Atlas Meh’ed

I think it’s hilarious that the new Atlas Shrugged movie has a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 86% “user” rating. The hilarity is not in the 6% rating, which isn’t surprising given that it’s a low budget adaptation of a terribly wooden book, but in the number of people who seem to think a shitty movie is a slight on themselves. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is one of my favorite books. The movie is horrifying shitty. As is David Lynch’s Dune. To the best of my knowledge, all the fanboys and fangirls of books that get made into movies are harder on the movie than the average filmgoer. They complain in great detail about how the movie shortchanges the book, changes a vital relationship, ignores the point, makes a character left-handed instead of right-handed, and so on. In this case, however, the fanboys and fangirls are protesting the protests. Seriously, guys and girls, you’re doing it wrong. You suck at being fans. Of anything.

Sure, I hate the book. It’s epically bad in terms of writing quality, which is forgiveable in a pulp novel, but not one of such abnormal length. As a smart-ish kid who felt underappreciated for his stupendous genius, I was all ready to love the damn thing. I wanted to be told, yes, the world doesn’t deserve your brilliance, that I was special, that I would be John Galt etc. But then I got older and actually met people who are fucking geniuses, much more than even I could fathom in my childish imaginings, and saw how they don’t exist in isolation. More to the point, they cannot. The world, I learned, was not as black and white as all that. But even before I understood all that, I could have told you “this book sucks. Don’t bother.” That so many people are willing to stand up and claim a turd for gold makes my 12 year old self look smart in comparison. I envy them their naivete and am terrified of the world where they have a degree of power.

I call myself libertarian not because I have a high opinion of Ayn Rand or Austrian economists or because I want to defund social safety nets or particularly care for guns but for other reasons. I will not be watching Atlas Shrugged.

Charlie Sheen

I come not to bury the man, but in one little regard, to praise him.

Not for his longstanding issues with women, which he ought to be rightly condemned for (but if we’re culturally honest, that ought to have put him out of business ages ago, not allowed him to earn $2 million an episode), but for his unwillingness to do the apology tour for his drug use.

I’m a writer and musician, first and foremost, a subset not always given to considering personal safety and inoffensiveness as necessary virtues. I’d much rather those that come after me consider me “flawed,” “problematic” but still “kinda cool.” I’m certainly no pillar of society nor do I aspire to be. At this point, I’m not sure I ever could be. At the risk of sounding like a nostalgic, I’d like for writers and musicians particularly to take a leaf out of the terrible, self-important vanities of the crazies of the past and create the sort of flawed selves that cannot simply be explained by mere professionalism or talent. Don DeLillo made the case in Mao 2 that if the writers ceded their place as the cultural vanguard, then only terrorists would remain to occupy that cultural space.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with self-destruction laced with a heavy serving of Puritanism. We expect our heroes to fall, then laugh at them, fully expecting to forgive them if only they would ask for our forgiveness. We love humility. We despise arrogance. My defense of Charlie Sheen, an actor whose work I’m only glancingly familiar with, is primarily a critique of that aspect of culture.

Charlie Sheen does drugs. Drugs are bad. Charlie Sheen must apologize for doing them. That’s the script in this eager-to-forgive era that so many politicians, for instance, have internalized. This is an artifact of this particular cultural moment, as is made clear by the absolutely destructive effect of scandals in previous eras. There, the argument was not absolution but justice. Puritanical but more just. Instead, Sheen went on record implying that he’s a functional user, and opted not to apologize for his drug-related behavior. I applaud that. With regard to his issues with women, ranging from shooting his fiancée in the arm, allegations of domestic abuse and assault, I’d much rather he be tried for those separately. Those are certainly not issues where a public apology will suffice or should be expected. He does not have to give the public permission to like him, by assuring them that he was in error. That’s between him, the criminal justice system and the women in question.

Why are we as a culture obsessed with absolution? Where do we get the idea that crimes, sins for the religious, can be struck off the record simply because one apologizes? What exactly does anyone gain from an apology? What, besides permission to watch him without acknowledging the complications? Is it the moral superiority we derive from having the mighty prostrate themselves before the ordinary? Or is it something deeper, a Jesus complex, with the public standing in for the Christian messiah’s grace?

