The Breaking Time

All Tomorrows: Sovereign Bleak

I should have posted this earlier this week, when it went up, but the political season's heating up in Asheville and my job has kept me quite busy. This is happy news though. After a long, work-induced hiatus, I've returned to the Coilhouse blog with a piece close to my heart, on how the vision of a dark tomorrow became the norm, and some of the writers who made that happen.

A main reason this topic's particularly important to me is because I give sci-fi a little more credit than most, and not just because I happen to really like it. The idea of not just a few writers, but an entire genre striving to write about what happens next is a radically new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things. Isolated and wonky as sci-fi can often be, its very existence impacts the kinds of futures we envision and strive for (or fight against). It often functions as the proverbial pebble in our collective mental pond.

So, without further ado, read the whole thing:

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

---

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

Fashion on a leash

So a casting agency is trying not to be a casting agency but, apparently, a high-level subversion factory, despite doing work for unconventional types like Old Navy and Avon.

So they produce a "stylized take on the casting process," an oddly formal set of words that absolutely fail to describe the ominous witch's brew of arousal, group-mind claustrophobia, desperate striving and all-around deviance that is their one and only promo video, a work I also have to give credit for the best use of a Stooges song I've seen in ages.

So yes, if all of the above doesn't describe a product symptomatic of the lovely Breaking Time in which we live, I don't know what does. 

And yes, it does actually manage to be subversive: I still don't know quite what to think of the damn thing.

The Rundown: Avatars in the late, late night

Photo by Robbie Cooper

It's past one in the morning and my sleep schedule is shot all to hell, both from a nasty head cold and the medicines I'm using to fight it. And I've seen so many interesting things, readers, that it's high time I shared some of them with you. Thank insomnia.

* Behind the Avatars A fascinating photo series from Robbie Cooper that puts people's images side by side with the virtual avatar they've created. In a more fractured cultural landscape, we increasingly individualize our identities, with countless cultures and fantasias to draw from. To top it all off, there's now virtual worlds to roam around in where we can create new visual identities with a few clicks.

Like the best photography, Cooper's series speaks volumes. In lesser hands this could've ended up with simple exploitative gawking ("Wow, look at who chose to have a hot chick as their avatar hur hur"), instead it's surprisingly poignant and doubly interesting for how many avatars do resemble their offline bodies.

* Children by the Millions Wait for Alex Chilton Speaking of brilliant poignance, Joshua Ellis' superb essay from Coilhouse 04 has now made its way to the online edition. It starts with a personal story and makes its way to the mutated state of our current cultures.

Ellis' time predated (and was radically different from) mine, but like all the best stories it resonates no matter where you are. This is a piece still has me thinking about its points large and small, long after I first read it. Only the best essays do that.

* Keats in Space Molly Young's interesting call for a re-fusion of poetry and science, harkening back to the days when Milton's poetry graced astronomy books. I don't think Art and Science can merge as comfortably as some might believe, but this is an excellent reminder that both mentalities can learn from — and need — each other greatly.

* The State of the Internet Operating System Tim O'Reilly (poetically, at some points) breaks down exactly how the fuck the internet does what it does and how quickly that's changing. For those of us to whom the nuts and bolts of technology don't come that naturally, this is an excellent primer on how infrastructure matters — and why we should pay attention to what form tomorrow's may take.

* Stealing Krakatoa If anything that better sums up, in the most batshit supervillain way "Well fuck, the future's here" than Indonesian black marketeers hauling away the most famous volcano on the planet, I can't think of it.

* Lawmakers announce bipartisan transparency caucus Interesting, and while I'll have to see where it goes, worth applauding. I hope this marks the point where some of the Gov 2.0 ideas begin transitioning into the larger political realm. The air can get a little rarefied up there.

Just in case you're wondering, here's all the bastards on Twitter.

* Iceland bans stripping, adult entertainment, declared female-friendly haven Ah, Neo-Puritanism ain't dead yet. A disturbing story on a number of levels, not least because the reaction of some media is to take the idea that women need to be sheltered from witnessing or participating in certain acts as empowering, instead of disturbing paternalism Bullshit, of course, and Salon's writers justly call them on it.

* Captain Planet is not as cool as a jetski Just think about it for awhile. He's really not.

