Comedy in Music

Novelty songs and the bands that specialize in them can be musically skillful, but the focus on lyrics makes them less able to lead one’s mood, less fundamentally affecting than music undiluted in artistic intent. Personally, everything I’ve heard of Jonathan Coulton that wasn’t provoking snickers with dirty words? Aggravating as hell. Especially that one with the office zombie gimmick. That was as entertaining as a bad Dilbert joke run on too long. Tim Minchin? Eh. Once in a while.

And I can see how people with less tolerance for lyrical “wit” or lyrics at all could want to throw the entire discographies of The Dead Milkmen, They Might Be Giants, and Electric Six in the garbage. I don’t begrudge them that, but I really like a lot of that stuff. I also recognize that makes me a “geek,” and in this day and age, that should be a real mark of shame. There isn’t a dimension of geek culture that hasn’t been tarnished by the fucking unspeakable conduct of the worst of us. Nonetheless, this.

Reading Julia Serano

A few people around FtB have linked to this article by Julia Serano about the BS that happens when transgender children are discussed in media. It’s very long and thoughtful. This paragraph jumped out at me (the bolding is mine):

“Because cisgender people cannot relate to gender dysphoria (having not experienced it personally), and often refuse to take trans people’s gendered experiences seriously (because they view us as illegitimate and suspect as a result of transphobia), they will sometimes invent ulterior motives or condescending theories to explain our desire to transition — e.g., that we transition to try to “fit in” (as straight, as gender-normative), or to obtain male privilege, or because we’re sexual deviants, or because we are confused/clueless/gullible and thus easily swayed by nefarious ideologies (e.g., patriarchy, medical institutions, transgender agendas). I’ve heard many other concocted reasons (and I debunk many of them in Whipping Girl), but what they all share in common is that they 1) dismiss the legitimacy of our gender identities and experiences with dysphoria, and 2) discount the severity of the transphobia we face (which allows them to depict us as making frivolous/reckless/thoughtless life choices rather than serious well-considered ones).”

I describe myself some places as “mostly cis,” because I have no problem with conducting most of my life as a cisgender person.  I don’t have gender dysphoria at all.  Sometimes I am bothered by people reinforcing cisheteronomativity – consciously or otherwise, but that’s a moral objection and emotional only insofar as I care about the harm it can cause to the disadvantaged binary gender (women) and people with dysphoria.  I don’t feel like I’m personally boxed in or wounded by perceptions and expectations of my presentation, any more than the average cis person.

So as a mostly cis person, no, I do not relate to gender dysphoria.  I am way more educated on the topic than the average person, through the necessity of helping a transgender person I care about deal with their difficulties.  But no amount of education is the same as actual experience of a situation.  I can see the pain and learn what to do to avoid causing it, and try to coach others to avoid causing it. But I can’t understand it.

I can learn a lot about gender dysphoria, but fundamentally, I cannot imagine it at all.  There are a lot of metaphors floating around to try and help cisgender people understand it, but none have ever worked for me.  One question asked: How would you feel if people did not recognize your gender, or expected things of you based on a wrong perception of it?  My answer?  I’ve been misgendered, back when I was a skinny long-haired youth, and it didn’t bother me at all.  If everyone around me perceived me as a woman forever, I can’t imagine being bothered by anything about that other than the misogyny.

So some specific thoughts this calls to mind, things I have considered in the past that Serano’s article reminded me of:

  • This lack of gender dysphoria is actually something that makes me queer, in a sense, because I don’t identify with any gender personally – my assigned one or otherwise.
  • Which makes me wonder how many raving transphobes are actually inviso-queers like myself: people who don’t actually identify with a gender.  If you can’t imagine dysphoria for this reason, and you’ve got the right fundie asshole background, it might make sense to bargle at the trans people about it.
  • I’m also reminded of when I was less sensitive to the transgender people in my life because I couldn’t understand / relate to gender dysphoria and hadn’t been educated yet, and I am saddened with regret.
  • Much like the way men are largely immune to noticing the pervasive misogyny of our society, cis (and mostly cis) people are immune to noticing all but the most egregious forms of transphobia and gender policing.  Since I started tying to look out for and defend the trans people I know, I notice this shit constantly, and I never did before.
  • I mention gender policing because it is a ridiculously common way our society harms trans people without even noticing they exist.  You have to be aware of trans people to be properly transphobic, but you don’t have to be aware of them to cause them harm.  All you have to do is tell people shitty truisms about guys do this, girls do that.  Oh of course the guy did this, girl did that because that is the way it is.  Biology, I tell ya.  Adam and Eve.  Vervet monkeys with pink berries.  Choose your toxic horseshit, and insist on telling the people around you the reasons they are forever doomed to live it.

