10 Brief Notes on the Gods/Superheroes

1. Nearby you’ll see pictures of Malinda Boothe, taken by her friend Lawrence D. Roberts, whacking a hammer against a resonant, metallic piece of interactive art at the surreal, amazing, sprawling, hilly, 500-acre(!), outdoor Storm King art museum not far from New York City -- and me amidst the vibrations. 

Walking around that place is like awakening in some Valhalla for artists (but it’s slightly farther away than Valhalla, NY).

2. That, and a second day of rain here in New York City, will have to substitute for any profound observations about Thor being back in theatres (though I will say that there must be at least some Marvel execs nervous about having schlocky ex-Troma producer James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy this coming summer be the thing to tee up the “third phase” of Marvel movies, likely climaxing with the third ensemble Avengers film’s final battle with Thanos circa 2018).

3. Alan Moore sure doesn’t care whether the Avengers movies continue to do well, though.  Hasn’t he taken every last one of his marbles and gone all the way home by now?

4. I don’t know what the name of the third ensemble Avengers film (presumably to be directed by Joss Whedon) will be, but I do notice Marvel already owns the URL AvengersInfinity.com, surely a good one to have on hand if it all climaxes with deathgod Thanos putting all the magical “Infinity Stones” together (here’s hoping they somehow have space to squeeze in Thanos-fighting hero Adam Warlock if it does).

They should also get the Rolling Stones to do an end credits song for it.  Something about stones and living death, maybe.

5. There’s something unapologetically pagan and pantheon-building about all these sorts of stories -- and I’ll revisit the topic of our pagan brethren (and their gods) soon in an entry about what G.K. Chesterton thought of them.

6. Of course, despite religious people constantly assuming (as they must) that secular folk must be tone-deaf, emotionally deadened, shallow creatures, we science-loving nerds fully understand that for aesthetic purposes, it is sometimes deeply wrong to reduce a story about magic to humdrum material explanations (fiction and reality are two different things, as we are more keenly aware). 

Thus, the midi-chlorians -- the bacteria that cause the Force in the eternally accursed Phantom Menace -- were one of the biggest mistakes in film history, we can all agree.  And I think DC Comics (if anyone I know still cares, and I’m not sure anyone does) made a similar mistake recently.

After two years of heightened fan interest, increased sales, and intersecting plotlines spawned by the 2011 reboot of the DC Comics fictional universe, the core plot -- about the goddess Pandora trying to find a fully-good or fully-evil person able to open her fabled Box again and destroy the literal Seven Sins themselves, thus warding off an incursion from beyond the universe that necessitated the reboot as a defensive measure -- ended (or worse, blurred into the next story) with the revelation that the Sins were just irrelevant alien parasites, the Box was just a teleportation device, the big incursion was just the Crime Syndicate (the evil Justice League from Earth-3), and Pandora’s scheming and manipulation of reality over the past 10,000 years or so was pretty much pointless. 

Oh, well.  On to the next advertising blitz and/or film tie-in.  Best to turn your eyes elsewhere (perhaps to a website called Liberty Island -- but more about that in a few weeks).

7. Yet geek hope springs eternal, and, for instance, I am cautiously optimistic about the impending second Hobbit film, despite the first one being bland, for the simple reason that dividing the fairly short and simple book up into three films, while a mistake, should at least have the positive side effect (I hope) of cramming the entire dragon arc of the story, from our first full sight of him to his death, into this one film. 

That should be a cool traditional story arc even if the first and third films prove lacking.  Go, Smaug!

8. Smaug is a very traditional sort of character, as J.R.R. Tolkien well knew.  More modern depictions of evil tend toward the unsettling, as with “BOB” from Twin Peaks, who oddly enough (or quite fittingly?) is sort of likened to ABC (and now Disney) exec Bob Iger in this neat 1991 news piece about the TV series.  It even has cream corn (pardon me, garmonbozia) and a nice chat with the actors who played “BOB” and the dwarf.

9. I feel as if the closest I get to dealing with creepy entities from a gnostic Black Lodge in real life is being tweeted at by and occasionally interacting face to face with “neo-reactionaries” and “Dark Enlightenment” advocates such as Michael Anissimov.  If you want to know why they’re weird-but-interesting, this recent article (h/t Tushar Saxena and Marilynn Larkin) is a good place to start.  If you find yourself thinking with alarm that it sounds like some people you know (or have dated), you may well be right.

10. Speaking of creepy friends, some lucky person is about to become my 666th Facebook friend.  Surely, we near the end times. 