Perfect Noir

It's the first true rain in months, the water seeping down into the gutters, washing away the last filthy remains of the Ice Age. In the brief moments of respite from work, you look out the window and enjoy the feeling of everything sinking down wet, just a bit. You put on some Tom Waits. But something's missing.

Perhaps the perfectly distilled essence of film noir, downed straight as a shot, set to Massive Attack's "Angel"?

Yes, that's exactly it.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Wild in the Streets! Psychedelic youth seize America!

Believe it or not, at one point rock n' roll and young people were apparently terrifying creatures preoccupied with consuming strange drugs and shaking society to its foundations.

That, combined with the then-controversial debate over lowering the voting age to 18 and, fueled the exploitation film Wild in the Streets, which happened to hit during the riot year of 1968. As one might imagine, it's a little high on the scenery chewing. Observe the trailer:

Yeah, it's like that. Rock n' roll kingpin/LSD manufacturer Max Frost rises from a fucked-up middle class upbringing to become President by leading mobs of The Youth. It doesn't go well for the old. For all the camp, Wild In the Streets is a surprising amount of fun, and worth a watch if just for the scene of a heavily acid-dosed Congress. If you've got a spare hour and a half and Veoh, watch the whole thing.

The movie turned out to be a sleeper hit, and "The Shape of Things to Come," by Frost's fictional band, actually made the Billboard charts. It's largely forgotten now, and it does seem almost quaint in retrospect, that the youth of America were ever viewed, even satirically, as this kind of threat, or LSD as a wonder drug.

Wild in the Streets also marked one of the last moments that youth subcultures were implicitly associated with radical political change, with their very presence perceived as a threat. That's changed, partly for demographic reasons and partly because alt cultures, except for the occasional ritual protests, aren't really associated with political activism except of a defensive nature.

Nonetheless, Wild in the Streets remains an interesting over-the-top romp. I have to wonder, if a similar fantasia were made today, what would it look like?

Textbook coups

Don McLeroy, ultra-conservative member of the Texas State Board of Education. Photo from the Washington Monthly.

If you haven't already, Mariah Blake's Washington Monthly story on the attempts of the Texas State Board of Education's ultra-right faction to rewrite the nation's textbooks is a must-read.

This would seem to be a state or local matter. It's not:

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

It gets worse. Much worse. At the very end, McLeroy, though he's encountered some setbacks, is bragging that "sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have."

This is, of course, an outrage. While I'm not particularly fond of the textbook style of learning, when trying to insure some basic level of free education for huge numbers of people, they're probably a necessity. If written well, they can provide a useful summary so students can pursue their own researches into more specific works, experiments and primary sources (sadly that's rarely how education works, but that's a rant for another day).

One interesting thing this illustrates is a fact of power that the far-right has grasped, but that their opponents generally have not. We wrongly associate power with high offices, big wins. Witness, for example, how third parties have disproportionately concentrated on quixotic runs for the Presidency instead of more useful organizing (imagine how their fortunes might have changed if the US' Green Party had, beginning in the '80s, concentrated first on securing the Northwest and Northeast at the local and state levels).

While the high posts are important, we live in a society vast and complex enough that there are all sorts of hidden pressure points such as, for example, the Texas State Board of Education. While Texas is generally a conservative state, the article makes it clear that the ultra-right faction has plenty of opposition, including from other conservatives, but got entrenched because they followed one of the oldest rules of conflict: attack where your opponent isn't.

So if you support science, sanity and the critical thinking necessary to a free society, the productive reaction isn't "It's an outrage that right-wing extremists control the country's textbooks!" but "why don't we?"

Valentine

Photo by Brian Orion

I have a Valentine's Day tradition, whatever blog I'm writing on, to post up a piece of mine that I dedicated to this particular holiday four years ago. I'll get to that in a moment. 

For those of us who often felt awkward, weird or just unusual, Valentine's holds a special place in the Hate pantheon. For myself, and for many I know, it was almost a rite of passage to write a "fuck Valentine's" piece at some point.

It's easy to see why. Love and sex are hard things to figure out, after all, full of pain, strange corners and unpredictable rules. A holiday that, in popular imagination, is devoted to hammering the most traditional version of those already thorny areas home is going to attract a lot of deserved ire. It's a difficult damn time to be on the wrong side of.

