A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”
-Andy Warhol
“Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We’re all nerds, on one subject or another.”
-Jonathan Lethem
“The brain is the organ of destiny. It holds within its humming mechanism secrets that will determine the future of the human race.”
-Wilder Penfield
“The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.”
-Jose Saramago
“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.”
-Nikos Kazantzakis
Images: New York Magazine, Slate, BBC.com, BBC News, CBS News
My geek-heart fluttered as the Resident Evil-themed restaurant Biohazard Cafe and Grill S.T.A.R.S. touched down in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood. For the unaware, Resident Evil is a survival horror video game that spawned zombified novelizations, comics, and feature-length films. Since it's Japanese, S.T.A.R.S. wouldn't be complete with just a Resident Evil-derived menu (though no “brain” dessert like at Shinjuku's Capcom Bar) and tons of memorabilia. And so, unlike Chuck E. Cheese's, where pizza comes with aweird-ass animatronic theatre show, the centerpiece at S.T.A.R.S. is a life-sized Tyrant that, via 3D projection mapping, “comes alive and attacks,” only to be subdued by the all-female S.T.A.R.S. ANGELIQUE staff's sexy choreography. You just can't make this shit up.
FROM THE DESK OF TODD
"Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We’re all nerds, on one subject or another."
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Dining Out (of This World)
07/20/2012
My geek-heart fluttered as the Resident Evil-themed restaurant Biohazard Cafe and Grill S.T.A.R.S. touched down in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood. For the unaware, Resident Evil is a survival horror video game that spawned zombified novelizations, comics, and feature-length films. Since it's Japanese, S.T.A.R.S. wouldn't be complete with just a Resident Evil-derived menu (though no “brain” dessert like at Shinjuku's Capcom Bar) and tons of memorabilia. And so, unlike Chuck E. Cheese's, where pizza comes with aweird-ass animatronic theatre show, the centerpiece at S.T.A.R.S. is a life-sized Tyrant that, via 3D projection mapping, “comes alive and attacks,” only to be subdued by the all-female S.T.A.R.S. ANGELIQUE staff's sexy choreography. You just can't make this shit up.
Think of the potential for other fantastical eateries! Consider Milliways, akaThe Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the time-bending brasserie and titular sequel to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Obliging cattle that converse before being butchered, mixologist-worthy drinks like the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, exorbitant prices, and the bestpeople- (or otherwise-) watching...sounds a bit like NYC's Meatpacking District, yeah?
I'm sure some ambitious local restaurateur could conjure a virtual “Gnab Gib”: the universe-terminating extravaganza enjoyed at Milliways. Evidence: the semi-private “Purple” room of superlounge hellhole Tenjune and the agoraphobia-inducing Great Hall in Buddakan around the block. I despise these places and the surrounding neighborhood, but the American propensity for outsized hyperbole—in restaurants and in life—is limitless.
Unfortunately, Martin Freeman quashed the possibility of a bigscreen Hitchhiker's sequel, so we'll not be seeing Milliways on celluloid anytime soon. All the more reason to consider brick-and-mortar.
Meanwhile, let's think smaller. Cyberpunk novels (and their steampunk cousins) tend to feature awesome, character-riddled booze havens. China Miéville's Perdido Street Station has The Moon's Daughters: your favorite dive bar, if you swap the bikers for “artists, thieves, rogue scientists, junkies and militia informants.”
The opening chapter title of William Gibson's Idoru is the Kafkaesque bar Death Cube K, whose chitinous, surgical, and chilling chambers recall The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Trial, respectively. And though the Black Sun within Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has a prohibitive door policy and dodgy drug undercurrents rivaling Little West 12th Street, this noirish virtual nightclub is strictly no-drama, hacker-approved.
Given the choice between these and any of New York's countless faux speakeasies (especially one masquerading as a deli), I say without hesitation: So long, and thanks for all the absinthe.
Main image: 4Gamer.net; Milliways via Hitchhiker Wiki
Desmond Pepperdine has a secret — one that’s revealed on the first page of Martin Amis’s new novel, Lionel Asbo. The secret itself is pretty unthinkable, but it precipitates a crime so unthinkable that, once it’s happened, Desmond can’t think about it. All of which got me thinking about the secrets that run riot though Amis's whole oeuvre. Here's my Top 5.
