Room For You Inside: Pink Floyd In Quarantine

You barricade yourself in your hotel room; it becomes a fascist rally. You write a concept album about your alienation; it becomes the Thatcherite Revolution. You live in modern luxury; it becomes a mad haunted house. This is a story about Pink Floyd's The Wall and the culmination of half a century of No Alternative.

Content warnings for discussion of quarantine, isolation, apartment horror, drug abuse, mental breakdowns, neoliberalism and its brother, fascism.

Just A Blog Before I Go

Looking back at the blog's eight year run, and recent past.

Complicated and Messy: Kingdom Hearts, Plot, and Being A Teen Queer

Kingdom Hearts feels like a wild game of pretend played with every random thing the players had lying around. That's also what my experience of being a queer teenager felt like.

Best of 2018 PART THE SECOND

Hey remember when I said this would be up the monday after New Years'? Hahaha. Anyway, part 1 of my Best of 2018 list is here; part 2 is below. Thanks to everyone who supports me on Patreon I was able to use the money from the last article to see an actual oral surgeon, so thanks for helping me out like that.

Best of 2018 PART THE FIRST

Hey 2018 sure did suck. There were occasionally some good things though. This is me celebrating those good things, because I need a quick $300 to pay for a visit to the oral surgeon so I can maybe eat without excruciating pain again, and also because it is good to reflect on the blessings of the year or whatever.

It's split into two parts, because as usual I can't shut up.

pictured: me exiting 2018

If The Train Stops We All Die: 2016 In Review

2016 sucked. Let's talk about Snowpiercer, clipping., and seceding from a broken reality.

All art in this article is by Kathe Kollwitz, queer revolutionary socialist engraver.

Populism, Politics, People and Superpeople: Luke Cage and This Fucking Election

Luke Cage is a narrative drawing heavily on popular antiracist politics, so why is it so suspicious, narratively, of populism? And how did the Democratic ruling class's own contempt for populism cost them an entire election and usher in four to eight years of proto-fascist stoogery? This article's two interwoven threads explore these questions and freely allows Perfect to be the enemy of Good, because sometimes "good" doesn't translate to "good enough," and god dammit, there's a whole lot of things that just aren't good enough anymore. 

This article is basically a 4500 word primal scream and it is not designed to make anyone feel better about anything at all. Instead of reading this deeply bitter article you could play this as loud as possible. The experience is probably roughly the same.

I'm Crazy But I'm Not Wrong: Stranger Things and Mental Illness

Spoilers for Stranger Things and Hannibal follow; trigger warnings for gaslighting, medical abuse, and narratively satisfying vivisection.

"I'm not crazy!"

It's a line you hear a lot in everything from urban fantasy to horror to paranoid conspiracy thrillers. The idea is to communicate that what's happening is real, and not just a delusion.

As far as throwaway utilitarian lines go, it's fine enough I suppose, but I think we can come up with a better line. Stranger Things, a Netflix original series which is so aggressively 80s that I keep expecting while watching to spontaneously be enveloped in black leather and chrome, might give us a bit of a glimpse of what a better line might be:

"I'm crazy, but I'm not wrong about this."

The basic narrative of Stranger Things follows a group of kids and adults battling against a Sinister Government Conspiracy and the Horrifying Extradimensional Monster that the government creeps have unleashed. And also there's a girl who can flip vans USING MIND BULLETS.

THAT'S TELEKINESIS KYLE.

What's really notable in the series is that major protagonists are, in fact, crazy, in the sense that they struggle with a variety of mental illnesses and traumas predating the start of the story proper. But that doesn't make them wrong. You can be both mentally ill in this show, and a main character, and correct about government forces fucking up your life. This is important to me as someone mentally ill in an exciting variety of ways, and as someone familiar with gaslighting and people taking advantage of my own uncertainty about my perceptions. This show, in setting out a narrative where people are explicitly suffering from various conditions, and who have to fight against those trying to take advantage of them because of this, is doing something important culturally.

A real good starting point for analyzing this is one of the show's absolute best characters: Joyce "Wallfucker" Byers.

Blue Screen of Death

Last week I downloaded 100 viruses to my computer, then downloaded a virus to myself, and then someone downloaded all of Patreon's information to their computer and uploaded it to the Internet.

None of this is an explanation, really, for why I haven't gotten shit done for several weeks--the timeline is wrong for one thing--but I think this hilarious chronicle of mishaps can maybe shed some light into just how precarious a project like Storming the Ivory Tower is, and all the ways that it can all come crashing down unexpectedly--the ways that it can bluescreen.

The Radical Implausibility of Love

This article is going to start out profoundly superficial, but I hope it will end at a place that is at least superficially profound.

I want to start the article with a discussion of shipping in the Dumbing of Age fandom.

Yeah, see what I mean? Don't worry, you won't need to be familiar with the comic for this article--it's one of those articles that's not exactly about what it's ostensibly about.

Dumbing of Age is a webcomic written by David Willis about a wide range of characters navigating their first year of college. It’s not particularly important for this article, but it’s maybe interesting to note that almost all of these characters came from several other interconnected comics that Willis has been writing since the early days of webcomics. To an extent, Dumbing of Age gives these characters a new lease on life.

The post that got me thinking about this week’s topic was actually a piece of fan art posted on the blog Queering of Age, whose purpose you can probably figure out from the title alone. The art depicts four of the characters on a couch together, cuddling and playing video games. I’ll link to my reblogged version of the post, since tumblr shenanigans have made the original post inaccessible:



You can see, in my reblog, basically an elevator pitch for this article. In summary, this article came about because of three reactions in quick succession that I noted in my response to the post:

First, I felt excited and gratified that a polyamorous ship that I had considered before was getting play in the wider realm of the Internet (or at least that’s the implication I read into the picture).

Then, I checked myself and thought, “No, this is cute, but it’s impossible with these characters. It simply isn’t plausible.”

And that thought was followed by the thought that prompted this article:

“Wait, what’s actually plausible about my own relationships?”

The Visual Intelligence of Pacific Rim

I want to talk about Pacific Rim, and why it is not, as I've seen a frustrating number of commentators claim, a "dumb" movie, or a movie that "knows that it's dumb," or anything like that, but first I want to talk about my girlfriend, and you're going to let me because you've already clicked through and given me the pageview, so you may as well stick around. Besides, I think it will help provide a reference point for some of the ideas I'm talking about.

Alright?

Let's talk about my girlfriend.



My girlfriend Sara (who has given me the okay to talk about her case, in the name of supporting this movie that she's fallen head over heels in love with) has a learning disability. I'm honestly not sure what the clinical name for it is (if it has one), but one of the things she has trouble with is processing language on a non-literal level. In other words, metaphors, figures of speech, and some humor that depends on incongruities, sort of doesn't interface quite right with her brain.

However, there's no "metaphor" sector of the brain. There's nothing that interprets figurative information across media. There's brainmatter that deals with language... and brainmatter that deals with visuals.

So, while my girlfriend struggles with linguistic metaphor, she takes to visual metaphor like a fish takes to water. I have to admit, sometimes she gets comics or movies, for example, in ways that I don't, despite my training in media. She can look at a weird background motif in a Manga panel and immediately list off for me its significance, or pick out recurring color schemes used to signify something about a particular character, or decipher wordless sequences that I find confusing or disorienting and (embarrassingly) explain them back to me like it's no big thing and I'm kinda silly for not getting it.

This is obviously fascinating to me as a student of media and how it interfaces with the human mind. We have very different ways of reacting to media, sometimes, because I tend to struggle when it comes to remembering faces, whereas she struggles with following complex, fast-paced dialogue (or, to put it another way, I excel at analyzing spoken/written language and she excels at analyzing visual language). To some extent, then, it's tempting to look at this as a cool quirk and study it in the abstract as two equally viable ways of exploring media.

However, we do not exist within a culture that views the two ways of analyzing things as equal, and that's why I'm writing this article.

