20090417.teaParty

Apparently Americans, grown obese on years of wealth and an absence of hardship, have a thing about attempting to compare their current situation with those of others throughout history whose circumstances don't mirror our own in, well, anyway whatsoever. While I worked diligently, earning money and supporting my family, other less industrious souls attended mild-mannered protests that they had the gall to compare to the Boston Tea Party.

Hey kids look: a history lesson!

The Boston Tea Party went down like this. American colonists, who were not being constitutionally represented, were being forced to pay a tax on delivered tea. They said: "Do not want tax or tea. Kay. Thanks. Bye." This worked in many of the colonial port cities, but in Boston, the British lackey governor said "Hey no way! You have to take this tea. Even if you don't buy it. And then Britain shall tax you!" So 7000 colonists met to figure out what to do and as usual, nothing got accomplished at the meeting, so angry people filtered out into the streets. Hours later, some of those angry people boarded the three boats carrying British tea and then they took that tea and destroyed it. And some of them were disguised as Native Americans because, you know, they thought they could fool the dumb British like that. And hey, if they took the tea, they'd be pirates, but since they dumped it overboard they're heroes. In any case, the British weren't happy and made a law that said the port was closed until the colonists paid for all the property they destroyed.

Why? Oh yeah, because these protesters were not throwing they're own property in the water. They destroyed British property. So how is that like the current situation? Oh yeah, it isn't. The entire world embarrasses me at like every turn.

I mean seriously. How are we supposed to look at these Tax Day Tea Party excursions and not be rendered helpless from the deep belly-laughs that overtake us? Can we cry out with any justice that we are being taxed without representation? Uhm, nope. Are we a distanced colonial franchise ruled by a government who cares little for our welfare? Not last anyone checked. And the protesters, did they destroy government property surreptitiously as mark of their protest? No, that was, uh, that was their own property.

Omigosh. These whiny, privileged adult children have officially taken a page from the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict and the Watts Riot, in which angry citizens destroyed their own communities and property. And yet, they don't even have the backbone to do any real damage to themselves. Maybe a dollar on tea bags? How...

*sigh*

How is anyone supposed to take this stuff seriously. It's hard to respect a people and their anger when that anger amounts to loitering and wasting money on a caffeinated beverage that will never be drunk.

Bonus, the incomparable John Oliver comparing British tyranny to Obama's so-called of the same.

20090414.zombieBears

At work, I was recently given the task of creating a t-shirt design for our primary product, the Blue Letter Bible. The specifications of this particular thing were something as follows:

1. A youth-oriented logo for our site
2. For local youth to wear around
3. To advertise the site virally

This put me in something of a pickle. We don't have anything remotely like a youth-oriented logo design currently existing. We have one logo and it is what it is. I've said this before and I'll say it again now: I have no talent for logo design. I'm not trained in logo design and I don't feel particularly competent in this field of the graphic arts. Imagine the best artist you know. That person probably couldn't design a good logo if their salary depended on it. I know I'm glad mine doesn't.

Further compounding my trepidation for the project, I'm to put together a shirt design for high-school/college-aged peoples. I'm thirty-five. I don't work to keep abreast of what the age group in question thinks is hip and what is hopelessly lame. I do know that kids, like adults, hate being pandered to and can smell a phony. Well, the smart ones can smell one at any rate.

And then throw in the viral advertisement bit. This, surprisingly, may actually be my saving grace on this assignment. I know as well as any of you that viral advertising doesn't really work as well as we all thought it would four or nine years ago. Consumers, as ever, are a cynical breed. (By as ever, I mean since about 1989 or so.) They smell the fraud of so-called viral marketing schemes and recognize them for what they are: marketing schemes. Still, if a campaign is interesting enough, it can gain a small following. The real problem with viral marketing is that it never really penetrates beyond the savvy elite to which it is first introduced (cf. Snakes on a Plane).

But! The viral mandate means I can abandon some of the rules that would weigh too heavily on me to have fun on the project. At least, I'm interpreting it like so. I've come up with a good fistful of ideas, ranging from pretty design-focused obviousness to obscure amusements that have a little fun with the idea.

