Keep getting stranger
Holly Boson’s epic journey through the Amicus Films catalogue reaches the 1965 film The Skull, which features Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and the Marquis de Sade’s skull. One of these things is cursed. Holly is joined this time by Jack Graham. He is not cursed. We think.
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| Slabs of bacon fresh from the smoker and resting in the author’s kitchen. |
Hey pig. Yeah you. Hey pig piggy pig pig pig. All of my fears came true. – Nine Inch Nails, “Piggy”
Amidst the defiant application of early Kubler-Ross stages to the recent news that bacon causes cancer was this collection of Islamophobic Twitter ravings, which, like any conspiracy theory, is right about everything except for any of the details whatsoever. The truth is more fundamental; the entire biomechanical edifice upon which bacon rests has once again been uncomfortably revealed to be wallowing in its own shit.
Religious prohibitions serve multiple overlapping ideological purposes. Among them: religious leaders are public health officials, a fact visible in the way in which local religious leaders and traditional healers have been successfully used in the apparently successful fight to eradicate polio in Nigeria, the last country in Africa to suffer from it – and note how Nigeria is part of the supposedly “uncivilized and barbaric” world of Boko Haram, the Taliban and ISIS. Even at the furthest edges of social collapse religion provides a public health service. (Consider also the way in which the American hospital system is to a significant degree church-owned, although this fact is more likely to deprive women of endometriosis treatment than to pay for their breast cancer treatment.)
And the Islamic prohibition against pork is a prime example of this function of religion. It’s rooted in the historical conditions of the Near East; similar prohibitions exist in Jewish law. Pigs, as literal urban shit-eaters, were unhealthy, parasite-ridden nightmares. Convincing poor people to not eat them in spite of their obvious cost efficiency was an important goal. Indeed, the cultural prohibition against pork extends far beyond the Middle East and into India, a fact that doesn’t fit Islamophobic biases and so is conveniently forgotten.
Obviously this is not a problem that still meaningfully exists. Or, at least, it’s one that can easily be overcome in a globalized economy. Its persistence is thus a mark of conscious difference. In modern Islam, the prohibition on pork is like the Hindu prohibition on cow or the American Catholic obligation to go to McDonalds on Fridays in Lent – an act of cultural solidarity. As, to be fair, is the Western tradition of pigfucking, derived as it is from Roman pig sacrifices and the basic fact that the forested terrain of Europe made for a food unmatched in succulence and efficiency.
Which is why the news that bacon causes cancer is so existentially unsettling to the West. Bacon is culinary technology; its efficiency, especially in its gruesomely industrialized modern incarnation, is profit, and, for that matter, military superiority, hence the Disney-made propaganda cartoon that reminded World War II housewives that “a skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory.” Bacon is capitalism made flesh.
And now that flesh betrays us. Moreover, it’s a specific property of bacon that does the deed. In order to preserve the meat longer, some of the salt used for bacon is what’s known as pink salt or curing salt.…
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By Anna Wiggins
I’ve said before that Japan (the fictional Japan of 1990s America, constructed through the distorted lens of its often poorly localized artifacts) almost killed me. That might have been uncharitable of me. Yes, the culture I consumed from Japan was full of crappy gender stereotypes and cross-dressing gags, and it did delay my transition. It hurt me, like so many other things hurt me, without my even being fully aware of it.
But in hindsight, there were some very important moments of validation that came out of those cultural transmissions, too. Some were obvious: Wandering Son aired right as I began my transition, and it did more to make me feel like someone understood than any of the therapists or support groups or forums. Some were more of a secret history, parallel and hidden until much later: Maddie Blaustein’s transition makes me inclined to go a bit easier on Pokémon. And some of these moments were right in front of me, and I knew that they meant something to me but I didn’t know exactly what.
Secret of Mana was released in October of 1993. I’m pretty sure we got it for Christmas that year. By this point, we had a system for RPGs: my brother took the top save slot, and I took the bottom one. The spot(s) in the middle were a no-man’s land; good for temporary saves, but no guarantees on whether they’d get overwritten. And at first, that’s exactly what happened. He took save #1, I took save #4, and we both started playing through the game.
