predicated on the movie's release date of 6/6/06. The movie courts controversy by including the 9/11 attacks in its backstory as examples of diabolic influence upon our modern world. The film's director, John Moore, defends the choice in a press conference, to which his questioner yells, "it's a good thing nobody's going to see your movie because it's a piece of shit!"

August 2006: World Trade Center, a melodrama-heavy dose of sturm und drang by Mr Oliver Stone, bizarrely eschews the director's trademark visual hyperbole, itself a clear forerunner to the 9/11 Aesthetic.

August 2007: The Kingdom, a Steven Seagal movie starring Jamie Foxx as Steven Seagal, features a super-stylized title sequence in which the events of 9/11 are recast as what looks to be a commercial for Nike brand basketball sneakers.

January 2008: Cloverfield, a shitkicking action movie in high-concept cinema-verite trousers, openly invites aesthetic comparison with 9/11. Nobody really minds, possibly because it is so willfully ridiculous that to quibble about aesthetic tastefulness in Cloverfield would be like asking Lady Gaga to model a new line of businesswear.

April 2009: Six Days in Fallujah, a forthcoming action game in which players relive the Second Battle of Fallujah, is dropped by its publishers, Konami, amid cries that videogames and the War on Terror are an inappropriate mix.

April 2010: Pixels, a short film blatantly utilizing the 9/11 visual style, sees a shadowy figure plant an advanced IED in downtown New York which triggers a massive and relentless attack on the city. It's what it would look like if Pixar made a 9/11 movie.

In Which I Tread A Thin Line.

2010-04-08T10:06:00.003+12:00

Some people see a Church in jeopardy due to its leader's obscene ambivalence toward sexual abuse and callous disregard for the wellbeing of his flock and they see a tragedy. Me, I see a feature that someone ought to write - and it might as well be me. Who else is going to work Isaac Hayes lyrics into a paragraph about Dracula?

What Monsters Would Say: Oriental Yeti

2010-04-07T15:36:00.002+12:00

"So they put me in this pink cage and I think to myself this is quite demeaning and emasculating, but then I think to myself well, wouldn't I put me in a fucking pink cage too? I mean look at yourself, I say to myself, you're a fucking travesty. I don't know where to begin. Look, fuck it, do you at least have some moisturizer I can borrow? You probably won't want it back. Fuck."

In Which I Say The Obvious Things.

2010-04-06T17:03:00.003+12:00

A while back I asked a bunch of friends what books they'd like to see made into games. Here are the most popular answers in article format!

Sample comment: "Feom boobs to books, Gamesradar has you covered!" Love.

Corganwatch: Fool's Mate

2010-04-05T15:59:00.006+12:00

The gossip blogs will not let go of the fact that Billy Corgan and Jessica Simpson like playing chess together. Let us touch but briefly on the reason why everyone likes the idea of Jessica Simpson playing chess with Billy Corgan. It is because in the minds of unimaginative people, Jessica Simpson is perceived as stupid; Billy Corgan is perceived as having many pretensions toward intelligence, tempered with some actual intelligence (both qualities being in evidence in the lyrics for Marquis in Spades); and chess is perceived as for being a game for great big super-brainiacs. So the idea of chess (very smart) being played by Billy Corgan (very pretend-smart, a little actual-smart) and Jessica Simpson (in no way smart) is amusing to people who like to see themselves as arbiters of smartness by dint of their own massive intellectual prowess, and who read gossip blogs about Jessica Simpson because all that curing of the AIDS with their perpetual motion machines gets tiring at times.

Anyway, so now we can move on to the real story, which is that Billy Corgan was never dating Jessica Simpson in a way that would cause you to overemphasise the word "dating" while making a "finger going in and out of hole" motion with your hands. While refusing to deny this rumor afforded Billy Corgan the valuable opportunity to have people paying attention to him while he expressed the exact same opinion of John Mayer held by everyone else in the entire world, apparently this was all a ruse. Billy Corgan is dating Jessica Origliasso, who, while she has the same first name as Jessica Simpson, is in no way linked to the singer; Origliasso and her twin sister are the Australian pop duo The Veronicas, despite neither of them being named Veronica.

While lazy speculation might have it that Corgan is either dating an obscure pop singer instead of a well-known one so as to get indie props (a ridiculous proposition), or dating someone whose publicist does not have to be consulted before sexual intercourse can be commenced (an only vaguely ridiculous proposition), Corgan has been spending his nights far more wisely than that. By playing the chivalrous celebrity chum in one move and the backstage feel-copper in the next, Corgan has distracted us from his real strategy, that of helping his longest-running pawn back across the field, that she might once more become the queen of fans' hearts. Obviously Billy Corgan is not such a bad chess player after all!

In Which All Things Geeky Are Done.

2010-04-01T06:08:00.002+13:00

My article about videogame comics - in which I defend the notorious Sonic comics - is published on Gamesradar. If you like videogames and comics, and you like my talking about things... well, you're just in hog heaven, aren't you?

In Which Bad Jokes are Not Laughed At.

2010-03-25T18:55:00.002+13:00

Some schmucks made a rubbish game about Sarah Palin. In response, my chums at Gamesradar suggested I contribute to their Week of Hate. Don't mind if I do!

In Which Our Hero Kicks a Dead Horse.

2010-03-17T09:40:00.002+13:00

I have this thing where I think videogames need to get over theyselves w/r/t this "Interactivity" thing. Here is where I make this point, with swears and jokes.

Corganwatch: Consume My Love, Devour My Hate, Powers My Keyboardist's Cape

2010-03-10T20:31:00.003+13:00

This earnest organ has written previously of words that the English language needs to start using. To said organ's immense hypercredulity, one word that hasn't yet caught on is "hypercredulity".

Hypercredulity is the sensation of believing something so strongly that you actually have trouble countenancing its existence. As opposed to incredulity - the feeling that something cannot be believed because it seems so unlike the sort of thing that would happen - hypercredulity is the feeling that it is hard to believe something, precisely because it seems so much like something that would happen. And let me tell you, it is a more useful word than you might think it would be!

Previously listed examples of hypercredulity include Don DeLillo writing a deeply metaphorical novel about post-9/11 America called The Falling Man; Tim Burton directing Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in an Alice in Wonderland movie; or John Cusack starring in a movie about a man who takes his children on a road trip across contemporary America because he can't face telling them that their mother has been killed in Iraq, and that movie being called Grace is Gone. Newer examples might include Mr. Chuck Klosterman writing an essay about the gulf between the social conservatism and ludological progressiveness inherent in the American game of football and calling that essay Football; all gay Republicans; and the imminent existence, silly name and all, of the Apple iPad.

Again, once you start using the word "hypercredulity" (which I gave you) to describe this immensely common sensation, you will most likely start noticing it all the time!

As a test run, I invite you to join me in learning[1] that Billy Corgan's bandmates from Smashing Pumpkins 2.0 have moved on, and that the one-time Spyer of a Fragile Heart is now soliciting video auditions "for a new keyboardist who is a fan of--and can play in the prog-rock style of--Jon Lord and Rick Wakeman."

See what I mean? Hypercredulity!

[1] Thanks go out to friend of the show Crewdson for the tip.

Corganwatch: Let the World Forgive the Past

2010-03-09T20:24:00.005+13:00

Friend of the show Starlajo noticed the round-headed rapscallion's reveries recently required some rank revisionism.

Do I belong in the conversation about the best artists in the world? My answer is yes, I do. I’ve been too productive for too long, and despite what anybody wants to strip away from me, I am influential. I am. So all the Pitchforks in the world can try to strip me of every ounce of dignity, but I belong. ... Rather than break up the band, what I should have done is chuck James out. I should have just said to Jimmy, ‘You go to rehab, and we’ll continue, and James, get the fuck out of here.’ Instead, I fell on my sword for James, for what I thought was a friend.

This is basically a morass of tangled half-truths, veiled allusions to things that can't be said plainly, and gratuitous distortion; but then, so was Love, and that was one of the best songs on the record. So let's give this Gordian knot of a pullquote the benefit of the doubt and think like somehow, if properly unwound, it might present a meaning by which we could pull out of Corgan the best music of his life (or at least pull Corgan away from the worst music of our lives). It's parsin' time, motherfuckers!

Do I belong in the conversation about the best artists in the world? My answer is yes, I do.

It's always tricky when people don't use enough qualifiers. Like on the Oscars when Barbra Streisand (why Babs? The world will never know) got up on stage and with the full sanction of the Academy proclaimed Avatar "the most successful movie of all time", which is to say, from now on, all awards in all categories will go to Avatar, because no film has ever succeeded at doing whatever it is that films were made to do as thoroughly as Avatar did? And this will continue to be the case for ever as long as there are films? Unqualified lips sink tributes, Babs! Anyway point being, do you think Billy means musical artists, or does he feel that because he wrote a few poems one time he's up for consideration against Cormac McCarthy in the words-for-our-times stakes, or are we just coming right out and saying that Damien Hirst can suck a dick because Billy Corgan did the music for a car ad? Let us assume the latter, because when wondering whether Billy Corgan is making quite a self-aggrandizing statement or a "Bigger than Jesus" statement, Billy Corgan is unlikely to be saying Billy Corgan is just okay.