If you’re going to accept him back on TV, accept him for the entirety of the person he is. As an alleged misogynist, as a functional drug user, as an actor, as the son of Martin Sheen, as a megalomaniac, all that stuff. Maybe finally we’ll stop expecting famous people to be role models who never have to use the bathroom. The ideals set up in the cultural script I’m critiquing here say more about us than him. We’ve got to accept we’re not much better and be okay with it, as he is, apparently.

At least, we now have the cats quoting Sheen site for our amusement. Small mercies.

i r return

and this time, i hate air quotes. this is the only difference, illiterate fucking cum-sodden dickrag <3

this is the only acceptable use of air-quotes. ever.

Klingon

I’m not ashamed to say it. I love Star Trek. I was raised on it. Growing up, I thought the only literature that existed was Star Trek novelizations. And Hardy Boys, the occasional comic book. Everything else was schoolwork.

What I liked best about Star Trek was how fundamentally optimistic it was. Some part of this had to do with the fact that the creators allowed entire races their history and culture, for culture’s sake. I mean, sure, Kirk would still probably bang anything that moved and the history didn’t usually amount to a whole lot but someone made the effort to put that all in there regardless of how easily cliche it all was.

Arika Okrent has a post up on Slate detailing the history of the Klingon language and its linguistics. Here’s something I didn’t know which delighted me. I can’t speak or understand a word of Klingon btw. Yet this is testament to its universality and awesomeness.

“Klingon is….an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The linguistic features of Klingon are not especially unusual (at least to a linguist) when considered independently, but put together, they make for one hell of an alien language.”

The Rosenthal Rule

OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus

-A.M.Rosenthal, former editor, The New York Times

Hate and love in Science Fiction

Science fiction is how I came of age. However, I’m not as well-read as I ought to be re: modern science fiction. My reading stopped after cyberpunk happened. I came across an interesting quote recently regarding Theodore Sturgeon by Harlan Ellison, which started me thinking about why this was. Before I get to the quote, I’d like to ruminate some.

Science fiction is classic outcast literature. It’s simultaneously an expression of wonder and fear. Wonder at the worlds the imagination creates to escape from reality and fear at the consequences thereof. Wonder at how easily society has excluded the science fiction reader/writer and fear of the world that would presume to do so. Science fiction seems to me to contain both the outcast’s conscious rebellion and the pervert’s intellectual masturbation. When faced with absurdity, how else to react but to subsume it and make it palatable?

Catshit One

Goddamn! I have rarely seen a more compelling war trailer! And it’s not just because the characters are bunny rabbits and camels and pandas and cats, though obviously, they’re all very cute. Motofumo Kobayashi’s Apocalypse Meow (isn’t that the greatest title ever?) is being adapted by Studio Anima into an anime series called Catshit One. It’s clearly set in Afghanistan where, despite what people often think, a war is still raging. Despite having all Americans be bunny rabbits and all Afghanis be camels and generally using the wonders of anthropomorphing to get past viewer bias, the series aims to quite accurately depict war. I haven’t read the manga so I can’t comment on how effective this will be but initial reports are that this production is incredibly technically accurate and not heavy handed. It’s pure genius though. If a movie were to be made about war, and plenty of them have, the risk is that the emotional pull of seeing the human face would be disconcerting to the viewer. Using animals is a novel way to subvert the conversation no one wants to have: the human cost of war.

David Foster Wallace on Empathy

As you may know, David Foster Wallace’s last (unfinished at the time of his untimely suicide…is there ever a timely one?) novel will be coming out this year as will a book containing the text of the graduation speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005.

In it, he defends the true capital T-truth behind liberal education. It’s pretty incredible that what he saw at the heart of the education system was humility. I’m deeply in awe of people that have seen the system and come to that conclusion. They are better men and women than I. We need more of them, less of idiots like me

Quote after the jump