See, critical theory, from what I've observed, is highly linguistic in focus and scope. In fact, even casual critics on Tumblr tend to fall into a linguistic mode of criticism when discussing movies--they talk, in short, about the dialogue of a film or show primarily, and talk actions and plot secondarily. This is encouraged by an education system that has students read the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Miller and so on, with the movie version as the reward once they're done reading. We consistently devalue the depth of visual communication in our culture--I mean, this isn't anything revolutionary to say, it's just the big dumb elephant in the room of media studies, that we have an overwhelmingly visual society that has no clue how to read images.

When confronted with a text that primarily relies on images, therefore, our response is to write that text off as dumb or lacking depth, because we're interpreting the text on a linguistic level rather than on the level that it's working. I mean, for goodness sake, look at the kind of language I'm using to describe this phenomenon! "Text." "Write off." Our mode of criticism, a century old, is wedded to the idea of communication through the typed or spoken word.

That's where Pacific Rim comes in. It's very easy, if you are confronting the movie with a linguistic bias, to see the film as "dumb," or, maybe even worse, a movie that's good because it "knows it's dumb" and doesn't aspire to be more. And yes, the dialogue isn't brilliant. Granted! You can totally watch the film and say "There's not a lot going on here as far as witty reparte is concerned, and the plot is pretty simple, so on that level, it's kind of a simplistic movie." You can take that away with you after watching Pacific Rim.

But that's not what my girlfriend took away from it.

She took away this:

"I thought it was really cool how Mako dyed her hair to match her jacket that she wore in the flashback scene. It was like she was still thinking about that day and carrying it with her."

I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that was one of the first things she said to me when the credits were rolling and we were freaking out together over how cool the movie was. She followed that up by talking about how expressive and cool the Kaidanovskys--the pilots of Cherno Alpha--were. These are, remember, two characters with effectively zero dialogue, beyond a few shouted commands during their fight scene, and yet they stood out dramatically within her mind as well rounded characters. And the conversation pretty much proceeded like that--sometimes with me echoing her thoughts, but often with her picking out details that I had missed completely.

She was responding to the film as a visual learner. She was reacting not as a traditionally trained--and traditionally, we might say, constrained--theorist, but as someone that interprets media according to images, body language, design symbolism, and color cues.

She was doing it right.

The rest of us are doing it wrong.

Pacific Rim is not a dumb movie at all. It is a visually intelligent movie.

Let's talk about some specific elements of the film, though, and why they operate quite differently when you view them as primarily things to be, you know, viewed.

Mako Mori is Not A Shallow, Timid, or Weak Character

One of the arguments I've seen repeatedly from multiple feminist critics can be summed up thus:

Mako Mori is not a strong, well developed female character, because she only has a few lines.

In a way, I feel the whole basic problem with our current discourse can be boiled down to just that one phrase. The character's relative depth is entirely contingent on how many lines of dialogue she gets. That, right there, is the devaluation of nonverbal, visual communication in favor of a... well, I'm not even sure what to call this. It's certainly no critical method that I've ever seen. Counting the number of lines a character gets is... well, kind of a bizarre standard, because it utterly divorces the actual content of those lines from their quantity.

The thing about Mako Mori, though, is that while her lines may be few, they pack a punch. In fact, they have strength in part due to how quiet she typically is--when she does speak, she is direct and forceful, and you know she's not speaking trivially.

But that's not exactly what I'm here to talk about. I want to talk about the visual cues surrounding this character. Mako's character development is actually almost entirely visual in nature--no one talks through her memories or explains her motivations aloud. What's more, her personality and character arc is defined strongly by color symbolism. So, while she doesn't have a huge number of lines, that doesn't make her shallow.

Let's talk about that color symbolism my girlfriend picked up on. Mako's colors in the film are blue and dark grey. The blue is, actually, the brightest spot of color that we see on her initially, and we are drawn to the blue highlight in her hair because it contrasts in saturation with the rest of her character design.

It's a small splash of blue, but look how bold it is. It screams "Pay Attention To Me."

Now, this is a good example of how a text trains or creates its ideal reader. The film is giving us a striking cue that both makes her highly identifiable as an individual, and sets us up to recall that cue later. It's telling us that we should be thinking about Mako's colors and her character design.

This pays off once we finally see into her memories and recognize that the blue which in later life occupies her hair is the blue of the coat she wore on the day she was orphaned by Onibaba's attack on Tokyo. So, while this is never articulated, it is clear that she carries the memory of that day with her--deliberately, in fact, unless someone is actively dying her hair without her knowing, which seems improbable. This lends a certain air of truth to Stacker's claim that she is highly focused on vengeance.

Grey and blue.

One of the other interesting aspects of the flashback is the way Stacker Pentecost appears idealized. He ascends from Coyote Tango backlit, like some mythic hero or demigod. And this actually makes perfect sense when you recall that we are seeing the scene through child!Mako's eyes--Stacker is quite literally colored (colored a heroic gold) by her emotions on that day. This vision provides the context for all of her interactions with Stacker throughout the film, and, again, augments her brief speech to Raleigh about "respect." The moments where she opposes Stacker's judgment involve her standing up not only to the man who raised her, but to a man that she views as a larger than life idol.

And yet, she still is adamant in her desire to pilot, and is not shy or demur about demanding her chance to seek her revenge against the alien invaders. This is a woman who knows exactly what she wants, know exactly how to get it, and is willing even to butt heads with the person she loves more than anyone on Earth for that chance.

Wow.

There's more to Mako than just this scene and its impact on the rest of the film, of course, but I think the flashback and its visual language serves to demonstrate two things: first, Mako is a complex, wholly admirable female protagonist that probably has more depth than the male protagonist (which actually isn't all that new--holla at my fellow Hermione and Eowyn fans), and second, the film is capable of saying complex things, but it says those things through visual symbolism. (CONSCIENCE EDIT: And just in case it's not clear, I don't want to sound like I'm bashing feminist criticism--I'm a feminist critic myself--I'm just suggesting that if we're evaluating female characters, number of lines in this context is kind of a myopic way of going about it. There are other feminist criticisms of the film--like the overall number of women in the ground crew, for example--that are totally on point, I think. I just think Mako isn't given nearly the credit she really deserves as a female protagonist.)

Oh, and while talking intention is always risky for a theorist (death of the author and all that) I think it's worth noting that reading the film this way does go along with del Toro's designs for the audience experience. Now, keep in mind that Sara picked out Mako's hair color and its symbolic significance on a first viewing, without assistance from any sort of word of god interpreting the film for her... and check out this quote from del Toro:

It’s impossible to condense because every single decision counts. And as I often say, I don’t do eye candy, I do eye protein because all of these design choices are telling the story.

I’ll give you one example. Mako is defined by the grey colour and the blue colour. As we go through the movie we find out that she’s defined by those colours because in her childhood we have a blue memory, a memory that’s all just in blue with splashes of red. I show her holding her heart, or a symbolic object that represents her heart. The memory has left a stain on her hair that is blue, and she’s carrying that memory with her. The introductory sequence of Mako is very significant.

Yeah. There it is, ladies and gentlemen, in black and white for all to see. Sara picked out the symbolism and together we sussed out its meaning without the aid of del Toro. This says to me that if you accept the film's language and read the film the way it quite openly prompts you to read it, you get results that are far more nuanced, valuable, and functional than if you read in opposition to the text. If you read with the film, you uncover the film's--and the character's--secrets.

Speaking of which:

The Kaidanovskys

Meet the Kaidanovskys:

Via

Look at Sasha creepin' there oh my god

The Kaidanovskys are basically the best.

I already kind of loved them for the fact that they pilot Cherno Alpha, a Jaeger that literally has its head transposed with a god damn cooling tower. But they're actually pretty fabulous even beyond having the hottest ride of them all.

