culture: June 2005 Archives

My first reaction: Great, now us gal geeks have more competition from the popular girls:

"A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first," says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine's love and sex advice columnist. "He'll turn out to be a great father and a great husband."

And, she insists that a woman who is willing to stick it out with a nerd and get past his quirks will be handsomely rewarded. "Don't give up on him too fast," she said. "If you stick with him, he's going to turn out to be really great."

Of course, the article assumes that there are no gal geeks:

But to get to that authentic nerd, chic women have to be willing to embrace their own inner geek and accept the guy for who he is, chess trophies and all.

No girl would ever have a chess trophy on her shelf, I guess... at least no girl worth mentioning.

[from the New York Daily News]

I dunno: Is a geek guy merely just a new accessory for a fabulous fashionable girl to hang on her arm? Or does this hint at a new appreciation for the geek lifestyle? This doesn’t give me a lot of hope -- Beauty and the Geek? Can’t girl geeks be beautiful? Don’t the people behind this embarrassment realize that no genuinely geeky guy will be satisfied with a woman with an IQ lower than what she tells everyone her shoe size is?

The Daily News article does mention what could be a valuable resource for lovelorn geeks of all genders: Geek2Geek, a dating site that matches folks up based on their favorite board games and gadgets and such. But girl geeks already knew how hot it could be to find a guy who likes to Fluxx.

AlwaysOn and Technorati have named their Open Media 100, a list of the bloggers and other online pioneers who are changing the way we as a society get our news, how we as a society approach the idea of what it means to be informed.

It doesn’t matter who’s on the list (though it is an interesting group; check it out). What matters is that the list exists, that an aggressively independent rabble of geeks and Xers -- much of the Open Media 100, I’d guess, would qualify as both -- is mad as hell and not taking it anymore... and that this rabble is making enough of a dent in The Establishment to get noticed.

As with all else having to do with life, the universe, and everything, this is but a new iteration in a never-ending cycle -- bloggers are, as many others have pointed out, nothing but modern-day pamphleteers, like Thomas Paine and the writers of the Federalist papers, who were anonymous at the time. And while there’s been lots of debate and consternation over the political activism of a certain segment -- perhaps the most popular segment -- of the blogosphere, it’s worth nothing that not all of the Open Media 100 are politically motivated, except in the sense that they might be said to be anti-corporate media. Like the "bloggers" of the Revolutionary era, those of us speaking up online do so out of a sense that there are wrongs to be righted, balances to be restored, and unheard voices clamoring to be heard.

Xers have been living in "interesting times," in the Chinese sense of the phrase, all our lives. The need for bloggers and independent journalists, and the niche we’ve been able carve for ourselves, suggests that times are probably about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Does news get any stuffier than business news? Does business news get any stuffier than Forbes? Well, geekiness has punctured even this pinstriped domain: Forbes.com is running a feature on what it would cost an ordinary billionaire to turn himself into a caped crusader.

Now, there aren’t all that many billionaires in the world, and Forbes, as it happens, is also the magazine in the gray flannel suit that produces an annual ranking of the world’s billionaire-iest billionaires. I’m surprised the mag didn’t go that extra step and give a little nudge to some of those on their exclusive list. Forbes has told these people what they need to do -- now, all each of them needs is a cool name to inspire fear in those who would use fear as a weapon... or a name that at least reflects their own fears.

And so, I pick up the challenge thrown down by Forbes and offer a few suggestions:

Voleman (George Lucas)

The Weasel (Donald Trump)

Aardvarkdude (Steve Jobs)

Skunkman (Ted Turner)

The Badger (Larry Ellison)

Ferret Boy (Bill Gates)

The Platypus (Ross Perot)

Lemmingman (Ralph Lauren)

It’s not that I ever really doubted that those Geek Squad TV commercials were advertising a real service, but you can bet I did a double take when I saw this car yesterday. Because certainly there was always a nagging suspicion that it couldn’t quite be true, could it? Valiant geeks arriving the nick of time to save computers in distress? It seems too... primally cool to apply to us. Sure, probably most of us geeks have had the experience of doing tech support for our parents or our nongeeky friends, and certainly those people can be awfully grateful when we demonstrate something so profound as how to change the desktop image or set up a browser home page.

