I don’t see movies
or buy comics from
people who screw over
friends of mine.

Recently, in a wholly unrelated discussion, the topic of Star Wars and Vader’s relationship to his kids popped up.

And that reminded me of the torture scene in the first[1] Star Wars movie where Vader visits Leia in her cell with his floating torture robot. The scene cuts away, but we are left to assume hijinx ensued.

A short while later, she watches as the Death Star blows her homeworld to smithereens, killing presumably a few hundred thousand to a few billion people in the process.[2]

So then she’s kinda rescued by Luke and Han.  Mind you, she’s just seen the equivalent of the Holocaust unfurl before her eyes, everyone / thing she knows / loves is obliterated, but she still plants a big smooch on Luke’s kisser “for luck.”

Okay, we’ll give her that one…

But then she and Luke start fermenting the hots for one another, although Han is floating around to keep things interesting.  Bottom line, less than three years after seeing her homeworld wiped out, Leia is just as spunky as can be.

What?  Seriously?
She should be an
emotional basket case.

But Lucas ain’t done with her yet! Next we learn she & Luke are twins and that she has the same inherent Jedi abilities as Luke and Vader.

Now, for someone who is supposed to be the equal of two of the biggest midi-chlorian badasses in the galaxy, Leia sure is slow on the uptake.  At no time when exchanging saliva with Luke does she realize, “Hey, this is my own brother!!!!  Ewwwww!!!”

But that’s almost forgivable.  The real stomach churner is the thought of what Vader was doing to her behind closed airlocks in the real movie.  Vader didn’t figure out who she was, but he shoulda had some clue — she either sang like a canary (logical, considering what happened next to her homeworld) or else he realized who she was at some level and just kept doing it anyway!

Which, for a villain, is okay, ‘cuz he’s
a villain and villains gotta do villainous deeds.
Torturing your little girl with a hypodermic
wielding torture-bot is just par for the course.

Naw, the creep factor comes in with her reaction — or lack thereof — to everything that happens to her in the movies.

Family / friends / culture / homeworld / record collection just annihilated?  Bah, shrug it off.

Survivor of a semi-incestuous torture session?  No daddy issues here.

Got the hots over your own brother?  Fuggeddaboutit.

Leia, for all her positive aspects as an action heroine, is one of the worst written characters in sci-fi.  She has more sublimated rage / grief / anxiety than any other character in history, all seething just millimeters below the surface, yet she never reflects any of this psychological baggage.[3]

Instead she sails blithely along, at peace with herself and the universe around her.

Really?  Really???

Y’know, if the snapper reveal had been she’s really a robot…or if some reference was made to powerful Jedi mind control / drugs used to help her sleep at night…or if she had the personality of Tank Girl, maybe this would have made a smidgeon of sense.

But whaddya expect?
She’s from the same
imagination that gave
us this guy…

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[1]  i.e., “Real”

[2]  Lucas famous directorial advice to her during this scene was to think of somebody blowing up her record collection.

[3]  Except, possibly, in this scene…

On a hill backlit by twilight,
the disciples gather like crows
for the night.

This is their down time, time to browse
among the olive branches, Christ with them,
their apostolic flight slowed at last to a head-nodding drowse,

to a flutter of tattered cloak, the unraveling hem
dragging in the dirt like a hurt wing.
They flock momentarily around him,

then settle down, safe in the soft swing
of wind that rises and then falls back
with the deepening evening

into the distance, and sleep, while Christ’s black
feathers burn in his father’s fist,
plucked by God before by Judas kissed.

(found via Andrew Sullivan);
art by Jean-Leon Gerome)

Ever a glutton for punishment, the always gracious Melchizedek Todd invited me back on his show The God Scene With Mel And Nicole, this time to discuss the writing process more specifically and how one adapts to Bible to comics, movie, TV, and other media.

It’s show number 7; my interview starts at the 24:30 mark.

Found here.

[previous]

For their part, the girls would have no idea where they were and would take pains to hide from the Japanese.  No big distress signals, no bonfires, no visible signs of human habitation.

Reconnaissance aircraft flying over the island would see no signs of people and, since both sides had cracked the other’s codes, they would know there was no enemy interest in Bidney Island so the girls would remain relatively safe.

Relatively.

Who were these girls and how did they would get there?

