God Is Change

Octavia Butler, the award winning novelist, died last week. Her obituary was in a lot places, including this touching tribute by Greg Howard in Geese Aplenty. One thing that kept bothering me was that nearly all the mainstream media write-ups used some variation of the phrase “the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer” as if she were some sort of circus side-show oddity. Somehow I doubt “Mormon” will be used within the first ten words of Orson Scott Card’s obituary.

If, as Kurt Vonnegut asserts, too many critics mistake the drawer labeled “science fiction” for a urinal, these same critics kept insisting on tacking a tattered “Colored” sign over Octavia Butler’s door. Perhaps I am once again just being too sensitive. Talent and achievement deserve to be recognized wherever it springs from.

All writers bring their cultural baggage to the typewriter. Butler’s included racism, prejudice, and the ravages of the African Diaspora. Wild Seed took the Lazarus Long archetype and ran it through the filter of the slave trade, the southern plantation system, and Reconstruction before reaching the stars. Her most famous book, Parable of the Sower, is superficially the standard post-apocalyptic tale of the descent into chaos and the pilgrimage to the rebirth of civilization. Her take, though, is darker than the typical shiny techno-topian fantasy. It is at once more horrific, more harrowing, and more hopeful.

Lost at the early age of 58, Octavia Butler will no longer stand in front of the communal campfire and wave her hands and tell us her version of ancient myths and legends. And we will all be the poorer for the loss.

Last night I woke and was compelled to fish Parables of the Talents out of my bedside bookshelf. As I skimmed the first fifty pages that I had read over a year ago, I began to cry. I turned off the nightstand lamp. But I never fell back asleep.

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes You.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

-Earthseed, The First Book of the Living

Mardi Gras Memories

This Tuesday is Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday or Carnivale depending on your locale and upbringing. This year all eyes are on New Orleans as it tries to emerge as a water-logged phoenix from the flooding of Katrina.

My one and only visit to The Big Easy was 18 years ago when I was but a newlywed. I had come home one day with my first bonus check from my first real job and my wife asked if we wanted to go to Mardi Gras since it fell on President’s Day weekend and she would only need to burn two days of vacation. Feeling flush, I said sure.

Then she told me how she tried to make reservations at the Days Inn in Metarie, but had dialed the Dauphin Hotel in the French Quarter by mistake. They had just had a cancellation for a king suite facing the street and we snagged it. I later found out that people make Mardi Gras reservations at this hotel upon check-out for the next year and it sometimes takes years to get upgraded to a street-view.

That sort of serendipitous naivete would work in our favor the whole trip. One morning we were strolling past Brennan’s and I popped in to see if they had a table. They were booked, but gave me a reservation for the next day. It turned out to be the most fantastic dining experience of my life. Eating at Brennan’s is more than a meal. It is a three hour lesson in culinary superlatives ending of course with the original and best Bananas Foster on the planet.


We collected a trunkful of beads without exposing any body parts on either of us. My wife had to explain why some of the balconies would only throw beads to me and not her. I had to tell that the technical term for what the guy was doing on the table at Pat O’Briens was not “mooning” but “flashing”. A Pat O’Briens hurricane is 5 ounces of rum with enough fruit slush to make it go down completely unnoticed. There were people with 4 or 5 empties lined up on their table. We were barely able to stagger back to the hotel after one.

We ate beignets at Café DuMonde. We had mufulattas, and jambalaya and gumbo. We saw celebrities. Buster Poindexter was there and "Hot, Hot, Hot" was the unofficial theme song, even though it was cool enough for my yellow jacket. Nothing screams MTV in the 1980s better than Adam Curry in full TV make-up.

We saw costumes and parade floats unlike any anywhere. The parades were endless, running all times of day and night throught the entire weekend. Each float was more spectacular than the last.


We were surprised by the number of families there in full costume. We had been prepared for a wild orgy of debauchery, but if you just wanted to have a good time, that worked too. There were evangelical groups trying to save souls that were noisier and ruder than any of the more exotically dressed partiers and at least as entertaining.

