You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 2nd, 2008.
I saw this image and had to post it. It’s too good not to! It’s one of those wonderful retro pieces, clearly of recent provenance (look at Hulk — he has those nice, clean lines of recent graphic art; also, Wolverine is in it), but looking fondly back on old-style comics. Hulk is really out of place, here, not in the Jack Kirby-style of the rest of it.
But mostly I posted it for the mummies. Earth’s Mightiest Mummies. It’s bizarre, the sort of postmodern weirdness that inspired the Marvel Zombies books. But mummies! Mummies have always struck me as the goofiest movie monster. There’s never been a single report of a reanimated mummy attacking a paleontologist or a group of mystery-solving teens, unlike werewolves and vampires and zombies, all of which have extensive folklore behind them to make them all the more powerful when they come on the screen.
I remember the first time I saw Nosferatu. Seeing Max Schreck as Count Orlock, a subhuman monster with long fingers like a phonograph arm, ready to scratch out a vile song, and pale horror-skin, everything I knew about vampires melted away. Yeah, I knew they weren’t real, how certain medical conditions can be mistaken for it, and how all the historical vampires were just famous brutes, but the tall and terrifying Orlock brought rushing into my head a real, innate fear of that sort of monster, something less than human and less than dead. Orlock is a sick parody of the Resurrection.
So many of our monsters are really representations of our fear of the Resurrection, our deepseated belief that death really is unbeatable. Clearly, anything that could beat back death is unnatural, inhuman, to be feared and destroyed. Vampires, zombies, and mummies, much more than ghosts, concern us in this regard, because they are walking, they are violent in their physicality. All are more than reanimated corpses, but it is they very corpse that frightens.
In vampires, that physicality is often heightened to an intense sexuality in our culture; it’s a common trope of film for vampires to be hypersexual beings, who seduce and conquer rather than overpower. They are often attractive and suave, objects of temptation, and that temptation is to living eternal life without transcendance. When you succumb to the vampire, you become one, immortal and bound to the earth, and there will be for you no resurrection.
The earliest vampires are hard to distinguish from the traditional zombie; they are corpses newly climbed from their graves, brutal monsters who don’t turn others into their own kind (I think they stole that from werewolves, with whom they are sometimes closely linked), but kill and consume them. They are soulless, purely physical, the antithesis of the ghost, who does not bring to mind resurrection at all, and seems far less impossible. After all, we’re all at heart really manichaeans; our culture sublimely separates the physical and the spiritual, and always elevates one above the other. So we’re not surprised that when we die we can shed the limits of the body and become the pure spirits we’ve always wanted to be, but the opposite proposition, the resurrection of the body which we proclaim every sunday in the Creed, is horrifying and unbelievable. Ghosts have always made sense, because we have a natural sense for the spirit, but the scandal of the resurrection? That’s what makes Christianity so hard.
It’s something anticipated by mummies, though. The Egyptians believed the afterlife would be an immensely physical affair, essentially an eternal continuation of the sorts of lives they had already lived. They would keep what they had accumulated, and the physical body itself would be utilized. So the preservation of the dead was of immense importance. But even they would have balked at the idea that a man could die and rise again. Why should that happen, when he had already entered into the Osiris’ kingdom?
Of course, zombies are the worst offenders, the most banal, terrifying notion of resurrection man could ever devise — the mindless, shambling shell of a man, intent only on preserving itself, less than a man, and less than an animal. It’s the basest thing we fear, that even when we’re dead, we won’t have any peace, and be reduced to something so empty. (Speaking of zombies, are you guys at all familiar with zombie walks? People dress up like zombies and shamble through the streets, chanting “Braaaaaains.“)
All of these are lies that Christ came to wipe away, and bring us into the reality of life we were all meant for, endless and in the light of the Father, and not as ghastly spirits, but as real, breathing, eating, flesh-and-blood people that tie their shoes and wear hats and laugh at bad jokes. We won’t be obsessed with immortality, because we won’t be fighting time. Nor will we be brutes or monsters, subhuman or inhuman or ahuman or however you want to say it, but we’ll be in the fullness of our humanity through the humanity of Jesus. It’s nothing to be afraid of, but most of us are. There’s a saying — “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”
We were made for everlasting life, but we’re terrified of it. What’s up with that? I think it’s sin, our disordered hearts and disordered minds that draw us apart from God and desire things we shouldn’t desire, and the things we should desire in unhealthy ways. We have vampires and zombies for the same reason we have pornography; we have the wrong attitude towards our physical selves. We’ve degraded ourselves, we’ve abandoned our humanity in our sins. We’re already monsters.
