truefiction.org

Stop it. Seriously.

Stop it.

This post contains spoilers. But I was, like, the last person to see the movie who actually wanted to see it, right?

1. It’s a shame that this means The Sparrow will probably never get made into a movie.

2. Leaving aside all of the political stuff, I thought the film was more self-aware than most people have given Cameron credit for. I mean, yeah, there’s the “unobtanium” thing, which is a groaner…except that when they made the same joke in The Core six years ago, everyone just ran with it. Because everyone knew that movie wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously.

3. And meanwhile, here’s a movie, made almost entirely inside a computer, that glorifies the natural world. And people have been confused by this, chalked it up to the drab irony of twenty-first century life, and moved on. Yet this planet is comprised a network of trees, all interconnected, like it was some kind of giant internet or something.

4. Incidentally, Pandora is a utopian, undemocratic society ruled by an all-powerful computer. This is the type of planet that the old James T. Kirk absolutely lived to destroy.

Let’s look on the bright side:

If McCain and Palin somehow manage to get elected, some enterprising soul will have FTL travel ready to go by the end of 2009.

Does anyone know what the terror alert level is today?

It took a little while (and a lot of the details are still being worked out, like an actual, I dunno, design for this page), but truefiction.org is back online after languishing in the wilderness for a while. Corresponding with the fact that we have a new hosting provider and finally managed to switch over to Wordpress, there are going to be some changes coming in the next few weeks. First: there are going to be new writers. Give a warm welcome to Kevin Bostic, who’s signed on already; there will hopefully be a few other writers signing on before too long.

Second: there’s something to be said for actually updating regularly. I make promises on this count far too often for my word to mean anything, but using WordPress is such a huge leap over the (very old version) of MovableType that I was using that writing in it is almost–dare I say it?–fun.

Third: I’m currently having trouble importing my old content into the new format. Apparently, I’m going to have to go through the old stuff post by post and replace the quotation marks and the formatting. This qualifies as a pain in the ass. But it should be done by the end of the month.

Anyway, welcome back to the site. I mean you by this, dad.

Yo La Tengo w/ The Rosebuds @ Starr Hill

Since the opening of Satellite Ballroom and the renaissance of Starr Hill, Charlottesville music lovers have been a little bit spoiled. Big acts come to town with alarming regularity now, and it seems like we all take it for granted. That big Peaches show? Oh, I’ll just get tickets the day or two before. Of Montreal? Again? It’s easy to forget that just a few years ago there was a huge drought of shows here, with poor students forced to drive two hours to DC to see any band big enough to not fit in the basement of Tokyo Rose. It’s easy to remind yourself, missing a show, that someone else will be here within a few weeks, and you’ll probably want to see them more anyway, and man, that bank account sure is suffering right now.

But Yo La Tengo is different. Yo La Tengo is special.

The seminal indie-rock band has been here before, but not in almost seven years. That means Clinton was still president, the dot-com market hadn’t yet crashed, and I was still a senior in high school: in other words, it was ages ago. Last Thursday night, they returned to a sold-out crowd, a packed upper room at Starr Hill, and plenty of resentment from those who weren’t able to get tickets.

Read the rest of this entry »

J @ Omphalos pointed me in the direction of this lovely article at Foreign Policy, in which Joshua Muravchik writes a neocon apologia, trying to figure out how to recoup after the massive losses of last week. It hits all the major neocon points–hey, we were campus lefties who saw the light!–acknowledges both that the transformation of the military was a bad idea (but Iraq wasn’t) and that America needs to rely more on its diplomatic corps. And then, amazingly, this bit:

Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb. Its rulers are religio-ideological fanatics who will not trade what they believe is their birthright to great power status for a mess of pottage. Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there. Nothing will embolden terrorists and jihadists more than a nuclear-armed Iran.

Isn’t that sweet? While the small-government fiscal conservatives and the big-government social conservatives are busy chewing their own arms off, trying to figure out how that one-decade-stand could possibly have gone wrong, the neoconservative movement is sticking to its principles, and its guns. Because its principles, as far as I can determine, are these:

10 Bomb the shit out of something.

20 Call anybody who disagrees with them “anti-American.”

30 GOTO 10

It amazes me how few ideas the movement actually has left. Sure, Mr. Muravchik mentions that America needs to use its diplomatic prowess more than just military force. Specifically, he mentions aiding Mideast moderates in a new fashion that is somewhere between useless and making them look like “American stooges.” But that doesn’t work, because any group in the Mideast that isn’t an American stooge is, by their definition, not moderate. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, instead of being engaged through diplomacy and slowly transformed into non-combatant political groups, such as the progress with the IRA and S”nn Fein over the past fifteen years, are cut off from any geopolitical process entirely. You could try to influence the Arab street, driving them towards more “moderate” parties, but if you could tell me which party that is in, say, Palestine, that would be awesome.

