R.I.P. Shel Silverstein

Be happy. Be normal.

As I've said, America isn't tolerant of oddballs. Especially oddballs in American high schools. We talk a good game about individuality. But it's bullshit. We celebrate non-conformity -- just so long as you look like all the other non-conformists.

In England, if you march to a different drummer, you're "eccentric" -- part of humanity's rich fucking tapestry. Just try that stunt in America. If the jocks see you marching to a different drummer they beat the shit out of you. You're a loser, a fuck-up, a dweeb, etc., etc. You're shunned. America's flood of firearms helps explain this.

In England, the quirky, Willy Wonka-esque fellow in the purple top hat might smear some chocolate on you or pour tea on your head. In America, they might pull out a Glock and aerate you. Different is dangerous over here.

So we shun the different. And, in one of life's cruel feedback loops, some of the rejected oddballs stew, feel rejected, develop a persecution complex and shoot up the high school.

So, now we're dealing with Columbine. America, the land of blame, is now on a scapegoat hunt. If something bad happened, it must be someone's fault. That's the American way!

The standard narrative: somebody should have seen this coming. Those two weirdo kids were, well, weirdos. Their killing spree was predictable. They were, after all, wearing trenchcoats.

Based on that logic, American high schools should institute an Orwellian oddball hunt. Every weirdo is a potential killer. We need to screen the weirdos out. We need a weirdo list. We need to watch the weirdos very carefully.

Being a weirdo myself, I think that's a bad idea.

Jeremy Spoke in Class Today

Jesus. Some massacre just went down in a school in Colorado. Evidently, some kill-crazy kids celebrated Hitler's birthday.

They're celebrating together now.

The Matrix

I'm in awe. Larry and Andy Wachowski -- the screenwriting/directing band of brothers behind this thing -- hit it out of the park. This has got to be one of the best SF movies of all time. Though not the most original ...

The plot/premise is a distillation of Philip K. Dick’s brand of paranoid Gnosticism. Basically, “reality” is a virtual reality dream concocted by an "evil genius" – in this case, a network of AI entities who kicked humanity’s collective ass in a recent war and deleted most people's memory of that history. A few hundred years later, the mass of humanity parties like it’s 1999 – naively assuming that’s the real year and they’re living in the real world. But that’s a digital delusion pumped into their brains to keep them asleep. In reality, humanity is hooked up in a series of goo-filled cells. The machines have reduced the formerly proud human race to the status of batteries. We’re powering them; they use our body heat to generate electricity.

But a few rebels survive in an underground city called Zion. Every now and then, Zion sends out a team to wake up a sleeping human, unplug their body from the Matrix, and make them part of their revolution. They do this to a dude name Neo -- Keanu Reeves, in a whoa-filled performance. But Neo's more than just another dude. He’s the savior, Jesus and Buddha rolled into one.

Well, at least according to Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), the leader of the band in the hovercraft that rescues Neo. Morpheus is convinced Neo's the savior -- aka "The One." (In practice, that means Neo can potentially bend the virtual reality world of the Martix to his will.) Joe Pantoliano plays the devilish Cypher (his first name is probably “Lou”)who plants the seeds of doubt. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss, as an old man’s fancy and a young man’s dream in black leather) gives Neo her faith. Like Jesus in the garden, Neo wrestles with his divine destiny. Meanwhile back in the Matrix, the artificial “Agents” (led by Hugo Weaving's implacable, Joe Friday-like Agent Smith) who guard the dream world, do their best to track them down. But the good guys bring the battle to them. After a few switcheroos and plot reversals, Neo plugs back into the dream world for the final battle between good and evil.

The storytelling rocks – a nice mix of action flick and philosophical head-scratcher, liberally stealing, not only from poor dead Dick, but William Gibson's Neuromancer, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Alice in Wonderland – you name it – and, above all, Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. (The climactic shoot-out is basically a scene-for-scene remake.) But stealing’s fine with me.

In terms of special effects and cinematography, it rewrites the book. (And neatly solves the problem of improbable Kung Fu wire work. Hey, it's a dreamworld, right? Of course it breaks the laws of physics!) Some really sweet stuff, kids. See it.

As cinematic storytelling, The Matrix is purt’near perfect. As a science project, it’s not going to win any prizes.

OK, fanboys. Hate to drop a turd in the punchbowl, but nobody told Larry and Andy about the second law of thermodynamics. I.e., it’d take more energy to keep the sleeping humans alive than the humans would generate. And spare me the “combined with a form of fusion” – if you’ve got fusion power, why wire all of humanity together in a vast Rube Goldberg scheme to turn them into batteries? For that matter, why not use cows?

