Secret Cartography: Simile, you just Metaphor. OR The Author is Still Feverish Hooray!

Tragedy tonight, gentle readers. A man with serious problems has enacted a most terrible scenario; we extend our sympathies.


Onward.

Hi! I am just recovering from four or so days of bed rest and fever dreams. There was one where I was a pokemon trainer, and more than a few where I was the Aragorn-like savior of the world, gearing up for some conflict that I envisioned only as a conflict between bright orange and a sort of sea blue shade, surging against each other. A vision that I realized shortly after looked more and more like a map. I'm no prophet, and I realized that this was because I was hunched over (like a sick kitten!) during lunch the day before, figuring out a 50 States puzzle from my youth.

So I've at least had cartography on the mind, and if not of the secret kind, then the insane dream-logic kind. And that's just as good! I mean, cartography itself is mostly a function of metaphor, as we base our understanding of the world upon relating two things that are not very similar. The whole idea of Red and Blue states is entirely fictive, a sickening reduction of thousands of human lives into a single simplified concept, but still an effective way of communicating the idea of difference. The strange part with the dream of Blue vs. Orange, then, was that they didn't really relate to anything - they were just some damn colors. But I still sensed conflict, so it's entirely possible they were just a metaphor for their own action. Does that make sense? It doesn't have to! Hooray for being sick!

Similar to dreams, language and thought processes are extensions of metaphor. On this Valentine's day, consider the choruses of people claiming that two people in love are travelers, or, Lockhorn like, one is a Ball and Chain on the other. They also say (Who says this? God, what's going on? Who are you people?) the limit of a man's world is his vocabulary, with obvious reason; as a person learns more ways to express themselves, they see that few things are cut and dry. Their map of the world suddenly grows new colors that they didn't even know existed. For example, they can recognize Schadenfreude in Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears or even whenever anti-war activists vote for John McCain. Previously, these sensations were just kinda funny! There's a whole new high-falutin' world out there of words (many of them German) to express guilty enjoyment. Red and Blue and Orange are allowed to expand in our understanding into Purple and Burnt Sienna and Off-White and Blue Green - there are now a million ways to reduce individuals to blank representations. Again, the symbols that we use to understand things soon become more and more accurate, akin to creating a map so large and accurate that it's a faithful physical reconstruction of that which it depicts.

Speaking of that. It can be argued that maps are artificial impositions, but doesn't the world, after all, only really exist as long as we agree upon it? The foundation of knowledge is the communication of facts, and understanding these facts relies upon metaphor, the application of what we already know to what we don't. Minnesota is not an absolute truth, after all. So it is with the internet philistines - their world is shrunken, and I come off sounding like I'm speaking a justifiably foreign language when I say something like "I thought their representation was unique" instead of "lol" and then nothing for five minutes (presumably because I was rolling around on the floor). Therein lies the dark side of this understanding - the above mentioned Red vs. Blue struggle, where one side opposes it's opposite so completely they cannot tolerate each other due to an inability to even talk to each other, as each side ends up sounding like an alien to the other. Each side of an argument may know objectively what the words Gun and Control mean in relation to each other, but the term together carries so much baggage with it depending upon your red or blue experience that good communication is impossible. The meaningless quibbles of our time (Obama vs. Hilary, Evil White Guy 1 vs. Evil White Guy 2, Creationism vs. Science as a whole... wait, maybe not so pointless, that last one) are more a function of our enthusiasm towards understanding things in simplistic terms - a sort of Go Fight Win Ra Ra Ra for whatever cause is closest to our hearts, setting it up in a simple adversarial opposition with, well, whatever it is not. Who cares that we can't talk, let's fight about it!

Finally, there's no way to approach the issue with right or wrong, true or false, because these, too, are just metaphors. You can't escape an issue by relying upon it (like what I'm doing now!) to provide it's own end, even though you can eventually hope that a representation of Object A slowly becomes so accurate that is almost becomes Object A in itself. So it is with maps - the physicality of places is secondary to the thoughts that we have about them in our understanding, and the only things that can really be mapped out are enthusiasm and fandom and the strange motivation that lies in the logic of dreams and language, because these, ultimately, are the only things that we can hope to give a flying fuck about. Seriously, fuck that hill, let's get into a fight about it.

(OMG RAMBLING D-)

Edit: Am I encouraging XKCD-ish happy nihilism? You make the call!