Of course, there's nothing set in stone about the current holiday. By all indications, Valentine's began as a saints' feast tacked over a Roman fertility day, mutated into a celebration of love by Chaucer and eventually hammered its current incarnation by industry and need. Culture's a funny thing, but in the end this day, as any other, is what we make it.

What follows is my take, something I don't feel the need to update or change because it says what I need to say.

—

Here's to love. Period. Here's to every family who have held each other together. Here's to every friendship that's survived against the odds. Here's to everyone out there who has found their soulmate. 

Here's to sappy poetry that needed to be written, the perfect gift that was just right and to the song that means more than it really should.

Here's also to everyone who has ever loved without return. Here's to everyone that loved when it couldn't possibly work out or when it was forbidden or when they were laughed at. Here's to every breakup, every awkward silence, every lesson learned and everyone who dried their eyes and went on with their lives. Here's to every memory of what might have been and every dream of what may yet come. Here's to all the ones we loved taken from us by time or distance or who no longer walk with us in this life.

So here's to love in all its infinite diversity, infuriating confusion and dizzying glory. It drives us mad and rends us asunder, yet we never give it up. Why? Because the world with it is infinitely richer than one without. Happy Valentine's Day.

~Amor est vitae essentia~

The Mystery of Princess Hijab

Photo via Tracy Clark-Flory

"My work supports right-wing radicalism like Taxi Driver supports cabbies. I'm using the hijab for myself."

-Princess Hijab

For the past few years, a mysterious street artist, supposedly a 21-year-old Muslim woman, has hit Parisian billboards, shrouding the models gracing the slick advertisements in black hijabs. 

Her work, has at times, seemed a Rorschach test for the culture wars. Critics swore that she was an Islamic fundamentalist, intent on blotting out images of sexuality. Others saw her works as sly feminist subversion, pointing out that she often left model's legs naked and covered male figures as well as female. 

In a lot of ways, what she's doing is not that different from how enterprising fetishists mutated corsets and nun's habits to whole new purposes.

Or is it?

United State of Pop 2009

It's another year, and another brilliant mashup of the year's Billboard Top 25 from DJ Earworm. When I remarked on last year's installment, the thing that struck me most was "a plaintive, shivering yearning for an easier time."

This year, the visuals made more of an impact: bleak scenes of home or work life, broken up by wild, otherworldly parties. The popular mind wants to get the fuck away, dammit, possibly to a bizarre sonic future ruled by will.i.am and Fergie.

I also have a new appreciation for why Illuminati temptress Lady Gaga has caused such a ruckus: in this visual landscape, her quasi-fetish fantasias stand out as comparatively inventive.

I am also predicting that we will see the usual wailing about how interchangeable and plastic music has become. So I'm offering the vaccine early; here's the top songs from 1989. Popular frequently doesn't mean influential. Personally, I remain thankful for our era of audio mutation, when the lowliest drone song can become musical gold.

There is no They: Men in hijabs

Iranian students donning the hijab in solidarity with imprisoned protester Majid Tavakoli

The Iranian regime locked up student protester Majid Tavakoli and, in an attempt to humiliate him, released photos of the young man dressed as a woman.

It backfired. Above is one of the hundreds of pictures sent in by Iranian men, wearing the traditionally female hijab, declaring their pride in Tavakoli and calling for gender equality. 

It's the sort of moment that brings a smile to even the most cynical of lips. "We'll humiliate you by dressing one of your friends up as a woman!" "Oh yeah? Well now we're all dressed like women. And anyway, what's so bad about women?" All this in the face of a regime that still hangs gay people.

Much of the internet fervor behind the Green Revolution has faded, but in Iran it's quite clear there's still a lot of activity and simmering unrest. It's good to see that in the fact of repression unimaginable to many over here, the Green Revolution's people haven't lost their defiance or sense of humor. It's also heartening to see that what began as a simple call for reform has widened to an attack on societal repression.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the next time some politician blithely talks about bombing the middle east flat to get rid of "fanatics," remember this is the reality, and that is the lie. 

So here's men in hijabs. Here's a lot of them. It ain't over.