Freckles & Doubt

I am somewhat terrified to note that fundamentalist Christians now have their own video game, in which you try to convert the evil heavy-metal-music-wielding UN-remnant world-order forces of the Antichrist with your own brainwashing forces of believers, medics and Christian rock bands and lots and lots of prayer¹, descending to actual violence only "in self-defense". This is Eternal Forces, based on the Left Behind series of post-Rapture adventures which are self-congratulatory, bloody and horribly, horribly popular.

While my opinions on fundamentalist religion are fairly well known, and my opinion of Rapturists is fairly unprintable (let's just say the whole thing is an egregiously smug and actively destructive wriggle-out from real-world responsibility), what amuses me most about this damned game is the double-think. Or, if you prefer, the rampant hypocrisy. There has been a lot of negative press about this game from Christians and non-Christians alike, not only because the game-play is apparently terrible, but because the Christian message doesn't seem to sit well with the assumption that it's somehow inevitable or unavoidable that non-Christians will eventually be slaughtered if they don't convert. I am amused to note that the game website claims that there is no actual violence in the game, and definitely no blood or gore: "Because our game is a ‘strategy' game, never does a player click a key or press a button to actuate a first-person violent act." Violence, note, is not real violence if it's not first-person. Explains a lot about the Bush administration's doubletalk on Iraq. The denial of violence is rather comically counterpointed, though, by the game description on the same site: as a player you can apparently "Conduct physical & spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Yup, not about violence at all. In a final irony, in the single scenarios you can choose to be the forces of the Antichrist instead of the believers, which is a poke in the eye to the evangelical purpose of the game, surely?

Amusing though this is, I fear I am using it to distract myself from my legitimate work, and I can feel wolverine_nun glaring at me, so I'll stop... < trails disconsolately off to do battle with own incoherence >

¹ I'm not even going to get into the rampant stereotyping: in unit design women can only be nurses, since apparently only men are able to build outposts, convert the faithful or produce Christian rock music. And all the Christian forces are white; black or Middle Eastern characters are bad guys. Oops, I did get into it. Hiss, spit.

OMG! I'm, like, totally addicted to The Princess Diaries! If someone doesn't rugby-tackle me now and take my credit card away from me, I'm going to hie me straight forth to the publishers' remainders sale and buy me books 4-to-infinity in the series. And then read them back-to-back, drinking tea and giggling. When I should be marking third-year essays on Disney and Shrek.

Meg Cabot actually writes refreshingly well: at last, a journal-keeping protagonist who isn't the kind of total, hopeless, ineffectual ditz who makes me want to slap him/her. (Evidence in point: Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones). She has her teenage angsts, but they're relatively realistic (which I never thought Bridget Jones was), as intelligent as possible under the influence of adolescent hormones (which BJ absolutely isn't while not even having that excuse), and interposed with moments of actual agency. And the princess/celebrity stuff is kinda cute (whereas in BJ it's simply agonising*). As cult teen lit, we could be doing a lot worse.

I owe a vote of thanks to khoi_boi, who rescued me from intense toast dialogue and Iburst battery yesterday by inviting me out for lunch in Obs. I realise, somewhat belatedly, that I actually don't hang around enough with people of my own vintage, who recognise the same 80s music as I do and can sagely bemoan the moral degeneration of the younger CLAW crowd from the same vantage point. Not that I derive anything but enjoyment from the less agéd among you, but the cultural references aren't quite the same.

Also, courtesy of wytchfynder, a new webcomic. Scary-Go-Round. British, whimsical, understated, off-the-wall. You have to relax and let it gently sneak up on you.

* Did I mention how much I loathe and despise Bridget Jones? In either book or film form. In the latter, she's definitely not worthy of Mr. Darcy.**

** Cue stv at this point: "Oh, Mr. Darcy!" . He gets quite camp.

Honestly. Eat your heart out, Rimbaud. Spam is so the new surrealist poetry. The stock tip in my inbox this morning announced itself by suggesting, under the mystifying subject line reproduced above, "glass cubicle a purifying sleight of you." Like all really high class gibberish, it suggests, maddeningly, that somewhere on the edge of consciousness is something not entirely unrelated to meaning.

Pleasant lunch with tsukikoneko today, although meeting in the bookshop was, in retrospect, possibly a tactical error. Piqued, if not vexed, by the unpleasant concatenation of PMT, nausea reactions to the antibiotics, and the tail-end of this cold'flu thing, I went forth and acquired the new Terry Pratchett in profligate hardback. Wintersmith: the third Tiffany Aching one. Not his best, IMNSHO: a slightly scattered, uncohesive narrative, although lots of lovely witchy detail and proper miffic overtones, with extra miff. If for no other reason, the book is utterly worth it for Horace the Cheese.

Also scored a R50-copy of The Iron Council, which means I might, eventually, get around to finishing the damned thing.

So, jo&stv head off to Thailand to buy more stuff for their shop, and what happens? Thailand's military stage a coup. Honestly. It's something about our favourite dynamic duo: last time they were in Thailand, there was a tsunami.

