I think I may have offended a friend, the other day, by not having any sense of humor at all about the news story that there was an arson attack on the central symbol of Black Rock City, Nevada, the Burning Man, last Tuesday. I feel like ranting about this at some length, and maybe even explaining my feelings and my thoughts about it in the process. But first, two points. For the fullest story, including all available links, see the summary on LaughingSquid.com, "Burning Man Set on Fire Early Due to Arson," 8/28/07 et seq. Secondly, by way of disclaimer, I am technically a "burner" myself, having attended the 1998 Burning Man festival. But my reasons for being angry about this have nothing to do with my particular ox being gored, with a piece of art that means something to me personally being attacked, and everything to do with history and principles. But then, of course, I'd say that, now, wouldn't I, whether it was true or not? Or at least, people would say so.

What does the symbol of the Burning Man mean? Do you think that nobody has ever asked the artist in charge of it, Larry Harvey, that question? He has been asked that question in every interview he has given in the last two decades. Never, ever, not even once has he even hinted at an answer to that question. And it's not because he's incoherent and unable to give a clear answer; he's justified everything else about his artwork at tremendous length, in manifestos you can judge for yourself if you read them at BurningMan.com. The reason he won't tell you what the Man "really means" isn't that he can't, but that he has decided very specifically not to tell you what it means. Any 1st year art student could glance over it and tell you some of the various symbols that it evokes, highly emotional symbols such as Julius Caesar's war-propaganda claim that Celts used a cage shaped like a wicker man to burn prisoners alive, or the centuries' worth of European agricultural festivals in which symbols of the old harvest are burned, or Native American potlatch ceremonies in which art and other valuable possessions were burned in a conspicuous competition to display wealth, or the ubiquitous symbolic protest of burning a public figure in effigy, or even the mythical phoenix that, like the Burning Man, burns completely to the ground and is born again fresh each time. And those are just the obvious associations. No, what he stumbled upon as an artist burning a sculpture on the San Francisco beach back in 1986 is a symbol so ambiguous and yet so potent that it can mean anything you want ... to you. And Larry Harvey has been telling people, for as long as he's been putting up the man and burning it, that whatever meaning you take away from the ceremony is your meaning, and perfectly valid for you.

That's not good enough for some people.

You see, the expansion of the Burning Man festival collided with a completely unrelated phenomenon early on. In 1991, anarchist theoretician and self-annointed Sufi mystic Hakim Bey (born Peter Lamborn Wilson) published his most influential book, Temporary Autonomous Zone. It's less coherent than almost anything that's ever been written about it, and certainly less coherent than this summary will be, but his basic thesis goes like this. Even if you managed to wave a magic wand and free everybody on earth from all government, there'd be nothing to stop any of those free individuals who wanted to from setting up governments. And no government will tolerate anarchists on their borders or within their borders for very long. Therefore, he reasoned, the failure of anarchists' attempts to set up ungoverned colonies or nations over the years should not be seen as proof that anarchy doesn't work, only that anarchists aren't willing to sell out their principles and form their own governments to defend themselves from hostile governments. He proposed an alternative model to the idea of anarchist revolution: the Temporary Autonomous Zone. Drawing on the example of the semi-permanent "pirate nation" of the Brethren of the Coast, who moved and rebuilt their whole city on three different islands over the centuries they were in existence, what he proposes is that anarchists seek out spaces where neither governments nor organized criminals bother to go, where there's nothing there to attract their attention, and simply live free, anarchist lives in those spaces. Let the word spread by word of mouth that this space is where the free, ungoverned people are living right now. If a hostile government decides to civilize or occupy or otherwise destroy and govern the Temporary Autonomous Zone, the free people should simply move along, scatter to the winds, and send out scouts looking for more worthless empty spaces to occupy: abandoned warehouse districts, empty desert ghost towns, under-used unimproved federal parks or nature preserves, any place that the cops and the various mafias just don't bother to go. Even he didn't claim it was a new idea; he was merely labeling and endorsing a recurring historical phenomenon.

Well, guess what. Not a few of people the people who read that book (or who claimed to have, a much larger number) also saw the Burning Man as the symbolic burning of "The Man." They saw in him the symbol of capitalism, corporate fascism, pervasive surveillance government, Big Brother, The State. In their interpretation of Larry Harvey's artwork, the reason that they went out into the middle of a salt flat and set up a city around it was obviously to build a Temporary Autonomous Zone, and to signal to other anarchists that this was a free and ungoverned space by burning "The Man" in effigy. For the next 10 years after that book came out, half the interviewers asked Larry Harvey if Black Rock City was a Temporary Autonomous Zone, if he was burning The Man in effigy? And each and every time he denied that it was a Temporary Autonomous Zone, that there was a difference between encouraging people to express themselves freely and encouraging anarchy. And each and every time he said that if some of the people dancing around the Burning Man as it collapsed in flames were interpreting it as burning The Man in effigy, that was their perfectly valid interpretation, but not necessarily his or anybody else's.

That's not good enough for some people. Some people are determined to impose their meaning on somebody else's artwork. And to use felony arson as a tool to do so.

Paul Addis, the man arrested in the act of using a propane torch to try to burn down the Burning Man statue for his own private purposes, has a history of his own. He is very specifically one of the asshole brand of anarchists who really don't accept that their right to swing their fist ends where the other person's nose begins; to him and to guys like him (and it's almost always guys, and, as Randy Milholland pointed out, usually the same wimpy guys who'd get the crap beat out of them if their fantasy ever came true) that's an unacceptable limitation on human freedom. And in fact, his longest running art piece of his own speaks volumes to his ignorance: he has proclaimed himself the symbolic heir to, and the rebirth of, Hunter S. Thompson. What you may not know (and he surely doesn't seem to realize) is that there were actually two Hunter S. Thompsons. One was a sports journalist who dabbled in political satire. By all accounts from his friends, he was a pretty nice guy. The other was the character of "Hunter S. Thompson" that Thompson wrote in his pseudo-biographical essays and novels ... who never existed. Even trivial attempts at fact checking show that most of it was made up. How much more evidence do you need than for me to point out that for a professional writer, isn't it awfully obvious how little time the character of "Hunter S. Thompson" actually spends writing? The fictional "Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Journalist" is a fantasy wish-fulfillment character, a totally heartless sociopath who gets away with it over and over again. That Paul Addis thinks he's re-enacting Hunter S. Thompson by acting like "Hunter S. Thompson" tells you an awful lot about why he'd destroy a several thousand dollar piece of artwork for his own political purposes. It's exactly the kind of thing that the fictional "Hunter S. Thompson" would have done, that the real Hunter S. Thompson never did.

But yeah, Paul Addis has also explained to several reporters, in a level of detail that will doubtless give whatever lawyer the morons who are funding his legal defense fund come up with severe indigestion, exactly why he engaged in felony arson. Over the last several years, the Black Rock Arts Foundation and Burning Man, Incorporated have done things that violate his personal interpretation of what the burning of The Man is supposed to mean. To him and to the pseudo-intellectual anarchists who agree with him, if the Burning Man doesn't symbolize the destruction of capitalist democratic society and the liberation of the masses into a happy and violent and dangerous world without the evils of law or money, then it's completely meaningless; no other meaning is imaginable. And if it's completely meaningless, then it's entirely appropriate for him to destroy that meaningless symbol, even if it doesn't belong to him, even if it did cost thousands of dollars of other people's money, even if it was a work of somebody else's art who is demonstrably several hundred times the artist that Paul Addis is, even if it's a work of art that dozens of people worked on under grueling desert conditions and had to do all over again under very tight time constraints.