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It’s mid-August. The city is all but deserted. Hell, the entire continent of Europe has decamped to la plage. But what if your bank account is as empty as the next three days of your gCal? What if $650 a night in the Hamptons (split six ways with friends, plus the Hampton Jitney, plus booze and food) just isn’t your cup of Pimm's? Never fear! Black Balloon’s armchair traveler is here with five extremely local weekend destinations to enjoy while your (non)friends are trekking up to Montauk!
5. The island from Lost
You can book a flight on Oceanic 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles, or you can watch Season 1 of Lost free on Netflix streaming. Take it from an accidental convert: start watching on Friday afternoon. You are going to get sucked right in. The first season (featuring polar bears, mysterious hatches, dreams of bloody compatriots, and a childbirth) is twenty-five hours long, and the episodes will zip right by. I’m not sure I ever want to go to that spot in the middle of the Pacific for real, but I don’t regret that weekend at all.
4. The park outside your door
Sometimes in the spring I go to a restaurant and sit outside and just watch people. If I can convince a friend to come with me, we usually start making up stories about the couples going in and out of the stores nearby, and we sip coffee while rain patters on the awning above. But in the summer, everybody goes to the park. So go people-watch at a park. In New York, go to the High Line. In LA, Venice Beach works. For every eighty-year-old sunbather with too much exposed skin, you’ll see a young couple hoping nobody notices their illicit affair.
3. Myst Island
I stumbled upon my old Myst CD-ROM last year, and I lost an entire weekend trying to work out the puzzles inside. It’s a very simple, strange premise: you’ve just landed on an island devoid of humans, but filled with their relics. Hidden clues everywhere take you into completely different, but deeply connected worlds—of trees connected by bridges, or islands formed by craters, or a rocky outcrop with two ends of a ship jutting out. There are more complicated video games, but none that are so strange, so calm, and so surprisingly addictive.
2. Le Cordon Bleu
Yes, Julie and Julia is a fun movie, but when I asked my mother to recommend an everyday cookbook, she said to save Julia Child's monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking for when I had a good stretch of time. I've always wondered what it would be like to spend an entire weekend planning out complex French dinner menus and making them all. Tackling her pâté en croute recipe (mentioned in the New York Times), with a few flashy desserts afterwards, should get you clear through to Sunday night. Be sure to stock up on wine. Careful with that knife.
1. Whangdoodleland
Stay with me now. If you haven’t read Julie Andrews’s (yep, the one fromMary Poppins) book about three children who train themselves to get to Whangdoodleland to meet the last living Whangdoodle, give it a look. The country (which, like the levels of Inception, can only be reached in a trance) is a strange one—featuring boats with soda fountains, a stampede of sidewinders, and a slimy creature called the Oily Prock. When the Prock appears in the real world as well, the quest to find the Whangdoodle becomes nigh impossible. It’s frighteningly easy to forget the rest of the world with a really fun book, and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles is a humdinger.
Leave Montauk to the moguls, I say, and Tilden to the topless hipsters. Have a great weekend, wherever it takes you.
image credit: centralpark.com
With the death of the author, Helen Gurley Brown, one can't help wonder what Cosmo would have been like without her.
Perhaps they would have gone the Vogue route, and featured famous authors in their fashion spreads?
Or maybe they would've taken a stark, realistic tone and alerted readers about the latest rise in potent STDs.
Though such a grim article could probably use some Lenny Bruce-like levity.
Or you could always hit up one of the top 10 richest authors to throw some literary bones your way if the subject isn't to your liking.
If all else fails, you could always retire to Argentina, where aging writers get a nice little pension.
Just don't take the same route of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun's hero and wind up in jail.
How do you think that kind of incident will look on your college transcript anyway?
The Millions recently proposed the idea that if MFA graduates were finding themselves unsatisfied with adjunct teaching (which, um, obviously), they should look into teaching high school. Nick Rapatrazone, the post's author, does make some pretty sexy arguments for giving your time to sweaty, self-interested quasi-adults who are horrifying at being adequately human toward one another. Still, I’d like to supplement his advice with a few second thoughts.
Let me be clear: if you’re into teaching high school, I applaud you. The prospect of a bunch of MFAs entering the public school system with enthusiasm and literary encouragement fills me with excitement and something close to glee. But as long as we're weighing it against adjunct teaching, I feel other perspectives might be of use.
Maybe try being poor for one minute. This is not to encourage anyone drowning in adjunct drudgery to continue drowning in adjunct drudgery. You are a sucker and totally not being paid what you’re worth. If you get some weird sadistic glee out of the it, please, by all means, keep encouraging universities to crumble under the weight of their own lack of integrity.