For one thing, there's the fact that Sasha Kaidanovsky is, you know, another female pilot, which is pretty notable and cool. What's more, she's the member of her team that is constantly shouting information and orders. She seems to take the dominant role as far as interacting with the outside world, analogous to the dominant roles Raleigh and Stacker take when they pilot (although it's worth noting the complexity of that dynamic in Pacific Rim--the pilots are two parts of a whole, after all). In a way, her relationship with her husband is the mirror of Raleigh's with Mako: she is the expressive, somewhat more dynamic figure to her far more restrained husband who, like Mako, is less vocal and has an air about him of the coiled spring--force held carefully in balance.

Again, my reaction here is kind of colored by my shared experience of the movie with Sara, who is a huge Cherno Alpha fangirl. (Sidenote: this is why I always try, if possible, to watch movies with someone else. A shared experience, I find, is so much more meaningful. I love theaters for this reason.) One of the things we both noticed while watching was the way the two characters are given depth and personality through their body language. Look at the above images: Sasha's movements are lithe and determined... and more than a little lusty. She loves her husband and is quite open about expressing it. A simple gesture meant to beckon him to the place she's found in the mess hall thus becomes a sultry gesture. This is pretty cool, actually, as an affirmation, once more, of a female character's desire.

What's more, she puts an arm around her man protectively, baring her teeth at Raleigh to warn him away! I love this so, so much, because this kind of attitude is sort of stereotypically masculine, but here we've got the lithe, sexy female positioning herself as the protector of the big burly man. It's a funny moment, but it's also cool, because it writes, if not a novel, then certainly a god damn short story about these two characters and their relationship and their love and their connection as pilots, all through the power of body language.

No, Sasha does not get any lines of consequence.

But when the Kaidanovsky's finally decide to get out of the way of the plasma canon that threatens to blow up half the shatterdome, she's the second to start moving along the catwalk, and her body language oozes derision for the bullshit she's being subjected to, like she's doing the plasma fist a fucking favor by not just staring it down until it breaks down and cries.

And when Leatherback crushes the cockpit of Cherno Alpha, it's her scream--a scream not of pain or fear but of hate, pure hate, and boundless fury--that we hear.

Sasha Kaidanovsky is a badass, and she doesn't need to speak for us to know it. Every movement she makes speaks volumes. The Kaidanovskys have a voice in this film. Their voices are their bodies, their movements their words, their gestures their punctuation. If Mako speaks through color--if she speaks through pigment like a painter--the Kaidanovsky's speak through the dance they do together, a beautiful, loving, protective, forceful dance that continues even to the moment of their deaths.

Optimism: A Parting Thought

There's more to say, but I'm realizing first that this article is reaching Kaijulike proportions already, and second that I really need to watch the film once more before digging into some of the ideas more easily. This is by no means a comprehensive catalog of the various visual language/metaphor components of Pacific Rim. It barely even scratches the surface, in fact. Like, we could talk about:

• The way costuming is used to portray character
• The fact that the Australians are the only pilots to mark their kills on their armor
• The crazy closing sequence in the rift
• The red shoe and the symbolism there
• Moving beyond images, the fact that Mako's freakout in the first test run happened because she was forced to experience Raleigh's brother's death both from Raleigh's perspective and his own perspective and how she would have been fine if she wasn't hit by a double dose of Raleigh's bad memories
• The images we see of Herman and Newt's memories when they drift together

And a whole lot of other stuff besides. Some of this stuff, it's worth noting, didn't come out of my own head--it's stuff I came across on Tumblr that people picked out, or, predictably, more stuff that Sara caught and I missed. There's this whole conversation going on right now, basically, about the visual language of the movie and how we can pull out the film's messages and the character arcs from sometimes very subtle cues or momentary flashes of information.

Now...

Think about that for a moment.

If this film really, truly was "dumb," or knew enough to just be dumb and not aspire to anything greater...

...Would that conversation really, earnestly be possible?

No. 

You could have a complex conversation, sure--fans do all the time. But that conversation would be built largely around the exercise of speculation and fanfiction/fan art production, not the exercise of interpretation and the evaluation of symbols within the text. It would not be the conversation we are having right now.

And really, that's what I want you to come away from this article understanding. We CAN and SHOULD delve into this work. We can do more than simply lazily write it off. For god's sake, isn't it obvious that a work that hints at character arcs is more intellectually engaging than one that spells those arcs out directly through dialogue? This film offers us an opportunity to engage a text that challenges us critically because it goes against our cultural and academic training. The proper response is to allow that text to change us, to recognize the challenge for what it is.

And really, if the film has taught us anything, this is a challenge we can overcome, in part by coming together as a community of viewers and thinkers and theorists and lovers of giant robots. There's an attitude present in a lot of "professional" reviews--usually not stated directly, but certainly present--that this sort of film, with its message of coming together as a whole planet to defeat a seemingly unstoppable opponent, and with its appeal to the flashy, the visually indulgent, and the almost aggressively upbeat, makes this film a lesser summer movie.

Fuck.

That.

Noise.

Look, I've not exactly been shy about my disaffection towards the modern grimdarkness of media. As a choice, though, I can at least understand and accept it. What bothers me more is the critical attitude that reads a film like Dark Knight Rises as nuanced or complex due to its moral ambiguity... rather than, you know, a film that contradicts itself on literally every conceivable thematic level, to the point where the film is a giant grimdark mess of growling and posturing, sound and fury saying nothing. The flip side of that, of course, is that a film like Pacific Rim is treated as somehow naive or insignificant because it dares, gasp!, to have not just a unified message, but a quite positive, affirmative message, spoken not in the language of Lifetime movies or this year's crop of Oscar-bait, but in the language of Metal, the language of force and bombast and people in giant fucking robots punching Godzilla in the face.

We have reached a point, and really let this one sink in because it gets more flooring the more you think about it, where it's more radical and unacceptable to say, "Humans can accomplish amazing things when we set aside our differences and disagreements and work together to make the world a better place," than to say something sour and bitter and cynical.

Cynicism used to be the radical thing. 

Now it's as mainstream as Greenday.

So, what I'm asking is that you give the film a second look, if you're not already one of us fanatics who loved it the first time through. Give it a chance to speak to you in its own language. Be the Raleigh in this situation--just as he surprised Mako by knowing and speaking Japanese to her, undermining her skepticism, enter a dialogue with the film that speaks in images. Open yourself to alternate ways of thinking and understanding.

There's a place by the fire here, and we've kept your second favorite chair warm for you.

Won't you join the conversation?

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

Not Proud To Be A Geek

This isn't going to be a cheery article.

A whole lot of, I suppose, relatively minor incidents and circumstances slowly piled up in the corner of my mind for months, or maybe even longer than that. They organized into a kind of primordial muck in my mind, and then, in spectacular fashion, they were struck by lightening in the form of my discovery of International Geek Pride Day.

What glubbed forth in the precambrian dawn was a lengthy, overwrought explanation of how countless frustrations slowly burned from me my ability to wear the moniker of "Geek" with pride. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am renouncing the term "geek." Or, I should say rather, it renounced me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's trace the evolution of this event.

Starting With The Last Straw: Geek Pride Day

I actually was unaware of Geek Pride Day until this morning, when I awoke to see some mentions of it on... actually, I don't recall now. Probably Google+, which seems to largely be a haven for geeks of all sorts (since, to their credit, geeks are early adopters of weird tech, and the broader Facebook set haven't migrated). Initially, my response was neutral-to-cynical. Geekdom and I haven't been getting along much lately (I'll explore the reasons why later in the article) so while I wasn't really irate at this point, I wasn't really enthused, either.

I decided to do some research, though, and initially found the results quite heartening. The holiday originated in Spain, apparently. Cool! A lot of geekdom seems to be Americocentric in nature, so having the holiday originate in Europe is pretty neat. And what's more, the day is associated with a list of rights and responsibilities. Responsibilities! That's pretty cool! Geeks have a lot of good to offer the world, and acknowledging that openly seems like a reasonable strategy.

Things were looking up.

And then I read a translation of the list.

