Pearls of Wisdom

More of my themes than one converged at a buffet table I attended on Sunday. It's banal, even disrespectful, to be struck first of three pearls of wisdom that I ate  pickled pearl onions at a memorial service, because this is why one sometimes recoils at the phrase, "celebration of life." The mind makes trivia out of solemn events, and so I was struck to only then learn that she had been christianed Pearl. Pearl is dead, and people are sad. They should be. For   all that she was born in the middle of the First World War, and that she has been slipping away from us for a very long time, she is still gone. (Better had I phrased this idea of a celebration in terms of the  niece and the nephew. Pearl was dear to me because she was precious to my cousins and it seems fitting that we all take these opportunities to give the next generation a chance to be with their cousins. Children playing. Now that is celebration.)

A second pearl; If you knew Pearl, you will be wondering why I am calling her that, and not the name that she chose for herself. It is so that you can take as much or as little intimacy as you like in the way of the Internet, but also to highlight that we can and do choose our names, if we are wise.

So I have family, and  semi-anonymity on the plate as well as my other themes. For a reason; I recall, some years ago, a relative that I will not name (as far as I am concerned, this is memory playing tricks, and there is no relative to name, or blame) telling me a story about Pearl and her son.  That story was that Pearl had finally revisited her distinguished Scottish pioneer ancestor and admitted that she was descended from his Salteaux Ojibway "country wife" and not his "white wife." (Though "white wives" are sometimes as dubious as "country wives, but that's yet another story.)

And another story, the one that her son told at the memorial. That story, told through actions and carefully-posed and mischievous photos was of a woman who played with, and hinted at, her aboriginal ancestry. It was, he said, another side of the story of his mother's life to put beside her class-conscious striving for genteel status.

But was it? Society imposes its canons of authenticity, according to which one must be one or the other, White or Indian, upper class or lower class. Each status belongs with its companion on the other side of the comma. To mix them up, to make the wrong combinations is ... well, what is it. I'll put it this way, any "or" that narrows us down into little  boxes of meaning is tyranny. And that is especially true when the subject is so tender as race. It did not suit Pearl. This the last, and best pearl, and Pearl's. It does not, I suggest, suit us.

Hate Them, I Do.

So I'm reading this, and boy howdy does Chris Sims and David Uzimeri have a hate-on for Tom Wellands' Clark Kent in Smallville. Just reading, I'm remembering how much I hated Captain Archer by the last season of Enterprise, or the Buffy Summers of Seasons 5 and 6. (This is Google top return for "I hate Buffy." Google is smart.) I've a bad feeling the same about Jack on Lost, and judging from the spoilers, it would be more than a feeling if I hadn't managed to buy the Blu-Ray version of Season 6 instead of the DVD. Then there's Wesley on Angel, and Starbuck and Apollo on Battlestar Galactica.... And then there's the Seinfeld gang and the last seasons of Friends and on and on. Hate hate hate hate hate.

What all of these protagonists have going for them is that they're fully realised characters in more-or-less working stories. We see specific problems: Welland and Buffy seem self-centred because, duh, their world revolves around them. This is also the problem with too many zombie films. As I might have mentioned. (Sorry. Kind of gunshy about narcissism.) The sit-com people ...well, see below. Wesley has plot-related stupidity. Mostly. He's also about fanloathing, but that's another thing.

But I'm going to single out Starbuck and Apollo, because my hate for them comes out of good writing. (Contrast this with Captain Archer, who is starting to become hateful by the middle of the first season as a result of the  boneheaded, inconsistent decisions that the writers constantly made him make. By the fourth, he's an irredeemable jerkwad. A Scot Bakula character has turned into a monster faster than David Schwimmer! Take a bow, Enterprise writers!) We see Apollo swallowed up by his neuroses; and Starbuck going from charmingly crazy to signalling "get away from me while you still can" because this is what constant stress does to you. These characters are run to Earth. (Literally).