Who cares? It’s a movie, not a science lesson.

And, for all I know, the “human battery world" is just another illusion.

I'll wait for the sequel.

The New Devil's Dictionary

The New Devil's Dictionary of Modern American Usage
(with apologies to Ambrose Bierce)

Government, Politics & Civil Order

Armed forces: A government make-work program in which unemployable, unskilled young men and women from the lower strata of society emerge from their term of service with a high degree of skill in shooting people and blowing things up.

War on drugs: A conflict in which the government attempts to shoot and blow up the highly-skilled, underclass people who are shooting and blowing each other up in their efforts to sell the drugs which the government has previously sold them.

Drugs: Mind-altering substances which people, either rich or poor, take so they don't have to think about the depressing shit I'm talking about here.

Illegal Drugs: Untaxed drugs.

Drug treatment: Treatment for rich people can be very expensive, involving rehabilitation clinics and highly trained medical professionals. Treatment for poor people is even more expensive and involves prison, vicious beatings and buggery.

Human rights abuse: An outrage perpetrated by a country or political faction I disagree with.

Free enterprise: Socialism for the rich.

Socialism: Capitalism for the nomenklatura.

Pork: Government money that someone else got.

Religious tax exemption: A means by which the government subsidizes religious institutions with successful building programs.

Insurance: A subsidy for the stupid, risk-taking behavior of rich people paid for by poor and working class people.

Foreign policy: This consists of sending poor and working class people to various foreign countries to shoot angry brown people as a way of subsidizing the wealthier percentage of the population with jobs in the defense industry.

United States energy policy: Shooting Arabs until the Middle East runs out of oil.

Public education: Jails for children which allow their parents to go to work. Also, educational institutions. (archaic)

Private education: Institutions by which the natural arrogance and cruelty of the upper classes is refined. They also teach Latin and Rugby.

Weapons development: An ongoing process in which the defense industry makes military technology increasingly complicated, unreliable, expensive and harder to use. (See upgrade.)

War: An ongoing miniseries in which the American military kicks the shit out of various dirtbag countries in order to get free photo-ops for their latest weapons systems on CNN.

PAC: An acronym for "Political Action Committee." An organization which prevents political action.

Republican: Somebody with money who thinks the government should write his corporation big checks. Believes in the principle of borrow and spend.

Democrat: Somebody without money who thinks the government should write him big checks. Believes in the principle of tax and spend.

Libertarian: Republican who smokes pot and doesn't want any government checks.


Religion and Philosophy

Religion: A multilevel marketing scheme combining a belief in the supernatural with a successful building program.

Cult: A multilevel marketing scheme combining a belief in the supernatural with an unsuccessful building program.

Scientology: Former cult now boasting a successful building program, airhead Hollywood spokespeople and numerous unmarked graves.

UFO Cult: A belief system which holds advanced extraterrestrial civilizations developed faster-than-light travel as a means of crossing the universe and sticking things up people's butts.

Moral highground: A convenient place for crucifixtions.

New Age Thought: Neither thought nor new.


Free Speech, Art & Popular Culture

Popular Culture: Fads stolen from the real culture of black people and sold to white people.

Free Speech: When I call you a dickhead.

Hate Speech: When you call me a dickhead.

Libel/Slander: When I sue you for calling me a dickhead.

News: Advertiser press releases rewritten in the third person.

Freedom of Speech: The inalienable right to print whatever the advertiser tells you.

Investigative reporting: Negative articles about businesses and individuals who don't advertise.

Political reporting: Occasional filler between articles about advertisers.

Intellectual property: Ideas, music and images stolen from black people without good lawyers.

Post-modernism: A literary & philosophical movement whose adherents have cast off the mind-forged manacles that prevented them from being longwinded, unclear and dull.

Appropriate: A post-modernist term for plagarism.

Eclectic Art: Bad art. A term used by art critics who don't want to say "bad art." (See Eclectic Artist)

Avant-garde: That percentage of the population dressing like it was Greenwich Village in 1955 or Paris in 1870.

Alternative: Teenagers and people in their early twenties who dress like each other.

Hippie: A popular subculture of the late 60s-mid 70s denoted by bad frayed clothing in combinations of earth tones and cotton and the use of mellowing, mood-altering drugs.