We’re so afraid we’ll turn out to be monsters in the end.
I’m a giant trekkie. I have been from the time I was seven and I would watch TNG with my dad those weekends he was home. I can identify practically any episode of TNG from season three onward within about ten seconds of catching it, and I even watched Enterprise to the bitter end. I’m also something of a rarity in that my position in the Kirk v Picard debate is a firm “Sisko!” and that I find TNG practically unwatchable because it’s so damn pretty and nice, so pat. My tastes run more toward Deep Space 9, which was entirely different from every other Trek show.
In DS9, decisions mattered. Consequences stayed with you. If you messed things up on Bajor one week, well, Bajor was still there the next. They weren’t off exploring the Planet Of The Week Designed To Highlight Some Social Issue — they were struggling to keep the area stable, which wasn’t easy, because the wormhole that the station protected rapidly became the most valuable, strategic point in the entire Alpha Quadrant. Problems came to them, and they stayed there, with real, lasting impact.
The series was also the first to explore spiritual issues in any depth, to introduce openly religious characters to Star Trek, and not treat their religion as a problem to be solved but, in the end, a mystery to be embraced. The ongoing tension between Sisko’s dual roles as Emissary and Starfleet officer came to a head in the sixth and seventh seasons after bubbling for the entire run of the show, resulting in a profound escalation of the show’s drama, coming as it did parallel with the increasingly brutal war.
And it got dark. The characters struggled with themselves and with moral issues. They made decisions, they made mistakes, and they dealt with sin and hell every bloody week. They held secrets. They lied. They got drunk and sang songs, they played darts and held grudges. They screamed and they came to blows, and they sought and found revenge. They were people, dammit, not the ciphers of every other Trek show.
I could wax poetic about DS9 for pages. I love that show with a boiling intensity I can barely restrain. It’s dramatically better than everything else Trek has ever had to offer, and I think Trek is some of television’s finest work to begin with.
So understand what it means for me to say that Battlestar Galactica makes DS9 look like an autistic kid’s crayon mess.
Battlestar Galactica is by far the best thing on television, and it just so happens one of DS9’s head writers, Ronald D. Moore, is the guy behind it, and that’s what makes it so damn good. It’s able to cover territory DS9 was never able to because of the constraints of the franchise. Prophecy, which forms an undercurrent to DS9’s entire run, is taken to the level of explicit plot, with Laura Roslin using them to guide her every decision. Roslin, like Sisko, has conflicting religious and secular roles, and her embrace of them enables the religious element of the show to shine. While in DS9, religious faith is limited to a few Bajoran characters, in BSG religion crops up from the very beginning as a guiding force for most of the human population. And not only that, we’re allowed to see theology explicitly debated, new ideas introduced, and see clergy and heretics.
BSG is the one show that understands religion as an important part of life.
And the interpersonal conflicts of DS9, a first for Trek, are taken further. For once, we don’t have a single ensemble cast with ties so strong they’re almost family, we have a series of competing, tenuously connected stories and casts. Adama, as commander and admiral, is not buddy-buddy with those under him. They respect him, they fear him, but they associate with each other, not with him. There are few legitimate friendships among the cast, but several deeply felt relationships, marriages, affairs, and unrequited loves.
It’s complex, it’s confusing, and its brilliant, just like real life.
It’s what makes Trek look just ridiculous.
