Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Secondhand CD Saga: Overrated Esoterica Edition
I know all the cool kids are stealing music these days (and I've certainly done my share) but I like CDs. In Fairfax, next to an EB Games with the Worst Clerks of All Time, there's a used music store that's really growing on me. The staff there seems genuinely cool, the prices are pretty good, and the inventory changes enough from week to week that I almost always find something interesting.
So for the last few weeks I've been dropping in, grabbing a couple of CDs by bands in my peripheral vision, so to speak, just to experiment. I'd say they're a matter of personal taste, but here's some short takes on them:
13:37 x Thomas x /music/capsule x link x 1 comment
Memo to Faceless Corporation: Bank of America Edition
Hey, you guys rock. But if I believed in the devil, he'd be your overdraft charges. Ouch.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/letters x link x 0 comments
New original, half-finished.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/mp3 x link x 0 comments
While we're discussing shooters: Nanostray on the Nintendo DS is hard core. Shin'en, the developer, has stated that the Normal mode of this game is really the Easy mode renamed. That said, it's still not "easy" by any stretch of the imagination, which is probably why they renamed it. I beat it in a couple of hours on that setting, but it handed me unlimited continues and didn't unlock anything. The medium difficulty mode gives you 5 credits with 5 ships each, and the hard difficulty only hands out 3 ships for each of its 3 credits. You also take more damage at higher difficulties, which means that it ramps up substantially.
I don't understand why there are so few shooters made for portable systems. It seems to me like they're perfectly suited for it. After all, on a console I can't play them for very long--the repetition and the harsh gameplay gets frustrating after a while. But on a handheld, I'm probably not going to be playing for long periods of time anyway. Nanostray, unlike its predecessor Iridion II, does have a battery save, so you can stop at just about any time. And the challenge missions, which include limitations or artificial goals to meet (no smart bombs, 35,000 points, no secondary weapons, etc.) are a good way to jump in, spend a few minutes, and maybe be rewarded with one of the game's unlockable features. Not that I've managed to do so yet, because Nanostray is hard core.
The perspective isn't completely top down, but it might as well be--the "tilt" is largely an optical illusion and rarely interferes with the gameplay, although it does come into play during a couple of the boss encounters. A more serious problem is the button mapping. There are four non-upgradeable weapon/subweapon combos available at any time during a level, but to switch between them you have to tap the touch screen. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but to make it work the developers have copied the fire button to the left trigger (normally on A), so you can continue shooting while you change weapon types. That makes my hand cramp up a little sometimes. It would be nice if they'd just included a next weapon function on the Y button, which isn't used. Also, the bottom screen's 2D graphics (radar, health, and super meter) are very pretty, but I'd like them to have been higher contrast so I could see them more clearly in my peripheral vision.
Regardless, these flaws don't make Nanostray a bad game. In fact, it's a pretty good example of the type, and with the current dearth of portable shooters we have to take what we can get. If you can find a copy (several stores won't carry it for some reason), it's well worth the trouble.
21:40 x Thomas x /gaming/impressions/ds x link x 1 comment
Until we actually manage to get Internet service running again at my apartment, it seems like I don't have much to say. That should happen tomorrow night, at which point you will be gifted with my capsule reviews of the used CDs I'm buying at a frightening rate, as well as ideas on musical instrument hacking. However, you may be pleased to know that today (thanks to a passing whim) I figured out the potentials of SSH combined with Blosxom. Among other exciting abilities, it lets me recatagorize posts and their comments without altering the date stamp, so I've cleaned up some of my writing from before the directory structure matured.
I think that's just about the last hole that I found with Blosxom. E-mail notification for comments would still be nice (not for you, for me) and I wish it handled non-ASCII characters, but I'm satisfied. Any tweaking from now on can probably be restricted to creating different flavors and cleaning up the design. Not that any of you care, but does anyone have any pet peeves with the site's design I should correct? Any browsers in which it parses funny, or functionality you miss from other CMS systems?
10:47 x Thomas x /meta/blosxom x link x 1 comment
Compared to Outfoxed, another documentary that covers modern media and propaganda, Control Room is reserved and traditional. It lacks the pop music, open politics, and Powerpoint presentation. For this reason--because Control Room concerns itself with real journalists as they moved through real events--it's a much more persuasive and humanizing effort.
Which is beside the point, really, although it makes a nice introduction. Outfoxed set out to highlight the bias and manipulation of the Fox news network, and used a similarly over-the-top presentation to make its point. It had a nice, blunt thesis statement. In contrast, it's harder to isolate the thesis of Control Room, assuming it has one. The documentary follows producers and reporters from Al Jazeera, the world's most controversial Arab news network, through the first months of the Iraq war.
The title of Control Room could refer to the actual booth where much of the footage takes place, as the producers splice together footage from the war, talk shows, and press conferences to create the channel's coverage. I have a feeling, however, that it actually refers to the power relationships that take place on and off camera through the news. Al Jazeera is introduced as a network that isn't completely objective, but attempts to spread journalism and freedom of speech through the Middle East. Because of those efforts, it was banned from several countries for criticizing their regimes.
When the war breaks out, however, Control Room follows several staff members to US Central Command. Simultaneously, we watch the Al Jazeera command room staff coordinate their coverage from correspondents in Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra (they were not embedded with the US military). The relationship between the network and the military staff is contentious and wary. The Arab reporters are obviously critical of US actions, while the military's relationship with all the media makes their intentions clear: ranging somewhere between controlled information to outright propaganda.
This could be reduced to a shouting match and press clippings, like a culturally-charged Odd Couple. Indeed, the first meeting of reporter Hassan Ibrahim and Marine Corps Lt. Josh Rushing indicates it might be headed in that direction, as they try to sort out where the bias lies and whether America's aggression is justified. Fortunately, the documentary quickly moves past the justification for war and instead concentrates on the difficult work of warzone reporting.
Al Jazeera draws a lot of flack from the US government for its stance on war reporting--showing the gory details as well as the policy side. Clips of Donald Rumsfeld accusing the network of lies and manipulation rank high on the irony meter, while the producers argue that they are trying to portray war's "human cost." One of the most compelling figures is Rushing, who begins the movie as a PR flack but quickly begins to empathize with Al Jazeera's choices. After the video of captured and executed Marines is shown on Arab television, Rushing is first upset, but then compares those casualties with the Iraqi casualties that were typically broadcast. He's disturbed by his own lack of empathy for "the enemy," and it's a painful moment for soldier and viewer alike.
