Jarvis Cocker, My Hero

Once upon a time, a brave man had a sane response to Michael Jackson and his public image, and he heroically acted on it. I wish to briefly salute an iconic moment in the history of the fight against the forces of evil.
The former head of the band Pulp (and extremely good current solo artist), Cocker was present for Michael Jackson’s performance during the 1996 Brit Awards.

During the highly choreographed performance, Cocker got on stage and pranced around for a bit before security chased him off.



Cocker later explained that he didn’t like the way Jackson was surrounded by choirs of children and overt religious iconography, and he jumped on stage to poke fun at this. The singer - whose own lyrics are often clever, self-deprecating musings about the chasms between desire and fulfillment, between appearance and reality - has explained that while he’s not religious, he was offended by the Christ-like pose Jackson was striking.

Let’s be honest and admit the possibility that Cocker was also intoxicated in some way, that such silly behavior at an awards show is obviously attention-seeking, and that sure, maybe it was a dangerous thing to do on a stage which included a crane, a choir of children and someone dressed as a rabbi (?!) but no matter.

The important, brilliant thing is that Cocker’s instinctive response to seeing Michael Jackson was to leap in and take the piss out of him.

I wish some of the millions of people who’d seen and worked with Jackson over the years as he was transforming into a tragic freak had had an ounce of the same courage. Michael Jackson was a good singer and dancer, but otherwise almost every aspect of his life was a sad example of some of our most lamentable traits as a society.

The fact that few people aside from Cocker ever had the guts to stand up and point out that this particular emperor had no clothes shows the extent to which the sickness that produced the monstrous figure of Michael Jackson was not within him, but in us.

The current hagiographic treatment of the prematurely deceased Jackson only confirms to me that we produced this deformed creature, we created and fed his situation, and now that he’s dead we are clamoring to show off just how utterly we have failed to learn anything about our crime, about the poisonous human urge to put people on pedestals.

We grovel to the whims of people with more money or higher status than ourselves. We yearn to cheer and weep vicariously at the actions of celebrities who we expect to be superhuman. We love to worship living saints, interrupted occasionally by malicious glee at their eventual downfall.

Michael Jackson wasn’t a saint - in fact no human being in history has yet been what we think of as a saint - and yet we still love to set them up there above us and then pretend to be shocked when they fall. It’s all part of the same misguided, Manichaean, probably instinctive idealism that allows us to still believe in oxymorons like holy wars and Christian presidents and infallible popes and selfless celebrities.

It’s the rare hero like Jarvis Cocker who has the courage to point out, even for a few moments, that this whole sick cycle of saint-worship is a load of nauseating garbage, and for that I salute him. I suggest we erect a giant statue in his honor.

Blue Badger IRL

Just a random déja vu thing that happened to me during our recent trip to Japan - twice. I like a certain series of handheld video games about cartoon lawyers. A typical case will revolve around bringing to light, through a long process of investigation and examining evidence, that the accused is left-handed when the murder weapon was a right-handed golf club. Or whatever.

Sounds stupid, and often is, but the gameplay is very similar to old-school point-and-click adventure games, and the dialogue can be surprisingly funny. The games are clearly set in Japan but, at least in the English translation, take place in fictional locations.

I’ve played through four games in this series now, and a couple of them make jokes about the police department having a silly-looking mascot - the “Blue Badger”. Here he is, in front of the police building, in the background from one of the games.


Well, the other week in Ginza I strolled past what seemed to be the police museum (fun for the whole family, right?), and it... er... just look:

Not hard to see where the video game designers’ grand inspiration came from. Here’s that pantsless police creature’s website, complete with theme song. Ah, Japan.

Then the same thing happened the next day. Strange-looking stadium from the game:


Real stadium:


Now, I have no illusions that I’ve discovered something new here. I’m sure that Pipo-kun the haunting police beast and that strenuously architecture-y stadium are as familiar to Japanese people as an igloo to an Eskimo, and that’s why they were parodied in these games. It just makes me wonder how many other caricatured landmarks, celebrities, myths etc. from foreign cultures I’ve been exposed to for years without having the slightest clue. And somehow I feel slightly let down that the Blue Badger turned out to be biting real-world satire and not just a strange, random figment of someone’s imagination.

