You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 3rd, 2008.
Between the World We See and the Things We Fear, There Are Doors.
The show is A Haunting, and the Discovery airs a two-hour block of it every day. It’s an hour-long docudrama about ghosts, demons, and poltergeists, all manner of supernatural phenomena that people encounter. The stories are all broadly true, and buoyed by interviews with the actual people involved. And while the show has had its share of criticism, it’s two consistently well-made to ignore. To put it another way, the show is freaky as hell.
Sure, there are the occasional dud episodes, particularly one where a woman becomes obsessed with a photograph and pretty much nothing else happens, but for every one of those, there are three or four that are twisted, bizarre stories of the strangest things in the world. The acting is usually passable, sometimes remarkable, and the narration creepy and effective. It’s a damn fine show.
One of the things the show gets criticized for is it’s uncritical look at the claims presented by each case. The experts present are invariably ghost hunters and paranormal investigators who participated in the cases and have a vested interest in making it look real. So it’s not exactly the most rigorous vetting process, here. But the show still has a particular power to it.
I wrote earlier about our fear of reanimated corpses, and this would really be a great opportunity to look at the spiritual end of the afterlife. But I’m not gonna take that road, and I’m not gonna do it because there’s something else I noticed in A Haunting that I think is worth remarking upon, and I’ve never seen anyone else bring it up. There’s a strong religion ghost, as GetReligion would put it, present in this show.
The show really tacitly endorses Catholicism.
What could I possibly mean by that? How can a show about ghosts endorse Catholicism? Well, I just can’t really think of an episode where a haunting or a demon was expelled by anyone other than a Catholic priest, and only once instance where a priest was ineffective. Every episode seems to end with the family embracing or re-embracing Catholicism or some other form of traditional Christianity, and clerics from other faiths are routinely portrayed as weak, unable to understand the situation, or simple unwilling to help.
The implication is clear: people understand that Catholic priests and Catholic priests alone have the ability to deal with the otherworldly. There’s a few episodes where they go elsewhere first — one family starts with a Wiccan priest, another tries a Baptist minister, but nobody gets anywhere until they find Father Whatshisface and get him to perform an exorcism.
People who aren’t even religious or are actively something else still look earnestly at each other and say “We have to get a Catholic priest!” It’s insane. I wonder if it that attitude just comes from the movie “The Exorcist,” or if its just an instinctual understanding of the power ordination imparts.
Ok, there’s one episode, “The Unleashed,” where someone who isn’t a Catholic priest performs a successful exorcism, but she’s a little otherworldly herself. Cute as hell, too.
Going to DC for the Fourth. May be gone much of the weekend. I’ve set up a couple posts to happen while I’m gone. Enjoy!
(originally written back in February)
‘Twas a Friday when I met up with Abdulmajeed (who prefers simply to be called ‘Majeed’), who has never had New York-style pizza, and thinks America is just great. We originally planned on meeting in that bastion of American mystique we so obliquely call Starbucks (notable both for its environmental concern and its willingness to sue people without much reason) which inexplicably closes at 4PM on Friday afternoons. Coming into Cabell library I see the baristas pulling down the gates and sweeping up the floor and all of those general closing actions those of us who have either worked in food service or have craved popcorn chicken at eleven at night are so familiar with. As the green-aproned workers wiped down the counters with Windex, I frantically dial Majeed on my new and rather swank Moto RAZR, hoping I haven’t missed him, that this is a cell number, that I can find this guy and change plans.
Turns out he was right behind me.
Part of me expected the traditional, stereotypical Saudi man. Another part of me was completely unsurprised when he showed up with sideburns, a goatee, and an Abercrombie teeshirt. We shook hands, and damn if he doesn’t have a good handshake, and agreed we’d go get some pizza. At least, he said, as he had just eaten, he’d come and hang out while I ate with my good buddy Tim, who tagged along like a tall, bald, Irish wolfhound. Majeed, as I’ve said, had not, and because he did not deign to join us in our consumption, has not yet had New York-style pizza. But it smelled heavenly, and even he enjoyed it.
