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Category Archives: commentary

A Good Day in Feed

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, reviews, writing

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antibiotics, charlie brooker, dead ideas, zombie politics

I read blogs much more than I write mine, so I fire up Akregator once or twice a day and cast a net into the RSS sea. I waited until late yesterday before hauling up that net, and brought up the kind of haul that depresses the global price of fish dinners and omega-3 commodities.

A new post by Charlie Brooker! Yay! — Brooker is the source of some of the best media commentary on TV (his Screen-, News-, and Gameswipe series) and science fiction and horror TV (Black Mirror) of any one person from the land-of-rocks-on-well-tended-green-hills.

This followed two interesting posts on the more practical aspects of keeping oneself alive through the food hole: Ferrett Steinmetz’s “I’m going to eat goop for a solid week, and probably not die”, about homemade food-substitute-drink; and Stina Leicht’s “The Little Picture Versus The Big Picture”, about the problem of factory farming, which is becoming more than a matter of feel-good, affluent, pseudo-activism. Either way, it is now easy, cheap, and healthy to stop eating meat—and less of an overt political statement—than it has ever been.

Charlie Stross is writing a doorstop, and his mind is managing not to be distracted too much by politics: The Myth of Heroism.

The Next Red Wedding(s)

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, horror, writing

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predictions, sympathetic characters

Not only does George Martin kill beloved characters and deny his heroes any real traction upon history, but he builds up the most sympathetic characters, tears them back down to the ground, and gives them permission to do terrible, stupid, destructive things. In doing this he links our favorite puppies back to the despicable characters of both yore and five-minutes-ago.

I predict another couple rounds of reaction shot videos this season. As books the story remains firmly in the tragic fantasy genre, but on the screen the story will do best if it slips into psychothriller and horror.

Land of Unknown Knowns

01 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, writing

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john wesley powell, savagery, the unknown known, wariness

Errol Morris made the rounds last week to plug his documentary, The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld. In Rumsfeld’s famous press-conference response, Rumsfeld talked about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. From what I can remember, Rumsfeld didn’t mention the fourth combination, the unknown known. Errol Morris uses this fourth combination as the title for the doc, and goes into the background in a post on NYTimes.com.

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My Prediction for The Walking Dead, Season 5…

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, horror

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entrepreneur, meritocracy

Spoilers, so… Continue reading →

Unstable Nature

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary

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erosion, geography, geological time, Oregon, rain

When I was young and we would walk on the beach of the Oregon Coast, I was told to never, ever turn my back on the sea. It wasn’t a rigid rule, despite the vehemence with which it was given. The rule was more of a guideline; imagine having any kind of fun at the beach trying to keep a constant watch for tsunami or rogue waves. Instead, the idea was to never take geography for granted. Keep an eye out in every direction.

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A Computational Mask for Editing

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, poetry, writing

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cession, editing, have had, poetry, that that, the voice of the first draft

Can it be that it is only the little words together like a song that is heard only when sung but looks on the page like many other little words unneeded and dribbling and gasping for derision? My little mind hears another little mind who can’t hear the thought, so we think that because we and they don’t hear the song there is no song to sing? Little word songs of poems of dialect, my dialect, the writer unthinking, and dialect of in with so of little words to sing of the writer must sing them. Little unneeded ors and its that that and over and still to be cut and cornered to come back to inside and over for cision and cession for of and over to come up again to be unheard and seen and slashed and cut and never sung.

I am not a sleeper.

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, no-category

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default, delusion, shutdown, sleeper agent, the color orange

I shouldn’t take politics so personally and I shouldn’t feel so strongly the stretch of tenterhooks from the mean-spirited, delusional shitshow that is this nation’s Republican party, but I do. I live here, after all, and the empathetic fabric of my skin is stretched just as tightly as anyone’s. I grew up in Republican-land and I was even a productive member of their society. But actually being hard-working and productive didn’t mean I got credit for it. I didn’t. Every generation realizes, at some point, that working is only a tiny part of doing well in the rat race. It took me longer than most to figure this out. When I realized that hard work meant little, when I realized that I’d get much farther if I bought a giant shitty truck, gained 50 pounds and joined the pseudo-anarchist right-wing, when I realized that I’d have to repeat Limbaugh or Randian talking-points at work and around my buddies, I lost all desire to martyr myself to the Protestant work ethic. I refused to live my life as a sleeper agent.

A good way to make an enemy is to restrict opportunities to members of a club. The stupidest way to make an enemy is to restrict membership of that club to the dumb, the lazy, and the mendacious.