But we weren’t alerted to a citizen in distress by a batsignal or a red phone, and we didn’t swing into action with rappelling gear or arrive in cool wheels.

Geeks as heroic? How refreshing...

Well, actually, they just want our money. The big fat greedy bloodsucking corporations, that is. Not that they haven’t always gone after us -- which flavored-sugar-water company was it, years ago, that tried to entice cynical Xers to buy their crap by pretending that they were eschewing attitude and talking straight to us? Not that it matters which corporation it was -- they’re all the same, thinking that our bullshit detectors are just our own expressions of "attitude" and not, you know, bullshit detectors.

And they’re trying again, not by attempting to ape our worldweariness but by trying to appeal to our techno love of gadgets:

Sirius Satellite Radio said Sprint will offer some of its radio programming over its wireless phone network to gain subscribers.

"We can expect more of this kind of combination as the companies try to differentiate their offerings," independent telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan said.

[from the Chicago Sun-Times]

No, we can expect more of this kind of ridiculous combination because companies think they’re being "cool" -- and hence they think we’ll think they’re cool, too -- even when the combinations make no sense. Does anyone really want to listen to groovin’ tunes on their cell phone? This is exactly the opposite of playing 70s-era video games on your Playstation Portable -- the cheesiness of the graphics and the gameplay is the point there. But no one wants to listen to Dave Matthews or ABBA or whoever through a tinny cell-phone speaker.

And then there’s this:

Now playing at the new McDonald's flagship restaurant in Illinois: Digital-media kiosks for burning CDs, downloading cell-phone ring tones and printing photos.

But the world's largest restaurant chain is tinkering with various possibilities in technology and design to try to ensure it is a hangout of choice in the future.

[from the New York Daily News]

Hangout of choice? People hang out at McDonald’s? People want their photos reeking of hamburger grease?

Except... wait a sec. Is it possible that geek stuff like using electronics for things they aren’t really suited for, just because you can, has escaped into the wild, where those who aren’t true geeks want to play with it too? Could it be that all the popular girls in seventh grade are listening to Britney on their cell phones and printing pix of last Saturday’s slumber party while they gobble french fries?

Could it be that we’re to blame for this? That we made the geeky lifestyle so appealing, so essential, that everyone wants it?

Naaah...

The utter lack of a sense of reverence for anything at all is one of the things I love most about geeks... and often, it’s the things we love most that are the greatest butts of our snark.

That is not the case, however, with The Curious Incident of Tom Cruise’s Celebrity Meltdown Over Katie Holmes. We might have to claim Cruise as a Generation Xer, just barely (he was born in 1962... and I am going to get around to creating a working definition of what exactly "Generation X" is soon, I promise), but he’s certainly no geek. But the multiple layers of derision and intellectually superior condescension that come together in the Free Katie movement -- as typified by FreeKatie.net -- warm the cockles of my cold, cynical, desperate-for-amusement geek heart.

Scary. [image snatched from FreeKatie.net, which snatched it from Defamer]

Everyone absolutely knows that the Cruise/Holmes’s "love affair" is mere publicity grab for the new movies both of them have opening this month, right? He’s in Spielberg’s updating of War of the Worlds, she’s in the Christian Bale/Christopher Nolan Batman revival -- all of which makes the entire thing so stupid, because it’s not like a new Spielberg SF flick and a new comic-book flick were going to have any trouble at all attracting audiences... unless the PR flacks who clearly engineered this bizarre "relationship" are looking to pull in everyone’s mom who watched Cruise behave like he’d gone off his meds on Oprah’s show, jumping on the couches and howling like a crazy person about how not gay he is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyway, the Free Katie people are seeking to get the poor girl out of the Scientological clutches of Cruise, who honestly believes 70-million-year-old aliens infect his brain. And you can buy a T-shirt to support this worthy cause.