But I have to ask: since when were writers supposed to be comfortable? You really want to have to go back to high school just so you can pay rent? In this economy, I say take whatever shitty job you can get. But I also suspect that there’s this lingering hope that getting an education guarantees some future stability in a fulfilling career. I kind of have the feeling that the whole MFA-to-high-school-teacher track is an adjustment, a concession to the dream that was really only for the generations before you. That shit was for the baby boomers and whatever unnamed generations became between them and...what, Gen X or Y? You need to talk to your grandpa (great grandpa?) about the Depression and lard on bread and some shit 'cause you want way too much.
My point here is that if you want stability while you write, be an artist who doesn’t need the approval of a teaching career. Stop thinking you’re owed something because you went to school. School was a privilege you lucked out on. If you write, worry about writing and don’t give a shit about anything except forming your life to allow writing to happen. And if youstill want to teach, god bless.
People who went to school for teaching K-12 are turning away from careers in education. My own mother, an excellent and incredibly dedicated public school teacher for over thirty years (and counting) has said she probably wouldn’t have gone into teaching if the atmosphere had been the same as it is now. This largely has to do with the sheer amount of time spent on test preparation for tests that don’t actually result in students learning anything. I find it horrifying that teachers no longer have as much discretion in what they teach, and I find it doubly horrifying that potentially excellent teachers might be turning away from that career because education is now such a shit show. Sure, steady paycheck, making a difference, etc. etc., but anyone going into teaching high school English under the impression that they’re going to teach kids how to appreciate literature should know that such labors will account for maybe twenty percent of their workload.
I hope with all my heart there are folks out there who will fight to make public education better, whether from the classroom or the capitol. But, my fellow MFAs, just know that it will indeed be a fight.
image: bestofthe80s.wordpress.com
Stephen King, horror's überscribe, is still setting the pace with new novels. If 2013's print-only Joyland doesn't get you going, check this: a recent Los Angeles Times article details Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining penned 35 years after the original. Doctor Sleep focuses on a now-adult Danny Torrance, the child with “the shining,” drawing intriguing parallels to youngShining-era readers who are now adults themselves. But the article's final paragraph bears the most divisive news: Hollywood is also talking about a prequel.
NO. No, no, no. Look, some doors do not need to be opened. Where's Hallorann when we need him, warning Danny (or us, or the filmmakers):“You ain't got no business goin' in there anyway. So stay out.” Take my hand through this Shining survey, from the late 70s original to futures unknown.
1977, Stephen King's novel horror: King's first hardcover bestseller is terrifying to this day, a modern haunted house tale enveloping a semi-autobiographical core: the tormented, alcoholic writer terrorizing his own family.
The good: Father Jack Torrance wields a sadistic roque mallet: “Roque...it was a schizo sort of game at that. The mallet expressed that perfectly. A soft end and a hard end. A game of finesse and aim, and a game of raw, bludgeoning power.” The bad: no "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" (typed by Jack, perhaps in subconscious homage to Christopher Knowles). The ugly: Danny's skin-crawling encounter with the old hag: “Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain. Her breasts swayed like ancient cracked punching bags. There was the minute sound of breaking ice shards.”
1980, Stanley Kubrick's film: It's rare that a film stands so vividly over its source material, but Kubrick's Shining does. His Overlook is my Overlook.
The good: Kubrick transformed the Overlook Hotel into a practically living, breathing entity, a frightening, temporal maze of impossible passageways, sometimes containing Grady's twin daughters (also absent from King's novel), intoning: “Come and play with us, Danny. Forever...and ever...and ever." The bad: not a damn thing. The ugly: the old hag, or rather, the young woman who seduces Jack and turns into the old hag.
1997, Re-adaptation as TV miniseries: King's major disappointment in Kubrick's adaptation was casting wild-eyed Jack Nicholson, as King preferred a more believable everyman for the role of Jack Torrance. Hence King's screenplay for an ABC miniseries, arriving nearly two decades later.
The good: As in King's novel, Hallorann survives the horror, and it's Danny who discovers the old hag. The bad: the Stanley Hotel location, while true to King's writing, lacks the labyrinthine dread of Kubrick's environs. (And don't get me started on the soap-worthy acting.) The ugly: those hedge animals, wisely absent from Kubrick's film, proved scarier in print than on screen. ABC gave King's verbose IT similar treatment in 1990 (without King's screenwriting credit), traumatizing coulrophobes everywhere and proving that living topiaries are no Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Did you even know there was a Shining miniseries?