It really was a multicultural affair. An Italian, an Irishman, and a Saudi transfer student grabbing a pie at a pizza place owned by Hispanics. Only, as they say, in America (which isn’t quite true, but true enough for the aphorism to merit attention) – and it was about America we spoke. We shared sexist jokes – because that’s what guys do – about the inability of the fairer sex to drive, including my sister’s six-year annual car accident streak, which flowed from Majeed’s interest in the ability of American guys to have girlfriends. In Saudi Arabia, the good man said, have a girlfriend and it’s “off to the jails.”
It went on like that. There appears to be very little a man can do and not be sent off to the jails. Majeed found equally notable to relative ease with which one can acquire and consume alcohol, even considering Virginia’s fairly strict blue laws and the dominance of the Ukrop family, which does not sell alcohol at their stores, over grocery shopping in Central Virginia. Incidentally, the Ukrop family came up particularly often in considering the strict Wahabbi government in Saudi Arabia. Our fine Saudi friend had been unaware of the existence of sects of Christianity that discouraged or forbade drinking.
We also talked about the process of language acquisition, particularly foreign languages. Ok. So, I’m really terribly envious of him for having the resource of living, at least for a while, in a country that uses his desired language on a regular basis. It’s a brilliant resource and he’s incredibly lucky to have it. It means that there are situations where you’ll have to use it on a daily basis outside of the classroom. It means you actually need to know how to ask where you can find the milk or the pretzels or if parking is permitted between the hours of six and eight because you can’t quite figure out what the sign is saying and so you stopped a kind passerby to make your strange, halting query. You stammer it out at first but over time, you know, over time it gets a little better and a little better and damn if eventually you can’t hold a conversation with a couple of big, loud natives and only have to ask about a couple of words like “term” and “cliché.” It was pretty awesome.
I’ve never had that. Language is tough stuff if you don’t get to practice all the time, and as much as I have a natural ability, always you need to practice and practice. Majeed came to the US to learn English and Accounting, so that when he returns to the dunes and beaten cities of his home place, he can stand up and get a job crunching the books for those American businesses that poor so much money into the region. A year and a half in, though, and he hasn’t picked up enough English to start taking English-language courses in his field. So far, it’s still just learning the lingua franca of world finance. He has the same problem anyone learning a foreign language has: when he goes home, he hangs out with his Saudi friends and speaks Arabic. English doesn’t occupy his day they way it probably should, and to some extent, he has isolated himself into an expat community rather than try to participate in the larger culture he’s presently living in.
This gets me thinking about the cultural aspect of the dominance of English: what is the proper role of a lingua franca, an international language? Maybe this sort of linguistic bloating is inevitable; the language of the dominant economic and cultural force always spreads, and today, there are about a billion speakers of English, over half of which only know it as a second language. Majeed here represents a pretty unavoidable reality, and that’s the growing dominance of English over local tongues in trade, to the extent that a Saudi kid feels the need to travel halfway around the world to learn it enough to be successful. But this has always been the case, hasn’t it? From Greek to Latin to Italian to French to English and, in the future, perhaps Chinese or Portuguese or Hindi, it always becomes necessary to communicate according to the dominant mode. It opens doors to money, power, influence, or simply opportunity. It’s only avoidable if you only want to operate in the limited sphere of your surroundings – but even here in the United States, Spanish is rapidly becoming a necessity for business discourse. Even Barack Obama says “Si, se puede!” at his campaign stops.
I also discovered that, much as George Bush would say otherwise, the world ain’t clamoring for democracy. Majeed tells me that the Saudi people are relatively satisfied with their lives, and do their best to get by. This, he tells me, is just how life is. It’s something I’ve been toying around with – that oppression is impossible, and that the human person can always be free. What Majeed tells me more than anything else, when I read the implications, is this: human freedom is not found in civil rights. The things he finds most notable about the United States isn’t freedom, but license. We can dress scandalously and drink beer. We’re free to be good and we’re free to be bad. We can dance and we can shop and we can move about without consequence, more or less. But is this what freedom is?
Is it possible that freedom is more than the ability to buy a Porsche and wear a miniskirt and watch Seinfeld?