And I a maid at your window to be your Valentine.

I form a rare front: I don't participate in Saint Valentine's day in any traditional sense, nor do I despise it. My blasphemous position, encompassing none of the accepted reactions (love, hate, or loneliness) may be aided by my working in an industry that profits from it. But it isn't the whole of it. Sure, I'll spend the next two days splitting lobsters, shucking oysters, and otherwise fighting the sea in an unremitting fury, and, in two weeks, I'll spend the money tossed to me by terrified men on something bespoke and unnecessary. And I do have a marked fondness for martyrs, especially ones that the church has since declared most probably fictitious. 

But I like the feast because, on this one day of the year, the women who are kind enough to allow us to place things inside of them become gods. The vagina becomes a great beast, a thing that must be appeased with gifts. The ritual is clear: the vagina, for some reason, demands flesh dredged from the ocean floors in great quantities. It orders that all the flowers of the world be plucked and laid at their sheets. (Intensely sexual little brutes, flowers. You can see their bits. They even let you smell them. They hold season-long orgies with bees.) They require chocolate and fine alcohol and jewels dragged from mines by terrified African child-amputees. And, if they are pleased, we, unworthy though we are, are allowed to enter the temple.

Furthermore, allow me to tell you about my favourite customer. I met him only once. He was an older man, unapologetically  gruff. He stomped towards my case years ago on Valentine's day, sized me up, and barked, "I'm cooking for my wife," in such a way that could only mean that he had never, and would never, make such a statement again. He then began a battle. He paced. He stared down my fish. He looked at them and they, though dead for days, felt that surely, in some sea far from where they now lay, had done something horrible to offend this gentleman specifically. After pacing and plotting for ages he looked at me, and in the same rough voice as before demanded, "Where's your prepared foods section?" He didn't even realise he'd been defeated. It was perfection itself. And he's hardly alone: I'll spend the entirety of today drawing diagrams of the dials on ovens for men who, apparently, never wondered what that hole in the wall of their kitchen might be, and never realised that, through twisting knobs, one could cause the inside of it to get quite hot. This is the other reason that I enjoy the holiday: it is entirely and unquestionably heteronormative, and yet contains an inherent role reversal. In order to gain access to women's bits, some men endure women's work, often, it seems to me from my position behind the counter, for the first time all year, or for the first time altogether. And, although I'm sure they'll forget it, I hope they'll realise that women's work is hard.

Is this prostitution? Yes. But I like prostitution. We all deserve to be compensated for our talents from time to time. Enjoy your spoils, ladies. 

Secret Cartography: Internet, please don't shoot me.

Following Zach's post about our own secret posts that never see the light of day, there's one of my own that I wrote about Cowboy Bebop and suicide terrorism at least a half a year ago that wasn't published because I was too close to it to edit it at the time, and now that I'm not taking a terrorism class, I don't remember the details, but this still makes sense to me, so here we go.

I'd call this secret cartography, but the truth is, this makes more sense to me as a b-side, something that should have gone on the site, but for spacial or emotional reasons it didn't make the proverbial record during the mutually assured destruction theme week. Well, here it is for your consumption.

We've come to recognize mutually assured destruction as something having to do with lots of nuclear weapons. Tom, of course, goes one step further, and places it in the context of his own life. We don't really see ourselves as doing these terrible things at the time because we're blinded by how we feel.

Spike from Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, has a very good idea of what he is. Given two conditions, he is a suicide terrorist. Those two things? Finding his lost love, Julia and then losing her.

The story, if you please.

Spike, an inhumanly talented interstellar bounty hunter and former mob hitman/enforcer loved a woman called Julia. The catch is that Julia at the time of Spike's and Julia's love was the current girlfriend of Spike's best friend, Vicious, who is also Spike's partner in crime. Vicious gave Julia an ultimatum: Either I kill you and Spike for being disloyal to me, or you kill Spike. Spike gets wind of this and fakes his own death in a gun battle with a rival syndicate, dropping off the mob (Red Dragon Syndicate's) radar. Spike told Julia he'd be waiting in the graveyard after it all went down. Julia never showed. Since then, Spike has searched for Julia, while meeting up with a former cop, Jet, turned bounty hunter becoming a loyal, if detached member of Jet's crew.