Rights:

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to show off your geekiness.
9. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

1. Be a geek, no matter what.
2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
4. To save and protect all geeky material.
5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a "museum of geekiness."
6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom.
10. Try to take over the world!

How utterly disappointing.

How disappointing that instead of looking inward and seeing how we can make our community better, instead of looking outward and seeing how we can improve the world, how we can be MORE inclusive, MORE welcoming, MORE passionate in a communal way, these rules detail all the ways in which we should become LESS inclusive, LESS welcoming, and passionate only in the things we can own and control and dominate and use as status symbols. The rights are fairly innocuous--there's some stuff missing (again, I'll get to that) but for the most part they're reasonable--but the responsibilities list represents almost nothing but narrowmindedness, status-obsession, and arrogant exceptionalism.

I find only two of the responsibilities reasonable: the first, which urges a self-determined identity (ironically a sentiment undermined by the rigid social code that follows) and the fourth, which urges artistic preservation, a value desperately needed when the speaker for the new XBOX One can blithely claim, "If you’re backwards-compatible, you’re really backwards."

Two out out ten.

Geeks do have responsibilities, responsibilities derived from the positive qualities people bandy about whenever geek pride as a notion comes up. Geeks have responsibilities that come from their intellects and their status as (former) outsiders.

Had we upheld our end of the bargain--had we acknowledged our important role in culture and reacted accordingly--I would be proud to be a geek.

But we failed.

And I am not proud to be a geek.

The reasons why follow.

WE CLOSED OUR DOORS TO NEWCOMERS AND PASSIONATE AMATEURS

There's an attitude in geekdom that intelligence is best expressed through a kind of arrogant dismissal of those less familiar with geek media, and that attitude is absolutely, incontrovertibly holding us back. It's ok to tell someone that they are wrong if, y'know, they are, but that's not a license to take on an air of absolute superiority over younger or newer enthusiasts who are genuinely just seeking answers, or seeking mentors that can lead them to greater understanding. Yet this is the response to newcomers that I see all the time. When you talk about "being the nerdiest," as though it's a competition, this is the ideology you buy into.

This even extends to the way that we deny certain activities the moniker of "geek." Look at responsibility 9 in the list above: "Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom." That's pretty messed up, if you really think about it. That's the kind of dictum present in the strict fundamentalist religions that a significant number of geeks claim to abhor. Abandon this world of things and come to Geekdom! Yuck.

As a consequence, we impoverish our own existence by denying the value of anything outside our narrow spheres of interests and disparage the people (think of "casual gamers," for example, or people who got into the Teen Titans cartoon when they were too young to read the comics) who we deem to be less fully integrated into the cult of Geek.

If we truly love and appreciate our geek media, why do we hide it from the world? We could enrich the lives of so many--and enrich our own lives--if we opened up more of a dialogue with those not traditionally considered geeks. It was our responsibility to open that door, but we closed it, instead.

Of course, the dividing line between geeks and non-geeks emerges from more than a simple judgment of experience. The fact of the matter is:

WE FAILED TO CONVERT SAFE SPACES FOR GEEKS INTO SAFE SPACES FOR ALL

Women. Queers. People of color. Geeks increasingly embrace a policy of marginalization and exclusion against these groups. I'm sure most of the regular readers of this blog are well aware of the issues, but it bears repeating, I think. If I catalogue the sins of geeks, this is certainly one of the top few.

How does this happen? Ugh, all kinds of different ways. A lot of social justice folks talk about microaggressions, but I'm more concerned with people just straight up being overt, aggressive assholes.

Like, let me give you an example. On the Wizards of the Coast forums, the word "queer" is censored, which I guess makes sense since it can be used as an insult, but which makes it difficult for me to discuss LGBTQ issues as openly as I would like. To get around the problem, I replace the "u" in the word with a "v."

Here's another poster's condescending response:

Why do you keep using a v instead of a w? You're not using real words even if the "community" thinks they are. Now we should definitely take this to another thread but I don't tolerate using fake words to make people feel special.

Reread that first sentence a few times. "Instead of a w." Yeah. He then proceeded to misuse the term "asexual" after I had literally just gotten through explaining the fact that "asexual" and "intersexual" don't mean the same things in gender and sexuality studies as they do in biology.

Sigh.

But the unique stupidities aside, what this really tells me is that I should shut up about my queerness, just as women should shut up about their womenness, and people of color should shut up about their weird skin. We don't need diversity, is the message here. You're the REAL racist/sexist/homophobe (how the fuck does that one work?) for wanting more people of color/women/queers in your fiction! And asking for special treatment is just reverse discrimination.

Women who speak out against misogyny within geek culture are slutshamed, harassed, threatened with rape. Casual homophobia seems to be a core part of the First Person Shooter and Fighting Game scenes these days. People straight up flipped shit when they found out that a non-canon parallel universe's Spiderman had died and was to be replaced by a young black boy. They did the same thing when they found out that there was going to be a black Lancelot. Oh, and then there's the Homestuck fandom. Remember when the fandom shit itself because a bunch of assholes used a joke in the comic to harass cosplayers of color and people who drew non-white fan art? And then shit itself further when Andrew Hussie removed the joke and those same fans decided that a horrible crime against artistic genius had been committed? That sure was... peachy.

The story of geekdom of late has been one of a minority of straight white males railing against political correctness, activism gone mad, and the destruction of their last safe space. Men's Rights idiocy spreads like malignant cancer through the body of our culture, and the message I hear again and again--loud and clear though it comes veiled in a pseudo-intellectual cloak--is that I am not welcome here unless I keep my fag mouth shut.

What kills me about this is that I remember a different geekdom. I remember geeks that accepted anyone that was an outcast, because WE were outcasts. If you would associate with us, we would associate with you. For a long time, I thought acceptance and understanding was, albeit imperfectly, woven into the DNA of geeks. Weren't we responsible for the first interracial kiss on American television? Didn't our authors push the boundaries of gender and sexuality (I think of people like Ursula LeGuin in particular, here) further than anyone but the most advanced of ivory tower intellects? Shit, didn't we used to be better than this? I have conversations sometimes with older geeks that are just as disturbed as I am by the current trends. They, too, remember when geekdom represented something more.

We had a responsibility to band together against those who did not understand us, those who found us weird or freaky. We had a responsibility to welcome other outsiders, the dispossessed, with open, if slightly smelly, arms. We failed.

And then we committed an even greater sin:

WE REBUFFED THOSE WHO POINTED OUT OUR FAILINGS

People spoke out. We turned them away, threatened them, called for their heads, declared them collaborators with the enemy. We did that Robespierre shimmy, danced beside the guillotine as, one by one, our former allies lost their heads.

The man who openly sneers at the dispossessed is a danger, sure... but more insidious is the man who reacts to conflict with endless cries for peace and calm!

More insidious is the man who chides the activist for raising a fuss, who scolds the activist for "sinking to their level," who bemoans the activist's constant need to bring up the uncomfortable, push things further than polite conversation allows, or show fury or hurt when attacked, insulted, dragged through the mud, and forced to endure insult after insult.

Where is that man when his fellow geek jeers and mocks the woman, the queer, the man of color? Nowhere to be found, in my experience. Because it takes two to fight and one to bully; when a fight breaks out, it's because the attacked party responds in kind. The fight would be impossible if we would just TAKE IT LIKE A BITCH.

So many speak out against the toxicity of our culture, and we had a responsibility to listen, to stand beside them, to defend them. And we rebuffed them instead, and made them the source of the problem. I see it on, again, the Wizards community forums, when female members react with justified rage to a poster that for six years has stalked, harassed, condescended, and made deeply disturbing sexual advances towards any openly female poster. The mods will not ban him, and more and more I see other posters chiding the women for reacting with anger and disrupting the community.

We rebuff them instead.

And as a consequence,

WE BLINDED OURSELVES TO REAL ISSUES

Listen:

I hate The Big Bang Theory. Everything geeks say about it--that it laughs at us rather than with us, that it relies on shallow stereotypes rather than a deep understanding of geekhood for its humor, that its gender dynamic is frustratingly regressive--is true.

