Archive for January, 2008
Footnotes to the Human Species (re)Begins with "City of Pillars"
January 31st, 2008
Footnotes to the Human Species has returned with an brand-new website and a brand-new story, “City of Pillars”!
For those of you who were enjoying “Trois Freres” on the previous, “beta-test” version of Footnotes–fear not: that story will return in a much-improved, edited, and greatly revised version shortly. The official launch of Footnotes to the Human Species begins with “City of Pillars”, however, simply because “City of Pillars” sets up characters, concepts, and major worldbuilding events that explain more about what is happening in “Trois Freres” and related tales. In other words, “City of Pillars” is the starting point from which all other tales in the milieu, whether they come before or after the events of “Pillars”, originate.
“City of Pillars” begins my re-telling of the history of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries from a Lovecraftian standpoint by supposing one simple thing: What if the terrorists who attacked New York City on 9/11/2001 were Cthulhu cultists armed with an authentic copy of the original Al-Azif of Abdul Alhazred? What if the attack on the World Trade Center was not a goal in itself, but merely a means toward achieving a goal–namely, opening a gateway to unhallowed dimensions of whirling chaos so that the Other Gods and their minions could begin again their colonization of our universe?
All of the stories in the Footnotes milieu are derived entirely from the works of H. P. Lovecraft himself. Readers don’t need to be familiar with Lovecraft’s works to enjoy them, but it sure does help! “City of Pillars”, for instance, features appearances by or mentions of the fungi from Yuggoth, the Great Race of Yith, and Yog-Sothoth, as well as Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos and, of course, Cthulhu itself. In some fashion, “Pillars” is a sort of “sequel” to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Shadow Out of Time”, and “The Call of Cthulhu”–but you needn’t read all of these original tales to understand what’s going on in “City of Pillars”. Lovecraft fans will find hundreds of references to all things…well, Lovecraftian–but even readers completely unfamiliar with Grandpa Theobald’s works will be able to enjoy the stories!
So do have a look at the new tale and the new site. Subscribe to the RSS feed and have new material delivered right to your doorstep. And most of all, feel free to leave comments!
Technorati Tags: city of pillars,footnotes to the human species,derek c. f. pegritz,pegritz,h. p. lovecraft,lovecraft,fiction,horror,science-fiction,9-11
Any Air-Heads Out There?
January 27th, 2008
Is anyone Out There in Internet-Land considering picking up a MacBook Air this week when they officially go on sale? If so, do consider answering the following question(s):
Why, exactly, are you buying a MacBook Air? What do you plan on doing with it?
Among my circle of friends, no one, even the few people I know who really like Apple computers (god knows why), are planning to buy one because none of them have a need for, or even the extra cash to spend on, a MacBook Air. Personally, I cannot envision any possible reason that someone would to spend so much money on such a limited product—hence the reason I am asking for any and all positive responses to the MacBook Air!
So tell me…what makes the MacBook Air appealing to you? Are you drawn to it only because it’s the latest must-have toy from Apple, or do you have specific computing/portability needs that can only be met by an ultrathin notebook? Is there some feature of the MacBook Air which you see as particularly revolutionary?
Technorati Tags: macbook air,apple,notebook
Our Awesome World: The Crystal Caves
January 26th, 2008
Mexico is not often thought of as a place of breathtaking natural beauty—unless, of course, one is willing to look under the ground.
National Geographic News presents a stunning, literally awe-inspiring photogallery of Mexico’s Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals). The cavern system was discovered near the town of Delicias, Chihuahua, in 2000 by a mining operation who subsequently drained the caves to reveal gigantic gypsum crystals unlike any ever seen before.
But how did the crystals get so large? Simple!
[F]or millennia the crystals thrived in the cave’s extremely rare and stable natural environment. Temperatures hovered consistently around a steamy 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius), and the cave was filled with mineral-rich water that drove the crystals’ growth.
Fortunately for the delicate crystals, the caves will probably never become a tourist attraction, thanks to the fact that the crystals need to be maintained at a godawful 120+ degrees Fahrenheit in order to keep them from crumbling.
If anyone reading this wants to brave the searing heat to see the crystals for him- or herself, do give my regards to Juan Romero and wish him a happy transition.
Technorati Tags: national geographic,crystal caves,crystals,mexico,chihuahua,geology,gypsum,awesome
Good Writin’: Two Excerpts from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth.”
January 25th, 2008
Very few readers of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction know that Lovecraft was a reasonably accomplished poet as well as a prose stylist. In fact, Lovecraft began reading–and writing–poetry at a very early age: he had read Homer’s Odyssey and produced his own “young readers” abridgement of the epic by age six! Lovecraft is generally not known as a poet, however, because, unlike his prose, very little of HPL’s poetry was ever published outside of letters and amateur-press ‘zines. The majority of Lovecraft’s poetry is modelled on “Georgian,” that is, 18th Century, British verse forms. Lovecraft adored Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and other topical satirists of their day, and modeled his own verse very closely on theirs; hence, much of HPL’s poetry is based on “current events” of Lovecraft’s time and experience, especially events and controversies within his amateur press circles. While these poems may very well have been extraordinarily witty to the folks who understood their allusions, to contemporary readers they read much like extended “in-jokes” that make little sense outside of their original contexts. Furthermore, Lovecraft’s poetry often comes across as very stiff and stilted, as HPL was more concerned with the “harmonious regularity of metre” than with the imagery, ideas, and symbolism which truly fuel poetry.