To be fair, Zach noted something very important: I think you're missing the bit where Vicious is a monster. And it's true. Vicious is a cunning, deadly, monster. He seizes power in the crime syndicate by staging a fake coup, allowing himself to be caught and imprisoned, then has the real coup de'tat by breaking free and killing the top brass of the crime syndicate during the execution and with the aid of turncoats in the syndicate. Vicious also testifies against one of his former soldiers who admired him, framing the soldier for the things Vicious had done.

Three years and some months later, fate has conspired that Julia and Spike find each other again.

Julia and Spike leave, as was their original plan, to get away from the Red Dragon forever. There is a gun battle on a roof. Spike and Julia manage to run away, killing the mob thugs below until one luckier hitman is standing between them and the door. Julia and Spike don't notice him. The thug, predictably, shoots Julia. His job for the entire series completed, the lucky hitman now exits stage getting-shot-by-a-disbelieving-lover.

After a predictably voalitle scene with Spike holding Julia during her last moments, the action eventually heads back to Spike's ship. Spike decides there's nothing left to do but confront Vicious, who is currently sitting at the throne of the Red Dragon. Spike says goodbye to his friend and partner of three years, Jet, who offers to come along despite Jet's broken leg. Spike says no, indicating the coming killing spree is something he must do himself.

Spike, enters the Red Dragon building with a bomb detonating in the lobby, then running up the escalators, killing whatever hapless thugs stuck on security duty remain with the ease of a man possessed. (Speaking of which, I feel bad for these thugs. Very bad, in fact. They just survived one of the most harrowing gun battles of their lives after the Vicious-concocted coup, only to be shot on guard duty by a killing machine with a deathwish.) After another couple running gun scenes, he runs into an old friend, Shin, who saves Spike from getting shot by Red Dragon thug #3578. Shin then tells Spike Vicious was waiting on the top floor and that Shin has been waiting for Spike to return. Shin then gets shot by Red Dragon thug #3579, likely fatally.

After killing his way to the top floor, Vicious (like any good anime villian) is waiting. A fight ensues. The two people are evenly matched, so much so that they both lose their weapons (Spike loses his gun to Vicious and Vicious loses his katana to Spike) to the other. Spike shouts "Julia is dead, let's finish this", to which Vicious replies, "as you wish". The two slide the weapons to the other, and both parties deal their killing blows, Spike shooting Vicious fatally, and Vicious slashing Spike across the chest. Spike, bleeding out of his chest profusely, somehow survives, walks down the stairs of the building to point a finger at the moon, say "Bang", and then falls in a bloody heap on the stairs in front of the confused remains of the Red Dragon Syndicate.

Spike owes more to this battle than is fashionable to admit. Far from being flung into these events, Spike is the catalyst for them. Vicious, knowing that Spike was still alive between episodes 14-23 (I believe...) could have very easily set up bounties for Spike and his friends deaths. He did not. Vicious could have gone after Spike personally, but did not. Bigger fish to fry? Perhaps. Being in jail might have hurt, but I sincerely doubt that it was impossible to get messages out of the prison.

When Vicious does meet Spike on the battleground before Julia's reappearance, Vicious has Lin (yes, Shin's brother, how did you guess?) shoot Spike with a tranquilizer dart and leave him in the snow. Had Vicious wanted Spike to die, Lin could have shot him with a real gun.

Spike continues to go after Julia, with the zeal of a man crazed. That's fine. But once Julia died, Spike was mentally committed to the death of Vicious. It is not as though Spike was out of options. He had friends, a group of people willing to risk their lives for him. He had possessions. It is not as though he did not have standing in the universe. Ultimately, Spike is a suicide bomber, and Vicious was perfectly willing to let him detonate around him. Vicious, in his only line to Spike, after hearing the woman they both at one point or another loved, didn't even attempt to say no, or try to stop fighting. He allowed Spike to shoot him, so he could slash Spike across the chest.

Both their demises could have been spared, Spike, by not going on an inhuman rampage to get to Vicious, and Vicious by at least attempting to continue the dialouge beyond agreeing to kill each other. Both fictional men were committed to death to destroy each other, and that's really the best example of mutually assured desctruction I can think of in an anime.

~

As for secret places, little caves, nooks or crannies to find and be found in, the fun, is not in having a map guide you to them, but instead in having a group of friends that also know where it is, and the excitement that comes in going there. Also, finding these little places where one can have something secret to themselves, or amongst friends is the fun.

