Frankenstein To Rome By Way Of Perdido Street Station

This one's late. Here's why: I'm not doing these with a buffer. It's my fault and no one else's. In response to and because of the fact that I'm going to be away from the Internet for the weekend, this is the first of the three pieces that will be up tonight. Call it the China Mieville Triptych. I have another two books by Mieville with me, so I don't see his influence becoming less pronounced on me, but also, because the other book I read, Jim Butcher's Storm Front, (the first book of the Dresden Files series) also has magic and a cynical outlook and was sooooooooo much quicker to read. That doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Anyway. This one is a comparison to Frankenstein, which I have chosen for my next A Theory Of book. What will be Wednesday's will be whatever Mieville I remember, on its own. And what will be Friday's is Perdido Street Station compared to the first Dresden Files book.

The other reason why is because my flights to Rome ended up arriving...eight hours late, I just went to bed Monday night and didn't have internet access until today, Thursday.

Which means I need to stitch this thing together, using whatever I've been reading and whatever I remember from Frankenstein. As you might have guessed from the title, I've been working my way through China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, a book about a lot of things, but also about a far too curious scientist meddling with things he shouldn't. In Frankenstein, it's, well, the scientist named Frankenstein, shooting life into a waiting creature he curated and created, using miles of blood vessels, discarded brains, body parts and whatever else he could find. In Perdido, it's an absent minded sorceror called Issac, living in a cosmopolitain shithole called New Crobuzon feeding a curious recreational drug to a caterpillar that blossoms into a soot-black terrifying creature of the night, which exists in multiple dimensions, can cut through armor like a knife through a receipt, flies adroitly and drinks the dreams and knowledge matter of its prey (anything, including apparently, a very Hell, who'se ambassador refused overtures to help the city.). Issac didn't know that going in. He just kept the caterpillar around because it didn't eat normal food and he pitied it.

Perdido and Kraken have a number of similar plot elements (along with The City & The City.) There's a skunky/manipulative head of an academic department who seems haughty and ends up being evil and behind one of the growing threats. There's a failed strike against a overclass (not present in City, IIRC). Authorities are at best, well-intentioned and ineffective (well-intentioned in City and Kraken, evil in Perdido and ineffective against the growing threat in all three) at worst, careless, responsible for the threat and ineffective (the trifecta is in Perdido.) There's also a cobbled together resistance which is startlingly effective against the threat (Kraken, Perdido).

In all these though, the cobbled together bits work the best. Apparently, trained militia can't hit the snake moths any of the time, but our heroes, only a couple of which have any kind of history with pistols can, 2/10 times. Oh shit, there's also a member of the underclass, ignored and underestimated by their masters, who rise in ways that save our heroes' ass. (Kraken, Perdido, maybe City) Honestly, when I read the Scar next, I am putting money on the idea that there's going to be a rising underclass member, an evil academic, and negligent, myopic authorities.

That said, Dr. Frankenstein could be a villain in a Mieville book: He brings life to something he created and then treats it like a thing without autonomy. He's also evil, but in a way that doesn't see himself way, or at least bad. Frankenstein feels a lot, lot denser. The type is smaller and is spaced even more shorter than Perdido, but I think the expectation of Frankenstein weighs on me.

There's another bit about Frankenstein that Mieville doesn't have. (Mieville's also not one of the celebrated authors of all time. That's a thing.) Frankenstein, or at least the first forty-nine pages of it I've read is immensely quotable.

“I shunned my fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.” Gives you an idea of the guy's state of mind as well as the fact that he might in the back of his mind, thinking about what he's doing is wrong.

“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.” This might be Mary Shelley in a self-deprecating moment. I can see her writing that with a sly smile.

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never allow a passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge ought to be an exception this rule.” That last one was on page 44, just before Chapter Five of Volume One and just before Frankenstein flips the switch on his now famous monster. That, kids, is how you do foreshadowing.

Song is called The Disarming Smile, by the World/Inferno Friendship Society. It's from their new record, which is a lot...jauntier than I would have expected. (Except for the track about a friend's suicide.) Think of what the band would be whistling as they're walking away from a crime sporting a shitfaced grin and that's about it. Not exactly new territory for the band, but less agitated. It's clear: the band knows something you don't.