I’ve been too productive for too long,

Agreed,

and despite what anybody wants to strip away from me, I am influential. I am.

This is true. However, it will become problematic. For now, though, let us give Billy the disputed My Chemical Romance; let us extend to him the olive branch of Silversun Pickups while we gently take from him the resurgence of My Bloody Valentine. Let us cough at the acrimony of knowing we give Billy Corgan too much as we extend to him the post-Black Parade incarnation of Emo (which is to say, the most fun one), and let us assure him that all the cantankerous 30-year-olds in the world cannot take away what beautiful anarchy he has loosed upon the world. We must give Billy Corgan everything to which he feels he is entitled, and then some; we must render unto Corgan anything that Corgan could possibly think belongs to Corgan.

So all the Pitchforks in the world can try to strip me of every ounce of dignity, but I belong.

It's still weird to hear Billy Corgan using terms ("Pitchfork"; "Youtube"; "Zeitgeist") that come from the 2000s. Like, does it even make sense that Billy Corgan lives in a world where 9/11 happened? Not really, eh?

Rather than break up the band, what I should have done is chuck James out.

This implies that kicking Jimmy Chamberlin out of the Smashing Pumpkins in 1996 was what broke them up. As we in reality know, of course, the band survived long enough for Chamberlin to rejoin, so that Iha could quit, which did break up the band, in 2001. So it's like some sort of 12 Monkeys thing where it doesn't matter whether or not you did something, because fate corrects itself and no free will and so forth. However, while Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin are two great guys who have loads of awesome fun, their separation produced The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right), which any sensible person would have to place among the top ten of the Smashing Pumpkins songs ever; and which any sensible person would have to realize was a song all about Billy Corgan breaking up with the love of his life, Jimmy Chamberlin. It is the Brokeback Mountain of songs about dudes who are ostensibly real and ostensibly did not fuck[1]. So it is fine that Billy Corgan wishes that this time never happened, but this does not extent to saying that his work would have been better had it not. Billy Corgan is conflating his personal happiness with the quality of his artistic output, and that is a grave failure of oversight. If you hated it on the Island, it's fine that you wanted to leave; but if we see an episode where your plane touched down at LAX just fine and the first thing you do is record Loki Cat, excuse us for wanting to see you battle the Smoke Monster some more.

I should have just said to Jimmy, ‘You go to rehab, and we’ll continue, and James, get the fuck out of here.’ Instead, I fell on my sword for James, for what I thought was a friend.

Let me just admit that it feels quite petty to pick apart the statements of a guy I have never met as he discusses regrets stemming from the hardest thing in his artistic life and all I can do is wonder whether I would have got to listen to Tear if things went down differently. That is out there. But then, I sang Billy Corgan Happy Birthday, so he owes me. Now then.

What Corgan is doing here is concocting some sort of ridiculous thing whereby he is the victim (surprise) of his own virtuousness (surprise, he's a nice guy) and, see above, his artistic output suffers because he was a nice guy and he finishes last. Let us pretend he is correct. Let us pretend that Billy Corgan's work is not clearly predicated on the spiritual and emotional schisms within his soul, and let us pretend that "Billy Corgan happy" is not dire anathema to the best work of his life. (This hardly makes him unique among artists, but then Billy Corgan belongs in the conversation about the best artists in the world, so that works fine).

The problem here is that when we consider our generous concessions (see above, My Chem etc) made to Corgan's desire to be seen as influential, his quote becomes a self-defeating statement. EITHER Billy Corgan missed out on the chance to be all that he could be and now nobody remembers what a great band he was in and all because he made a virtuous choice and was punished for it; OR Billy Corgan is an influential guy and some of today's best rock music for what it's worth owes a debt to him and all because he had a shitty time in the 1990s what with Courtney leaving him for Kurt and Trent never returning his admiration and everyone lumping him in with the Singles crowd when all he ever did was write a song for them and oh by the way the dead keyboardist thing.

This evening my girlfriend asked me if, if I could go back in time, I would kill Hitler. Obviously, I wouldn't (you know, because if time travel is possible then its proliferation is inevitable and thus Hitler has survived more high-tech assassination attempts than Billy Corgan has recorded spiteful songs simultaneously addressing God, heroin and Courtney Love). But I hope Billy Corgan never gets a time machine.

[1] I feel that by waiting this long to make a "ha ha those guys really love each other" joke, toothpaste has come out of the lamp which can never be put back in. My apologies.

What Monsters Would Say: Genie

2010-03-09T19:05:00.003+13:00

"Nice rubbing - gimme ten!"

In Which Our Hero Elbows You in the Gut and Asks, "Huh??"

2010-03-09T08:41:00.001+13:00

I recently wrote an illuminating and fascinating article on pornography and videogames, centered around an interview with the author of a book on same. Interested parties can witness my pandering to the target audience here.

Another fine journalist, lost to reality

2010-02-17T10:38:00.006+13:00

Really there is an awful lot that one can say about the Atlanta Progressive News firing a reporter for "[holding] on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy".

One might say that Aristotle had a good go of it, but he simply had no place in modern opinioneering, and that it's about time someone took a professional editorial stance on the outdated notion of "an objective reality"; because really, that thing has been knocking about for literally (not literally) aeons, and we put little boys in chimneys in the old days, but we don't do that any more, so why do we still persist in this "objective reality" scam?

Perhaps one might wonder why the Atlanta Progressive News is throwing its lot in with the notoriously reality-averse Bush II administration: because that cadre's stance on reality in the age of the American Empire, while surely radical in its day, must have been supplanted by new and ever more exciting ontological advances since then?

I suppose in the end one has to give the Atlanta Progressive News some credit for hewing to cutting-edge scientific theories. Apparently the Universe is actually just a great big hologram anyway; so as long as the ousted Jonathan Springston is replaced by a foreign correspondent reporting directly from the holographic plane, then their stance on reality is to be lauded.

Hoorah for reality!?

What Monsters Would Say: Domovoi

2010-02-16T14:59:00.006+13:00

"Oooooooh, why have I been shut in a rooooom whose dooooooor I have no way to ooooopen? I'm in a bit of a paaaaanic. And the fiiiiiiireplace is having a conniiiiiiption!"

Growing old: getting old

2010-02-15T08:51:00.005+13:00

As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

- The Hero with a Thousand Faces

New evidence suggests that retreating permanently into a pastime heyday could promote longer living. The more ~~quacktastic~~ radical details of a 1979 study into behavioural anti-aging techniques have been made public, and it would surprise me very much if an "old people are so lively" movie had not been greenlit on these details:

Surrounded by props from the 50s the experimental group would be asked to act as if it was actually 1959.
They watched films, listened to music from the time and had discussions about Castro marching on Havana and the latest Nasa satellite launch - all in the present tense.
Dr Langer believed she could reconnect their minds with their younger and more vigorous selves by placing them in an environment connected with their own past lives.
- BBC News

Which is just precious, is it not? I bet those old people got to dancing and riding motorcycles and doing all the things you see on life insurance commercials!

As they waited for the bus to return them to Boston, Prof Langer asked one of the men if he would like to play a game of catch, within a few minutes it had turned into an impromptu game of "touch" American football.

Perfect. But did it work?

Prof Langer took physiological measurements both before and after the week and found the men improved across the board. Their gait, dexterity, arthritis, speed of movement, cognitive abilities and their memory was all measurably improved.

Hm.

I think Professor Ellen Langer is basically a movie villain.

I read the BBC article the same day I learned that my brother had delivered a short eulogy I'd written for my grandmother. Though she had been fed up with life for at least the last ten years, her last months were spent not preparing confidently for the next step on her journey, but slipping gradually into muted primal terror. Her steps toward death were slow swings between a desperation to be rid of the world, and a weakening resolve to hold onto the last thing she knew: her failing body.

In his phenomenal book, On Monsters, Stephen Asma suggests that the allure of undead creatures is their place within the Freudian Uncanny: simultaneously casting us backward into a childish, primal state of death-resistance even as they provide a literal embodiment of the inevitability of death. The article on the hokey-as-you-please Langer study fills me with the same Uncanny horror: a childish parody of nostalgia inhabited by poor doddering dupes, taking their place in a misguided fable about the power of imagination even as they slouch toward whatever the 1970s version of Bethlehem might be.

It doesn't surprise me that such a study happened, and it doesn't surprise me that we'd talk about it, but I'm glad my gran wasn't around to read about it.

What Monsters Would Say: Gnome

2010-02-14T19:29:00.001+13:00

"I love this barrow."

Tom's America: Things Americans Don't Think About New Zealanders

2010-02-08T13:35:00.006+13:00

As a New Zealander abroad, I am of course always keen to hear what people are saying about me and my country. In fact I suppose you could say that, as a New Zealander, I care about nothing else! But while every person's experience of What People are Saying About Me will differ - I am, after all, almost certainly more fun than you, and so people will say to me, "Oh, New Zealanders are so much fun", but what they really mean is, "You are so much fun" - there are constants in what they don't say. And these constants are worth paying attention to, because the things nobody says turn out to be exactly the things people back home say they say.