Except, after the first few hours, we realized that this game was multiplayer. After that, we abandoned save #4, and only played when we were both able to play. This wasn’t the first cooperative game I’d ever played (Bubble Bobble and Gauntlet come to mind), but it was certainly the first one I fell in love with, and that made me realize just how much I preferred cooperative gameplay to competitive.
Secret of Mana has three playable characters: Randi, the boy-turned-accidental-hero protagonist; Primm, the competent and determined nobleman’s daughter, and Popoi, the sprite child. Now, my brother immediately chose the boy, which was fine by me. And the standard trans narrative goes “and I picked the girl, because I always picked the girl.” Except I didn’t. I never did. I was afraid of associating with anything the least bit feminine, because I was afraid people would somehow know about the thoughts I had. The ones I tried to keep myself from noticing.
And so I chose Popoi. The Japanese release of Secret of Mana carefully avoids ever using a gendered pronoun for Popoi; they are explicitly intended to be ambiguously gendered. The US localization slipped up a bit, and uses ‘he’ a handful of times. But mostly, Popoi is basically genderless. Many of the spoken references to them are not kind – a lot of disdainful “it”s and “that”s – but they don’t seem bothered by it.…
It is, in many ways, the most Part One of the two-parters we’ve had so far. Which is as it should be. I mean, it comes right out, first thing, and proclaims “we’re doing Zygon ISIS.” Pretty much right there, you’ve justified your second part. This isn’t some premise that requires a stealthy inversion at the halfway mark to work over ninety minutes. This is just an incredibly meaty, dense concept that it would be a travesty to even attempt in forty-five. Which makes it a beast to review, of course, but oh well.
Let’s stipulate up front, then, that much like Under the Lake/Before the Flood, a lot could go wrong in the second half. Clara – the actual one – is going to need something significant to do next week to avoid this contributing to a frustrating pattern of sidelining her this season. There’s an “immigration requires assimilation” subtext that, without some actively managed balance, could turn genuinely ugly, although there’s self-evidently no chance of this story going UKIP or anything, having already skewered them. And The Zygon Inversion could just suck. I’m pretty confident it won’t go wrong, though. Part of that is that I just have a lot of faith in an episode with the writing credit “by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat,” but much more of it is just that this is simply a very, very good episode of Doctor Who, and requires none of the “OK let’s be willfully sympathetic about what could easily just be abject sloppiness” that Under the Lake did.
From the start, there’s a deft balancing act going on between the two 1970s that Terror of the Zygons represented. On the one hand is the UNIT era that it ended, with all its political thrillers and sense of implied scale. On the other is the Hinchcliffe era it was a part of, with all its buried gothic horrors. The opening scene, as Osgood runs from a raging battle sold convincingly through a shaky camera and sound design into the police station is emblematic. The first part is neo-”Action by HAVOC.” The second is intimate dread. And the episode keeps toggling between those two approaches. On the one hand, the population of London is being sucked into the ground through its elevators. On the other, drone strikes in Generistan.
But this balance is all the more compelling when it’s tied unapologetically to the headlines in a way the series hasn’t really done since Davies left. When I say “Zygon ISIS,” I am not reading into the story to any meaningful extent. The radicalized Zygons are, first of all, actually described with the word “radicalized.” They send video messages of their hostages, whom they sometimes execute on camera. They have a sigil consciously designed to mirror the ISIS flag. This episode is not fucking around. Similarly, as a metaphor about immigration and assimilation, it’s as subtle as a brick, and gloriously so, both in the “they’ll think you’re trying to pinch their benefits,” a very particularly sort of classic Doctor Who line that just doesn’t show up much in the new series (“The rest were all foreigners.”…
A category in which I know a fair amount, but find myself with relatively few opinions, simply because there’s been an awful lot of smart stuff written about sci-fi this year, albeit not for the happiest of occasions. But many of my picks here are conflicts of interest and long shots anyway, so those with saner taste – inform us what’s good in this category, and we’ll be back later with Zygons. …
Previously in The Last War in Albion: DC took the somewhat unusual position that the real reason for Watchmen‘s success was their innovation in marketing it, a position embodied by Paul Levitz, who displayed a consistent attitude that what’s good for DC is good for freelancers and vice versa.
