September 2005 Archives

My brother Ray’s poodles, Rosie, the very tiny one, and Daisy, the somewhat less tiny one. Rosie is sort of dignified and elegant and will cuddle in the crook of your arm for an hour or three, but Daisy is a maniac who demands constant attention. They’re both hilarious and adorable. Oh, and Daisy has some disease that JFK also had -- Addison’s? She’s fine as long as she’s on her meds.

Speaking of medical issues: poor Leonard the cat, about whom I blogged recently, has passed to that giant catnip field in the sky. His person, Brian, is very sad...

Mal, Wash, Jayne.

I’ve just wrapped up my episode-by-episode look at Firefly, and my review of Serenity is now live.

If Time magazine notes a trend, that must mean it’s common knowledge. In this new joint interview with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon -- in celebration of what could well be National Geek Day, as Gaiman terms it, on September 30, when Gaiman’s film Mirrormask and Whedon’s film Serenity open -- both have very interesting things to say about geekiness. And by "very interesting" I mean they’re saying what I’ve been saying for a while now:

TIME: Let's talk about your respective fan bases. A lot of them self-identify as kind of on the geeky side.

Neil Gaiman -- writer, genius, rock star of speculative fiction -- has a new movie opening in limited release on September 30: Mirrormask isn’t based on one of his books or graphic novels but was written directly for the screen. (My review coming soon to FlickFilosopher.com.) As if that weren’t cool enough, his new book, Anansi Boys, just hit stores. (Gaiman signed a copy of the book for me; I’ll be giving it away to a micropatron supporter of FlickFilosopher.com soon.)

I sat down with Neil recently (along with journalists Hal Johnson from Midtown Comics/Buzzscope.com and Valerie Reupert from Jim Hanley’s Universe) to talk about art, literature, and being a geek. Neil claims he isn’t a geek, though his description of himself pretty much aligns with the positive image of geekiness I’m trying to promulgate: the geek as smart, creative, and in touch with the world, not the stereotypical clueless nerd locked in his room with his Xbox.

(This interview was transcribed by Reupert, and also appears on Newsarama.com.)

MAJ: Do you consider yourself a geek?

NG: Well, no. I have a son who is a geek and I know he's a geek because he is very proud of his geekdom. He wears glasses even though he doesn't have to. He likes the fact that he figures he looks less like a 6'2’ blue-eyed kid who used to play hockey when he wears glasses. He is a self-proclaimed geek. To me the idea of geekdom came along too late in life. People say, "Were you a geek or a nerd when you were at school?" I said, "Well, neither. I went to school in England. We didn't have those kinds of divisions then."

I’ve just come from my second press screening of Serenity. My review of the film isn’t posted yet, but if you take a look at my on-the-fly ranking of the year’s films so far, you’ll get a clue as to my reaction.

I’ve been wondering if perhaps a lot more people aren’t going to feel the same way I do. At my first screening, last week -- which was packed not just with press but with fans and other assorted non-press, non-fan moviegoers who scored tix somehow -- two women got up and left halfway through the film. But there were many, many more cheers and claps and snickers of recognition and gasps and cries that mirrored my own. The audience at tonight’s screening was somewhat less vocal -- instead, they were so respectful they were almost silent, which is almost unheard of at an all-media advance screening. Both screenings had long lines of non-press folks who waiting more than an hour for the film with no guarantee of getting a seat.

There have been numerous advance fan screenings of the film over the past few months -- none have been advertised, and all sold out almost instantly; how fans found out about the screenings is anyone’s guess. The buzz around the Net has been extraordinary, not just at the typical venues but also at major political blogs, like Atrios’s Eschaton and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, not the first, second, or even third places you’d expect everyone to get worked up over a movie based on a failed TV show.

So what I’m wondering is: Is Xer Joss Whedon’s little movie gonna leap out and become a huge hit on the backs of a cult that no one even realized was there? Cuz that would be cool... and it could signal a new era of geek Xer influence not only in the audience but behind the camera.

Boston.com has posted its top 50 science fiction TV series of all time. I’m not gonna get into the placement of shows in the ranking -- though the absence of Max Headroom, Firefly, and Farscape from the top 10 casts a dubious light on the list -- because these things are matters of personal choice, no matter how wrong they may be.

No, what rankles here is the writing, the explanations of the particular qualities of each show that make it worthy of our esteem. The number 5 entry, Babylon 5, is described as "arguably one of the best sci-fi shows ever made" -- surely, that goes without saying, seeing as how it’s ranked at number 5. Why is it ranked so high? Well, it’s just great! Number 6, Stargate SG-1, is a "great show with a solid cast." Number 3, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "nearly made our number one spot." Why didn’t it? Gremlins got into the computer the night before the piece was published? An editor who hates Data overruled the writer? No one seems to know.

Perhaps the worst example of how these editors fail to understand the appeal of these shows -- I wonder whether anyone involved in this project has even seen any of them, is this entry:

Number 8
'Dr. Who'
No sci-fi show list is complete without Dr. Who. The series ran from 1963 to 1989 and featured several men as the doctor - a time traveling, eccentric alien - and his comrades. Sure, many of the monsters were terribly cheesy, but it is a classic nonetheless.