It's startling to see the war's narrative documented so clearly as the Pentagon feeds it to the waiting reporters at CentCom--and it's not just Al Jazeera's reporters that are upset by it. CNN correspondent Tom Mintier is astonished by the audacity of the military at spinning the Jessica Lynch story as opposed to the storming of Baghdad. Although the documentary doesn't hammer the point home, it's disturbing to remember just how prominent that story was, even over the skepticism of the reporters themselves. Dissatisfaction between the media and the military is palpable--however, you can't help but feel frustrated as the US journalists refuse to challenge the government story. Al Jazeera has its own problems finding good coverage, as producer Samir Khader is shown rejecting crackpots that his own well-meaning but ethically-inexperienced staff has cued up for interviews. Although Al Jazeera is extremely skeptical of the US war narrative (like the demolition of Saddam's statue), they struggle to find a balance between that skepticism and good reporting.
The real emotional center of the movie is the bombing of several Arab news correspondents who were stationed in Baghdad. The US military claims it was accidental, but the network staff are clearly shaken and not convinced. The insinuations of Donald Rumsfeld begin to seem more sinister, and the excuses offered are shaky. Khader is most visibly affected, as he considers the station's options. "We're just a little tiny network," he says. What can they do?
In the end, Control Room should give both journalists and ordinary citizens a lot to think about. Unlike Outfoxed or Farenheit 9/11, it doesn't shout a message, but it is no less incendiary. Its focus on an Arab news network also contains real implications for US networks, where they are getting their stories, and what we should believe. It's a bleak picture of war and freedom of press that I can highly recommend. Control Room makes me wonder about the bubble that our media have created for us, and hope that eventually it will be popped.
01:17 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/documentary x link x 1 comment
In response to my previous post on evolution, I've gotten involved in a couple of discussions on the subject. I've pitched Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker as a introductory text, seeing as how he's an excellent writer and covers the arguments for natural selection very well. In the process, the theory was advanced that Dawkins might be hurting his reputation by his hostility to religion.
I call double standard.
In The Blind Watchmaker, which I have right in front of me, I can't find a single place in which Dawkins actually takes on religion. He does attack specific, flawed religious arguments against evolution, in particular the Argument from Personal Incredulity ("Because I can't think of a possible way for evolution to achieve a given goal, there is no possible way.") and the Irreducible Complexity argument (also known as Intelligent Design). Within this book, however, he doesn't take the next step and imply that the failure of these arguments means that a god does not exist. He simply argues that they have not made successful case against evolution as a scientific theory.
That doesn't mean he hasn't made a strong atheistic case in other places. Take, for example, the following excerpts from an interview with Salon:
Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?
Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of God.
There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.
The whole interview is worth reading, because while Dawkins can be a jerk he's clearly a sharp guy and good at explaining his atheism. But these relevant portions make his view clear: sure, you can believe that the universe and life within it was divinely created. You can believe it was built by cosmic hamsters, too, if you feel like it. But as Dawkins sees things, since there's no direct evidence at all for either of those scenarios, while there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for alternatives that can explain each step of the creation and evolution processes, we can statistically treat both God and cosmic hamsters as null.
This is controversial even with scientists, because it's a very strong hypothesis. The weak form (not weak as in persuasive power, but as in reach) merely states that a god's existence is an unfalsifiable claim, and so science doesn't have anything to do with it. That's likewise perfectly reasonable. They're simply different views of the same problem--Dawkins says the glass is almost certainly empty, while religiously-inclined scientists state that the glass might be full or empty and science can't tell either way, thank you very much.
I'm not trying to take sides on which side is correct. I'm trying to use it to illustrate a bigger point. We're pretty certain that the tooth fairy doesn't exist, and we're positive that there are no cosmic hamsters. Dawkins simply applies the same inductive reasoning to the divine--and frankly, if the dominant cultural position wasn't Christian, no-one would blink at his assertions. What we're seeing here is what I like to call Christian privilege.
If you've read feminists, either published or around the web, or if you hang out with any of the well-educated feminists, you have probably heard of male privilege. It's the concept that being a man in Western society comes with certain invisible advantages, making life easier. For example, men do not usually face the suspicion that they slept their way into a position. Men are often given priority in conversation, because there's an unspoken cultural imperative for women to be silent and defer to male opinion. Likewise, there's a white privilege. Appropriately-named guest writer Angry White Kid at That Colored Fella's Weblog has a few examples.
Privilege can be held by any dominant culture, and it suppresses co-cultures by way of setting the norm. If you'll allow me to sink back into my native Marxism, it's a tool of hegemony. Privileged people aren't aware of their privilege, because they've lived with it all their lives, and it's built into the society. It's "soft" discrimination. However, if you ask someone from a co-culture about the idea, they'll know what you're talking about right away. It can be a real shock as a member of a privileged class to run up against this form of covert discrimination, and very difficult to learn to remedy it.
There is, once you start looking for it, a clear Christian privilege at work in Western society. Our politicians go out of their way to express how religious they are when they're campaigning (and no doubt many of them are sincere). No-one questions a self-professed Christian, but atheists face curiosity and often outright hostility for their views (or, to be technical, absence thereof). Implicitly, we distrust people who can't profess to a "spirituality," and we may assume that there's something missing from their lives. Religion, and more specifically Christianity, is the norm, and we distrust people who deviate from that norm. They do not have the privilege of immediate trustworthiness.
None of this will make fundamentalists re-examine their views. They are too deep into their persecution complex. But for rational, liberal Christians who consider themselves open-minded, it can be helpful to consider the many ways your life is easier because of your religion. When most reasoning people, religious or not, consider science and faith to be separate, it would be a shame to miss a good science book like Dawkins just because his views on faith disagree with yours.
16:44 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 1 comment
There's Evil in My Chair (apologies to John Popper and fafblog)
So I get back from lunch an look who decided to drop in! "Well, hello Evil!" I says. "How're things?"
"Take a look!" Evil says, an we're off onna worldwide tour of Evil! There's torture an bombs an pollution an all kindsa of crazy stuff. "Very nice," I tell Evil.
"Thanks," he says. "What have you been up to?"