I can’t help but think about the post-Soviet states. When democracy and capitalism came through, everyone celebrated. It was the triumph of the century, right? The end of the Cold War had come. But in the end, all it did was give the people walkmans and Coca-Cola, and within a few years, people were complaining, no, lamenting the fact that everyone had become insular and materialist. The community-mindedness Communism had fostered had eroded. Meanwhile, all of their lofty democratically-elected governments were cancerous with corruption. The fall of the Wall brought no paradise. And all they’d been hearing about the Communist years was how horrible it had been. But, they said, at least then everyone was fed. Everyone had a job. Was it worse, or was it just different? I can’t imagine how it must have been to hear endlessly about how your happy childhood hadn’t really been happy at all. But those were the lives they lived. Weren’t they happy, then? Wasn’t life still life, then?
In Saudi Arabia, should democracy come, I’m sure there would be celebration in the streets. But just a few years in, they’d be lamenting the decline in religious devotion, the increasingly-lax morals, and the bad influence of Western movies.
Just what I was thinking about.
“Some men are only virtuous enough to forget that they are sinners without being wretched enough to remember that they need the mercy of God.” – Thomas Merton
This comic strip is poetry to me. It’s a simple, simple three-panel arrangement, and at first glance, is easy and uncomplicated. Comic strips, especially the three-paneler, are something we can all approach with some amount of confidence; we all read Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, and Zits. We’re familiar with the idea that each panel represents another instant, another moment. The three-panel strip is a progression in time, and that’s something so basic we never even consider it.
But it’s also something spacial. It’s on paper or a screen, arranged linearly, and each panel is there, right now, right in front of you. You can read them in any order you want, or just take in the entire composition. It’s something physical, something visual, and does not, in fact, move in time the way we want it to.
This strip from xkcd, an older one, takes advantage of both facets of the comic strip, and plays with them, and can’t be understood unless you realize that strips exist in both time and in space, and that’s what makes this one so beautiful.
We have a man twenty feet away from a couple, but he’s not in the same timeframe as they are. Because a comic strip is what a comic strip is, that doesn’t prevent him from speaking into the past, and beckoning the girl to come into the future with him, to explore it. But she can’t — not only is she forever two panels behind him, but she’s already moved on.
It’s something out of a movie — a mysterious book written in an unknown script, likely as early as the fifteenth century, seeming to cover topics tame and arcane, from botany to astrology, with strange illustrations. It defies categorization, it defies analysis, and nobody knows for sure if it even says anything at all. It’s the Voynich Manuscript.
Records indicate it existed at least as early as the seventeenth century in the collection of an alchemist in Prague, and spent two centuries in a papal library eventually seized when the Italian government took Rome from the Pope. It found its way into the private collection of Petrus Beckx, Superior-general of the Jesuits at the time, and was eventually donated to Yale in 1969.
Nobody knows what it is, but the maddening thing is that it seems sure as hell to be something. I downloaded the entire text a few months back for the simple need to see it, and it’s surely no less strange than the Codex Seraphinianus. Ok, I lied. The Codex is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. But to pour through Voynich is to see something that screams with meaning and be entirely unable to make out what it’s yelling about.
What can you make of it? People have been struggling to decipher it for centuries. Is it a simple substitution cipher? Something more sophisticated? And what could be gained by painstakingly hiding such a text as this? It’s speculated that it’s an alchemical text, something very much contrary to the painfully political and powerful Christianity of the day. But the meaning of the images remains unclear. Will this be a mystery forever? Is meaning here always going to be just past our reach?
Possibly the most influential science fiction movie of the twentieth century apart from Star Wars, Metropolis, a three-hour German expressionist picture, was considered largely lost for decades. It was cut to shreds before distribution, and numerous different versions of the picture circulate toda, some reducing a three-hour movie to ninety minutes, and adding an eighties rock soundtrack. It’s been sped up and lowed down.
A great disservice has been done to a classic.