Anyhow, the point: Don’t try to over-apply your own experience, trust people about their own. What you’ve known of the world, what you’ve lived, is not all universal human truth.

Cowboy Jutsu

Howdy y’all. Now, you wanna talk about that there cultural appropriation, you wanna talk about the Japonisme Renaissance of the nineteen-hunnerd–eighties an’ thereabout. Folks around the world got themselves the fever for the flavor of a ninja, kinda Part Two of the seventies interest in kung fu, itself a sequel of an even creepier post WWII interest in Japanese culture and judo. The Chinese were into it early on (see movies like Heroes of the East and Five Element Ninjas), but no one went whole hog for it like the U S of A.

During that time, Frank Miller had a run on Daredevil comics which featured extremely ninjatastic plots, that ultimately formed the basis of the most recent season of Netflix’s Daredevil series.  Now, I was on the tumblrs when I came across a screen cap of a hilarious tweet by someone name of Sam Kriss:

“imagine a japanese tv show in which someone investigating a corrupt american corporation is attacked by droves of lasso-wielding cowboys”

As it happens, back in my unselfconscious days of youth, I owned a role-playing game called Ninjas & Superspies, which had dozens of martial art forms.  But it didn’t have Cowboy Jutsu… until now!  You can thank me in the comments.  Now I reckon a lot of you will care less about bonuses to Parry and Dodge, so just focus on the color text for yuks in the following section.  (For the interested and egregiously nerdy, I tried to make this balanced within the system by modeling it off of Triad Assassin style from “Mystic China” but made it a bit more versatile and tough with the excuse I was making it an “Exclusive” form.)
[Read more…]

Shaytan e Bozorg

I started calling myself Great American Satan back in the time when all I knew of the Middle East was creepy fundamentalist religion and oil. I had hints of other things in the back of my mind, but they didn’t really come together for a few years.

If you check out the wikipedia page on the phrase, you’ll see the central thrust of the Assholatollah’s speech what that the US conducts itself abroad with imperialism and corruption. In these facts, he was completely fucking correct.  We support dictatorships that make our rich richer, actively use the CIA and their stooges to overthrow sovereign nations that dare to put the well-being of their own people before our corporate profits.  We’re satans in a bad way.

At least some of us are satans in a good way.  I’ve been using the label a while and stand by the sentiment: If you ain’t living your life in a way that would piss off an ayatollah, you ain’t living right. Never pray, never fast, drink what you like, and get busy as much or as little as you desire, preferably with weird body parts and weird people and no weddings in sight.

Let the ladies drive from Mecca to Medina in a convertible covered in truncated shahadas, preferably with their colorful trisexual SJW side-cuts whipping in the wind, taking rest stops to make love with a Salman Rushdie bobblehead-shaped strap on, and piss on hadith booklets.

لا إله

A Thesis in Progress: On Action

As a youth, one of my first loves was action movies.  I used to stay up well past midnight watching anything labeled as “action” in the TV Guide.  I’d dig it when Gary Daniels did a totally gratuitous standing backflip or kicked someone’s face causing a bunch of talcum powder to burst forth in a mysterious cloud.  When Bolo Yeung told Jean-Claude “You are next!”  Good times.

I haven’t been very thrilled by an action flick in some years.  Getting old I suppose.  Space Shooters was alright, the one with the laser people?  I forget.  Anyhow, as someone who was once very invested in a thing, I must examine why, what was good about it, what wasn’t so good, and if I could get back a bit of that magic.  Especially as a creator of narrative art, I have to ask myself if I can make something that would thrill a thrillable person.  So analyzing action, in film, comics, prose.