First off, let's clear up this Australia thing. Nobody I have met in America thinks New Zealand is part of Australia. While it is true that people in America tend to mistake the New Zealand accent for the Australian accent, and then the British accent, before identifying it correctly, I have never met anyone - black, white, urban, suburban, conservative or Republican[1] - who confuses Australia with New Zealand.
Indeed, whenever anyone finds out they have mistaken me for an Australian, they apologize profusely, because everyone thinks that there is an Australianian/New Zealandanite rivalry, and it is a long slow battle I have explaining to every single person in America that actually, that's not strictly true, it's actually just that New Zealanders hate Australians, but it is America's lucky day to have in her midst the one New Zealander who actually thinks Australia is quite nice, apart from that goddamn ugly nasal quality to their accent. In fairness to people who think Americans think New Zealand is Australia, I have had to field a stupid amount of questions about Koala Bears since I got here[3].

This being the day of the Superbowl, I feel another misconception to be cleared up is that everyone in America thinks rugby players are the shit. Everyone in New Zealand seems to have talked to this one American who spread fallacious rumors about America's feelings re: rugby. The omniscient Yank, so far as I can see, said the same thing to every single person in New Zealand: "Wow! We thought our American Football players were tough, but your guys - they don't even wear pads!"
Firstly, why would this one American call American Football "American Football"? That's like an Irish saying, "Let's go get drunk at the Irish pub"[4]. Secondly, rugby is something I have spent much of my adult life trying to get into enjoying, but simply cannot escape the feeling that it is an idiot game about a bunch of hairy triple-Y behemoths chasing a slab of juicy meat up and down a field; a moron pastime where you can get ahead by sticking your finger up another man's asshole so long as it's not consensual. Whereas I cannot get into American Football because there has never been a time in my life when I have enough tactical cognizance to understand the strategy at play; and I have read Chuck Klosterman's "Football", clocked the strategy-heavy Dynasty Tactics, and had the rudiments of the game explained to me by a philosopher who debates exclusively in NES metaphors, ie Someone Who Should Be Able To Explain Football To Me.

Related to the above, there is a perception that Americans envy Antipodeans for our drinking prowess, both alcoholic and teetotal. Apparently New Zealand's coffee-and-beer-crafting skills are exceeded only by her coffee-and-beer-consuming skills, and both these skills are highly envied by the American people. Not so! I have had the finest coffee of my life in America, and what is more, I have had much fine beer also. I think the perception that Americans are rubbish at making and consuming beer and coffee stems from the fact that New Zealanders have access to Budweiser (The King of Beers) and Starbucks. Someone has told New Zealanders that America is something of a monoculture, and so boom, apparently all Americans think Bud = beer and Starbucks = coffee. Right, because by the same token, every American's favourite movie is Forrest Gump, and Pulp Fiction was made in (and about) Brazil.
This misconception could be cleared up if New Zealanders had access to any of the coffee houses littering the West Coast whose decor and brewing style hark back to the drink's renaissance in the thick-spectacled early-to-mid 1990s; or were willing to spend a few days in the Onanopolis that is Portland, Oregon, on the condition that they were allowed to spend the entire time drinking of the microbrews by which the region self-identifies. I got into a heated discussion with a local there when I made the mistake of asking the barkeep for "a simple unadventurous IPA". And, amazingly, it wasn't for being wanker enough to invoke the concept of adventurousness within a discussion of piss to be drunk, it was for not being wanker enough to imbue my tipple of choice with sufficient swashbuckling fervour. Say what you will of the Man of Portland; he certainly won't settle for Miller High Life (The Champagne of Beers).

The one thing that all Americans do say is something that New Zealanders never attribute to them. When an American finds out you are from New Zealand, they will - even Barack Hussein Obama would do this if he had the opportunity - say, "I have never been to New Zealand but I would love to go. I have wanted to go to New Zealand ever since I saw The Lord of The Rings".
New Zealand, you may wish to consider using The Lord of The Rings as a component of your tourism branding. A free idea, from me to you!

[1] It's an oft-noted peculiarity of our respective sprawls on the political spectrum that, the same month that America elected an uncommonly Liberal Democrat as President, New Zealand elected a Conservative who was almost as Conservative as the new POTUS. Oft-noted, but worth noting one more time for those late to the party or not intimate with New Zealand politics[2].

[2] I actually talked to a New Zealander recently who saw American ignorance of the New Zealand news cycle as evidence of America's national ignorance. Come on, man, I was raised in New Zealand, and when I got to America I had to seduce a local just so she could tell me Cesar Chavez wasn't a lounge singer. Let's not pretend like anyone knows all of everyone's business.

[3] I don't mind this too much, because it gives me the opportunity to tell people that one of the most common word used to describe Koala Bears is "ornery". It's true.

[4] There is actually so much irrelevance in this sentence that the way an Irish would actually say it is simply, "Hi"[5].

[5] No, it's okay, I dated an Irish[6] one time, I can make the jokes. That's how it works, right?

[6] Geez, when did this post become this post?

What Monsters Would Say: Baron Samedi

2010-02-07T10:31:00.003+13:00

"No, it's hop to the end, then jump, then hop back on the other foot. I won't budge on this point. Straight outta Camptown."

What Monsters Would Say: Sphinx

2010-02-04T13:07:00.002+13:00

"Can we do that thing where you hold my front paws and I walk up your chest and do a flip? That's not a riddle, I'm just asking."

What Monsters Would Say: Roc

2010-01-31T22:05:00.003+13:00

"Doing awright back there? Listen! Isay listen! You know I've seen horses flying before! But you know I NEVER... crap, I told it wrong."

I Am A Fan of Kiwi Pro Wrestling.

2010-01-29T20:27:00.023+13:00

As the South Pacific's answer to the WWF has recently released a slew of posters for your enjoyment (and potential purchase!), let us peruse their wares, and their stable while we are about it.

The idea of a time-traveling wrestler from the 1980s is as high-concept as the storyline in WCW in which the Ultimate Warrior returned to wrestling but was only shown in the hallucinations of Hulk Hogan, which the documentary crew's cameras somehow had access to. What I mean, of course, is that both are pretty great.

Max "The Axe" Damage's continual nomenclature confusion puts him in the company of luminaries such as John "Cougar" Mellencamp, Cardinal Joseph "Pope Benedict XVI" Ratzinger, and "Roseanne".

Why is the Flame shown in front of society's most potent force for its eradication? That's like showing Chris DeLorean standing in front of 1990.

Inferno is the Overly Expressive Bass Player of KPW.

"Lazarus Volt: Fresh from the 1890s". How has he been kept fresh from a time when domestic refrigeration was far from widespread, and cryogenics unheard of? We are clearly meant to imply from the man's moniker that his presence amongst us of the 2010s owes a debt to some manner of bodily rebirth, possibly scientific in nature, but why would a man with such potent spiritual and/or technological acumen choose to focus his attentions on reviving the circus traditions of a bygone age? Lazarus Volt poses so many questions and answers so few.

By exhibiting technical prowess and a lean musculature even past the ripe age of 80(?), Irishman Mike Ryan gives the lie to the notion that his countrymen are all drunken poets with non-ridiculous trou.

Calling yourself "Jade Diamond" is like saying you're "A Cast-Iron Gold Nugget", or changing your name to "Knifey Gunn". Which Jade Diamond should definitely consider doing.

I can't help noticing that The Maori Warrior (one of my KPW favourites) is the only wrestler without a catchphrase. Are they saying black people are inarticulate? RACIALIST.

The King of Cool says, "Smell my finger!"

The first time I saw The Brute wrestle, he was wearing tight spandex shorts and there was not a man, woman or child in attendance who could avoid the fact of his tumescent enthusiasm for the thrill of the ring. When Brute engaged his foe in a particularly punishing grapple, a young boy behind me yelled, "FEED HIM THE SAUSAGE!" The egregious inappropriateness of this display of bulging manhood was clearly not lost on KPW staff, as Brute's next appearance saw him wearing extremely loose-fitting camo trousers. Amazingly, the soldier still stood to uncomfortably visible attention. I like to imagine I can't see any evidence of engorgement in this picture, but as Brute is not here presented in what scriptwriters call the "ethical habit of action" (in this case, wrestling), it's hard to tell what this means.

Hollie once took her top off and made out with a future star of Show of Hands for a movie I made, and hence I cannot say a bad word about her.

"Honey, the technician's here, can you show him what the TV's doing?"

Jimmy Fox was great in Collaboral, but his best work was probably in Rhey.

The first time I saw Terry the Golden Greek wrestle, he shocked and impressed me by donning a vivid crimson mask to the delighted howls of a crowd whipped into xenophobic frenzy by his nakedly race-baiting taunts. The reason this was shocking was that the two hysterically traumatized children in the front row, watching the gross Mediterranean caricature endure this ritual scourging for our shameful amusement, were apparently Terry's kids.

Live From The Internet: Apple Show All Cool, Cold

2010-01-28T15:49:00.005+13:00

I didn't think that today I would sit at my Apple Macbook Pro with my Apple iPod plugged into it and ignore the beeping of the phone that would be an Apple iPhone if AT&T would sell me one (they don't trust my credentials as a foreigner) as I wrote about the Apple EyeTabLet, the latest step in our (all humanity's) progression ever closer to glorious utopia. I thought I would probably let the geegaw enjoy a successful release despite my lack of comment and then realise one to three years later that I could really do with one.