Contrast this with Sharon "Athena" and Karl "Helo" Agathon. I like the latter two. Oh. Wait. I might have mentioned that. They're attractive because they are supporting characters whose dramatic arc is over. They had a romance, they got together. "And they lived happily ever after." They pop back up again because you can tell stories about couples: specifically, sit-com stories, with Helo and Athena as two wacky pilots that have family hijinks aboard the Battlestar Galactica. And the writers do tell these stories now and again, because the two of them are the parents of Baby Cylon Jesus. The stories are admittedly not very funny, but there's no rule that says that sitcoms need to be funny. And instead of a bad excuse, BSG has the perfectly good one of being set on a can-of-death fleeing relentless genocidal hunters into a  darkness of chronic fatigue and PTSD. So good on the Agathons. Attractive, congenial, and not overexposed. Because that's what happens.

All heavy-going mystery aside, every TV show ends. Look! Someone (actually, Winston Rowntree of Cracked.Com) drew a picture:

If a series goes on too long, we'll hate the protagonists. Simple.

But back off for a moment. "Hate" and "unlikeable" are different things. There's a narrative reason that these characters become unlikeable. We understand, and often forgive it. Did we hate David Hythe Pierce's Niles by the end of Frasier, when the show was limping home to the finish? No. We liked his unlikeability. So where does the hate come from? Why don't we understand?

Well, Chris and Dave hate that Clark won't just be Superman. That's one thing. But the interpersonal relationships seem a realer objection. They hate the way that Clark mistreated Lex, just like I hated the way that Wesley mooned over Fred. I hate that Buffy spent two seasons sitting on her couch while her friends fell apart around her, but I hated the way that the only action she took was on her attraction for Spike more.

 I'm going to put it out there that for Chris and Dave, what matters is that Welland/Clark doesn't get together with Lex. Hee. What's a discussion of Smallville without some homoerotic hilarity? Put it that way, and I think I'm seeing my problem with Wesley. He had a steady, and he threw her over. Sure, she ended up an evil lich working for an evil law firm, but everyone has issues! Now that they're working at the same firm, they're bound to see each other more. Right? But when the new season starts, no Lilah, just more crushing on Fred. (So far. I've only been able to sit through 7 episodes of the final season of Angel so far. Maybe it'll turn out that Lilith's in the next office, and he could just go over and knock her up if he weren't such a chicken.)

When you look at it, there are a lot of protagonists actively avoiding anyone who might like them until they go away or do something even worse.  Just be mean to anyone who seems to like you until they give up! What kind of rule of living is that? "Go away, Lilith," says Wesley. "You like me. No girl worth dating would want me. Look at Fred. She hates everything I say or do and has zero chemistry with me. Now there's a girl!" Buffy even drops Riley in favour of a soulless, demonic mass murderer. Admittedly, that's because the internet wanted it, but ..really.

So what's going on here? Duh. They're derailing plot culminations to sell more episodes. ("Tah, everybody. I'm leaving Angel Investigations to start a consulting firm and make babies with Lilith." Okay, admittedly, Angel would have gone on without Wesley. How about, "hey, Scooby Gang, don't be sad. After the wedding, you can come visit Riley and me at our suburban split level. Sometimes. Look. Call first.") Sometimes the derailment works, as with Niles and Daphne. But that's a lot less important than squeezing out a few more episodes and making some money!

By way of contrast, actual people make every mistake a serial protagonist makes, for much less excusable reasons. We're winded and we want to stop jogging. It's early and we don't want to get out of bed into a cold apartment. If we apply for a new job, people might  reject us. If we get it, we'll have to move. We snack because dieting is hard, and blog instead of writing a review for H-Net because we're lazy. The one thing that all of these reasons have in common is that they're harmful. That's why we have an inner drill-sergeant yelling at us to get moving. ("Stop the insanity!" I wonder what ever happened to her?)

So the hating? That's our inner drill sergeant acting out. We should leave Buffy and Clark and Wesley alone, since, after all, they're just earning residuals. We should yell at ourselves, until we actually are writing that review. Sigh.

(Edit: Thought I'd try to get Stephanie Romanov's character's name right.

Talking Is Who You Are?