But.

The Big Bang Theory is not "Blackface For Geeks."

In fact, if you think it is, I recommend that you go see an eye doctor immediately, because shit, son, you got to get yourself some fucking perspective.

It is so damn offensive to compare a show about white male geeks that is a little stereotypical to a practice that systematically denied the acting capabilities of people of color while simultaneously reinforcing racist stereotypes that were part of a systematic disenfranchisement and, in some places, an establishment of an economic system that was slavery in all but name.

Similarly:

Male geeks? For fuck's sake, LOSING A GAME OF MAGIC: THE GATHERING IS NOT GETTING RAPED. I don't care how quickly your opponent beat you, I don't care how much damage that spell did in one turn, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. It's not rape, it's not comparable to rape, and the fact that you are describing yourself as "getting raped" shows that you are at best profoundly insensitive, and at worst profoundly misogynistic.

Geeks pride themselves on their intelligence (this is a point that'll show up later on as well). We pride ourselves on having more adapted imaginations than others, better insight. And yet somewhere along the way, we forgot that with that great power comes great responsibility. We blinded ourselves to the realities of oppression, we lost our sense even of what truly constituted our own exploitation and abuse and transformed trivialities into great crimes.

But it's no surprise we can't even recognize when we're getting fucked over. See,

WE POISONED DISCOURSE

Yeah, now we're getting a bit meta here. See, there's two camps of very vocal geeks these days. There's the people that absolutely cannot be satisfied with anything and work themselves into a frothy-mouthed rage each time something happens that they don't like. And on the flip side of that coin, there's the people who go into a frothy mouthed rage any time someone decides that something new isn't to their taste. "You're raping my childhood!" one side screams. "If you don't like it, get out!" howls the other side.

And in the process we've absolutely slaughtered substantive discourse.

How do you begin to analyze whether or not The Dark Knight Rises or Iron Man 2 were functional films when the voices of critics with actual deep-level understanding of narratives or the broader political implications of certain film ideas are drowned out by people howling that the continuity has been screwed with, or backstories don't work? Or when the response is that anyone criticizing the films on their own terms are simply grognards unable to adjust to changes? Even changes that are legitimately boneheaded and insulting, decisions that legitimately undermine a work or pander to the lowest common denominator, simply cannot be discussed any more because there's so much damn noise. The discourse has been poisoned because we collectively decided that we didn't need theory, we didn't need to find better ways to articulate our complaints, we didn't want to reflect and contemplate and compare our media to other acknowledged masterpieces of literature and film and music, we didn't want to differentiate between unfocused incoherent anger and fully-articulated fury at legitimate slights.

And now that we poisoned our ability to discuss the state of our media,

WE ENSLAVED OURSELVES TO THE INTERESTS OF OTHERS

Remember when Call of Duty was advertised by Oliver North?

You know, the guy who was a part of the clever deal where we sold weapons to Iran to finance far right dictators in South America who were responsible for perpetrating all sorts of atrocities upon their own people?

That Oliver North.

Geeks are being co-opted in all sorts of deeply disturbing ways. One of them is the collusion between Call of Duty and other first person shooter game producers and the American military-industrial complex. Oliver North's endorsement of a shooting game is simply one representation of that. There was also a thing where Call of Duty was selling advertisements for real guns within their games. That's kinda sick, huh?

Another is the constant refrain I discussed above that dismisses any criticism aimed at geek products as illegitimate. This creates an atmosphere where corporations are protected by a loyal meatshield of lapdog fans, eager to explain why their favored product or company is beyond reproach. So, unfair business practices, decisions that reinforce the alienation of minorities from geekdom due to the purported "simple economic necessity" of choices like refusing to include female sprites in multiplayer games or refusing to support any game with a non-sexualized female protagonist... all these things and more are fervently explained away by the devout. In the process, they enslave our culture to people who do not have our best interests--or in some cases, the best interests of the world--at heart.

It is almost fitting, though, that this should be the case. It is almost a karmic fate, because

WE DEMANDED MORE EVEN AS WE ATTAINED THE MANTLE OF LEADERSHIP

Somehow geeks have internalized their outsider status so fucking hard that the mindbendingly huge success of a science fiction movie that features blue aliens as main characters and a movie that is the culmination of a bunch of other movies that bring together a giant green guy, a Norse god, a man in power armor, a superspy, a supersoldier, and a super... uh... archer (poor Hawkeye) is still somehow not evidence that we won. We took over. The world is effectively ours. From the bizarre surrealist and science fiction experiments in pop music videos, to the staggering success of shits like Mike Zuckerberg, to the staggering cultural penetration of weird shows like Adventure Time, geeks have taken over.

And yet we still behave as though we're outsiders, as though we're the underdogs, as though we can't catch a break.

Like, a few days ago I was wading through the maelstrom of stupidity that was the My Little Pony fandom's reaction to Equestria Girls, a movie where Twilight Sparkle goes through a magic mirror to a human high school. Amidst all the generalized stupid, there was one comment that stood out to me. The person was outraged because this was, in his mind, a clear attempt by Hasbro to take My Little Pony and turn it into something for little girls.

Yeah.

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick.

That's the kind of acquisitiveness I'm talking about. It's like anything not for us is somehow an insult, as though we are all that matters in the world. It's not enough that we should dominate culture, we must utterly absorb it, and anything for anyone else is an abomination. Here's our weird geekdom religiosity rearing it's head again... in the dumbest way possible.

I guess this is just a variation of what I said earlier about our blindness, with a touch of my points about the pervasive racism, sexism, and homophobia in the culture mixed in for flavor, but I think it's worth saying as its own sort of point. We had a responsibility, once we finally won, once we got the respect we deserved, to rule wisely. We had a right to conquer the world! And we had a responsibility to recognize what winning looked like it. But somehow we missed it, and we kept demanding more. Eventually we're gonna do that King Midas thing, I think. We'll demand the world turned to gold. And in our glorious golden palace, we'll starve.

Which leaves us, I guess, with the elephant in the room. The final sin. The final great failure that underlies all the others.

WE EXPLOITED OUR INTELLIGENCE AS A STATUS SYMBOL, NOT A TOOL
We decided we were brilliant, and that we deserved to rule, and that the world should dance to our tune.

And then instead of using that intelligence, instead of using our sight, and our thoughts, and our hands, and our hearts, we erected greater and greater monuments to our own genius--sterile and perfect, reaching upward to the sky.

Seeing the ivory towers of those who had spurned us, we did not use our minds--our greatest gifts--to build a new kind of dwelling for culture, a new kind of fortress with walls to protect, not to exclude. We built, instead, our own towers and cried, "Look, we are surely gods! We have surpassed all those who spurned us, all those who sought to limit or exclude us!" We built our own Babels, our language degraded as we increasingly shouted out liturgies to our own egos, and now the animals look back and forth between the humans and the geeky, nearsighted pigs, and they just can't quite tell the difference.

We cry that pop culture exploits us, while we exploit ourselves. We turn ourselves into cultural commodities, scrabbling for every ounce of respect we can get, acquiring flunkies and moochers and fans of our own. We built high and lost sight of the dirt from which we climbed, and we keep building with our own hands, enslaving ourselves to our intellects rather than enslaving our intellects to a deeper purpose.

Geekdom is a failed experiment. Every responsibility that we had, we failed to fulfill. We did not keep up our end of the bargain.

The towers we built did not lead to God at all.

They just led straight up our own asses.

Don't Call Me Geek

I'm not a geek anymore. I was, but the culture has changed, and it's made it clear to me that I'm not welcome. Because I'm a critic and a theorist, and because I'm a social justice advocate, and because I'm a pansexual genderqueer, I'm not welcome.

My girlfriend, my sister, my other female friends... unwelcome.

My friends who are black and Latino... unwelcome.

Hell, a lot of the people I love and respect, simply by virtue of their particular opinions, or their acceptance of and interest in broader culture, are... unwelcome.