Punk: A popular subculture of the late 70s-mid 80s denoted by bad ripped clothing in combinations of black and leather and the use of stimulating, mind-altering drugs.

Goth: A popular subculture of the 90s, similar to punk but 10 years younger and more catatonic.

Left-wing intellectual: Somebody who swallows his or her opinions whole from "Mother Jones."

Right-wing intellectual: Somebody who swallows his or her opinions whole from "National Review" and the "Weekly Standard."

Rational discourse: Left-wing and right wing intellectuals screaming at each other in scripted dustups with all the spontaneity of championship wrestling.



Professions & Gainful Employment

Eclectic Artist: Bad artist.

Naive Artist: Not-so-naive artist who pretends to be bad because crappy art sells.

Art Director: A bad artist who, in sympathy to other bad artists, fills their publication with bad art.

Performance Artist: A stand-up comedian who isn't funny.

Ad Agent: The only human being capable of bending over and kissing his or her own privates.

Politician: The only human being capable of being over and kissing his or her own anus.

Spin Doctor: A cross between a politician and an ad agent. Can spin around and kiss anything.

Journalist: A j-school graduate trained to do search and replace in advertiser press releases. (see Newspaper.)

Fiction writer: A writer who believes in the fiction of a successful career as a fiction writer.

Sex Worker: Honest whore.

Golddigger: Dishonest whore.

White House Intern: Honest political whore.

Lobbyist: Dishonest political whore

Fashion industry: A form of employment for gay men with design skills and young women with eating disorders.

Advertising Agency: A place giving employment to either failed or aspiring writers and visual artists willing to suck their own privates or anybody elses.

Restaurant: A place giving employment to failed or aspiring actors and directors.

Newspaper: An advertising agency employing writers and visual artists too ashamed to admit they're in the advertising business. (See News.)

Editorial Department: As distinct from the advertising department. That portion of the newspaper staff devoted to up-to-the-minute interviews, articles and reporting concerning the advertisers.

University: A place providing employment to actors and directors too clumsy to work in restaurants and writers who can't get work at ad agencies and newspapers because they can't write. As of this writing, continued funding for university positions for bad photographers and visual artists who can't paint or draw remains in doubt.

English Department: That subsection of the humanities department in which English teachers, when they aren't drinking or smoking pot, teach their students to be English teachers in order to teach the next generation of English Teachers, and so on.

Government: An entity providing employment for right wing firebrands attempting to eliminate government.

Walt Disney Corporation: A hellish realm where writers, voice character actors and visual artists cursed with too much talent are forced to begger and bugger themselves to Satan on a daily basis. A constant source of wholesome entertainment for kids of all ages.


Science & Industry

Leading Edge Technology: Stuff that doesn't work yet.

Product Development: Originally, corporations designing and testing products until they work. Now, convincing people to buy shit that doesn't work so they can keep paying the engineers until somebody figures out who fucked up. Eventually, this results in products which work -- after which the product line or industry standard is discontinued.

Product Support: A means by which corporations charge you money to fix their mistakes.

Product Help Line: A person from India you can't talk to who doesn't help.

Upgrade: When software developers improve their products by making them worse.


Miscellaneous

Asshole: Metaphorically, a term for any other driver who drives the way you do.

© March 1999-February 2000

'The Prisoner' explained

OK, kids. Here's the secret of The Prisoner. To put it in context, I'll give you the premise first. (No insult to your intelligence intended.)

Yes, most of you trivia-obsessed nerds know this show inside-out. If you’ve been wasting your time making money instead of watching old TV shows, you might not. So here’s the basic premise:

Sometime in the late 1960s, a high-level secret agent (not to be confused with Secret Agent) resigns from M-I6 in Great Britain. He doesn't say why. When he gets home, unidentified bad guys fill his flat with knockout gas, capture him and bring him to an unidentified “Village.” The place is a creepy holiday camp where Muzak fills the air and the brainwashed residents have numbers instead of names. If you try to escape, a wicked, self-motivating, white spheroid (aka “Rover”) either eats you, amoeba-style, or herds you back.

A headmaster-like authority figure calls the Prisoner into his office. Officially, this official is Number Two. (Numero Uno is never seen.) They talk. The show’s two big questions emerge.

Why did the Prisoner resign?

Who's running the Village?

The Prisoner refuses to say why he resigned. Number Two refuses to say which side is running the Village — and it's assumed there are only two candidates. (The show is set in the binary Cold War era. The "side" responsible is either the Commies or the West.) So, the Prisoner tries to escape; the Village tries to make him talk. A game of cat and mouse goes on for 17 episodes. The show continues to tease you with those two big questions:

Why did the Prisoner resign?