I have only recently returned to trips to find my own nooks and my own private headspace that no one else knows about, which you'll understand if I don't spill what or where they are here. It's just not fun, somehow. My adventures aren't really worth posting, because they all occur in my mind, and they require a little more background to my life than I'd like to give here. My eureka moment for the month was when the idea came to me that it wasn't what I was, but what I could be.

If my idea of secret cartography sounds kind of like a treehouse, I apologize for nothing. Furthermore, girls have cooties. All of them, without exception. (Yes, Cathleen, Beth and Jack, this includes you.)

If only it was that simple...

Theme Week: Secret Cartography

This week, we will delve into the project of mapping the unseen, divining the secrets of maps and charting old secrets. We will explore imaginary geographies, and share anecdotes relating to geographical explorations in reality. We will make grandiose promises, with nothing more than a glimmer of hidden knowledge to back them up. We will map out the future and past, showing you hidden things about each.

In that last capacity, here's a post I wrote acouple months back about Daft Punk's 'live album'. I never posted it, and I think it fits the theme rather well:

-
Alive

So, yes. Daft Punk! They create music somehow. Magic may be involved.

Their new album Alive, is a strange beast. A live album from a pair of DJs, it contains no completely new songs, but instead mixes old favorites into new mashups seasoned with highly enthusiastic crowd noise.

The crowd is justified in their enthusiasm.

It is a very good album. It is also an interesting album, because the more Daft Punk you've listened to before, the more you will probably enjoy it. This isn't to say that if you've never heard a Daft Punk song before, you won't enjoy the album: depending on your taste in music, you might. It's very good music of whatever precise genre Daft Punk happens to be, and, as a dabbling Daft Punk fan, there are tracks that I don't really recognise. I still like them. However, in the tracks that I do recognise, a strange alchemy takes place.

For example, an entire song been compressed into background music-beats, abbreviated but perfectly recognizable, that underlay another song, changing its context. If I didn't know either song, I would just hear one song, with an interesting counter-melody of synth beeps. But I know and recognize both; they amplify and play through each other, each one carrying with it a full emotional context of history and place: the people I've kissed, the roads I've driven while that song played.

Unlike more lyrical music, techno doesn't tell a story: it creates a space for you to tell your own. Hearing these songs successfully interposed and amplifying each other is like discovering that the perilous forest you killed an ogre in fits in between the walls of the cloud mansion you've always dreamed of, that the tulgey woods can grow out of the pavestones of Ankh-Morpork--that Narnia is Amber.

I'm not sure that this album really deserves that sentence, but I like the sentence too much to remove it. Also, I'm pretty sure I have more to say about techno songs being places rather than stories. Maybe I can work it into that hypothetical One Piece rant I'm supposed to be writing.

Back to the album.

It is, in short, a little bit like finding that someone has taken many of your favorite landmarks and shuffled them into a single super-landscape, where you are cordially invited to walk. They've done it in a way that, while not always perfect, contains glimpses of transcendent beauty, where the new context raises familiar sights into new realms of meaning that abandon nothing.

It's a little less awesome because they were all built by the same architect, so they're probably just some places you're fond of instead of Narnia, Amber, Viriconium and so on. That said, it's a little more awesome because you don't have to worry about distortion of the artists' intent: they distorted it themselves.

There are the slightly awkward elbow-junctions of back-alley and cloud bank, but even these are always handled with a charming grace, and give you somewhere to walk between one transcendent glimpse and the next.

It's not a perfect album. But it's made me smile harder than pretty much anything else this week. When it's on, it's on. And when it isn't, it's building to bring it back harder than ever when the time is right.

And that's more than enough for me.
--

I wrote that on December 14th of last year, and never posted it, possibly because I had failed to beat James to the punch on reviewing the album, which we both eard for the first time simultaneously.

So there you have it: a secret brought to light, light shed on darkness, and a thesis about the imaginary geography of music brought, at least dimly, into view.

An entire week of such cryptogeographical expeditions await us. I, for one, can't wait.

Anonymous versus Scientology - Pittsburgh Edition

An interesting thing happened in Pittsburgh yesterday: thirty or forty nerds (of both genders) stood up from their computers and walked, drove or used public transportation to get to the local office of the Church of Scientology. There, in below freezing temperatures, they stood in masks, hats, sunglasses and coats, and peacefully protested the tactics employed by the Church of Scientology in suppressing information about its beliefs and practices.

