Category Archives: Culture

The Art and The Artist Part One Million

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With the further and now apparently well documented allegations that paint Neil Gaiman as a rather nasty piece of work we are once again thrust into the unresolved and unresolvable debate concerning separating the artists from the art.

First off, it is decision of personal moral standards. I hold no ill will or any negative opinion for anyone that decides to boycott or who continues to support the art an artist. We each make our own choices about how much compromise the broken world demands of us. No one can live in this universe pure and unsullied. Every choice we make has consequences and moral implications.

Personally, I think one defining line is asking how much of the art promotes the objectionable stands, beliefs, or actions of the artist. Roman Polanski should be rotting in a prison cell for forcibly raping a child. yet, his cinematic production of Macbeth or Chinatown do not promote such a world view and while both have a cynical approach to evil in the world, both recognize and clearly delineate that the evil is real and not an arbitrary illusion crafted by mere mortals.

Bryan Singer a talented filmmaker is always accosted with more than a little credibility of also sexually abusing minors. If true he should face legal consequences. But it is also true that his film X-Men is an allegory for the mistreatment of minorities and takes a stand against such bigotry.

Kevin Spacey’s career was derailed by allegations of sexual abuse and he cowardly tried to use he newly disclosed sexuality as a shield. A dodge that did not work and he was ejected from a number of productions. Spacey’s portray of Jack Vincennes as morally corrupt cop who comes to realize the evil he has helped perpetuate and tried to correct it is a deeply moving and touching job that gives hope to the concept of redemption.

In each of these cases and others I would argue that the art is not corrupted by the evils of the artist. These are also all films, and I think the boycotting of film productions if particularly problematic.

Film is a collaborative art and to boycott a film is not just a harm to the objectionable artist but to all the artist that work and profit from that production. Boycott the Harry Potter films due to Rowlings despicable beliefs and you also are striking against Radcliff who gives every appearance of a devoted ally. Boycotting film, for me personally, has too high of a ration of collateral damage to target.

Books are a different matter.

Only three entities profit from the sale of a book, the book seller, the publisher, and the author. Everyone else has already been paid and compensated for their time and labor. If you are one to buy books then your support for the book seller is unlikely to change, leaving just the publisher and the author. Given that I find the boycotting of books from questionable artist much easier to justify.

Luckily for me I was never much of a Gaiman fan with his novels, so not buying them isn’t so much a boycott as life as normal. For you, well that’s your decision.

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Celebrity is a Performance

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The Neil Gaiman story which went much wider this week with a long and disturbing account of his alleged sexual assaults and other nasty work has stirred up some very deep feelings of betrayal among his fans in the fantasy and horror communities.

I don’t blame them for feeling betrayed. Gaiman had constructed a nearly perfect public persona that invited respect and admiration. He doled out advice that encouraged artists of all stripes as they struggled with impostor syndrome, his stories celebrated the outsider, and they presented a level of inclusion that welcome many groups of people form whom society has always felt excluding and threatening.

But it his public persona was all for show, and the most vital lesson we need to take away from all this is that all public personas are for show.

Gaiman, Whedon, Cosby are but a few names of men with public faces that made them admired are people who lifted up others and presented what appeared to be images of our better selves. The truth for each of these turned far darker than most expected.

Everyone who is some form of celebrity presents a public face that is not their true self. Some do it to market themselves and their art. Some do it to cover up an inner insecurity that never leaves them. Some do it because their true selves are not readily accepted in wider society. This is particularly true for those in the closet. But some do it to conceal their monstrous nature.

On the outside looking in we cannot not their true selves, we can only know what they project, the image that they create and distribute for their own purposes, some of which are mercenary, some self-protecting, and some nefarious. This is way it is important to never place anyone on that pedestal of admiration.

Praise the art, praise the skill of the artist, but do not believe that simply because of the art that they are good. They may be, there are noble, good, and great people everywhere, but you cannot know them save by their actions and even then, your data set is limited by what they want you to know.

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Trump and the Cardinal Virtues

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At a recent event hosted by Univision Kamala Harris was asked if she could list three virtues of her political rival Donald Trum. Like Hillary Clinton before her this question stumped her with Harris only managing to pay some services to Trump by saying she believed that he loved his family, a safe statement that would enrage no one.

The story got me thinking, what if we matched the seven cardinal virtues with Trump? Would we be surprised by any of the answers? Each virtue traditionally has a corresponding vice, so for each I think the test is which better fits the know personality and action of Trump, the virtue or the vice?