Nonetheless, Lovecraft has produced some poetry of extraordinary beauty and power. None of his verse works are as stunning as his sonnet sequence “Fungi from Yuggoth” (1929-30). In these thirty-six sonnets, Lovecraft has created a number of fourteen-line mini-narratives, poetic remixes of several of his prose works, and gorgeous congeries of weird words that evoke the same delerious atmosphere of his best-known stories.
For your appreciation, I present you two of my favorite sonnets:
XV: Antarktos
Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!XXI: Nyarlathotep
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.
Modern Monsters and Modern Humanity
January 21st, 2008
Part One: A Quick Primer on Giant Monsters
Cloverfield (IMDB link) is, simply put, the best giant monster movie ever made. In order to understand why this is, let’s take a look at some other sterling examples of the genre in order to, first, understand what made a few sterling examples of the genre so good, and second, to understand how and why Cloverfield goes beyond them to break new ground and inject new life into an otherwise moribund horror concept.
We must, of course, start with the two most recognizable names in the genre: Merian Cooper’s King Kong (1933) and Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954), better known in the US as Godzilla. Cooper’s Kong was a landmark in that it was the first film to ever portray a gigantic, superhuman creature attacking a city, thereby establishing the basic identity of the monster-movie genre: an oversized creature, representative of Nature at Her Most Powerful, attacks that most recognizable symbol of contemporary, technological human civilization—the glittering, glowering metropolis. In King Kong, the monster, a giant, primal ape removed from his Edenic jungle paradise is brought into the cold, angular realm of New York City—the very archetype of the Modern City—and wreaks all manner of havoc before finally being defeated by human might as represented by biplanes, the height of 1930s technology. Twentyone years later, the same basic plot was transplanted to Japan but essentially repeated in Honda’s Gojira: the monstrous, saurian Gojira emerges from the primal Pacific Ocean and proceeds to pound Japanese civilization (typified by the capitol, Tokyo) into the dirt until finally defeated by the technological superiority of Dr. Daisuke Serizawa-hakase’s “oxygen destroyer.”
In both cases, the giant monster clearly depicts the unbridled, inhuman power of Mother Nature rising up to humble Mankind. As Blue Oyster Cult notes in their musical tribute to Godzilla/Gojira, “History shows again and again / How Nature points out the folly of Man.” Eventually, humanity prevails not through physical prowess—we are individually little more than dolls in the big simian mitts of Kong and little plastic figurines beneath the clawed feet of Godzilla—but through our intellectual/technological capacities. Where the two films greatly differ are in their explanations of their monsters’ origins.
In the 1930s, there were still unexplored black spaces on the global map where dragons (or, at least, dinosaurs) and huge apes could still exist untroubled by mankind. King Kong, like the other dinosaurs on Skull Island, is a living, breathing chunk of the prehistoric world which, supposedly, has vanished forever beneath the pavement and electric lighting of civilization. To have a piece of that prehistoric world of archetypal nightmares dragged back to the urbane surrounds of New York City was a source of wonder that soon turned to terror as Nature’s champion, Kong, breaks loose and brings the horror of unrestrainable Nature into the very heart of civilization.
However, after the technological horrors of the Second World War, human civilization itself is shown to be responsible for the birth of Gojira, a gargantuan mutation summoned from the depths and given flaming radioactive breath by the fallout of atomic weapons testing. To Japan, the only nation in the world to have ever experienced the unbelievable destructiveness and virulent aftereffects of that very pinnacle of human weaponry, the Atom Bomb, nothing could be more horrible than a perversion of nature produced by the most awful weapon ever developed.
From the beginning, therefore, the giant monster movie has always followed the basic trope of Giant Primitive Thing attacking Civilized Human World (in the form of a large modern city). Pick any of the myriad monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s—Them!, The Monster that Challenged the World, or Gorgo—and you’ll find either the King Kong formula or the Godzilla formula repeated virtually unaltered. Aside from featuring different prehistoric or radiation-enlarged monsters, and from differing locations (some take place in rural areas, swapping the Big City with the bucolic imagery of America’s heartland as symbolic of civilization) these films are all virtually indistinguishable. Entertaining, yes, and sometimes revolutionary in terms of the special effects artistry used to depict the monsters on screen, but all more or less the same.
Same, too, are the depictions of human characters in these films. No matter how grand the destruction depicted in the movies, the scripts’ focus is always on a small number of people—almost always featuring:
- the person responsible for bringing the monster (or monsters) to the mainland,
- a scientist of some sort who’s usually there to explain the monster’s origin and/or provide a means to stop it,
- a military character who is often to person who spearheads attacks on the monster,
- and usually a few “everyman” characters who just happen to get caught up in the fray.
