John & Belle Have A Blog

Political Compass

The missus and I are off to a Halloween party. But before I go I'll tag along with Leiter, Bertram, Yglesias and others by up and taking my political compass test. Here I am. Equal parts moderate lefty and libertarian. I think that's a bit off. I should be one notch more libertarian and one notch less lefty. And who figured the Dalai Lama for a libertarian on their little chart? Oh, well. Glad I'm not sitting next to Mugabe. On the other hand, I'm doomed to vote for Kucinich or Sharpton, a proposition subject to grave doubt. As Leiter observes - it's damn obvious - a substantial number of the questions are so ambiguous as to be worse than useless. It always surprises me when people put so much technical work into surveys or little tests like this then don't bother to iron out simple problems with word choice and phraseology that are bound to lead to bad data.

Kill Bill

Sorry guys. Making you look at David Gest's plastic head-substitute and then not blogging for three days? Is that the fine service you've come to expect from J&BB? I think not. John's having another week of hell with grading and I'm still moping around. Seems like a good time for our big announcement: I'm pregnant, due in May. Hence all the queasiness. I've been having that variant of morning sickness which in-the-know people call "the whole fucking day sickness". I don't recommend it. I've been eating fine, because I'm still hungry, just revoltingly nauseated. Don't tell me that doesn't make any sense, because I'm way ahead of you. Obviously it could be worse; some women can't keep food down at all. But, things could always be worse; I mean, someone could be making me watch that dying mom movie with Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts, right? (Gives me the cold robbies, as Pogo would say.)

Instead, John and I snuck out to see Kill Bill last weekend. I really liked it, although it is a strange movie. I have zero patience for the people who bitch and whine about Tarantino and say he's a no-talent hack addicted to shock tactics and cheap thrills. There is such a being in Hollywood, and his name is Jerry Bruckheimer; I strongly recommend that those with spare opprobrium look there for a target. Tarantino is obviously a great director, the proof of this being that he has directed a number of great movies. He's also an annoying, hyper, nerd -- but so what? Just because everybody ripped him off badly and we got tired of third-hand pop culture-infected dialogue and casual, humorous violence is no reason to blame the man. And I find objections to his violence strange, anyway. He is fascinated by violence, to the point of what might be called directorial sadism. Granted. But is this fascination worse than the casual disregard for bodies displayed in the average action film? Kissing in front of a nuclear blast in True Lies? Leering at the tits on a female corpse in Bad Boys 2? Even people who were disgusted by Peckinpah's Wild Bunch had to look anew at the bloodless crumpling of a gunshot victim in an old-timey Western and see something false about it. People do awful things to each other, and when they do, blood gets everywhere. Which brings us to Kill Bill.

It was beautiful, and it was very funny, although less so than his other movies, simply because so much of thier humor came from the dialogue, of which there tends to be less when everyone is busy getting their heads cut off. It did suffer from the defect of not being about anything, but seemed to be making strenuous efforts to transvalue that into a virtue, in which it was partly sucessful, I think. John and I are divided about it in one respect: I am partially withholding judgment until the second half comes out, since we don't actually know what's going on yet, in some sense. John thinks it should retain the awful crystalline purity of just never telling us what the deal is and remain a unexplained revenge vehicle. We'll see. It's also true that I spent my formative years laughing my head off as Chow Yun-Fat shot fifty people in various ways in a single scene, and I love Japanese movies where the hero is posessed by a demon and becomes so deadly with the blade that in the end a mob has to drive him into a fire, since an infinite number of armed men have already been sliced to bits. Maybe, if you don't like that kind of thing, you won't like Kill Bill either.

Ideas That Can't Help But Creep Good People Out

The Times had an article this week about how China's economic boom has increased its energy consumption (much of it from heavily polluting coal) and thus brought closer the day of reckoning: should developing nations be brought into the Kyoto protocol? Their absence from the greenhouse gas calcuclus was one of Bush's -- you know, I was going to say pretexts, but it would be more accurate to say not wholly meritless objections -- to the Kyoto Accord. But I'd just like to give some unsolicited advice to environmental campaigners: don't ever, ever say things like this.

Environmental groups that once promoted China as a good example are now increasingly worried. "If they're seeing 6 and 7 percent growth, that is obviously a concern," said Dan Lashof, a climate change expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has done several studies of Chinese energy use.

That whole "wanting poor countries to stay poor" thing is supposed to be part of D^2's Globollocks Watch, i.e. a canard brought out by pro-globalizers to cariacature opponents' views, not something people actually say in earnest.

My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!

Are you sitting down? Don't have a mouthful of chai or anything? Go look at this picture of David Gest's plastic head. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid to close my eyes now and I thought if I could force 12 other people to look at the hideous image I might be spared the torments of the damned.

Dr. Mahathir

An interesting retrospective in today's Straits Times, looking back on a quarter century of often bumpy relations with Malaysia's Dr. Mahathir.

UPDATE: And here's the latest from the New Straits Times, in response to the Wiesenthal Centre's call for a boycott on tourism and investment in Malaysia.

Adaptations

I saw three movies last weekend which have an obvious thematic link: two book-to-screen adaptations - one high, one lowbrow; and Adaptation, which I had already seen once, which is about book-to-screen adaptations, high and lowbrow.