Think more Hothouse Flowers and less Brother of the Mayor of Bridgewater and you're about there.

Some Elbow Room

I'm not sure if I have much to say about the attempted (!!) assassination in Tuscon, except that I don't think it will change anything, regardless of how inspiring Obama's speech was. And it's not just a Republican thing, either. I'm not going to insult your intelligence and say that there's equal opportunity slander and misrepresentation since, frankly, it isn't. If the Republicans feel hijacked by Fox News and driven to a more radicalized strategy to retain voters, that's their fault. It leads them to start spewing more and more insulting, callous garbage, which gets the craziest people re-elected and the most reasonable out of office.

The Republicans, and Republicans admit this in public and on camera, were led by the most radical voices in their party to a defeat on the health care bill, which itself was a watered down version of its original form that lacked backbone. But: When you put this kind of material out in front of people, there are people that will amplify the message and take it to heart.

This has not been the Democratic strategy. The Democrats have been doing their best to remain as moderate and inoffensive as possible in a vain attempt to win over Republicans, which hasn't paid dividends until, the lame duck session of Congress of 2010, which ended up being the most productive of the last two years.

And yet. Maybe this will make House and Senate Republicans (Yes, I'm singling them out. Remember: They're the ones that held up the 9/11 first responders bill because they were concerned about it being too expensive. Let that one sink in.) think twice about using that kind of language since they know the person that got shot in the brain. But here's hoping that they people that didn't know the Congresswoman can't use the language until after the 2012 election and then we can get back to the good old fashioned food fight that is our political process.

2. Mike Steele is no longer the chairman of the Republican Party, a white guy is, now. Maybe he'll talk about something fresh, like traditional values.

3. The idea of a media diary is nothing really new, but the twist on it (that year-end list privilege what I've been listening to in the last five weeks) makes me want to pick it up again. Of course, then I realize how many different songs are on my iPod and I laugh hysterically. Maybe I can integrate it somehow into Mondays. (Oh, right. Monday I go back to Rome.

In that vein, I read Who Is Jake Ellis #1 (a limited comic book series from Image) and enjoyed it quite a bit. I see the art and I think of David Aja, who did Immortal Iron Fist, but the artist isn't quite that good with Aja's brilliant little pieces of attention to detail. Anyway. The hook is that there's a White Dude With A Gun, but he's got a guy in his head that can tell him what's going on around him and keep a look out for guys that are trying to kill White Dude With A Gun.

It's not clear that the guy in White Dude's head is another part of himself, subconsciously repressed or whether it's another being entirely, which makes it fun. I can just see the pitch now and I'd bet money the key phrase is Jason Bourne meets Fight Club. And you know how much I like Fight Club...

The first new song from No Trigger since 2006 and man, just listen to the opening drum tattoo. You think you know how it's gonna go and it sticks around just a little longer than you expect. Plus, at less than 90 seconds, it's lightening fast and sprightlier than quicksilver. It's called Commonwealth and if you're from Massachusetts when you read this, even better.

In the Rivers Float Our Modern Times

The guy who wrote this is Toby Altman, of Lufftwaffe and most recently, Camera Phone or his writing partner. I'm going to proceed under the impression it's Toby, because that makes it simpler. Why? He's my good friend and we go way back. He's defending (sort of) his enjoyment of Jersey Shore, which, I am surprised by. Below is an excerpt. Italicized: Not me. Not italicized: Me. Unless it's the music writing. In which case, me. Clear? Clear.

Here we see GTL in its natural environment. On the one hand, it is a set of practices — Gym, Tan, Laundry. On the other, it is a byword for a whole lifestyle, almost a political philosophy: “SITCHNATION GTL all day,” he writes. What is remarkable about the phrase, at least in this cited instance, is the way it defies its origin. In none of these instances are the actual practices of going to the gym, or the tanning parlor, or the laundromat, referred to. The phrase transcends its roots in practice; what begins as practice becomes identity, a rallying cry for a nation acolytes.