(Sidebar of Art Fag City)

But if there's some sort of weird Promethean sacrifice thing going on involving the unfathomably creepy Mr Jobs, then the device may be interesting to me as soon as a year from now!

Tom's America: The Coco Channel

2010-01-24T13:59:00.006+13:00

H and I have been watching a lot of The Office on Internet reruns of late. I am convinced that is the best show currently on television. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were a more skilled Lost or Mad Men watcher, but I'm not, so this is where we are.

One thing that I missed the first time it aired was the way the show was attempting to draw subtle parallels with the Global Financial Crisis. The tension between the firmly fairytale-realm Michael Scott and the realism attempted by the "financial strife" plotline served to exacerbate the most common criticism of the show (which I at once am usually totally un-bothered by and have to admit I have no pithy answer to), which is that there's simply no diegetic support for the notion of The Office as real-world documentary. It's hard to accept Michael Scott never having things thrown at him on the street because all of America is watching him refuse to grow up week after week, but it's impossible to accept the behind-the-scenes meltdowns of the company being filmed and broadcast without consequence.

This is why it is so lucky that NBC has been airing a competing take on the same events. What a compelling drama we have had, in those late-night hours! What biting theatrical commentary has been passed on the classist strife of our time! The serial drama, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, has delivered in ways The Office's writers simply cannot compete with. In Jay Leno, we have a true villain, a puffed-up henchman to put The Office's Charles Minor to shame. He works so well because hating him makes us feel clever: to despise Jay Leno is to see through his mugging, eyebrow-twitching "working class shmoe" schtick. Not watching Jay Leno is its own reward, the gift that keeps on giving.

To see ourselves as The Office's hero - John Krasinski's hapless Jim Halpert, desperate to be an old-school, stand-up guy - is hollow because recent plotlines revolve around Halpert simply not being very good at his job. Whereas to feel for Conan O'Brien is to see through the eyes of the ultimate good guy done wrong. When was the last time fiction gave us a guy this hard-done by what Freud called ananke, the unmovable forces of cruel fate? O'Brien swaggered cliffward like the Tarot's Fool: wearing a grin, his little dog making wisecracks from behind the podium.

The concluding episodes of Late Night with Conan O'Brien became a glorious ceremony in which we burned our betters in effigy for their sinful excesses. That ceremony should have been allowed to conclude in earnest. The fantasy of O'Brien as latter-day Girolamo Savonarola, leading a postmodern Bonfire of the Vanities every bit as urgent as that of renaissance legend, was one that should never have been undone.

Just as I can, for the most part, accept that Dunder Mifflin is a real company in an alternate reality in which The Office is not broadcast, so I can see the Picasso that O'Brien sprayed with Beluga caviar as the real thing, as long as I am allowed to. No communion I ever attended ended with the priest explaining that there'd been a lot of distressing talk on the Internet and he wanted everyone to be clear that those wafers weren't really a dude. O'Brien's acknowledgment of his part in the pageantry of the whole affair was the only bum note in his final episode: the shock-headed psychopomp would have been forgiven had he extended the deception at least until his first post-tv interview.

And so now, with the drama concluded, we have Jay Leno on late-night television, which we had all along, and which was a sorry state of affairs. And we have Letterman, the grand old man of late-night, looking on with bemused disdain at the whole thing. And have we Conan? To say we do not would be to deny his final message to us: "Don't be cynical. I hate cynicism. It's my least favorite quality."

Do this in memory of him, for this is his show.

What Monsters Would Say: Djinn

2010-01-24T09:21:00.003+13:00

"Hnyeh, everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, hnyeh hnyeh?"

What Monsters Would Say: Metroplex Monster

2010-01-19T11:04:00.002+13:00

"What a day! I'm all tuckered out."

In Which Our Hero Prompts the Getting of an Old Joke.

2010-01-15T14:26:00.001+13:00

I am rubbish at spotting when an article of mine goes up on The Games Radar! Case in point: this article about irritating sidekicks, in which I get the most Diggs ever given to any piece of media on the Internet, and a lot of people finally work out what "Miles Prower" is a pun on.

Do not think this is too ridiculously obvious a thing for me to say.

2010-01-14T19:52:00.011+13:00

What Monsters Would Say: Death

2010-01-13T15:30:00.002+13:00

"And you can never get them open. You're fumbling, elbowing the person in the next seat, knocking the stewardess over in the aisles and what have you, nobody can get those packets open! Am I right?? Then BAM! - you've suddenly ripped the pack in two! Peanuts are ALL OVER YOUR LAP! How is that meant to comfort you on a long flight? Lemme tell you, I was on a long-haul from Denver three weeks ago, I'm still finding those things in the crannies of my robes! I mean, what is the deal?!"

Tokens of the 2000s: The One-Disc Edition of Fight Club, $19 New

2010-01-11T21:43:00.001+13:00

Don't be stupid! Nobody will ever buy that! No movie more strongly commands cult attention in the form of mandatory Special Edition purchase than Fight Club, and middlingly smart people will never tire of pointing out the irony of this: if you really loved Fight Club, you would show it by not owning a copy of Fight Club at goddamn all. (Much less playing the game).

Which is a ridiculously juvenile way of looking at it, but Chuck Pahlaniuk has this magic power of making ridiculously juvenile thinking seem like this empowering action, which is fortunate for Chuck Pahlaniuk, because people thinking in a ridiculously juvenile manner are far more likely to buy his books. Anyway, Fight Club is one of the most important films of the 2000s, which is impressive given that it was made in 1999, and if you can forget everything about any person who you could ever associate with Fight Club (especially Chuck Pahlaniuk), it is a very good book also.

However you can not possibly own Fight Club on DVD without availing yourself of the opportunity to hear Pahlaniuk talk about how Fight Club is one of the only movies which he considers to have any redeeming quality whatsoever, which is the sort of solipsistic childishness that marks truly empowered thinking.

And so here is an Amazon.com listing for the Special Edition of Fight Club.

What Monsters Would Say: Cynocephali

2010-01-11T21:15:00.004+13:00

"So of course my mother from a young age, she refused to shave me. Well, not that I'd look regular that way, but I have a vaguely sort of Michael Wincott sort of charm to me I think, and maybe I could work that better if I didn't have, I don't know, a face full of fucking hair? And - this is a personal thing and all, St. Christopher notwithstanding - but the simple fact is I have not, okay, accepted Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. I mean, so yeah, there's that. Basically I'm trying to say is, life ain't pretty for a dog-faced boy."

Corganwatch: What, This Isn't a Thing Already?

2010-01-10T17:19:00.006+13:00

Would you buy a new Electric Prunes record from this man?

I'm a little embarrassed to learn that Billy Corgan has taken this long to set up a record label with Kerry Brown. What the hell do you mean, Billy Corgan hasn't had a record label with Kerry Brown this whole time? James fucking Iha has had a record label with Kerry Brown for years!

Then again, James Iha had actually done a whole bunch of things Billy Corgan wanted to do long before Billy Corgan got around to doing them, such as releasing a solo album, knocking about with poppier-than-pop teen idols, seeing D'arcy's breasts, and being like Trent Reznor.

If this keeps up, soon Billy Corgan will be doing that other thing that James Iha got round to doing years ago: recording music that is nominally listenable but really rather terrible by any sensible standards, and yet everyone feels compelled to listen to it because it is technically Smashing Pumpkins music.

Ha ha ha! That future event can not be far off!

In Which Our Hero Brings Back Christmas

2010-01-07T09:20:00.001+13:00

Oh look, my article about Christmas bonus content went up and I didn't even notice! Have a look!

What Monsters Would Say: Spring Heeled Jack

2010-01-07T09:05:00.002+13:00

"Remember when I broke my foot from jumping from the second floor?"

Tokens of the 2000s: Bailey's and Hurricanranas

2010-01-06T21:46:00.003+13:00

Mysterious Pete and myself determined that we would have a fine evening seeing in 2000. It did not work out quite that way!

Firstly we went to go and see End of Days, which - why haven't more people picked up on this? - is exactly the same movie as The Usual Suspects, except that it isn't very great. Seriously, it features Gabriel Byrne being more evil than he appears; a scene of a man pissing on or near a van which leads to dire consequences for Kevin Pollack; the line, "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"; and a title with a plural in it. SAME MOVIE.

We joked that we should see End of Days on the evening of December 31st, 1999, as it really would be the end of days. We would soon wish it was. This is not a hyperbole! The only thing going in Christchurch was Dave Dobbyn singing maudlin dirges about how he'd recently discovered that the Bible had some deep themes in it. A couple of these had us wailing. (If you are not from New Zealand, that is a pun on a well known Dave Dobbyn song). (Also, if you are not from New Zealand, Dave Dobbyn is sort of like John "Cougar" Mellencamp to the Finn Brothers' Bruce Springsteen, except that Slice of Heaven certainly is no Paper in Fire. But then, Don't Dream it's Over is no Born to Run).