When Katrina hit, everybody poured out their hearts and wallets to help the victims. I made a modest effort myself. Now the money is running out and people aren’t back in their homes yet. Even though they are more somber than in the past, the parades and festivals are going on with the gallows humor that gets people through tragedy.

New Orleans will survive. It always has. But you can't step in the same river twice and I will always remember the wide-innocence I had when I saw big muddy Mississippi and the Crescent City that sits in its shadow.

Laissez le Bon Temp Rouler!

Shanks For The Tunes

My musical taste is at best, suspect, as I have proved over and over and over. Still, I try to keep up with the cool kids as much as I can. For a middle-aged suburbanite like me, staying up on musical trends is a fool’s game, so I have to rely on the tastes of real hipsters, like Carol with her Friday DrinkPod Download (Pela RAWKS!).


The hippest people I know in real life are Benn Ray and Rachel Whang, the owners of Atomic Books, an independent bookstore in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Hampden in Baltimore. They also have a great blog/e-newsletter called the Mobtown Shank that is crusading to prevent the Starbucks-ification of this great quirky neighborhood that was immortalized in John Waters’ Pecker.

Atomic Books bills itself as “Literary Finds For Mutated Minds” which I think understates the case, particularly on the mutated end of the scale. Kurt Vonnegut and Dave Eggers are the most mainstream type of authors you will find. They run a book club, but they do graphic novels instead of lying memoirists. I don’t think V is For Vendetta or The Watchmen are going to get plugged by Oprah anytime soon.

The best way to characterize their extremely eclectic stock they carry is “a LOT of really weird shit.” They have one whole section of what I would call Ironic Smut, stuff that while not quite adult book store hard-core pr0n, you would never leave on the coffee table during a first date, unless you like giving the impression you are a serial killer. Check out the categories they have on their website if you don’t believe me. I think they do a lot of mail-order business, because you just can’t find these things at your local BigBoxOfBooks™.

A few weeks back when I was in the neighborhood, I picked up Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and the music issue of Bust, Benn threw in his DIY home-brew CD that he had compiled from various freebie tracks off the internet. It had a bunch of bands that I had heard of like, The Decembrists, Bright Eyes, and Sleater-Kinney. It also had bands I had no clue about like Of Montreal, Deerhoof, and Magnolia Electric Co.

I didn’t think much about it, then the FM antenna went out on my car stereo and for a week all my son and I had to listen to on the way to school was The Shank Best of 2005 CD. And it was good. My son quickly got to like several of the songs. When a dad can impress his jaded teenager with good music, that’s worth everything.

I ended up trekking back to Atomic Books to get the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Franz Ferdinand CDs. Sure I could have used my 10% off bonus points coupon at BigBoxOfMusicAndRefrigerators™, but none of the people working there are hip enough to look out for me the next time. If you want more music links to listen to than I have time to go through, try out Radio Shank.

Thanks Benn and Rachel. For exposing me to new music. For serving a needed niche in the bookselling world. And for making me look cool to my kid.

Memed Again

I got tagged by Courtney, so it's time for me to sigh passive-aggressively, mumble about how I hate memes, roll my eyes and go ahead and do it. Actually, this one asks interesting questions. So many out there don't. If anyone ever tags me with a meme that asks my favorite color or if I've ever kissed another blogger, not only will I not do it, I will publicly ridicule the answers of the person who tagged me. You've been warned.


1: Black and White or Color; how do you prefer your movies?

The color the director filmed it in. Although I do think most old black and white movies would have been in color if it had been available.

2: What is the one single subject that bores you to near-death?

Sports. My eyes glaze over as soon as someone starts citing stats. How can they remember all that useless trivia. On the other hand, ask me who sang “Locomotion” and I can give you three answers.

3: MP3s, CDs, Tapes or Records: what is your favorite medium for prerecorded music?

CD’s. Never owned vinyl and I have had too many hard drive crashes to trust my music collection to Bill Gates. I also like being able to hold a case and read the lyrics and stuff.