–

My strategic analysis of the current situation is that unless a discharge petition goes forward, John Boehner is going to have to ride this out to the end. The people who think he’s going to be a statesman and break the Hastert Rule are mistaken. He doesn’t identify with anyone; he and his are very well set up; there is no motivating impulse that will wobble him from his historic path. He might even see a path to the Oval Office. If so, then we are fucked because there’s no arguing with a delusional wannabe-tyrant. That seems like a stretch given Boehner’s orangey loucheity, but greater turns in history are known.

More specifically short-term, John Boehner has already lost in any reasonable scenario. His only option for a win is the unreasonable scenario. If no Rs vote to discharge a D bill, the next step would be for the executive to invoke Article IV to avoid default. If Obama invokes the constitution to make interest payments then Boehner must either choose to give up (giving up his majority and maybe his seat in the election) or keep going without a budget. He would have nothing to lose. A louche and callous character argues for destruction, in this scenario.

What does Boehner see at the end of this path? Will he throw a couple dozen Rs under the bus along with his majority? Is someone planning a coup? That really is the only option for the Tea Party right now. Anything less will be another humiliation for them. They can’t win national elections; they can’t win much territory without gerrymandering; their only option is to continue the shutdown, assume that Boehner won’t bend the Hastert Rule, and keep their fellows from breaking ranks, somehow. Do we instead get an entire year of shutdown even without a default?

An entire year until the next election is a long time. An actual slide into deep recession maintained by Boehner’s adoption of the Tea Party mantle is a path into uncertain darkness. Can the country hold out until the election, then through the lame-duck Congress all the way to January 2015? I don’t think it can. We’ll either get enough Rs signing a discharge of a continuing resolution, some kind of coup, or John Boehner acting like a human being. I predict the former, followed by a D-House next November. Then an attempted coup. Followed by Boehner crying real human tears that smell of citrus.

Reading

09 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, no-category

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Charles Stross

I cleaned out my research queue so I can catch up on some fiction I’ve been wanting to read: Stina Leicht’s Fey and the Fallen.

Leicht had a guest bloggo on Charlie Stross’s site a while back and what grabbed me about her writing was her humanity, her location (Texas) and her politics (humanist) despite the social pressures. That combination is important. It’s courageous, of course, but it’s also inevitable. It is now possible to dissent from conservative doublethink and state one’s dissent publicly with broad distribution. The social consequences still exist; stepping outside the role of self-hating-redneck is best done if you don’t rely on self-hating-rednecks for work or family.

So my appreciation of her blog was political. A while back I read and wrote a blub about Mur Lafferty’s Shambling Guide to New York City. At WorldCon last week Lafferty won the John W. Campbell award for new writers. Leicht was up for the same award and suddenly I felt guilty. I began following Lafferty because of her work on the Escape Artists podcasts. I mirror the ambition of her podcast, I Should Be Writing. I also use The Magic Spreadsheet to keep myself motivated and my wordcount up. But Stina Leicht has a wider scope on her blog.

The competition between new writers is played down to a degree (everyone gets a tiara) but I feel like my attention to Lafferty’s work was unfair given Leicht’s place in my feed. It’s not a competition, I know, and I lack both power and readers so the unfairness is just a feeling. Perhaps I should be more fair to me and begin submitting work. Maybe I could wear the tiara as a bracelet.

So I now have trade paper copies of Leicht’s two Fey and the Fallen books from Powell’s. More to come.

Cheap Theaters are Good

26 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, reviews

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health care, Into Darkness, Kelly's Hero's, Nerd Nostalgia, plutocracy, science fiction

I have two cheap theaters within walking distance so this weekend I caught up on my blockbusters and saw Star Trek: Into Darkness and Elysium.

Regarding Into Darkness, I don’t have too much to add to the comments I’ve already seen online except that Trek has become a Trek Nationalism (of a non-goosestepping kind) and that we are now being sold a repackaged, retold, re-convoluted version of a history we already know. We’ve had this before in movies about World War II (Kelly’s Heroes and Inglorious Basterds for two examples). Into Darkness is a ceremony of Trek Nation Nostalgia. While the film was excellent entertainment (in a scene-chewing-parody sort of way), I wonder if the folks who own the Trek Universe will actually start coming up with new stories the way The New Generation and Deep Space Nine did and Voyager didn’t. For the next film they’ll need a great new story, I think, or the franchise will fail for good.

