The Man Behind the Curtain

One of the worst possible things to do when you really like a book or a movie is to find out everything there is to know about how it came to be. To read about the actors, or about what drug the author was on while they wrote it. What does it mean to me to know that Stephen King was so drunk and coked up that he doesn't remember writing The Shining? Does that make The Shining better or worse? People are so desperate to know everything about something they like, but I believe knowing it all takes away from the entertainment value of the thing itself.

For example, Ben told me that his dad avoided all reviews and articles and interviews about the Lord of the Rings movies. Doing so made the movies more real for him. Meanwhile, me, Ben and many others spent hours watching the DVDs extras to see how the movie was made.

I bring this up because on Thursday I stood in line for three hours in 92 degree New York City heat to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As previous posts can confirm, I love The Daily Show. I love Jon Stewart. Well, loved. Because being there and seeing how they film it and what they do during commercial break time and how the studio really looks ruined it for me. After taking the ferry back across the river to New Jersey and arriving at home after a Diner dinner, I said, "I can't ever watch The Daily Show again."

Learning about what parts of a book are based on real experiences, what parts of the movie stunt doubles were used, or that your favorite TV personalities have a TV personality... well, it's like wanting to learn how magic tricks are done. You feel more in-the-loop, but it's not fun anymore.

As our ferry scooted between Circle Line tour boats and Manhatten was left behind us, I thought of the Wizard of Oz. That sometimes you really should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Superman Returns: A Pre-Review

I now posess tickets to Superman Returns, for tomorrow night, 9:55. This has been a long time coming. It goes back to 1997, when Tim Burton was going to dress Nicolas Cage in black leather and give him some guns and call that Superman. (And that, scarily enough, was one of the better ideas.) But here we are in 2006 and the Man of Steel is just as he should be, complete with red undies and spit-curl.

For two years I followed the production via message boards and blogs and set reports and interviews. I remember when Bryan Singer, who I knew from X-Men, came on board to direct. I remember when Christopher Reeve died, and, by a coincidence that made it seem like myth unspooling, a few days later Brandon Routh was plucked out of some Iowan cornfield and put in Reeve's red boots. The unveiling of the suit. The casting of Lex Luthor. The first photos of the Kent farm -- I watched the corn grow. And now...

Deep breath. I don't want to hyperventilate here.

I've wondered why it is that I care so much about this. I've always liked Superman, but it used to be that I thought he was cool, his powers were cool, he could fly. Now it's that I need him. I look around and everything is shit. Religion often seems to bring out the very worst in people. Our government right now is despicable. Sure there are good people to be found, but there is no grand, exciting idea that isn't rife with corruption.

The S is one of the few symbols that hasn't been stained. Sure it's a cartoon symbol, but everyone knows it means "truth, justice and the American way" -- terms vague and elusive enough to still actually mean something. I see a cross, and the good it's supposed to represent is tarnished by what it really means when people carry it around. It's never done to welcome. Even when I see an American flag my patriotism isn't what it used to be because I'm ashamed of so much of what has been done with it lately. Ideals, pure and valuable as they may be, have a hard time overpowering what I see their representatives doing every day.

So that's why I need a comic strip hero. Because here is a messianic god-on-earth story mediated by blue tights and a red cape. Because the "American way" Superman fights for still means what the Founding Fathers intended. Because everything else sucks.

Call me an alienated Christian and a disenchanted American.

And I don't think I'm the only person who feels that way. I read one review somewhere (I wish I could find it again), where the reviewer said, "I didn't realize how much I missed Superman until he was back."

People treat him like he's real. Some people even argue that he is. From a Wired article by Neil Gaiman:

About a decade ago, Alvin Schwartz, who wrote Superman comic strips in the 1940s and ‘50s, published one of the great Odd Books of our time. In An Unlikely Prophet, reissued in paperback this spring, Schwartz writes that Superman is real. He is a tulpa, a Tibetan word for a being brought to life through thought and willpower.

An Unlikely Prophet brings up an important question about Superman: What makes people want to meet him so badly? It’s tough to imagine a similar book about, say, Green Lantern or Captain America. Superman is different because he doesn’t really belong to the writers who’ve created his adventures over the last 68-plus years. He has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has a stake in who Superman “really” is. We retell his tales because we wish he were here, real, to keep us safe.