Excuse me if I don't think that that's at all funny, let alone appropriate in any way. Way too many of the people who think it's funny are the kind of people who think it's funny any time anything bad happens to a hippy. Where they come by the weird idea that there are hippies at Burning Man, I have no idea; I didn't see a single one when I was there, and haven't seen one yet in any photographs of the event. But however many things you may blame the hippies for (and even I have a few), thinking it's funny when bad things happen to them doesn't say anything nice about you. But more people think it's funny just for the irony that they were going to burn him anyway, and here they are getting all angry that it got burned. Yeah, well, Burning Man's seen that form of idiocy before, too. One year a group of people showed up with portable propane torches like Addis's and walked around trying to set every piece of art on the playa on fire. They got arrested and evicted, but only after destroying thousands of dollars' worth of other people's property and creating not a few public safety hazards. Even if you are such a barbarian that you would intentionally destroy the set and the props for somebody else's performance piece, which part of "it's never okay to destroy somebody else's stuff without their permission" is unclear to them, or to anyone? Destroying other people's property, let alone their art, wasn't funny then and it's not funny now, either. And after the first time, it's not even an original way to be a jerk.

And if the "Temporary Autonomous Zone" fans don't like what the rest of the world has done with an outdoor art and performance event that they didn't create, that they did very little to help, and at which they've done very little but create trouble for other people, then there is only one appropriate thing for them to do: start their own event. Nothing's stopping them. Several of them have tried. But then, there's a long history of bitter, unsuccessful artists burning the work of and otherwise attacking skilled, successful artists, isn't there? If all of these morons and losers packed up their toys and went to play elsewhere, nobody but the few of them would even notice. I'm sure that the anger they feel over that had a lot more to do with Tuesday's crime than any artistic or political statement that Paul Addis says he was trying to make.

And he may be more trouble, and in more trouble, than we even know yet. The day after he made bail, he told several reporters that he had co-conspirators, all of whom committed suicide rather than be taken in for questioning. That same day, Black Rock City found its first suicide, a guy who'd hung himself from his tent poles. Last I heard, nobody had released the name of the deceased yet, so we don't know if the guy has any connection with Paul Addis. Maybe it is just a statistical quirk, totally random and unrelated. But if Paul Addis not merely engaged in felony arson in the middle of a crowded campground at 3:00 am and then assaulted a cop while resisting arrest, but also persuaded another person to commit suicide in order to cover up some or all of his crimes, there went any plea bargain that even the best lawyer money could buy was going to get him. They may well lock him up in a very unpleasant place for a very long time. And I hope they do. Because periodically society has to make an example out of psychopaths in order to keep the other psychopaths too cowardly to be the kind of psychopath that Paul Addis has shown himself to be.

(I'm still half-brain-dead from all the disruption to my schedule lately, but at least the bathroom repair is done. Things can start settling back towards normal now.)

Over the weekend, I was at a party to celebrate a couple of birthdays plus American Independence Day, and we took advantage of the fact that my friend lives in one of the few remaining tiny postage stamps of land within an hour's drive of here where it's still legal to own and use class C fireworks without a pyrotechnics license and an event permit. The subject of the laws on fireworks and the history of those laws came up, and I mentioned that I'd almost blogged on the subject Friday. But when I sat down to type out my arguments, I concluded that they were self-serving, callous, false to fact, and, well, basically lame. So my friend and her guests wormed them out of me, and I find out that I'm the only one who was there that night who still thinks the argument I was going to make is lame. You be the judge for yourself, I suppose.

Water them down all you may, even class C fireworks are still sources of white-hot flame and/or they're explosive. They can be made remarkably safe, but never fully safe. Americans have been playing with fireworks since before the revolution, and after a couple of hundred years of re-designing the fireworks themselves to make them as safe as possible and training everybody in the country in fireworks safety handling and plastering every surface of the packaging and of the fireworks themselves with extensive safety warnings, we had made setting off your own fireworks as safe as it can be, at least given the constraints of the species. And yet we were still ending up with at least one dead kid every other year or so, and long strings of maimings per year, and several very expensive buildings every year getting burned down. And once we'd long-since passed the point of diminishing returns on fireworks safety instruction and improvements and we were still ending up with pre-teen corpses and burned-down million-dollar schools, a not unreasonable question got asked. A lot of people, almost certainly the majority of us at the beginning, didn't like the question and didn't like the implication of the only possible answer, but we didn't have another answer. And the question was this:

We put up with dead kids in car accidents and dead kids in sporting contests and so forth because cars are too useful to live without, because any kind of physical exercise that's entertaining enough that people might stick with it long enough to get health benefits is likely to be strenuous enough to produce occasionally lethal injuries, and so forth. But is there anything about setting off firecrackers and bottle rockets and so forth that's worth even one injured kid, let alone a dead one? And after going back and forth about this as a nation for about a dozen years, the majority of us grudgingly conceded that the only answer we had was, "No, no benefit. It's just easily replaceable entertainment." And city by city, county by county, and in some places even state by state we started banning personal use of fireworks.

And here's what I was going to say that I now think is lame.

Dig out a pit in the back yard and line the outside of it with a circle of rocks or bricks, if the local laws will let you. Dump some dry tree branches and some chopped up tree trunks or roots and some scrap lumber into that pit with some cardboard and, some time between sunset and midnight, set the pile on fire. All you've done is create artificial fire, something humans have been doing since the Paleolithic. Big deal. You probably didn't even make the fire yourself, you probably started it with a plain old ordinary industrial fire-making tool, a match or a cigarette lighter or fireplace lighter. So you bought something that makes tiny flames and set some garbage on fire, big deal. And yet ... you and your friends and your neighbors who live within eye sight are not unlikely to sit and stare at that fire, chatting desultorily, for an hour or more. All it is is a fire, a rudimentary technology? No, it's art. And it's art that we'll sit and contemplate, members of our species, in substantial discomfort and while getting eaten alive by bugs, for longer than all but a tiny fraction of us would spend going over the whole art collection of a large, well stocked, well lit air conditioned museum of our finest art.

If there's that much artistic respect for routine artificial fire, how much more art is there to be had in playing with, manipulating, staging and controlling the timing of artificial thunder and lightning?

I know that there are more arguments to be made. The pro-fireworks case can be argued from tradition. It can be argued from relative harm. It can be argued from intensification, the class of risk analysis failures where trying to make things too safe ends up making people do stupider things with what you do let them have. It can be argued from the fact that we've taken every possibly dangerous chemical or tool out of our kids hands and then wonder why so few Americans go into chemistry or engineering or so forth. *shrug* All those cases got made, and came up short against a dead kid every other year and a couple of million-dollar buildings a year. But while I was thinking it, I was thinking this: as Scott McCloud argued, humans almost certainly felt the powerful urge to express themselves through art before our species even had a spoken language. Even if it's crap art, even if it's cheap folk art made by people who say things like, "here, hold my beer," isn't it worth it because it may be the only time all year those people make art?

No, probably not. I think not. Even though it's my own argument, when I see it written out like that, it sounds pretentious and callous and self-serving and lame. To me, anyway. You?

kukla_tko42 called me up out of the blue to remind me that this is the last weekend of St. Louis Shakespeare company's performance of Anthony and Cleopatra. She's got a friend in it, and wanted to know if I'd go with her to show support. And the funny thing about going to see theater with Kukla is that we've both spent enough time around theater (and her more than me, since she runs her own part time theater company these days) that we both end up getting distracted by the question, "What would I do differently?" -- her as a director, me as an actor. Which is pretty pathetic of me, because I've done nothing but bit parts. And there's a reason why I've done nothing but walk-ons and one-liners, and that's that I suck. Worse, I kept auditioning for parts that no director was ever going to put a guy who looks like me into.

