Omnia Mutantur

I’d always had a low impression of audiobooks. From my bastion of literary snobbishness, they seemed too much like a way out for lazy people to claim they’d read something, when at best they’d listened to a few minutes of an abridged version.

No more.

I started exercising a few months ago. Originally I listened to a couple songs, but as my condition improved I switched to podcasts like Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. Finally I decided to try something longer and there, sitting on a shelf at a friend’s house, was the audiobook version of John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

I’ll save you the time. Perkins claims he was under indirect contract by U.S. agencies, and he went to countries in order to economically destabilize them, get them deep in debt to the U.S. government and make them easy target for U.S. control.

I’m not only not a fan but highly suspicious of the U.S. nor its policies, and I don’t doubt that something very much like what Perkins’ describe exists, but for all of Perkins’ empty claims and innuendo the book ends up being nothing but empty fiction, with no data you can compare against reality.

It’s The Da Vinci Code for modern socialists.

On the plus side, I’ve gained an appreciation of audiobooks. Not only I got to exercise, but I didn’t waste precious hours of my life dedicating them singly to this junk.

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I’d heard of Claire Wolfe before my friend Jorge lent me her latest book (which is also her first fiction book, it seems). I knew she was a libertarian author, and it was on her site that I first saw the V for Vendetta poster, but other than that I was a complete novice.

Interestingly, the last book I read before Out of the Gray Zone was Paul Freiberger and Michael Swayne’s Fire in the Valley, about the creation of the personal computer. The authors make a point several times: during the computer revolution, what really mattered for software developers was not how much of the installed base they could convert, but what a percentage of newly bought machines they were able to get.
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I read Alan Moore’s latest, Lost Girls, about two weeks ago. It’s taken me a while to digest it, and only until now I understood it was because I was torn between my emotional and intellectual responses to the book.

What follows is more of a commentary on the book than a review. It’ll contain what people might consider spoilers, so those who haven’t read the book and wish to be surprised should consider themselves warned.
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These sort of books have always seem self-disqualifying to me.

Jacqueline has a post on her blog referencing The Rules, a dating advice book whose subtitle is Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, and how it makes good economic sense.

Not having read “The Rules” I may be missing something, but it sounds like it could be a perfect manipulation tool for inconsiderate assholes. If the book’s ruleset gets widely adopted, a slightly manipulative person would only need to pretend he’s playing by those very rules. This would send out signals that indicate he’s a decent, caring partner, and fool all women that consider the ruleset a checklist that can substitute common sense.

After all, if bastards weren’t good at sending the signals a potential victim expects, and adaptable to comply with changing conditions, they wouldn’t date at all and books like these would be irrelevant.

As for the possible male manipulation advice from the book (there seems to be quite a bit as well, just by paging through the scanned book at Amazon), how valid is that advice once the technique has been made public by the book’s bestseller quality? Any man with half-a-brain who is playing the dating game on a Rules-saturated community would know that he’s being manipulated, after at least a casual leaf-through at a local Barnes and Noble. That would leave only the lazy or brain-dead susceptible to be easily roped in by those rules.

Are supporters of these books really itching to date that demographic?

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The V for Vendetta trailer is up. Some choice quotes from government officials:

“Fear became the ultimate tool of this government.”

“If our government was responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand people… would you really want to know?”

“I want this coutry to realize that we stand in the edge of oblivion. I want everyone to remember why they need us!”

If the script stays faithful to the spirit of the book, being uncompromising and avoiding the easy answers (the germans made us do it!), this could be a truly great movie.

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I remember seeing once a bumper sticker begging God, deliver me from your followers. I guess the same could be said about libertarian fiction writers.

A few of them, like Vernor Vinge, manage to subtly convey a feeling of what libertarianism is like and why it may be better, with superb novels and shows in which libertarian philosophy takes a back seat to good, enjoyable fiction.

Others… well, others are a lot more like L. Neil Smith.

A good friend of mine, who is also a libertarian, lent me Pallas – and even though I rarely leave a book unfinished, I wasn’t able to get more than 10% into it. Descriptions were the literary equivalent of 3-day-old Papa John’s and characters were nothing but sock puppets used to either regurgitate the author’s view, pat on the head others that come to the same conclusions, or condemn the cardboard villain of the book. Apparently he doesn’t understand that if you present the morally corrupt villain as someone that does everything from landgrabbing and mind control to raping underage girls, you just give ammo to the people opposing libertarianism – you open up the possibility of someone saying that socialist system failed because of a corrupt leader – you just have to put a good guy in charge. In the process, he forgets about Sol Steins’ maxim that the purpose of fiction is to convey emotions.