And that's it. We want a protector. "You wrote that the world doesn't need a savior," Superman tells Lois in the new movie, "but every day I hear people crying out for one."

Obviously I don't worship Superman, and maybe that's the key. A good story can suffer under the burden of people believing it's true. Truth is controlled and fought over, while fiction (especially money-generating fiction) is spread as wide as possible. So that's where I disagree with Mr Schwartz about Superman being a tulpa. Not that I don't think there's enough collective willpower to spring Superman into existence, but rather that it's better for him to stay a story. I think, if he exists in our imaginations, and if we can find some happiness in the idea that someone will swoop out of the sky and save us while knowing it will never really happen, that's good enough. To accept something as fiction and to be un-deterred by that is something special.

I would even suggest that maybe, possibly, that's faith.

South Central Farm

The South Central Farm was the largest urban farm in the U.S. On June 14 it was "attacked" by city officials. Trees were cut down, bulldozers plowed over families' food, and tree-sitters removed (including actress Daryl Hannah).

350 families created the farm 14 years ago after the 1992 uprising. At that time, the land was given to the community by the mayor.

The official owner of the land decided to sell and the community could not raise the $16.3 million to buy the land.

Such a shame. I'd never heard of this before but it seems like it would be a really great thing for any community. (On July 12, the farmers and community will go to court to fight the legality of the sale of the land.)

I wish things like this made the news while they were still in existence. I wish it didn't take demolition or loss to get into the papers and onto the Web.

Pleasing Mr Gore

Dear Maggie,

Was yours and Mike's decision to keep your air conditioner set to 75 instead of lower influenced by Al Gore? Chris and I reluctantly installed ours last night, only after any chance of sleeping without it seemed impossible. With some things, I'm happy to lower my carbon footprint. For example, since seeing Al's movie I now put my computer to sleep at night and when I'm at work, where I used to leave it running 24/7. And drowning polar bears are a good excuse to use fewer lights (I prefer dim ambiance anyway). But other times, like with the air conditioner and other power-slurping appliances, I feel guilty choosing emissions over discomfort. But I guess there must be some balance struck between what is feasible and what's not. For example, the fridge must run and there's no way around it. But, of course, Al says that small lifestyle adjustments, multiplied by millions or billions of people, is all it takes. I think he would be happy with our efforts.

Environmentally yours,

Ben

PS: Plus, the financial conservative in me, who doesn't give a crap about the bears, will be thrilled by the low electric bills.

Honor Among Vagrants

"I'm a friend!" screeched one vagrant as he thew another vagrant to the ground. "I'm a friend!"

Yesterday when I was walking home from work I noticed these two beating the shit out of each other beside the Park Street fountain. I adjusted my path to take me around the opposite side from where this vagabrawl was going down.

"I'm a friend!" screamed the first vagrant again. Other vagrants standing around said "Let him up" in hushed throaty tones. But the first vagrant was having none of it. The other vagrant lay stiffly on the ground on his back, while the first vagrant jumped around on top of him. And finally we (we as in all the passersby), who had missed the beginning of this fight, got more information: The first vagrant screamed, "How could you think I'd mean anything by it!??!" He screamed this in agony, the agony of someone whose car has just cruelly been driven into a lake, and then he resumed slamming his buddy, his pal, against the concrete.

So this wasn't a dispute over the half-empty Starbucks cup some officeworker had left on the curb, or a stray nickel, or even an old mitten. This was about honor. Something had been said in jest, but not received that way.

I imagine it went a bit like this:

"Haha," the first vagrant laughs, pointing. "Look how shiny your baldino is."

"What?" retorts the other vagrant. "Why you talking about my baldino? You're a fucking asshole, talking about my baldino."

"I'm just kidding, I didn't mean anything by it."

"I thought you was a friend, but you're talking shit about my baldino."

"AAAAHHHH!!!!" The first vagrant erupts and lands a punch in the other vagrant's toothless kisser.

It was funny to me, at first, that these people would care so much about their reputation. But, on second thought, what else do they have?

The first vagrant is a friend, goddammit. And there's a puddle of blood on the sidewalk to prove it.

Hemingway's shortest story...

...consisted of six words. Here it is, in its glorious entirety:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Earth breath

One of the most interesting things pointed out in An Inconvenient Truth can be seen in this graph, which measures the growing amounts of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.