4: You are handed one first class trip plane ticket to anywhere in the world and ten million dollars cash. All of this is yours provided that you leave and not tell anyone where you are going ... ever. This includes family, friends, everyone. Would you take the money and ticket and run?

No way. A kid is a lifetime commitment and I love my wife too much.

5: Seriously, what do you consider the world's most pressing issue now?

Intolerance. It comes in all flavors.

6: How would you rectify the world's most pressing issue?

Education. Smart people get jobs. People with jobs buy stuff. People with property don’t have time to riot and hate. Most of the time.

7: You are given the chance to go back and change one thing in your life; what would that be?

There are probably a few people that think I’m a complete asshole when I was really just an immature teenager. I’d behave better to them.

8: You are given the chance to go back and change one event in world history, what would that be?

A life cut too short is the most significant historical turning point that can be pinpointed. But there are too many assassinations to pick from. JFK, MLK, RFK, Francis Ferdinand. But even if I could, I’m not sure the world would turn out better.

9: A night at the opera, or a night at the Grand Ole' Opry --Which do you choose?

Grand Ole’ Opry. The one thing I didn’t get to do in Nashville.

10: What is the one great unsolved crime of all time you'd like to solve?

Who killed Nicole Simpson. Me and O.J. will get to the bottom of this one eventually.

11: One famous author can come to dinner with you. Who would that be, and what would you serve for the meal?

Kurt Vonnegut, of course. And I would cook one of the recipes out of Deadeye Dick. If it were breakfast, I would have Neal Stephenson over for Cap’n Crunch.

12: You discover that John Lennon was right, that there is no hell below us, and above us there is only sky -- what's the first immoral thing you might do to celebrate this fact?

Nothing. True morality is doing the right thing without the silly threat of an afterlife.

I also don't like tagging people with memes, but these folks might be good sports:

Mooselet
J. Po
Jane
Karen

If you've got better things to do, I understand. And if I didn't tag you it's because I'm too intimidated to. You could do the meme anyways if you want. I'd understand that too. After all, I'm a peace, love, and understanding kind of guy.

New Olympic Sport: Closet Watching

When my college roommate came out of the closet, he introduced me to a game I call “closet watching”. In his newfound Pride (as dyslexics and lefties tend to do as well), he kept telling me about all the famous people that were gay. This was back in the mid-1980s when there were very few “out” celebrities. A lot of them, like Elton John, Richard Simmons, and Freddy Mercury, fell into the “Well, duh!” category. Some, like Richard Chamberlain, Lily Tomlin, and Jim Nabors, were news to poor sheltered me. Others were pure wishful thinking on his part.

Anyone suspected of being gay went on the Closet Watch List. We would watch for evidence in the press or gossip magazines for evidence one way or another. Many times he was eventually vindicated, but not every celebrity that was rumored to be gay was. Burt Reynolds really was very, very sick.

Then Rock Hudson died of AIDS and this parlor game went mainstream. There are tabloids that have annual, or it sometimes seems weekly, Are They Gay? issues. These articles rarely “out” anyone not already out and are usually just innuendo-ridden rehashes of existing speculation.

In this post-Seinfeldian “not that there’s anything wrong with that” era, closet watching is a much more challenging sport. Even today, some gay celebrities have public personas where it would damage their careers if their fan base knew the truth. One of the unwritten rules is that while it is okay with the mainstream media to be gay, being a hypocrite about your orientation is grounds for scrutiny. The press has developed a set of dog-whistle adjectives to alert those in the know while still sounding innocuous to the general public. For example, gender neutral references to a “partner” or “companion” are a good clue.

Now it seems that there is a male figure skater named Johnny Weir that is rather flamboyant, but not publicly “out”, even though his behavior leaves little doubt about what side of the fence he is on. Who knew there were gay figure skaters? Well, the Advocate claims that half of the recent medal winners are, and they should know. I know I can’t name seven openly gay figure skaters and most people can’t because that is personal information they don’t share with the world.