Idiots. It’s a classic, in part, because the monsters were cheesy, not in spite of that fact.

Until someone who genuinely understands SF starts explaining it to the mundanes -- for at who else could such a list as this be aimed? -- SF will remain, unfairly, in its ghetto.

I’ve always wondered whether the term "speculative fiction" wasn’t just a euphemism for people who can’t tolerate the overt geekiness of the term "science fiction" or, even worse, "sci-fi," but Chris Schluep -- an editor at Ballantine/Del Ray, Random House’s SF/F imprint -- kinda confirms that:

The first author I acquired as an editor was China Miéville, who -- while being an unapologetic genre geek -- is a very accomplished writer. His style is often referred to as "speculative fiction," which I think is a nice way of saying three things: 1. that it's a little weird; 2. that it's better than average; and 3. that there aren't any dwarves or elves in it.

There ya go: weird, but no elves. That’s speculative fiction.

Nathan Fillion, the star of Serenity, is a big ol’ geek. He posted this at a Firefly fan site (and I snatched it from FireflyFans.net):

It is times like these that I feel like Malcolm Reynolds.

Mrs. Kennedy always looks to me like she's been dipped in bleach. I've never seen another cat with such pale tortie coloring.

In honor of the new on-the-ocean TV shows, modern seafarers: Bill Paxton’s just a wee bit piratical salvager in Titanic, Richard Dreyfuss’s shark boy in Jaws, and Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou, who lives the life aquatic.

A friend of mine recently wondered, just where is this Gen X perspective I’ve been talking about? How come it’s not showing up in our pop culture? If we’re going to have a new Golden Age of movies (and TV and literature and I’ll even include video games and comic books and other entertainments), shouldn’t we be seeing some of it already? After all, the oldest Xers are now over 40 -- if some special Xer perspective was going to show its face, wouldn’t it have done so already?

I am Captain Prudentilla Flint, about whom they say: "Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!"

On official Talk Like a Pirate Day, find your pirate name.

Because there's nothing geekier than glomming onto a Web craze...

What have I been reading lately? How about Killing Paparazzi, by Robert M. Eversz, the second Nina Zero novel. I dunno if Eversz is an Xer, but he’s an American writer living in Prague, which is to literary Xers what Paris was to our counterparts of the Lost Generation, and -- much more importantly -- Nina Zero could well be the poster child for Generation X. She’s a good girl who got a raw deal, became an accidental terrorist, unexpected punk artist, and hard-boiled denizen of the streets. That all happened in Shooting Elvis, her first outing. Killing Paparazzi is even better, a snarky slice of Xer noir that sends up our celebrity-obsessed culture as Nina, who holds in disdain pretty much everything except a good roll in the hay and her beat-up monster Cadillac, discovers how to make a buck off the same. Who’d play Nina in the movie? A punked-out Kate Winslet, maybe.

For some reason, Sam loves to lounge among the piles of books and screener DVDs and press kits and other assorted junk that accumulates around my desk...

Ferris Bueller, Tracy Flick, Napoleon Dynamite: where were you along the spectrum in high school? (I was somewhere between Tracy and Napoleon...)

Fanzines, fan sites, fan films... One of the characteristics of geeks that best defines us and distinguishes us from society as a whole is that we are active consumers of pop culture. Geeks don’t veg out in front of the boob tube, at least not as a way of life -- for us, the experiences of TV, film, books, graphic novels, and games are not merely receptive. Even if we don’t produce fan fiction, for instance, we watch and rewatch our favorite shows and analyze them, hash over the plotlines and the character interactions either on our own or with other fans. We refuse to be force-fed pop culture -- we may eat it, but we do so in full awareness of what we’re consuming. We challenge what we consume, turn it around and upside down and attempt to figure out what it’s all about, or at the very least, why we think it’s cool enough to even warrant so much attention in the first place.

Which makes Charles Ross something of an übergeek. His stage show, One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, is the ultimate expression of the geeky experience of pop culture. The New York Times, in its review of the show, exudes the mix of cluelessness and condescension that has lately typified its discussion of anything remotely geeky (which is ironic, because the paper is allegedly attempting to reach the very audience it regularly disdains). The Times derides Ross’s audience as "composed largely of very intense-looking overgrown boys wearing Coke-bottle glasses and Darth Vader jerseys" in the same way that it never, ever characterizes the crowd at an NFL game as "a bunch of morons courting pneumonia by appearing shirtless and painted in team colors in below-freezing temperatures." It pointlessly insults Ross himself -- "who reportedly has a girlfriend, although she may be the victim of a Jedi mind trick" -- in the same way that it never, ever characterizes the performers of an off-Broadway production as "a bunch of theater nerds who mistake overenunciation for acting and bland prettiness for presence."

But most egregiously, the Times reviewer misses the point of Ross’s performance entirely:

The energetic Mr. Ross, who cannot be faulted for lack of effort, is a mediocre performer, especially when compared with the many brilliant quick-change artists in the crowded field of multicharacter solo shows. There's not a trace of smooth Billy Dee Williams in his Lando Calrissian, and his Princess Leia could be confused with a man. No one expects him to have the baritone of James Earl Jones, but there were a couple of potheads in my freshman dorm who did a better Darth Vader.