So, don't call me geek. I'm not that, not anymore, not just by my own choice, not just by my own disgust and anger, but because I am a storm unwelcome in these new towers.

Sometimes I bandy the idea about with my friends of starting a parallel geek culture--a fork of geek culture, if you will--that takes on the mantle of responsibility, that embraces the roles I lay out here and adds some more rights--the right to be protected from misogyny and homophobia, the right to articulate arguments of like and dislike without dismissal, the right to blend high and low culture, maybe. I'm not sure what you would call us. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe fans of our respected geek things--fans of The Avengers, fans of Tolkien, fans of Homestuck, Adventure Time, My Little Pony, but also James Joyce, Beethoven, hip hop, goth rock, whatever we like, whatever we want to geek out about.

Part of me wants to call us "Grangers." I like Hermione, ok? And her demotion to second in command maybe is a good symbol of the kind of problems we seek to solve.

But probably you don't call us anything at all. We're the geeks of geekdom, the new dispossessed.

And maybe I can be proud of being that kind of geek, after all.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

On Being a Mad Artist

So, there are some disadvantages to being an artist that suffers from depression.

Besides the obvious, I mean.

I want to talk a little bit about madness and genius and how we've mythologized it in our culture--I'm doing the Roland Barthes mythmaking thing, in other words--but let me first give some background so you can understand where I'm coming from personally. It won't take too long, I promise.

I've suffered from depression for quite a while now, and boy does it ever suck eggs. It's difficult to quite describe what it's like to periodically become uncontrollably sad and panicked for no external, easily understood reason, so I think I'll just stick with the "suck eggs" thing as useful shorthand. You may find Hyperbole and a Half's explanation enlightening, however.

I can, however, describe what effect it has on my work: the anxiety paralyzes me completely. You know that stretch where I was posting once or twice a month for a while? Yeah, some of that stemmed from my brain not feeling well. When you're depressed (or at least when I'm depressed) even just washing dishes becomes either an act of staggering, astonishing ray of triumphant light that simply serves to magnify the shadows, or a symbol of utter futility that reinforces what an inept, useless bag of flesh and bile you are.

So now take that feeling and apply it to the act of writing a whole essay on Homestuck, then posting said article on the web for a bunch of strangers on Reddit to complain about--an act, in other words, several magnitudes of OH SHIT SCARY FEELINGS above washing dishes.

Ahuh. Yeah. I think perhaps one can approach an understanding of mental illness and art through this basic method. Just imagine a place where simple daily activities like getting out of bed turn your stomach into a seething pool of sentient acid that wants you to know just what a bad person you are, and then apply that sensation to an activity where you are exposing uncomfortably deep parts of your brain to public scrutiny.

So now, that's a picture of what depression and anxiety have meant for me and my art. Ok? We got that?

Now.

Add to that sensation the fact that culturally I am supposed to feel this way.

Let's go mythological here, folks.

The Mad Genius trope is pretty much omnipresent in our pop cultural discussions of great men and women in art, literature, and science. Our stories overflow with eccentric artists and mad scientists, and Suffering For Your Art is the mandated mode of operation if you work in a creative field. What's more, to be creative, or creatively insightful, or innovative, you must be a little crazy, because no one normal could come up with stuff like multiple levels of infinity or End of Evangelion or The Scream. I think we can sum up the basic components of this myth thusly:

• Creativity is something innate; it cannot be learned, and only a small portion of the population can truly tap into these innate talents.
• Since inspiration and creativity are innate, but only belong to some people, it only makes sense to consider those people abnormal.
• In fact, let's take things a step further and say that great art can really only come from someone abnormally tormented internally. You can only get good art if you're a Frida Kahlo, a Vincent Van Gogh, or a Kurt Cobain.
• Because artists are, by default, kinda crazy, any of their eccentricities can be explained as coming from their mental illness. They can thus be patronizingly indulged but ultimately dismissed as impossible for Normal People to relate to.
• In fact, patronizing indulgence is the best response to even the most extreme signs of actual mental suffering, because if one were to treat a genius's mental illness, that genius would lose their innate creativity and revert to normal. Oh, and artists? Don't seek help--especially in the form of medication--because you'll lose what makes you special!
• Just as virtuosity leads to antisocial behavior, so does antisocial behavior suggest latent virtuosity. Thus, there is a certain subset of the population that will view anyone with antisocial tendencies as an unappreciated genius-in-training. Call this the RomCom Principle.

There's kind of a lot to unpack here but I think this does a good job of giving an overview of the myth we're working with and some of its effects--most notably, the cutting off of help for creatives, the comfortable castration of eccentricities that threaten to challenge convention, and the restriction of creative potential to a limited, Othered group of people.

If you want a case study, look at the reaction to the accidental death of Heath Ledger. Wow, wasn't that a shit show? It wasn't too hard for the press and the public to draw a connection between Ledger's craft (in particular, his penultimate role as The Joker), his own mental (and physical) health problems, and his death, which was at first rumored to be a suicide. Looking back on the coverage, there's something decidedly ghoulish about it, something akin to the whole Ghost of Christmas Future sequence in A Christmas Carol. While any celebrity death draws out the ghouls en masse (how's that for zombie horror?) there was a particularly vile possibility put forth with Ledger, mostly in the form of insinuation:

Ledger was only able to become The Joker so fully because he was, himself, mentally unbalanced. That his performance came about because he was a mad artist, not because he was, you know, A FUCKING GOOD ACTOR. And what's more, it was the practicing of his craft that drove him to suicide/accidental death, not something else that was broken in his head.

His death, in that narrative, transformed from tragedy into the same kind of sad inevitability as the death of Cobain or Monroe or Hendrix. Ever heard one of the variations on the old saying that the brightest flames burn out more quickly? Yeah, there's our mythology right there.

If you really want to see the myth at work, though, look to the death of another luminary, Jim Henson. I think there are some rough, broad parallels we can draw between these two men. In particular, they seem to have been driven to overwork at the cost of their own health, and they both died because of some tragic, fatal error in judgment.

But the difference is that Ledger mixed the wrong coctail of drugs for his insomnia... and Henson failed to take his case of strep throat seriously.

One died because he made an error of judgment with regard to his brain, and one made an error of judgement with regard to his lungs.

And yes, I think an argument could be made that both men were able to accomplish so much, were able to create such brilliant work, because they drove themselves to the point of exhaustion. I suppose I can accept that, although such an argument seems to depend quite a bit on big What Ifs--mainly, What If they had been persuaded to relax a little--would The Dark Knight have inevitably suffered, or is that just the myth at work? But ultimately both of these men died due to an illness. The illnesses affected different organs, but they were ultimately illnesses. And by treating them differently--by treating Ledger as fundamentally wedded to his illness while treating Henson as a man who was struck down by an illness with no symbolic relationship to the rest of his life and work--we reinforce the idea that an artist MUST suffer, an artist MUST walk the tightrope of madness, and the occasional corpse is the price we pay for creativity.

In short, if you want to be good, you better be prepared to break yourself utterly. You will leave a beautiful body behind, and that's ultimately what we want. Goodbye Norma Jean, yeah?

So, that sucks.

I mean, I don't know how to say it any more plainly than that. It sucks that artists are born to suffer and die. It's a stupid, destructive, sick way of setting up a culture. It means that artists are discouraged from seeking the help they need for fear that when they do get their lives in order, they'll lose what makes them special. I mean, look at someone like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. I have to wonder, how much longer did it take him to seek help for his drug problems because his problems were a part of the legend that had grown around him? Would Michael Jackson still be alive if... man, you know what, I could be here all day doing this. I think you catch my drift. It sucks.