Jared Loughner thinks that grammar controls us. No, I haven't a clue what he's talking about.  I'm talking about this because I have opinions about what happened in Tucson this Saturday that I'd be screaming at the Internet if I weren't sure that many people who are talking right now are not talking about what they're talking about. They're talking to be who they want to be.




Personally, I talk like a lot of people, shifting voice for any number of reasons.  Maybe it is all faking it, and I just need to speak to my authentic place in world and time.



But I can't! I'm not smart enough to sound that stupid!

So, by all means, let's talk about talking.

The World Needs More Canada!

So what the heck's wrong with this? It's not a national anthem. It's not a real star singing the not-a-real-national-anthem. The new words don't bother me.
I mean, c'mon. There's this. And everything else. Anthems are lame. Say what you will about party hack communists, but "the Internationale/Unites the human race" gets it right because it's the opposite of (almost) every other national anthem's "my country rocks" theme, even if it is still about about  eternal war against the world outside our head because the one inside isn't to our liking.


Oh, wait. It sucks because Michael Bublé is teh smarm. And the inauthentic way the song is performed makes it wrong.


But --aargh! Who are we to propose tests of authenticity and inauthenticity? What Michael feels is right for him, we have no argument against. I suppose that some musicologist could get some traction, but that's most definitely not me, though I could ask my buddy Brandon next time I see him.


So we don't worry about other people's attempts to be authentic or not. Unless, say, your family murders twelve colonies worth of your boyfriend's closest friends, neighbours and acquaintances. What do you say then? (Link to something that can only live in the Youtube crèche. And, no, you're not being inflicted with my horrible ideas about what constitutes good mood music. It's someone else's horrible ideas, instead!) 


If your boyfriend then says that the Cylons who did this can't possibly be human, even though they clearly must look human, he's obviously in denial about you being a Cylon. BUT, male denial doesn't work that way. We may look oblivious, but we do know what's going on. Denial is a way of asking you to work with us. 


What's that mean? What is Helo asking for? For not-Boomer to say that she's grown emotionally --that isn't going to work. "I was pro-Cylon, but I'm too hot for your bod to stay that way?" Nope. Flattering, but no way. Helo, by contrast, frames his denials around his loyalties to the dead. Only a machine could live with knowingly kill 20 billion people. You're not a machine, so....
That's not a denial of not-Boomer's past. Because Helo will work with that, if not-Boomer will work with him. That's why he didn't shoot her when she said, "trust me."

So he wants to reconcile your relationship to his loyalties. What's a girl to do? Oh, you could defect, or just admit to yourself that you've defected, but that ain't much for loyalty. Yes, as it turns out, there is a way out of this bind. Maybe the writers will rebel against characters get off the plot train, but the heck with them. Ha, writers, ha! Here's a version of Hamlet where everyone dies because Fortinbras shows up with a machine gun and the antidote. Maybe he calls Claudius, "dude!" Maybe H and F do the "beautiful friendship" thing. Instead of tragedy, kick-ass summer action blockbuster, thank you very much. Suck it, writers.


How? Stories don't get work if you get to throw out the script if you don't like where it's taking you.


Except in life! Life is not a story! You get to do exactly whatever is right, whenever you need. Moral judgments aren't inevitable. Decisions made in the past don't have to bind right now. Being a genocidal Cylon then doesn't mean being a genocidal Cylon now. Can't get out of the genocide? Get out of being a Cylon! 


So you say, Oh noes! It's all unauthentic. You're really a Cylon, and can never not be? Screw that. If going forward means being inauthentic, then bloody well be as inauthentic as you like.

That's Canada. The inauthentic country. No culture, no ethnicity, no national history. We used to have all that, but it was based on hating the Frogs, so we rewrote the song. (Check out the comments for bonus hate!) And now we're post-authentic. Well, more on that later, elsewhere.

As for the world, better get used to it. You're getting more Canada. First we get rid of race, next, culture. Then all we have left is this:

 And this

In our secret labs, we are combining this DNA. The prototypes already walk the Earth: a post-cultural superman who will reign over the age to come!