"Not so much," I say. I show him a paper airplane I made, an he tries to claw my throat out through my spine. We're gonna have to work on this relationship.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/micro x link x 0 comments
Lunch in the Golden Triangle: The Perfect Pita
I'm very good at disliking things, but it's a symptom of my cynicism that I nitpick even my favorites. So when I ate at the Perfect Pita (20th street between K and L) and enjoyed the meal, I thought it might be appropriate to get a second opinion. The Nerdlet joined me in DC today to give it a second shot. We agree: it's good food, if a little overly-spicy.
The Perfect Pita offers hot and cold sandwiches, mini pizzas-on-a-pita, and a collection of hummus-related side dishes. On my first visit I tried the stead-and-chicken pita, which was good, but a little salty. The TCB chicken (which contains chicken, bacon, ranch dressing, lettuce and tomato) is also very salty, but that's pretty much par for the course when you order a sandwich with bacon. There's a fair amount of vegetarian options available--Belle ordered a falafel sandwich. Oddly, the Perfect Pita doesn't offer fountain drinks. It's all bottled Snapple, a few other teas, and an assortment of 20oz Cokes.
Basically, the food is a decent sandwich joint put onto the house pitas. The bread is much lighter than other pitas I've had. It's almost more like a tortilla, but it's very good and the dressings inside the sandwiches don't leak through it. The insides themselves aren't terribly distinctive (the chicken and steak may be pre-prepared), but they are very strongly spiced and the vegetables seem fresh. Belle felt that the falafel was nicely cohesive but dry, and I thought it had a spicy kick that I liked very much. The meal isn't terribly expensive: two people ate for less than $13, and we were both full when we finished.
There's one oddity: the restaurant is a split-level affair crammed in between a bank and a gym, so it's a little cramped downstairs. I guess they wanted to get the most out of the space, because there are no chairs, but the upper level has counters around the edge for customers to stand and eat. Also, the web site says that you can get the sandwiches in Whole Foods stores as well, in case you want to try it out that way. I think it's probably much better fresh and hot, but I'm crazy like that.
The bottom line is that I can recommend The Perfect Pita as a good office lunch. It's cheap, the flavors are simple and strong, and they're easy to carry around. Just don't expect to sit down and have a meal without bringing your own chair.
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/golden_triangle x link x 0 comments
Lunch in the Golden Triangle: Cozy Cafe, L Street
Bubble tea, like silly putty and the smell of WD-40, is one of life's unexplainable pleasures. If there is a good reason that adding tapioca bubbles to ordinary drinks makes them better, I have yet to hear it. But nevertheless, I'm incapable of resisting its soggy siren lure.
Unfortunately, I'll have no trouble resisting Cozy Cafe, the first place I've seen that offered bubble tea in the Golden Triangle. I ordered the Thai tea and a tuna melt. It was a bad sign from the start when the former was made in front of me from a mix in a blender. Now, I'm not a drink purist--I'll drink chai that's made from a box, and I consume diet sodas like nobody's business--but I like the illusion with my tea that at some point actual leaves and boiling water were involved. It doesn't bode well when the person behind the counter reaches for a jar of what looks like particularly extravagant Crystal Light. I'm also not really comfortable with the blender. Maybe it's a regional difference, but every other place I've had bubble tea (from Virginia and New York City to Shanghai and Xi'An) it has always been poured over ice, like an iced coffee. The end result from Cozy Cafe was something like a Slurpee both in consistency and faithfulness to the original flavor.
No doubt the poor showing by the beverage side of the meal predisposed me to be critical of the sandwich, but it was likewise a pretty poor showing. You don't have to go overboard with tuna salad, melt or no, but some things are traditional. Celery larger than finely puree'd specks are important (it lends a little crunch to what can be a sloppy and textureless meal). Onions are also generally acceptable. More innovative elements like carrots and spices are optional, but always a nice touch. Today's tuna melt was plainly just tuna, mayo, and cheese. It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't very good. For a small sandwich on a kaiser roll that costs $5, I expected a little bit more.
The end result is disappointing, and I'm afraid Cozy Cafe may not be around long enough to improve. In a move I usually consider the kiss of death in this area, they don't take any kind of debit or credit cards. Don't bother running to the ATM--instead, bring your own bubbles and grab a sandwich elsewhere. Cozy Cafe isn't worth the trouble.
15:54 x Thomas x /dc/golden_triangle x link x 1 comment
Every time I hear the word carnival, I think of a song off the Amores Perros soundtrack with the same name. Regardless of that irresistable latin beat, carnival in this case refers to a couple of fine online group meetings. First, my entry on Defending Dawkins has been included in this month's Carnival of the Godless and there are several other excellent pieces there as well. I'd be remiss in my duty if I also didn't point you to the 13th Skeptic's Circle, which unfortunately marks the departure of St. Nate as both host and blogger. I'm hoping he returns soon. Finally, the Tangled Bank and the Grand Rounds, carnivals for scientists and surgeons respectively, will be at Pharyngula next week. Always interesting reading from the experts.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 0 comments
Note: I'm posting this for archival purposes--I want to have a copy available without having to search for it. Feel free to read it, though--I think this is Thompson writing at the top of his game, even though it's only ten years old. You can feel the bizarre mix of rage and affection that made his writing so potent.
Also, please note that the last section ("Kicking Nixon While He Was Up") is an excerpt from On the Campaign Trail, the first chapter if I remember correctly.
(Rolling Stone, Jun 16, 1994)
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK
DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:
NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
--REVELATION 18:2
Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all the way to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.
Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. Hhe was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP
It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....
At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.
Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"
05:17 x Thomas x /journalism/gonzo x link x 1 comment
It's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses
The next item on the list is sunscreen. Check! says the Nerdlet, holding up a bottle of SPF 190 somewhat distastefully.
We are going to the beach! It is the first time I have been on vacation in quite a while. I will be in North Carolina until Monday, and since we're camping I probably won't have any kind of trustworthy internet access. I don't think withdrawal will hit until after a week, so I should be fine.
Swim trunks? We both eye the lime-green-and-purple shorts I've packed.
Wish me luck!
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 0 comments
Briefly, across the span of nanoseconds, I was tempted to write about the new editorial direction over at 1up.com. But honestly, how much can I beat up on Jane Pinckard without boring all of us, incluuding me? I mean, I can sum up everything that needs to be said in three points, namely: A) she's a hack who really needs to take some basic journalism classes, B) she got her 15 minutes from using a video game as a sex toy, and C) she hasn't done anything particularly interesting since. Fair enough, if a bit opinionated, right? I'm not really sure how I feel about B), actually, because as a feminist I'm torn between applauding the mature presentation of a non-submissive female sexuality, and a nagging contempt for "Rez Vibrator Article" as a resume item.