The rumour was that at the stroke of midnight, white supremacist biker gangs would descend on Cathedral Square to unleash unholy fury on the impure, drug-addled reprobates ringing in the new century. We decided that we wanted very much to be among these reprobates, because see above, Dave fucking Dobbyn. Much to our dismay, there was no impurity or drug-addlement or the like to be found in the civic centre of the South Island's biggest city. There were a couple dozen old white people watching a little LCD screen that counted down, and when it reached 2000, there was some cheering that, were I to describe it as "half-hearted", would be an insult to the ouevre of Matchbox 20; so let us say that the moment it became the 2000s was sufficient to prompt Mysterious Pete to turn to me and say, "fuck it, let's go to a strip club."

Mysterious and myself are less than priggish gentlemen, but we are not big oglers. We wandered from the Square to Lichfield Street, trying to goad each other into a state of readiness to See Some Fuckin' Titties, and we paid our Titty Toll, and we slunk past the wrought-iron pentacles in the door of the Voodoo Lounge. Astute readers will notice a recurring theme in our evening's proceedings: from demon-fighting to Bible Studies in the park to descending into the domain of the Adversary we went, our pilgrims' progress at its nadir, our lower impulses awaiting any sort of rank enlivening in this joyless new age.

We left at around the point the evening's featured dancer pulled a chain out of her cooch.

Mysterious Pete turned to me. "This evening sucks," he observed. I allowed as that it was, indeed, a less than salutory way to usher in the new Millennium.

"I have some Bailey's at home," said Mysterious Pete. "Let's watch wrestling."

We sat in his house, reveling in the empty dissatisfaction of the infant century. Was this how it would be? Hunter Hearst Helmsley spewed angry mist like a vengeful gargoyle. We sipped Irish Cream in his living room and watched grown men play-fight for our amusement. Neither of us were tired, but there was less and less to stay awake for.

The sunrise of the new millennium found me on Sumner beach, squinting through smog and drinking weak coffee out of a thermos. The Twenty First Century had arrived, and it was the least significant thing that had ever happened.

What Monsters Would Say: Kappa

2010-01-05T10:53:00.006+13:00

Friend of the show Mike D has a masterplan for increasing the amount of What Monsters Would Say content on these fine pages: sending me a hearty swathe of monster images, both classic and obscure. Oohh my my, and thank you Sir! Suggestions are always welcome - this means you!

"'Ere, I don't swim in yer toilet, do I, so see you don't go piddlin' in my pond, eh? Now I mention it, couldn't have a quick paddle in yer toilet, could I? Hnyeh hnyeh hnyeh!"

Tokens of the 2000s: The "Lurid Green Distressed Text on Black Screen" Colorscheme

2010-01-03T17:56:00.004+13:00

The 2000s were as cruel to few media entities as they were to The Matrix. But then again, and more importantly, few media entities were crueller to people during the 2000s than The Matrix. Remember how there was this amazing thing that came out of nowhere and synthesized all this shit about the millennial moment in a way that was this perfectly self-contained little pop-cultural nugget of concentrated worth? Remember how we mulled over it for just a little too long, allowed just one or two too many philosophy-for-gibbons books to use that distinctive design scheme, and someone said oh, well, you want Matrix, we got Matrixes till your whole life is a Matrix?

And then before we knew it we had The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and The Animatrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo and Enter The Matrix and we were all like "I have had it up to here with these goddamn Matrixes in this motherfucking mass media" and Matrix was all like "no you love The Matrix, remember how you like The Matrix, dodge this, jurismydiction"? I feel like the inability to distinguish between "I sure did like that Matrix" and "oh look, The Matrix Online, sign me up" is a uniquely idiotic thing about the people of now, but this may be universal across time, space and all Matrixes.

Tokens of the 2000s: The dog-ears on my dad's copy of The Da Vinci Code

2010-01-01T18:01:00.003+13:00

Check this snappy motherfucker.

I read the shit out of that motherfucker. I remember among white people who defined themselves by their own perceived intelligence (which is basically how nuclear wars get started, yo) The Da Vinci Code was this avatar of everything that was ridiculous and uncritical and lazy and unthinking about the culture, and we would just sit in coffee shops and listen to Pink Floyd and drink chai and look across at the young man peering transfixed into his copy of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (we were in our 20s! There is no excuse for this carryon!) and we would talk about how much we hated The Da Vinci Code, and then we would exchange copies of the works of Terry Pratchett and Neal Stevenson. GOD.

Anyway, I was like the kid who gets told that doing drugs will rot his brain and turn all his thoughts to mush until he just has to smoke some acid, so I read The Da Vinci Code; and it was better than that, because it came pre-mushed, like the brain equivalent of baby food. And there is no person in the world that does not love the taste of baby food. Also, if I could dress every day like Dan Brown, I would do so, at least three days a week.

Tokens of the 2000s: Copies of Michael Moore's books on an otherwise sensible bookshelf

2009-12-31T18:22:00.005+13:00

There is nothing quite as bittersweetly humanising as seeing copies of Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country sitting embarrassed and alone on bookshelves across America and around the world. Nobody in their right mind will ever read them again but what else are you going to do with them? Are they reminders of the Michael Moore Moment, that time when this cavorting oaf came back into our lives and was totally necessary and had some embarrassing moments but these were still outweighed by his good points? Or more of a liberal hairshirt, a memento mori, a reminder that when the going gets tough, white people kind of fall to bits if there's not an Obama to vote for? Yes.

What will we do with all our Michael Moore books? It would feel like too much to rid ourselves of them. After all, we can say, we still agree with Michael Moore, do we not? Do we not still feel that big business is not our friend? Are we not now still of the opinion that George W Bush was an unremarkable President? If we rewatch Bowling for Columbine, is it not a well-made documentary, marred only sporadically by foreshadowings of the buffoon-with-a-blowhorn schtick Moore would soon make his stock-in-trade? Do we not think that men ought not put soap in their ass, even if we are not sure why Moore feels the need to lecture them on this last point in Stupid White Men's pagecount-propping later pages?

And so we keep our Michael Moore books, cherishing the incompleteness of our collection, reasoning that the absence of The Farenheit 9/11 Reader or Will They Ever Trust Us Again? represents our ability during the 2000s to sip but discerningly on Moore's embarrassingly earnest brew, because he did have some points, after all, did he not, and he was in The Corporation alongside Klein and Chomsky, so obviously he's not an idiot, is he?

Maybe in a parallel universe, we reason, Moore might have written a funnier book instead of Stupid White Men, and then maybe Dude, Where's My Country might have been replaced by a tome that was less funny than its predecessor but also a lot less shrill and blunt and choir-preaching than any of Moore's books; and we entertain a ridiculous fantasy that Moore, the TV clown, might have put his money where his notoriously capacious mouth was and become himself a politician! Maybe he might then go so far as to get so aggressively democratic as to have John McCain throw a hissy fit at him for disturbing the "comity of the Senate!"

Don't be silly. Michael Moore's just a putz off tv, we can't expect miracles from him.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day 7: A Discussion of Ouroboros Leading Into an Anecdote About Babies

2009-12-26T19:31:00.001+13:00

One of the reasons why I have spent a week trying to say anything interesting about Avatar is because it is quite a challenge to do so. Almost everything anyone says about Avatar is a value judgment on the technical merits of Avatar, which is quite a boring thing if you are not one of the world's only interesting film critics and your friends are not the other ones. Because the subject of Avatar is how good Avatar is (very), any discussion of Avatar becomes a discussion of how good Avatar is (very).

It does not surprise me that it took twelve years to make this movie, because the plot is a remarkable ouroboros of a thing: discussion of any diegetic element of Avatar leads on to discussion of the movie's whole, and because the movie's whole is about being transported into a fantastic alternate reality, you have to start talking about how remarkable that reality is, because the remarkableness of that reality to the characters is a necessary plot point; and because the characters are not exactly the Brothers Karamazov, you can't really talk for that long about why it's so important that they find floating mountains and palette-swapped Peter Chung characters remarkable. So you have to move on to talking about whether the central experience of Avatar's characters rang true for you, which is to say, you have to talk about whether you found Avatar remarkable, and before you know it you're talking about the amazing advances in computer graphics since the days of Titanic and virtual actors and a whole new era of storytelling and yadda yadda yadda.

So it is very hard to say anything about Avatar without being drawn into a discussion of the movie's technical accomplishments, and because the movie is made by James Cameron, it is full of impressive technical accomplishments. But that is not to say that they are very interesting.

Let us instead talk now about babies.

I once saw a news report on a new technology that allowed couples to visualise their baby in the womb in a clearer state than hitherto possible. In the report, the news crew traveled with a young couple to the lab where this technology was on display, and in a thoroughly uninvasive manner, the equipment was hooked up to the woman's belly, and the visualisation software was booted up. The couple looked at the screen and for the first time saw their baby as it moved under her skin, and she smiled and looked at the being that was growing inside her, illuminated on the screen in all its fragile, nascent humanity.

"Wow," said the husband, "those graphics are amazing."