Not propaganda.

I remember thinking that characters couldn’t be flatter if they were drawn on a page, and guess what? On the latest version of The Probability Broach they actually are.

Lucky for me, I guess, since wading through it is a lot easier when you don’t have to suffer through most of Smith’s descriptions. How does thou bore me? Let me count the ways…

• Good guy, will-be libertarian called Win
• Horribly scarred bad guy
• Good girl called Jenny Noble
• Homeland security’s logo as an iron first gripping a bloody blade
• And finally, proto-Nazi Manfred Landgraf von Richthofen as a final villain

At which stage, even if a name like Landgraf von Richthofen (Red Baron or not) for someone that would expropriate other people’s lands and rights doesn’t make you wonder if this was written by George Lucas, and Evilus Maleficus is going to walk through the door any time now, I’d like to point out that by Goodwin’s Law we’ve already lost.

As with Pallas, characters are nothing but propaganda conduits, channeling Smith’s philosophy. As with Pallas, plot is nothing but a scarecrow, there only for show – and probably to stop the book from becoming My dinner with Lt. Bear. And as with Pallas, I’m left totally non-plussed by it.

Books like these only preach to the converted, creating an echo chamber where everyone who already agrees with you tell you what good points you make. If you turn the government into nothing but a poorly drawn charicature, others will be left thinking this could never happen here, my government’s employees don’t dress up like COBRA thugs.

Don’t just give them the iron fist on a horribly scarred nastie. Show them the velvet glove worn over it by a homely-looking bird-flipping cowboy-and-everyman-impersonating millionaire, and they may begin to get it.

Peace War this ain’t.

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Near the beginning of China Melville’s Perdido Street Station, Isaac acquires a beautiful, colorful caterpillar that immediately sets on to do fuck all – it just sits on its cage, looking more and more faded by the day, its behavior progressively more sluggish, until Isaac is about to give up on it.

Until well over a third into the book, the little grub miraculously springs to life after some time spent on a rather unusual diet, and begins wrapping itself into a cocoon. Yagharek and Isaac stare at it.

“Well…” he said. “Better late than never. Finally, what I bought it for in the first place. The thing’s pupating.”

After a while, Yagharek nodded slowly.

“It’ll soon be able to fly,” he said quietly.

“Not necessarily, old son. Not everything with a chrysalis gets wings.”

“You do not know what it will be?”

“That, Yag, is the only reason I’ve still got the damned thing. Wretched curiosity. Won’t let me go.”

I can’t think of a better way to describe the book itself. Damned bloated thing, with beautiful but useless spots of colour here and there, but some wretched curiosity keeps me hoping it’ll pupate and turn into something that will fly.

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Closer is like those french film art snobs insist you should watch, only without all the dreadfully boring parts. Go see it.

How is it a French film if it ain’t boring?, Joe asked. It’s obsessed with human emotions, I replied, but it’s actually good.

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I’ve said it before – I’m not a big fan of television. It’s partly due to the abysmal quality of the programming, which sinks to lower depths each year. But part of it is much like an mistreated woman, who has a hard time trusting men and jumping headlong into a new relationship because of past affairs that were cloying at first and bitter at the end, and who is certain that is going to be the case with this charming young fellow she just met.

With each new failure, each new relationship leading nowhere, she ends up thinking they’re all alike.

It was then with merely a cautious excitement that I began watching the eight season of The Practice. I’ve seen the series before and (call me superficial, if you will) it always seemed too self-important, well balanced on top of its moral pedestal while juggling ethical issues, letting rapists go free because it was the righteous, law-abiding thing to do, and pitting its characters against harrowing moral choices in situations where they inevitably did the right thing.

Sure, it was well-written and the actors all did their part properly, but I felt like I was inviting into my house a friend that while smarter than average, acted more arrogant than his bit of extra intellect warranted. The type of person who feels they need to publicly prove that they’re just a bit smarter than the rest because they’re insecure of their own perspicacity, and in doing so alienate everyone but the most patient.

Why, then did I give it another shot? Because of James Spader.

He’s one of those actors that I’ve always considered under-appreciated, and while a few movies in the past ten years have managed to use his amazing talent for understated and subtle performances, he has been mostly relegated to doing dreck.

It was uplifting then to see him raise from the crud usually handed down to him and completely steal the TV series with his performance as Alan Shore, an amoral, lustful, sharp-tongued sinner that somehow managed to do the right thing more often than all the other bishops, a mirror raised to their characters that made them appear more righteous than right, more self-important than selfless. In this season, the writing dropped most of its conceitedness, born probably of viewers assuming it was an intelligent show, and focused on proving it actually was.