What’s perhaps odd is that Moore did not, at least at first, really differ from that belief. Indeed, the way in which Moore describes his falling out with the company is telling: “I was starting to realize that DC weren’t necessarily my friends.” Because it’s crucial to realize, Moore really did think they were. That’s the entire reason he never actually read the Watchmen contract: he trusted the people handing it to him had his best interests at heart. This was, of course, many things; hopelessly naive, for one. An almost inevitable extension of his honor among thieves approach to creating art, for another. But, perhaps most crucially, it was more or less how people like Paul Levitz were encouraging him to think. And so when Levitz subsequently got into a dispute with Moore and Gibbons shortly after Watchmen launched over whether or not they deserved royalties on the replica bloodstained yellow smiley badges that were being widely sold in comic shops (a dispute that was over, at most, a couple thousand dollars) and made a grand show of agreeing to a royalty without conceding the legal point by which DC had originally argued the badges, despite being sold in comic shops, were “promotional items,” Moore was understandably rattled, minor as the issue was. And when, later in 1986, Jeanette Kahn had lunch with Moore and Gibbons and made an off-handed comment about doing some Watchmen prequels and how “of course we wouldn’t do this if you were still working for us,” Moore was once again rattled by what he took as a threat. Indeed, as Moore put it when describing the incident in an interview four years later, “I really, really, really don’t respond well to being threatened. I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me on the street; I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me in any other situation in my life. I can’t tolerate anyone threatening em about my art and my career and stuff that’s as important to me as that. That was the emotional breaking point. At that point there was no longer any possibility of me working for DC in any way, shape, or form.”
Although it may well have been Moore’s breaking point, this was, as mentioned, still not quite the moment he decided to walk away from DC. But it’s a striking incident all the same, less for what it reveals about Moore (whose response was on the whole what you’d expect from him) but rather what it reveals about DC. The fact that Kahn remarked on how Moore’s willingness to work for them might impact their publishing plans is, after all, fairly compelling evidence that DC was already aware that they might be losing Moore as of 1986, despite the fact that at this point the only actual dispute between the two had been over the Watchmen buttons.…
This week I’m joined by Caitlin Smith, aka abossycontrolfreak on Tumblr, who previously contributed the searingly good guest post on Clara in Series 7 for TARDIS Eruditorum. It just seemed a good one to have her on for, what with Clara not actually being in it and all that. Anyway, she’s brilliant, and I’m a mad editor thing, and that makes for good radio or something. Have a listen here. And tune in next week, when we’ve got a massive exciting guest. …
Batgirl #45
It’s a good week when this is the worst comic in it, as it’s not a bad comic in any way, shape or form. I mean, it’s Batgirl at a wedding. Sorry, a lesbian wedding. Sorry, a lesbian wedding where one of the characters is trans. Every part of this is marvelous. The only part that’s not wonderful is Dick Grayson showing up and being a complete jerk. Which is, to be clear, called out unambiguously in the text, but I dunno, apparently I have feels about Batman comics and one of them is that Dick Grayson shouldn’t be the overly entitled ex-boyfriend.
Stumptown #8
Rucka does his thing, plots advance, Dex does things that are clever and rash at the same time, and they end up biting her in the ass. The character bits between Dex and her sister leave me slightly cold, however, and I admit, this arc isn’t quite grabbing me at this point in it, with the main hook feeling contrived. I assume there’s a twist, but in said twist’s absence this is a bit rough.
Chew #51
Glad to see this book move into the homestretch, and even more glad to see it have such a sense of energy as it does so. Love the diegetic ad pages, glad to see an Olive-focused issue, she being the best character by some margin. And the intro in heaven is great too. When this book works, it has a delicious mixture of grotesque silliness, and for all my occasional frustrations, I’m looking forward to seeing the home stretch.