My ideas aren’t very well formed yet, don’t know if I have much by way of conclusions.  The work thus far has been in the laboratory of random thoughts, in the shower occasionally, waiting for a bus.  But harken and hear me out!  Because if I don’t present these ideas in half-assed form and they never reach a full ass, then they’ll never see the light of day in any form.  Proceeding thus,

I love action movies, but I recognize some underlying problems in them.  Aside from the usual reinforcement of toxic cultural norms and ideas, prioritizing the power and presumed righteousness of the victor in a violent struggle is a wretched mess.  A corollary of ableism is vaunting athleticism as a moral virtue.  We’re all taught to avoid thinking “might makes right,” but what is John McClane‘s victory over Hans Gruber if not the outcome of a contest for physical supremacy?

What is the fundamental appeal of an action movie or story?  I tried to pare it down to the most abstract form, even before you get into questions like just how universal or valid the campbellian hero myth is, and came up with this: What makes a story “action” in genre is that the hero uses some form of power as an extension of their will to change the world.  The hero could use gun skills to take out a bad guy, could use kung fu to avenge a murder, could use super strength to save people from falling off a bridge.  The thing behind the power is will, desire to make something happen.  The power is the tool that allows the will to be enacted.

So in essence, the action genre is a fantasy about being able to make things happen, to have an effect on the world.  Not surprising that the heavily disenfranchised often find horror and romance more relatable.  I’ve spoken with an AFAB person on the subject and they said they never felt like it was possible to make a difference or change anything, wouldn’t find it believable as a narrative.  Running from monsters, on the other hand, easy to get into.  Not everyone downtrodden has that sense of power crushed out of them so utterly, lots of girls getting into action stories these days.  Progress on one front.

How do I, as a writer, craft a compelling action story?  There are a number of different plot structures and subgenres that have been used over the years.  An example I’m fond of is the tournament plot, like Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport, Heatseeker, Harry Potter and the (edit:) FUCK THAT SHIT, and so on.  But I feel like, as long as you have a basic familiarity with how storytelling works and the genre you want to work in, this isn’t the challenge.  Finding out what makes someone want to read a story and implementing that – this is my aim.

Not sure the best place to start, but with my favorite movies seems good.  What made Hard-Boiled so awesome?  What made Space Shooters so affecting?  What’s so good about Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, a Jackie Chan movie that predated his signature style?  I don’t know, and what works for me won’t necessarily work for someone else.  My conclusions are tentative.

  • Themed Teams.  Different colored ninja suits.  In Tha Harry P Chronicles, the factions all had special colored scarves and stereotypes about the peeps in their clubs.  In kung fu movies, different clans or groups of fighters would have at least somewhat matched outfits.  In Hard-Boiled during the warehouse fight, it was janitor jumpsuits versus black motorcycle gear.  Call it pageantry or a narrative device, it’s kinda cool.
  • Sexy Mans.  Hard-Boiled could only have been improved by Tony Leung and Chow Yun-fat making out.  Om nom.
  • Social Justice.  When everyone in space shooter lady‘s life says “you are worthless, wait forever for anything good,” and she gets dragged into awareness of her importance and worth, she doesn’t know how to feel about it, resists, and it makes my heart a splode.

The answer is probably something in the neighborhood of the last one, rather than the more superficial elements.  But I’m not done thinking about this yet.  One of these years…

Self and Self Esteem

Once again, I’m about to do a lot of talking out my ass on subjects I’m not certified to comment on. But what I’m about to say feels true to me, so good enough for now. Just don’t cite me in your term paper.

The struggle of all thinking animals is to make sense of the world, and all social animals are also compelled to make sense of their relation to conspecifics. Both problems (which I’ll return to later) involve an assumption of a self – that there exists at the core of one’s impulses, thoughts, and perceptions a singular entity that owns its being. “I think therefore I am” is often misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with philosophy* as meaning one must think to exist legitimately – “I’m clever therefore I am cool” – but it simply means that if there is an “I” to be capable of thinking, then the “I” must be real.

This “I” has not, since about age fifteen, felt quite like it is real. I’m not qualified to debate this formally, but if anyone has the high-blown formal jargon and practice to take that up in the comments, go for it. I’m simply saying I don’t feel like the self is as coherent a thing in reality as we normally assume it to be.