It was no surprise then when I got all excited to hear that after the series’ cancellation, the spin-off show was going to be created around Spader’s character.

What was a surprise is that I find myself much like the jaded woman leaving the honeymoon stage of the relationship, where she starts noticing on her new beau the patterns of previously disappointing lovers.

In this case, I’m afraid we’ve been cursed with cool. Alan Shore was cool and the others were not, right, so why not make a series around cool characters? Right? Cool senior partner played by William Shatner! Cool sexually liberated law firm! Cool offices! Right? Right?

It’s like people began paying attention to the first guy who wore a leather jacket on the show, and now everybody else is doing it.

I hope I’m mistaken. The writing on these last few episodes of the eight season, where we can see the old show die and the new one being born, prove that the creators know their business. Throughout this season, they seemed to realize that conflict was interesting, and not only when it came from the outside of the organization.

I can only hope that Boston Legal won’t become Matrix Reloaded, all about the cool looks with no soul.

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While I’ve never read the comics, I’ve been expecting Hellboy for quite a while. Director Guillermo del Toro did a good job with Blade II, maintaining a good rhythm to the story while making a hero look vulnerable and the opposition terrifying. Del Toro had also passed on both the next Blade movie and the third Harry Potter film in order to make Hellboy, because it had been his dream project for a while – that gave it a greater chance of being carefully crafted, with the respectful attention to detail that Bryan Singer brought to the X-Men movies. Plus, it seemed like Hellboy was going to be a sort of superheroed Delta Green (and I do mean that in a good way).

I confess, I had high hopes for the movie. That’ll bite you every time.

Hellboy is indeed a lot like a Delta Green scenario, with some superheroes and Catholic mythology thrown in the Lovecraftian mix. The beginning is pure DG – a group of soldiers on a mission to stop an envoy from Hitler and the Thule Society from opening a portal to release seven unspeakable gods, who are imprisoned in a crystal jail that looks suspiciously like Azathoth. The Nazi team is led by Grigori, a shadowy, robe-wearing, mechanical-glove donning wizard that will open the portal for the old gods to return, and who would be a lot more impressive if he didn’t speak just like that Russian kitty from Cats & Dogs.

Pay no mind, I tell myself, he’ll be gone soon. Everybody but the bad guys know that chaining yourself to a mechanical monstrosity, in order to invoke some apocalyptic power at the very beginning of the movie, is a one way ticket into the ether. Soon enough, Grigori Rasputin is sent off into that lounge in the sky where villains that never die spent their holidays, in order to wait for the sequel while his cohorts, Ilsa the walking cliche and Kroenen the assassin (and the coolest bad guy I’ve seen in a while) deal with this movie.

No such luck, buddy. No more than five minutes later Rasputin is back, stealing Kroenen’s rightful spotlight and relegating Ilsa to even less of a position that she would otherwise have had. But let’s leave our R-dragging mastermind aside for now. He’ll be in the shadows for a bit anyway.

When Rasputin is off the screen, as he mostly is on the first two thirds of the movie, it progresses quite well. It has a good combination of humanity and action, sprinkled with Call of Cthulhu-like library research, reliquaries to ward off evil and small diversions into what makes a person and why we are not just what we look like. The sense of humor is just right, and while the movie suffers from the fact that we can’t worry about Hellboy (he seems to be indestructible), it does balance it out by placing Abe Sapiens, the psychic, literate amphibian, in mortal danger.

That, unfortunately, will be the last time you’ll ever feel suspense in this movie.

The last third of the movie, initiated by a shake up in the organization that happens just as we’re getting to know the characters, has them taking off for Russia in order to eliminate the Ultimate Evil. Suddenly the movie forgets about research, relics, spells and characters, and becomes one big race to firebomb as many things as possible. Kroenen is dispatched ignominiously fast, beasties are napalmed left and right, Ilsa is revealed for the Obligatory Bad Female that she is and eventually a Chtonian-like beast emerges from the body of Rasputin to wreak havoc upon the world.

Only to be stopped by those pesky boys and their fire grenades.

It’s like in the middle of the session, some munchkin in the party realized that a) they were ìmpervious to fire and b) nothing else was – not even gods. You can imagine that the session was over pretty quickly after that.

Potential a movie does not make.

It is Delta Green with superheroes. In a schizophrenic, decidely not-good sort of way.

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