In and of itself, that is interesting.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day 6: Avatar, or On The Amazing Genre

2009-12-25T15:07:00.000+13:00

There is basically no point discussing whether or not you like Avatar with someone who likes Avatar. If someone likes Avatar, there is no point telling them you do not love Avatar. People who love Avatar are like people who love Rush Limbaugh. If you say you do not love it (not that you do not like it, or that you hate it: just that you do not love it), it is assumed that you want to destroy the Western world and put the world under the yoke of a Socialist Islam dystopia. This isn't a metaphor.

This is because all things made by people until now have been subjective works that cater to individuals' tastes, but Avatar is the first thing ever made which it is impossible to not love as a sane rational human being. Here are the reasons why.

Avatar has better computer graphics than any other film, if you think that the point of computer graphics is to impress people with what good computer graphics they are. If you think the point of computer graphics is not to call attention to themselves as impressive works of artifice, you are wrong.

Avatar is also in 3D, which is good because it means you have to see it in the theaters. People who love Avatar often think they are or could be working successfully in the motion picture industry, so they see it as professionally savvy to applaud Avatar for being a movie that you have to see in the theaters.

Avatar is Amazing. This is the genre Avatar belongs to: the Amazing genre. It is a movie whose main theme is its own amazingness. Earlier examples of the Amazing genre are Pan's Labyrinth, King Kong, and the new Star Wars films. The good thing about making an Amazing movie is that everyone loves them. The bad thing is that it is impossible to say anything interesting about them, because they are not interesting, they are Amazing.

It is things like this that make me hope that James Cameron makes an interesting movie again sometime.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day 5: On Violence in Avatar

2009-12-24T14:59:00.002+13:00

A common thing to say about Avatar is that it is hypocritical, because it spends two hours talking about how beautiful it is to be peaceful and in tune with nature and what-all and then has a final hour in which the killing of people is fetishistically rendered up for our delectation even as elegaic choral music plays to provide the token suggestion that said killing might be a bad thing.

This criticism is as valid as it is of any other movie that seeks to provide a moral perspective on gruesome acts of warfare; which is to say, it is a radically oversimplified and fundamentally boring thing to say, and I don't think espousing such a position is a worthwhile trade of my interest in exchange for your smug feeling of moral cleverness.

This is hard to have an interesting discussion about because people who like Avatar tend to be like religious fundamentalists, convinced that deep down everyone holds their point of view; they view discussions of the movie's patronizing racial attitudes or medieval sexual politics or hamfisted colonial apologia as contrivances on the part of Avatar non-lovers intended to intellectually distance themselves from the deep-set, visceral love for Avatar shared by all people.

Which is a shame, because if they wanted to, they could point out how unreasonable it is to expect Avatar to be the first action movie ever to forgo making the obligatory ideological excuses for its scenes of cathartic violence. Why bother attacking Avatar for failing to justify its clunky structure of innocence > violence > retribution in kind, when you still have Death Wish 2 to pick on for the exact same thing? Also Avatar isn't as good.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day 4: Avatar, or On Making A Statement

2009-12-23T18:19:00.005+13:00

Pictured: my friend Rowan, some other coves.

Avatar is a movie about Westerners going to a place where there are lots of native people and fucking their shit up for oil/land/gold/etc. You think I am being lazy by just saying the white people are after whatever, but Cameron actually never really clarifies this himself, using a common sci-fi shorthand for "I will give this thing a name at a later date", so what do you want me to do?

Anyway at one point Stephen Lang's character (who is basically the exact opposite of Stephen Lang's character in The Men Who Stare at Goats, and yet looks exactly the same, as he is also played by Stephen Lang, which I actually found consistently interesting within the context of the movie, such is the dearth of intentionally interesting content within the context of Avatar) is giving a speech to his goons about what stupid tree-dwelling backward-ass idiots they are about to wipe the floor with. Everyone laughs when Stephen Lang characterises these people as having ridiculous boogedy-boo cosmic spiritual notions they cling to! Everyone cheers when Stephen Lang proposes a military attack that will teach these primitive forest-people the meaning of Western military might!

Avatar was filmed largely in Wellington, and the extras casting was mainly done in Wellington. The extras casting was mainly tasked with filling the brief of "really tough looking dudes". In New Zealand this basically amounts to filling a room with Maori folks.

Now, I'm not saying it is bad to ask people to re-enact in a science-fiction setting the exact attitude of the dudes who fucked shit up for their ancestors. That is the last thing I am saying. I am often frustrated when people act like you should have some sort of problem with pretending to espouse an attitude you disagree with, for the purposes of dramatising a narrative that explicitly decries that attitude and the people that hold it.

Nobody ever says to the actresses on The L Word, "you should not say those terrible things about lesbians and/or women", because most of the actresses on The L Word are themselves lesbians and/or women, and it's understood that they are intentionally playing out a dramatic narrative that will ultimately be sympathetic to views they hold in real life. But there is a corollary to this. Wwhen Brendan Fraser plays an idiot, people don't say "there is that nice man from Gods and Monsters saying something interesting about the perception of intelligence in our society"; they say, "what an idiot".

Avatar marks the first time James Cameron has explicitly tried to talk about race (which is impressive, as he made a movie about an Austrian ubermensch beating the shit out of every Arab in the world except Art Malik). His statements about race are basically very juvenile and well-meaning if painfully ill-thought-out, and as such they make you feel a bit ill, but then so do the unreal blue gumby-cat-men lolloping about the place. And it's about time James Cameron made a juvenile and well-meaning if painfully ill-thought-out movie about race, because Titanic was a desperately juvenile and well-meaning if painfully ill-thought-out movie about class, and he has this common theme running through his movies of "chicks kick ass, as long as they are basically dudes with titties for Michael Beihn to fondle" (which, obviously, is a fairly juvenile and well-meaning if painfully ill-thought-out position to take re: gender). Basically in the Brendan Fraser analogy, James Cameron is Encino Man.

It is things like this that remind me that James Cameron has always been an adorable dolt.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day 3: Avatar, or On Talking About Dreaming

2009-12-21T10:23:00.006+13:00

My grandmother likes to say that she has no time for people talking about their dreams. And she is older than democracy, so she has probably heard many such discourses! I have taken this maxim to heart, but extended it. There are three things I have no time for talking about:

- Your dreams,
- Your cat, and
- Your atheism.

Avatar is almost three hours of a man talking about his dreams, which is quite a solipsistic thing to make a movie about. Also, the dreams are basically all about his cat, with whom he has onscreen sex. So there's that. The movie's most dynamic figures are actually the atheists, because they are the ones who catalyse the scenes of Shit Getting Blowed Up Real Good, which is what you paid to see; whereas the folks with strong beliefs spend far, far too long talking about them under the mistaken assumption that these beliefs are at all unique or interesting, which (I will hesitantly call this ironic) is exactly why talking to atheists about their beliefs is usually so boring.

ANYWAY, why is people talking about their dreams so boring? After all, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud loved that shit. But outside of the codified structure of a therapeutic discussion, talking about your dreams is more like sending someone a video of you having a wank. You are both subject and object of the conversation, and there is nothing the other person can do to enrich the experience for either of you beyond acknowledge that they are paying attention. It is a supremely anal-fixative act, to tell someone about your dream.

Avatar is very explicitly a big dumb white guy spending two and a half hours telling us about his dream (and when I say "very explicitly", what I mean is, "he specifically refers to it as a dream, to make sure you know what he is talking about"). If you met a big dumb white guy in a bar and he said, "so I had a dream about the richness of tribal animism", you could say, "whoah there Paul Gaugin, I'm trying to get drunk here", and you would have gotten as much of a meaningful thought experience as Avatar offers.

Because the dream in Avatar is so astoundingly literal. I don't mean that I would have liked to see more dwarves/midgets (though I have nothing against either race, and I happen to wish the people in Avatar weren't so tall, because it honestly made me feel physically ill), but the dream-world of Pandora is really a very shallow metaphor for whatever it wants to be a metaphor for. You know when Sam Worthington is dreaming about a horse, because he dreams of something that is basically a horse but has gills and a slightly longer snout. You know when he is dreaming about a tiger, because he dreams of something that is a tiger, only with a hard carapace. You know he is dreaming about human tribal society, because he dreams about a supposedly utterly alien race that just happens to be exactly the same as an amalgam of all the people white folks have ever done wrong, only their skin is blue.

When you are listening to someone talking about their dream, the best thing you can do is say, "well, this element in the dream you just told me about probably corresponds to that element in your life, because you are a person who et cetera". This lets the person talking about their dream know that you are not just buying into their self-fixation, you are applying your mental powers to deepening it. But if you were listening to Sam Worthington's character talking about his dream, you'd want to say, "well, that probably represents horses/tigers/colonial guilt", but you'd be embarrassed to say that, because you'd feel he'd probably just look at you like, "well, I know that".

But he probably wouldn't. Toward the end of the movie he gives up on calling things by the made-up names James Cameron paid someone to invent a language for, and he just calls the things that are basically horses "horses". This makes him seem like a charmingly unimaginative lunkhead, which is what he started out as.