Well, they couldn’t be from the mainland USA or even Hawaii, that would make no sense.  How in the world would they end up on the other side of the Pacific?

World tensions the way they were,
nobody would fly students into a hot spot,
they would be flying them out.

That meant they had to start in the Philippines and be heading south to safety in Australia.  And they had to fly:  An aircrew could get killed easily but on a sinking ship there would be at least one sailor assigned to look after them on a lifeboat.

So…what are these all-American girls doing in the Philippines?

Obviously the children of diplomats, trade managers, oil company executives, etc.  People of privilege who could afford to bring their families halfway around the world back in the 1930s.

The school would cater to that class of clientele, though as often the case, the nuns running the school would be using it to fund another school for needy children in a rundown Filipino only neighborhood.

The girls in the school would all be white Americans or Europeans, certainly all English-speaking.

There would be one Filipino girl among them, an outsider.

As war tensions ratcheted up, their parents evacuated them to Australia, youngest girls first, until only one planeload of girls in their mid-to-late teens was left.

That would be the flight that got shot down on December 7th, 1941 (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines it was December 8th because of the International Dateline; it’s called artistic license, folks).

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

Disney’s first stab at
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martians,
before they owned the trademark.

If you have even the slightest interest in seeing John Carter in a theater, please, do so.  Friends whose opinions I trust have seen it, think it’s great, and urge others to see it.

So, based on their recommendations, I urge you to see it.

Me, I’m not going to.  Not in a theater, anyway.[1]

Read the rest of this article »

I was also interviewed by What’s On Joe Mind podcast a couple of weeks ago; as you might guess they specialize in all things G.I. Joe related.  They just uploaded the episode today.  My interview begins at the 1:19:50 mark.

My favorite of all the Joe characters.
If I had my way, G.I. Joe: The Movie
would have been 90 minutes of
Shipwreck on shore leave in Tiajuana.

Here’s how I imagine mi amigo John Shore’s personal workspace:
There’s a computer, there’s some standard tools of the writing trade (pens, note pads, etc.)…

…and there are dozens and dozens of open cans of worms.

John loves opening cans of worms, but he doesn’t always get around to re-canning ‘em before opening the next can.

As a result his blog has got oodles and oodles of fascinating topics, but just as you’re settling in to go through one thread in depth, John’s already opening a brand new can.

One of the most recent cans is this one.

The topic:
Porn.

It’s a topic with a number of facets to it, and as I don’t think I could even begin to do justice to it in a single post (no matter how lengthy!), I’m going to use this as a kick-off / touchstone for further posts on the matter.

In a nutshell:
Anti-porn speaker Dawn Hawkins recently flew on a flight where a male passenger sitting slightly ahead of her was watching what she considered to be pornographic images (she is unclear but I gather the man was either across the aisle or else his activities could be viewed through the gap in the seats ahead of Ms Hawkins).

While she identifies the images at first as child porn, she then walks that statement back, saying the Asian models looked as if they could be 14 – 18 years of age.  She doesn’t describe in detail what they were / were not wearing, but from her description of them wielding whips against one another it sounds pretty clear this was not an “all ages” video.

Let it be stipulated that I am a first amendment fundamentalist:
Unless it can be demonstrated in a court of law that something presents a clear and present danger to innocent parties, no artistic, literary, or verbal speech should be banned.

Let it be further stipulated that I also think
Ms Hawkins was absolutely in the right here
to be offended under the conditions described
and absolutely within her first amendment rights
as a traveler within U.S. airspace to protest
the man’s choice of public viewing.

She would have absolutely been within her rights to protest anything he was viewing that she would find offensive.  I can’t speak for Ms Hawkins, but if I was sharing a crowded public space with someone who wanted to enjoy pictures of infectious wounds, animal cruelty, bodily wastes, racist slurs, or other edgy material that reasonable people might find offensive purely on aesthetic reasons alone, I would suggest they show a little more discretion.[1]

But none of those things are necessarily illegal to view or possess within the U.S.[2]

As I posted above, from Ms Hawkins’ description I can’t be 100% sure the images in question were bonafide porn, but it sure sounds like they could be.  The man in question has exactly as much right to watch porn in public without criticism as Ms Hawkins has to travel in public without being exposed to porn.[3]

Which leads us to the central point of this particular post:  How do we define porn?