Hank Stuever of the Washington Post wrote an exceptionally catty article called Out? In? Or Past All That? Johnny Weir's Fancy-Free Skate. The general tone of the article was Johnny, you silly nellie, why are you being so coy? You’re not fooling ANYone, girfriend. Hank Stuever is a very talented features writer who just happens to be gay (A fact not prominently mentioned on his website bio, but why should it be?). He has written excellent articles in the past about closeted celebrities and politicians. I just found the article on Weir particularly mean-spirited. Would such an article have passed muster or even have been considered if the subject had been a hyper-masculine female speed-skater instead of a Bjork impersonator?

Stuever is not the only writer to take a stance on this issue. David Haugh wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune that quoted Rudy Gallindo trashing Weir for his reticence. Being called “over the top” by Rudy is a serious bitch-slap. In counterpoint, Philip Hersh of the same paper took offense to the article in his offical blog saying he doesn’t “give a damn” about Weir’s orientation. Ann Killion of the Mercury News also had a great defense of Johnny’s privacy. For the record I agree with a lot of this article.

When a putatively straight male like me sticks a toe into the waters of sexual identity politics, it can only turn out bad. No matter what I say, I will be branded either a latent homophobe or a humorless politically-correct priss. So as an exercise, I am going to make a list of celebrities, none of which I know for a fact is gay, and it’s very likely that some are not. Then I am going to ask a series of questions that I will not even attempt to answer myself. Think them over.

Sean Hayes
Clay Aiken
Ricky Martin
Brian Boitano
Jake Gyllenhall
Tom Cruise
Collin Ferrell

• Who on this list would it be safe to write a bitchy article about what an obvious closet queen they are?
• Who can be safely ridiculed for blatant hypocrisy about their private lives?
• Which careers would be affected positively or negatively if they were to come out?
• Is flamboyance a positive or negative trait for a gay celebrity?
• Do gay celebrities have an obligation to be a role model for closeted homosexuals?
• Can only gay writers write articles ridiculing closeted gay celebrities?

Johnny’s Olympic medal hopes were dashed when he, as some wags put it, “flamed out” during competition. I’m sure the controversies over his orientation, whether self-inflicted or not, didn’t help his mental preparation. Let’s hope for a world where one day these sort of private conflicts do not have to be public issues.

Update: In the February 22 Post, Libby Copeland writes Drop Till You Shop about a purse-shopping trip with Johnny to Louis Vuitton without mentioning his sexuality once. That's a way to give us a peak inside his closet (literally) without dragging him out.

Awesome 80s Birthday Bash

My wife and I have our birthday today. Yup, same day, year, and everything. After accounting for time zone differences, I am two hours older. Having a shared birthday sure makes remembering it a lot easier. And it's more fun that way too. We usually just celebrate by going to dinner. Since our anniversary is in September, that spreads two nice meals out through the year. But one year we had a big birthday bash.

Two years ago, as we were staring the Big 4-0 in the face, we got really into the numerology of it. Our birthday is February 20th or 2/20. 2 times 20 equals 40, which is how old we were turning. 2 times 40 equaled 80 and the 1980s were a very important decade to us. We went on our first date in 1980; we graduated high school in 1982; we got married in 1986; and our kid was born in 1990. It was a decade with a lot of changes in our lives.

To celebrate, we rented the banquet room of a local restaurant and invited friends and co-workers for an 80s themed bash. We used Trivial Pursuit 80s Edition cards for ice-breaker games. We put out an impossible trivia quiz with questions like, “What was the movie we saw on our first date? (A: Breaking Away)” Some of the guests brought 80s memorabilia. Since most of the participants were similarly aged, it became a great night for looking back.

I put together the music. I went through my iTunes list and then went down to Tar-Jay and bought up all the “Monster Hits of the Eighties”-type compilations I could find. I came up with a playlist of 40 songs I felt embodied the 80s in all their Reagenesque/New Wave-ish contradictory glory. I hooked my iPod up to some speakers and when the guests started arriving, we all got into the 80s groove.