The wags behind the campaign are funny and clever, of course, but they’re more than that: they’re right on the frontlines of Generation X, proving that we are no mere consumers of Hollywood’s pabulum -- we can throw it right back in their faces and laugh. And make a coupla bucks in the process, too.

Not sure if you’re a geek? Have you done any of these things?

Made an origami Yoda? (warning: PDF)

Kidnapped a Dalek?

Pissed off a major corporation by satirizing -- with love -- their cash cow wizard boy?

Gotten paid to blog about a bad 70s TV show?

If you answered Yes to any of these questions, you may already be a geek.

I recently gobbled up Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede’s Sorcery and Cecelia, a delightful little trifle that’s what might have resulted if Jane Austen had learned to write at Hogwart’s School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. The novel’s subtitle is "or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country," and that kinda gives you a sense of the playful tone of the book, which takes the form of a series of letters between two cousins over the course of the London "season" in 1817. Kate has been swept off to the city for all the society doings -- the balls and dances and comings-out of respectable young ladies -- while Cecelia is stuck back home in Essex, but even though their only contact is via postal mail, which keeps each of them days behind the other’s news, they still manage to jointly fly headlong into social catastrophe, maneuver their aristocratic betters in a tea-party of a chess game to resolve the disaster, pick up some rudiments of proper magic (such as how to use charm bags to ward off evil spells), and of course fall in love with dashing and fascinating young gentlemen along the way. The whole thing is wonderfully clever, sophisticated fun (even if it is rather mysteriously labeled "young adult fiction"), and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality. The sublime wit and supremely understated snark implied by the subtitle alone tickles me something awful.

Sorcery and Cecelia is emblematic of a certain impishness in geek culture: a willingness to combine things we love in unexpected ways. And it’s not just books I’m talking about: it’s everything from self-described "brick artist" Nathan Sawaya’s life-size sculpture of Han Solo in carbonite made out of Legos to all the many dioramas mounted in Peeps -- those disgusting blobs of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup some people consider confections -- commemorating such things as The Lord of the Rings. It indicates a certain instinctive urge on the part of creative geeks to not only create but to comment on the pop-culture universe out of which the new material springs. Fine art and high culture have always engaged in that kind of commentary about the fine art and high culture that has preceded it, but what geeks are doing suggests that "low" art -- or at least some "low" art -- is worth exploring and re-exploring, too.

I’ve got an essay up over at The Internet Review of Science Fiction (free registration is required to read the site) about how Anakin Skywalker fits into mythological traditions that turn up all over the globe. I know a lot of fans think Lucas has let the mythmaking thing go to his head, and maybe he has -- I’m not interested in getting into a debate about it. But I mention it because I think almost everyone would agree that if Anakin/Darth Vader is any kind of "hero," he is emphatically not heroic in his Vader phase.

So why is Darth Vader turning up selling everything from Burger King hamburgers to M&Ms?

I mean, sure: Dark chocolate M&Ms? It’s about bloody time. But what is being suggested by a "Darth Mix" of somber colors and a red M&M done up like Darth Maul? "Eat this candy... and turn to the Dark Side"? Am I the only one who finds this a tad uncomfortable?

But the M&Ms and the creepy Burger King TV ads aren’t the worst of it. I touched on this in my review of the film at FlickFilosopher.com, how icky it is to have a mass-murdering maniac with evil superpowers selling stuff to children, and that was before I came upon this:

This is truly demented. "Lava Berry Explosion"? Holy crap: why not just have a burned-to-a-crisp Anakin on the box, howling in agony as all the nerves in his dermis are cooked away while his former best friend looks on and refuses to put him out of his misery? Why not engineer the Pop Tarts to smell like burning hair and frying human skin while they’re toasting in your kitchen? (In the IROSF essay I touch on how Anakin’s journey through the Dark Side might be considered akin to a crucifixion such as those the mythological figures of Jesus or Odin endured. Passionfruit of the Christ Pop Tarts, anyone?) Cuz that’s what these artifical-everything breakfast treats are commemorating: a man being roasted almost to death... and surviving to live on another 20 years or so in what can only be a neverending hell of emotional and physical wretchedness and torment.