And I got a reminder of exactly what my limitations are watching their performance. To my taste, the meatiest part in that play isn't any of the leads. It's the part of Enobarbus, Marc Anthony's oldest and most loyal retainer, a part that St. Louis Shakespeare's Richard Lewis just completely rocked, only narrowly managing to keep himself from upstaging the leads at several points, he was that amazing. See, here's the part: Enobarbus is a guy who was with Marc Anthony when he was the greatest general the world had ever known. Now Marc Anthony is, whether he admits it or not, pretty much retired, and pretty much (whether he admits it or not) disgraced. Enobarbus affects not to care: he's following the man he knew, not the man he sees in front of him. So when Caesar and Anthony turn on each other, it's not hard for him to decide to be loyal to Anthony. Then Anthony screws up, tactically, and suddenly it becomes obvious that frankly, they're going to lose. And Enobarbus has this great speech, to his fellow soldiers who're thinking of defecting, about how he won't judge anybody else, but he would rather die fighting for the man he believes in than live by betraying his beliefs -- and I so want to do that speech. Then Anthony screws up yet again, this time in a way that makes him look horribly cowardly. And now that Enobarbus feels like Anthony has betrayed his faith, he switches sides ... and immediately regrets it. After Cleopatra sews Anthony's man-bits back onto him and sends him back out to fight for her, both before and after Anthony's victory, Enobarbus has two more really meaty speeches about how much he hates himself for his betrayal. And watching Lewis do those speeches, I was so jealous; I want to get to do speeches like that!

Never happen.

No, in the same play I saw the part that I'd get cast as: the soothsayer, one of those grim old men with the second sight you see in so many old tragedies, who's always right but nobody understands or believes. As I mentioned the last two times that Kukla cast me in one of her performances, I hate playing the heavy. But watching the way that St. Louis Shakespeare's Hal Scharf played that part, I saw myself -- not the actor I want to be, but the actor I am: massive, implacable, humorless, grim, and dignified in the middle of everybody else's scorn. That's easy for an Aspie to play. But as an Aspie, while I can clearly feel every pain and every joy that Enobarbus feels, there's no way I have the facial or postural language in me to make the audiences feel them. And that's why I end up with the parts I get, if any. And if I could just make myself embrace that, I'd get more parts.

Had a harder than usual time wanting to sleep today and a dinner date, which has rendered me unlike to say anything useful, let alone profound or educational, of my own. Reading that, all my regulars can predict the next sentence: you get QuickTakes.

"Fear and Loathing in Paragon City." Only people who know both their gonzo journalism and hipster poetry and the City of Heroes and the City of Villains will get the references in this. But a group of players with time on their hands (waiting for today's Halloween annual event to begin, or waiting for the next update to get off of the test server probably) starting going through Hunter S. Thompson's classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When they ran out of inspiration on that (ran out of Inspirations during that?), someone else started in on Alan Ginsberg's "Howl." For example:

We had two Emp Defenders, seventy-five Prestige, five Presents left over from the last Christmas event, a Jump Pack half-full of Time Remaining, and a whole multi-colored collection of Lucks, Sturdies, Insights, Ranges... Also, a Ribosome, a Microfilament, a Nucleolus, a L52 Endoplasm, and two dozen Lysosomes. Not that we needed all that for the Quarterfield TF, but once you get into a serious powergaming SG, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the AR Blaster. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of a Trip Mine binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.

and:

I saw the best archetypes of my generation destroyed by the nerf-bat, looking for respecs,
dragging themselves through bump-mapped streets looking for mobs,
horn-headed hipsters with forked tails and shoulder-cats, burning with auras that cause fear not aggro,
who tired and debt-ridden climbed the tops of Kings Row tenements contemplating powerleveling ...

Paper Moai, Paper Moai, Sitting on the Dashboard of My Car: I had the weird urge to google "papercraft tiki" a while back, and found something of a jackpot if you've got a color printer that can handle card stock, an x-acto knife, a glue pen, and the patience. Not only does Canon give away print-your-own-and-assemble kits of the famous Easter Island statues, but just an amazingly long list of artistic and architectural models, from Mont-Saint-Michel to a Dutch windmill, from the Trojan Horse to the Taj Majal, from a Viking longboat to the Great Buddha of Todaiji. Check it out!

More Examples: Capitalists Making Capitalism Look Bad. Would you have expected one of the protesters, and not just any protester but one of the leading intellectual leaders, who were the victims of China's Tienanmen Square slaughter, someone who spent years of hard labor in a Communist re-education camp, to come back and sincerely say that what China needs is a stronger central government? But that's exactly what Wang Hui, the leader of what most Chinese intellectuals are calling the "New Left" faction, is doing. You see, the Chinese government at the time was in the middle of, well, the same experiment we've done here since 1980: appointing more and more corporate executives and wealthy investors to government positions. So he ended up being "re-educated" on what free market capitalism looks like, and in the filthy, polluted, half-wrecked rural city they forced him to labor in, what global capitalism looks like to him is like letting people accumulate unlimited wealth and use that wealth to corrupt political officials, and using those corrupt political officials to steal from the public and then kill the public. Even going back to his early years, he points out that a significant portion of what many of the Tienanmen protesters were begging for, were putting their lives on the line for, was begging the Chinese central government, the Communist Party and the Supreme Court, to intervene on the side of the law in local and regional corruption cases and local and regional pollution cases. (See Pankaj Mishra, "China's New Leftist," New York Times, October 15th.) Nor is Wang Hui the only one to notice that giving business leaders and investors more influence in government has had horrific results in China. An anti-pollution charity and think-tank called the Blacksmith Institute just released a list of ten of the most deadly polluted places in the world. And when they got to China, they said that rather than repeat themselves over and over again, they're letting one city, Linfen, stand in for the problems that have come from letting businesses make their own rules. In the footnotes, they note that a World Health Organization study of the world's most polluted cities reports that 16 of the world's 20 more dangerously, most murderously polluted cities are in China. (See Blacksmith Institute, "World's Most Polluted Places: Linfen, Shanxi Province, China.")

So much for the benevolence of The New Capitalist Man. I'm a big believer in entrepreneurial capitalism, but these last few decades have been one long lesson, repeated all around the globe, reminding us that unregulated capitalism really does contain the seeds of its own destruction, because it lets greedy and corrupt individuals worm their way into places where they can do just as thorough a job of discrediting capitalism as similarly greedy and corrupt individuals, when allowed access to similar sized concentrations of power, managed to discredit Catholic rule in Europe and Communist rule in Russia.

A Thought about the Failure of Scam Education: It occurred to me, well after I put that article "to bed," that there may be a really plausible reason why there is no confidence scam so old, hackneyed, and widely exposed that thousands of people don't fall for it. The thing to compare it to, as cheesy as the comparison is, is trying to teach kids not to be vulnerable to kidnapping by strangers. Now, thank God that kidnapping by strangers is so rare ... because it turns out to be basically impossible to educate most kids out of vulnerability to it. I remember seeing something on TV about a year ago where they got permission from parents and cops to stage an attempted hijacking on various grade school kids who'd just, literally just, been through a class on how not to fall for kidnapper's scams, how not to end up so close that it's easy for them to grab you before you can get away, how to tell if a stranger who says they're from your folks really is. Without a single exception, every kid they tested fell for the "look at the puppy in the trunk of my car" scam every time. Was it because the scam is so irresistible? No. It's because the kids had been warned to protect themselves from strangers, and the nice man didn't seem like a stranger at all. No matter how often you tell the kids that anybody they don't know is a stranger, they have it in their heads at some deep level that strangers are people who look scary somehow, that they can't possibly be in any danger from anybody who looks normal and seems nice. Which, unfortunately, is step one also in every pyramid scheme, Ponzi scheme, and confidence trick -- look normal and seem nice.