It is things like this that make me wonder if James Cameron really is as imaginative a constructor of metaphor as I have always assumed he is.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day Two: Avatar, or On Typography

2009-12-21T00:00:00.001+13:00

I could honestly not make sense of the decision to use the font Papyrus in the posters for Avatar. I thought we had got to a point where nobody who expected to be taken seriously in the real world used Papyrus for anything. I was sure that as a culture we had made the unspoken agreement that the rubes had hopped onto the Ban Comic Sans bandwagon, and that that battle was as won as it was going to get, and that the new enemy was Papyrus; and that we would not get a massage from someone who used Papyrus on their business card, and we would not eat Eastern-fusion food from anywhere that used Papyrus on its menu, and if we were at the video store we would not get the movie whose title was in Papyrus, we would get the one which had had a cinema release instead. And then along comes The Biggest Fucking Movie Ever and uses Papyrus on its poster! What the shit?

And do you know what? That font is used for every single subtitle in Avatar as well! The movie honestly expects you to get into the swing of things, while rendering every non-English word in fucking sands-of-ancient-Egypt-yellow Papyrus! Not only are the subtitles not in a sensible, unobtrusive font so you can read them and get back to the movie, they are in The Teenage Witch's Choice of fonts, Papyrus! It is such a relief when the movie's end credits come up, and they are in Helvetica, it is honestly a physical weight that is lifted from your (my) shoulders.

I suspect that one of two things happened on the road to putting Papyrus into Avatar. Either:

- Cameron liked this font, because it communicated everything he wanted to say about the beauty of primitive nature-loving reverence for the spirit world in all its yadda yadda yadda, and someone said to him, "Sire, that font, it's the second most reviled font in all the world, if you use that font you will never be --"
But the whelp was cut short with a primal bellow from Cameron's bearded maw, the great man's weathered paws locking in a raptor's grasp at his underling's shirt collars, a grip like surgical tools hewn of iron, mighty and exacting and merciless yet warm like a father's touch; and Cameron looked into his assistant's soul with his eyes that had seen apocalypses and alien realms and men born of lightning and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's blue-aureolaed fury, and explained to him that if this was the perfect choice for this movie - and it was, for The Cameron had made it - then pre-existing cultural signifiers meant nought: for from this day, "Papyrus" would mean only "Avatar". Just as "a timeless sigil of mens' foolhardy reliance on technology" had come to mean "the most technologically successful movie of the 90s", and "Robert Patrick's glowing elf ears" had come to signify "evil's own halo", and "James Horner's least favourite temp-tracked rush-job ever" had become known as "James Horner's signature opus", and "cat-faced gumby-men" were about to become "the new actors". And It Was So. Or:

- It is things like this that make me suspect that James Cameron doesn't know what he is doing to the degree that I have always assumed he does.

The Week Of Trying To Say Anything In The Least Bit Interesting About Avatar, Day One: Avatar, or On Dreaming

2009-12-20T22:41:00.005+13:00

Avatar is the story of a man who lives in a movie made by the fellow who made Aliens and The Terminator. But this man dreams about being a strange and ungainly creature who befriends other strange and ungainly creatures. Basically it is a movie about dreaming. Avatar is not the first movie to feature dreams as a major plot point though. There have been a good half dozen prior to this one, and they all fall into one of several holes:

- The dreams contain lots of FASTFLASHES! that inform you QUASISUBLIMINALLY! of things that HAVEBEENORWILLBECOME! important. I have never had a dream like this. My dreams are all edited pretty much like Russian Ark, with the occasional extremely slow fade.

- The dreams contain too much gratuitous craziness. Remember in Living in Oblivion, when that dwarf/midget loses his shit onset and asks the Steve Buscemi character why everybody always thinks that putting a dwarf/midget in your scene is shorthand for "wack-ass dream", pointing out that he is a dwarf/midget, and even he doesn't dream about dwarves/midgets? He is right.

- The movies spend far too long making sure you know the rules of what happens if you die in a dream/die while dreaming/kill someone in a dream who was themselves also dreaming/etc. I am fairly certain that there is a Nightmare on Elm Street movie somewhere around the middle of the saga that is nothing but people explaining the series' rules regarding in-dream death, interspersed with Robert Englund playing air guitar.

Avatar does not fall prey to the first fallacy at all, because James Cameron is a classy guy. It goes to great pains not to fall prey to the second fallacy, having a detailed and entirely self-sufficient reason for every design decision (apart from when the rules need to be broken to make the girl character's boobs look nice) (or someone at Mattel designs a character and James Cameron says, "sure, it's in the movie", instead of saying, "hang on buddy, your company designed Stinkor, the Stinky Master of the Universe, stay out of my movie").

Avatar also spends no time explaining its particular rules as to what happens if you die while dreaming, which means that for the movie's first third or so, there is no dramatic tension whatsoever, because the only thing that is in any jeopardy is Sam Worthington's Second Life character. In the film's final reel it is explained what would have happened if this character had come to harm: Sam Worthington would have felt a bit bad for a few minutes.

It is things like this that make me wonder if James Cameron is still paying as much attention to scriptwriting as he did for Aliens, which had the most beautifully pretentious opening line of any script about vaginas that hide under the bed and was all uphill from there.

Corganwatch: The Woman's Side

2009-12-14T19:13:00.003+13:00

HANG THE FUCK ON.

"They are getting to know each other," says the source. "He's a nice guy... She's a great girl. She's really sweet. She's had a tough year. She deserves the best."

WHAT.

"They are getting to know each other," says the source. "He's a nice guy."

COME ON, people. There is only one thing about Billy Corgan that is so obvious that it is a cliche this prestigious organ has felt no need to confront head-on. Only one truism about William Patrick Corgan is so trite in its staggering bald-faced truth that there is no reason to revisit it unless either (a) you are Simon Sweetman (and thus a profoundly unoriginal buffoon), or (2) you have just read a report that says someone told People magazine that Billy Corgan is "a nice guy".

Saying your friend "has had a tough year [and] deserves the best" when breaking the news of your friend getting into a relationship with Billy Corgan is like saying you have just sunk the majority of your label's capital into an album that Axl Rose has assured youwill be completed by mid next year. It is like if all of the publishing industry got together and agreed that print media could be saved by allowing Courtney Love to write a memoir without the burden of editors or ghostwriters. Saying Billy Corgan is "a nice guy" who should be in a relationship with your friend (a great girl) is like saying Art Alexakis will lend you the credibility you so desperately need to move up in the world. It is like throwing Paul Simon a live bat and expecting him to bite its head off before the concert will be allowed to continue.

Billy Corgan is many things, but to examine history (or, if you are lazy, to listen to the Zero EP) and say that Billy Corgan is "a nice guy" w/r/t his relations to women is like examining history (or, if you are lazy, watching Rambo III) and suggesting that American lives will be saved by sending more troops into Afghanistan.

I think that comparison is a new high/low for Corganwatch.

Corganwatch: I Am Embarrassed Not To Have More Of A Frame Of Reference For Jessica Simpson.

2009-12-12T20:48:00.009+13:00

This week, Billy Corgan released a new song from his forthcoming album, whose name I cannot be bothered going to the mental effort of remembering[1]. This is not important. What is important is that this week, it was announced that Billy Corgan and Jessica Simpson are dating.

Basically people stopped having time for Billy Corgan around the time he broke up with that nameless faceless Asian woman who stood by him while he made Gish, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (henceforth to be referred to as the The Quality Trilogy). This certainly didn't seem to be due to any sort of encouragement on the part of Kit(?), because that always seemed like some sort of mail order thing-of-convenience anyway[2]. But once Billy Corgan was free to have loads of sex out in the open, his music really suffered.

The early possibility that he might shack up with Marilyn Manson[3] brought promise: Eye and The End is the Beginning is the End were exciting extensions on previous Pumpkins themes. But the blue skies of his time with Yelena Yemchuk brought tears to the eyes of fans: an album produced in long, happy hours in the studio away from Kim(?) might yield (for instance) Here is No Why, Muzzle, Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, Galapogos, Love, Thru the Eyes of Ruby and 1979. But a record cranked out as a way of filling the time until Billy could go home and bask in Yemchuk's far greater knowledge of b/w photography and how to get half-hearted bassists to flash their nipples for a liner booklet would yield a Tear, if you were lucky.

The problem was inspiration: too much inspiration by half. Billy's time with a jetsetting, model-schmoozing, beret-epitomising muse like Yemchuk convinced him that the artful undercurrents of The Quality Trilogy could be placed front and center of future projects: because proggy anti-grunge with strains of artistic flourish is good, so it follows that a record that was nothing but artistic flourish ought to be better! And so, Adore. To round off this chapter, then: if Kay(?) was the stable, stultifyingly pedestrian rock on which Billy Corgan built his church, Yelena Yemchuk was the silver-retained, high-contrast tempest that swept it up and spread it to the four winds.

The Zeitgeist era was marked by philandering, gadaboutery, Corgan as misogynist playboy, thinking he was being enlightened by only calling American women whores. Corgan consorted with Paris Hilton, proclaiming her the world's most famous person or some such nonsense; people uncomfortable with the notion that Billy Corgan and Paris Hilton might have anything to talk about became further uncomfortable with the notion that Billy Corgan might like to see himself as a photographer and Paris Hilton might agree to be photographed. Meanwhile the first track of the record Hilton's image had launched debuted in the end credits of a Michael Bay film about giant toys who piss on each other, and nobody really minded.