Jo&stv report that, as of yet, they have not been run over by a tank.

On the cultural wossname front, I find it interesting that I hear about a coup in Thailand and don't immediately run off to read the BBC: I think, "oooh, Cultural Snow's in Thailand!", and dash off to read his blog. This is a behaviour acquired only over the last year, which I suspect means I'm considerably behind the cutting edge of the blogsphere.

BoingBoing points out that French also has the verb "to google" - googler. Je google, tu googles, il google, nous googlons, vous googlez, ils googlent. J'ai googlé. Nous googlerons. It is quite possible that my life is now complete.

My morning's post-first-period grind was considerably lightened by a farewell tea-drinking session with wytchfynder, who showered me with muffins, conversation and a random copy of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's redRobe*, before buggering off to the Evil Empire again on Saturday in pursuit of the Dread Phid. Cape Town, desert, you know, the usual. And we never even got in our planned evening of booze and bad superhero movies. Woe.

This blasted final encyclopedia entry has jumped all over me in hobnailed boots. Every time je google, I find another bunch of beastly fairy tale films I haven't included. I think they breed when I'm not looking, which I suppose would also explain some of the more unlikely crosses which keep turning up. Go on, tell me all about the obscure, weird fairy tale films you've ever watched, and see if you can poke more holes in my thin veneer of authoritativeness.

< waves tiny fist impotently at uncaring cultural universe >

On the upside, the copies of the Marvels and Tales edition containing my actual full-length paper arrived today. It looks pretty spiff. I feel all academic, like.

* I know nothing of this man. Anyone read? looks grimy, gritty, cyberpunkoid.

Chatting with wytchfynder at lunch the other day, I was somewhat surprised when he said he seldom remembers his dreams. I remember mine pretty vividly on a more or less daily basis; last night, for example, I dreamed I was at a departmental meeting of some sort which entailed about eight of us seated at a long table, at which the guest of honour was Sheri Tepper. She was cool :>. Although always seated distantly from me at the table, so we couldn't chat. This was clearly career wishful thinking on my part, but I'm curious: how often do you witterers remember your dreams? do I dream unusually vividly?

Have just madly devoured the four volumes of Ultimate X-Men, lent to me by a kind first_fallen. Am v. impressed. The artwork is beautiful, and the stories gritty and real. It's a very, very interesting comparison to the Uncanny X-Men anthology I've just read, which hails from the 1970s, and which has a very different sensibility. Far more adult, the modern ones; far less cutesy idealism, far more accomplishment in the storytelling. (These new ones seldom feel the need to insert text boxes telling you what's going on).

I am fast realising, though, that superhero comics are very much a folklore for our society. Comparing the film versions to the earlier and current versions, what they basically are is a retelling of the same story, not only in different settings, but with variations in plot. Characters remain pretty much the same, and their origin myths are similar; often the emotional interactions between them are repeated, too, at least to some extent. But each version is different and unique. This is pretty much how folklore works: there is no one "right" version, simply different, equally valid iterations, each momentarily stamped with the identity of the teller, whether scripter, artist or director. It's testament to the strength of the X-men as icons that they cheerfully survive this treatment, becoming more complex and interesting instead of losing all character.

So. Superheroes. The vague throwing around of concepts like "innocent" and "naive" in yesterday's post, together with the fact that I've spent all day wrestling with an attempt to define Disney's moral high ground in under 200 words, means that bells and whistles blow, red flags are waved, Cultural Analysis Alert!

It's possible that superheroes are innocent in my mental construct of them because of their origins: children's comics, and 1950s morality, which is basically a sort of squeaky-clean hard-work ethic in which self-betterment is always subordinate to the Greater Good. (It's also possible that they're thusly defined because of the incredible, knee-weakening but basically very innocent crush I got on Superman when I was about 13, which must, on mature reflection, have been Christopher Reeve in the third movie, where he Went Bad owing to faulty Kryptonite, thus sparking my long line in bad relationship choices. I hasten to point out, for the sake of my argument, that naturally he also Got Better and sorted out all the evil things he did when Bad, except perhaps the night of passion with the supervillain's sexy sidekick, which was moderately irrevocable.)

Above all, certainly in their original form, superheroes are about clear-cut moral choices: defend the weak, beat up the bad guys, use your powers Only For Good. Even postmodern versions of superheroes such as Watchmen gain their effect precisely from the invocation and deliberate undercutting of a binary opposition we take for granted: grimy postmodern superheroes are only effective because we expect them to be unambiguous and are alarmed - and intrigued - when they aren't. When the classic superhero suffers angst, it's superficial: romance, responsibility, the conflict between normal and superhero identity. Most superhero angsts are momentary darkenings of the Good Guy bit which are never allowed to disrupt its essential functioning. If they Go Bad, either it's temporary (and excusable for some good reason) or they're supervillains. QED.

