December 2003 Archives

...in no particular order:

The iTunes Music Store, MASTER & COMMANDER: FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD, HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET Seasons 1, 2 & 3, GameCube, XPad, TypePad, Kottke and HiveLogic redesigns, THE RETURN OF THE KING, Blankets, the World Series of Poker, my new job, Kung-Tunes, Zeldman's Orange Book, iChat AV, the best wedding present ever, Flyguy, blogging politicians, PALOMAR: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, Arrested Development, the new Powerbooks, Ryan Adams' Rock N Roll, "Hey Ya," the Pixies reunite, I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives, TiVo (better) and Time Warner DVR (crappier but cheaper), KILL BILL, GLtron, Radiohead at Madison Square Garden, Hulk Hands, 4x DVD burners, Paper Sky, eMusic (briefly), tabbed browsing, and, finally, marriage.

...jiggitty-jig. I'm back in Ohio for the week, once again looking at a white Christmas. And what do I find myself doing, now that I've momentarily escaped the big bad city? Why, looking at these beautiful pictures of it on Bluejake. I'm funny like that.

The American Family Association, an organization that "represents and stands for traditional family values," and that prides itself on having pressured Disney and ABC to cancel the "pro-homosexual show Ellen" and is now fighting against the recent Massachussetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in the state ("The future of the family is at stake!"), is taking a poll on gay marriage on their website, the results of which they say will be presented to Congress. The current results of the poll, when I last checked, are shown below.

As of today, according to the poll, the supporters of gay marriage outweigh the detractors by over eighty thousand votes. While this may not please Don Wildmon, I certainly do hope the man will be true to his word and present the results of the poll to Congress.

In the meantime, go take the poll. You may want to be wary of entering your correct email address, however, if you don't feel like getting emails from the AFA on their version of "matters of importance."

I'm not going to review RETURN OF THE KING, here. I don't need to. All I need to say is it's awesome, an every sense of the word, the fitting finale for an unparalleled filmmaking achievement. It rocks. Go see it. That's all I got to say on that.

No, my friends, we're here to discuss the sexuality of hobbits.

Now, I know I'm not the first one to discuss the subject of hobbit sex, and I certainly won't be the last; but it's been on my mind, and I wanted to try to start a meaningful dialogue on the issue.

To begin with, you have to admit there's something there, something slightly, well, different, in the relationships between hobbits Frodo and Sam, and Merry and Pippin. As my wife put it, while we were watching an emotional scene between Sam and Frodo in the extended version of TWO TOWERS, "They're a little too...into each other, aren't they?" Or as my dear ol' da' might put it, "They're so up each other they can't see daylight."

For those of you who haven't seen RETURN OF THE KING, or are too repulsed to proceed any further and want to quit now, FYI, there are spoilers ahead.

So. What it comes down to is, are the hobbits gay? There's clearly more than friendship, here, as scenes of a sobbing Pippin being torn away from an equally distraught Merry and a seemingly doomed Sam and Frodo cradling each other in their arms demonstrate. But is it man-love, or something else?

I've nothing against the man-love ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!" George screams), but I believe it's the something else. It's not Sam's token wife (his "beard," one might think; and really, is "If I was going to marry, that's the girl I'd marry" a convincing statement of heterosexual love?) or the throwaway scene of Merry giving a half-hearted glance to a bridesmaid at Sam's wedding that's got me convinced they're straight. Tolkien was a bit of a prude, for one thing, and much of his writings on Sam and Frodo's relationship were based on his observations of men in combat during World War I, for another.

Personally, I'm of the belief that sexuality doesn't even come in to play, here; that, in truth, there is no "straight" or "gay" in this particular world. In this, as a co-worker of mine noted, the hobbits are more like children than anything else. They like to eat, they like to sleep, and they like to be with their friends, with whom all meaningful time is spent. Director Peter Jackson, it must be noted, is no stranger to these kinds of relationships; his excellent HEAVENLY CREATURES was the story of two teenage girls who develop an extremely close bond that goes beyond sexuality: they want to be with each other, until death or beyond, with each ardently refusing to leave the other's side and the two going to great lengths to remain together. It's love, but not love in the sexual sense; rather, it's an unconditional love combined with an unwavering loyalty, two things that are rare enough these days to be mistaken for something else entirely.

At this point, it's getting too late for me to go into the theory I developed, in the course of my morning ablutions, that LORD OF THE RINGS is one big allegory for marriage, and I think I've said enough on the subject anyway. But if you're still looking for more, try this essay on sexuality in Tolkien's writings. Or, if you're looking for a RETURN OF THE KING desktop, help yourself to this one I just scratched up.

I shudder to think what kind of Google hits this one's gonna get me...