Regardless, it isn't something I feel like writing. I tend to swing between a few poles as to my focus, with obsessive interest that waxes and wanes. Right now I'm caught between words and music, both my own and those of others. The pendulum will return to gaming at some point, just as I'm sure it will make its way to language/culture study, politics, and tech, but right now it's just a little hard to care. I considered, at one point, figuring out a way to use this to track my cyclical interests, but that's a bit close to "Dear Internet, will you be my friend?" And it's not like you can't see the one-two-three shot of post categories that I hit when I'm in the right mood.
Earlier this week I put up a short note about how I'd bought HST's The Great Shark Hunt. I've been reading one or two stories every night, before I fall asleep. I don't think it would be exaggerating to say that Thompson changed the direction I wanted to go in life. I read his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 when I was in high school, and I enjoyed it but didn't entirely understand. A few years later, while I was an undergrad, I re-read it and felt like I'd taken a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. This was journalism that caught fire, and Thompson just kept pouring on the gasoline. I understand now that this is not an uncommon reaction, although I certainly didn't see it enough in my peers at college. If you ask me, On the Campaign Trail should be required reading for anyone leaving school with a Communication or Journalism degree.
There is a misconception by those who have only read (or watched, the poor fools) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Certainly, it's an accurate picture of HST, who was wild, unreliable, and drug-fuelled when sent to cover even the most mundane stories (perhaps more so). But it leaves readers with an image of Thompson as a fine caricaturist and stylist, not a serious journalist. Although it is woefully underexposed, his Hell's Angels shows a careful, observant reporter who actually bought a motorcycle and rode with the Angels for months (ending the book when they turn on him and beat him to a bloody pulp). Thompson exposed their social structure (inside and outside of the gang), their odd beliefs, their customs and rituals, and other minutia with the detailed eye of an anthropologist. Likewise, the opening stories in The Great Shark Hunt are straight journalistic reports that he filed at a newspaper in Kentucky, but his narrative touches are just gloss over undeniably solid reporting (the piece on racism in post-integration Louisville should be a model for op-ed writers everywhere).
Of course, Thompson was nothing if not uneven as he began to reach out toward Gonzo. "Fear And Loathing At The Super Bowl" is muddled and rambling, although my own disinterest in the subject matter doesn't help. Parts of On the Campaign Trail tend to get skipped, particularly his long transcriptions of conversations regarding the Democratic convention that are still confusing if you're not as big a political junkie as he was. But the real secret of Thompson's writing is not, as many of his pretenders would claim, that it is all about him. That may be true for his fiction, but in his non-fiction HST clearly loved his subjects--even the ones, like Nixon, that he loathed.
And now, of course, his ashes will be shot out of a cannon. Moment of silence for that, please. Just the way he wanted it.
I think where I'm taking this is a discussion of why I write, and what I want to do with it. I'm not actively published at a newspaper right now, but I still consider myself a journalist. I do not, however, consider what I do here to be "journalism." I know it's old-fashioned, but I agree with the sentiments of Michele at A Small Victory, when she discusses her goals as a writer and defines the end success as being published and paid. Of course, I've been published and paid before, but I empathize. I write because I have to--it's just a part of my makeup. If I don't touch a keyboard for a certain amount of time, I start to get a little antsy. That's fine for a quick fix, but the real aim is to write something that matters. There are many ways to be relevant, but one of them is to make it through the maze of publishing. Putting something on the web is writing, but it's not work, if that makes any sense. I want it to be work.
And once I'm there, like HST, I want to use journalism not just as a way to tell you what's happening but to explain why and how. As his early work demonstrates, even as an objective reporter it is possible to create progress. Those who would burn the straw man of journalism's decline, even as they stand up crying Me! Me!, fail to understand the value of that objectivity. Shining an unbiased light into the darkness forces us to confront it.
I am restless. And starting to bore myself.
Look! Jesus!
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/writing/career x link x 0 comments
The Late Mr. Xiang's Lunch Break
His office staff watching from the 12th floor, Mr. Xiang sets out to prove, once again, that his iron stomach can digest anything. On previous occasions, he has eaten canned grubs, exotic cheeses, goat, yoghurt past the sell-by date, ocean oysters, prairie oysters, skunk, cow tongue, cow brain, bull pizzle, possum, Chicken McNuggets, steak tartare, hamster tartare, escargot, hamster flambe, baked Alaska, rooster feet, ox whisker, shark fin, and (on one notorious occasion) 50 hard boiled eggs, among others. This week, he promised his office staff that if sales exceeded the previous month's record, he would surprise them yet again. The staff, who have become grizzled veterans, agreed on the single condition that they be allowed to pick the challenge. Then, with gusto, they set out to finally make Mr. Xiang sick.
So now Mr. Xiang, the moment of truth upon him, steps up to one of the district's finest sidewalk vendors, right outside and across the street from the office window where his staff gapes impatiently, and orders a foot-long hot dog with extra relish. The vendor, a well-known character by the name of Smelly Melvin, takes payment in grimy, grease-covered hands and smiles widely with both of his teeth as he gives Mr. Xiang a steaming frank on a cold, stale bun.
The day is won! Perhaps they thought this would stop Mr. Xiang, but his appetite is invincible. He tosses the now-empty wrapper into the trash can and considers ordering another hot dog. No, he thinks as a strolls nonchalantly onto the crosswalk. Even he can only take so much. Looking up, he catches sight of the staff members still waiting at the window, screaming and yelling behind the soundproof glass. They are waving to him wildly and pointing, which Mr. Xiang thinks is overkill even for such a magnificent feat as Mr. Xiang's lunch break. Ridiculous, he thinks as he crosses the center lane, cars honking madly all around him. They act as though a mere hot dog could kill him!
No. That would be the bus.