Smile!

I just thought I would make a little demonstration to supplement last night's post. Pictures of Zoë, the first taken before she was aware the camera was there; the second when she knew it was time to SMILE!

Jack Kirby

So the Thing's Jewish! (Via Volokh.) And so were Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Poor Dr. Mahathir. Not only does he have democracy and such-like Jewish tricks to contend with; he's going toe-to-toe with the people who brought you Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Spider Man, the X-Men.)

And here is a page about Jacob "Jack Kirby" Kurtzberg, tough kid from the Lower East Side.

I'm a huge Jack Kirby fan, in case you haven't noticed. His comics just stunned me when I first discovered him in about the fifth grade. I got so wrapped up in comics then that my dad strictly forbade me to take drawing in junior high. (Worse, I was forced to play the French horn.) So I tried to teach myself drawing by copying Kirby's style, which - in my childish way - I didn't realize was a style, you see. I thought all human beings just naturally look like they have pots of ink pouring down their foreheads, among other disinguishing characteristics. (See here, for instance.) Which is why I find the subject of this issue so humorous.

And here are various interviews with comic artists and writers, talking about Kirby's influence on them. Here's Alex Ross; here's Kurt Busiek; here's Alan Moore; here's Will Eisner. You can poke around for yourself.

I got Belle to read some Kirby when she was pregnant with Zoë. The Forever People and The New Gods. Two of my favorites. I think it had a salutary effect. When she was one year old, the kid sort of looked like Modok. Now she looks more like Big Bear.

(NOTE: the kid smiles all the time, unless you tell her to smile. Then she looks like Big Bear. Also, those headphones aren't plugged into anything. She just likes to wander around wearing daddy's 'hear things'. I'm not blasting music in her ears to make her look this way or anything.)

Eisner Can't Be Faded

If you get tired of the blogospere-wide Easterbrook pity party, just visit the Antic Muse, here and here, for some bracing total lack of sympathy. As she puts it (alluding to Easterbrook's infamous "no doesn't always mean no" theory of consensual sexual encounters), "The real reason ESPN fired Gregg Easterbrook wasn't because he criticized his boss; it was because when he wrote "I'm sorry," what he actually meant was, "Please fuck me."... ESPN is already smoking the cigarette, I hope it was good for Gregg." Seriously, I think we've all learned an important lesson here: don't fuck with Michael Eisner. If Easterbrook isn't blogging about the horse's head in his bed tomorrow, it's only because he's too scared to mention it to anyone.

Gene Wolfe

I finally finished Gene Wolfe's four volume Book of the New Sun. And in recent months I've also read Peace, Fifth Head of Cerberus and Strange Travellers.

Wolfe is strikingly unlike other fantastic fiction writers. I am having a spot of trouble putting my finger on what makes him unique. Each book is a puzzle-box. Events in them are baffling to a truly unusual degree, and the books themselves are sliding-door, false-bottom architectonic affairs. And all very sober and serious in tone, while at the same time wildly original and imaginative. Like watching a skilled magician give a flawless and obviously endlessly rehearsed performance without once smiling at the audience, or at himself, or taking a bow when it's over. There's a sort of stern, vaguely theological chill always threatening to take hold, and often it does. Passionless but intense. Cerebral without really being about ideas. Psychologically gripping and convincing, but in a distorted, thin way. The protagonists tend to have oddly stipulative motives. We really don't know why they are doing what they are doing. Nor is this a failure of the author's capacity for characterization. A great many of the minor characters are as rich and fully developed as any one might hope to meet. But the main characters are - by craft and design - eerily hollowed-out, compelled ghosts, changlings, people who are not who they think they are. It's as though all the puzzle pieces are sort of somnambulating themselves into proper position, if only one could quite tell what part of the overall picture they are bound for.

There's also an odd, stately steadiness to the progress of the narrative. Thrilling things happens - especially in The Book of the New Sun. Anxious escapes and battles and tense encounters and monsters and sieges and such. This ought to cause the feel of the thing to speed up and slow down. But it doesn't. There is not much edge-of-the-seat 'how will Severian get out of this one?!' reader-response, because Severian (the protagonist) seems indifferent to Severian's fate. His eye is somehow always focussed on something in the distance. What grabs and holds one's attention, then, is the precision engineering of the characters and the setting, not warmth of identification with characters. Not a lot of warmth all around. (Here is a man who keeps writing books about the sun going cold, in fact.)

It's really impressive that the author is able to have a sword-and-sorcery hero - Severian is basically that, in The Book of the New Sun - wander through four volumes of adventures without really having a clear motivation. I don't mean he bounces around randomly or is impulsive. Nothing of the sort. And his incidental psychological characteristics are drawn very finely and clearly. But the core of his personality is a blank. This ought to get annoying or ridiculous after a while - or at least feel like a highly affected literary device. But it doesn't. Severian does not really seem to care that he does not really know why he's doing what he's doing. And, oddly, by steadily maintaining the audience's interest in the story - by somehow deflecting the demand that the hero's behavior make transparent psychological sense - Wolfe may actually manage to achieve a high degree of audience identification with his chilly hero.

Well, those are my tentative thoughts for the night. I know a few of our regular readers are Wolfe fans. Anyone want to add their thoughts about this fine author?