First off, Apple's Backup software is a great and well-intentioned idea: provide an easy and painless way for a Mac user to regularly back up 100 MB of their data. And while a hundred megabytes, the size of a Zip disk (remember those?), doesn't seem like all that much, it's more than you think. You can fit a lot of documents, and emails, and even a good amount of photos in a hundred megabytes. So, good on ya, Apple. Way to go, Backup.

That is, if only the damn thing wasn't the buggiest piece of Apple software since OS 10.0.

See, I've got Backup set to run at 4 AM every morning, so that, in an ideal world (which I lived in for months with no idea of the precariousness of it all), the application would run, back up my files, and quit itself, while I was snuggled all warm in my bed. I would never really see it, but I would always know it was there, keeping my most precious files safe. But instead of this quiet, assured service that I'd grown used to, I've now woken up every morning for the last three weeks to the above window. If I select "Try to Recover" (at least it's honest, it DOES try), the application spins its wheels for a couple hours before failing to recover, or stalls completely. If I try to wipe the iDisk and start fresh, it starts backing up anew, but quits an hour or two later, halfway through the backup, with another error message that says the iDisk is unreachable. Okay, I can deal with the fact that it takes Backup more time to transfer a floppy disk's worth of data over my high-speed cable modem connection than it would take a 28K-modem Compuserve user to download RETURN OF THE KING from KaZaa. What's driving me nuts is this sudden inability to get it to work at all. I mean, c'mon, I do this kind of thing for a living.

My next attempt, after trashing the preferences and then reinstalling the application one more time, is going to be to start small: try using it to back up just a couple folders, then grow from there. Being the buggy freeware that it is, I've noticed that Backup often has a tough time figuring out the cumulative size of the files that its backing up, so I might be going over my limit without even knowing it and inadvertently causing these issues. And anyway, I've got no real cause to complain: Backup IS free, and as I said, it's got the best of intentions, and if I really want to protect my files, I can get off my lazy ass (figuratively, at least, since I'll still be sitting at the computer) and burn a CD, or a DVD.

That said, I'd be happy as a clam if I could get this to work.

[UPDATE]

Scaled down the amount of files I was backing up, and now it's working like a charm. Yay, Backup, yay.

I recently picked up Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: Earth to Earth, one of the trade paperbacks collecting the legendary writer's equally legendary work on the Swamp Thing comic series. I've got the earlier Moore volumes, and I'd been meaning to pick this one up for a while, expecting an entertaining read.

Then I got to the final story in the book, entitled "My Blue Heaven."

I'm gonna try to sum this up: at the end of the previous issue, the Swamp Thing, a self-described plant-elemental whose consciousness can reside in and manipulate the entirety of the planet's fauna (it's more interesting than it sounds, believe me), finds himself cut off from the plant collective, which he calls The Green, and trapped in his plant body, which is then burned to ashes by assassins. Swampy, faced with annihilation, launches his consciousness into the void, only to regain awareness on an odd planet, a long, long way away from Earth. Which is where we find him, when the story begins.

The Swamp Thing, marooned on this strange world in which everything is blue, misses his home. He misses his wife (yes, he's married). Forlorn and desperate, he tries to recreate both from the planet's blue vegetation: a town of plants, skillfully woven to look like brick and stone, a facsimile of his wife with skin of blue moss, bones of blue wood, embodied with a part of his consciousness to act like he expects her to act, to say what he expects her to say. To further the illusion, he creates simulacra of other townfolk, men sitting on porches, lovers strolling, all a part of him, given life by him, and doing what he assumes they should do. It's a good lie, incredibly convincing, and he almost manages to believe that he could mistake it for reality.

But he doesn't. His wife, he can't get her smile quite right. It's off. Her tone is wrong. His mind gets distracted, and the puppets in the puppet show begin to wander, and then it all falls apart, as these lives of lies always do. The artifice can't bear the weight of the reality, the illusion requires more energy and will than he can bear, and it crumbles into the nothing it really was all along.

It's a beautiful story, one I've read a number of times since. And I can't fully explain why it's moved me as much as it has. There's no real bearing on it for me...I don't see myself reflected in the tale. My own blue world is relatively free of illusion, an odd thing for a writer; but perhaps not so odd, as I've a strong analytical side as well and have always striven to resist self-delusion. I'm not living a lie, and I like my reality quite enough to not need to go to great lengths to escape it. But escapism has a tremendous appeal to the imaginative: we wake from the best dreams with reluctance, and with a desire to return that can be overwhelming enough to haunt us in the waking day. In college, when I spent my days studying engineering, filling reams of paper with intricate calculations and filling my conscious mind with analysis and science, my unconscious would retaliate while I slept with amazingly detailed adventuries taking place in past and future times, on this and other worlds. I once woke from a dream of robbing stagecoaches with the taste of dust in my mouth. Such is the curse of imagination: the ability to create worlds that, once you've created them, can become far too appealing to leave behind. In the worst or most vulnerable of us, the danger of this attraction is surprisingly real; as in the case of Jean-Claude Romand, who over the course of eighteen years built up a life in which he was a respected doctor for the World Health Organization, convincing his wife, his children, his parents, all the while hiding out during working hours in caf駸 and hotel rooms, spending his and his family's savings, until the strain of the illusion became to great, and he ended it violently.