I've said that philosophy is like lying with big ideas (only like two or three times) and this one seems like the best example I can think of offhand.

It [GTL] is a byword for a whole lifestyle, almost a political philosophy.

Yes but WAITWHAT? What we've got here is a catchphrase whittled down to its most basic elements, repeated until it sticks in your brain, because he's got a book to sell, a DJ tour to promote and however else he's monetizing his fame. What are the politics of this philosophy, pray tell? I doubt, intently, that he cares about where he goes to gym, except that there aren't too many grenades or butterfaces there. If there is a belief in the philosophy, it's believing in looking fresh, getting laid and repeating steps one and two.

Nowhere in Gym, Tan, Laundry does it involve other people except for the desire to have sex with them, which makes it very hard to argue about it being political in any way, shape or form. Unless you want to argue that ignoring people and using them only when they're convenient to you is the Republican political philosophy, in which case, it's a great joke, but basically inaccurate.

I want to celebrate the show, and the wild, great people who are its heart...On “The Jersey Shore” we see personhood at its rawest, its most naked, unencumbered by everything but hair gel.

Great is an interesting choice of words, man. The characters inhabiting Jersey Shore are people, yes, that are barely held together, but I don't see needing to celebrate that. If your point is that you can't go anywhere else to watch overgrown children who never matured past seventeen desperately stretch out parts of personality to appear like full human beings, then yes, it's an avenue for that.

It's a trainwreck. If the trainwreck is gigantic and colossal, well, that's something. But let's not lie about how clown shoes these motherfuckers are. I don't mistake that sadness just underneath the surface of the program for depth. Jersey Shore is a show where desperate people a) try to comb over their lack of personality to appear to be full human beings so they can have sex with people they actually interact with and then b) try to sell that desperation to actual human beings with real problems who they don't interact with.

(Given that description, could this enterprise be underwritten by anyone other than MTV?)

This is why I insist that I am not condemning Ronnie and Mike and Snooki. They’re no more fragile than the rest of us, no less cobbled together.

Okay, but you're saying you're just a fan of the show because it lets you see personhood without self-awareness, interactions while disregarding other human beings and sex with disgust.

It's a show about how miserable humans can be to each other in a way that's played for laughs and the joke's on everyone except the advertisers. Dude, if that's what you like, cop to it, but don't hide behind the idea that it's really a great program and that they're just like you and me, except they're self-centered drunks who are being watched 24/7 with the knowledge that the crazier they get the more money they can stand to make. I don't think that's a bullet point that's attractive to you or me.

Since Toby named an entire EP for me, the least I can do is use Private Radio here, since in this case, there's a little thing between him and me that was released to the world. It's now something on the internet and still a little private moment walking back home from a bar excitedly.

Also! I'm proud of the title, since it's about the exhaust and silt of modernity. Trap Them! Metal! Yes. Wait. Where was I?

Oh, yes. You know the Bouncing Souls, don't you? Wait, you don't? Seriously? They're from Jersey and they're a punk band. They're also hugely influential on kids my generation. Anyway. Fast songs about finding yourself, then, after Anchors Aweigh, about getting older and still intelligent. This one is...a bonafide classic.

Trapping Justice

Chapter 14 is about two different constructions/conceptions of justice. The one I'm focusing on, because I think it's more interesting is the idea of justice as purely procedural. This conception of it is something that makes justice seem less...divinely inspired.

Justice as a construct as best practices, constantly revised. Or in other words, improving by increments. We do not simply become more just by existing, we become more just by putting in place and keeping in place rules that reinforce justice, as we see it on the ground of 2011.

Justice becomes a kind of efficiency, unless equality is preferred. One part of justice becomes setting up a system and then trying to replicate the process. (Of course it can't work.) Justice not as an ideal, but a reflexive process. Maybe this is really basic stuff that I don't know because I never took a course on it, but the process as something evolving is new to me, when I'm forced to think about it.

There was a limited series comic called Cry For Justice. (It was terrible, and the rumor mill has it that DC editorial had their hands in it, contorting it, Twister-style.) The title gives off the idea that justice is something with a capital letter and that it's conferred upon something. And that's not quite right, according to what I believe the book to be saying.