This way, the large-scale aspects of the giant monster’s rampage are humanized and made real for the audience by focusing on the destruction’s effects on this core group of characters. Monster movies are not just about the monsters, of course, but also concern the impact of the monsters on humanity; and in order to give the films a measure of pathos so they remain interesting to viewers, a tight focus on a number of people with whom the audience can empathize is necessary, or you’d just end up with a documentary about the monster’s attack.
Over the decades since the ’60s, though, giant monster movies have been in sharp decline, mainly because the sameness of their plots eventually wore thin. Godzilla films devolved into campy kaiju versions of Wrestlemania. Giant monsters were traded for man-sized monsters that didn’t need massive FX budgets to portray (just put an actor in a latex mask and, well, there you go). Every now and again during the 1980s and 1990s, a new giant monster movie would appear in the States—for example, The Relic (1997), the abysmal 1998 American “remake” of Godzilla, and 2006’s surprisingly good (and funny!) Korean entry, The Host (Gwoemul). But for the most part, even younger movie-goers and monster aficionados born after the heyday of the giant monster movie have come to identify the genre as primarily a 1950s/1960s phenomenon.
But now Cloverfield has come to reinvigorate the giant monster movie with a cleansing shot of cosmic horror mixed with ultra-realistic, street-level depictions of humanity.
Part Two: Cloverfield and the Giant Monster Reborn!
Cloverfield broke box office records for January, raking in $41 million dollars in its opening weekend alone. Not only did it make money, it also debuted to extremely positive reviews by various film critics—an almost unheard-of occurrence in the giant-monster-movie world! But…what’s so special about Cloverfield?
Fundamentally, the movie adheres to all the basic tropes of the genre: a giant monster appears and proceeds to terrorize and devastate New York City while a small “focus group” of human characters scrabbles for safety in its considerable shadow. The military naturally shows up to combat the monster (ineffectively), there are plenty of tense moments and furious action sequences, and viewers get to witness the heroism of “everyday people” dealing with an extraordinary situation. But, aside from those basic similarities, director Matt Reeves, screenwriter Drew Goddard, and produced J. J. Abrams—well-known for his clever, postmodern television dramas Alias and Lost—have created a film that brings a completely new perspective to the giant monster film. It does so in two ways: stylistically, in the hyper-realistic “handcam” medium in which the film is shot, and conceptually in the inexplicable, utterly alien depiction of the monster as a force of destruction whose origins, motives, and very nature are left entirely(?) unknown.
The first thing any viewer will notice about the film is that it is presented as video “evidence” taken from a video camera recovered in the ruins of what was once New York City’s Central Park. The videotaped evidence initially depicts characters Rob and Beth’s burgeoning relationship, establishing a measure of pathos and sympathy for these characters and establishes a “before-the-disaster” view of workaday New York City life, but then properly begins with Rob’s going-away party, which viewpoint character Hud is taping over the previous material. The entire film, concerning characters Rob, Beth, Marlena, Lily, and (behind the camera) Hud, is shot entirely from the subjective viewpoint of this one small group of people as they attempt to survive the monster’s rampage. There are no “omnipotent” scenes depicting the monster’s origins and overall chaos, no chunks of exposition or infobites—all we see is filtered through Hud’s limited lens.
This leads to some very clever means of exposition that serve to highlight the down-in-the-streets realism of the film rather than detract from it. When the monster initially strikes, the crowd at Rob’s going-away party pause to turn on the television and watch a news broadcast breaking the news of a mysterious “earthquake” in Manhattan and an oil tanker capsized in the bay. Later, as the characters are scrambling around the city looking for safety, Rob and Hud enter an electronics store in the process of being looted and witness, on a number of TV screens, more news broadcasts of the monster tearing up buildings and shedding vicious arachnid “parasites” that magnify its destructiveness by unleashing another danger on the streets around it. All of this exposition is delivered in a naturalistic fashion.
Throughout the film, the camera is as much in motion as the characters themselves—leading to inevitable comparisons with The Blair Witch Project (in fact, the movie has occasionally been called “The Blair Witch meets Godzilla”). This presents some action scenes in a dizzying blur of panicked scenes, in which the monster is often glimpsed but not directly seen. In fact, the monster’s appearance is kept vague and fragmentary throughout most of the film, as the characters run from it. This is not a film that glorifies in revealing the monster and focusing on its destruction; rather, it is a film that by dint of its stylistic “shakycam” narrative device focuses on the human characters just trying to live through the experience. In that fashion, Cloverfield redefines the giant monster genre by altering the viewpoint of the entire flick.