Burning the non-wicker Man: I don't know if I got around to mentioning Current TV's "TV Free Burning Man" podcasts, even though the only thinly tolerable remake of The Wicker Man came out right before the Burning Man festival. Current TV is a tiny little cable station, only shown in a handful of places, that specializes in podcasts, and they sent a team out to Black Rock City to do a daily 6 to 8 minute podcast from this year's Burning Man festival. They finally got the last of the episodes up on their website, and you know what? If you have ever wondered what Burning Man is? Or more importantly, if you think you "get" Burning Man but you're not sure? What you've got up on that site is roughly an hour's worth of broadcast, and if you watch it, then you will truly "get" Burning Man, because they do get it. As someone who Burned about 7 years ago, and who had massive nostalgia attacks watching their podcasts, let me tell you flat out that no broadcast journalists I've seen yet have understood the point of Burning Man as much as this team does, nor have the few print journalists who've tried done it as much justice.

Told You So about the Secret CIA Prisons: When the White House went after the whistleblowers on the CIA's very illegal secret torture facilities all over the former Warsaw Pact, I told you that the fact that they were going after somebody for leaking it was, in fact, itself a leak. Now, it wasn't much of a leak. Amateur plane-spotters had long, long ago used their worldwide-web databases to track the tailfin numbers of the CIA's front-company planes, and we knew where those planes were leaving from, when, with whom, and where they were ending up. But I argued at the time that the minute that George Bush complained that the whistleblowers had endangered national security by exposing a secret program, that was the secret program's first official acknowledgement. When I said this, several people claimed that no, it was nothing of the sort: he could have meant that it was endangering national security to claim this whether it was true or not. I said that was incompatible with the way he was saying it. Doubtless some of you thought that was "part of the coverup" or somehow proof of his competence or subtlety. Do you still think so now, that, this week, he's announced that they shut down the secret prisons in the Warsaw Pact countries that the CIA was running, praised the CIA for using "rough questioning" techniques on those prisoners, and that he's now transfered them all to our gulag at Guantanamo Bay?

A Good Weekend to Play Auto Assault: Since I hear that City of Heroes/City of Villains' "double-XP" weekend was a huge successful "draw them back in" event, the team on Auto Assault have decided to do their own loyalty-reward event. They're not doubling XP gain, though. Frankly, that would be silly. Especially after Update 2, which simplified the heck out of the first roughly 8 or 9 levels of the game and gives out about 4 or 5 levels' worth of free XP; if you ever thought leveling was hard in Auto Assault, well, for one thing you blow my mind, but for another, try it again. So what are they doing instead of doubling the XP? Doubling the "loot" dropped by NPCs. So not only will everybody who plays between noon Friday and noon Monday (US Central time) make in-game money like a bandit, your odds of getting an "uber" weapon or chassis or whatever to help you level up with or to help you in tournaments just doubled.

Auto Assault patched their servers today, fixing a rather frustrating bug that had been "gate-keeping" my main character. Now the fun is back big time, even bigger than before, and while I may have something for tomorrow, tonight I'm too distracted by my fun to think out anything especially weighty. That makes this a good time to go digging through the bookmarks directory of things I set aside regularly because I might want to comment on them, but end up having less to say than I thought. Which is to say: you get Quicktakes.

Privilege. By now probably half of you have already seen this. I have several friends who will go right up a wall over this, because they're right in the cross-hairs for a wonderful article by Barry Deutsch, aka "Ampersand" at Alas, a Blog. For those of you who insist that there is no such thing, I give you: "The Male Privilege Checklist."

It Takes More than Controversy to sell me a movie, it takes even more than attempts by people I hate to get me to not see it. I'm all into Forbidden Lore, yes, but on the other hand I'm not interested in wasting my time on a movie that I think will be boring, trite, or poorly made just because it also ticks people off. Which is why I've only seen seven of what Entertainment Weekly called "The 25 Most Controversial Movies Ever." Although to be fair, I'm planning on seeing one more of them when I get around to it.

The Other Alice and Wendy Story. I saw in the news that Alan Moore is in the process of getting his 3-volume Alice Liddel/Wendy Darling cheesy slashfic reprinted; the sample pages I saw reaffirmed my belief that the man hasn't written anything worth reading in over a decade. I'm rather more interested in the premise behind somebody else's take on those characters, and more: Cheshire Crossing. It assumes that neither Alice Liddel, nor Wendy Darling, nor Dorothy Gale were believed when they said that they'd traveled to other worlds. (Yes, I know that Dorothy Gale is an anachronism. So are half of the characters in LXG. For an interesting enough premise, I'll cope.) But unlike in most of the sequels (including, yes, unlike in the rest of the Oz books), Cheshire Crossing makes the much more plausible assumption that their parents sought professional help to cure their daughters of this delusion. All three have been through extensive psychotherapy; Dorothy, being from America, has even had a great deal of primitive high-voltage electroshock therapy. And now their parents have been persuaded to enroll all 3 of them in the same boarding school, whose headmaster (we find out) does believe them, and wants to find out more about them and their other worlds. He also has exactly the right headmistress to deal with 3 girls with magical powers: Mary Poppins. Only the first issue is out, and I admit the artwork is a trifle primitive. But the premise has my attention.

Well, There Went Two Hours of My Life. Who knew that there was a website with fourteen hundred 1980s music videos on it?

Hey, Wait a Minute. I don't know what to make of this funny, but deeply wrong The Onion satire: "Report: U.S. May Have Been Abused During Formative Years."

Happy birthday, becka_kitty! Which reminds me, since she's an artist having trouble pricing her work, I had occasion to tell her a Jim Hicks, Man of Concrete story the other day, and I meant to share it with the rest of you.

The Man of Concrete was, in addition to being an electrician and a general contractor and a cabinet maker and a blacksmith, an artist. He'd worked in a lot of forms, media, and styles over the years, but his preferred medium and style was suburban and near-rural landscapes, in watercolor over India ink on high-rag-count paper with his own custom frames. He had a job that took him all over eastern Missouri and southern Illinois, and wherever he got a glimpse of a view that seemed to him to be beautifully composed, he would shoot a few Polaroids and/or make a few quick reference sketches. There was always something in progress on his easel, and even though he kept plenty busy with other things, he still produced probably an average of a painting a month. They tended to accumulate. New paintings would sometimes replace older paintings on the walls in the house, but as often as not they went into cabinets, and when the cabinets overflowed they went behind furniture, and when there was no more room behind the furniture they'd pile up under the stairs, and when there was no more room left, Mom would have a fit.

When it got to the point where Mom felt that the house could not contain another painting, she would deliver an ultimatum to Dad. So every couple of years, she would make him pick out a dozen or twenty paintings that he was willing to part with. Then would begin several evenings of negotiations. Mom would ask Dad to price each one as high as he could conceivably imagine it selling. That would be her starting point, and she would spend the next several days ruthlessly and relentlessly bargaining the prices ... up. The final price as far as Dad knew was usually about twice what he thought any reasonable person would pay for it. Mom would then spend a couple of weeks driving around to galleries all over town, making cold calls and asking to see the manager. How she got away with that, I have no idea, but it generally took her no more than a half dozen gallery visits to move 10 to 20 of Dad's paintings, a few per gallery. She was offering them to gallery owners at twice the price she quoted Dad, and told me that she usually got it, cash up front not consignment, no questions asked. Nor should there have been much bargaining; the few times she spot-checked and found the paintings still hanging, the galleries had priced them at twice what they paid her. And it was hard for her to get that data, because they generally sold in at most a couple of weeks.