All this is pretty obvious. What intrigues me, though, is why, in our increasingly complex day and age, we have such a huge attraction to the essential innocence of superheroes? We live in a postmodern, capitalist era which has taken self-centredness, redefined as a virtue, to incredible heights. Identity and morality are no longer simple: they shift, flex and continually reconstruct themselves among the multiplicities of media society. A superhero is, by definition, a superlative: a distillation of the desirable into a symbolic notion of power. The realistic superlatives of power among which we live are quite simply those of money, or, in the Hollywood system, beauty; not of protective strength. A superhero, in the crime-busting sense of the original, is a hopeless anachronism: evil is no longer susceptible to having its lights punched out. (More's the pity).

It's vaguely worrying, because it suggests that we have taken the notions of selfless action and moral activism, exaggerated them to unambiguous, unrealistic and essentially symbolic heights, and thus defined them solely as fantasy. We love superheroes not because they offer an ideal, but because they define what we are not, and can never become again, because after all, we are no longer innocent.

strawberryfrog and short_mort are getting married on Saturday, and I wanted some new boots to wear to the (semi-formal) wedding, my current bootedness tending to the big and clunky. This means that I spent an instructive half-hour wandering around Cavendish yesterday, looking at shoe shops.

I hate shoe shops*. They are universally filled with overpriced objects of shoddy workmanship in dubious taste which I wouldn't put on my feet with a ten-foot pole**. But today I had my nose particularly rubbed in the current recurring fashion trend in women's footwear, which is towards obscenely high, thin heels. You know fashion is hitting the silly season when footwear looks more like an alien artefact, all thin curves and mysterious functionality. This year the spike heel is apparently In, in a big way.

High heels - particularly such enormously high heels, some of them four or five inches - are very, very, extremely, incredibly bad for you. Apart from the dangers of slipping, turning ankles or simply falling over because of your unbalanced centre of gravity, the raised-heel position throws the whole body out of kilter. In addition to ankle problems, knee problems, shortened calf muscles and achilles tendons, shin splints and bruised balls of the feet, they can cause back and spine damage because in high heels the way you walk, and the way you hold your whole body, is simply unnatural. Ye gods, they can cause menstrual and fertility problems! I've never worn particularly high heels, but even lowish wedge heels are implicated in several of my interesting falls, slippages and other evidences of ungainliness, and thus in my weak ankles, buggered knees and floating splinters of ankle-bone. This weird little page suggests that even dominatrices should consider slipping the extremely high heels off once their partner is safely blindfolded, to avoid muscle strain.

All this being the case, one has to ask why the hell contemporary fashion gets away with foisting these atrocities on hapless womanhood, year after year? The high heel is a serious fetish, at least superficially because it extends both height and leg length and forces the wearer to take little steps and sway their hips more while walking. Yay, sexiness. Not. But I think it's more than that: it's not an accident that high heels are worn almost exclusively by women, with male forays mostly into things like cowboy boots, which are at least a development from practicality (a heel stops the foot from slipping in the stirrup while riding). Nope, our culture codes the high heel as female/sexy because it underscores the whole bloody construction of woman as object. A woman in high heels is vulnerable, teetering, not quite in control; she cannot run, or even move fast; the heel traps her into immobility, and hence uselessness. She is an object of display, her very helplessness testament to the power of her (male) owner who can afford to keep her around as a non-contributing trophy whose value is in her long legs and decorative sexuality. The fact that her five-inch heels also damage her really only contributes to this construction. Western society gets all superior about Chinese foot-binding practices, but, guess what? We do it to women too, cripple their feet because of a perceived notion of beauty and passivity.

*retires to contemplate a new career in fashion-activism, including but not limited to pushing models in high heels off catwalks by judicious application of banana-skins*

* a tendency I apparently share with Douglas Adams.
** assuming the mechanics of such an action were even possible

In no particular order:

• Simply marking an essay on Underworld: Evolution has given me a headache, so on the whole I'm glad I didn't get around to seeing the actual film. Although I suppose the headache could equally have been sparked by the student's punctuation, or almost total lack thereof.
• Twenty essays on issues of power and intimacy in any vampire text, and not a single one is looking at Buffy. What's with modern youth? On the other hand I've marked two on Deacon Frost (the bad guy from Blade), whose sole charm, as far as I'm concerned, is his uncanny resemblance to Lindsay from Angel.
• Lost: I've got to the bit where Sawyer takes off not only his shirt, but everything else as well. He has also been given some backstory, or I suppose flashbackstory, which gives him something approaching a reason for being angsty and tormented. I'm sorry: nice chest, but he's still a dickhead.

Bugger, I'm not sure why that last entry posted twice, with variations. Jiggery-pokery in cyberspace, is what.

Definitely a good morning for giggles. Driving up to campus, I passed a refrigerated truck with a huge banner ad for natural yoghurt, endorsed by ... Batman. The cartoon Batman, not Christian Bale, but still all dark blue and black and broody. What's with that? Batman, the Dark Knight, heroic vigilanteism, gadgets, violence and... yoghurt? Stretching it, people.