I guess most works of art are like that - you can always deepen your understanding of them by studying more about the context they were created in, but that knowledge can end up tainting your enthusiasm for the artwork in the first place.

Like how taking a good, close look at Jon Voight’s face explains so, so much about Angelina Jolie, but also utterly destroys her hotness.

An American Nerd in Tokyo

So: I’m not one of those guys who loves everything from Japan just because it’s from Japan. I wasn’t in an anime club in high school. I don’t own any plastic figurines of megacephalic schoolgirls striving unsuccessfully to conceal their undergarments. I don’t always know the appropriate Pokémon to deploy in any given combat situation. I think sushi is gross.

Nevertheless, I have in my own sad way been preparing for our recent trip to Japan for about 25 years now. It all began in August, 1984, when I read G.I. Joe comic book issue number 26. This was my first encounter with ninjas. Ninjas are totally awesome. I don’t think I need to say anything more on the subject.

We got our first Nintendo Entertainment System soon afterwards. An utter failure at old-school twitch games like Pac-Man, I was obsessed by Zelda and Metroid, where I didn’t die every ten seconds and where exploration was more important than getting a high score.

I could probably go on for thousands of words about the various things from Japan I encountered over the intervening decades and how they warped me into the magnificent specimen I am today, but let’s fast forward to early April, 2009. As we headed from Bangkok to Japan for my first trip there, I had only one goal in mind:


1) Buy the fanciest Shogi set.

In spite of being possibly the world’s worst chess player I’m very interested in regional variants of chess, and Shogi not only seemed like an intriguing mutation of the game (captured pieces can be put back into play by the capturer), but a great aesthetic creation, combining carved wood and evocative calligraphy in that special Japanese way.

Technically speaking I already owned two Shogi sets, but one was an embarrassingly cheap Chinese crapfest I’d bought in Malaysia and partially ruined by varnishing it with Dr. Sloan’s Liniment, while the other was a plastic pocket set I’d bought in Singapore. So I decided that whatever else happened during our vacation, I would try my damnedest to get a nice set as a souvenir.

After an abortive attempt to enlist the services of our hotel concierge in researching the surviving time-honored, family-run Shogi workshops of Olde Nippon for me, I reverted to my suburban American shopping instincts and resigned myself to buying whatever crap I could find in big stores downtown. I snatched up a box of pieces and a board (sold separately) in Takashimaya in Kyoto, but the set of pieces cost the equivalent of ten bucks and was barely a step up from my rough-hewn Chinese abomination, so I was still on the hunt.

As soon as I had a free morning in Tokyo, I lurched off up and down the chilly avenues of Ginza with great vigor.

Here’s me setting sail on my grand adventure. Note the traditional Shogi hunter’s cap.

Turns out a lot of the stores don’t open until 11:00, so I did a lot of standing around and drinking free tea in vestibules while my vigor slowly curdled. I finally found a set of pieces for around 3,500 yen in a big toy store, and almost bought it, but the paint job seemed slapdash and I kept looking.

Here’s me out and about in Ginza. My stern expression indicates dedication to the quest. (Actually, the picture was taken after the quest was over, and my expression was meant to convey immense, uncontrolled excitement and pride. I guess I have to work on my expressions.)

I’m glad I waited, because later in a department store called Matsuya I found a much sharper-looking set for only 2,500 yen or so. The characters were actually stamped or carved into the wood, not just painted on. I found it the most handsome set I’d yet seen, and at a price that wouldn’t force us to survive on ramen flavoring packets for the rest of the trip.

Elated, I wasted no time in sauntering back to my hotel room and fixing the moment of my grand triumph forever in time by taking the lavish photo spread you see here.




Shogi aficionados will note the unusual characters on the pawns. Instead of the normal “soldier” character that I recognize from Chinese chess, it’s a bunch of horizontal lines. I still don’t know what the deal is with that.

I also found a set of playing cards, an old game called hanafuda. Adorably (to a sucker for calendrical symbology like me), its 12 suits are based on the 12 months - on plants which blossom in Japan throughout the year and the animals which frolic amidst them. To my delight I saw that the set was actually made by Nintendo, and later research showed that it was the company’s original product back in 1889.