Mercury Heat #5
Not as good as the previous issue, due largely to having an awful lot of exposition to do, much of it needing to be delivered by videophone, which is just tough to draw excitingly, and Nahuel Lopez, being a standard quality Avatar artist, is not really up to enlivening it much. (“Lovely” brokeback on the cover, though.) But the ending is a piece of deliciously sick comedy that plays to the 2000 AD roots of this beautifully. Kieron Gillen at Avatar is apparently a recipe for Pat Mills homages. Not complaining.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1
Delightful in the way that only an issue of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl can be, this one has teleporters, food courts, German alien robots, and, of course, lots of squirrels that say important things like “Chkkt!!” and “Chukk.” Plus footnotes. And catchphrases. And computer science. I don’t know how to sell this book, but apparently Marvel does, so OK then.
The New Avengers #2
It’s such a good week that there are two comics featuring Squirrel Girl in it. And though this one features mind controlled Squirrel Girl, she’s mind controlled by a multidimensional entity unleashed by evil Reed Richards that replaces her head with a gemstone. Also Tippy-Toe’s head. There are panels with mind-controlled squirrels with crystals for heads. Much like computer science and footnotes, this seems like it should sell the book, y’know?
Black Magick #1
Another Greg Rucka comic, this one featuring a female detective who’s also a witch.…
Hey, remember these? I barely do. This was recorded way back in early September and, basically, I’ve just been busy with this whole launching a website thing and forgot about it. In any case, here’s Jack and me doing commentary tracks on Vengeance on Varos for your amusement, and one of these days I reckon we’ll do Paradise Towers.
You can grab it here in a handy zip file containing both episodes.
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We all have in our heads the idea of an art of fighting. Not necessarily any interpretation of that art, but the fundamental concept of its existence. That fighting should be an artform seems self-evident. No shortage of cultural work must go into an instinctive equation like that. And examples abound: all discussion of boxing as dancing (and indeed the way both boxing and fencing are largely matters of footwork); indeed, the existence of ritualized fighting sports, which tie it inexorably to the notion of play. This can even be pinned to E.V.O.-level concerns if we want; one need only watch the play of our domestic pets to see that the act of combat is our oldest game. (Literally true; c.v. Spacewar) And with games come strategy and skill, and with those art. That this particular art is also how we topple empires is beside the point.
The fighting game is a distillation of this, and in some ways the best example of the idea of playing with and within a system. Done well, and Street Fighter II Turbo is done very well, it is a genre that works in the chaos engendered by the rules. Each character has a finite moveset – in Street Fighter II (you’ll forgive me if I just start calling the game this) a light, medium, and heavy version of punch and kick, with variations depending on whether you’re crouching or jumping. There’s a rudimentary block, some grabs/throws, and some special moves for each character, but that’s it; a simple framework for movement.
And then there is the game – the actual act of throwing down and fighting. And suddenly a wealth of variations emerge. Even if you ignore special moves – and let’s face it, a sizeable number of people to play this game, especially in the arcade, had no earthly idea how to perform any of them – the differing speed, power, and reach of characters and moves quickly impose fighting styles, which then vary again based on your opponent. Add the special moves that, for instance, give Ken and Ryu viciously good defense against aerial attacks (while also being able to punish players who try to maintain wary distance) or make it near-suicide to get caught unaware in close range with Chun Li or E. Honda and you have a game of astonishing depth.
And my does it have depth. It’s simplistic compared to modern fighting games where the fine-tuning that goes on for elite players and edge cases is so intense as to be nearly incoherent to most players. But I remember at the time reading something or other that listed a bunch of combos, and just being in awe of the obviously wildly superior skill that was required to even have a snowball’s chance in hell of executing one. Hell, half the time getting the D-Pad roll needed to pull off a fireball was slightly beyond me, and I say this as someone who was generally speaking one of the better video game players in my school.…
