Screws, Spiders, Sydney, Science!

First, we return to the business of the Amazing Screw-On Head. For the poor beleaguered souls unable to watch the pilot on SciFi.com for some reason, the enigmatic Tyler has pointed out that the episode is available in three parts on YouTube:

Part 1!
Part 2!
Part 3!

(I hope those links work. I can't check them from the Job.)

My last day. Thank you, Jesus. You're just swell.

I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's latest novel, Anansi Boys, which is sort of a sequel to American Gods but mostly not. I'm basically (and obviously) obsessed with Gaiman's work, probably because he's writing exactly the kinda fiction I want to read, the kinda things that I never knew I wanted to read until I started reading them. It's the same breed of fiction I really want to write - real, literary, fantastical adventures. There is a sense of wonder in his writing, the undeniable certainty that the impossible can and will happen just around the corner.

And there's this weird thing that happens, when I pick up one of his books, because I'm never certain that I'm going to like it, when it starts off. Most of his stories begin so simply and quietly that you're not even sure that they've started, you're not even sure that they're going anywhere. And then, very suddenly, you're there, in the middle of this incredible, subtle, undeniably complex wonderland, and you realise that you're starving, which doesn't make any sense until you look at the clock and see that you've been reading for three hours and are late for dinner with the lady friend.

Anansi Boys is just like that. Only now, knowing Gaiman, knowing the way he works, I've been able to take it a little more slowly and enjoy every word.

This picture is more fun than it has any right to be. See how far you can zoom in.

Have you ever been carousing about a harsh, alien landscape, and then suddenly realised that, gallivaloping right behind you, it's squarms extendonating outwards in a frumious display of territorial legominance, is a Diremic Megalophant? I know I have. And I'm just glad I had my FMOM Industries Wave Disrupter Gun:




Courtesy of Dr Gordbort's Infallible Aether Oscillators! Act now and receive a free, all-purpose prosthesis!

(This is one of the many reasons that WETA is awesome)

Off to continue to avoid doing work.

Sense Gone Wild

I've come up on the last week of the Job, much, much faster than I anticipated. The summer has blurred around me, a watercolour miasma that dizzies and hurts the eyes and bends, liquid, into abstractions, fragments of time. Someday, you and I, we can sit down and discuss all of the misadventure of it.

But the point is, with three days left, I just do not give a fuck. So I'm back to posting from work. Contrary to popular belief and almost everything I've said about it, I don't hate the Job. I don't like it. But I don't hate it. It's actually ok, as far as summer student work goes - the coworkers are nice, the pay is good, I have a comfy chair. But it's nothing if not draining, and it gets in the way of a lot of things I'd much rather be doing. In short: I'm glad to see the motherfucker go.

In (what is quickly becoming) the tradition of finding harrowing, fascinating articles among the Particles and Sidelights of Making Light, I've spent the morning reading this LA Times profile of Joe Francis, the creator of "Girls Gone Wild" and this accompanying, excellent post from hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. You really need to read them (if you're having trouble getting at the LAT article, bugmenot is an easy fence-jumping way to get past registration portals).

The LAT article is surprising, and a little frightening, and disturbing and disgusting. In it, Claire Hoffman, the article's author, is assaulted by Francis, who, in the same night, predatorily selects women in the nearby club to appear in his videos, gets them drunk (under-age) and then, allegedly, rapes an 18-year-old:

Footage from that night shows a close-up of Szyszka's driver's license, proving she's not a minor. The camera then captures Szyszka lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup. Following a camerman's instructions, she shows her breasts and says, "Girls Gone Wild." She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her underwear. She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion, she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts but also feels good. Francis enters the room at certain points and you hear his voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, "You are so adorable." When she says she's a virgin, he responds: "Great. You won't be after my cameraman gets done with you."

When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she "didn't quite realize" she was being filmed. "But I didn't care because I was drunk and who cares?" Then she adds: "It didn't feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on 'Girls Gone Wild.'"

Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. "I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, 'No' twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, 'Oh, my god, it hurts.' I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn't keep talking."

Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, "She's not a virgin anymore."

The article goes on to chronicle Francis harrassing and lying about Hoffman to police officers, bystanders, her editor, and the woman herself, documents his various court appearances, and generally paints a picture of a deeply disturbed man who makes an enormous amount of money from the mass exploitation of young people. As hilzoy said, Francis might very well be a sociopath.