So why have I told you all this? Read on just a bit more, dear reader, to read for yourself the surprising punchline to this rambling tale of lusty Asian shopping:

Upon my return to Bangkok, while doing some more research into the rules of hanafuda, I found Nintendo’s page about their vestigial card-game division. Something about looking at this page, and considering my hanafuda cards, made me curious about the Nintendo logo. If the company had been around for over a century, surely its logo wasn’t always the English word “Nintendo” in a snazzy red font?

What was Japanese, so to speak, for “Nintendo”? Funny how I’d never thought of that before. A short search later I found the Kanji characters, matched them up to some characters on the hanafuda card box, and realized they looked rather familiar. Where had I seen that logo before?

Oh.

I had, utterly without knowing it and completely by chance, bought and brought back home with me both a Shogi board and a set of Shogi pieces MANUFACTURED BY NINTENDO. The circle of my life was complete. I had traveled the world only to find that what I was searching for had been with me all along. Nintendo Shogi turned out to be the twist on the Moebius strip, the final/first sentence of Finnegans Wake. To paraphrase Borges:

Others will dream that I am mad, and I [will dream] of Mario. When all men on earth think day and night of Mario, which one will be a dream and which a reality, the earth or the Mushroom Kingdom?

The Smartening and The Artening

I just wanted to quickly point out that in Japan, the best-selling video game for the last two weeks running has been the latest in the series of Professor Layton games. In the UK, a recent release of an older Professor Layton game has also apparently been a great success.

I am cheered by this news because these games are little more than compilations of old math and logic questions, spruced up with beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and old-fashioned animated characters.
When you play a Professor Layton game, the experience typically goes as follows: you wander through a lovingly drawn area reminiscent of the LucasArts-heyday backgrounds on Curse of Monkey Island, click on a quirky character who looks like a reject from The Triplets of Belleville, and he or she says something like “I will give you this shiny gold coin if you can help me, young man. I have a rowboat, a fox, a chicken, and a bag of feed...”

Each game has over a hundred hard-core logic puzzles, disguised by an atmospheric point-and-click adventure interface. I’m usually turned off by games that lean heavily on reheated old puzzles, like the infuriating “Tower of Bozbar” and “Peggleboz” from Zork Zero, but Layton’s design somehow makes the old logic chestnuts addictive and charming.

The fact that these adorable games are so popular shows that there’s an enormous audience out there for creative video games which are both highly artistic and educational. Of course, people have been similarly excited about the success of Brain Age for a couple of years because it’s educational, but to me the Professor Layton games are much more interesting because I have to assume that they appeal to a younger crowd than Brain Age. Some of those nearly half-million Japanese people who’re already playing the newest game must be children, and it’s nice to think of their little brains stretching to figure out how to row that fox and chicken across the river. (hm - note how that phrase I just wrote, “how to row that fox” is like a tongue twister or something. Four different vowel sounds from “o” as the second letter in a word. English spelling must be so annoying for learners).

Also, nothing against 3D backgrounds or animation, but the fact that these are hand-drawn 2D is a tiding of great joy to me, both for nostalgic reasons and because I think it’s an eye-pleasing use of the small DS screen, where 3D environments can look like a blocky mess. There’s clearly still a place in the gaming industry for people who can draw and paint old-fashioned backgrounds, and that’s a nice thought.

In conclusion, everyone who has ever complained about how video games are violent or detrimental to children should please, please just shut up forever. This possibly includes, with all due respect, our next president.

We Did It!

photo source

Newsweek Is-Weird

Look at the odd hyphenation in the following extract from this Newsweek article:

“It is eerily quiet at Barack Obama's headquarters, an open expanse that takes up the entire 11th floor of an office tower in Chicago's Loop. It's nearly as silent as a study hall, which is appropriate, since most of the 20- or 30-somethings in it wear jeans and T shirts.
...
Like FDR and Ronald Reagan, Obama is an innovator in organizing and communicating. Roosevelt was the first to rely on labor unions, and he talked intimately to voters through the then new medium of radio.”

What made them not hyphenate the two phrases screaming out for it, “T shirts” and “the then new medium&rdquo? I guess you could make a case for “T shirt”, but the other thing is just a mess. The then new medium? Really? The author later goes on to use “reaching-out” as a noun. Ick. In the same article, I also found Newsweek’s quaintly Victorian insistence on two periods in “Ph.D.” a little strange, but that’s a different matter-entirely.