As I point out in my review of the show at FlickFilosopher.com:

This isn't about perfect impersonation of famous actors; it's emphatically not about watching Ross and seeing Sir Alec Guinness or Mark Hamill; it's about watching Ross and seeing ourselves. Ross holds up a mirror to our own geekitude and shows us how silly and how wonderful a healthy grownup playfulness can be.

Naturally, I have a lot more to say about the show. Check it out.

Am I gonna have to take Bruce Campbell off the Perpetual Boyfriend list? It would be a very sad day indeed on which I was forced to take such desperate measures, but my patience does have limits, even with the man who gave us Ash and Brisco County Jr. and Roland the Intrepid Explorer and Smitty the ‘Argus’ reporter and Autolycus the king of thieves and...

*sigh* Okay, I spotted Bruce ‘Alien Apocalypse,’ cuz everyone's allowed an off day, even a god, so we won't talk about that one. But ‘The Man with the Screaming Brain’ is just a horribly cruel geeky tease. Campbell simply cannot toy with our affections this way, seducing us like he did for the last few weeks with those hilarious ads on the SciFi Channel, the ones that knew exactly what we wanted to hear: ‘Oh yeah, baby, I know how you like it, all snarky and pulpy and B-movie and self-referential and deliberately trashy...’

From my review, over at FlickFilosopher.com, of The Man with the Screaming Brain, Bruce Campbell’s new less-than magnum opus.

"Rub my belly! Rub my belly!" As if I could resist.

"What kind of an archaeologist carries a gun?" Col. Jack O’Neil asked scornfully.

"Um," Daniel Jackson offered, raising his hand tentatively, "I do."

(For those of you playing along at home, that’s an exchange from Stargate SG-1.)

If the fogey editors of The New York Times think they’re going to attract younger Xer/geek readers by adding a "comics page" down up all high-toned by graphic novelists, they’re deluding themselves. But it’s cute they’re trying.

So, I’m putting together a list of movers and shakers of Generation X, which I’ll share soon and will continue adding to forever. Prior to last week, Anderson Cooper of CNN would not have been on the list -- I’ve always found him infuriatingly shallow, and not in that people-are-misinterpreting-GenX way, but as in actual infuriating shallowness. But last week, in his on-the-scene coverage of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, Cooper (Xer, born 1967) was a new man:

On September 1, during a live, on-air interview with a water carrier for the Bush administration, Cooper had this to say:

Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap -- you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up.

Now, the point really isn’t to whom Cooper was talking or even what he was so angry about -- what knocked me off my feet (I was watching this as it happened) was how dramatic and sudden the paradigm shift was: We went from "journalists" who’d drunk the Kool-Aid -- whatever the Kool-Aid of the moment was -- toeing the party line -- whoever the party was -- to, well, actual, genuine, human anger, like we haven’t seen in my memory. We’ve seen decades of bullshit from the rich and powerful go, for the most part, unchallenged, even uncommented on, by the people whose jobs it’s supposed to be to do those very things, and now, literally overnight, they’ve found their backbone. Even 9/11 didn’t have this affect. As a commentary essay on BBC News noted, "last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow..." (Jack Shafer at Slate has a nice rundown of the wakeup.)

CNN’s Miles O’Brien has also noticeably awakened from his coma -- he’s definitely a geek and may be an Xer; I haven’t been able to learn his date of birth, and I’m terrible at guessing people’s ages, but he looks like could be on the Boomer/Xer cusp.

It’s too early to say if this sudden reappearance of a vigorous watchdog press will endure to amount to anything useful, but if it does, we may look back at Katrina as the moment when Xers reached the kind of cultural maturity needed to begin really shaping the next era of American (and global) history. (Which isn’t to say that other older journalists weren’t getting plenty pissed and not letting corporate HQ shut them up; Jack Cafferty on CNN and Geraldo Rivera on Fox have been downright quivering with indignation) Anderson Cooper, we may then recognize, will have been one of the standard bearers.

The comments on this post have rather devolved into a "my god is better than your atheism" tedium, so I just have to share this awesome little graphic:

My too-cool brother Ken, who is also "unrelenting in his atheism," sent me this, which appeared in some comment thread on Fark.

Geeks are so clever.

Dinnertime, chez Johanson...

I missed my chance to party at Mardi Gras. I never listened to jazz on Bourbon Street. I never saw the French Quarter. And now I never will.

I feel very much like I did after 9/11. New York is my heart and home, but I never even visited New Orleans... and yet I feel the same sense of helplessness combined with an itch to do something useful (without there being much I could usefully do) and an overwhelming dread that this is only the beginning of Very Dark Times.

Lance, that dude from The Triplets of Belleville, Pee Wee, all doing their part to conserve gas...

GasPriceWatch is on the job: Highest price in the nation? $4.50 a gallon in Georgia. A real steal? $2.35 in Wyoming, the lowest price in the U.S.