Who's running the Village?

You never find out until the last episode — Fall Out. Actually, you don't find out then, either. What you get, instead, is a goofy, surreal, allegorical, bad acid trip. McGoohan (the show’s lead actor, producer, frequent screenwriter and all-time Jr. God) fills your brain with trippy imagery, and then pisses on your head. He leaves the two big questions hanging. Big joke. Because the big answer hides in plain sight. It's bloody obvious, but (thanks to McGoohan's magical misdirection) you just don't see it. Allow me to explain ...

Take The Prisoner on its own terms.

Supposedly, the Village is a prettified internment camp for spies and people who know too much. It’s designed to protect (or extract) information and test new brainwashing techniques. The World Power behind it wishes to remain anonymous. OK, fine, I'll buy it. So ...

Realistically, what would a place like that look like?

First, they wouldn't telegraph which side was running it. They'd invent a new lingo, and avoid the buzz words of East and West. They’d also rotate the nationality of the man in the big chair. There’d be a Russian Number Two. They’d be followed by an American Number Two. Then Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, and so on. If the Power behind the Village wants to remain anonymous, that’s how it’s done.

Second, a village of spies wouldn’t be a village of sheep. Spies are the least sheeplike people imaginable. They’re cunning, inner-directed, analytical chess-players who get in other people's heads and keep their own thoughts private (and present an elaborate fake persona so the other side wouldn't suspect(. They wouldn't be bossed around (or broken) so easily. The Prisoner wouldn’t be the only rebel.

But that’s not what this village looks like.

The Prisoner isn’t a realistic scenario. As anyone remotely familiar with the show knows, it’s an allegory. OK. An allegory of what? Individualism vs. conformity. Sure, but that’s far too general. The allegory has a far more specific target.

Consider the picture it paints …

The Village pretends to be a democratically elected government. The people in charge are really thugs. Behind its techno cleverness, the Village's default solution to people problems is a punch to the gut, a kick to the head or a lobotomy. The rulers rule by force and tell the people they’re free.

The Villagers believe them. Because they want to.

The Villagers are a herd of mindless conformists. They shout slogans, twirl umbrellas, march in parades, discourage “un-mutualness,” trust their leaders and think they're living in a democracy.

Some prisoners are actually jailers in disguise. The Village is a village of finks. And many CCTV cameras. An Orwellian nightmare with pseudo-Italianate architecture.

The leaders have a superior attitude. They feel entitled to grab you out of your home, plop you into their system and tell you want to do and how to think.

And all of the leaders are British. Every last one of them.

Yes, there’s some half-hearted misdirection involving foreign languages. But every bloody Number Two is obviously from Great Britain. British, British, British. On it goes, for all 17 episodes.

The Number Twos are not simply British. They exude the smug, preppy, upper-class, Oxbridge, old boy arrogance of Britain's ruling class. (With the working class exception of Leo McKern's Number Two, who'd been forced into the job — and ultimately helps bring the system down.)

Conclusion?

The Village = an allegory of Great Britain.

QED.

Obviously.

Yep. Patrick McGoohan, with his fiery Irish background, has given us a satire of Great Britain. The Village = the UK. From an Irishman's perspective, it's an ugly caricature of the vast hypocrisy of British democracy that, coincidentally, aired about the time of the "Troubles."

Case closed.

The Day the Clown Cried

 ObserverSubj: Once upon a time...

Date: 1/28/99 11:13:05 PM Eastern Standard Time

From: JGetz

To: JoeRioux, TLPatten

Apologies in advance. I’m only a clown, goddamnit. I realize that the most pretentious thing in the world is to be humble. I’m not. I’m not even claiming that I have the necessary courage required to wrestle the devil of my nightmares.

Just that they are honest nightmares. Just that I’m really not lying when, as overblown, pretentious and tub-thumpingly Edgar Allan Poeish as I may sound, I’m telling the truth when I say...

There is something eating into my brain. Something big that I can’t quite see. Something I can’t quite describe without sounding like a jibbering mushmouth...

The very, very, very short version:

“Once upon a time” is the glue that holds everything together. Stories are sacred; stories are real. Stories, since the dawn of humanity, have been created in an organic, almost mystical process -- a kind of waking dreaming. “Once upon a time,” says the storyteller.

The people stare...wide-eyed...hypnotized...

Because, like acid, a REAL story is a trip that rattles your bones. You get in and you go where it takes you in an act of surrender...