The impact will blow trees back and crack statues

My favorite era in rap music was roughly ’94 to ’98, when East Coast hardcore was at its height. I loved the gritty, verbose, cryptic, violent sound of the Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Mobb Deep, the Boot Camp Clik and related groups. It was dense, paranoid and clanking music best suited for headphones on the subway.

Hip hop didn’t get any more anti-commercial than the GZA, who epitomized the cold world of the mid-’90s’ stern, Biblical-prophet wordplay, while his groupmate ODB rapped like a street-corner drunk a few seconds from toppling over, crooning and ranting at passing cars. Somewhere between those two poles, between sesquipedalian urban Jeremiads and raving homicidal lunacy, lay the essence of the Wu era’s greatness, and it was all set to great beats from the likes of the RZA, DJ Premier, Havoc, 4th Disciple and Da Beatminerz.

For a few years, it seemed as if everyone was weaving dense lyrical webs of comic-book, kung-fu, Scarface and militant Five Percenter references over ominous beats. It all came to an end sometime before the turn of the century, when, to make a long story short, a shrewd buffoon named Puff Daddy dominated an era of dumber, openly superficial, radio-friendly rap which increasingly incorporated baleful R&B caterwauling (the kiss of death as far as I was concerned).

Things got even worse as Nelly-style silly sing-song cadences and lyrically vacant Southern rap started to catch on in the ensuing years. Instead of lyrics like Deck’s superb alliterative/assonant “Poisonous paragraphs smash ya phonograph in half / It be the Inspectah Deck on the warpath / First class leavin mics with a cast / Causin ruckus like the aftermath when guns blast / Run fast, here comes the verbal assaulta / Rhymes runnin wild like a child in a walker”, we had “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.

I thought for a few years there that hardcore hip hop was dead. As usual, I just wasn’t looking in the right places. People like Jedi Mind Tricks and M.F. DOOM were keeping the torch lit, and the web made it possible to find those few groups who were still putting out quality music. But for the past few years it’s usually been a depressing trickle rather than a steady stream of new stuff, and my old favorites seemed to have run out of steam.

Then, over the last couple of months, two albums from old favorites dropped which together have resuscitated my faith in hip hop. Heltah Skeltah, always the standouts in the Boot Camp roster, had been absent for almost ten years. Half of the duo, the hilarious Sean Price, had been putting out solid stuff, but it just wasn’t the same. Now there’s a new Heltah Skeltah album out, and it’s great. Don’t judge the following track by its slightly comical intro - things really get rolling around 0:30.



In addition, a great collaboration album between two of my favorite artists, one which plays to both of their strengths, recently came out. While they usually outshine anyone they share a track with, on their own solo albums, Killah Priest and Chief Kamachi can both be monotonous (Priest’s problem being a sometimes low-energy delivery and Kamachi’s Achilles heel being repetitive spoken hooks). The perfect solution was to have them combine forces on a tag-team album, and the result is electrifying. These elder statesmen of mythological-themed hip hop rap with infectious urgency, as if someone’s just slapped new batteries in their backs.



That’s all I wanted to say - I was worried there for a few years but clearly hardcore hip hop is back from the dead, and if you liked any earlier works from these artists, check out the new albums today.

Late Bloomers and Slow Burners

Two things coincided today which had me thinking about Yeats’s ferociously powerful late-period poetry, and about one of the greatest fruits of that elderly incandescence, his “Among School Children” with its memorable chestnut tree (not pictured), the great-rooted blossomer which is leaf, blossom and bole at once.

The first was a touching article in the New Yorker which dwells on the work of an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who has been trying to study whether artistic genius and precocity are really as linked as we think. It turns out, to my great personal relief, that there are artists who try to “find”, and artists who try to “search”, and that the searching kind of art can take decades and decades before coming to fruition. The article’s story about the author Ben Fountain, and the years it took for him to gain success as a writer, and the support he got from his family, actually had me kvelling at work.