Disregard the overall increase (but don't disregard it too much, of course) and notice how the levels go up and down every year, like teeth on a saw. This is because each year green plants take in carbon dioxide when they're growing and give it off when they die in the fall. It's like every year the whole earth takes a giant breath. Ahhhhhh.

Isn't that cool?

On a related note, Stephen Hawking says we need to establish colonies in space soon to ensure the survival of the human race.

[I]f humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, [Hawking said,] they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

My bet? We don't make it in time. Thus my theory of time travel would work out perfectly. Mwuhahaha.

MySpace priorities

Have you ever bumped a real-live friend out of your Top 8 to make room for the profile of a fictional character?

I'm a little embarassed to admit that I've done just that. But hey, it's Superman!

I'm sure the bumpee will understand.

Hear ye? Hear ye?

Can you hear this ringtone?

According to the NY Times, this new ringtone, which only young people can hear,

is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.

"When I heard about it I didn't believe it at first," said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. "But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could."

I can hear it. Thank god. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to. Guess I can push that quarter-life crisis off a little while.

An Inconvenient Truth

I've been interested in seeing this movie for a while, mostly out of curiousity. What would a 90-minute science slide-show by Al Gore be like?

Turns out it was pretty damn good... which made it also pretty damn depressing. Seeing the man who was almost president made me long for what would have been, or at least what would not have been. There would be no war in Iraq, Americans wouldn't have to say they were Canadian in order to travel abroad -- to name a few. Gore needn't have been the next Lincoln to have had the country better off than it is.

And then it was further depressing because I could see how different Gore is when he's not campaigning (something he's admitted he sucks at). He was less stage-managed in this movie than during his 2000 campaign. He was knowledgable, approachable, even funny (it wasn't a political movie but he still got in two or three humorous jabs at Bush), and, most imporantly, curious. He likes to learn. He has imagination and vision. And it was depressing to think that all of these things can so easily get shoved aside in modern presidential campaigns, where the focus group is everything, and you have to be so careful about what you say because every word that comes out of your mouth will play on a hundred news stations.

After my regrets and my election-pessimism passed, the movie started to get scary. Terrifying. Because if it's even half correct on the effects of global warming (which apparently is agreed upon nearly unanimously by scientists even though the media portrays it as a theory), we're in big trouble.

If I had any problem at all with the movie as I was watching it, it was that I felt it sometimes portrayed Gore as too knowledgable, too borderline omniscient on the subject of global warming. He has been pushing this for over twenty years, but there was never a sense of "I told you so" from him -- that wasn't the issue. The problem I thought I would have was that the movie would end up presenting Gore as The Man To Fix This. And that gave me pause.

Everyone knows that the best way to gain power is by scaring people. It's been demonstrated in fiction, in, for example, V For Vendetta, wherein the regime seeking power secretly creates and unleashes a deadly virus and then runs on the platform of finding a cure. And it's been demonstrated in real life by the Bush Administration working the terror angle till they're blue in the face -- the old "Only we can keep you safe" routine. So I thought, is Al Gore showing this problem and positioning himself as the answer, as our best hope? Because this movie was pretty damn scary. Scarier than anything the Republicans have come up with.

But it didn't stay scary, and that's what separates it. After the pictures showing that there are no more famous "snows of Kilimanjaro," and that Glacier National Park is now more accurately called Lake National Park -- and after the simulations showing what the country would look like if the polar icecaps melted and the oceans rose twenty feet... after all that, it turned out to be inspiring. And it eased my earlier fears of a Gore power-grab. Because, at the end, he asks us to fix this problem. It was the furthest thing possible from Bush's tactic of "Go about your lives as normal while we handle the problem." Gore says the opposite: Do these things, some simple, some difficult, change the way you live, and you can fix the problem. He himself didn't factor into it. It was all about us.

And that's great. Because when was the last time we were asked to do anything? When was the last time we were made to feel like we can? It's as though our leaders are afraid of pissing us off by asking us to get off the couch. We are a great people in America, but we're lazy. We need to be inspired. Not since Kennedy has anyone looked to the stars and given us a seemingly impossible goal and told us to meet it. "America, get yourself in gear. Go, go and get me the Moon."