Also, the ensemble of viewpoint characters is strictly limited as well: there are no Merlin-like scientist characters or tough-as-nails military men in the party—the main characters are just a handful of ordinary (if relatively well-off) New Yorkers. Hud and the others occasionally speculate about the origins or identity of the monster, but there are no wise scientist characters even encountered in passing who identify the monster or attempt to offer up a rational, scientific means of defeating it. Military characters are only encountered briefly, and are shown to be barely keeping themselves together as the monster and its parasites attack. They are not stalwart, all-American heroes whose technological prowess and cool-headed, can-do resilience is guaranteed to ultimately overcome the monster, but frustrated, scared, and confused bystanders of the monster’s seemingly unstoppable rampage. The National Guard is not here to Save the Day in Cloverfield; like Rob and Hud and the others, they, too, are just trying to live to see the sunrise while the monstrous horror stampedes through their ranks.
In the absence of “authoritative” characters who offer up even a possible explanation of the monster, we have only the monster itself: a hideous, aberrant cipher whose origins, motives, and meaning are left entirely unanswered. The monster is a Complete Unknown: not a giant ape captured in the wild, nor a lizard or ant colony grown to great size by atomic radiation, nor even an alien come to earth in a meteor—it simply shows up and begins ransacking the city. This is the point at which Cloverfield departs most strongly—and most effectively—from the established giant-monster ideal and therefore adds a refreshing novelty to the otherwise played-out genre.
Throughout the months leading up to the film, during which the monster’s appearance and most of the film’s plot were a closely-guarded secret, speculation abounded as to who or what was the thing attacking New York. A common suggestion was that the monster was H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, a popular gigantic “monster” invented by Lovecraft to embody the great Fear of the Unknown which he so brilliantly wrote about. Though the Cloverfield monster is not Cthulhu itself, it is still a highly Lovecraftian monster in that it, too, represents the Lovecraftian idea of an entity without identity, or convenient explanation.
In his essay on “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927, revised 1933-1935), Lovecraft notes that:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.
What can be more unknown, more alien to all contemporary human experience, than a gigantic, incomprehensible thing whose actions and motives are left entirely unexplained? In past giant monster movies, the terror of the creature was often blunted and, eventually, defeated by explanation: once it was understood that Gojira was a radioactive mutant, a certain amount of mystery concerning the monster was dispelled and effective means of eliminating it were then suggested based on the knowledge of its identity. Oftimes in giant monster movies, understanding what the monster is will usually lead to the human characters’ development of a way to defeat it. In many ways, these films frequently have a “didactic” nature, too, which serves to “uplift” the viewer (as HPL notes) at the end by offering an optimistic resolution brought about by human ingenuity and technical superiority. The “lesson” inherent in King Kong and Gojira is simple: treat Mother Nature with respect or she will lash out at you—but, because you are human and therefore smart and powerful, you will always prevail in the end.
So what are we to believe about the Cloverfield monster? No one has any idea where it comes from; its origins are totally unknown (with one potential caveat: see appendix below for explanation). The characters speculate on this, but there are no definitive answers. What is it? Don’t know. Why is it attacking New York? Don’t know. What are the spider-things it brings with it—parasites, children, symbiotic organisms? Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Can the monster even be stopped? We. Don’t. Know.
The Cloverfield monster is an ultimate enigma. It is a ten-story-tall chunk of the fearful Unknown.
The monster is a thousand times more terrifying because nothing is known about it. Humanity has no clue as to where it came from, how to stop it, or what to do with it. Bullets don’t phase it. Tank shells don’t phase it. Even five-hundred-pound bombs, symbolic of undefeated American aerial might, do nothing to it.
Hence the reason the movie is, quite literally, a rebirth of the genre. The monster is a truly monstrous unknown, and the narrow, immediate lens of the narrative device lets the film maximize that unknowability by focusing on a small handful of average folks caught up in the destruction. Even at the very end of the film, the fate of the monster (and the human protagonists) is left undecided—and, perhaps, undecideable. Unlike King Kong, Gojira, or a hundred other giant monster films, this one manifestly does not have a comfortable ending. Humanity does not prevail. The monster may or may not be defeated. Either way, the usual resolution of humanity standing triumphant over the monster’s carcass thanks to our innate technological superiority is thwarted. The horror does not end with the “smirking optimism” of those who have lived to see a Bright New Day.
The film ends, but the horror does not end.
A quick survey of criticism shows that many of the people who did not like the film objected to either the fact that there is no tidy resolution or to the limited viewpoint. These folks either misunderstand what the film was aiming to do, or, perhaps, are just too in love with the basics of the genre to see them turned on their heads. Either way, critics have noticed that the film is an excellent example of genre-bending. In the case of the giant monster genre, a little bending is a good thing. Even Godzilla needed to reinvent himself periodically.
With Cloverfield, Abrams et. al. have managed to make a film genre once thought completely milked dry entirely relevant again by tweaking the sacred fundamentals of the genre. Forget the post-9/11 imagery, the commentary on the “YouTube generation”’s so-called individual absorption. At the bottom of all that, Cloverfield’s incredible success has everything to do with its producers’ desire to revivify the giant monster drama by stripping away all certainty and focusing the camera narrowly. What makes Cloverfield so great is not what is seen, but what is unseen. The mystery of the gigantic Unknown drives the film and brings the giant monster movie up to date.