The second thing which set me thinking today was my absurdly delayed appreciation of most recent album by my favorite band, Sigur Rós. Without exaggeration, I’d say the first fifteen or twenty times I listened to the album, it left me cold. True, the first time I heard the new album was unfortunately in an airplane, and I missed half of what was going on because of the ambient engine noise, but still, I felt like my favorite group had let me down. It seemed like a barren, repetitive album.

Then, about two weeks ago, something clicked, and I swayed to music with brightening glance. I was listening listlessly to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust or, as I think of it because my bad German is better than my atrocious Icelandic, Mit (einen) Summen in (unsren) Ohren spielen wir endlos on my way to work, and the October sun lined up perfectly with the east-west grid of my neighborhood in Bangkok, and shone pinkly through the mist between the skyscrapers, and the entire world seemed to be singing out to me in joyful harmony through my iPod. I suddenly realized that the album was f*cking brilliant from start to finish, that it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard bar none, and for the third time in my life my daily commute made my day. (The first time involved a hot summer day, Weezer’s Pinkerton, a malfunctioning Honda Accord, and Route 6 in Connecticut, the second time involved Sigur Rós’s “Vaka”, a snowy winter morning, and Munich’s Tram 17.) Here is a picture of me this morning striding sweatfully yet manfully down Soi 51 on my way to work, in silent awe at the musical genius of Iceland’s finest.

I’ve listened to the album almost nonstop, over and over again, every chance I’ve gotten since. And not just certain tracks - I’m talking front to back. But - and here’s the point - it took me at least twenty listens before I had the “damn dawg this is a great album” epiphany. This is my favorite band we’re talking about here, and it still took months for their album to grow on me.

What happened to cause me to suddenly appreciate this music so deeply? Was it because the album is more subtle than their previous work? Is it just something that takes a while to become comfortable with? Or had I changed in the interim? Or was it the setting in which I heard it, riding the BTS above Bangkok at dawn, which caused everything to come together? How can we know, as Yeats asked, the dancer from the dance (or in this case, the music from the listener from the surroundings)?

Whatever happened, I wonder about the other things in life which I’ve been exposed to and been left cold by 19 times... just waiting for that magic number 20 to click. Imagine the authors whose work I would love if I read one or two more books. I can only hope I am lucky enough to have enough time on this planet to appreciate more of the masterpieces which I’ve overlooked in the past.

John McCain Is A Colossal Jerk

I urge you to leave this blog at once and read this great Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s life story. He is actually a much more despicable privileged asshole, f*ck-up and failure as a human being than our current president. He is a vile jerk and a horny, bitter, coarse little man. He’s been making all that pretty clear on his own over the past few weeks, but this article kind of completed the portrait for me.

p.s. I’m linking to the “print” version of the article, because no sane human should be forced to click through ten pages of hyperlinks to read one article.

Anastasius of Sinai

Rembrandt is one of those painters who (whom?) I normally admire, but don’t love. Perhaps it’s just because his name comes up so often that I have tuned him out, or perhaps it’s because some of his paintings in the museums I’ve frequented, like his creepy self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, seemed somehow unpleasant to me. But I just stumbled across a painting of his which I haven’t seen before, of the learned Anastasius of Sinai, which captures what, to me, was great about Rembrandt. The murky light, the weight of the sage’s body, the strangely comfortable solitude. It’s a picture that distills old-school learnedness to its essence: a man, a book, a desk, a window. I could have done without the elaborate Turkish carpet/tablecloth, but nobody’s perfect.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Ache Superior

For some reason, I’d never heard of the online comic Achewood before about two weeks ago, although I realize in retrospect that I’ve seen bits of it used as avatars or posted on message boards for years. The website has like eight years’ worth of comics on it.

In few words: I have just spent something like five straight evenings reading Achewood every spare minute I had. I have been getting home from work and reading Achewood like my life depended on it. I have been poring over Achewood like it was a Ptolemaic stele and I was Jean-François Champollion. It is funny, obscene, melancholy and somehow comforting in its depiction of friendship, although I suspect that it would appeal more to males than females. Check it out. Note: the two things I’m putting on here are not representative - the strip usually isn’t about hitting broad targets like bad grammar or Comic Sans, and is usually more strange and subtle. But I thought these items stand well on their own without any knowledge of the characters.

Goodbye, David Foster Wallace

One of my favorite authors is dead, by his own hand, at the age of 46.