Gore, though not as eloquent as Kennedy, is giving us a similar goal with An Inconvenient Truth: Go, go and get me the Earth.

www.climatecrisis.net
watch the trailer.

The Ghostwriter

No, not a comic book character... a profession. Would I be a good ghostwriter? I tend to think I would be, especially if it was more on the editing side of things rather than full-on writing from scratch. The ego aspect of having someone else's name on my work wouldn't bother me, I don't think. If my book ever gets published I will almost certainly use a pen name anyway (most likely my first and middle name). God forbid I ever have fans -- who wants random people knowing who you really are? Not me. Of course, they're welcome to a carefully-managed caricature of me that I can present to them at readings and book-signings...

No, I think I'd be a good ghostwriter. I just need to get published a few times on my own to show I've got the chops.

All these yummy flavors

Why does dental floss need to be flavored? Do billy-goats and people with polyphagia choose it over string as the tastier snack?

For that matter, why does every hygiene product known to humanity need to be flavored? Shampoo that smells like mountain sunshine; honeysuckle bodywash; icy blast deodorant; hair stuff that smells like coconut; hand soap smelling of coffee and bananas; eucalyptus shaving cream -- the combination of it all gives the impression that the wearer has tumbled into the perfume kiosk at Macy's. It's a smell cacaphony.

Indecision

I like reading books that blow me away. Indecision, which I got from the library last week, is one of those. I remember when the book came out last year and I grumbled about having been beat to a post-college life-languishing story, and by another Ben, too -- this one a Kunkel. The similarities end with that most basic premise though, and Ben Kunkel deserves all those write-ups he got in the NY Times when his novel came out.

There isn't a plot to speak of (the typical McSweeney's-inspired voice of generation whatever-we-are), but this Ben has a knack for bundling major life commentary into neat little sentences. My favorite so far (and I wish I had the book in front of me so I could quote), was about how Kunkel's main character, Dwight, has for years mistaken all the hustle and bustle of his hometown NYC for actual life movement. In a twist on Hemingway's famous warning, "Don't mistake motion for action," Dwight is cautioned not to mistake the city's commotion for his own.

It's such an easy mistake to make, really. One I've probably been making myself for a while. Boston has surged up around me in the seven years I've lived here. It's so easy to think of new buildings and new stores, new condos and new restaurants as proof that you're actually going somewhere. But I realize that the new building beside the Pru, although it changes the skyline, doesn't really have an effect on me. And a new streetlight doesn't make me a better person, or even a different person.

I don't know what happens to Dwight, whether he'll pull himself together. I'm only half-done with the book. I don't know what happens to me, either, except that I'm going to pack up and go mistake some other city's commotion for my own, for a while.

Google Notebook

Has anyone else discovered this yet? Google has a habit of stealthily releasing beta programs and services, and Notebook is the best one yet (second to Gmail, of course).

In simplest terms, it's a net-based bookmark file. Excellent for people using more than one computer. Often in my browsings at work I'll stumble across an interesting website. How then should I remember the address for when I get home? In the past, it has always meant emailing myself links -- a process that's inefficient, at best. Now, with Google Notebook, I just right-click on anything -- links, pages, pictures -- select "Note this," and it gets popped into a little window via a browser extension. Then I can sign into Notebook at home and have my day's stumblings instantly available. Genius.

Batwoman likes girls

So the new Batwoman is a lesbian.

DC Comics says the character, who was brought in originally in 1956 as Batman's love interest, will be reintroduced as a lesbian as part of an effort to diversify its superhero roster. Kane is open about her sexuality with her friends, but has not come out to her family, executive director Don Didio said.

Cool. (Note to CNN, though: It's Dan Didio, not Don. Get it right or pay the price!)

What gets me is the QuickVote poll on the CNN main page. The question is "Should the sexual preferences of comic strip superheroes remain a secret?" A whopping 61% of voters said "yes."

Um, hello? Are people saying that superheros should be neuter? Should there be no Lois Lane for Superman? No Vicki Vale for Batman? No Steve Trevor for Wonder Woman? Give me a frickin break. No one's suggesting that Batwoman will be shown performing comic book cunnilingus, but I think we can handle some same-sex romance in between her kicking supervillains' butts.

But just when you thought a lesbian Batwoman was as bad as it can get... the new Blue Beetle? He's Latino.

God help us.