2013, Doctor Sleep, a three-decades-hence sequel: I got into King as a preteen, probably around the same age as younger Shining readers, tackling Desperation (disgusting) and Bag of Bones (heart-wrenching) in the late 90s. It's notable, and unfortunate, that both became avoidable TV movies. I approach Doctor Sleep guardedly.
The good: We'll know in wintery January if Doctor Sleep is crud or an early classic. The bad: King's preview of Doctor Sleep at the 2012 Savannah Book Festival, featuring a still-young Danny revisited by the old hag, closely mirrors The Shining in disgusting descriptives. The ugly: Evidently, adult Danny will be fighting quasi-vampiric immortals.
201?, The Shining filmic prequel: I don't need Danny's “shining” ability to foresee this as a very bad idea.
The good(?): Screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (who penned claustrophobic Shutter Island) is involved. The bad: I fear this “Outlook origin story” becomes a near shot-for-shot remake like The (2011) Thing and/or casts Ryan Reynolds or Channing Tatum as the Outlook's caretaker. The ugly: old hag in her carefree pre-bathtub days?
If a more authentic TV miniseries couldn't shake Kubrick's masterpiece as the definitive cinematic Shining, what more could a prequel possibly afford? I hope it ends like Jack in Kubrick's film—spoilers!—lost and frozen in a (developmental) maze.
Images: Main image via The Overlook Hotel; Danny via GoneMovie.com;Here's Johnny! + Grady Twins; Pennywise + Hedge Animals; Overlook Hotel party photo via Haunted American Tours
A new weekly series that explores a featured theme—this month, it's "Headcases"—by pairing timeless quotations with urgent images. Read on, spot the connections (some are more hidden than others), and by all means quote your favorite headcase in the comments.
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It's fun to argue about difficult books (cf. Publishers Weekly's Top 10 and the ensuing comments); it's even fun to read one every now and then. But what about unreadable books—the ones where you can't hope to get to the end, no matter how hard you try? Remember now: we're not talking about long books or simply challenging books. I'm used to those. In college, I had to read War and Peace, down to its dual epilogues, in two weeks; I readUlysses in eight days on a bet. I'm talking outright unreadable.
Here are five books that make JR look like JWOWW.
I love Péter Nádas, but this Hungarian master pushed his first great novel to the limits of the form, and barely made any concessions to readers. Even the brilliant bookseller Sarah McNally says reading it is “like climbing a mountain.” There are two first-person narratives—the memories of a Hungarian man in a love triangle, and his alter-ego in a lightly fictionalized memoir of the first narrator’s own life—and, near the end, a third narrator who punches holes in the first two. I’m a careful reader, but I had a hell of a time figuring out who was narrating some chapters. More than anything, though, the sentences can be downright impenetrable:
“Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality, which is in no way the mathematical sum of their two bodies but something more, something different, something barely definable, both a quantity and a quality, for the two bodies contract into one but cannot be reduced to one; this quantitative surplus and qualitative uniqueness cannot be defined in terms of, say, the bodies’ mingled scents, which is only the most easily noticeable and superficial manifestation of the separate bodies' commonality that extends to all life functions..."
Okay, the PW people were right to put this on their list. Finnegans Wake(no apostrophe there!) is filled with multilingual puns from European and non-European languages. Your only hope, they suggest, is to read it out loud in your “best bad Irish accent.” I might add the suggestion to pick up Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake—then you’ll know that the looping sentence on page 75 boils down to, more or less, “As the lion in our zoo remembers the lotuses of his Nile, so it may be that the besieged [man] bedreamt him still.” There’s a dream-narrative, a long internal monologue, the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section that incorporates thousands of rivers’ names, and quite a few puzzles and tricks to make any regular reading a nearly nonsensical experience. And that's not even getting into the last sentence, which begins what the first sentence ends.
3. Maze
Now we’re getting into more concrete definitions of “unreadable.” Christopher Manson's book is narrated by a strange beast who describes you, the reader, traveling through a maze of 45 rooms, but the maze in question is actually encoded in the book itself—a room on each page spread—and it’s fiendishly difficult (chew on that, House of Leaves). With Choose Your Own Adventure, you can look through all the pages and pick the story you like best. But no matter how many times you flip through these pages, there's no way to just guess your way out of the Maze. The Internet has made this challenge a mite easier, but computers can’t solve the riddles within for you. And even when a shortest path is found through the hundreds of doors between Room 1 and Room 45, there’s another riddle encoded in the random objects within each room. Why was the maze built, though? Why are there so many clues that people once lived there, or can be heard in other rooms? What other riddles remain to be found? The book has been uploaded to the Internet, so go ahead and look.