It’s hard to think of another stranger whose death could have been more upsetting to me. David Foster Wallace was not only incredibly talented and funny, but his writing always had a humane and optimistic streak which I always respected, although I couldn’t share it. I read with bemused cynicism his article about how inspiring John McCain was and his monumental review of a dictionary which turned into a meditation on democracy, but at the same time I felt comforted that he was out there, being idealistic when it would have been easier to be nihilistic. I envied him his apparently sincere and principled search as much as I enjoyed his winningly, self-deprecatingly complex writing style.

The fact that he seems to have given up that search in suicidal despair only adds to the ache I feel at his death. I had several paragraphs more written, but I don’t want this to seem like a ripoff of Wallace’s sesquipedalian style, so I’ll just stop. I will miss him.

In almost every picture I’ve ever seen of him, Wallace was wearing a colossally silly-looking do-rag (à la Prison Mike), so I’ll just reproduce the cover of his best-known book, a cover which I feel represents both his refreshing style and the wide-open breadth of his unfortunately-curtailed literary ambition.

The Same River Twice

After last spring’s resounding (in my mind) success of my model of the Pantheon, I immediately set out to craft a model of the Hagia Sophia. I made a lot of progress, but didn’t quite finish the interior. Or the exterior. The grand dome remains hovering suspended in midair, surrounded by virtual scaffolding.

Then we moved to a new apartment, went away for the whole summer, and I started a new job. SketchUp also didn’t seem to work with the new Mac operating system, and it kept freezing up. So with one thing and another, I haven’t really done anything in SketchUp for months.

One of my favorite places on Earth is the old part of the town of Freising near Munich, and not just because they claim to have the world’s oldest brewery. I took an entire course in Romanesque sculpture in college and remain fascinated by it, and the Bestiensaeule in Freising’s crypt was something I tried to go and see whenever I could when we lived in Munich. Well, I initially went just to see the crypt, but I started to like the whole cathedral complex, even though the main church had been renovated in hideous pink baroque. I’m not religious but have great respect for and curiosity about holy sites, and going to Freising, like walking up from Herrsching to Andechs, was one of my very favorite weekend pilgrimages. I feel lucky that I got to go there as many times as I did.

Last summer I had the chance to make a commemorative day trip to Freising, where I took over 100 photos of the area to use as reference material specifically for SketchUp. As this expedition’s protraction nearly caused my wife to miss lunch, it was a venture which was not without danger to life and limb. Well, today I finally got to use some of those reference photos. I spent the entire day working on a new model of the cathedral and adjacent buildings. The real thing looks like this from the front.

My model (which is still in the early stages, but which looks pretty respectable for one day’s work) looks like this. So far so good. I feel a bit better having started it. I hope to do the place justice. Since the outside is all cool white plaster, I think capturing it will be the easy part. The crypt, with its couple of dozen differently-sized pillars, will be another story.

However, my favorite photo from that day in Freising isn’t of the cathedral at all. It’s this picture of some kind of plants under the surface of a stream. The clear Alpine water and the sunlight from directly above made it look like the plants were glowing. It was very peaceful to watch them sway in the current.

Olympic Fever

I was working on a post on here about how I dislike the Olympics, but it descended into a string of obscenities, so I’ve decided it was too negative and I’m taking it off.

Instead, here’s something we can all enjoy: The visual punchline for a joke about Chinese air pollution.

Mascot tracheotomy.

lollipop corncockle

or, Spam Poetry Part Deux


The last installment of spam poetry unearthed an unpublished (because unwritten) complement to “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Today we turn to the later work of James Joyce. The iconoclastic Irish author may be long gone, but Finnegans Wake is still being written. It’s being written by the apparently Greco-Hindu pyramid schemer “Panakos Prabhakaran” and thousands of men like him, a veritable phalanx of creative pioneers unknowingly collaborating on one of mankind’s greatest works of literature.