But friend-of-the-blog Nick Milne reports that a full, two-hundred-ten minute reel of the film has been located in Buenos Aires. The find of the century! (the twentieth century, too)
Ein film von Fritz Lang? Ja, ein film von Fritz Lang!
I enjoying thinking and writing about memory, especially cultural memory, and the failure to preserve Metropolis has always been to me an icon of memory’s failure. Cultural memory is always degrading, and requires constant upkeep to preserve the things worth preserving. Inevitably, though, things manage to get lost, and little and big things get forgotten. We remember that there’s a Mount Sinai but neglect to record its location. We stumble across something like the Voynich Manuscript, without the slightest idea what it means. Every so often, though, somebody finds one of these little yellow beads in the tapestry, things that have been preserved despite everything going against it. They’re shards of the past. They’re the Rosetta stone and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I thank God every time we find one.
And while I’m at it, I’ll remember the name of this blog and point out a great comic: Superman’s Metropolis. It’s a strange, beautiful retelling of the story of the Man of Steel through the lens of German expressionist film, taking the obvious connection of Superman’s base of operations and the name of the movie. Lois Lane talkes the role of Maria, who prophesies the coming savior who will life the working class up and take down the elites who run the city, Jon Kent and the evil Lutor.
Of course, it turns out to be Clarc Kent-son, the Superman.
The art is gorgeous. I’ve never seen a comic before or since that looks like this, and that’s a hard statement to make. The series continued in “Batman: Nosferatu” and “Wonder Woman: Blue Amazon.”
It’s wonderful stuff.
Nobody in the world remembers Exo-Squad.
It was a short-lived cartoon in the early 1990’s, when I was a wee lad, and came on FOX Kids Saturday Mornings, and I remember being super into it in 1994. It was such a toy-friendly show, revolving around an interplanetary war fought primarily by single-pilot rigs called E-frames. The toys were so frakkin’ cool; I could pit them reasonably against any number of monsters. After all, they had robot suits. The show wasn’t half bad, either; I was glued to the floor in front of the TV every week, waiting for the next installment. Sure, it was bright and poorly animated — like every show except Batman: The Animated Series which deserves its own post — but heck, I enjoyed it.
Of course, I was ten, and I also liked Big Bad Beetleborgs.
A few months ago, though, I stumbled across a two-episode VHS tape of the show at Rite-Aide for a dollar. It was still freshly shrink-wrapped, in impeccable condition, and even had an advertisement for the next tapes due out in ‘94. Clearly, it had found its way into some crevice in the store room fourteen years prior and only recently been uncovered. So I picked it up and watched it a couple of weeks later, when I dusted off my VCR, which I’ve had since at least 1991, and hooked it up.
I was pretty surprised. It was good. It was a killer premise: humans reaping the consequences of our own mistakes. We’d created a race of slaves, the Neosapiens, who were bigger, stronger, sturdier, hardier, and smarter than us, and they’d risen up against us. Of course, in any other kid’s show, that’s opening credits information, and the first episode would be the barest bones of exposition followed by a big toy-advertising battle. But Exo-Squad was different. They spent the first two episodes on a plot that was neither terribly interesting nor, at first glance, even connected to the exciting show I remembered so well. The fleet protecting Earth goes off in pursuit of pirates around Jupiter, and spend two episodes chasing and fighting them, only to be brutally stabbed in the back. It was a trick! Two episodes devoted to the opening feint! When I was a kid, how well would I have understood this? The Neosapiens staged the whole thing, and attacked and conquered a defenseless Venus, Earth and Mars, leaving humanity enslaved, hoarded into concentration camps, clearly intended to die.
This is a show intended for ten year-olds.
The show’s depiction of war is unique for the era and medium; battles are brutal and deadly, and main characters die throughout the show’s two seasons. Campaigns go awry but are studiously followed, and no development is unexplained. The creator referred to it as the European theatre of WWII as opposed to Mobile Suit Gundam’s Pacific theatre, and roughly followed it’s contours. It was serious, it was self-assured, and it was extremely well-written.
I’m going to to have to make an active effort to acquire as much of this show as I can, and give it my full attention. It sounds like it deserves it.
Man, you’d never see that on TNG.