Chastity/Lust

Well, this one’s pretty much on the vice side. A man who has been adjudicated in court of sexual assault, criminally convicted for covering up sexual affairs, and who boasts his personal Vietnam was not getting an STI. This virtue cannot be listed as one of his.

Faith/Idolatry

Again, there is no question. He sells bibles but displays them proudly upside down while calling for violence the man has shown no interest in faith and not only idolizes himself but expects others to do so. This virtue too cannot apply.

Good Works/Avarice

There are no good works that can reasonably assigned to Trump and his lust for money may very well exceed his lust for flesh. Even when it came to his own protection detail, he charged the government for freight for his expensive hotels unwilling to lose a single dime. Avarice it is.

Concord/Discord

It is a virtue to have an agreeable nature and a sin to be pointlessly disagreeable. Again, Trump nature makes this an easy call. A man known for his screaming and demanding nature while expecting subservience from everyone else can hardly be called ‘agreeable.’

Patience/Wrath

His anger at even the slightest perception of an insult is well known. Trump routinely calls for violence and harm upon those who he perceives as enemies, without every showing the slightest ability to forgive or even delay his own gratification. Wrath wins.

Humility/Pride

Well, a man who slaps his name is giant letters on everything he can and who has never ever admitted error, and who cannot, in his mind, ever lose only be cheated raised Pride to levels rarely seen.

Six virtues so far and not one can be credibly associated with Trump. Is this going to be a clean sweep?

Sobriety/Indulgence

Here’s one we can actually give to Trump. He is sober. The loss of his older brother to alcoholism apparently affected him deeply and he is known to be a non-drinker and non-intoxicating drug used.

1 out of 7, clearly a failing grade.

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Retro Review: The Lieutenant “To Set it Right”

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Before Gene Roddenberry transformed his life and our world with the series Star Trek he produced and ran a series about a green Marine second lieutenant commanding a platoon at Camp Pendleton California called The Lieutenant.

Staring Gary Lockwood, who Gene would employ to play Mitchell in Trek’s second pilot, 2nd Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice is an educated and idealistic young officer learning the rope of command from his superior Captain Rambridge, (Robert Vaughn.)

NBC Publicity Photo

I watched episode 21 of the show’s only season, to Set it Right, dealing with racial conflicts with the platoon. When a new private, Cameron (Don Marshall) arrives at the base he instantly attacks Corporal Devlin (Dennis Hopper) recognizing Devlin as part of a gang that beat him in a racially motivated attack years earlier. Rice requests permission from Rambridge to keep both men in his platoon as Rice wants to learn how to solve this sort of issue.

While keeping an eye on language that would be acceptable to Standards and Practices the episode, written by Lee Erwin, is fairly honest and direct in its approach to racism. Both characters are presented as flawed and twisted by racism, Devlin for it practice and Cameron by the anger flamed through years of injustice. Cameron’s anger rarely lets him have a moment’s peace even poisoning his relationship with his fiancé Norma (Nichelle Nichols.)

To Set it Right ends on a hopeful and optimistic note that, following the intensity of the preceding pages, struck me a forced and unrealistic. The characters of Devlin and Cameron had transformed too much for such a brief time.

The episode also guest starred the classic western actor Woody Strode as a sergeant of the platoon who attempts to calm Cameron’s hostile nature.

This episode has several ties to Roddenberry’s next series Star Trek. In addition to Lockwood and Nichols, Don Marshal would return for an episode as Boma in The Galileo Seven and the episode’s director Vincent McEveety would helm six episodes of Trek including Balance of Terror.

Episodes of The Lieutenant can be found on YouTube.

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Vance’s Idiotic ‘Solution’ to School Shootings

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On the subject of School shootings Senator Vance advocating for ‘hardening’ of the targets as the preferred solution saying, ‘But I unfortunately think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger.’

This is sheer pedantic word play. For one thing the Senator is far too bright to not know that the money simply doesn’t exist to harden every forking school and pre-school in America.

Set that aside, though. Say we could wave a magic wand and instantly fortify every school like a well defended hardpoint on the battle line. Does that actually solve the problem? Does the would be shooter, now denied the school as a target, just lay down his arms and assume the post of a responsible peaceful citizen?

Of course not.

The shooter driven by rage that has been fueled by agony moves to a softer target. Perhaps a park, or a supermarket, or a shopping center, or a sport game. Or even just a forking busy street out in the open. The school isn’t shot up but someplace else is. Then what? Harden that next target, and then the next and the next until all of America is locked-down self-imposed prison calling itself the land of the free?