There's another aspect to this, too, that is probably less rage-worthy than the meatgrinder of celebrity culture, but is still pretty infuriating to me. I was thinking about this today in the context of this analysis of the recent AP Style Guide change that admonishes reporters not to connect crime with mental illness unless there are strong, professionally-evaluated reasons for connecting the two. The author explains how mental illness does more than explain crime, it explains any kind of convention-flouting you can imagine:

It is comforting to believe that people who flout social norms, whether they’re as minor as wearing the wrong clothing or as severe as abusing and killing others, do so for individual reasons or personal failings of some sort. It’s comforting because it means that such transgressions are the acts of “abnormal” people, people we could never be. It means that there are no structural factors we might want to examine and try to change because they contribute to things like this, and it means that we don’t have to reconsider our condemnation of those behaviors.

This is what I mean by patronizing indulgence of difference. (Sidenote: I hate "tolerance." Fuck "tolerance." What a patronizing term!) I recall reading a story quite a few years ago about Einstein's eccentricities, where the author, seemingly at a loss to explain the great physicist's problems with marital fidelity, or some of his other occasional odd behaviors, simply shrugged and suggested that a genius shouldn't be expected to behave the same way as you or I.

But--and as I am not a biographer of Einstein, this is ENTIRELY speculative, I really want to stress that--what if Einstein was simply strongly inclined towards polyamory? Why should our response to that be to dismiss it as an eccentricity that could never be applicable to normal people? Why should we not respond by thinking, wait, if this is good enough for Einstein, perhaps I should consider whether it works for me too? As the brilliant metalhead Devin Townsend (who, incidentally, also suffers from bipolar disorder) once sang: "I'm not insane, I'm not insane, I'm just smarter than you."

The myth of the mad artist allows us culturally to enjoy the product of artistic labor while devaluing its potential insights, and the potential insights of its creators. It allows us to avoid interpretation, to waive our responsibility to think about the artistic or ideological products we consume. The Othering of artists allows us to be pleasured by art without having to consider the ramifications of that art on our daily lives. It's a really handy way, too, of objectifying creatives--after all, if they aren't like us, we can be entertained by their crazy antics in a pretty free and uncritical way.

In fact, to get at this idea, let's talk about the Ur-Mad Artist.

Let's talk about Vincent Van Gogh.

It's hard to think of a figure that has been more mythologized in our culture than Vincent. He is, like I said, the Ur-Mad Artist, the guy who was able to paint so many cool things because he was, well, cracked.

Except that... Vincent didn't paint when he was at his lowest points. He was at his most prolific when he was actually doing better. And his death wasn't just an inevitable result of the mental illness he suffered, it came about because he had the bad luck to hook up with a quack doctor that was feeding him drugs that (as far as I recall) either didn't work at all or actually made his condition worse. Some of this sounding familiar given our discussion of Ledger earlier?

Let's talk, though, specifically about the ear cutting thing. Everyone knows the story--crazy Vincent looses his shit, cuts off his ear, and mails it to a prostitute. Wow, what a zany guy, LOL!

I bet you didn't know about the fight he had with Gauguin before he cut his ear, though.

Oh yeah. See, Vincent had this vision: he fell in love with Arles, France, and he dreamed of creating an artist commune there, a group of people that would support each other, and push the boundaries of art that the Impressionists had already started to explore. Except no one else was interested, and finally Theo, Vincent's brother, managed to persuade the Fauvist Gauguin to join Vincent. Vincent was overjoyed for a while at finally having another artist to keep him company in a town of backward farmers and suspicious villagers.

Except Gauguin was a gigantic prick. He apparently spent most of the time badgering Vincent to produce art HIS way, and Vincent grew to hate it. Eventually the two got into a blazing row in which Vincent threatened his one-time companion with a knife.

Now, here's where things get a bit speculative.

I studied art history with an early modernist scholar, and he had this theory about the events that followed. See, there was (and perhaps still is, I don't know) a tradition in bullfighting that the matador who slew the bull would cut off the bull's ear and present it to his lover.

After the fight with Gauguin, Vincent cut a piece off his ear and presented it to a prostitute.

He was declaring that Gauguin had slain him as a matador slays a bull, and the prize went not to a virginal bride but a prostitute.

Wow.

Now, this isn't rational behavior; I'm not suggesting that. What I AM suggestion, though, is that this reading of Vincent's actions is MUCH more in line with the man who experimented extensively and deliberately with form and perspective and color, the man who wrote beautiful, poetic letters to his brother that I cannot read without weeping, the man who was, by every account, extremely intelligent. Vincent, in this reconstruction, is no longer some zany artist. He's a sensitive and brilliant man who suffered unnecessarily at the hands of a disease that wasn't properly understood, and at the hands of a belligerent asshole that skipped out on his wife to go fuck teenage girls in Polynesia.

Is it clear yet that I really, really don't like Gauguin?

Anyway, the ZaNy ViNcEnT vAn GoGh myth means that we don't have to address the possibility that his death and suffering in life were totally presentable tragedies. It means we don't have to view him as a complex, thoughtful individual who, yes, behaved in a self destructive way. It means we don't have to see his actions as anything other than random craziness. You can see this in more minor forms all throughout our culture: look at the way people dismiss Lady Gaga videos as just random weirdness, or Andrew Hussie's creations as just crazy gags with no logic behind them, or even the failure to hold Chris Sims Dave Sim (Ha, whoops, good catch Jon) accountable for the misogynist screeds in Cerebus, because he just kinda lost it, you know? By conflating genius with madness, we write ourselves a Get Out Of Critical Thought Free card.

And that also really sucks.

There's one last idea I'd like to touch on, and that's the Rom Com principle that I mentioned early. Deep inside, the messed up dude is a creative and imaginative individual. This is actually probably the most dangerous aspect of our conflation of madness and genius, because it encourages the tolerance of destructive  behaviors in people that are just, well, actually crazy.

I ran into this recently with a longtime poster on the Magic: The Gathering forums. Now, this is a person that posts a lot of card designs in the forums, which is fine. But there's a few problems with this guy. For one thing, he's convinced that the head of Magic R&D is stealing all his cards. So, that's kinda weird. What's more, he has this bizarre cosmology that exists entirely within his own head that--I think, maybe--shows how Magic is some sort of true expression of the mythological origins of the universe in the struggle between good and evil gods and... fuck, I can't explain it. And he frequently argues with other people about his bizarre made-up religion. Alright. Worst of all, though, he creepily stalks, patronizes, and hits on every single female member of the boards. Seriously, the guy is like the Magic nerd version of Taxi Driver.

Now, it seems clear to me that, given that the Wizards forums are NOT a mental health clinic, and given that having female players hit on and then verbally abused when they rebuff unwanted advances is a poor way of supporting gender inclusivity, it seems obvious to me that this individual is fundamentally toxic and needs to be removed from the forums (he has been behaving in this way for six years, incidentally). So, I pointed this out.

The response I got from another user was that he should be kept around because even though he's clearly off his rocker, there's potential for genius there.

Hooooboy.

This is the problem with the Rom Com Principle in a nutshell. Any flagrant abuses can be ignored because someone that is mentally unbalanced might be creative. Within each manic pixie dream girl or weird, creepy dude is a unique artistic flower.

Bleh.

This is just a really gross attitude, especially because of the gendered element at work here. It's just really fucking easy to look the other way and downplay abusive or deeply dysfunctional behavior if the target of that behavior is a woman. After all, if madness and genius go together, women just have to make a sacrifice for the rest of us, right? And boy, it sure does make it easy for geeks to behave as though their maladjusted bullshit should just be accepted by everyone else. Why grow when your dysfunctions are a part of what makes you special?

So, I suppose if I can summarize my main point here, it's this: the Mad Genius myth hurts everyone. It hurts artists, it doubly hurts artists with mental illnesses, it hurts regular people with mental illness, and it hurts people affected by people with mental illnesses.

I'm sorry to leave on such a downer note, but this is kind of a downer subject. Dealing with depression is already hard enough. Culturally, we've collectively decided to make it harder. That really has to stop. So, my plea is essentially this: like the AP style guide urges, do not conflate things with mental illness unless you have a really, really good reason for doing so. Don't feed into the mad artist myth. Because as long as we keep feeding this myth, we also keep feeding it our artists.