Breakfast of champions? Oh, wait, I forgot: Ani’s not on the Wheaties box, he’s on Corn Flakes. My bad.

No, it’s not your local comic-book shop, it’s a whole damn neighborhood in Tokyo:

At his favorite neighborhood cafe, Shunsuke Yamagata, a college student who proudly calls himself a nerd, smiled shyly behind his horn-rimmed glasses at waitresses hurrying about in black Minnie Mouse shoes and lacy, racy mini-dresses inspired by Japanese comics.

For Yamagata, 20, it was just another night out with the pocket-protector crowd in Tokyo's neon-splashed Akihabara district, where "costume cafes" are the latest of hundreds of new businesses catering to Japan's otaku, or nerds.

[from The Washington Post]

I’ve never owned a pocket protector, and I suspect that no one under 40 ever has -- didn’t they go out with fountain pens? -- and ya just gotta love this: "Eyeglass adjustment kiosks compete for space with shops selling nondescript dress shirts and thick leather shoes."

Yeah, there’s a lot of stereotyping going on, and damn, the only women mentioned are the fuck-me blowup-doll waitresses in the nerd cafes whose "uniforms are inspired by the French maid-meets-Pokemon outfits of adult manga" and those who "greet patrons at the door with a curtsy and the words ‘Welcome home, master.’"

Yuck.

But a couple things leapt out at me:

"Sociologists and urban planners compare the phenomenon to ethnic and social enclaves such as New York's Chinatown or San Francisco's gay Castro district, born of a blend of discrimination and shared cultural cues." Heh! I’m not the only one to suggest that geeks and queers have some problems in common...

"With some analysts estimating the Japanese geek market to be worth as much as $19 billion a year, companies are jostling to cash in."

Aha! So then someone is going to start one of those cafes for girl geeks, where Indiana Jones or Captain Mal Reynolds will greet me at the door with a sardonic grin and the words, "I love a gal who loves adventure"?

I’m just finishing up Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which I’d never read before but felt I finally should if I wanted to consider myself a real armchair scientist, and I’m fairly disappointed to discover that it isn’t blowing my mind like I thought it would. It’s a profoundly influential book, of course, but it was so profoundly influential when it was published in 1976 that its ideas have disseminated and been so widely appropriated that they’re become part of the scientific common knowledge, or at least a common set of dominant assumptions -- I’ve absorbed the gist of Dawkins’s argument through much of my reading, in more recent books and magazines, in the fields of biology and evolutionary thought to the point where I almost can’t believe that what Dawkins was saying could ever have been considered controversial. It all seems so... obvious.

One thing that did strike me, though, is Dawkins’s discussion of memes, the intellectual equivalent of genes -- I’m not sure I ever realize he coined the term in this book -- and subsequent ruminations on computer networks and how malicious e-viruses could infect them. Even in the revised 1989 edition, the one I’m reading, Dawkins is anticipating the public Internet, and it occurred to me that if someone wanted to invent a vector along which the memes for geekiness could travel, she couldn’t have done a better job than with the Internet, which combines the typically geeky love of computers and technology with the typically geeky love of never shutting up about the things we love. We took a tool we loved to play with -- computers -- and used it to spread the geek memes, and we did it so well, and got everyone else to love it so much, that it’s part of what has helped the geek aesthetic go mainstream. Geeks have been sitting around at science fiction conventions, for instance, since the 1940s dissecting films and books, and now folks of all stripes, whether they’d call themselves geeks or not, are spending inordinate amounts of time at sites like Television Without Pity, geeking out over the season finale of Lost or Alias or 24... all of which, in their own ways, are supremely geeky shows.

This idea -- about how a generation of people predisposed to embracing gadgets and obsessing about the things we love met the technology that allowed us to do interesting and entertaining things with our obsessions -- is, in the broad sweep, much of what Geek Philosophy the blog is going to be all about. For the moment, I think it will suffice to say that my first computer, a TI 99 4/a -- which I received for Christmas in either 1979 or 1980, when I was 10 or 11 -- and my first VCR (well, the first family VCR) arrived in 1984, when I was 15... and that’s when my adventures in geekdom really took off.