To make sure we knew that Zeitgeist was a commentary on fame-culture in the 21st Century[4], Corgan turned his life into performance art: being seen about the place with Tila Tequila, going so far as allowing her to go on the Internet and say he might have impregnated her. It would have been a bit ingenious, had it been auxiliary to the promotion of a piece of media more substantial than Zeitgeist; as it was, his attempts at sex-life-as-metacommentary were misinterpreted as postmodern folderol as a means to getting laid. Billy Corgan didn't care at the time: Billy Corgan was fucking Tila Tequila.

And so now Billy Corgan is dating Jessica Simpson, and they are "taking it slow", so anything that comes out about them is somewhat sparse and unsatisfying, and it feels like we've been here before, and we say we're nominally interested in what happens next, but really, it's just going through the motions until we can stop pretending to be emotionally invested. And also he released Song for a Son, about which I couldn't possibly say a thing.

[1] If this sounds harsh, bear in mind that I didn't have the energy to consistently intentionally misspell the title of Quentin Tarantino's latest film until sometime during the scene where the girl's face is projected in the smoke, so apparently it just takes a while for me to get on board when people I loved when I was fourteen insist they're going to stop being self-referential fuckbadgers any day now.
[2] She ordered the catalog, sent away the page with the guy she wanted, and Married An Alternative Rock Impresario. What, that's where you knew I was going with this? Don't lie. Racialist.
[3] This Happened.
[4] Well, because Billy Corgan had not had an interesting thought since 1997, it was actually a commentary on fame in the 1990s, but this is how it was packaged, so.

The Men Who Stare at Goats, or On The Impermanence Of The Mediocre

2009-11-10T18:55:00.004+13:00

Your Correspondent finds himself in a curious position w/r/t movies. Of course he enjoys watching movies; why else would be have seen so many of them? But more and more, he finds himself despairing of this whole let's-make-movies-of-good-stories lark.

Case in point being the stultifyingly mediocre The Men Who Stare At Goats, which is being written about in a last-ditch effort to wring any glimmers of interesting comment out of it, even as YC feels it fading from his brain like the polaroid picture at the beginning of a better movie, such is its incredibly forgettable nature. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Men Who Stare at Goats. Did you ever have a conversation with someone and walk away, realising you had no idea what that person's name was, or what they did, or what their passions were, or how you'd got talking to them in the first place, but with the general feeling that they'd spoken in a lot of well-wrung cliches about things that, by all appearances, ought to be pretty interesting, if they'd only cared enough to use their own words? Yeah.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is already but a flickering clatter in YC's brain, a selection of wacky hippy montages and funny Clooney faces, a slide projector missing most of its pictures. He can feel the slides falling from their carousel, and he cannot be bothered picking them up.

He remembers that it hewed closely enough to the tone of the book, and that it conformed to that irritating syndrome whereby someone writes about something in a way that skilfully blends the literary and the cinematic, so as to capture the best of both spheres, and someone else reads that and goes, "wow, this is so cinematic, it ought to be a movie!" No it oughtn't, it ought to be a book, one of whose strengths is that it has a pace that is skilfully-maintained in ways that at times resemble that of a good movie. And you know what it is already? That exact thing! So put it the fuck down.

Your Correspondent dimly recalls the opening title card: "You Would Be Amazed How Much Of This Is True". Yes, well, very good, but you'd be amazed how much of this has, in the transition to the screen, been cack-handedly bent to feel as much as possible Like A Movie, and how pointless that renders the "true" bits, and indeed how insulting it all is. Because for instance, one of the True things is how the US kept innocent detainees in the War on Terror in steel boxes and flashed strobes on them and played them music 24 hours a day to stop them sleeping, so when that happens in the movie, you would be surprised how much of that is True, but you know what else might surprise you? How incredibly crass and insulting it is to then conflate those people with cute wee goats and reduce them to props in the Redemptory White Guy Experience of the main characters. So now not only did we perform cruel and unusual torture on these guys, but we then fictionalised and objectified them to the point where they served less of a narrative point than a farm animal? Hey, yeah, fuck you buddy.

Hardly any scenes of The Men Who Stare at Goats now remain in Your Correspondent's head. They drip from his mental screening-panel like wet ink, leaving only the words they were based on. And he is fine with that.

In Which I am AWESOME.

2009-10-23T09:17:00.002+13:00

Read the first comment, bitches! Oh yeah, so this is me talking about time travel in video games and making more than a few cheeky wee movie references.

Tom's America: Miracle and Wonder

2009-10-21T11:09:00.007+13:00

Last year, Americans threw up their hands at eight years of What-Should-Be and elected into office a man who campaigned on a direct, sometimes confrontational, platform of telling America What Is. After two terms of being brutalised with torture-porn, adrenalised by 24 and coddled by a man who seemed to have stepped out of Norman Rockwell and talked like he had a mouth full of wet paint, it was time for a guy who promised nothing but a mirror. And last Thursday he was going to be at the Westin, and we were going to be staying right around the corner from him. But that wasn't the only thing we heard about that day.

When it was a cute story floating about Twitter, folks didn't know his name or what he was doing with a homemade balloon. You know when you see a group of kids at a fair and one of them lets go of his balloon and it flies into the sky and becomes a smaller and fainter dot of red against the clouds? Well, now that balloon had become national news, because the kid was still freaking attached to it.

It was an impossibly sweet and picturesque nugget of universality carved out of the Colorado mud. It was only on second thought that you imagined the kid, drifting away and terrified, the whole world stretched out below him like a toy landscape.

So when the balloon was recovered, without the child - whose name, by this time, was Falcon, and who had been on the hundredth episode of Wife Swap, and whose father was a storm chaser - it was pretty hard to actually accept the reality of what must have occurred. That a boy had fallen out of a makeshift device somewhere over Colorado, and was in all probability smeared unrecognizably over the landscape of same. How could that compare to the narrative of a magical bird-named child who went up into the sky in a silver cloud and never came down again?

How long would this fairytale be able to continue before reality's magnetic charge pulled it back in? As it turned out, it was until Kid Icarus was found, alive and safe. We chided ourselves for putting our love of a good story before our wishes for a real human being, or at least a televised one.

But when the fable came crashing back to earth, it hit so hard that another narrative tract was carved out of the crater and launched skyward. As the details came out of the circumstances in which Falcon's balloon had launched, it turned out his 2012-obsessed, reptiloid-believing, fame-addicted dad Dick was the truly Icarean one.

What Is is great comedy. America's sainted transcendents of the form - Bruce, Pryor, Hicks - made careers out of traveling further and further into the realm of brutal honesty. But What Is isn't great politics. Without a steely resolve, What Is soon degenerates into the noble foolishness of What Might Be, a stone's throw from the futile wastelands of What-Should-Be. The last time a President determined to stay the course of What Is, we got COPS, Timothy McVeigh and Monica Lewinsky. Because What-Must-Be needs a release valve: What Is is well and good, but What-Should-Be must be, somehow.

The moment when the story in Richard Heene's head slips its earthly bonds and sails into the sky, never again to diverge with reality, is marked clearly in this video. It makes a noise hilariously similar to what it sounds like when a human being, puffed with heated gas, deflates.

Because everything after that moment - the moment when Falcon protests, "you said we did this for the show" - becomes automatically filtered through an incredulous prism: the question of, "how the hell did they think this would go?"

Was this meant to be the moment when America congratulated Richard Heene on his engineering prowess and media savvy, patted him on the back and awarded him a house next to the Kardashians'? If Falcon hadn't explicitly drawn the line between the Heene reality and the rest of the world's narrative, would we have just gone on forever believing the family was made up of latter-day Da Vincis and Anne Franks? How the hell did they think this would go?

Waiting outside the Westin for three hours for a glimpse of the man who had by now been returned to his position of Most Significant American, we asked each other, was this better now that we knew? We never saw Obama, and Falcon had never flown at all.

No matter what you thought of the way the President was doing his job, the fact remained that millions had gone to the polls and agreed to remove the blindfold. His candour invited a Zen disregard for idolatry: if you meet Barack Obama on the road, question him. But what place What-Should-Be? Trickling off primetime, bleeding out of the organs of discourse, it retreats into artwork of Presidentially anointed unicorns, hateful mashups of Obama and Heath Ledger (what?), balloons that we fly up into the sky and deep within our skulls; and when they return, the young life we imbued them with is gone, or was never there.

In Which I Get Punny.

2009-10-17T19:05:00.002+13:00

I wrote a story for Gamesradar about gaming scandals, and here it is. Go to the second page of comments to see my point being misconstrued somewhat.

In Which I Engage In Socratic Dialogue About Kirby.

2009-10-03T13:01:00.002+13:00

I am on Gamesradar here, telling you why bad guys are actually good. This is the article where I manage to shoehorn in some Lincoln reverence, just because.

What Monsters Would Say: Beast of Le Gevaudan

2009-09-25T06:13:00.004+12:00

"Wassat? Whosere? Nevermind. Phew. Okay. Cripes. Okay. Reckon I'm in the clear. Gotta get up pretty early in the morning to outsmart the ol' Beast of Le Gevaudan!"