—
APPENDIX: The Cloverfield monster’s “origin” may not be a complete mystery. In the final frames of Rob’s tape, when it jumps back to Rob and Beth’s adventure to Coney Island, if you pay close attention to the ocean in the background, you can catch a glimpse of something falling from the sky to splash down in the ocean. Some viewers have suggested that this is the monster (or an egg/vehicle of some sort) coming to Earth. Setting aside the elaborate viral marketing scheme that built up interest in the movie over the last year and concentrating only on the contents of the film Cloverfield, as such, this subtle little hint does seem to suggest an extraterrestrial origin for the monster—however, this still does nothing to explain the monster’s actions or nature.
Technorati Tags: cloverfield,review,monsters,giant monsters,kaiju,gojira,godzilla,king kong
The Matrix to Beat All Matrices!
January 15th, 2008
One of my favorite science blogs, Universe Today, has published a summary of an intriguing paper published by the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Aukland. Brian Whitworth’s “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” considers a very interesting premise:
that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing….The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.
In layman’s terms, “Is everything that we see or seem / But a dream with a dream?” In many ways, Whitworth’s paper is a reformulation of the Simulation Argument, which suggests that the “universe” in which we currently live is nothing but a simulation of a universe running in a vastly-powerful quantum computer (either in another universe or in “our” causality-stream’s future). A similar idea is also presented in Seth Lloyd’s amazing book, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos, which employs information theory to explain that the universe itself is, in fact, a gigantic quantum computer whose entire “purpose” is to…well, compute itself!
Nonetheless, it would seem that more and more attention is being focused every year on the possibility that “reality” as we recognize it may not be the ultimate reality. But, fortunately, this isn’t some theist’s or mystic’s dualistic mumbo-jumbo: this is theoretical science at its finest. How likely is the Simulation Argument and other such theories of a “virtual” universe? At present, just as likely as any other scientific theory accounting for the origins and/or continued functioning of our universe on the quantum scale—in other words: no one really knows precisely what our universe is yet.
Fortunately, though, with the age of quantum computing soon to dawn upon our civilization, it will eventually be possible to test these hypotheses—to, in essence, hack our universe’s operating system and see what processes are running beneath those that we recognize as physical laws.
On way to test such a theory as Whitworth’s is to look for “glitches in the Matrix,” or observable errors in the universal simulation. In fact, I think we may have already observed one: the gigantic, six-billion-trillion-miles-wide “empty space” astronomers recently discovered in the cosmic background radiation. The gargantuan volume of space, six to ten billion lightyears away, is literally filled with…nothing. No stars. No galaxies. Not even freakin’ dark matter. It’s like a portion of the universe just…isn’t there.
Or, perhaps, like part of the program running the simulation of our universe has crashed. The big “empty space” could be the cosmic equivalent of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
Technorati Tags: physics,reality,virtual reality,universe,brian whitworth,simulation argument,nick bostrom,empty space
Open Mouth, Insert Entire Body
January 15th, 2008
One thing y’all may have noticed lately: I don’t write much about the RIAA or about DRM and such issues anymore. Well, there’s a simple reason for this: DRM is effectively dead in the United States. What with even Sony recently agreeing to drop DRM in order to sell unrestricted tracks on Amazon.com, the "culture of copy protection" in the States has prettymuch admitted defeat—though, of course, there are still plenty of holdouts in the movie industry. Nonetheless, DRM is on its way out.
And I rarely pay attention to the RIAA anymore, as well, for one simple reason: they are blithering idiots. It’s not even a slight challenge to point the finger at them and laugh. Witness this statement from a recent interview conducted between CNet.com’s Don Reisinger and RIAA talking-head Cara Duckworth:
Don: Why [sue] college students?
RIAA: First, it should be clarified that our college campaign is in addition to the lawsuits we file against individuals using commercial ISPs to illegally download and distribute music. Second, college students have reached a stage in life when their music habits are crystallized, and their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development. These two points coupled together present challenges to those who would like to be compensated for their creative works. Understanding the value of intellectual property is important to the future job market for many of these students–industries that rely on copyright protection employ more than 11 million workers nationwide and continue to grow.
Ummm. Right. So, how does it help to sue college students so that they can’t afford to earn degrees and work in these industries? And what’s this "appreciation for intellectual property" mean, anyway? College students have a full appreciation for artist’s rights—they just refuse to spend their money on overpriced CDs and digital downloads that are keyed to only work on one computer.
The international music industry has to realize one very simple fact in order to survive: the existence of digital media has completely undercut their old 20th-Century business model. They can react to this in one of two ways: adapt or die. The Internet is never going away; neither are P2P networks. But if the RIAA and the IFPI are any indications…well, the recording industry is doomed. Oh well. It’s been nice knowing you, but you’ve clearly overstayed your welcome.