Justice is what you make it. Maybe? Literally. If you make justice some cowboy western arithmetic, it's going to be cowboy western arithmetic. How much value that has is up to you. Justice is a product of the construction process. If you have more tools, it can be refined pretty far. Whether it's a good conception of justice or not, I don't know. But the idea sounds intriguing and feels fun to play around with. I think that's what this blog is for and it makes a pretty okay ending.



I saw Trap Them recently and they were wonderful. I describe them using a description from Greg Rucka's Private Wars. They're a IED slathered in rat poison. The rat poison is an anti-coagulant, which means that if someone is bleeding from the blast, the blood will not clot and they'll continue to bleed out. Trap Them sounds, on record, like that, with the anti-coagulant level of attention to detail.

They started off their set with Fucking Viva, which is a stellar opener. It's methodical and it builds in a way that lets you know there's so much nasty heavy coming. Fucking Viva opens the record it appears on with this line: So, in the rivers float your modern times and your alpha death decree. Ignore the alpha death decree part, for a moment since it makes explicit what's floating in the river.

What's important is that the record opens with the idea that modernity has a price and it's paid, brutally, in front of us. Modernity might be good for us in terms of justice, but Trap Them reminds us there's a price. Or: Think of Fucking Viva as the evil answer to We Will Rock You, which is another description that I got from somewhere else, but I can't remember where. Anyway. This is a metal band. Play loud and bang your head.

What's Keeping Me From Sinking

"The Disposable Culture might offer many things, but stability and longevity are not among them. I fear for the "fully digital" push--because one war, one bomb, one EMP, one earthquake, and it all can go away. Marketing idiots and future-philes want us to teeter on the edge of another Dark Age, to embrace the possibility of losing all of what makes our culture tick, all for convenience. But what happens when something goes wrong, as things inevitably do? Everything "virtual" disappears, maybe forever.

No thanks. I'll stick with printed paper and physical discs. Because this push for pretend possessions has no appeal to me, and I think it's more dangerous than we are led to think. There are points where marketing and the drive for profit winds up hurting the companies, the culture, it's trying to serve, and I think this is getting awfully close. Maybe conceptualizing future war or disaster is a little bleak, but a quick look back at history tells us war and disaster is about as common, and certain, as rain and sunrise. "

I ended up seeing something very late last night on Kotaku (see above) about how this person was fed up with what he/she referred to as "the disposable culture" videogame people had found themselves in. This person also spoke somewhat hysterically about how "one EMP or earthquake" could lead us to a new Dark Ages, and oddly enough, that if this disposable culture went to its logical conclusion by everybody purchasing more digital pieces of media, those pieces of media will be beholden to the people who'se service they're on and when that service goes under, historians will be lost as to find those media.

This person holds on to their NESs and a couple games, confident they'll be able to play them in continuing years, but the plebs who buy things on digital services can't count on that.

This person is wrong, of course. Most of the catalogs of any digital storefronts are the same, with a couple oddly timed releases here and there. Quick: Name something that Steam won't get if Good Old Games goes under. This person is also wrong about the decay of systems. I'm not sure the half life of a Sega Genesis is anything to bank on in 2020. Or a PlayStation, for that matter. And! That's assuming TVs still have the same kinds of audio/video/etc plugs in those years.

He's right in that we're going to have to pay for it again, (or not, if we go to...unauthorized digital services, to employ a euphemism.) but those digital storefronts will be purchased or acquired by others starting up.

What's the shelf life of books? This isn't a joke. Finely bound books might have a better chance of survival, but I'm pretty sure my wall of paperbacks is going to survive into 2030.

But that's not the point. What is the point is the idea of backwards compatibility and a universal file type for information. Your computer may not play .m4a files, but it sure as hell will play mp3s. Your computer may not be able to read a .doc file, but it will be able to read a .txt file. Do we have that going forward? That's what I hope we have. Because: if we're ever living in some crazy Fahrenheit 451 scenario, the entire works of Western literature, or at least three books by Dickens, can fit on a 1 TB external harddrive. (That's a joke, kids. Dickens was paid by the word so his stories are exhaustively long.)