Which the dreamer has to do first. You can have all the technique you want -- and God bless the tiger cage of technique -- but the story’s either REALLY HAPPENING in your head or it ain’t. The story either takes you on its trip -- finding you worthy or not worthy -- or it doesn’t. You can’t lie.

Even though it is a lie.

The paradox: an organic (meaning the opposite of bullshit) story is fiction -- but also real. An organic story weaves its pattern into the larger pattern of the universe with the exactitude of a Persian rug. It is what it is and what it has to be. It is, at the same time, absolutely uncontrolled and fucking magical...

But, in a radical break with what it means to be human, we’ve learned to do away with the magic. Now we manufacture stories, distilling them precisely for demographic exactitude and precise quantity of bullshit per liter...

We have learned to create fake dreams because only fake dreams can have commercials.*

In a radical break with almost all that has gone before, we have tied almost all of our shared narratives to the selling of products. At a very basic level, almost all of our most popular stories are fake because their basic message is “Let’s go shopping.”

“Let’s go shopping” is not where the sacred terror lies.

Intellectuals have been convinced that bullshit dreams are OK because stories are just stories and mean nothing. The masses have been convinced of the same thing because the shit you watch is your sacred consumer choice which, along with your religious beliefs, cannot be discussed or questioned.

Nobody can say “this is bullshit.” The referees have been stripped of their whistles. All critics have been taken outside the city gates and stoned to death. 

And the little child has discovered that, while the Emperor has no clothes, the torture apparatus of his secret police is second to none.

It’s a wonderful life...it’s a beautiful day! All the bad people have been turned inside out and buried in the cornfield at the edge of town...except for dat funny mans is bad on purpose make me laugh like Howard Stern, hahaha....

But no bad dreams.

Everything is great. Everything is wonderful. 

Mel Gibson can act. Bad things happen to bad people.

It’s a beautiful day...

Let’s go shopping!

There it is, kids. It’s almost all one big fucking fake. (Why...it’s nothing but a bowl of shit! Yes...but it’s very good shit, Miss Matesky!) Honest nightmares and holy visions becoming more and more rare...

At the same time that the simulacra of fiction is increasingly indistinguishable from reality...

Cultural movements are now created whole in the media replicator like Swanson's frozen TV dinners. Why invent new music for the 90s when we can simply REHEAT SWING?

MTV has various shows like “MTV’s the Real World” and “MTV’s Road Rules” in which a spoiled elect of twentysomethings -- transfigured into the golden streets on the other side of the Tube -- self-dramatize, soliloquise and bitch -- playing and mugging for the cameras in real/unreal dialog about their real/unreal existence.

Kids play videogames in which they get inside the “story” and kill things. Every year the games get better, if that’s the right word...PUSHING THE ENVELOPE OF SPLATTER TECHNOLOGY!

“Cops” is a show about real life in which real cops grind real negros, with identity hiding, digitally-generated rectangular black bars on their faces, to the ground. The cop, of course, knows the camera is there. The bellowing black-barred black dude on the ground does too...THAT'S ACTING!

Why get involved with the lives of fictional characters when you can listen to the REAL pseudo-encounter-group confrontations of “Transexuals who want to fuck themselves” on “the Jerry Springer Show”...?

And let’s not forget “the White House in Crisis!”

So it goes.

Our dreams are fake and, at the same time, astonishingly realistic.

Our “real life” is turning into a dead push-button grind we endure between hallucinations...(because, fuck it, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox ain’t got nothin’ to do with me...) Deadly real -- and, at the same time, astonishingly fake.

Black is white, up is down, truth is lies, dumb is smart, old is new.

We have fallen down the rabbit hole of the fucking tube and something has to give.

That’s what cyberpunk was getting at before it was mainstreamed.

That, whatever it is, is the next big thing.

That's what scares the shit out of me and what I wish I had it in me to write about...

Though I hafta admit I don't feel quite up to the task...

Sorta like Bozo the Clown stumbling onto the corpse of a dead God.

BOZO: Oh my...oh no, there's a dead God here, somebody h-help...anybody else notice this...oh nooo, I'm just a clown I don't know what to...HELP....could somebody...oh no, I just wanna go to the circus and make the children laugh...i-i-isn't somebody else responsible for cleaning up this kinda … ? HELP ME doesn't anybody else notice this HELLLLLLLP! (looking at watch) Uh-oh. Better run....

(He runs)

Calliope music...

Fade to black.