The Great Compromise
January 12th, 2008
Sometime this week, my friend and D&D compatriot Josh “JJ” Hornbeck, a sergeant in the National Guard, is going to be redeployed to the bottomless pit of Iraq for a little over a year. To say that I’m worried about his safety is a bit of an understatement…but JJ is highly-trained, alert, and most likely going to be detailed to a postal outfit handling snailmail communications to and from the States like he was during his last tour of duty.
Nonetheless, in honor of his redeployment, I’m quoting here the complete lyrics of one of my alltime favorite John Prine songs, “The Great Compromise,” as, even though it was written during the Vietnam War era, it is even more relevant to the United States’ current military endeavours than it was to ‘Nam.
And in case you’re not particularly perceptive, let’s just say that this song is not about a guy jilted by a slutty date. “The Great Compromise” is one of the greatest examples of extended metaphor ever utilized in a protest song. In fact, despite the fact that Bob Dylan is considered the God of Protest Songs, he never produced anything with the poetic sublimity and sad resignation of John Prine’s “The Great Compromise.”
So, without further ado:
I knew a girl who was almost a lady
She had a way with all the men in her life
Every inch of her blossomed in beauty
And she was born on the fourth of July
Well she lived in an aluminum house trailer
And she worked in a juke box saloon
And she spent all the money I give her
Just to see the old man in the moonChorus:
I used to sleep at the foot of Old Glory
And awake in the dawn’s early light
But much to my surprise
When I opened my eyes
I was a victim of the great compromiseWell we’d go out on Saturday evenings
To the drive-in on Route 41
And it was there that I first suspected
That she was doin’ what she’d already done
She said “Johnny won’t you get me some popcorn”
And she knew I had to walk pretty far
And as soon as I passed through the moonlight
She hopped into a foreign sports car(Repeat chorus)
Well you know I could have beat up that fellow
But it was her that had hopped into his car
Many times I’d fought to protect her
But this time she was goin’ too far
Now some folks they call me a coward
‘Cause I left her at the drive-in that night
But I’d druther have names thrown at me
Than to fight for a thing that ain’t right(Repeat chorus)
Now she writes all the fellows love letters
Saying “Greetings, come and see me real soon”
And they go and line up in the barroom
And spend the night in that sick woman’s room
But sometimes I get awful lonesome
And I wish she was my girl instead
But she won’t let me live with her
And she makes me live in my head
Think about it. How many of our young men and women today are spending years in that “sick woman’s room”? Ask yourself: when, precisely, did Lady Liberty become the oil-addicted whore of OPEC and the American petroleum industry?
I think it’s time for an intervention.
Derek C. F. Pegritz, “A Dying Star (High Def V)”
January 11th, 2008
In late 2006, I discovered that Twentieth Century Fox was sponsoring a competition to remix Clint Mansell’s eerie, haunting main theme to Darren Aronofsky’s latest film The Fountain. I’d seen the film the day it opened and was quite taken with it: its nonlinear, almost minimimalistic storyline, lush visuals, and stellar performances all combined to form a diamond pick of inspiration that drilled its way into my audial cortex and immediately flowered into a cosmic blossom of nifty musical ideas. When I shortly thereafter discovered the remix contest, I immediately signed up to take part, as what better way to bring some of my ideas to life than by actually remixing the film’s main musical theme!
Unfortunately, my remix—a hypertrophied ambient dirge to Xibalba, the dying star—was long. Ten minutes and fifty-four seconds long, to be exact. It was literally too long for me to upload to the remix site because they have a cap on how many megabytes your final mp3 file can be (a strangely small prohibition in this age of ultra-cheap multigigabyte storage). Needless to say, the only way I could “shrink” my mp3 of the final mix to a size the damned site would accept was to encode it at 64kbps—and it sounded like shit.
Here, though, I present the full, high-definition, 192kbps mp3 of “A Dying Star” for your delectation and meditative purposes. Turn off all the lights. Open up a window and stare into the limitless black of the night sky. Listen. And dream of weary stars hording iron in their hearts, praying for the day gravity releases them in one last mortuary flash….
Derek C. F. Pegritz, “A Dying Star (High Def V).” (Click to play if you have QuickTime installed, otherwise right-click to download.)
As always, it’s Creative Commons licensed!
Nine Inch Nails: 2007’s Album of the YEAR ZERO
January 8th, 2008
Beyond any shadow of a doubt, Nine Inch Nails’ re-breakthrough album Year Zero was my favorite album of 2007. Rather than write an all new appreciation of the album, I am reprinting here my review of Year Zero as it originally appeared earlier this year on my now-defunct music blog, The Spacing Guild Guide to Good Music. Enjoy! If for some reason you don’t own this album yet, click on the above link immediately before the Administration (or the RIAA) makes it illegal for American citizens to enjoy music of this caliber. If you need convincing however, read on:
Nine Inch Nails and I…we have a seriously bipolar love/hate relationship that goes waaaaaaayyyy back. I remember hearing Pretty Hate Machine for the first time when I was a senior in highschool and just loathing that album. What a hideous mishmash of groovy synthpop and crunchy industrial! You don’t take two genres like that and…and…and smoosh them together! Right?! That’s like drinking orange juice after you brush your teeth! But, given time, I began to realize that Human League-ish synthpop and Ministry-ish guitar industrial could function together, each element twining around the other like the snakes climbing the caduceus. Not only could they function together, but their strengths combined to produce a form of music even more potent than its separate constituents could ever hope to be alone. I not only grew to love the album after I while, I came to regard it as one of THE finest albums ever recorded: a syncretic masterpiece that truly broke new ground musically.