Even if we don't have that now, look back at OINK. That was a place that had almost any piece of music you could have ever wanted, with more constantly being revealed and provided by music obsessives. Yes, OINK was shut down, but it's hard to believe OINK hasn't been entirely reconstituted elsewhere, even if it's a collective of other trackers. Somewhere in the world, there are at least hundred people who have every book ever digitized, because they literally can't stop.

It's those people that will keep books/music/video games/movies going and spreading. The obscure stuff will fade, but obscure stuff always does. Yes, everything virtual eventually disappears, but so does everything tangible. My bookshelf of books I haven't read three feet high shows that I'm unlikely to ever prefer the digital version of something, but I recognize it has an incredible value who'se upside is constantly growing.

I was going to leave a cool ending here, but I just saw that one of my friends had iTunes delete everything off of his iPod touch on Twitter. I want to leave that hanging in the air instead.




Clash covers are usually good. Here's an unusually good cover of Straight To Hell by the Menzingers. There ain't no need for youuuuuuuuuuu....

Videogames I Actually Played in the Last Decade

Lots of other websites that make things like sense and money have best of the decade/year lists and I thought I'd do the same thing. Unfortunately, as I haven't played many, many of the games they list and I don't feel like lying about what I've played, here's a top 10 of the last decade of games I've actually played.


Persona 3 and Diablo 2 are here because they took in shitloads of my hours for the last decade. Persona 3 most recently, and Diablo 2, for basically middle and high school. Diablo 2, by virtue of the loot/kill dudes cycle that Borderlands added guns and a first person perspective to.

Persona 3, I've spent 140 hours on (finished both it and the expansion) and I still have a feeling in the back of my mind that I should go back to it. Yes, there's probably youtube videos of the interactions I want to see, but the fact that the "play it again" feeling is stuck in the back of my head means that there's something in the game that worked.

SSX 3. It does for snowboarding what Burnout does, which is communicate one thing: You aren't going to win unless you go faster and take chances. Are you barely hanging onto control of your rider? Are you not going for the crazy jumps? Be content with third place. At the final peak, you don't so much play SSX 3 as guide a human-shaped bullet down a mountain that's trying to kill you and the only way you'll survive is going fucking faster.

Chrono Cross. Not a sequel to the universally revered Chrono Trigger, but instead the next game in the series, Cross did too many things differently from Trigger for fans to appreciate it, but for me, the game comes to me when I think of best RPGs ever. There were 45ish characters, who all reacted differently to the game's stimuli, which means: you could play the game as serious or as straight forward as you wanted to, with the game's approval.

The battle system has aged well, the story's vicious little twists haven't lost their punch, the music is varied and rich, but what stands out to me, to this day, is the color palate and the environments. They were all evocative, they all were stages that had their own identities and reinforced the narrative.

When people say games don't make you think, I say put this in front of a fourteen year old boy and see the blown mind when he's finished.

Rock Band 2. It's a videogame where you play music with a band. Do you read this website?

Timesplitters 3: Future Perfect. My favorite first person shooter, which plays very very quickly, with a casual disregard for plot and a focus on a so bad it's good script. It had a fantastic sense of humor but also pacing, each end of the level boss was bigger and tougher than the last one and usually, more outrageous, too.

There's time travel, zombies, Russians, KGB, nuclear weapons somewhere, a train level, but more importantly, enemy types with character, level design that made me think before jumping in guns blazing and lots and lots of guns.

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. Speaking of guns, that's what the Ratchet and Clank series is known for and this iteration does not disappoint. True, there's no mind-control disco ball, but there's plenty of other oddball weapons for you to rain down murder with. Ratchet and Clank has always been a series about exploration/platforming and guns and here, they reach the sweet, sweet spot on the PS2. The weapons upgrade in an RPG like path, there's always a puzzle to break up the action and when they get to the final boss battle, it's basically a textbook on how to ramp up the difficulty in a way that's visible to the player.

Okay: That boss battle. It's in three stages. The first stage is a circular room, enclosed and it's just you and him. From there, he retreats to the sky where he uses his untouchable shield and death ray to harass you while you also fight off his elite units, using whatever you've saved up from the boss fight to get through them, culminating in a bridge where you fight two tank guys that more or less absorb ammunition every 50 feet.