16:33 x Thomas x /fiction/micro x link x 1 comment
I'm convinced that Roger Ebert must have more fun at his job than anyone else on earth. It's not that he has a great job, although watching movies for a living is kinda spiffy, but the way he so obviously enjoys writing about them is amazing--Ebert does not get enough credit for his gentle, conversational writing style. Check out a few lines from this review of the Australian zombie film, Undead:
But I digress. Rene hits a traffic jam on the road out of town, and meets a bush pilot named Wayne (Rob Jenkins) and his girlfriend Sallyanne (Lisa Cunningham), who was runner-up to Miss Catch of the Day, which means, I guess, you throw her back in. Sallyanne is preggers, so that she can do what all pregnant women in the movies and few pregnant women in life do, and hold her stomach with both hands most of the time. There is also a cop named Harrison (Dirk Hunter), who if you ask me should be named Dirk and played by Harrison Hunter, as Dirk is a better name than Harrison for a cop whose vocabulary consists of four-letter words and linking words.
They wander off the road and into the company of a local gun nut and survivalist named Marion (Mungo McKay), who if you ask me should be named Mungo and played by Marion McKay, as Mungo is a better name than Marion for a guy who has three shotguns yoked together so he can blast a zombie in two and leave its hips and legs lurching around with its bare spine sticking up in the air. For him, every shot is a trick shot; he'll throw two handguns into the air, kill a couple of zombies with a shotgun, and drop the shotgun in time to catch the handguns on the way down and kill some more.
Marion/Mungo hustles them all into his concrete-and-steel underground safe room, where their problems seem to be over until Marion announces, "There is no food or water." He didn't think of everything. Meanwhile, on the surface, the nature of the attack has changed, and some actual aliens appear. Who they are and what they want is a little unclear; I am not even absolutely certain if they were responsible for the meteorite attack that turned people into zombies, or have arrived shortly afterward by coincidence, making this the busiest day in local history, especially if you include the Miss Catch of the Day pageant.
I alternate between being dumbfounded by the comfortable, meandering cleverness of that review, and wondering how Ebert ever got the job in the first place with a writing style like that.
13:02 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/meta x link x 1 comment
Lunch in the Golden Triangle: Lawsons Deli on 18th
Perhaps you have not had the dubious pleasure of working in DC's "Golden Triangle," or as DCist has been known to call it, "non-profit hell." I'm told that the rest of the town can be a fun place to hang out, party, and do whatever else it is that the misbegotten twenty-somethings of my generation do when they're not drinking heavily or working for the Heritage Foundation (not that I'm bitter about it). Unfortunately, the Bank is located firmly in the Golden Triangle, and so my primary experiences in DC have been that it's a bit stuffy and goes to bed at 7pm. It's also populated primarily by chain fast food joints, incredibly expensive sit-down restaurants, and Starbucks (one on every block! no kidding!).
But like my slanted view of the nightlife, that's not entirely true: there are some smaller eateries scattered around the Triangle that are quite good. Even though places like Au Bon Pain, Quiznos, and Potbelly's may offer a pretty good bank-for-the-buck, there's still a little twinge of anarchist in me that shudders when I eat there. So this is the first of a series that will chronicle my gradual attempts, over the next year or so, to find good places for the average young (read: not making big money yet) DC professional to do lunch in the Triangle. Of course, I'll also write about the terrible ones, because it's more fun to write about bad food.
First up is Lawson's Deli, on I St between 17th and 18th (I don't know why they call it Lawsons Deli on 18th, unless they moved at some point). I had the Tuscanini, which is a panini sandwich with roast beef, cheddar, fried onions, and a vinaigrette sauce. It's roughly an analog to the Quiznos sandwich I like, the Black Angus, and about the same price (with chips and a drink it came in at just over $10, but they have a combo special on one panini each day that's only $8). What really stood out for me was that the roast beef was rare. It must have been completely uncooked when they put it on the grill, because the outsides were nice and brown but the under the bread was bloody and pink. I personally like that, but I'm sure it makes a lot of other people squeamish. The bread is a crisp white roll, similar to Bread Line's. The vinaigrette was good, but very sweet, and the onions had a nice flavor. However, the cheese was very thin and didn't have a strong taste--at a deli I expect more, and it's the kind of sandwich that really could have used a big chunk of sharp cheddar. All in all, I'd rate it a decent meal, but not a spectacular one.
The other options were along the same lines. The other hot sandwiches looked very good, but the cold-cut offerings were pre-packaged, and I don't like to see that when I go to eat. It makes me wonder how long they've been sitting there. The salad bar looked like a decent offering, not too much variety but the lettuce was fresh. There was a vegetarian panini, so meatless diners will find they have a couple of choices at least. Lastly, although there were a lot of drinks in the cooler, they were pretty much the same old thing: Snapple, Arizona, bottled water, Coke. I'd like to see some really oddball beverages at these joints.
Final decision: Lawson's is a good option if Bread Line is too expensive or the lines are too long, but the actual food is only average. Consider this a meal, but not a treat.
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/golden_triangle x link x 0 comments
Found at a used book store yesterday, but in hardback, well-worn.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/gonzo x link x 0 comments
Me: I just don't understand why we're still debating evolution. Shouldn't we have bred out the ignorant people by now?
Her: Well, these things are all just theories...
This is an educated, intelligent woman who has gone to journalism school, worked in law, and is clearly no raving right winger. Just a theory?
We are doomed.
14:59 x Thomas x /science/creationism/spread x link x 1 comment
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Apply Here
Wow. If only I had no self-respect at all.
-The Staff Writer works closely with all departments at Heritage to learn about current projects, policy initiatives; and to grasp implications for donor base.
-He or she then communicate Heritage’s work in a compelling manner to different donor audiences (i.e. individuals, corporations, foundations, etc.)
Education: B.A. in Journalism, English, or related degree. Graduate degree preferred. Experience: Established writer with at least 3 years of experience; experience in fundraising and or journalism (feature writing) preferred.
Please send an email for a fuller job description.
Translation: help the poor little Scaife-financed conservative propaganda apparatus beg for money. Good pay, great benefits, loss of soul may be necessary.
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/wingnuts/heritage x link x 0 comments
15:39 x Thomas x /music/tools/update x link x 1 comment
I have just spent an hour or so playing with new audio toys. Krystal is a lot of fun, and it actually runs VST plugins (a sore spot with Audacity). This means I can have access to virtual synths and filters that I could never justify buying in hardware. Ditto for the Jesusonic, the blasphemously-named but incredibly versatile multi-effects simulator from the same guys who created Winamp. I haven't had a chance to really get down and experiment with it, but it basically gives you fine access to the equivalent of a pedalboard, complete with custom-built stompboxes, assuming you're willing to do some automation work and hook a laptop into your signal chain. That idea got me playing around again with Hammerhead, the great freeware drum machine.
I don't intend to exploit any of these tools to their full potential.