At some point, you have to swallow the bitter pill and sit down with groups that make you nauseous. You have to find some bit of common ground, however small, that both parties can agree upon. You have to have full faith in the dialogue in order to make it work–it can’t just be a series of show summits en route to a shock and awe campaign. I mean, come on. Iranian officials want to speak to the US. Syrian officials want to speak to the US. But nowhere in Mr. Muravchick’s “comeback story” does it actually mention sitting down and talking with these rogue governments tyring to come back in from the cold. The diplomatic corps is looked at primarily as a weapon to combat–you guessed it!–anti-Americanism, by utilizing talking points and telling people how great the West is. In moderation? A fantastic idea. Sign me up. But on its own, with no tangible dialogue taking place between the US, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, it cannot be a successful policy. Without it, all we’re doing is taunting these countries, occasionally waving a 500-pound-bomb-stick. The only carrot we offer is not to impose more sanctions than we already have, which isn’t really the most powerful incentive. Even Reagan sat down with the Soviets.

Inciting simple dissatisfaction amongst the people is not the way to go here. These regimes have already held on longer than the former Soviet Republics, so mere resentment will likely not be enough to overthrow their regime. And hopes that new media will overwhelm state-run channels, prompting rebellion, are hard to justify when Iranians have access to the internet and email already. Most don’t like the regime, either, but you don’t see them rising up to throw the mullahs off.

The best weapon that we have to fight anti-Americanism, jihadism, extremism–whatever the hell you want to call it–in the middle east is the weapon we’ve been loathe to use: talking with them. Opening up diplomatic channels, instead of acting as a giant bully, is the key to minimizing the threat of rogue states. Leaving Iran and Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, North Korea and so on, to stew in their own juices only makes them more likely to lash out. That’s bad. Failing to speak to them means that America is neglecting its duty as a world leader. And neglecting the country’s role as a world leader is something that everybody–especially Mr. Muravchik–can agree is the worst of all possible options.

. . . for the first time in three years, I woke up believing that I might actually live to see my thirtieth birthday. Even though it was overcast, the day seemed brighter, the colors more saturated, the air more sweet. The world swirled with possibilty, and everything truly felt like it was going to be O.K. And I’m merely describing how it felt to finish my official career at The Declaration.

I kid, I kid. Yesterday was like Democrat Christmas, with the Party Formerly in Exile returning home to the House and hopefully the Senate as well, Rummy resigning, and a reinvigorated, “Is that thumpin’ without a G” Press Corps. Somehow, after two months of freaking out about encroaching fascism and vote manipulation and the endless abyss of evil that is Diebold, the American people did the right thing and threw the bums out of office. They revealed that Bush and Rove’s certainty that they would win the midterms wasn’t so much evidence of wrongdoing as it was of ignorance. It’s enough to make me jump up and start singing and dancing. But I don’t want to gloat too much. That’s for Republicans to do.

And did you see the photo of Santorum’s kids crying? Schadenfreudtastic!

Sorry. I’m done gloating. Seriously.

Up after classes: what the Dems need to do to hold on their majorities in 2008.

It was bound to happen eventually. I’d finally get sick of not having the website to procrastinate with, and I’d finally put it back up. So we’re back, with a layout that doesn’t work in Microsoft IE at the moment, only a vague understanding of what I’m going to be writing about, and a solid worry that every word I write will be analyzed by the administration’s web-spider.

There’s a couple of reasons I pulled the site in the first place. First, I had my hands full working on the Dec, which didn’t leave a lot of time for writing on my own. Second, there wasn’t nearly enough schoolwork for me to procrastinate. And third, I needed to take a break after the disaster that was the year surrounding the 2004 election. It’s really the third that drove me off the internet, though.

I mean, think back to a year and a half ago, to the apocalyptic imagery that was getting tossed about on both sides: the fear of a draft, the fear of a totalitarian state, the fear that Bush was going to do something really crazy, like attack Iran and start World War III–and all of this had absurd religious overtones. Even the atheist, hard-core lefties were throwing out arguments with the certainity of the true believer. Shit, the Red Sox winning the Series felt like it was predicted in Revelation. (It was after the locusts and before the seas boiled.) The undercurrent of religion–and, along with it, the imminent end of the world if things didn’t go exactly your way–wound up being so strong that you would drown if you tried to struggle against it.