Once you get past the bridge, you bring the boss back to earth, now more powerful than before, on an even smaller stage with all that copious extra ammunition leftover from going through another level's worth of enemies and a boss.

Resident Evil 4. Less jump scares, just more bad guys that you're not sure you can kill in increasingly small spaces. The terror comes from being trapped, desperately pumping bullets into enemies thinking "I literally don't have an inch I can move further backward into and the thing with two heads isn't stopping." The story isn't terribly exciting: Save a girl and get into progressively bigger trouble with higher caliber weapons, then the sprouting scythe head zombies show up and that's when you get HOLY FUCK THAT'S A TENTACLE SPIDER RUN MAN.

Metal Gear Solid 2. Say what you want about the looooooooooong cutscenes the game is known for, the Kojima Productions team knows how to set atmosphere and keep it. For half a year after I beat the game, I was so paranoid I peeked down corners to see whether there was a PMC guard on patrol. Also one of the subjects I used when I wrote about the military industrial complex in my mind: I can tell it to be terrified and produce the adrenaline but telling it to relax and think calmly? Much harder.

Super Smash Bros. If there was a gathering in college or free time in high school with other people, I was probably playing Super Smash Brothers, or one of the sequels. It's an icebreaker and something that accounted for hours of strategy practicums, by which I mean fighting Zach's Donkey Kong with my Kirby.





The title (and first track) from We Are the Pipettes. Look on the upper left, there's someone else's hand holding up the We Are sign, which I like as a subtle way of hinting at the band's post-Motown origin, "an experiment in manufactured pop," in that they manufactured themselves. The girls are out front and the male backing band is as invisible as they can get away with. There's also been enough lineup changes that I'm pretty sure the founding guitarist and that girl who sang on Pull Shapes are the only ones still in the band that recorded We Are the Pipettes, so, in that way, it's authentic to its manufactured origin. Anyway. We Are the Pipettes. Play loud.

A Theory Of the Second Day of 2011.

Since I've finished 2666, this leaves a vacancy in the A Theory Of.... posts. This will be replaced, so far as I can tell, by Whatever The Hell it is That I'm Reading. So. One week it might be A Theory Of The Long War, another week it might be A Theory Of The Last Run and another it might be The Three Trillion Dollar Theory.

In short: A Theory Of Justice is in the title not because it's always going to be in the title, but it's one of the two formidable books I'm reading. Subsidized Sincerity being conceived in a moment of just do it and figure out how later, the idea of doing it is paramount. It might take a while to finish, but it's something I'm engaged in as opposed to not.

For Subsidized Sincerity, I should always be jumping in, head thrown forward proudly. (Or maybe just for the book posts.) I will, of course, smash my head on rocks. Hopefully, less often than I don't smash my head on rocks, but I'm reaching the end of this metaphor's range. I think hope it's clear what my idea here is: I'm going to say yes to big ideas. This figures into my next idea for 2011: Increments.

I don't like where I am and I know I have to change. I can't think myself to change, as Johnathan Hickman put it in Secret Warriors #23, I have to get up and fucking do it. But there's a mountain between where I am and where I want to be. And every time I think about the mountain, I think of how big it is and how small my steps are. That it's never going to work and I'll just sit here, again, eating chocolate covered pretzels or thinking about anything other than A Theory Of Justice or a book/author that intimidates me.

Instead, my counter-idea for 2011 is simply do it and keep doing it. It's easy to get depressed and nihilistic when I'm on page 71 of a 500+ page philosophy book, but by the same token, just a chapter a week. Or a chapter every couple days for weeks on end. The same goes for exercise. I don't have a goal. I just want to put one foot in front of another and repeat the process throughout 2011 and see where I am after this year.

So: Stick around. There will be a proper return to form here next week with full A Theory Of Justice bits, but the station ID stuff got so long that I think it's worth its own post.





I listened to this song walking home while the wind played with my hair. Utterly magical in an extremely comforting way. It wasn't even that cold, either! Happy new year.