Patience is a Virtue, and Virtue is a Grace; and Graces are a Little Girl, Who Wouldn't Wash Their Face

So if you're really old, like me, you remember  the 1970s, and various Marvel writers flailing around in Spider-Man, trying to  match the early success of the "mystery" villains, meaning mainly the Green Goblin. Basically, Spider-Man is a luckless loser of a bachelor forever being attacked and enmeshed in bizarre circumstances by a mysterious masked villain who turns out to be the most unexpected enemy of all! At the beginning, Norman Osborn was the Green Goblin, and also the father of Peter Parker's best friend! Woah. Heavy. By the end, we had the Hobgoblin.

(Doofus or dweeb --you decide! Image from Wikipedia.)

In the middle, which is to say, those same fabulous 70s, we had the Jackal, a wacky evil mastermind with an animus against our hero that led him to send a pre-cool Punisher, Grizzly and Tarantula against our webslinging hero. We're an awful long way down the road leading from Green Goblin to Hobgoblin here. 

Turns out that the Jackal was none other than kindly old Professor Warren, who used to teach Gwen and Peter physics at Empire State University. And when Gwen Stacy was killed in a fight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, old Professor Warren got kind of upset. (She was probably the only student who paid attention in lectures, and he got attached. It happens). So, naturally, he had his  lab assistant clone Gwen, and also Peter, from some tissue samples he collected from the class. Because that's what physics profs (never mind the geneticists!) did back before "ethical research." Nowadays you can't even give pregnant women untested drugs to quiet away their endless hysterics, or infect black men with interesting diseases! In those days, if you wanted to clone yourself up some students, you could just hump the work off on one of your lab assistants. (He would have got one of his graduate students to do it, but the clones would have been six months late and "theoretically engaged.")  At least at the good colleges, as you probably didn't see many "homicidal rampaging clones" at the local community college in those days. Now? Meh. Who knows?

Imagine the Jackal's surprise when his Peter clone turned out to have Spider-Man powers (well, obviously)! He then did the most logical and super-villainy thing he could think of with his windfall -pitted two Spider-Men against each other in a battle to the death! The clone died, Warren/Jackal died, clone Gwen Stacy fell down a plothole, and everything went back to normal, all forgotten. Unless you were me and kept thinking, "oh, that poor clone."

(Image from Comics Should Be Good.)

Until,that is, the October, 1994 issue of Amazing Spider-Man, when the not-dead-at-all clone returns under the vastly significant pseudonym, "Ben Reilly." Ben has been living his own life after apparently dying five years before (comic book time), but has now returned to New York because he has heard that Peter/Ben's sickly old Aunt May, who raised him, oh blah blah angsty blah, is dying. Ben and Peter, as good superheroes do, hang out, fight, trade costumes, become family. Peter is married to Mary Jane at this point and expecting little May, who is going to have an uncle. Ben settles in, working at a coffee shop and having all the luckless bachelor loser adventures that Peter can't, anymore.....

Which would have been a nice plan for rejuvenating the franchise, but it didn't work out. Maybe market research suggested that the 10 year olds who didn't read comics anymore would be confused about there being two Spider-Men. So instead the writers had Peter discover that he's the clone. Oh! Existential crisis! No longer entitled to the life of the Peter Parker persona, clone-Peter and MJ punish themselves by moving to Oregon,  and Ben assumes the mantle of Spider-Man. 

And the readers ...revolted. In December of 1996, Poochie dies while returning to his home planet. Or, in this case, Ben dies (and disintegrates, because in reality, he is the clone, and clones disintegrate into goo when they die,  bECUZ THEI R NOT REEL pEEPLES!1!!) Aunt May comes back from the dead, baby May dies or something, and it turns out that the Green Goblin faked his death and has been orchestrating the whole plot all along as his ultimate revenge on Spider-Man! Which is a pretty lame revenge, if you ask me.

But, then, no-one asked me. I was happy with the Clone Saga --well, the whole "Peter is the real clone" thing seemed a little too much, but the rest, I was fine with. In particular, I liked Ben Reilly. So when Mightygodking joked recently that the "readers demanded the Clone Saga," I was reminded of some of Grace Park's scenes in Battlestar Galactica, and thought to myself, "yes. Yes, I did."