Earlier today I wrote about how empowering it is to have such powerful studio tools for practically free. As a writer and a bit of a technophiliac, the thought makes me giddy--a part of me can't wait to hook the bass up to a whole set of midi-controlled filters and start playing "In The Hall Of The Mountain King." The catch to all that power is that it can be a distraction. I've owned hardware multieffects units before, and it's possible to spend weeks just twiddling with the parameters of a few patches, never really being satisfied.
My current philosophy of music says that the fewer options I have, the better I can exploit them. I want the maximum level of flexibility with the least amount of complexity. I formed a lot of this mindset when I was playing live--I had a multieffects unit, which I then replaced with an ingenious but complex pedalboard. Both were too complicated onstage, and there was too strong a possibility that A) something would go hideously wrong and kill the whole signal chain, or B) a mistake would throw the whole thing into confusion, and I'd end up using a clean tone for everything anyway. Singing and playing bass is hard enough without doing a tap-dance to try to fix the result of a badly-aimed kick.
Nowadays, I use only two pedals. One is a 3-channel preamp, which does my clean/thick/distorted sounds. The other is my looper, incorporating a whole set of its own headaches. I miss the other sonic possibilities from my pedal collection (chorus and envelope are most tempting), but keeping it simple has forced me to be a better player. For example, where you play on a bass can have a dramatic effect on the sound. Playing back by the bridge with a little bit of a bend in the note can mimic an envelope for my purposes, and the sound is in my hands instead of on the floor. Moving up on the neck or palm-muting achieves the opposite--a thick, bassier tone with less growl. Combining greater control of my technique with a simpler range of effects (albeit ones that I know inside and out) lets me intuitively build my sonic palette, and I never have to stop the performance to turn a knob or press a button--very useful when building, layering, or exiting loops.
This is not to say that I'm against technology in music. I have unlimited respect for people who have learned to play a studio, as it were. The things a clever engineer can do amaze me, as my admiration for Trent Reznor and Rick Rubin shows. I'm also fascinated by bands like Muse that have incredibly complicated effect racks controlled by midi boards--but they have lots of money and people to figure those connections out for them. They make different music than I do. My vision as an experimental bassist is the equivalent of an electric blues guitarist--dirty, chunky Rock produced by one person. I shouldn't need more than some overdrive and a little EQ to pull that off, and I like the challenge that comes with restriction.
I certainly plan to use the tools I've got. If it records as well as it looks, Krystal will replace Audacity as my default studio. I may mess with Jesusonic for overdubs of sounds I can't create in analog. Just as the Ministry fans have hoped, I'm already thinking of ways to use Hammerhead live, converting the looper back to a delay and creating drum patterns instead of sampling my bass percussion. But these are just added compositional tools, and if they conflict with my vision or my comfort zone I'll toss them right back out. Music should be about the songs, not about the process.
Besides, if I take the time to sit down and worry about my tone again, I'll never get anything written. I'd rather be a musician with an armful of clumsy originals than a technician with a flawless orchestration applied to nothing in particular.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
"It's me ma's. She thinks I'm having it cleaned."*
While we're on the topic of music, I saw this note on MusicThing the other day about building a home studio for less than $50. The Thing notes that, assuming you already own a decent computer (one that can see this web site), you probably already have most of what's necessary to record good music. Personally, I find that to be incredibly empowering.
I'll admit right up front that I'm a terrible amateur producer. I don't know the tools very well, I never balance the vocals correctly against the instruments, and I overcompress like crazy. My recording attempts sound like a guy who tossed something together as fast as he could, and there's a good reason for that. But that doesn't mean that it's not possible to put together something really incredible with the equipment I've got--namely, myself, a bass, some pedals, a cheap vocal mic, and an eight-year-old laptop with a buggy sound card. The software I use (Audacity) is free, and I understand there's even better stuff (Krystal) out there for a tiny amount of money (assuming that you're using it for commercial purposes).
There are an awful lot of classic rock albums we now regard as timeless that were done on a four-track tape recorder, where finished portions would have to be "bounced" onto other tracks to make room for more vocals or instruments. The Beatles and the Boss both made great music this way, but you don't have to--Audacity lets you record as many tracks as you want, move bits around, take out parts you don't like... It's more than enough to put together a demo, at least. I'll tell you a secret: only the snobs care if you did it with great technique and expensive equipment, and they won't like your music anyway. My old band got a pretty good CD recorded in my drummer's basement using an old ADAT machine, cheap mics, and a shower for reverb. One of the best albums I've ever heard, the Black Keys' Rubber Factory was, in fact, recorded in a rubber factory using whatever they could get their hands on. It is dirty and imperfect and it rocks like nobody's business.
The only real barriers are time and ambition. It takes time to learn, and it takes ambition to stick with it. It's become much harder to find excuses for my own lack of productivity since I realized that.
* A classic line from The Committments, when the band's manager pawns an old stuffed bird in exchange for a drum kit.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
So they are making a Left Behind game. They are making a Left Behind game. They are making a Left Behind game.
No matter how I say that, it still reaches my ears like great Cthulhu ripping his way through the subcontinental shelf. The End is Near.
They Are Making A Left Behind Game.
of course, the usual suspects are thrilled. I think we all know how I feel about it. But you know, I'm a good Liberal and I support the right to to make crazed religious games based on fundamentalist misconceptions. Just don't expect me to leave it unmocked. We should note, first of all, that as much as Left Behind Games wants it to be the case, this is not the first "god game." That honor would have to go to Populous, followed by a long line of great sacreligious entertainment. There's also tongue-in-cheek variants on the theme--I remember enjoying 3DO's buggy FPS "Requiem: Avenging Angel" in high school, which featured abilities like "turn enemies into pillars of salt" and "summon plague of locusts." Every time it crashed to the desktop, you could blame Satan--or DirectX, which at version 6 was just starting to act like an actual API and not a hideous collection of error messages ("I am Legion, General Protection Fault at 0x000800A3.").
There's been an issue bothering me since I read the New Gamer's review of God of War. It points out that GoW is a dark game about an anti-hero, and as such contains atrocities committed by the main character. Movies and books are filled with that kind of theme, but in games, where you control the hero... well, that makes me think. At what point would I be unwilling to do what a game asks me to do? I couldn't bring myself to watch Kill Bill 2 after the first one nearly made me sick--would it be possible for me to reach a point in a game where I would be unable to advance because of my own ethical concerns? The Garth Ennis-scripted Punisher game comes to mind, with its graphic torture mini-games. I just don't know if I could play that, personally, and I'm a heathen commie who hates freedom.