Now, the Man of Concrete was good, but he wasn't great. He had a flair for composition, and a draftsman's precision, and exquisite line work, and good control over his colors, and the frames were things of beauty in and of themselves. No professional frame shop I've seen yet has had a framing jig as sturdy or multi-functional as Dad's, and as a cabinet-maker he knew a lot of woodworking tricks that most framing shops never learn. But he wasn't famous, had no credentials, wasn't working in a particularly popular medium or in anything like a then-popular style, and there were probably dozens of artists who could have produced work as beautiful as his who never sold a painting. And even with all of that against him, the paintings flew out of Mom's hands, alighted only briefly on gallery walls, and landed in the hands of art collectors at lightning speed ... for 8 times what Dad thought they were worth. Nor was he foolish with money; in his contracting and blacksmithing and cabinetry, he was a shrewd bargainer who found places to buy materials for free or cheap and commanded top dollar. He just had, like every other artist I've ever met, no idea whatsoever what art was actually worth.

I'm convinced that the main reason that this mostly uneducated working class housewife representing herself as the artist's agent was able to sell his paintings so quickly was that she didn't bargain-price them. It literally never occurred to her to do so. She knew that people who buy original art for their homes are, generally, not poor or working class or middle class. That art was generally selling to people who made vast multiples of what we were living on, people who wouldn't hesitate for a second to drop $1,500 on a framed canvas to hang in one of the guest bedrooms just because they liked it. When you offer an art lover a framed painting and you price it the same as a cheap poster from the head shop, you're telling them that in your considered opinion as a professional artist, you aren't any good. The thing is, artists are generally not especially well off. Most struggle to sustain a working class standard of living, and as such find themselves surrounded by other members of the working class, with a smattering of poor and maybe middle class friends and acquaintances. When they try to imagine what someone would pay for a work of art, they base it on what their average friends could afford to spend on art. Which is, frankly, insanity, since with few exceptions people in their socio-economic bracket don't buy original art.

Apologies for not getting anything written yesterday. I had day-time plans both days of the weekend, and after getting used to sleeping during the day, I couldn't make myself sleep more than a couple of hours of the night. So I ended up very nearly sleeping around the clock Sunday night and Monday. The Sunday event was for St. Louis Pagan Picnic; I was arm-twisted into volunteering to help kukla_tko42 reprise one of her recurring bits of interactive theater, Living Tarot.

When I got to the Paganic (as we used to call it), the place smelled like hippy and looked like a particularly poorly run refugee camp; the previous night's storm winds had pretty thoroughly torn the place up. When I woke up, it was still raining. Frankly, part of me was hoping, when I checked the weather forecast, that it was going to rain through the afternoon, and thereby wash out the performance. I kept thinking about why I was thinking that all the way through the performance. (I obviously wasn't the only one, either; an unprecedently large percentage of her actors flaked out on her. These are people who want to think of themselves as actors, who want to enjoy being on stage when they feel like it, but who seem to be incapable of understanding the first moral principle of theater, which is, "The show must go on.")

The odd thing is that in hindsight, I have never actually enjoyed working in theater, whether acting, doing tech, or even just financing a performance. It is hard work, done constantly on the ragged edge of failure (the play Noises Off is a documentary), in ways that are guaranteed to crush the ego and the spirit, for audiences the vast majority of whom completely miss the point of almost any of what they're hearing and seeing even if they enjoy it, working almost entirely with people who are obviously and perceptibly deranged. Nor does it help that, frankly, I suck at it -- and that knowledge was very dearly bought, let me tell you, because like every mediocre to poor actor, I fought against that realization for decades. And for what? Well, yes, to serve the God, the twice-born son of Zeus, who obviously chose me for his servant whether I will or not. But for what? I'll never know, maybe, I just keep doing it.

Nor has it improved my appreciation of my theatrical experience that I have never, once, in almost three decades of trying, been offered a part I actually wanted. Even though I can wrap my head around the implicit stereotyping that says that a 250 to 300 pound man with sunken eyes under a prominent brow ridge on an impassively immobile face is never going to be cast as an action hero or a thoughtful person or (ha) a romantic lead, it wounds me every time, even harder than not being perceived that way in real life, and I don't know why. Even Kukla, who loves me approximately as dearly as I love her, and who has known since she was a wee little thing that I haven't an ounce of malice or threat in me, casts me in dark, twisty parts at least half of the time. Hmm. OK, now that I think of it, I can remember one theatrical performance I came close to enjoying, my bit part as the tribal chief in that tiki-themed dinner theater piece we did at Lothlorien two years ago. And it occurs to me because it may have been the only time in my life that I wasn't cast as some kind of a villain.

And it's unreasonable for me to complain about this, unless I'm willing to do what it takes to fix it, starting with losing about a hundred pounds. The simple fact of the matter is that while we've gotten rid of the character masks, audiences need to know who the character is when they see them, before that character even opens their mouth. Which means that the 290 pound bald guy is a biker, a thug, a monster, or a pirate. Oh, in theory a guy meeting that description could also be the comic relief, but I obviously lack the talent for that; even Kukla can't imagine me playing Nicely Nicely in her (has never gotten off the ground) effort to perform Guys and Dolls, and has her heart set on casting me as Harry the Horse. And the curse of it is, I have to admit that I'm good at playing the heavy. I just don't like doing it. I don't like going there in my mind. I don't like seeing people scared or troubled or put on the defensive by what I say. If I could get past that, and embrace my God-fated roll as a perfect theatrical villain, if I could find a way to enjoy playing the heavy, my life would go a lot easier I suppose. Maybe I could work my way up to the kind of jovial but still sinister heavies that the late, great Sidney Greenstreet made a living at, if I could stand having people see me that way.

Which, I say with a sigh, does not suggest or even hint that the next time I'm asked I'll say no. If it weren't enough that it's for Kukla, for crying out loud, it's theater. And that's important. Because the show must go on.

Rob Gonsalves officially rules.

I'm sleepy, busy, and a trifle distracted, so that's all for today. But trust me, if you've never heard the name before and you're at all fond of M.C. Escher, Rene Magritte, or Salvador Dali then click that link.

On a personal note, I just can't stay awake long enough, can't concentrate enough, to get anything written tonight. I'm not surprised; I had to struggle like mad to get the last couple of things written, and they're the culmination of something I've been thinking about ever since I set out to figure out how someone could be as monstrous as our home state's gift to the nation, the left wing's most prolific fund raiser (we have only to mention him in a letter and money comes pouring in), the monster under the bed that liberals scare their children with, former Missouri governor, former US Senator from Missouri, former US Attorney General John "Deacon" Ashcroft ... and still have everybody who knows him personally, both Republican and Democrat, insist that he's actually a pretty nice guy, not any kind of a monster at all. Reconciling the monstrosity of the theocratic and plutocratic positions he's taken his whole political career with his personal reputation was a challenge, to say the least. So I've had a lot of time to think about it.

But maybe I'm coming down with something, or something, but I've done almost nothing but sleep for the last 60 hours. I get up for a few hours, can't keep my eyes open, go back to bed for four to six hours, over and over again. Even when I am awake, I feel like I'm running on maybe half my cylinders. Weird. So, rather than continue the thought above where I could in theory explain to you why I think that John Ashcroft sincerely thinks for reasons that are neither insane, nor ill informed, nor monstrous that he has stood for the right things his whole life, and rather than write any of the things I promised some people I'd get around to writing by now ... you get some more Quicktakes. Hey, at least it gives me an excuse to empty the Temp bookmarks folder some more.