Broken was a good little followup EP…even though it made me wonder, "Why is Trent Reznor trying to be all metal now?" By the time The Downward Spiral came out, though, I’d outgrown my late-teenage/college-freshman wangst and had begun to find Reznor’s one-track "Oh, woe is me, now please fuck me anyway" lyrics to be obnoxiously juvenile: the kind of crap the black-clad quiet kids in my poetry classes used to write in notebooks decorated with pictures of skulls and bleeding hearts. At least Reznor’s music was still okay….Or so I thought then. Today, having acquired the deluxe, remastered "anniversary" edition of The Downward Spiral and having listened to it in its entirety for the first time since…oh, 1997, I’ve come to see that album as little more than a constellation of blatant musical and lyrical cliches so relentless average it’s just not worth listening to. The brilliant poppy industrial of Pretty Hate Machine had been swallowed entirely by ludicrous cock-rock guitars, stupid fantasies about suicide, and (ugh) that relentlessly awful "I want to fuck you like an animal" line….
Don’t even get me started on The Fragile. It’s the only NIN album I do not own, and will never own. It’s so awful, I won’t even talk about why I hate it.
Nine Inch Nails’ "comeback" album, With Teeth, was decent…but far too homogenous. For the most part, every song on the album save for the big singles, "The Hand That Feeds" and "Only," sounds exactly like every other song on the album. I tired of it in little more than a week. Especially because the lyrics, again, sounded like something found on a suicidal 14-year-old’s LiveJournal.
When I first heard that Reznor was putting out another album this year, my first thought was: "Eh." Reznor gots skillz: he really can put together a catchy, memorable jam when he sets his mind to it (witness "The Perfect Drug" with its amazing combination of malevolent synths and psychotic drum solo)–but after more than a decade of overexposure and the same ol’ petulant self-hatred, NIN’s schtick had completely worn thin for me. When I soon discovered that the album was going to be–oh, joy–a concept album, I shuddered to think that the world was going to be forced to endure yet another onanic ego-fest like The Fragile.
And then came the first "leaked" track, "My Violent Heart." And the barrage of mysterious websites detailing a terrifying police-state future presided over by a totalitarian Christian fascist regime, a future in which the water has been doped with sedatives and a vast four-fingered hand is reaching down from the skies to impart warnings of a great and terrible change. The viral marketing campaign, with its bottomless layers of puzzles, backstory, and eerie art, was nothing short of brilliant–and hinted that this new album was going to be unlike anything heretofore attempted by Reznor and friends. But would the music live up to the hype surrounding it? "My Violent Heart" sure as hell did. In fact, it went beyond the hype. I found myself playing it over, and over, and over, and over again. I listened to it under headphones so I could appreciate the gritty, mutilated sonic textures and better hear the ominous revolutionary lyrics:
you have set something in motion
much greater than you’ve ever known
standing there in all your grand naivety
about to reap what you have sown
time will feed upon your weaknesses
and soon you’ll lose the will to care
when you return to the place that you call home
we will be there we will be there
Wwwwwwwwwait a sec. This is from the guy’s whose greatest lyrical claims to fame so far have been "Head like a hole / black as your soul" and "I wanna fuck you like an animal"?!
Needless to say, as more and more tracks were "leaked" on USB drives left in various places at NIN concerts around the world–"Survivalism" then "Me, I’m Not", and finally "In This Twilight"–and more and more websites detailing the bleak, brutal world of "Year Zero" (approximately 2022) came to light, my anticipation caught fire. I loved the songs I was hearing. There was plenty of hype surrounding the album, yes, but song by song, I was becoming more and more impressed by the music–and, after all, that’s what matters the most.
The album is now out, and I’m here to report to you that Trent Reznor has done the damnear impossible: 1) he has topped Pretty Hate Machine; and 2) he has matured both lyrically and musically. This is, simply put, an incredible album.
It’s difficult to separate the music from the web-presence surrounding the music. In many ways, the lyrics just won’t make much sense unless you’ve read about The Presence, Opal, the Administration, the Church of Plano, "Angry Shooter," and the rest…but this review is not going to deal with any of that. Ultimately, any album has to be able to stand on its own feet as a unique musical achievement. So, let’s take a look at just the music itself on its own terms. What hath Reznor wrought here?