Take a good look at that still from the opening of the first season of Battlestar Galactica. What do you see? An actress doing a good job of portraying twin characters. One of them is a pretty admirable person, one of them is pathetic. Park's directorial instruction seems to have been, "strong and determined, on the left; damaged and weak, on the right." Throw in those great costumes designs and the obscene, walking-dead planet of Caprica, and you have a moment of true emotional power.

That, though, is not what I'm going to talk about here. Notice that not-Boomer has reversed her part. Talk about stale visuals --but, a stale visual that takes us in a new direction, because this what TV twins do when they want to assert their individuality, and it seems pretty darn dumb for the Cylon clone whose job appears to  be to convince Lieutenant Agathon that she is, in fact, Lieutenant Sharon Valenti to choose this line of self-expression. He's got a gun, not-Boomer! That said, Helo is a guy, so he presumably won't notice. So who is?

 In the first of three episodes that I've rewatched since my last posting on this theme, not-Boomer has reported back to her handlers again, telling them that, "we had sex." Wow. In the next two, she and Helo are genuinely on the run, after not-Boomer turns. This is a pretty key interview. And what, exactly, happens here? 

Spies sometimes turn when they're not doing a good job, and this is one of those sticky workplace interviews you have sometimes where it becomes clear that you have not quite aced the assignment. Two attractive, healthy young people all alone in each others' company for three weeks, and you've had sex? Promotions all around! That being said, what the Tricia Helfer model asks, isn't, "does he love you," but, rather, "did he tell you he loved you?"

I mean, what is this? Mean Girls? He's a guy. Words will follow deeds at some remove, and boy, howdy, have there been deeds. So what more do you want, Doctor Laura? An engagement party? More-or-less, it turns out, and if Helo won't go along, not-Boomer is to kill the boy.

The things they tell you about motivating deep cover agents in Clone Cylon Management School these days! Not-Boomer runs away, all but singing the Colonial Anthem as she goes, and Clone Tricia looks after her, saying that "Sharon" is getting too involved in her assignment. The other handler, master of the obvious, says, "I notice that you call her Sharon, now." Clone Tricia puts her slip down to the emotional neediness that not-Boomer has picked up from the humans, but we get to see not-Boomer return to Helo, wake him up, and tells  him that they're going to run even harder now. "What's changed?" He asks. "Trust me," she says.

That ain't neediness, Clone-Tricia. That "trust me" is a tell that something is going on here that not-Boomer can't share with Helo. It implies that not trusting is an option. Will you go along with whatever she's planning for you, Helo? And the answer is, yes. Things may get better, or they may get worse, but they will get better or worse with not-Boomer. 

The hair-part is not a message to Helo. It is a message is to Clone Tricia. And that message is that not-Boomer is not just one iteration of a lineage of clones. She is a person, and a person who chooses to live a life. The great mistake of the Clone Saga is to assert that if you were not authentically the individual that you thought you were, that you can never be the person that you want to be. 

And that is what is stupid and wrong in the Clone Saga. Not-Boomer doesn't want to be Boomer any more. She wants to be the babe that got Helo. (Hopefully she won't settle for just being that, but the point is that she is going to define herself by what she does, and what she does will not include killing this man who loves her.) In the same way, it is utterly irrelevant which of Peter or Ben is the "real" clone. What matter is doing what is right: right by New York, right by old Aunt May; above all, right by little May, the life that's coming.  

It's not who you are that counts. It's what you do. Whether you are born into this world a baby or a fully-formed duplicate of someone else, it only matters if you think that you are somehow bound to what you were, that to be "real," or "authentic," you must be true to some essential being. "You're a Cylon. You have to kill Helo." "You're a clone. You must move to Oregon." (Yeah. Me not understand, either.) Some people "keep it real," while others keep it fake, and that's bad.

Look. If being "real" means doing something bad or stupid, don't be real. Be fake. It's better. Or you'll just be giving in to the people who think that once a clone, always a clone.