The article serves to underline two things for me. One is the nature and power of celebrity - Joe Francis should probably be in jail, or in isolation somewhere, being rehabilitated or analyzed or assessed. But, instead, because he had the idea to sell a video chronicling gruesome accident footage (his first project, before "Girls Gone Wild," was a VHS called "Banned from TV") and then to take advantage of the effects of youth, booze, and a camera, he has a private jet. He's created a brand from essentially tricking women into taking their tops off, and that means that he has an estate in Hollywood, hosts celebrities and millionaires at enormous parties, and is reportedly considering buying Playboy.

The other is the nature of pornography. It makes me think about a couple of things Alan Moore said in this interview with the Onion's AV Club about his (and Melinda Gebbie's) new, pornographic comic book Lost Girls:

None of the filmed or photographic material did anything for me, because there's such a lot of emotional human baggage that comes with anything that involves real models, real actors. You're too aware that this is somebody real, and that they might not have actually wanted to do this for a living. There's an air of disappointment or sadness that hangs over the material.

And I thought, when I read that, y'know, he's right. There's people behind all of that, isn't there? And there's a good chance that a lot of those people would rather be doing something else. And that's so much more true for "Girls Gone Wild". Most (if not all) of those girls are under the influence of something - drugs, alcohol, or, perhaps most pervasively, celebrity. Joe Francis is essentially wielding a psychological broadsword. "Girls Gone Wild" is a huge brand identity - there's the allure of fame, or what fame it can bring, and fame's made hundreds of thousands of people do strange, destructive, and irrational things for hundreds of years.

And yes, you can argue that these girls choose to do what they do, choose to put themselves in that situation. But you'd be hard-pressed to say that Joe Francis's coercion-engine doesn't have anything to do with it, and you'll never be able to make a case for the violence and assault that Francis has reputedly perpetrated time and again against people who have been lied to, harrassed, or threatened.

And no one makes the choice to get raped. End of story.

Danny Goddamn Glover

I'm watching Saw, not because I have a burning need to see it, not because I like it (I've never seen it before, actually), not even because it's been highly recommended to me (it hasn't been, and, in fact, from what I've been given to understand, I'm not even going to particularly like it), but because it's not costing me anything, thanks to TMN OnDemand. I could be watching Junebug, or Proof, or Thumbsucker, or a couple of HBO shows. But instead I'm watching... holy shit, Danny Glover just walked in. And now, Henry Gale from LOST.

(By the way, has anyone seen Cary Elwes as Ted Bundy in The Riverman? He's real good in it, actually.)

There are already a couple of things the movie's done wrong, but the premise is clever, so I think I'll stick around.

Some of you may like Terry Gilliam. I dunno. Some of you may know him as the maker of Brother's Grimm, and think that you don't like him (and, if that's the case, you should probably go watch a bunch of his other movies, and then shut up). Anyway, there's a trailer for his next film, Tideland, online. It looks pretty damn cool, in that low-budget, Gilliam nightmare kinda way.

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So I stopped writing this post to pay attention to Saw, because I didn't want to just half-watch a movie. Here is my twenty word review:

Could've been so much better. Good idea, poor structure, decent actors, bad chemistry, interesting plot, terrible dialogue. Five from Ten.

Hunh. That actually worked.

The Hype Machine is a neat little tool that finds you an unnecessary amount of fantastic music that you can listen to for free (I found it on Fabulist, which is rapidly becoming one of my very favourite websites). You should give it a whirl. It led me to Seachange, who I've immensely enjoyed listening to today. You can listen to some of their stuff on their MySpace. Think Stars, but British.

I've spent a good deal of my time today going through China Miéville's latest novel, Iron Council. Miéville's books are almost written in a different language - his prose is lyrical, dense, and complex, and the same can be said for the fiction that it constructs. He's aggressively intelligent, gritty, controversial, and fucking talented. He's rapidly become one of my favourite modern writers. You should read him. (Look for Perdido Street Station, his second novel - it's his breakout work, and certainly one of his best)

I should probably go be productive.

Pants!... and Other Things

I bought pants!

... I felt that was worth mentioning.

I had a moment, while shopping for pants, of near panic. I had picked up a pair of black jeans that I didn't think I wanted, and suddenly thought, "Wait. Do I want black jeans? Are black jeans good? Are they stylish? Will I have any friends if I wear black jeans?"

I called Sheena. "Black jeans," I said. "Yes or no?"

"No," she told me. "No no no."

"Oh. Ok," I said. "That's what I thought."

"Are you buying pants?"

"Yeah."