Okay, so it probably isn’t fair to include philosophy here, but Jacques Derrida devised his writing style specifically to evade any hope of a central, compact conclusion—the premise behind his literary theory, Deconstructionism, being that there no longer exists (if ever there did) a stable organizing principle in any text or system of thought. He did a fantastic job of proving his point with his own words, which famously loop around themselves and move farther and farther away from any truly linear argument. On Grammatology is where he takes that logic to its extreme—even (like modern art writing) to the point of being nearly incomprehensible in translation:
"Let us now persist in using this opposition of nature and institution, of physis and nomos (which also means, of course, a distribution and division regulated in fact by law) which a meditation on writing should disturb although it functions everywhere as self-evident, particularly in the discourse of linguistics. We must then conclude that only the signs called natural, those that Hegel and Saussure call “symbols,” escape semiology as grammatology. But they fall a fortiori outside the field of linguistics as the region of general semiology. The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably contests Saussure's declared proposition when he chases writing to the outer darkness of language..."
There’s unreadable, and then there’s unreadable. A manuscript from the 1500s written in a script and language that resembles no other on earth, theVoynich manuscript has stumped amateurs and professionals alike. The pages include many strange drawings, from naked women in basins with tubes to plants that do not exist in real life. The Beinecke Library, which houses the original sheets of parchment, says that every week they receive numerous emails claiming to have broken the code, “but so far no theory has held up.” Until that changes, though, the entire manuscript is available on the Internet for codebreakers everywhere to solve.
image credit: Duncan Long, http://duncanlong.com/blog
For reasons unknown to me, this story about a St. Paul man threatening a 62 year-old woman with a sword over a borrowed book has gotten way toomuch press. As a fan of St. Paul, and in the spirit of promoting the Midwest as a fairly decent place to write, I’d like to dwell on some of the story’s finer aspects.
Books matter to Midwesterners. As far as I can tell, the whole ruckus began when the suspect threw the book he had borrowed onto the floor, and the kindly loaner of the book gave him a little shit about it. Not only does the woman here acknowledge the value of books by suggesting they don’t belong on the floor, but the borrower, by his swift decision to get a weapon, suggests that he, too, knows the import involved here. If the guy didn’t think it was a big deal to throw a book on the floor, why would he bother brandishing a sword? It hard to imagine any of this happening over a Gilmore Girls DVD.
Midwesterners have Scandinavian impulses regardless of whether they are actually Scandinavian, and Scandinavians are insanely afraid of getting called out on something they did poorly. Scandinavians are also almost godlike in their ability to bring shame on others. We have here the genius of seemingly innocent Midwestern passive aggression: the woman suggested he just throw the book away if he were going to leave it on the floor. She doesn’t accuse him directly of doing something shitty but suggests that he might as well have done something shittier. Most people have likely expected the worst from him his entire life. And the poor guy, who later in jail admits he is an idiot, can’t help but get emotional: he, too, is caught up in the Scandinavian shame cycle.
And then there's his choice of weapon. A sword. Really? Most people I hang around with aren’t really prone to take an unsheathed sword as a threat. A gun? Sure. A big knife? Oh yes (more on that in a second). But a sword? From a kid who also has ninja stars and nunchucks? If it weren’t for the sword, there would be no story. Whatever the guy’s intentions, he has succeeded in provoking a great amount of curiosity. He might not be a good neighbor, or a good criminal, but he has proven that minor criminals can still surprise us, and that sometimes people’s small quirks get the most attention.
Saturday's frightening incident in Times Square lies on the opposite end of the blade-wielding spectrum. While our book borrower's actions provoked lots of trashy curiosity, the killing of Darrius Kennedy brings up a whole lot of actual fear. His standoff with the cops, the bystanders, and the rolling cameras of a hundred smartphones was not funny; it was chaotic and very sad. For all we know, both men might have begun with the same small, dumb impulse: a trigger response to a mix of panic, fear, helplessness. Our book borrower only briefly acted on the impulse. Mr. Kennedy took it to the limit.
Image: faildaily.blogspot.com
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