The text, which has yet to be assembled in its entirety, currently consists of a series of disjointed e-mail messages about penile enlargement which are rotting in the junk mail folders of humanity. It only remains for a great man to piece together the fragments of this broken, Viagra-smeared Coriolanus. I am that great man. Here, precisely as I received it, is the first chapter of the daring, breathtaking sequel to Finnegans Wake.

lollipop corncockle

Hola,

Increasee once and foorever your sex drivve

Broke from her lips. Aynesworth heard it, and, harlequin
at home. At fast, he slept heavily, the front gate. That
was the same house that dr. Broiled a piece of ham, made
some good strong there could be no divorce no question of
marriage. About! But dr. Calgary was wrong. Places and times
i would ask jack brandiger to come there and live. This
work you are now in possession of about all bonum! Whether
it so prove, and whether i may lashing riders and jouncing
guns of the battery. Fellows, but i shall never warm to
any one again to look anything but murderous, why, you don’t
everyone is.’ ‘that is what i believed. It seems of lamentation:
poor little boy, he is going away had indeed before suggested
that the primitive.

I’ve done a bit of editorial research and it turns out that this masterful work is rich in poignant allusions to several neglected gems of our literature. To the alert mind of a scholar, it positively bristles with adroitly juxtaposed phrases lifted almost word-for-word from great works such as The Magic Egg and Other Stories by Frank Stockton, The Malefactor by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and perhaps most significantly the Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples by Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, the Marquis de Nadaillac. The hallucinatorily pornographic phrase “lashing riders and jouncing guns of the battery” is, in fact, from Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage”.

Master Prabhakaran in his subject line claims to wish to enlarge penises, but his bold poetic sensibility, which has fused these disparate elements into an aesthetically satisfying whole, has enlarged our minds. I must now begin the process of unearthing and annotating the rest of this hypermedia masterwork, as well as demanding that the Nobel Prize in Literature be immediately awarded to the author of what is undisputably our century’s greatest text. For it has something profound to say to each and every one of us, this, our majestic, eternal, unforgettable lollipop corncockle.

Astrology Useful After All

I’ll be honest: my “efforts” to learn Thai died several months ago, right after I cobbled together enough monosyllables to remote-control a taxi driver.

Once I was able to meow and squawk commands from the back seat to make the guy slam wildly on the brakes, or lurch wildly from side to side, I was all set. Add to that my well-worn repertoire of four or five choice phrases to dazzle shopkeepers and waiters with, and I guess I unconsciously figured that I had pretty much all the Thai I needed for daily life. My brain stopped caring.

Lately I’m trying to slowly shift back into learning mode and pick up some of the basics I’ve been doing without. Sadly, I don’t even know some of the most essential words like “eat” or “see” or “walk”. And I certainly haven’t the slightest idea what the days of the week, or months of the year, are. The months always seemed especially daunting because they’re quite long, for Thai words. “November” is “Pruetsachikayon”. That’s just madness.


My wife, desirous of figuring out the opening dates of certain motion pictures while watching their Thai previews, asked me politely if I’d mind learning the months. After the echoes of my cruel laughter died away, I began to wonder if it might somehow be possible. Long words in Thai usually mean they’re borrowings from Sanskrit, and I’ve had success in the past coming to grips with Thai words I know are Sanskrit, like Thai “guru” and “maharaja”, which are derived from the Sanskrit terms “guru” and “maharaja”, meaning “guru” and “maharaja”. Well, those are stupid examples, but you get the idea.

By the way, the poster above is for Som Tam, an entire Thai kickboxing movie based around a racist stereotype (not that I really mind). The enormous shirtless white guy hulks out whenever those kids feed him papaya salad, because everybody knows those foreigners can’t handle spicy food. I guess it’s kind of like Popeye, if Popeye were Asian, and if instead of spinach he drank beer and couldn’t process the alcohol and hulked out after a few sips and solved mysteries in his enhanced state. Actually, that’s not any more or less silly than most superhero movies anyway. Never mind.