As a former professional pornographer[4],
allow me to offer this working definition:

Pornography is any artistic expression created and/or shared with the specific intent of generating sexual arousal in its target audience.

Artistic expression includes live spoken or sung performances, all forms of visual arts including photography, music including dance, drama including pantomime, and literature.

Specific intent means the person/s creating and/or sharing it deliberately wanted somebody to get sexually aroused when they heard / saw / read / experienced it.

Creators and distributors are not responsible for the pathology of their audiences,
however, and a work of art created / shared with innocent and/or non-sexual intent
might still inadvertently arouse some members of its audience.

An unintentionally arousing work of art that is shared by someone for the specific intent
of creating arousal in a third party becomes pornography when it is shared for that intent
even though it remains non-pornographic when someone shares it for non-sexual purposes.

Sexual arousal differs from titillation in this manner:
If a viewer sees an ad for pizza and thinks, “That looks yummy”, it’s titillation;
if a viewer sees an ad for pizza and picks up the phone to order one, that’s arousal.

A pornographer doesn’t need to know exactly who his audience niche is in order to create pornography; just the intent of creating something with the desire to stir arousal in somebody is enough.

We’ll leave it at that for today & pick up this can of worms again at a later date…

Image above is what got people all hot & bothered back in 1929.
Hey, vintage porn fans, ever stop to wonder if that might be grandma you’re jerkin’ off to…?

[1]  “Reasonable” being a loaded term.  I have vegan friends, and if we were sitting next to someone watching actual footage of some goober hacking a kitten to death, our outrage would be identically high.  If we’re sitting next to someone watching a detailed documentary on the operations of a slaughter house, my vegan friends might keep their high level of outrage, but mine would drop considerably; I’d think it was tasteless to watch something like that in public but I wouldn’t see anything legally wrong with it.  Conversely, documentary footage of wild animals preying on one another might also get a similar negative response from me, while my vegan friends may be more tolerant since it was showing animals in their natural settings and behavior.  Finally, a cooking show on preparing beef might still rank as high on the outrage scale to my vegan friends while I’d probably regard it as perfectly acceptable.

[2]  I’m allowing myself some wiggle room considering age of audience, whether actual crimes were being recorded, etc.

[3] Think about it, people…

[4]  Penthouse Comix, 1995

Damn, this is crappy news…

I’ve just been informed through Phil Proctor that Peter Bergman, one of the members of the Firesign Theatre (and arguably the group’s founder since it started as a spin off his show Radio Free Oz) has just died of leukemia.

I first heard of the Firesign Theatre when their album Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers was nominated for a Hugo award in 1971.[1]

Curious, I sought the album out and immediately became hooked.  Don’t Crush… is my favorite of their work, but I also loved I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus, their Nick Danger, Third Eye stories, and of course the wonderful off the wall riffing that they’d do called TV Glide.

TV Glide is perhaps the purest distillation of their craft.  Taking that week’s TV Guide as source material, Bergman, Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman would then improvise an entire alternate reality based on the short log-in descriptions of various TV shows.  As Harlan Ellison once observed re the craft of writing science fiction & fantasy, “There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ‘normal’, the obvious.”

The Firesign Theatre was capable of doing this every week off the cuff and have you laughing all the way through.

In addition to their work together, the various members of the Theatre worked in a variety of side projects, sometimes together in various permutations, sometimes separately.  Zachariah, The First Electric Western was as wild & wolly & weird as the title suggests with the Firesign Theatre providing the script & playing supporting roles, while Americathon was a scarily prescient view of then-future / now-contemporary American culture.  Proctor & Bergman also did a hilarious series of video mash-ups, culminating in J-Men Forever (a.k.a. The Secret World War), a hilarious re-dub parody of classic Republic serials.[2]

Bergman’s own individual credits were wide ranging and impressive.  I only had a chance to meet him once, on an abortive video game project; I would have cheerfully sacrificed a testicle to have had a chance to work with the Firesign Theatre.[3] He was charming and gracious, and seemed pleased that I remembered his early work so fondly.

We’ll still be remembering it fondly for many years to come.

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[1]  Not one but two LPs got nominated for Best Dramatic Hugo by the World Science Fantasy Organization that year:  Don’t Crush… and Blows Against The Empire, a proto-rock opera concept album by Jefferson Starship.

[2]  View the opening here.

[3]  Not mine, somebody else’s.