Imagine the difficulties facing an ultraconservative Christian who sits down to play Left Behind. First, don't make it run on a Mac. They use that "Darwin" kernel, and we all know how sinful evolution is. Then, to fulfill your "family values" the game can't contain violence or sex. It can't ask you to make choices that would lead away from dogma--after all, surely the designers shouldn't be placing temptation in your path. In fact, given the behavior of Christians like James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, we might ask what kind of difficulty curve the game should have. Is it possible to fail in a game based on immutable prophesy? Does that imply the fallibility of God?
If you play from a typical RTS view, are you taking the role of God? How do you think He feels about that, kids?
I am assuming, asking these questions, that the intended audience will even think for a moment about the implications of their faith, and of course they won't. Part of the fundamentalist faith is a belief that questions themselves are bad. The unexamined life is thereby made worth living--indeed, it's exalted.
18:44 x Thomas x /gaming/society/religion x link x 1 comment
Last week I was unable to see Land of the Dead, the fourth of George A. Romero's critically-acclaimed (and socially-aware) epics. This week I intend to remedy that fact, because while I love horror movies of all shapes, sizes, antagonists, and qualities, I particularly love the humble zombie.
The greatest horror movie villains have personified an aspect of the unknown, or have exaggerated the slightly creepy to excess. Silence of the Lambs puts a thin patina of rationalism over the sick uncertainty of the insane. Freddy Krueger is every bizarre, unexplainable nightmare you've ever had--and the early Nightmare on Elm Street movies play this in a way that later, campier films betrayed. Vampires have long been exposed as metaphors for libido and sexuality. Jaws stands in for bestial Nature. The recent influx of Japanese and Japan-influenced ghost stories (The Ring, The Grudge, or Dark Water) mix malevolence with a Lovecraft-like fear of What Lies Beyond.
Common to both the greats and to lesser aspirants (Darkness Falls, Wishmaster, Gigli) is a specific type of conflict. They express Man (or Woman) against Monster. Sometimes, as in slasher films, the Monster is also a Man. In Audition and Misery, it's a Woman (a whole topic for another day--or week). The exact nature of the Monster can vary, but it is almost always singular. Monsters that attack in the plural can still usually be dealt with as a distinct group--the Gremlins, Ghoulies, or Them! are still fundamentally actors within the plot. They are characters that have their motivations and react to the actions of the protagonists.
The undead are a unique creation (and they are a creation of Hollywood, as any informed person is painfully aware of the discrepancies between movie zombies and honest-to-Baron-Samedi-raised-by-a-houngan-and-set-to-work Voudoun zombies) because they don't fall into that role. I propose that zombies are not so much distinct monsters as they are an extension of a newly-dangerous environment. Whereas even automatons like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers are variables, zombies are a constant. Zombie movies, especially the good ones, don't focus on the zombies themselves as much as they focus on the people who have been placed in a zombie-fied environment.
For example, take 28 Days Later, which is not technically a zombie movie but fills the role of a condensed homage to the original Romero trilogy. At no point in the movie do we ask ourselves what the "undead" will do--they simply attack and infect anything within reach. Our attention is always focused on the human actors of the plot. Where will they go? Are the people they've met trustworthy? Are they themselves trustworthy? Who is betrayed and who is the betrayer? 28, like the best undead flicks, is really about people who are placed in a dangerous environment and not about the monsters themselves. The heart of its conflict could be expressed just as easily if the main characters were dropped into the middle of a jungle, or indeed, a war.
Romero has always played with this dynamic in his films. Night of the Living Dead is probably its purest expression, centering as it does on strangers thrown together in a farmhouse against the undead hordes. With Dawn of the Dead he added a social subtext about capitalism, and the zombies started to differentiate themselves more clearly. Day of the Dead continued that trend: both of the later movies feature walking dead that are clearly ex-members of society. Instead of simply wearing rags, there are zombie cheerleaders, businessmen, construction workers, housewives, and more. The third Dead movie also picked out a single zombie (I believe his name was "Bub") to treat as a character apart from the rest of the horde. Despite these nods to reality, the movies remained firmly focused on the living, despite their titles.
I'm curious to see what Land of the Dead will add to the mythos, because I understand that Romero has again used zombies as both environment and agent. I'm likewise interested to see the evolution of his Socialist undercurrents. Perhaps the greatest irony of zombie films is not their niche within horror movies, but that they are often smart movies about brainless subjects--both the living, and the undead.
19:28 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/horror/zombies x link x 1 comment
Last week someone posted a flyer all around the main headquarters of the Bank. It read:
What if you knew when the Berlin Wall would collapse? Would you be there?
What if you knew when the Chinese Communist Party would fall?
Would you be there?
Come be a part of the force that's ending the Communist Party!
I managed to get a copy before we tore them all down, and I'm staring at the second page now. It's a long rant on how my old friends, the Epoch Times, and their Nine Commentaries have "shocked all Chinese people around the world."
Where to begin?
First of all, I was at the panel the Epoch Times held to celebrate the release of their Nine Commentaries. It was all in Mandarin and the translation was sketchy, but I gathered enough to conclude that these commentaries are not anything terribly "shocking." They ranged from the relatively obvious (the Communists are bad people who torture dissidents and engage in suppression of free speech) to the insane ("The Communist Party Opposes Nature"). I was perhaps a bit kind in the article that resulted from the panel, because they were calmer in person, and because my editor is a big fan. I wrote that the commentaries were controversial, which they are, and noted that they had sparked political discussion, because (at least in that room) they had.
Still, the Commentaries are not really "news," and unless I have drastically misread the situation they are not--as this press release claims--the trigger for massive withdrawals and boycotts eventually leading to the downfall of the Communist Party. Run a search on Google News for Chinese demonstrations, and you'll find plenty of articles about the recent Japanese textbook contraversy, but the only people writing about this Communist exodus are employed by the Epoch Times--and as I hope you've realized, they're not exactly acting sans agenda. The paper claims that over a million Chinese have left the party, but can we believe them? I'm not sure. Where are these Chinese located? Are they actually on the mainland, where the epochtimes.com website has been blocked and they would have to find a way around it? Or are they overseas and Taiwanese citizens? Have that many people actually signed, or is the Epoch Times just counting hits to its Nine Commentaries website? And how many of them are just jokes? The Internet is not exactly a secured area, after all. I am not one to claim that the American media is perfect or follows every story that it should, but riots and demonstrations against the last serious communist state? That would be news. The lack of any coverage is damning.