First off: this is a sonically-challenging album–and yet, it’s still quite listenable and accessible. Do not expect the clean, sparkly synthpop of Pretty Hate Machine, the industrial metal of Broken and much of The Downward Spiral, or the fuzzy-bassed rock of With Teeth here, folks: this is a seriously "industrial" album…in that it’s assembled mostly from harsh, distorted, mechanical sounds and rhythms that fall upon the ear like an avalanche of rusted slag in an abandoned machineshop. The beats are hard and crunchy, mechanical and glitchy: rather similar to the rhythms heard on Skinny Puppy’s triumphant Mythmaker, in fact. The basslines are murky and heavily-processed, as are the synths and the geetars…which are so processed, they barely sound like guitars. The music is sharp-edged and brittle, flat-out vicious at times (as one would expect from any NIN album, no matter how diverse his output can be), and yet surprisingly melodic. Most of the songs have catchy choruses ("My Violent Heart" and "God Given") or stirring guitar/synth solos (the coda to "The Good Soldier" and all of "The Warning")–they stick in your head like shrapnel, and you’ll definitely find yourself humming along to them as they shriek out of your speakers.
But what really makes this album are the lyrics. Yep. You heard me. The lyrics, people. The words comin’ outta Trent Reznor’s mouth.
"Hold up, Pegritz," you say. "Didn’t you just say that Trent’s lyrics are, ahem, ‘obnoxiously juvenile’?" Damn right, I did. But do note that the lyrics from "My Violent Heart" quoted above were surprisingly thoughtful, mature, and downright meaningful in their poetic discussion of responsibility. No 14-year-old-goth-girl-oh-I-hate-myself-and-wish-I-were-dead blather here! With Year Zero, Trent Reznor has finally come of age…and he’s proven that he actually has something to say.
Year Zero is ultimately a collection of vignettes, with each song being told from the various perspectives of different voices speaking from the totalitarian future America which is developed more thoroughly in the webwork of "secret" websites that complement the album. In "Survivalism" we’ve got the words of the "Angry Shooter" declaring his one-man war against the Regime (a very thinly-disguised Bush Regime). "The Good Soldier" relates a young conscript’s growing crisis of conscience, and could easily be spoken by many a soldier today posted in Iraq. "The Warning" recounts a sighting and revelation by "The Presence", which is apparently an alien contact scenario in which humanity is warned that its days are numbered unless it cleans up its act. "Zero Sum," the album closer, describes the end prophesied in "The Warning" not with horror but with a terribly sad resignation. We tried…half-heartedly. But we failed just as we always knew we would.
If you want to see how far Trent Reznor has come as a lyricist, compare the chorus of "Zero Sum" with all the lyrics of "Big Man with a Big Gun":
shame on us
doomed from the start
may god have mercy
on our dirty little hearts
shame on us
for all we’ve done
and all we ever were
just zeros and ones. ("Zero Sum")
I am a big man
(yes I am)
and I have a big gun
got me a big old Dick and I
I like to have fun
held against your forehead
I’ll make you suck it
maybe I’ll put a hole in your head
you know, just for the fuck of it
I can reduce you if I want
I can devour
I’m hard as fucking steel, and I’ve got the power
I’m every inch a man, and I’ll show you somehow
me and my fucking gun
nothing can stop me now
shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot
I’m going to come all over you
me and my fucking gun
me and my fucking gun. ("Big Man with a Big Gun.")
Uuuuuuuh-huh….Can you possibly get more puerile than the latter’s tired, worn-out "wang as weapon" metaphor? That shit had been done to death by the end of the year-long Punk Era. In light of that, I honestly find it difficult to believe that the same voice responsible for that pathetic spurt of overtaxed machismo dressed up in cheap death-metal grinding also wrote the disturbing words, "I can swallow it down / keep it all inside / I define myself / by how well I hide" ("Me, I’m Not").
In turning his lyrical focus away from the wanky self-hatred and romantic disappointment that drove so much of his other work toward an uncompromising sociopolitical message that attempts far more than mere introspection, Reznor has finally found a thoroughly adult and undeniably potent attitude that gives his latest album a force never before seen in his work. If anything ensures his presence in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it will be Year Zero.
Which is not to say that this is a perfect album. Far from it. Perfect albums are rare than radium, after all. Many of the songs on Year Zero follow the exact same structural formula of "intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-instrumental coda." Many of the songs follow the exact same "whispered verse, shouted chorus" followed by glitchy guitar/synth solo pattern. The beats show little variation over the course of any individual song, and many are obviously loops. All this makes the album start to sound a little repetitive by, say, the ninth or tenth track. And the album’s one ambient piano piece, "Another Version of the Truth," is completely misplaced, coming toward the very end of the album and shortcircuiting its otherwise seamless build-up.
Nonetheless, these flaws are not extremely pronounced and can be easily overlooked, overshadowed as they are by all that’s so right about the album.
In short: Wow. Year Zero is finally showing NIN’s talent for all that it is. It’s an album of raw power and disturbingly contemporary vision. If you can listen to Year Zero and NOT find yourself wanting to overthrow the current American government by any means necessary, then you are obviously drinking too much of the water.