(Or at least, we near the end of me doing such frequent Facebooking, tweeting, blogging, and e-mailing, I swear -- if I am thus unresponsive to your future Facebook-friend requests, do not be offended, and please assume I’m either offline or can’t tell whether you’re a bot.  All other overdue matters shall soon be attended to.)

Song Parodies, Maybe-Parodies, plus Muslims and Mexicans Rocking

•There’s been debate over whether Rebecca Black’s video “Friday” is so bad that it has to be parody, but it’s not so different from all of the by-and-for-kids pop emerging from “the Orlando scene” and the like ever since the Mousketeers started stealthily taking over music in the late 90s (causing me to tune out for about a decade, but I’m attentive again).

• Now this is definitely a parody – and indeed I think it might be the best fusion of original song and lounge-ified Richard Cheese sound of any of his songs: "Welcome to the Jungle."

•More ambiguous is the huge, operatic, and disturbing Puddles the Clown – seen here as Nybakken and I saw him last year, touring with the live Aqua Teen Hunger Force show and accompanied by a dancing gorilla girl – finishing his alarming medley of “My Heart Will Go On” and “Enter Sandman.”

•The band MeWithoutYou hits enough spiritual themes to be very popular with Christian audiences (as I learned from Daniel Radosh).  There’s a certain Bible boot camp feel to their video for the great manic song “Nice & Blue, Pt. 2.”  I am even more impressed, though, by their more recent song “The Fox, the Crow, and the Cookie.”  I imagine hipsters sing songs like that to their children. 

Rather than being Christians, though, the Weiss brothers at the heart of the band were raised Sufi Muslim by parents who'd converted from Episcopalianism and Judaism.  (Might that explain the line "Let the crescent cookie rise"?)  Eclectic.

The song’s story itself may come from ancient Southwest Asia -- somewhere around Pakistan -- but reaches the West through Aesop, itself a reminder that ancient societies were not wholly self-contained, despite fear of globalization erupting anew circa 1999.  And again in 2001.

•Speaking of Muslim rockers, anyone (who I already know) who’s keen to be my guest Saturday, April 2 to see Muslim convert (and vegan and Turkey-dweller) Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, perform his (far more beautiful) solo stuff at the Highline Ballroom should (be the first person to) let me know.  (I wonder if there’ll be a moment of extra applause from the audience for the Middle East uprisings, comparable to the big hand for a fleeting reference to Tunisia – just a mention of the country, not even its politics – by singer Nassima at Carnegie Hall when I saw her there last month.)

•And if MeWithoutYou and Peter Murphy make you feel more comfortable about culture getting eclectic, you’re ready to watch a video by a Mexican rock band I’ve mentioned before (pointed out to me by Michael Malice – an immigrant himself): Hello Seahorse!’s “Won’t Say Anything.”  We are not so different, you and I, senorita.  (And Gerard Perry points out that even the Irish can joke about the IRA.  World peace through global pop culture, as an anime company slogan used to put it.)

P.S. If anyone’s wondering: truth be told, if I had to distill everything I actually respect about rock into one (relatively simple, non-postmodern) band, it would likely sound less like New Wave (often as I praise that) and more like Guadalcanal Diary, the Connells, or Crowded House.

A Century of Change and Sheena Easton

The creation of the Saudi Arabian government, World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nazi Party, and the American welfare state all lay in the future when my grandmother was born (around the same time the Panama Canal was completed in early 1914) -- and she's still here, but not all of those things are (neither is the British Empire).  Maybe someday soon none of those new-fangled things will be.  Things change quickly.  Don't let people -- right-wing or left-wing -- convince you that impermanent things are permanent, not even religion, about which some more tomorrow.

But tonight a tradition endures: socialize at Langan's from 7pm until late, at our monthly Manhattans Project gathering.  Extra libertarians are likely to join us.

Meanwhile, it seems as though many libertarians or conservatives would like to switch from talking about politics to talking about neuroscience, touched upon lately in books, blogs, comments, or articles by Ken Silber, Ryan Sager, Will Wilkinson, and the mushy and unprincipled but trend-watching David Brooks.  This may prove useful when taxes and regulation become passe in fifteen years and everything hinges on cyborg liberation.  Well see.

•••

I must ashamedly admit that I was reminded of how quickly the culture changes by something pretty fluffy recently: stumbling across a Sheena Easton 80s video clip for the song "Modern Girl" on YouTube (this is my version of Scottish Enlightenment). It's no older than my childhood -- and wouldn't sound aesthetically out of place on the radio even today -- but the lyrics are in large part an assertion that Sheena can earn her own money and thus plan her own life, still a novel and tough-sounding stance at the time ("She don't build her world 'round no single man/ She's just gettin' by doin' what she can," etc.).