The truth of the matter is that Vance proposed no solution, and he knew he proposed nothing. He wanted to cast the illusion of someone that cared while maintaining for his base that solid commitment that no amount of a slaughtered children or people would ever justify even the slightest impediment to their hobby.

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A Writing Blindspot

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As a writer one of the things I strive to do is get emotionally in the head and heart space of the characters in my stories. Of course I am far from perfect in this. I maintain one of the hardest things for any human to do is truly see something from another point of view. It is difficult to ignore the years of joy and pain and experiences that formed your nature and try to imagine even a sliver of that which was felt by another, but I try.

That said one aspect of people I can never seem to connect with emotionally is antisemitism.

Intellectually I can construct the flawed and hatefully reason why someone might believe such idiotic things, but it is a mindset and a prejudice that is always alien to me.

Perhaps my distance from it stems from my own non-religious nature. While as a child I was exposed to Southern Baptist teachings in Sunday school they never took root in my mental garden. Even if they had I suspect my ever-questioning nature wouldn’t have place me in a position to hate Jews because they had ‘killed Jesus.’ Wasn’t that his purpose anyway? To die, albeit get better after that that, for our sins? That would just mean the people who killed him were all part of God’s plot and plan. It makes no sense.

Of course, there are the conspiracy theories that Jews run the world. Conspiracy theories are sanctuaries for those that need an explanation for the chaotic world we live in. They are poison to a healthy mind, and none stand up to the most casual scrutiny. I cannot emotionally connect with any conspiracy theory; they are more ludicrous than any religion.

Sadly, antisemitism is very real and my lack of ability to even fake feeling it has no bearing on the world, only a weakness in my fiction. Out there in the wider world it is alive and well and sadly thriving.

It may be strange, alien, and incomprehensible to me but that doesn’t mean I will not denounce it or that I will not fight it.

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Booths are for Cruising.

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When the story broke that the MAGA and Trump backed candidate for Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, a pol that frequently rants about pornography, was in fact a loyal customer of porn shops in the 1990s and early 2000s I had little interest. The story struck me as merely another example of the blatant hypocrisy so often seen in crusading extremist politicians. But then one detail came to my attention, not only did he visit these shops five or more times a week, but he was a regular customer of the booths.

Now, for several years in the 1990s I worked in a adult shop selling toys, magazines, and renting out porn to the customers. Like any business we had our regular customers and for someone to shop there five or more times a week would certainly be memorable. Also like nearly all of the adult shops we had the ‘arcade,’ a dozen or so closet sized private booths. A couple or the booths were fitted so that someone could rent a video, we’d load it into the player, and they would watch it in the booth, but that was not the majority of the booths. Most played an endless loop of porn on a number of channels and the customer just fed money into the machine and cycled the display to what struck their fancy.

But the real purpose of the booths was not to watch porn.

After all this was the 90s, video tapes players were in nearly every home, rentals were easy, and a cramped stuffy booth was hardly comfortable. Anyone interest in the porn would be far more comfortable at home.

No, the booths were for cruising.

Cruising is anonymous sex in public and semi-public places. Public Parks at night, airport bathrooms, and video store booths. Men, and it is always men, make their discreet eye contact and then follow each other into a booth, feeding the machine for the privacy to engage in sexual activates, afterwards going their separate ways.

Mark Robinson, in addition to his rants about pornography, his holocaust denial, and other unpleasant public stands is also blatantly homophobic.

I do not know that Robinson cruised the booths but it would hella shocking for someone that dedicated to the booths to not have.

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Patriarchal Horror

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One of my regular podcasts The Evolution of Horror where each season a particular cinematic sub-genre of horror is examined in chronological order to study its origins and changes over the decades. Some of the sub-genres that have been explored are ghosts, the occult, and slashers to name just three.

Last night as sleep drifted into my brain I thought about another possible sub-genre, Patriarchal Horror. What I envisioned was something closely related to but distinct from feminist horror. I would categorize feminist horror about the claiming of power and agency by female characters but that does not require an explicit depiction of patriarchy to exist. For example, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, a key film in the development of the slasher sub-genre coming a few years before Carpenter’s Halloween exploded in the culture is specifically about a sorority house dealing with a stalker and murderer but the men and the wider world that they inhabit aren’t depicted as subjugating or dominating the women. It is feminist without dealing with patriarchy.

An example of what I would call patriarchal horror is the original The Stepford Wives. In the film the men of small town of Stepford substitute their wives with perfect robotic replacements, ones that never challenge, always know their place, and perform all their wifely duties without complaint. It is the platonic ideal of horror that draws entirely from the patriarchy.