So why write about this flyer today? Well, in a strange kind of way, the Epoch Times fascinates me. I can't say they're a cult, because they have a point about China's atrocities. But their hyperbole is so strong, and their view of events is so clearly unhinged from my own perceptions, that they create a kind of cognitive dissonance, and I don't see that very often. See, when I talk to friends and acquaintences with connections overseas, none of them can verify the stories in the Epoch Times. Their exact reaction often depends on how far from the country they are--second-generation Americans with Chinese relatives are almost embarrassed by the anti-Communist movement (probably because they don't know anything about it, but they're assumed to be experts by random Americans due to prejudice). Those with closer ties to the Middle Kingdom are well aware of China's dictatorial tendencies--my ex-girlfriend told me stories about regular TV censorship and media suppression, but admitted that it wasn't considered a real issue. This matches pretty closely with my own experience in China, which indicated that the average person fully understands how corrupt and abusive their government is. They just don't really pay much attention to it. Those who want more information find ways around the Internet blockages or the print and television censorship, because the Chinese (like most of us, I suspect) are deeply pragmatic and creative when they need to be. The rest just go about their daily lives.
I think, when it all boils down, the fact that remains is that China has always been corrupt. The Epoch Times believes that this corruption is new, stating that people are "shocked to find out how much they have been brainwashed by the CCP." But for a group that wants to revive the "traditional" Chinese culture replaced by Communism, they seem to have missed the obvious themes present in almost all of ancient China's literature and history. For as far back as we can trace, scholars and dissidents in China found themselves under a strong, abusive central government--from Qin Shi Huang to Cheng Kai Shek. They published subversive poetry, spoke out when they could, and worked the system when they couldn't. Everyone in the country evolved an understanding of maneuvering through the graft as best they could, and that tradition that continues today. It is not a coincidence that China has modern issues with intellectual property rights and a complicated political dance with Taiwan.
I don't want to say that the Epoch Times should stop their work. The human rights abuses of the PRC are egregious, and the country still has a lot of work to do in development. I admire people greatly who take part in those struggles, and I support the ideal of open government in a democratic China. But at the same time, it is important to take a careful look at their arguments and their methods. The Chinese Communist Party itself started as a movement that was brutally suppressed and hounded by the then-ruling Nationalist Party, who had themselves captured power in a military coup. I think we need to be wary of revolutionaries who play fast and loose with the truth. We've seen what happens when they gain power.
meet the new boss
same as the old boss
19:53 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/democracy x link x 1 comment
NGJ: The Economics of Used Games
As I noted below, I'm planning on doing freelance work while the Bank has retained me for another year. Freelance is primarily difficult for two reasons: motivation and sales. The former has to be present at every step of the way, and the latter determines what you will write and who you can sell it to, both of which are stressful.
In the past, although I've technically worked freelance, my primary experience has been as a stringer, so I knew with confidence what my editor would and wouldn't buy, and I was often given assignments (I had a semi-specific "beat," which helped). It's really disorienting being cast off into the wild, not sure what to write or where it can be published. I don't like it, and I tip my hat to those who do it successfully. As you may have guessed from my content, I have a tendency to take on a million personal projects and finish 3 of them, so I'll need to improve my discipline.
However, I had an idea last night for a piece and some of you might be able to help (crickets chirp). I want to do research and eventually draw conclusions about the economics of the used game market(s). Clearly, it seems to me, there's the underground eBay/trading market and there's the corporate Gamestop/EB-run market. But what's the relationship between these two? To what pressures is the former reacting? For the latter, what influences the prices set at each store, and at what level are those prices decided? Although the institutional game market theoretically reacts to supply and demand, are there other forces at work? There are a lot of questions here that I'd like to see answered--and I'm guessing others might be curious as well.
To that extent, I plan (at some point) to start tracking a small set of newly-released games, their reviews and sales figures, and their new and used prices in each market. With this information over a period of months, it should be possible to make some general observations about the market. I also want to interview the people responsible for setting prices at the company, possibly retrieving information on the margins and financial rewards of the used vs. new sales role.
This is a long-term project, but it's one I think is marketable to a tech mag (Next Generation or Wired would be my targets) or a few mainstream news sources. But perhaps you can help: is there anything I'm forgetting? If you have access to this kind of information, or can offer insight into investigative directions I might not be considering, I'd appreciate that help. Please visit the comments or send me a note to let me know.
12:36 x Thomas x /gaming/media x link x 1 comment
I do all of my writing in Notepad, and have done so for years. This is so that formatting will not distract me, and theoretically I am forced to write in a more clear voice without the assistance of tricks like bold and italics.
Of course, now I am writing my work in Notepad with HTML so it can be posted here. For this reason, I like to think that I die a little more inside whenever I use those insidious tags, but it doesn't stop me. I may be getting spoiled.
Just in case you wanted to know.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/style x link x 0 comments
I have just sent off my contract to be signed for a year here at the Bank. It makes me nervous to sign a piece of paper placing me anywhere for a solid year, but it comes with benefits (go health insurance!) and job security, so I'll deal. In the meantime, I'm working on getting writing work within the Bank, as well as considering freelance jobs to keep up my journalist street cred (Sy Hersh threatened to cut me up, man).
The renewal comes with a new ID card. Obviously, I won't show it to you, but I wish I'd gotten my hair trimmed first.
Signing the new contract and applying for my benefits required a lot of forms that weren't necessary when I was short-term. This means I have become aware of a lot of policies that are new to me, and in some cases quite interesting. For example, the Bank recognizes "Domestic Partners" of either sex as a "spouse" for insurance and other perks. That's very progressive of them, but I wondered how they classify a Domestic Partner when most of the US doesn't offer marriage/civil union options to non-heterosexual partnerships. A little digging around the HR site shows that the Bank requires a 12-month cohabitation, as well as some evidence of financial interdependence, including:
In unrelated news, Internet access at home is (how shall we put this) completely dead, thanks to the competent and friendly service of Cox Internet. I resort to checking my e-mail on the weekends at Panera. Just in case anyone decides to send me an urgent note (not bloody likely).
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/experience/hr x link x 0 comments