That particular playlist is lost to history, but here is a reasonably accurate recreation:

1. “Down Under” – Men At Work
2. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” – Cindy Lauper
3. “I Ran (So Far Away)” – A Flock of Seagulls
4. “Born In The USA” – Bruce Springsteen
5. “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” – Wang Chung
6. “Come On Eileen” – Dexy’s Midnight Runners
7. “Goody Two Shoes” – Adam Ant
8. “Little Red Corvette” – Prince
9. “Material Girl” – Madonna
10. “Jesse’s Girl” – Rick Springfield
11. “Take On Me” – aha
12. “Relax” – Frankie Goes To Holywood
13. “St. Elmo’s Fire” – John Parr
14. “The Safety Dance” – Men Without Hats
15. “Mickey” – Tony Basil
16. “Walking On Sunshine” – Katrina and the Waves
17. “Stand” – R.E.M.
18. “Stray Cat Strut” – The Stray Cats
19. “Walk Like An Egyptian” – The Bangles
20. “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” – Culture Club
21. “Hungry Like The Wolf” – Duran Duran
22. “Whip It” – Devo
23. “Money For Nothing” – Dire Straits
24. “Sunglasses at Night” – Corey Hart
25. “Would I Lie To You” – Eurythmics
26. “Obsession” – Animotion
27. “Juke Box Hero” – Foreigner
28. “Rock The Casbah” – The Clash
29. “Rock Me Amadeus” – Falco
30. “Jeopordy” – Greg Kihn Band
31. “The Power of Love” – Huey Lewis and the News
32. “Open Arms” – Journey
33. “She’s A Beauty” – The Tubes
34. “Broken Wings” – Mister Mister
35. “Doctor, Doctor” – The Thompson Twins
36. “True” – Spandau Ballet
37. “You Can Call Me Al” – Paul Simon
38. “Maniac” – Michael Sembello
39. “Like A Virgin” – Madonna
40. “Time After Time” – Cyndi Lauper

Unlike my Cheesy 70s Songs, this list is not exhaustive or canonical. You may have lived through a different version of the decade. Feel free to disagree or expand. I know there are some major omissions. For example, The Go-Gos are missing. And the lack of hair bands is intentional.

There is also lot of room for debate on the individual songs. Which Madonna or Prince songs best embodies the spirit of the decade? Which is the definitive Men at Work song, “Who Can It Be Know?” or "Down Under”? These are the questions music scholars will be debating for decades long past the musical treasure house that was The Eighties.

And I’m sorry for any tune cooties I may have inflicted on you.

No, I’m not.

If you are here for the first time from the Complimenting Commenter site please read all my recent posts and check out my Best of 2005.

Anansi And The Boys

As the founder of NaJuReMoNoMo I get to make the rules and they do not require any actual reporting on or about the book read. However, as a self-proclaimed Winner with three Oak Leaf Clusters, I fell a certain obligation to provide my bona fides. Here’s a little synopsis of the first of the four books I read in January.

Anansi Boys by Neil Giaman. This as a sequel to the Hugo Award winning American Gods. The oxymoronic phrase “instant classic” is thrown around a little too easily these days, but American Gods is definitely that. A weird, dark, rambling, and in places, intensely funny, look at mythology and human nature, American Gods is a book that makes you just sit and think for about a week after you finish it. Anansi Boys is less a true pick-up-the-pieces sequel and more of a little sidebar story. Much more humorous in tone than American Gods, and several hundred pages shorter, Anansi Boys is about the sad sack son of one of American Gods’s minor but intriguing diety characters.

Anansi is an African spider legend that serves as the seed kernel for a whole host of contemporary tales most people are totally unaware of. Everything from Song of the South to Bugs Bunny owes a debt to the tales of Anansi. In the book, Anansi’s son, Fat Charley, is lucky in the “bad luck is better than no luck at all” sense. He then finds out his dad has died under unusual circumstances and that he has a brother that he never knew about who seems to live a preternaturally charmed life.

Neil Gaiman uses obscure legends and fables to tell a tale that takes place in a magic realist modern London and Florida as well as in the dream world of forgotten myths. The laws of logic don’t really work here and that is part of the mystical charm.