Well, I was drowned. I think it was the Schiavo case that was the final straw. I finally threw up my hands, withdrew into the sanity of alcohol and friends and just getting my two jobs done. And then that lead to me working myself into the ground last fall, finally coming up for air a few months ago and wondering what had happened.

I didn’t wind up dropping out of school and owning a record store. I didn’t wake up to find myself living on a beach in the Caribbean, working menial jobs at a hotel to pay the bills. All I’d done had been to watch a lot of TV, not to do any writing beyond a few short music and book reviews, and to learn how football worked. Oh, and got three credits closer to graduating. Woot.

So it’s 2006 now, I’m doing all right, and you can breathe in without getting all that crazy apocalyptic dust back in your lungs. Sure, there’s a lot that’s wrong at the moment–the Teflon Administration, the torture that Congress can’t put an end to, people still listening to The Killers–and I’ll get to that stuff, eventually. But The Rapture’s back to being a too-trendy band and a bar downtown, instead of being right around the corner. That’s something I can live with. That’s something I can puzzle fight.

This originally appeared in The Declaration on 9 February 2006.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Maybe the primary colors fried our brains. Maybe we’re hiding from a geopolitical order in which everyone acts like they’re six-year-olds by remembering our six-years-old selves. Or maybe it’s the realization that we can’t play these new-fangled games with their four shoulder buttons and their analog sticks and their three-dimensional gameplay. For whatever reason, the original NES has been experiencing a cultural revival these past few years. Sure, the scope of that revival has ranged from the dorky (Nintendo controller belt buckles) to the kitschy (an emo band named after the Konami code). But the best part is all the attention being paid to those 8-bit soundtracks of our youth.

Because let’s face it: those songs were good. Limited to such a small range of options to make the background music—a handful of Midi tracks, and that’s it—the composers of the 8-bit era managed to make songs that the geekier among us still hum from time to time. Take the Mario theme, or the opening track from the Legend of Zelda. Awesome, right? Those short melodic hooks work so well that they’re still influencing game music today, even with the 32-bit sound that the Playstation and Xbox can throw out.

So what the Advantage do is take those songs and cover them with a live band. They’re not the only guys that do this; the Minibosses, from Phoenix, do essentially the same thing, have been doing it longer, and cover Ninja Gaiden. The difference is that The Advantage cover everything from Mario to Contra to Metroid to Double Dragon III, and they’ve got the guitarist from Hella (though he plays the drums). The Minibosses are a wee bit looser in their songs, giving their tracks a bit of a punk rock, let?s-crowd-surf-with-our-power-pad vibe; the Advantage replicate the songs more faithfully, with a couple of weird time signatures and a math rock accuracy ’cause, hey, it’s the dude from Hella.

Given that math rock is essentially making Nintendo songs with stranger time signatures, it’s amazing it took until last year for The Advantage to release their first, self-titled album. That one focused on the games that everyone played: the Mario themes, the Zelda dungeon (they had the decency to leave the overworld theme—quite possibly the best video game song of all time—well enough alone). The new album, Elf-Titled, takes quite a few of its tracks from obscure games you might not have played. But that’s fine, since the songs are still awesome. “Batman—Stage One” doesn’t sound like any of the Batman movies, but the bassline is so rocking that you won?t care. You probably never played The Guardian Legend (but you should), but “Corridor 1″ hurtles you through space just like it should. And I swear that “Duck Tales —Moon” was ripped off by Slash for “Sweet Child O? Mine,” but that’s probably all in my head.

Sure, the element of nostalgia counts for a lot—it’s great to suddenly hear the Kraid boss music from Metroid, for example, or level five of Double Dragon II. But that alone wouldn’t make this a good album. The performances are amazing, but good musicianship doesn’t make an album, either. It’s the songwriting that makes it rock, regardless of how much time you spent in front of the TV with a controller in hand.

The one problem with the album is that, depending on the mood you’re in, the songs might get a little repetitive. But it’s a testament to the quality of The Advantage that that rarely happens, even when the theme they’re drawing from is just ten or fifteen seconds long. And much more often, it creates the trancelike state that you used to hit with these games. It’s good for paper writing. Or for dancing like an idiot. Or for playing old-school video games with the TV on mute. Nostalgia for 8-bit music only goes so far.