This is really what Voyager should have been, and what it was supposed to have been; lost, far from home, they’d have to discover what it meant to be in Starfleet on the other side of the galaxy when half your crew isn’t even commissioned, far from the chain of command, far from supplies, far from help. They should have taken damage, lost crewmembers. Things should have gotten progressively worse day by day, but instead, the ship was clean and pretty, and any damage it took was quickly and surely repaired. They hung out in holodecks and had tea parties. It was just another Star Trek show instead of something special.
And that’s a damn dirty shame.
Diamond Distributors, who put out the first issue of my comic this past March, has informed us they won’t be carrying our book anymore. This is baffling. They normally give small press books a few months to meet the $1500 sales figure, and we did $900 with issue 1. They also require books to show a “pattern of growth;” hard to show a pattern either way after one issue.
So this is confusing. Pray for us! There’s a whole lot of money invested here, in addition to a whole lot of hope. If they drop it, there aren’t a whole lot of options. We’re going to try to contest this, and see what we can do.
Anyway, swing by the store and pick one up! I don’t see a cent from this, by the way.
The real difficulty of learning a foreign language is never having to actually use it apart from that one hour five days a week. I’ve been trying to learn Italian for two years, and it’s difficult, because there’s no Italian community here in Richmond where I could practice, and, despite our heritage, nobody in my family speaks more than a smattering of it.
I’m my family’s historian, and I’ve made a real point of tracking down our heritage and learning what that means for us. Much of the work on my mom’s side was done by my uncle Bennette, and that line, specifically her mother’s side, can be traced back reliably to the fifteenth century. I advise anybody that can do this research to do it. You’ll never know what bizarre things you’ll uncover.
My mom is part of a very, very old family, the Powers, who emigrated from England in the first century of the English presence in America, and includes, so my grandmother claims, Francis Powers, who was shot down over Russia in the infamous U2 incident, and are distant cousins of the Adams of Massachusetts, and therefore of three US presidents, and one by marriage. The Powers family descends, although I don’t have the documentation bridging the gap yet, from Robert le Poer, sent to Waterford, Ireland, to govern and curb the influence of the initial participants of the Norman invasion of the island in the twelfth century.
I’m also related to a Samuel Porter, who, in the waning days of the American Revolution, was captured by the British in Kentucky and imprisoned in Detroit, and forced to take a loyalty oath to the Crown. After he escaped, he was captured by the Continental Army, and the government of Virginia briefly pursued treason charges against the man while he was in house arrest on his plantation. Apparently nothing came of these charges.
My father’s family has been much more difficult to track, plagued by bad information, family legends, and misheard tales. When I was young, my dad used to tell me that his father — who died in 1977, seven years before I was born — used to tell him that they were from a small village called Abruzzi, on the French border. He told me this to bouy up an old family legend that we Visaggios were descended from the Kings of France.
I spent a lot of time in those pre-Wikipedia days trying to find out where this Abruzzi was, only to discover that Abruzzi is actually the region of Abruzzo (pl. Abruzzi), not a small town, and is in central Italy, nowhere near France. When I finally began really delving into genealogy, I learned that the Visaggios aren’t even from Abruzzo. I found several records in my great-grandfather Prospero’s hand testifying that he was born in Stigliano (stee-lee-AH-no), a village of about five-thousand people, in Matera, a province in Basilicata, deep, deep in southern Italy, on the arch of the boot. The only thing the old stories got right was the existence of small village.
There’s a bunch of possibilities here. Abruzzo could be the place of origin of my great-grandmother’s family, the Brunos, even though my great-grandmother herself was born in New York a few years after Michele and Maria Bruno immigrated. The thing is, we can’t ever know, because the knowledge of Italian was lost almost immediately, and I’m sure a lot of this confusion stems from possible mistranslations and misunderstandings of parents for whom English was not a native tongue by children for whom it was, and did not speak that of their forebears.
I want to visit Stigliano, and meet those cousins I have there.
Anyway, here’s my family tree.