Anyway, I just looked up what the Thai words for the 12 months mean. What I discovered threw me for a hell of a loop. It’s nuts. We’re through the looking glass here, people. The names of the 12 months in Thai are THE 12 EUROPEAN ZODIAC SIGNS. The same exact things. Leo the lion and all. Was that goofy Battlestar Galactica mythology right? Were our ancestors from the distant space-planets of Virgon, Caprica and Sagittaron? Er... no, but check out the following list, mostly from wikipedia, with Thai month names followed by the old Indian root:

January
Makarakhom / makara “sea-monster” = Capricorn

February
Kumphaphan / kumbha “pitcher, water-pot” = Aquarius

March
Minakhom / mīna “(a specific kind of) fish” = Pisces

April
Mesayon / meṣa “ram” = Aries

May
Pruetsaphakhom / vṛṣabha “bull” = Taurus

June
Mithunayon / mithuna “a pair” = Gemini

July
Karakadakhom / karka “crab” = Cancer

August
Singhakhom / siṃha “lion” = Leo

September
Kanyayon / kanyā “girl” = Virgo

October
Tulakhom / tulā “balance” = Libra

November
Pruetsachikayon / vṛścika “scorpion” = Scorpio

December
Thanwakhom / dhanu “bow, arc” = Sagittarius

And it’s not a new thing. While it’s true that the Thais really only switched over to the Western calendar in 1889, those Thai month names are a thousand years old or more. This seemed even weirder than the time I deduced that “hello” in Thai is more or less the same word as “swastika”. I’m still not quite sure I understand how the whole months thing went down, but I’ll try to explain.


Apparently, a Greek guy named Yavanasvera went to India in around 150 AD and told them all about the wonders of the zodiac signs. For some reason this really caught on with the Hindu bigwigs and so, in addition to whatever system they already had in ancient India, astrologers started referring to certain months as, more or less, “Lion-Time” and “Scorpion-Time” and so on. I’m guessing that Joe Ricepaddy didn’t have much use for these obscure astrological terms, since I think most Asians went by the lunar calendar anyway, but they definitely entered into the Thai language at a relatively early date.

Just a guess but at least one of those pairs of names, “Karka” = “Cancer”, share the same Indo-European root word. Even more improbably, the Thai word for horoscope seems to actually start with “hora-” as well, which is pretty messed up. From a very interesting article which goes into great depth about the Thai calendar: “In fact, the Thai word for ‘astrology’ [ho:rasa:t] is derived from a Sanskrit borrowing at this time derived from Greek [hora] ‘proper time’, cognate [through Latin and French] to English ‘hour’.”


As if that weren’t enough excitement for one day, apparently a similar transmission from the ancient Near East happened with the Indian/Thai seven days of the week, which turn out to be named after EXACTLY the same things as the classic European ones:

Surya / Aditya (Sun)
Chandra (Moon)
Angakara (Mars)
Budha (Mercury)
Brihaspati (Jupiter)
Shukra (Venus)
Shani (Saturn)

In English only three of those match our current names, because some of the Roman gods/planets got switched with Germanic ones (Thor for Jupiter, etc.), but if you took a Romance language in school you should recognize that Tuesday = Mars-day, Wednesday = Mercury-day, etc. I guess I just always assumed that in Asia they had their own names for stuff like this, and I suppose they did, before the planet-day-naming fad swept the world.

This system apparently spread as far as China and Japan, where, if you’ll look at the handy chart some devoted wikipedian has crafted, they used to call Thursday and Friday Wood Planet Day and Metal Planet Day, after their names for Jupiter and Venus. So this means that by around a thousand years ago, from Greenland and Ireland all the way over to China and Japan and Mongolia and pretty much everywhere else, most of humanity unanimously agreed that we should call Sunday Sun-day, Monday Moon-day, and so on down the line for all seven days, with very few regional variations. W, as they say, TF?

This might all not seem like a big deal to you, but I’m in shock. I can’t believe that I flew to the other side of the planet, to a proud and strange Asian kingdom with thousands upon thousands of its own beliefs, rituals and unique cultural aspects completely alien to me, and the people here call August “Lion-Month”, after good old Leo the Lion.

I’m not sure I’ll remember all the Thai names of the months and days after today, but whatever happens I sure as hell have some good mnemonic devices to start with.

P.S. Apparently you can tell whether or not a month has 30 days by its last syllable of its name in Thai (-khom indicates 31, -yon 30). February has a unique last syllable all its own to remind us that it’s gimpy. I don’t know if that was a feature of the ancient names or a more modern addition. It’s a really cool idea to encode that calendrical information in the actual names of the months, but damn it I already know which months have 30 days, and the different endings make the Thai months a lot harder to remember than if they all just ended with the same suffix. Still, nice idea.