Is This Why Disney Isn't Making Classics Any More? There's a blog out there called Re-Imagineering where former Disney employees scratch their heads over how recent Disney management could have managed to produce so many awful movies and so thoroughly muck up (in their opinion) the signature theme parks. About a month ago, one of the tiki-themed discussion groups I read passed along a link to a point-by-point analysis of the things that were changed between Walt's original Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, the attraction for which audio-animatronics was invented for crying out loud, and the current Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management, called "When Birds Attack!" The long and short of it is that to make it more "current" and "relevant," they added Zasu from The Lion King and Iago from Disney's Aladdin to the cast of audio-animatronic birds that decorate the place, complete with extensive dialog. And here's the part that's interesting to me ... the dialog is entirely contemptuous of the Enchanted Tiki Room itself. Is it possible that Disney is dying of irony overdose? Is it possible that there's hardly anybody left at Disney who actually likes their classic products for un-hip, un-sarcastic, un-ironic reasons, that almost everybody at Disney secretly looks down on and despises anybody who likes Disney's old stuff?

Greenpeace Owes Us an Apology. A couple of weeks ago there was a guest editorial in the Washington Post arguing that the safest, most environmentally friendly, most economical, most efficient way for the US to meet its energy consumption needs, and the only way to do so without burning so much coal that we trigger runaway greenhouse effect, is by rapid expansion of our civilian nuclear power capacity. Which would be no big deal, because nuclear industry shills have been saying that for decades now. No, what makes it a big deal is that the essay "Going Nuclear" was written by one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, one of the original and most fervent anti-nuclear lobbying groups out there. It's big of him to admit that he's been wrong about this for 30 years, pretty nearly his whole adult life. Too bad so many people listened to him.

Satire is Impossible. The Onion weighed in on one of the issues I wrote about a few weeks ago. I wish I was sure this was funny: "EPA Didn't Know Anybody Was Still Drinking [Tap] Water." That's just a little bit too plausible.

Hmm. Suddenly I Feel an Urge to be Sequenced. There was a fascinating long science article in the Sunday New York Times entitled "A Question of Resilience," by Emily Bazelon. They're collecting data to see if they can confirm a correlation between people who react badly, for a lifetime, to trauma and a particular genetic variation, the "two short alleles" variation of the 5-HTT gene. Apparently there may be inheritable neuro-chemical reasons why people with one long allele do a better job, after trauma, of reconnecting with people who can help them, and people with two long alleles do an even better job than that, that the people with the naturally more resilient neuro-chemistry do a better job of building new relationships after major trauma. Apparently there's a company called Neuromark that's about to offer 5-HTT tests to the public. I'm tempted to get one.

And, in honor of today's planned marches and boycotts: There are many reasons why Chris Muir's "Day by Day" is the only conservative webcomic I read. It's funny in a way that cartoons about politics haven't been since Gary Trudeau's stuff during the Nixon administration. The characters are fresh, and the female leads the two sexiest characters I've seen in recent fiction, especially Sam. And Muir frequently rises above the conservative/liberal spectrum to find new ways to look at things that are side-splittingly funny. I'm not sure the following metaphor holds up well, but I laughed myself silly over it:



Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: Told You So. I predict that history will record that George Bush's popularity bottomed out at 32% and rebounded steadily from there. Why? Many months ago I said that Scott McClellan had broken the one unbreakable rule for a presidential press secretary. You're allowed to tell the story however you want. You're allowed to emphasize any facts you want. You're allowed to ignore any facts you want. You're allowed to refuse to answer any question you want. But the one rule going all the way back to when FDR invented the modern media daily press briefing 60 years ago, the one thing that a presidential press secretary may not do is get caught knowingly lying to reporters. It was a stupid lie, not an even especially important one. But the fact of the matter is that neither the conservative press nor the liberal press nor the corporate press have been giving the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt about anything since then, and Scott McClellan's press conferences turned into daily beatings. I said at the time that if anybody in the Bush Administration had any sense, Scott McClellan would have been encouraged to pursue other interests. Apparently that couldn't be done because McClellan is a person friend of Bush's. So when Bush got desperate enough to bring in a new chief of staff, John Bolton, who actually knew how these things are done, the very first thing he did was exactly what I suggested. And on Tony Snow's first day, his first time at the podium, he told reporters in the White House Press Corps just how much he respected them and looked forward to working with them. Contrast that with Scott McClellan's not-even-thinly-veiled contempt for the entire institution of the press, something that he considered "just another lobbying group," just another business instead of a pillar of freedom, an attitude that was primarily his that the whole White House got blamed for. McClellan was so incompetent at his job that by comparison, a second-rate pro-administration flack from right-wing radio looks both professional and honest. Starting now, you watch and see -- the administration is going to get the benefit of the doubt from the press a lot more often.

Friday evening I spent a couple of hours at this year's St. Louis Venus Envy, the annual multi-city women-only art show. The venue was even convenient for me, being right on top of a MetroLink stop; it took up most of the 3rd and 4th floors of the disastrously poorly designed and all-but vacant St. Louis Center mall. Well, convenient to get to and from, anyway; getting to art venues on the 4th floor of a mall with only one tiny elevator that does not itself serve all floors, when all but one of the escalators was out of order, was less fun than it might have been. And my god, is a dead multi-story mall a soul-less venue for art. By comparison, the long-abandoned and fallen to ruin Lemp Brewery factory complex where it was years ago was less depressing. Dead malls age worse than dead factories do, in my opinion.

I saw a lot of amazing art. I wish I'd taken notes; many of the cooler pieces I saw weren't in the catalog, so I can't give you the artists' names and the titles. There was a huge display of beautiful hand-blown glass sculpture that was especially striking, and some beautiful uses of digital photography. Not a lot of multimedia stuff, which suits me well enough; I've liked some of what I've seen done in that venue, but it veers towards the boring and pretentious in most people's hands. I was also surprised, I guess slightly pleasantly, at how apolitical or at least un-strident it was. I'm absolutely okay with overtly feminist art, but in past years you could count on at least a couple of artists' work being displayed that was on the far side of strident and well into murderously hostile. If anything, this year they tilted perhaps too far back away from that; what most of the artists were concentrating on was the shared experience of being a woman and of girlhood and femininity.

But the real disappointment for me, the thing that very nearly ruined the show for me, was the performance parts of the show, which were overtly embarrassing. I lost count, so these are best recollections, but I think they had at least five stages going at all times. And at any given time, at least two of those stages and more often three or more of them, were showing the same thing: amateur "belly dance." I put it in quotes for a reason. For one thing, no more than two of the dozen or so troupes seemed to know more than two or three moves between them. For another, all but two of them were performing to hip-hop, not traditional north African or southwest Asian belly dance music. The bulk of the dance moves were straight out of BET videos, too, as were the girls themselves. News flash, children: When Pink sang, "What happened to the dream of a woman President? She's dancing in the video next to Fiddy Cent," that wasn't a compliment. And for that matter, when Sir Mix-a-Lot mocked those kinds of background dancers as "knock-kneed bimbos dancing like ho's," that wasn't a compliment either. The catalog also let the cat out of the bag about one of the other performance venues. Every ten minutes a group called Defying Gravity was performing a "feminist" pole dancing "acrobatic" routine. Critics loved it. Critics left out what was actually said in the catalog, on the off-chance you couldn't figure it out on your own: Defying Gravity is a group of east-side strippers. And, of course, for all that Venus Envy is routinely billed as a feminist event, the stripper and hip-hop background dancer troupes had easily three or four times the crowds that the actual artists had, and held their crowds rapt for easily twenty or thirty times as long as any of the artists were able to. The few friends I saw down there kept wanting to wander over to and ogle the dancers; I kept having to wander away within minutes of the beginning of each performance lest I say something really snarky.