The pretentious teenage Satan of yore was introduced to Descartes and began to question their previous assumptions that reason+observation were sufficient to know reality, and this feeling followed from that.  The failure of his ontological argument (which aimed not just to prove the existence of god, but to establish that one could trust the reality of the world) stranded me partway through his line of reasoning, in a state of endless doubt.**

What are we if not beings, individually existing selves?*** Biology can provide an idea of what I mean. We are colonies of differentiated cells, working together, but without any central governing body.  The brain is an organ of those cells, but it doesn’t directly control all of the others, doesn’t even have a singular controller of the cells within itself. Likewise, the “software” of a human consciousness seems to be made of disparate impulses, senses, and thought processes that – while they add up to something that seems like a whole – remain distinct.

And if we try to isolate the center by feeling our way through to the dark pit of our minds, to some of us, it will feel like there isn’t anything there. My guess is that there really isn’t anything there, for any of us, but that people with a strong sense of their self are more able to construct a functional illusion.  That isn’t always a good thing, because a social animal’s sense of self can be fundamentally horrible.

Which takes me back to the first paragraph.  Assuming a self that needs to eat and dodge bears to continue experiencing life – this is useful and great.  Determining the value of that self, the relative worth that entitles us to experience life, is a kind of hell that no animal should have to deal with.  If it works out for you, it doesn’t even feel like you did anything at all.  If it doesn’t work, everything you do can be ruined, all the way down to simply breathing.

This is where I was before I truly started to understand what self esteem means to people that don’t have it.  I couldn’t imagine there even being a question of whether I’m entitled to happiness.  If someone outside tries to bring me down, it is obviously because they are wrong.  I didn’t know the reason I felt OK was because my mind was actively doing something.  Feeling OK doesn’t feel like anything.

But as a social animal, being worthy of life is a decision I am making, an act I am undertaking.  Or more accurately, something that was decided for me by luck and circumstance practically before I could speak, and that has since been an assumption I can take for granted, that my healthy mind reinforces every day.  If, at the age of two, I had been ignored, dismissed, abused, I could feel very differently.  I could feel like the only metric of my worth is the approval of others, that without an overwhelming amount of positive reinforcement from people around me, I should just shuffle off and die.

I could, when I look in a mirror, see every insult or dismissal or cutting remark made about every aspect of my appearance, or of the appearance of people who look like myself.  And then what?  I’d think of myself as gross, disgusting, unlovable, worthless.  I could earnestly believe all of those things as if they were my own thoughts, rather than the programming of a society that exists in a twisted and cruel scramble of social sorting.

There isn’t any cure for it.  That’s our minds doing what they’re built for: forming a socially stable population with maximum potential to carry the genes forward.  As animals, we’ve gotten beyond the need for this kind of built-in social valuation, the same way we’ve gotten beyond the need for whatever the appendix was.  We have an ethical system that builds on what’s best in us – humanism – and other ways of helping the whole population get by.  Bad self esteem is a holdover from a time when our species was less fancy.

In our society as it exists now, bad self-esteem is a maladaption that has to be worked past, like natural childbirth.  Bring on the pod-grown babies.  And bring on a cure for bad self esteem, whatever that may be, because living in a world this full of sadness bums my neurotypical shit out.  No one should have to feel like they are unworthy of life and happiness.

Seems like my topic did a 180 there and maybe it did, but I feel like these things are related.  Maybe something that insulated my brain from bad self-evaluation is that I’ve never had a fully developed sense of self in the non-social sense in the first place?  Or maybe it was having a peer group in the form of siblings near my own age, so that being ignored by parents didn’t harm me.  I dunno.  I just wish I could donate all this extra self-esteem to those in need. It is extra – I feel like I have more esteem than self.

 

*I have literally 101 level familiarity with philosophy.  It’s enough to mess with childish teenage me of long ago, not enough to go into any substance with trained professionals.

**This doubt isn’t very significant.  It’s there, but it doesn’t affect a life that has thus far been safely lived as if apparent reality can be trusted.  It just felt disturbing at the time, having previously always felt much more confident in my sense and senses.

***This whole essay has likely suffered from a lack of vocabulary to address the issue.  I hope that it still makes sense.

Best Anti-theist Song Ever?

“Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” by The Vaselines.  There are a lot of songs against god and that means plenty of room for disagreement.  “Dear God” by XTC is strong, really lays out a case.  This one is more personal.  Lately, I’ve been feeling that the personal is more powerful.  It’s like the difference between a grandiose story with a cast of thousands, and a story about just a few people.  Personal is more affecting.  Anyway, fuck god in all his names.  Carry on.