My favourite has to do with what I'm thinking of as zombie bears. Even if technically, they aren't really zombies. Though they might be. The design was frustrating because I realized that of all the things I could easily draw, bears (and especially zombie-like bears) are not among said things. I went through more bear designs than I imagined was possible. And once I settled on a general design, I had to go through a number of mouths and eyes before I was even mildly happy.

In any case, though this design is my personal favourite and even The Monk wants one to wear around town, I don't have particularly high hopes that it will ever see print. And I don't know whether the quote-unquote youth would think as highly of it as I do. So then, internet. What think ye? (p.s. click for a larger view.)

Ahem. You may also have noted that I sort of abandoned the whole create a logo idea. The bears were just too cool.

20090413.amazinfail

One of the ways that cultural Christianity most often capsizes itself is its reaction to the world around it. We (if I may say we without necessarily implicating myself in our transgressions) have a historically reliable fear of that which is not us, of that which is—ironically like us—not quite pure as the driven snow. Our fear causes us to react badly. Our apprehension over the things and people of the world about us cause us to engage in a multi-variegated palette of poorly conceived behaviours.

From political propaganda founded on ill-informed dogma to outright hatred. From slippery-sloped doggerel to trenchant panic. From amateur paranoia to... professional paranoia. We, as a cultural Christianity, don't have a great track-record.

And that's just the last couple years. Never mind decades and centuries of reacting poorly to the world around us.

So then, what's this all about? It seems that as every week, this one features a whole new topic about which we might prove our success or failure. While apparently there had been various Amazon ranking shenanigans over the preceding months, things seemed to have stepped up a bit quite recently and over the weekend, the social networking hoo-hahs got ahold of the story. And there has been furor.

It seems that Amazon has gone out of their way to strip the sales rank of a particular sector of the literary product. Quoted as saying that it is Amazon's policy to remove adult-oriented books from their ranking system, Amazon has really only stripped books with GBLT themes. Apparently, books with non-graphic homosexual content are falling to the sales-ranking axe, while books with graphically sexual content catering to a heterosexual crowd are both Scot and Free (notably among others, Playboy books and American Psycho.

What being forfeited from the sales-ranking circuit means for a book is virtual invisibility. Not only do books show up at a lower rank in book searches, but it seems an added value is that the books do not show up at all in Amazon's sitewide search. For instance, when searching all of Amazon for Brokeback Mountain, the in-print paperback version is unseen. As if no such book exists. Only when one refines the search to troll only through the category Books does one find that the book does indeed exist. And as L.A. Times writer Carolyn Kellogg says, "As troubling as the unevenness of the policy of un-ranking and de-searching certain titles might be, it's a bit beside the point. It's the action itself that is troubling: making books harder to find, or keeping them off bestseller lists on the basis of their content can't be a good idea."

Now for our purposes here, I'm not super concerned with whether this particular sales-ranking methodology so far as what Amazon's going to do. It seems pretty clear and predictable that this operational philosophy, which has turned into a bit of a PR nightmare for them, will be abandoned forthwith. And while I worry about the mindsets of those Christians who may have cheered Amazon's effort here, my mind is already set on the potential calamity that Christians may bring upon their own heads when Amazon inevitably reverts its policy.

Christians have an uncanny ability to be rendered entirely unable to divorce the thing they believe to be sin from portrayals of that thing in fiction. If a film has a character reviling the church and mocking its practices, the film is anti-Christian. If a singer sings that she kissed a girl and that she rather enjoyed it, that singer is promoting homosexuality. If a book features a story in which a Christian behaves hypocritically, that book is a diatribe against the church. Add to this acute myopia a certain forgetfulness of what it means to live in a free country and we can almost expect a Conservative Christian outcry that Amazon is kowtowing to the godless.

Heck, we might even catch wind of a boycott or two.