Lest you misunderstand where I'm coming from, I used to work in a strip club myself. I'm enthusiastically on the side of professional erotic dancers. But when nearly all of the performances at a feminist art show are by and of strippers and wanna-be hip-hop video background dancers, I've got a problem with it. And when the local feminist community and the local arts community can't or won't more than a couple of women's music and/or dance and/or poetry and/or theater performances, but chooses to instead fill up five or more stages full of hip-hop background dancers and strippers, that's not what I went there to see. And when that many untalented hacks flood in thinking they can do it as well as the trained professionals and semi-pros like Aalim Dance Studio (and no, my criticisms do not extend to them, I have tremendous respect for them and their art) and think that that's the only form of women's performance art that they're interested in learning or performing, it tells me two things. First of all, it tells me that we've somehow missed out on teaching these girls that there's more to life than trying to get men to ogle you. And two, it tells me that the field of self-proclaimed talented artistic belly dancers is so saturated that the fad has peaked, and will (by the grace of the god) be over soon, and not soon enough for me.

(Unrelated post-script: the last 3 panels of today's Home on the Strange pinched me in an uncomfortable place. Ouch.)

Eris forfend that I should step into the middle of an argument between a half-closeted gay man and a furry activist. (* waits *) Uh oh, Eris didn't forfend. Crap, you know what that means. It means that my "someone is picking on the freaks unfairly" alarm has gone off, and I'm going to try the thankless task of convincing people that the scary, weird, crazy and obviously dangerous freaks (or so they think) are actually harmless people who have a pretty good reason for what they're doing. I've been comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable since 1983, so I guess there's no reason to stop now.

What the argument is all about is that triggur has put together (or is promoting? it's not clear the authorship of) a video up on YouTube.com entitled "Pride versus Progress." (Warning: Link will play video automatically, and is not work-safe in most environments.) Via his blog, he's asking for every gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, and trans-gendered person in the world to see it and to act upon his recommendations. cargoweasel's reaction can best be described as uncharitable. Or, it could be described someone more thoroughly and accurately by saying that Cargo thinks that Triggur is a homophobic gay man who's done more to fan the flames of hatred against GLBTTs than anybody this side of Pat Robertson, and he didn't even vaguely mince words about it. kynn has weighed in on Cargo's side, hard ... and in particular, he's mightily offended that some of the furry activists who are most demanding that people be kind to them about their weird hobby are among those most thoroughly angry about Gay Pride. And since then, xydexx, who's normally a pretty reasonable person, is veering close to being one of those furries, himself.

So what's the argument all about? For the benefit of those of you who aren't interested enough to watch the video, or who don't have a chance to do so yet until you get home from work, what Triggur is arguing is that the very survival of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and transvestite human beings depends on not angering or offending the rest of the population. That, in particular, any suggestion of sexuality or kink or fetish "belongs in the bedroom," and simply should not be on display in any public forum, let alone paraded in front of TV news cameras. He has filled his video with pictures of transvestites dressed like 70s Vegas showgirls, and of (presumably) gay men dressed in leather gear, thongs, and backless chaps. And he insists that by showing that side of themselves to the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells and Fred Phelpses of the world, they are giving them the ammunition they need to convince the calmer, saner part of the American public who are, despite being calmer and saner than Falwell and Robertson Phelps (a low hurdle) are only tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and transvestite citizens so long as it is possible for them to imagine that they are all celibate. The least reminder that these people actually have sex, and much of it their own kind of sex with other people like themselves, so grosses out people (and surveys show that it does) that, per Triggur and Xydexx's reasoning, every time we show an actually sexual gay man in public as opposed to a mincing, prancing eunuch or a boring office drone who says that he's gay without showing any hint of attraction to any actual men, the cause of full and equal rights and respect for gay men is set back by another 20 years.

Let me beg to differ, if I may.

Eight years ago, and I know that none of you have forgotten this so I'm astonished I have to remind some of you of the details, a semi-closeted gay man exactly like the ones that Triggur and Xydexx extol met another man in a gay-friendly bar, believed based on his internal "gaydar" that the man might be gay himself, and asked him out on a date. The other man agreed, but when they got to the car the man who was asked out had several friends with him and no intention of a friendly date. They took that semi-closeted, polite young gay man out of town, beat him to within an inch of his life, and then crucified him on a barbed wire fence and left him there to slowly and painfully die -- and felt no remorse for doing so. To the best of my knowledge, what happened to Matthew Shepard has not actually happened to any feather-bedecked drag queens or strap-clad exhibitionist leather daddies. I suggest to you that the reason why not is that they're not alone. Is it really so hard for those of you in the generation behind mine to remember or understand that Silence = Death? What those of us who fondly commemorate the Stonewall Riots for is not just that they fought back, but why they fought back. They were so angry that they forgot to be embarrassed about who they were and what they did. And rather than let themselves be taken away to be separately shamed, they collectively stood up for not just themselves, but each other.

Before Stonewall and for a long time afterwards, it was considered a matter of settled law, a 100% confidently known fact, that all gay men, lesbian women, bisexuals of either sex, and people who dressed or felt as if they were intersexual, were so ashamed of what they did that they would do anything to keep it a secret. That is, after all, why they were routinely denied security clearances or any sensitive or financial jobs; it was assumed that simply by being GLBTT, they were 100% all of them vulnerable to blackmail. And that didn't change until a generation came along who refused to be made ashamed. And that, friends, is what a Gay Pride Day is really for. A Gay Pride parade is not for pretending to be just like the straights so you can be accepted; that's a lie and you'll never sell it, everybody knows better. Since that lie can't possibly work, the original Gay Pride generation, and those who continue the tradition, have fallen back on the blunt truth most famously summarized by ACT-UP: "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it." That's a hostile, confrontational demand, yes. (Too much so for the St. Louis chapter, to my embarrassment, who routinely softened it to, "We're here, we're queer, and we'd like to get to know you." Oh, good, because nothing so closely resembles defending yourself as mincing and apologizing and groveling for pats on the head.) It puts the uncomfortable majority on the defensive. It demands that they not only accept that there are GLBTT full citizens of their countries, it places that demand in its inescapable context that if you can't stand the fact that this is who they are and what they do, you're not really standing them.

And the "we're just like the straights thing" is, you know, really a lie. Men and women really are different, and even if you disagree with that, you must agree that they certainly are raised with different expectations, roles, and skill sets. A relationship between two men or two women can not especially closely resemble one between a man and a woman, irregardless of any mechanics of slots or tabs. Nor does it. Hell's bells, this is for all practical purposes what the public on both sides of the GLBTT versus homophobes war crucified Robert Mapplethorpe for. Again, a history lesson is in order. Prior to 1990, he was mostly known as a photographer's photographer, one of those ultimate technical photographers for whom everything, from lighting to lens use to darkroom work, had to be about the truth of the subject, about showing the subject in a way that fully conveys the reality of it, a journalistic style so precise and artistic that it transcends journalism. Then came Gay Related Immune Deficiency, a cluster of odd illnesses that was statistically isolated (at first) to American gay men. Eventually came a broader understanding of it, and its modern name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS. And he had it. So did a lot of New Yorkers and San Franciscans in the creative class; we lost half a generation or more of our theater, art, dance, music, and photography talent. But, at least at first, not a lot of other people. And between the relatively low number of people dying of AIDS compared to, say, cancer or heart failure, and considering that AIDS way, way disproportionately struck people that mainstream Americans wished would die, junkies and gay men, finding funding for research into the causes of and possible cures for AIDS was pretty hard. So mainstream gay activists adopted a strategy of "putting a human face on AIDS," of convincing the straights that gay men are just like everybody else. But to an artist like Mapplethorpe who had devoted the entirety of his artistic career to The Truth, the dishonesty of that stuck in his craw. So he went down to a regular, ordinary gay leather bar on an ordinary, unscheduled Friday night, and took seven pictures of things that gay men routinely do to each other in public, with his full artistic precision, and put them in his next display, "The Intimate Moment." The anger, both gay and straight, hasn't quieted down yet, and probably never will. But it was the truth, and a truth he died telling, and I respect him for that.