On a related note -- as foreseen by us capitalist types -- we've now reached the point where millennial females (at least in urban areas) out-earn males, and we simply do not have the political or cultural-analytical tropes on hand to say (without tumultuous repercussions) that

Anarchy Everywhere Immediately! (A Cautious Explanation)

Am I rapidly changing my tune, after spending the past two decades trying to subtly nudge the culture rightward and the right punkward?  Yes, but I am not backpedaling or contradicting myself.  

Rather, I think (a) the urgency of the financial/spending crisis, (b) the heightened awareness of government-business collusion on both sides of the political spectrum, (c) the popularity of the (mostly) anti-big-government Tea Party movement (highly popular relative to the small hardcore libertarian movement in the decades preceding it), and (d) the diminished appearance of legitimacy of big governments around the world all combine to make this an appropriate time to switch to a more econ-focused and more urgent mode, even though a reserved gradualism, I swear, suits my temperament (not to mention Edmund Burke's) better in most circumstances.  

Also, the ever-diversifying media make gradual, subtle approaches passe, I fear.  The Whole Message must be conveyed in each sentence if anyone is to stop long enough to hear it.  The ship of state still turns slowly, but the ship of political discourse is becoming a jet ski among jet skis. 

•••

When it appeared that bland decades stretched before us in which to subtly steer the ship of state into one of two highly-popular channels, it made sense to focus on that tactic.  But if even the elderly are in the streets wielding signs painted with Rand slogans while wearing tricorn hats, things have changed.  I must change with the ever-more-fluid times as well, as must this blog (and its new-minted companion media modalities, products of this "twenty-first century" thing in which I have begun taking an interest). 

I will no longer assume there will be a right and left twenty years from now.  I am not confident there will be a stock market or welfare state as we know them, for good or ill.  There is no time left in which to mince words, then.  And no time to waste, over and over, on using political labels that confuse (and amuse) by meaning one thing this decade and the opposite thing the next (true of terms ranging from "anarchist" to "liberal" to "conservative," perhaps even "libertarian").  I will try to keep things more concrete and clear as we ride the changes together (hint: "property rights…taxes… spending cut…"). 

Tomorrow, a concrete reminder of how quickly things change (and tomorrow at Langan's at 7pm, a Manhattans Project gathering, where we can discuss it all). 

A Government Shutdown EVERYWHERE? More “Jasmine Tea Party” Thoughts

Frustratingly, America will have to wait nearly two more weeks for the federal government to shut down (and then, it will only partially shut down).  Most people will barely notice when it does, and it will be interesting to see if the press is as eager this time as it was back in 1995 to hunt down cases of mild inconvenience resulting from the shutdown and make them sound like crises. 

The press’s favorite, endlessly repeated example back then, you may recall, was the difficulty of getting last-minute “emergency passports” during the shutdown, a great example of the press thinking that the one small thing that irks their rich friends is something that strikes at the hearts of all Americans (my parents do not even have passports, last I knew, having traveled no farther afield in recent decades than Canada, apparently without being detained). 

I’m not saying the ruination of your last-minute plan to ski the Matterhorn is irrelevant, but it’s a small price to pay to get the government (partially) off our backs, and absent government, we wouldn’t have passports in the first place (nor borders, which a true libertarian should view with as much suspicion as prison walls and guard towers).

But – as I will likely say in my intro remarks tonight at Lolita Bar (7pm) prior to DAVID FRIEDMAN’s speech there about the third edition of Machinery of Freedom – I would love to see government shut down, as both idea and practice, the world over.  Now may be the time for it, with people irked enough here to stage Tea Parties, irked enough to riot in Europe, and irked enough to rebel across the Middle East.  I know, I know, the grievances vary and are in some cases at odds with my own, but how hard would it be, I wonder, to ju-jitsu the current mood into across-the-board anti-government sentiment – and crucially, into a sense of global common struggle – if we all agreed to start thinking of this mood as a single, broad “Jasmine Tea Party” instead of unrelated Jasmine Revolutions in the Middle East, complaints in China, and marginalized right-wingery in the U.S.?

I used to be something of a gradualist, but there’s already a sense of crisis in the air, and we might resolve it faster if we spread the recognition that humanity has a common enemy, and that enemy is government.  Not the current crop of bums.  Not just Mubarak.  Not just the latest Democrat to spend money on his friends or the latest Republican to say something insensitive.  Government.  Leave the idea of governing our fellow humans on the ash heap of history, alongside the idea of selling them as slaves or forcing them to pledge fealty to a monarch.  Good people do not (for example) rape each other, and they do not govern each other.  I hope I live to see the day when people are ashamed to recall they ever thought otherwise. 

