You May Be Able to Get There From Here

My friend Rachel sent me this vivid image from Rapture Ponies:

Jesus Riding a Dinosaur

“Is some variant of motherfucker used all over the world?,” Nina Shen Rastogi in Slate asks:

Pretty much. While it’s not quite a universal insult, variations on the command to commit incest with one’s mother appear in every region of the globe. Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent’s family, your opponent’s religion, sex, and scatology. Because motherfucker covers two of these topics—plus incest, a nearly global taboo—it’s a popular choice just about everywhere. In Mandarin Chinese alone, riffs on the basic phrase include Cao ni ma ge bi, meaning “fuck your mother’s cunt,” and Cao ni da ye, “fuck your elder uncle.” Given the Chinese culture of ancestor worship, Cao ni zu shong shi ba dai, or “fuck your ancestors of 18 generations,” may be the worst incest instruction of all.

Over 300,000 people lined the route of this years Mardi Gras parade, which marched up Oxford and Flinders streets in Sydney’s inner-city Darlinghurst this Saturday.

If you were there on the night: I tried to capture as much as the event as possible. High quality digital still images are available from every frame of every movie – Please contact me via this form keithloutit.com/contact-keith/ if this is of interest, or if you have any questions about the film. Happy Mardi Gras!

[vimeo 3548220 w=500&h=400]

There’s a certain brand of movie that I most enjoy. Some people call them “Puzzle Movies.” Others call them “Brain Burners.” Each has, at some point or another, been referred to as “that flick I watched while I was baked out of my mind.”

The Morning News survey’s films that puzzle us:

Mindfuck Movies.

I’m keen on watching The Dark City and finish David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which I’m currently watching.

Cool idea:

The Times Book Review has a wonderfully written piece on Flannery Connor:

Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After ­Kennedy’s ­assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a ­cartoonist.

This line is great:

She read a lot of theology because she believed it made her writing bolder. When she went to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she said, she “didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper.” Yet she quickly became a star there and “scared the boys to death with her irony,” as a teacher put it.

It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and you’re getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you’ll like it.”

[...]

We are asked to believe, usually by critics, that the most important factor in our response to a book should be its objective quality – a good book is a good book – but we know that’s not true. Mood and taste are important, self-evidently, but mood and taste are formed by educational background, profession, health, amount of leisure time, marital status, state of marriage, gender (men don’t read much fiction, depressingly), age, age of children, relationships with children, and parents, and siblings, and, possibly, an unfortunate experience with Thomas Pynchon’s V as an overambitious and pretentious teenager. All these and thousands of others are governing factors, and many of them are wildly inconstant.

In addition to this thoughtfully equivocal definition of a good book, I’m looking forward to reading some of Hornby’s book suggestions.

I’ve also always have enjoyed his column in The Believer, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”. Really, the way I blog (or the way I would like to blog) owes much to the rational and purpose of this column– reading a bunch of stuff and putting it together for other, anonymous people to read.

I don’t read comics, but I try not to discount the form. I read Watchmen around 5 years ago at the behest of a friend, an avid comic book and graphic novel reader. I’ve not decided if I’ll see Watchmen, the movie: When I first saw a teaser for it, I felt disinterest, with a touch of disgust. But in thinking more about the film the other night, I remember reading the novel-bound edition of the comic over an evening with no breaks. It was the first time I truly appreciated the graphic novel form. I was also just emotionally involved in the story.

The series creator, Alan Moore , it is argued– and I just accept this valuation– its a master of the comic form. A craft that often remains just this, but with a touch like Moore’s becomes art. Of course, much can be said about the denigration of comics as an art form, just an one can point to the many great science fiction, mystery, and espionage writers that have been pigeonholed as genre fiction writers. Denigration of this other beast, the adaptation of comics to blockbuster films, however, may be too little.

I recently read a exposition on the act of adaptation by Salmun Rushdie, which lead me to think about Watchmen and comic-to-film adaptations in the first place. Of course, comic books are often adaptations of adaptations. This is sometimes the commercial reuse of intellectual property in the form of characters and stories; but there is also an mythological element in the reworking of superheroes and villains to square with contemporary issues. In the case of Moore’s watchmen, DC Comics made an acquisition from Charlatan Comics, a cast of characters. Moore was then hired to adapt these character’s for a DC series. He choose to take a group of status-quo super heroes and make them dysfunctional anti-heroes. As Grady Hendrix writes of the comic:

Watchmen made the point that superheroes, realistic or otherwise, were beside the point. Its costumed do-gooders are retired, impotent, or insane, and they generally do more harm than good [...]  This [is a] surprising development, the comic reframed itself: Watchmen isn’t about crimefighters coming out of retirement and taking up their rightful mantles, but about how they never should have existed in the first place. The nuclear war they’re trying to prevent is almost entirely their fault in the first place, and the arms race that preceded it was accelerated by their mere existence.

Last summer’s comic blockbuster, The Dark Knight, also considered whether a non-super hero should retire. The comic book release of The Dark Knight was released at the same time as Watchmen, and the two works are interesting companions. They shared critical acclaim in the mid-Eighties– both perceived as revolutionary in artistic process and narrative. Also, they both take place– one figuratively– in New York city.  The Gotham milieu says many more things about our current condition, about American fear and politics in an age of terrorism. And whereas the effete watchmen either become the literal tools of Richard Nixon or hang up their capes, its natural to feel, as many critics have argued, that Batman’s heroism against terrorism is apologetic for the policy’s of Dick Cheney and the Bush Department of Justice.*

The Dark Knight is an exception to movies derived from comics though– they generally stink. They stink for many reasons, but in part they stink because the format doesn’t allow for hero’s to be deconstructed, as is done in The Watchmen series and, too a smaller extent, in The Dark Knight. I expect the movie retelling of the story will try to, despite its grit and frame-by-frame loyalty to the original, recast the Watchmen as heroes (not that their story ends heroically).  In the case of Watchmen, its doesn’t really seem to matter that the original work is masterpiece. As Dana Steven’s sumarizes, “the book’s spirit—its paranoia, its dark humor, and above all its bleak anti-triumphalism—has been squelched in the transition to a big-budget action epic.”

* I felt that this question in Christopher Nolan’s Batman was more provocative than allegorical. Thinking of its portrayal of torture and also a scene where the police, to their demise, neglect a suffering man because of his association with the Joker. (The Joker has given the man an implant of explosives.)

Some related readings:

• In Defense of the Blue Penis
• Is Watchmen the Next Dark Night
• The Watchmen Rorschach Test

I’m really savoring how the FreeBSD devil is transposed along the vertical axis:

JLO sporting some Free BSD wear