Elysium is 85% of a great film. Production design was complete, the script was about done, blocking and continuity were worked out pretty well (apart from the shoulder-launched magic-missiles and the lack of gauntlets on the exoskeleton), but it still had a fair amount of story to tell or not tell, depending on the ultimate message of the film.

The message of Elysium, I think, was meant to be more generally an indictment of the self-righteous yet casual way our plutocratic overlords seek to make the entire world smaller and more manageable for themselves. Being a film instead of a series of episodes (which is the proper format for a deep narrative) Blomkamp focused on health care and tried to let setting take care of the rest of the message. This may have been a mistake. The negative comments about the arbitrary unfairness of the Elysium health care model (which ignore the arbitrary unfairness of the setting in general, and our own world) show that the message didn’t connect squarely.

Science fiction is about metaphorical messages about ourselves and creating fantasy settings that might be real. Blomkamp has done the latter very well in his two major pictures—better than any other current sci-fi film auteur, period.—but for the former he may need to move to a more long-form video medium. I wish him luck.

Man of Steel and the Possible Trap of Propaganda

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, reviews

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canon

I listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour every week and their comic-book-guy, Glen Weldon, is a freak for Superman. He wrote a book about the history of Superman as a character and its influences in culture (I haven’t read it; it’s somewhere in my trans-dimensional queue. One of my infinite selves will get around to it one day.) and Glen Weldon hated, hated Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. He hated it much so that I was prophylactically prepared for moral outrage when the movie came around to the three-dollar theater. One of the PCHH folks (probably Weldon) described it as “evil”. But I ended up being somewhat charmed by the movie despite its immorally unacknowledged body count and its monochromatic lack of soul.

I’ve had problems with Snyder’s previous work. I blamed him personally, as director, for the dead-eyed lack of performance in Watchman. What left Watchmen dead, however, informs Man of Steel’s portrayal of Superman’s actual origin story. This story is a seventy-plus-year-old commentary on the Romantic Übermensch-ian justifications for imperial nationalism that caused a half dozen world-ish wars during the 19th and 20th centuries. There’s really no way to be faithful to that and give it the modern sort of heart that a loving contemporary human might truly enjoy seeing. Apart from the time constraints, there’s simply no room in this canon retelling for any humanizing additions as there was in Smallville or the other Superman films. Snyder is working in the tradition of D. W. Griffith, not Richard Donner or Mario Puzo, complete with the implications of that kind of questionable historical ambition.

So the film has no humor and no statement of nuance that doesn’t rely entirely on the viewer. What’s left are the facts of the canon and the highest production values possible.

The one consistently annoying thing in this edifice (apart from the way the sound was turned up far too loud in the theater) was the incredibly tight framing of the shots. Visually, this is a movie of faces. Faces talking, faces reacting, and faces intercut with short shots of CGI mannequins driving each other through CGI concrete. Making this a film of faces makes it much more effective than it might have been otherwise and there is little chance of confusing or forgetting the important characters. But it’s a bit like some recordings of Philip Glass or the use of dynamic range compression. It’s the exhausting exploitation of a technique for maximal effect—and framing faces from the middle of the forehead down to just below their flappy jaws is nothing if not maximum—which becomes a statement in itself and it isn’t a statement of entertainment. It is information design. It is the knob of fidelity turned up to eleven. It might not be art.

If one assumes this movie is propaganda of heartless bashing, it is perfectly put together for the purpose, a well designed technical explication, an accurate restatement of an early formulation of a fictional canon and a simple philosophy. This reading might be a bit of a leap but it is possible because the film ignores what was lasting about Superman’s legacy, it ignores the stories that came later: Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan; Superman, Lana, and the version of Lois Lane that came about as feminism was going mainstream; Superman versus the corporate supervillain. This film is focused entirely on Superman as a presentation of the limits of theology, a depiction of a reluctant Übermensch. Not Christ as some badly-planned publicity seems to have attempted to present him, but Joshua or David plus a self-abnegating conscience.

The next film in the series will pit the government-friendly Superman against the insurgent plutocrat, Batman. If Snyder and Nolan have motives beyond canonical presentation of the original source material, they’ll probably show their hand much more obviously when they match the two heroes against each other. It doesn’t bode well that they’re skipping the sympathy-producing storylines of the 40s through the 70s in favor of Frank Miller’s edgy sociopathy.

Making choices about what is and isn’t canon will be revealing. If humor, human fascism and the quasi-legal plutocracy of Lex Luthor don’t make the cut, then the people choosing the cut will have shown their hand and we can look past the design of production and make clear judgments about the motives of the film’s creators.

I guess we’ll have to see.

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