The rest of us, we just write.

My point? I don't know...I was moved by a comic book. Of course, I was also moved tonight by the Christmas episode of JUSTICE LEAGUE. So either the holidays and my birthday are making me reflective and sentimental, or as my wife has suggested more than once, I'm somehow starting to psychically share her emotional rollercoaster of PMS. Me, I'm praying for the former.

"An ape on a rock no great way off threw a turd at him, quite unprovoked; and when he half rose in protest it shook its wizened fist and gibbered so furiously that he sank down again, so low were his spirits..."

...at the Gotham Comedy Club:

Yes. I did it. I knocked over you glass of wine. I was crammed in that corner table, and you wouldn't move out of the aisle to let me by, and I tried to squeeze past carrying my coat, and, well, your glass of wine got knocked over. So I did what you do in these situations: I apologized profusely, and I quickly mopped it up with napkins, and hey, no harm done. The guy sitting at the table was unscathed, he was cool with it, just waved me off, no problem. And to make amends, since I've got this thing about personal accountability, I even caught the waitress on my way out and PAID for your glass of wine. At the Gotham Comedy Club, where a glass of water will run you four dollars, that means I shelled out eight bucks--no tip, sorry. I was leaving, and I didn't have to face you again, but I did it anyway. Because that's the kind of guy I am. Decent.

So why in the hell did you have to look at the spilled glass of wine like I'd just butchered a baby on your table? Your mouth literally hung open in shock. Your eyes were dinner plates. You looked at that spilled glass of wine like it was a crime against humanity, at me and my wine-spilling ways like I was an affront to God himself. The horror, you were implying, with every fiber of your being: the sheer fucking horror.

Honestly, drama queen: get over it.

For a guy who apparently makes a profession out of eating, and eating well, he can't weigh more than a buck seventy-five.

"I'll have lunch here. Then, maybe go to Nobu. Or Union Square. Excellent tuna burger. You said you wanted a burger?"

I did. Gramercy Tavern's legendary (or at least to me) hamburger had proven to in fact be a legend, so I was just sipping a pint of beer at the Tavern bar and figuring out my next step.

He finishes his quail, and the bartender brings the salmon over.

"Peter Luger's," he says, like he's naming Peter the Rock. "I've been all over the world. Best burger you'll find."

Last time I was there, I ate a steak the size of my head, I tell him. Best meal I ever had.

"I've been going there twenty years. Thirty. It's the best. Go to Union Square. Take the 6 to Canal Street. Transfer to the...J, M, whatever. Get off at Myrtle, walk down. You're there."

Despite the fact that I just left Brooklyn, it's sorely tempting.

"The best. Forget about it. No wine list to speak of, though. Here, pass me the Marcassin." This last bit to the bartender, who manages to be there, but not there, during our conversation, as the best bartenders do. The bottle is handed to him, shown to me. "Marcassin. The best. Here, you'll pay--" as he checks the immediately proffered wine list "--two hundred bucks. You can only buy it by the case, at auction. That's cheaper than the auction price. You should try it."

Bit out of today's lunch budget, I tell him.

"In the old days, I'd have one for lunch. Not any more. But in the old days."

A glass or a bottle?

He chuckles. "Oh, a bottle." He thinks about that for a bit, then goes back to his salmon and his glass of water, and I go back to my beer.

...it's my birthday.

Okay, the photo viewer is now online, complete with some wedding pictures. The photos are set up in albums, which you can browse on the right-side menu. It's a work in progress, and a little bare-bones in design at the moment, but hey, I'm working on it, and I'll be uploading more photos shortly. Enjoy!

If I haven't been posting much recently, it's because I've been tearing my hair out and poring through the Movable Type user's manual trying to figure out how to do my friggin' photo browser, which is too damn simple in design to be so damn complicated. Dammit. On top of it, I've got a cold that's making me miserable.

On the plus side, it's December, it snowed yesterday, and my birthday is next week. I plan to take the day as a paid holiday (a nice perk, from a nice employer) and roam the city, enjoying that cutting-class feeling and doing some of the city things I never get to do during the day, like having what I'm told is an excellent and surprisingly affordable lunch hamburger at Gramercy Tavern. Of course, if I still feel like crap and it's a zero-degree windchill like it was today, then I might have to rethink the roaming part. But either way, I'm making it My Day, as it should be.