"You should get cords."

"Oh, yeah. Ok."

I went looking for cords, feeling content and happy that I had avoided buying jeans that I hadn't really wanted. This feeling lasted for about three minutes when, after wandering around the store a little, I realized that I had no idea what cords were, panicked, and bought more jeans.

I am everything fashion is not.

I came back from pants-shopping to find my brother watching "The 99 Most Bizarre Surgical Accidents." I sat down with him for a few minutes. The narrator, suitably grim-voiced said, "Kelly went in to get stitches removed from her cheek."

Kelly piped up. "I was supposed to go in and, uh, right out, I was supposed to be able to go back to work the next day."

The narrator came back. "But what was supposed to be a routine minor surgery became life-threatening when, using a cauterizing tool, the doctors set her face on fire."

My brother and I sat up.

He turned to me slowly and said, "That's ridiculous."

"I know!" I said, "That's the sort of thing you threaten your friends with, because it can't happen. Your face isn't flammable."

"Well, it's better than what I watched last week."

"What was that?"

"101 Things Removed from the Human Body. Two."

Maybe real-life is only stranger than fiction because we make a conscious effort to make real-life (or, at least, the real-life you see on TV) the craziest shit imaginable.

(Now they are talking about accidentally removing a man's penis. This is quickly getting very upsetting. Oh, good, they're ending on this story. Wait. They're ending on this story?!?)

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I've said it before, but I've a feeling I'm being ignored. You will (I compel you, I command you) watch The Amazing Screw-On Head. This isn't a question, or a request. Do it.

Eunoia by Christian Bök (brought to my attention by the unstoppable W) is a remarkable book, and probably the most stunningly and carefully crafted piece of writing I've ever seen. The concept is simple - write five chapters, each dedicated to one of the vowels. And in each chapter, use any of the consonants but only use that vowel, and not the others. Which means that Chapter A only has words that use 'a', Chapter E uses 'e', and so forth.

An example from Chapter A: "Awkard grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal)."

It took Bök (who calls himself an artist, performer, writer, and pataphysician) five years to write it, and it went on to win a bunch of awards and generally be damn amazing.

The point of this is that the whole text is free online. You can read it here. You really should.

Finally, I'm afraid that you really, really have to watch this.

Yes. I am a Gaimanite. Sue me.

This is mostly for the wonderful folk (namely Olga and Jewlie) over at The Fabulist, who, for their wonderful work on finding desperately cool and highly amusing things and for finding a way for me to flex creative muscles during the doldrums of the office day, deserve high praise.

And, also, because I just couldn't back down from the challenge.

(You will click on this, and you will love it, and you will buy it, because it is fantastic.)

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Neil Gaiman: an acronym

When you talk to me about books (or comics, or movies), and
Hear me mention, within an hour, a moment, a breath, (and
Everyone who knows me well will remember), something I
Read or heard or found that’s wonderful or strange or
Exceptional, and you ask me, “Where
‘S that from,” I’ll say, “Neil told me.”

Not that I couldn’t live without him, but
Every time
I think about what it would be
Like if, one day, he wasn’t there, I worry.

What if, on the day
He vanished, all the stories that he held in his head,
Every fantasy and fable, monster and witch,
Now that he was gone, were set free?

You’d go mad, wouldn’t you, in a world where gods reached
Out of the sky to play chess with cities, where the monsters
Under the bed were suddenly on a pub crawl?

Nations would panic and run in a world where
Every closet held a secret world, where
Every cat became a king of men and mice, and
Dreams sat down for tea with faeries.

How would we look then,
In our suits and skirts and polo shirts,
Mouthing at the sky:

WHERE’S NEIL WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

A Quick Little Stretch

This'll just be a quick warm-up post before I sit down and actually start writing some of that play.

Recently, and largely thanks to Patrick and Theresa of Making Light, I've been delving through wave after wave of pseudo-political blogs maintained by startlingly intelligent people that both frighten and enlighten me. It's renewed my interest in world politics, and helped me to settle a little more comfortably into an actual position on the spectrum (which, according to this Political Compass makes me damn near an anarchist).

This article on the death penalty in Japan, in particular, had me outraged and nearly proselytizing for Amnesty International. You should read it.

All of you must immediately listen to The Meligrove Band's Planets Conspire. You can listen to a few of the tracks on their website (the title track in particular is excellent).

Babel looks damn good, and features a greying Brad Pitt, which jolted me a little and made me think it wasn't him.

Off to write.