However, these were no ordinary nerds, and this was no isolated, easily ignored protest. The protesters were members of internet strike force Anonymous, a group that sprung up out of some of the least censored places of information exchange on the internet: the *chan family of boards. The boards, which include the notorious 4chan, serve as a home to one of the internet's most vibrant, rapid-paced, bewildering, brutal and intellectually incestuous cultures. Serving as houses of exchange for images as well as ideas, they are the secret forges in which lolcats were forged and the breeding grounds in which memes exponentiate.

Anonymous emerged as a kind of group identity in these troubled waters, a sort of lurking presence that would have you believe they are always behind you, watching what you do, always there to mock anyone who displays overweening pride, a collective voice moving through the shadows. You see, anyone can post anonymously on one of these boards, but you never know which anonymous comments are Anonymous.

This shadowy group of forum dwellers and IRC aficionados was incensed when, on January 18th, the Church of Scientology attempted to have a certain infamous Tom Cruise video (check the tag) removed from Youtube as a copyright violation. Considering this act an act of internet censorship, Anonymous launched Project Chanology on January 21st with a video in which a synthesized voice read out the following message over intensely menacing music and time-lapsed footage of clouds:

"Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous.

Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you, who call you leader, has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed."

The message continues, in brilliant propagandistic form, and was merely the opening move in a strategy which yesterday saw actual human beings taking to the actual streets in actual anonymity, except for the brave few who left their faces uncovered, and those who were picketing in areas where masks were prohibited. Some of those made do with hats, scarves and sunglasses. The nearest protest,as far as I'm concerned, was the one in Pittsburgh.



A friend of mine, who we're going to call Jordan Edwards*, was able to make it to the scene. He took the pictures you're seeing, and had this to say: "Besides the fact that it was a protest, everything seemed pretty cordial. No one was shouting anything, they were just waving signs and talking politely to the people who stopped or honked their horns."


*The illegitimate son of John Edwards. Yes, this is a pseudonym. Somewhat.

The rest of the pictures depict similarly peaceful scenes, which seem to have been a general theme for the day, with protesters apparently enjoying themselves. There was an incident in Hollywood where a Scientologist woman apparently approached, heckled, and then assaulted protesters before being dragged back into the Scientology compound and subsequently arrested. I find it infinitely amusing that, as she approaches and attempts to provoke hostility, Anonymous begin to chant, "Don't feed the troll!"

I think this is the first time we've seen an internet subculture become actively involved in protesting organizations or events in the real-world that do not directly threaten them. Certainly, it's the first time an internet subculture has organized global protests of an organization in under three weeks.

Pundits and traditional journalists have frequently disparaged the internet generation for writing about things on their blog, but not taking action in the real world. Events like this, which remind me of flash mobs (or, more accurately, smart mobs) on a global scale, make me wonder if we're just still figuring out how to best arrange such displays.

It's something to keep an eye on.

The Writer is a Liar.

Hello. I'm Beth. I'm new here.

I guess I should tell you about myself.

Hm. I've re-written this part a few times, now. I can't get it right. It's just that, there's not too much to say. I'm not that interesting. I'm one of those girls with dark hair and glasses. I look like I majored in English (I did). I look like I may want to be a librarian (I do). I like books, cats and muffins. I'm 21. I have a tattoo; it's from my favorite book. I like snakes, and they've been known to like me in return. I'm a pretty bad speller. I only speak English. I've never been outside the country. You see? I'm just not too interesting.

But my house is.

The first thing you should know is that my house is a Fort, located on the south edge of the city. My house was a place of ill-repute, drunken brawls and drug trade before we claimed it, sailing through the sky in a teacup like Baba Yaga. We: myself and another you're acquainted with, the dispossessed rent boy, the Earl. Our local shaman, peacock and fish-monger. We claimed it with a kiss, and wine, and music. We throw parties for the seasons and ourselves and nothing at all with Bacchanalia's that have become epic legends in our own minds. We've even gone so far as to imagine (in our silliest moments) ourselves a live-in Butler, wildly disapproving of our antics and always ready with a tray of tea if required after a particularly ribald moment.

We decorate our house in feather and bone and velvet. There is no place like us, a Fort defending beauty and spontaneity, good taste and a true enthusiasm for the art of living. We are a Fort on the south edge of everything, defending ourselves against the mundane, the boring, the hopeless.

I promise, I'll tell you all about it.