•••

Recognizing a common enemy across so many regions means accepting diverse motivations and philosophical perspectives instead of expecting my own precise formulation to reign unchallenged, of course. 

But my pals on the libertarian right may, I dare say, have a good model for a meta-philosophy or at least strategic approach in the idea of “fusionism,” which was the

Book Selections of the Month: "Death of the Liberal Class" and "How to Disappear"

ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (March 2011): Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges and How to Disappear by Frank M. Ahearn with Eileen C. Horan

Avoiding indulging in “confirmation bias” (disproportionately registering data that confirms your existing notions) gets harder with each passing year.  I was once criticized, for example, for saying that I largely just read whatever books my friends give me (especially if they wrote the books themselves), but that passivity was partly an effort to combat the inevitable impulse to pick things myself and end up even inadvertently reading more sci-fi, libertarianism, and pro-science stuff I may not need.  (NOTE: Don’t recommend anything!  I’m swamped!  And if you want to talk about one book at length, remember to join us tomorrow night at Lolita Bar at 7pm to hear from Machinery of Freedom author David Friedman.)

Occasionally, worried that my friends are themselves obviously a biasing cohort despite their ideological diversity, I will attempt to strike out on my own – and still often end up picking more Seaveyesque books than intended, I must admit.  So, when I bought Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges, I was honestly trying to give my brain a dose of leftism to compensate for its usual drift – and I literally picked up the Ahearn/Horan book on How to Disappear just because it was nearby on the display table and sounded more earthy and concrete than the philosophical stuff I had just, once more, picked up. 

Well, turns out Death of the Liberal Class is largely an Old Left lament that self-proclaimed “liberals” have all turned (back) into de facto libertarians over the past several decades (a lament so negative that, although I am no sadist, I actually had to laugh a couple times at how bleak – and laissez-faire capitalist – Hedges thinks everything is).  And the main author of How to Disappear, it becomes gradually apparent throughout the book, is, yes, a libertarian (or very close to it).  I don’t plan these things.  The world – and our brains – are full of rather fine-tuned filter mechanisms of which we are only dimly aware, as I often say. 

(Similarly, you may have had the experience of walking into a hotel and just sort of knowing that someone in the lobby is in town for the same event you are because she sorta looks like the type.  Other scrimshaw and polka enthusiasts, or whatever it may be, just have a walk that you immediately recognize as akin to your own vibe.)

But on to the books.

•••

Death of the Liberal Class is largely an angry history-recounting rant about what Hedges sees as twentieth-century American liberalism’s dereliction of duty.  There was a time – though apparently we have to go back not just to the 60s or FDR to find it but really all the way back to a century ago – when left-leaning intellectuals were not interested in pleasing governmental, corporate, or fellow-hipster establishments but were genuinely ornery and ready, like communist insurrectionists and

DAVID FRIEDMAN Speaks This Friday at Lolita Bar

What does DAVID FRIEDMAN (son of Milton, father of Patri) have planned for the upcoming third edition of his groundbreaking anarcho-capitalist book Machinery of Freedom?

Find out when I host a speech by the man himself, this Friday, March 4 (7pm) at our old stomping grounds, Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; Broome runs east-west one block south of the Delancey St. FJMZ subway stop), as a special Manhattans Project event. 

With resistance to government occurring around the world from Boston to Beijing -- something I hereby declare a global “Jasmine Tea Party,” but more on that in the days ahead -- what better time to hear from the man who best explains how we could do without government altogether?  Join us -- and please spread the word!

Speaking of spreading the word, note that I’m now doing so on Twitter and Facebook, so please join me there, too.  And my thanks to Megan McClellan and to Chris Whitten of WikiTree.com, a neat site for tracking and writing about your relatives, since those two have been nice enough to put up Prof. Friedman post-speech.  (Will he be properly incentivized to treat their property as his own?)

•••

I plan to hit this Jasmine Tea Party theme of mine -- the idea that now is the time for anti-government forces the world over to make common cause, be they neocon, Muslim, or anarchist -- repeatedly in the days ahead, but is that any guarantee I won’t spend another two months blogging about romantic tribulations, you ask yourself?

Well, one reminder that this blog’s traditional themes -- political philosophy, sci-fi, scientific rationality -- do not necessarily lend themselves to blogging about women is provided by this almost verbatim, only half-joking conversation I once had with a model-beautiful female:

TODD: That's admirably rational!

FEMALE: Well, you know, I was a philosophy major.  And a science fiction fan.

TODD [almost as if joking]: Are you single?

FEMALE: No, I've got a pretty serious boyfriend.

TODD: Damn it!!

FEMALE [very calmly, amused but humble]: Yeah, I gather I'm kinda "rare."