Neil Gaiman is much better known for his comic book work like the Sandman series, but his written fiction carries a lot of that same blurry water-colored dark spirit. Anansi Boys is a slight book that is charming and doesn’t require any knowledge of the epic events of American Gods other than an awareness that forgotten gods still live and die. Pick it up, but be prepared to be both baffled and amused.

Inside Mount Foob

Last Saturday when I was reading this For Better or For Worse strip, I nearly snorted iced cappuccino out of my nose. Not because the lame gag about computers was funny, but because the strip is so hypocritical. Elly and John may trust April, but the folks at Foob Central sure don’t trust me. Like any sufficiently obsessive-compulsive blogger, I religiously track my visitor statistics. It seems that the Masters of the Foobiverse do too. My very first post about the History Of The Foobiverse drew a visit from Sudbury, Ontario. When I published my Tour of Foob Central, I was getting two or three visits a day for about a week. From my logs, I could practically tell when Stephanie, the site’s pixie-ish webmistress, showed up at work. She hasn’t been by in a while and I miss her. I was kind of getting a webcrush on her.

Normally, I would be flattered by a look from the subject of one of my posts (are you reading this Angelina?), but when Mount Foob pays attention, bloggers tremble. Johnston and Company have a reputation for zealously protecting their intellectual property. At least one site had to shut down because of pressure from Lynn and the Syndicate. The Foobiverse Journal has received cease and desist letters as well. When this happens, other bloggers like Josh from Comics Curmudgeon take notice. [Update: See the comments for the Josh's experiences.]

I try my best to stay just the side of allowable practice under fair-use, because I would hate to lose my comfy free Blooger account because some system administrator at GoogleWorldHQ didn’t want to listen to my side of the story.

Fortunately, people like Ellcee way more familiar with their foobish quirks warned me against “deep-linking” their content. For graphics, I only use a panel or two of a strip hosted on my own account under the fair use review and commentary principle and always include a link to the original source. This hasn't drawn the wrath of the Lynnions, yet.

So why are they so defensive? It’s all about the eyeballs. Their web page is a huge graphics heavy site that gets over 75 million hits from more than 300,000 unique visitors each month. 600 Gigabytes of monthly traffic is a lot of foobs, and it all costs money. Take a look at the number of unique visitors for 2005:

Notice the big spike in September. That is when Lynn refused to renew her online distribution agreement with comics.com. Anyone who used to read the strip from that site had to find a new source, and it seems a lot of them turned to Foob Central.

FBorFW.com, and its mirror site FBoFW.com, are ad-laden destinations. Any links to content that doesn’t include their ads is taking money out of their pocket. The home page doesn’t even include the current strip. Which means you now have to click on Strip Fix and see even more ads. No one ever accused Lynn of being a foolish businessperson. At least Foob Central doesn’t have pop-ups, so it isn’t all bad.

The whole website is very sticky with lots of reasons to click around. Most people come for the strip fix, but the CafePress specials page actually gets more visits. People also love John’s Coffee Break game and hunting for Ned. And if I were Elly, I’d be a little worried about Liz taking over the strip, since Liz's character page is nearly as popular as our potato-nosed retiring heroine.

There are legitimate licensed ways to see the latest strip without risking a diabetic coma from the splash page of the FBorFW site. The Washington Post and Yahoo skin a feed of the colorized strip from uClick. The Houston Chronicle uses the black and white “official” version but host it on their own servers and keeps an archive of old strips. Most other newspapers just provide a link to the homepages of their comics. The Detroit Free Press does that and is the number one source of incoming links to the FBorFW homepage, accounting for 16% of the incoming traffic from external links.

I hope this behind the scenes tour has been interesting and I haven’t annoyed Lynn or Stephanie by revealing too many trade secrets. Here's my open letter to them:

I still have an open invitation for either of you to leave a comment on my blog. If you want to talk to me privately, just say so and I will e-mail you confidentially. I can find the address on the website. And if I’m ever on MacPherson Drive in Corbiel, I hope I can look you up so you can show me Rod’s trains.

See you in the funny papers.