The fact is, though: Amazon's precedent here is dangerous. Why is it that "making books harder to find, or keeping them off bestseller lists on the basis of their content can't be a good idea"? For this reason alone: when a society has the ability to censor a strain of thought based wholly upon its whim, its only a matter of time before its your idea or belief that is the target of censorship or ban. The thing is, it doesn't matter if I think that homosexuality or pedophilia or income tax evasion or naming your daughter George are unpardonable offenses. It doesn't even matter if I think they are the highest affront to the Almighty.

So long as we play at being a free society and a democracy, these are things that must be allowed. A privately owned business does have the liberty, I think, to makes discriminating choices, but when one is as powerful as Amazon, it is a liberty I do not think the company ought to take. And please let us not, as Christians, embarrass ourselves by encouraging them to take that liberty.

Unless we're going to be upfront about wishing to trade in our quote-unquote free society.

20090406.outOfControl

The dying-a-slow-death aggregator of women/comics sex issues, When Fangirls Attack, pointed me today to an interesting article evaluating the position that female protagonists enjoy under the male gaze as instigated by contemporary videogame developers. Here's the summary of the part that I found interesting, if only because I disagreed.

Using Tomb Raider as a test case, the author decides that one of the primary features game developers build into games of this sort centers around the concept of control. And particularly, control of and—most importantly—over the female avatar.* As games are often built upon the proposition of virtually-realized fantasy, the author extends this to include the persona of control—as evidence of gamers' and developers' previously internalized desire to control women. If the author had recently read Bolaño, he might attribute this desire to the conscious/unconscious fear men hold for women.

In Tomb Raider, instead of becoming another—you can control another. The prospect of controlling another, as is made possible by video-games, acts as a form of interactive voyeurism as the male gamer may not feel as if they themselves are implemented within the game which may change the way they react to different situations.

The author believes that the way male gamers play a game in which the avatar is a clearly sexualized characterization differs markedly from playing with alternative representation, positing among other actions, that male gamers will intentionally bring about character deaths in particular ways that might (and this could just be my read on what he's saying) draw upon or even help exorcise male fear of the female. He additionally makes the point that when these avatars are presented in-game from the first person camera-view, players feel less of this desire to control a third party and are more likely to inhabit the avatar to the point of creating a vaguely intimate bond with the character's plight.

Speaking again of third person avatar control and specifically citing Tomb Raider's protagonist as example, the author continues:

This level of control could also act as a means for the male audience to self-assert an attitude of dominance over the opposite sex both directly and indirectly. Directly, it would satisfy the male gamers’ satisfaction of control and leadership by directly having control over the female character, and the actions she performs, to the extent where you can choose whether she survives or not.

The author sees control of the female avatar as speaking overtly of the male desire for patriarchy, the male dismissal of the female as full-fledged person, and the male desire to dominate the feminine Other that he fears. He sees this as a conscious-or-not assertion of patriarchal hegemony.

The thing is, I think he's right that a character like Lara Croft is an outright participation in the common patriarchy despite the fact that I find his theory of male dominance here overstated simply on the basis that it is stated at all. Rather than citing awkward psychological needs arising from the male cultural distinctive (i.e. the dominance/control scheme), there seems a much simpler answer to the dilemma. There is a straightforward reason for the main of male gamers who enjoy playing through female avatars that concerns neither the desire to dominate a female nor the desire to engage a feminine view of the world (something which videogames rarely capture).

The simplest answer, I think, is this: if given the option of spending twenty-plus hours watching the backside of a strapping young man, chiseled to perfection, or that of a cutish, physically desirable young woman, a large number of heterosexual males will choose the latter. (There are still a number who will associate the avatar closely with their own persona, breaking down the cipher aspect of the representative, and will feel uncomfortable choosing a female avatar when given the opportunity.) My own theory is that many heterosexual males will find it more comfortable to dwell on the appearance of a female avatar than to do the same with a male avatar, well-endowed with strength, speed, and cool, good looks. This reaction, I believe, stems from the same psychology that made the light homophobia that ruled my high school pretty much the status quo.

So rather than an overt bid for control, I think the use and popularity of female avatars such as Lara Croft speaks of the sexual preferences and appreciation of the female form intimate to the heterosexual male. I believe this principle may be comparable to the male proclivity for the use of female pornography. The desire is not so much for control as it is for sexual expression (though the difference between playing Tomb Raider and using pornography is stark enough).