Promising Young Woman is often slotted into the ‘rape revenge’ sub-genre and that’s not a terrible fit even if the principal character exacting her revenge isn’t herself the rape survivor. It also neatly fits into patriarchal horror because the film depicts quite intentional the culture and male dominated systems that create the environment where men escape any form of consequence for their horrible actions.

What got me started on this line of speculation was this year’s outstanding horror film Immaculate. Starring and produced by Sydney Sweeny Immaculate is very much about men exercising power and domination over women’s bodies. About how control over oneself is a fundamental freedom and right.

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Why the Joke Sticks

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The conservative side of the political divide is upset because the ‘JD Vance is Weird’ line sticks to their vice-presidential candidate like napalm to an innocent civilian.

The ‘weird’ descriptor gained a lot of traction when it was deployed by a Democratic governor and then amplified by a political group that governor headed. From there is has taken off with other surrogates and just plain people on Twitter. Vance’s people have yet to find an effective counter and I think it is unlikely that they will, but it is also unlikely to the dispositive in the election. It sticks because it fits like a key in a lock to many people’s perception of Vance.

One of the minor fake controversies surrounding Vance and that surface before he was picked for the number two slot was that he used eye liner make-up. I have no idea if the man utilizes that particular form of facial make-up, but his eyes are striking in a manner consistent with that use. It adds to his appearance feeling ‘off’ in a way that doesn’t quite rise to intuitively obvious but noticeable.

Vance also exhibits a lack of stage presence or charisma. This is not a new phenomenon. in the 2022 election cycle that elevated Vance to the Senate the Republican Governor in a red state beat his Democratic rival by 25 points but Vance in the same environment could only manage a 7-point victory over Democrat Tim Ryan. Even among Republicans affection for Vance is lukewarm.

These observations made Vance particularly vulnerable to the label ‘weird.’ Bill Clinton gave the impression of someone willing to tell you whatever you wanted to hear, to a smarminess that made the description ‘slick’ stick. During the Regan administration there was a skit where Regan showed his old friend Jimmy Stewart about the white house with Regan kindly but slightly befuddled. Once Stewart left Regan turned into a cold, brilliant calculating man commanding ever officer with sharp orders. That skit is forgotten because it found no cultural fire because that image of Regan, the brilliant mastermind, was at odds with the popular perception. Narratives stick with they line-up with preexisting perceptions.

After McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 the Alaskan governor came under national scrutiny that she was ill-prepared for. When asked what sort of foreign policy experience she brought to the ticket she answered that as governor of a state that was close to Russia this gave her foreign affairs experience. Just as Rick never said, ‘Play it again, Sam’ in Casablanca Palin never said, ‘I Can see Russia from my house.’ That was a satirical performance on Saturday Night Live. But because that performance fitted perfectly with the impression because of Palin poor performance under intense press scrutiny that image of her stuck.

When a single Twitter user posted a joke tweet reporting that in his memoir Hillbilly ElegyVance confessed to having sex with a couch the visual raced to the top of the political environment. The joke about the couch stuck to Vance for a few reasons, firstly because he already had a poor charismatic image, his already well-known and extremist views on sexual matters lends itself to sexual perversions, and finally because anyone slapped with the label ‘hillbilly’ is suspect in American Culture.

JD Vance no matter the outcome of this election is going to remain stuck with the ‘weird’ couch screwing image until he managed to fully shatter it with a wholly new one but that is a monumental task.

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An Idiotic Theory

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I will grant you that Trump has a feral innate cunning when it comes to publicity. A nature endpoint for this celebrity obsessed culture.

However, the assassination attempt on Saturday was not some staged master-plan plot to sway the election. Ford had two assassination attempts and still failed at reelection. Such a thing does not generate sympathy for an already unpopular candidate.

And tell just how does this plot actually work?

There’s no way Trump stood there and let someone shoot withing inches of his head. Even Trump isn’t That stupid. So that would mean the shooter was just a decoy, a distraction.

Did they persuade the shooter to get up on that roof as an act of suicide?

Shots were fired and people were injured and killed. So that would have to have two or more shooters. Who are they? Where were they? Why take extra shots and kill people if the whole idea was to injure Trump and promote sympathy? You could do that with one shot.

How are the people remaining silent? The fatal flaw in nearly every ‘vast conspiracy’ is that it requires numerous people to maintain a perfect wall of silence. People just don’t do that.

No.

We have a young male shooter, acting in all likelihood irrationally, and whose exact motivation may never be known.

That’s it.

The world is often chaotic and unreasonable and this is just another example.

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