A culture that isn't OK with what gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, and the transgendered do in private is not a safe place for them, period. The Stonewall Rioters suddenly understood that. The original Gay Pride marchers proved it. Robert Mapplethorpe went to his grave proclaiming it. Matthew Shepard's death proved the futility of claiming otherwise. Show a little respect -- and a little backbone.

One: The link to the Sunflowers story update is dated 1997 and later. The story happened in 1987. Excuse me for remembering only the part that I did see, the widespread press coverage around 1987 and the resulting international legal debate, and not having seen the 1997 retraction. My point stands, though: in a sense, thanks to that controversy, artists sometimes have some rights over how their works are used or abused. Sort of. Not that the resulting laws and treaties have seen much testing in courts. It's not a settled issue. And that was my point.

Two: Again, I'm reporting what I remember from the press coverage surrounding the release of Watchmen about Ditko versus Moore. If my sources were wrong, then I'm wrong, and there's nothing I can do about that. Again, the point stands though that those are recognizably somebody else's characters that he twisted all around in ways the original creator did not approve, and he's just fine with that, but demands that his characters (even the ones derived from other people's work) be treated better than he treats other authors. My reason for having no measurable sympathy for this position stands.

Three: This is not just an argument about whether or not Moore's name should appear on the movie poster or have been brought up in press briefings, or he wouldn't be telling every interviewer who would listen that he wishes that the movie hadn't been made. This is, very specifically, Alan Moore trying to sabotage the film.

Four: Not all writers get shat upon equally. Comic book writers, as Alan Moore accurately complains, get shat upon more. There's a reason for that, and that's that what they do is, yes, really is, that easy. When you consider how much of what Alan Moore has done is based entirely on other people's characters and simply continuing inherited story lines, jesus, I'll bet at least two hundred of you could (for example) have done as good a job as he did on Swamp Thing, and I have no doubt whatsoever that any ten out of fifty random fanfic writers could have churned out fan-fic involving the same characters as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and done a better job of it than he did. I have a hard time judging From Hell, because obviously unlike most of you, I'd actually read the same sources he did before he wrote it, and in my opinion he didn't do nearly as good a job of explaining the theories or telling the story as almost any random book that he was copying from did, which is why I never got more than about a third of the way through it before I started leafing through it to catch the high points; it's that dull to me. Watchmen is the only thing he's ever done that came anywhere near deserving the hype he gets, and even then, applying Roshomon to a superhero-motive deconstruction isn't that original or that hard to do ... for all that in this one case, I'll admit that I've never seen it done better. I mean for god's sake, a comic book script is fewer words per month than your average high school student is expected to produce every week. So it's easy work, for an undemanding audience, with bazillions of people willing to do it for free or cheap just because they want the job that badly, and probably at least 10% of them can do it at least as well as he does ... it's no shock that his contracts stank. Why do you think that guitar-playing rock-and-rollers get screwed just as hard? It's because if you took any J. Random Bar-Band and gave them U2's news coverage and publicity and advertising instead of giving it to U2, they'd be selling just as many records and nobody would heard of Bono except his friends and a few people from his home town. Comic book writers and rock and roll guitarists are entirely as entirely disposable as LiveJournal columnists.

Five:The only thing that makes it worth arguing about V for Vendetta is that, of all of the work that he's actually famous for, it's the only one where he actually had to create the characters and the setting himself. And while I never finished his V for Vendetta (I thought it was boring to the point of being unreadable), I think that what the Wachowskis did to his background story made it a lot more generally applicable and a lot more plausible than his original, which simply wouldn't have flown with a 2006 audience. You can like or dislike what they did with the characters of V and Evey (I like them better this way, myself), and yes, as much as he poured into creating them, I can see why he doesn't like having them changed at all. Does this teach him any humility about screwing with other people's characters? No, he's still writing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Now, I'm going to bed; I'll talk about the actual movie later.

I probably have more to say about V for Vendetta the movie than will fit into one journal entry. For now, suffice it to say that it is great, it's a better movie than the critics say it is, and I enjoyed it tremendously. But there was something on my mind about the movie from before I even saw it that I want to make first.

There is a very interesting ongoing cultural (and even legal) argument that has been going on for almost thirty years now about how much right an artist has to control the uses to which is work is put after he's sold the work and/or the rights to it. And, in fact, what made it a legal argument was that there are several international treaties now requiring at least some artworks to be preserved and displayed only in a manner that the original artist would approve of. These treaties began when a Japanese real estate speculator (from before their real-estate bubble's collapse) got sick and tired of Van Goh's "Sunflowers" being praised as the greatest painting of its time, found out it was up for auction, and bought it with the stated and explicit intent to destroy it. To prevent this, governments all over the world stumbled all over themselves to vest in the creator of certain great artworks a certain amount of rights over how an artwork is to be treated, and to vest in all of humanity a right to have a say over what uses that artwork is put to.

Alan Moore is so not entitled to be involved in that discussion.

Alan Moore was a virtual unknown outside of comic book fandom before he wrote Watchmen. This is a good time to remind some of you how Watchmen came to be. DC Comics had just bought out a competing publisher that had gone bankrupt, Charlton Comics, and thereby acquired the rights to all of Charlton Comics' characters and titles. So they handed these characters to the guy who wrote Swamp Thing and asked him what he would do with them. What he did with them was turn The Question into a deeply delusional, psychopathic, pathologically ugly son of a whore with a propensity for physical torture. He turned the original Blue Beetle into a maudlin retiree, which is OK, but turned the New Blue Beetle, who was one of my favorite characters as a kid, into a sexually impotent whiner. And so on, and so on, but suffice it to say was that he took a lot of basically good, basically decent hard-working superheroes and rewrote them entirely to make each and every one of them in some way deranged, perverted, and/or psychotic.

It turned out that the guy who invented those characters was still alive. And even though he didn't have a legal leg to stand on, having created those characters as work for hire and having no vested legal right to them whatsoever, when he saw an early draft of Alan Moore's work he wrote in to DC and told them that he was perfectly willing and entirely determined to spend every penny he had saved, and every penny of his pension, and every hour of his remaining life no matter what it cost him or did to him, to tie this project up in the courts via any pretenses he could come up with, that he would fight Alan Moore to his dying breath to keep Alan Moore from doing that to his characters. So DC caved, and ordered Moore to redesign and rewrite the characters so that they were no longer recognizably the Carleton Comics characters (although the resulting characters are still quite recognizable if, like me, you were a fan of any of the originals) and thus were Rorschach, Night Owl 1 and 2, the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan and so forth born ... over Alan Moore's objections.

May I also remind you that Alan Moore didn't create any of the characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? I'm not an obsessive H. Rider Haggard fan, but I know enough to have been disgusted that he took Haggard's character that was supposed to be the greatest and most honorable gentleman adventurer of all time and turned him