I could, I suppose, argue that pornography too imposes a patriarchal psychology of male-over-female dominance and that even the theory I forward speaks to shades of similar desire to control the female (if only her form). I think those could make for fair discussions, but they seem to be some distance from the direction our author proposes.

In any case, from examples such as Tomb Raider and a host of other videogames, the male gaze is relentlessly supported and the origin is unquestionably an institutionalized sexism that rides on the back of our long history of patriarchal hegemony. There are changes that ought to be made within the industry and without—and recognition of the flaws these changes should address is an important initial step.

---

Notes:
* For those unfamiliar with avatar terminology, the character one controls is referred to as one's avatar. One's onscreen representation is the cipher through which the players is masked and interacts with the game environment. In Super Mario Bros., one's avatar is a squat plumber with unspeakably large moustache. In Tomb Raider, one's avatar is an ill-proportioned** young woman in hot pants and hiking boots.

** For the movie version of Tomb Raider, Angelina Jolie had to wear artificial boobs to fill out protagonist Lara Croft's prospectus. That's on top of Jolie's already artificial assets.

Extra: sorry to reference a Tony Danza film in my title. I realize that was in unquestionably poor taste.

20090403

Apparently, and this has been brought to my attention on several fronts, I have not kept up the kind of rigorous schedule of posting that readers expect or require of me. How did we get to this place, you and I? A place where I kind of have just become indolent, flush with the lethargy born of years of practiced irresponsibly? A place where you can barely be bothered to care, challenged only by the vaguest sense of a tickle in the backs of your minds—a curiosity—that prompts little more than a whatever happened to... Whatshisname?

So last Thanksgiving, the Monk and I took a week's vacation to travel northbound in order to visit one of her long-sequestered college chums. After a relaxing time away, we returned to a house that was in desperate need of cleaning. I took on the dishes and halfway through, whilst scrubbing a glass tumbler, said glass broke and lacerated my right hand to the bone. Essentially, I couldn't type well for over a month. After that I just kind of got out of the habit and while occasionally considering renewing my interest in the platform, just couldn't get up the inspiration. This earned lethargy continues apace even today.

This does not mean that I have been inactive though. My use of Facebook has been fruitful, I have written several book reviews, my participation at Christ and Pop Culture continues undaunted, and I've even begun a Twitter stream that I am attempting to keep worthwhile despite the fact that the platform actively thwarts worth. In any case, if you're interested, here are a pile of links to things I've produced of late.

Christ and Pop Culture
While primarily occupied as what I like to think of as the backbone of the site's commenting citizenry, I was recently asked to guest write an article in regards to Michale Karounos' recent review of the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. The book and movie were great fun and the review's author both didn't get the material but made a number of foolish statements in its regard. So much so that Gaiman posted how thoroughly amused he was by the ridiculous effort. My article in response is found here: "Sticks and Stones: Being Hurt by a Christian Review of Coraline".

Book Reviews
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Absolute Sandman (4 vols.) by Neil Gaiman
Silverfish by David Lapham
Emma (7 vols.) by Kaoru Mori
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Twitter
Twitter, to me, is a bastion of obnoxious nothings. There are a very few people performing on Twitter that are worth the trouble. As an evolving medium, people are still trying to figure out what to do with it and I think they'll continue to wonder until Twitter itself evolves. Part of Twitter's allure is its limitations, but those limitations also fuel my frustration with the medium—as they actively hamper value. Facebook offers something similar to Twitter, but adds the ability for user interaction with comments. This destroys Twitter's model in some ways. Yet Facebook's post-interactivity is limited to those who are your friends. One cannot simply just Follow worthwhile people on Facebook. As I said, media in flux.

In any case, my experiment with the communication vehicle lies here.

As I said there are very few people who make Following a really worthwhile endeavor, but one of those people is Merlin Mann of You Look Nice Today. I'm following Neil Gaiman, who is sometimes interesting, and Melanie Cogdill, who is likewise sometimes interesting. But really, Merlin is the only master of the medium I've encountered.