And that sucks.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall

So here I am, sitting in your chair on New Year's Eve Eve with a pounding headache and a pounding set of anxieties to match. (It took me a few days to get all the images together for this article.) In the morning I'm going to be finalizing the list of Grad-level Media Studies programs I'll be applying to, and then starting as many applications as I can before I pass out once more. (Note from the future: it wasn't many.) Between seasonal depression, panic over the application process, and the always nightmarish portfolio composition process, I'm feeling like a bit of a basket case at the moment.

And in the back of my mind I'm thinking, "Oh god, it's been weeks since I posted a StIT article."

You want to know something for absolutely free (as opposed to the subscription fee you need to pay to access the rest of the site)? I kinda hate that I can see my pageview information. Don't get me wrong, it's damn useful in some respects since I can figure out exactly who is reading what articles from what traffic sources, and it's forced me to up my quality and write for a general audience.

But that information is a ruler. It's a tool, an aide, a crutch. It's great for helping you draw straight lines, but it holds you back because you aren't forced to draw straight lines freehand. And you sure as hell aren't going to be able to draw nice fluid curves that match the quality of your other lines. What I'm saying, before this analogy that I'm outlining gets too smudgy, is that a ruler is just as much a curse as it is a blessing.

And I'm feeling pretty ruled these days.

Which is part of why I'm cutting loose here and composing this drawn-out metaphor that's full of sketchy puns. It's been a while since I wrote an article that was completely self indulgent, that really had the chance of making sense to myself and myself alone.

And hell, this is my 99th article, and it's coming right at the beginning of a new year, so I decided I might as well wander down memory lane and ponder aloud about my work so far. There's a bunch of articles that didn't get quite the same dramatic reaction as, say, my My Little Pony or Homestuck or Avatar pieces, and you know what? I had a lot more fun writing them than quite a few of my big blockbuster pieces. So what the hell, let's give them a spotlight, huh?

Sing it with me folks:

99 Bottles of Beer on a Tow'r
99 Bottles of Beer
Storm the wall
Guzzle 'em all
98 Bottles of Beer on a Tow'r

1. MODERN MUSIC, MODERNIST POETRY 

"H3Y TOM 1S TH1S YOU?"

So the basic premise of this article is that the early 20th century poet TS Eliot is a mix master, a sampling fiend, and a hell of a DJ. I still love this article. It might be my all time favorite, actually. The premise is so ludicrous (or... Ludacris maybe?) and yet I think it ultimately works really well as a comparison. The article for a while actually was among the most popular on the site, too, before the My Little Pony articles dethroned it. My only regret is that I wrote it before I started photoshopping goofy images to illustrate my articles.

And you know what? I think my argument still holds true. Check out DJ Earworm's compilation for 2012:



There's a clear throughline here, similar to the one I talked about in my Pop.Sci.Fi articles (which both also probably deserve a place on this list) where the reaction to the collapse of dreams and hope results in the speakers taking solace in pop culture. It's honestly weird to hear this coming from Earworm. In a way it seems like he's channeling Eliot in more than just methodology.

So hey, I'm going to go ahead and make a resolution for the new year: I'm going to do an article on Earworm's latest song and how it all fits together. And, in fact, I'm going to look at some of these older articles from my early days and see if they deserve to be dredged up and expanded upon. Sound good?

2. APPROACH

So, I wanted to write a poem that had sci fi subject matter. I think I succeeded, personally. This isn't what I would call perfect or fully polished but damn, there's some things here I still really enjoy. Like:

God does not suffer a Gene Witch to live. Not anymore. Only the Witchminds,
Bred from the vats of
Angels, live in the core of
God, closest to His light and heat.

Not to sound too full of myself but I still really enjoy that play on the "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" thing, with the implication that the genetic engineers that allowed the race of superhumans to conquer the world are now hiding in exile on the blasted surface of the abandoned Earth, having acquired a magical status among the downtrodden lowbloods.

Not that any of that is necessarily clear from the weird modernist cadence of the piece, but that's the idea, anyway.

And it's an idea I want to explore further. That's my second resolution: I want to write A. more weird experimental poetry like this and B. more stuff about this particular setting. This world is intriguing to me, and the idea of expressing a semi-cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic distopia through non-standard media appeals to me quite a bit. So expect to see some more experiments of this sort.

3. SOME FASCINATING HIGHLIGHTS FROM GOLDEN DUSK 

I'm still super proud of that cover, personally.

Some people actually believed that Golden Dusk, the spin off sequel to the Twilight series, was real, and was as awesome as I was making it out to be in this article. They were pissed when they got to the end of the article and found out I was yanking their proverbial chain.

I love doing this kind of thing. Not just because I'm a troll and I live to alienate my audience, either. There's something about a review of a fake work of art that tickles the same fancy that's tickled by cyberpunk poetry. There's something really great about plotting out a whole alternate trajectory for Art History. I mean, there's a whole field dedicated to alternate history full stop, and Steampunk and its spin offs are essentially alternate science, so why not alternate art history or alternate media studies?

Besides, I hear Randolf Giorgi Jaffe is hard at work on a sequel, despite the fandom's explosive reaction to the first one. And when that novel finally comes out, I'll be there to review it. That's resolution number 3.

4. THE PASSED OVER 

Yeah, I'm looking at engravings on my widescreen TV in a pub. This image makes sense on every conceivable level.

I keep forgetting that this story exists. The idea was essentially to look at what the final Biblical Plague would look like from the perspective of an ordinary Egyptian slave. Historical inaccuracies abound, I'm sure, but I really like the notion of using the whole thing as an allegory for how the vying of religious powers often ends up catching the dispossessed and downtrodden in the crossfire.

Honestly, part of me is disappointed that I didn't get more of a reaction to this. I mean, I'm basically calling out the whole "Kill the firstborn sons of Egypt" thing as a dick move on God's part, but maybe everyone already figured that out and the concept of an Old Testament God that is actually kind of an asshole is old news?

Anyway, I actually really like writing fiction. It's just interesting to take a break from the usual essay format and put together an argument in the form of a narrative. And I love the idea of writing fanfiction about traditionally unfanfictionable stories--the Bible certainly being at the top of the list.

So, I'm planning on doing a bit more of that in the new year. I don't think it'll get as much attention as my articles, particularly since some of the stuff I'll be posting will probably be material for the Magic: The Gathering Expanded Multiverse project and will therefore be totally inaccessible to most people.

But damn it, I enjoy doing it so I'm gonna do it anyway!

[smashes wine glass]

5. I DIG MY HOLE, YOU BUILD A WALL 

I AM A SOMEWHAT EMOTIONAL DRUNK

Oh my god I still have so many FEELINGS about the game Bastion. It's such an incredible piece of work, and I'm actually super pleased with how this analysis of it turned out.

You know, I don't play a whole lot of games, and I think it's time I changed that. I just picked up Minecraft from a friend and despite how glitchy it is I'm finding it to be an incredible artistic experience on a lot of levels. So, I might as well write about it, no? It's interesting to me that I've ended up kinda gravitating towards bitesized media for the most part--TV shows, music videos, shorter comics, poems--rather than these longer, open ended games that demand more time and are harder for me to pretend-multitask to. But really, games are an important emergent art form, and it's stupid of me to ignore them. Especially since, like, I enjoy playing them.

And I'm sure there's more games like Bastion out there, games that have such fantastic story arcs, such great synergy between gameplay and story, such beautiful art and music...

So, resolution number 5 is to find those games and write about them.

6. THE IMPOSSIBLE IS POSSIBLE TONIGHT 

Dammit, Melies gets all the strange semi-human girls.

I could talk about how I'm really happy with this argument, and I think this is another great way of exploring the esoteric with the popular, and really I'm hoping that you take note of that stuff if you go back and read the article now, but...

...Honestly, the main reason this is here is because I just love that image of Kanye with George Melies's big, goofy looking head photoshopped onto it.

That's my sixth resolution. No really, we're doing this. I hereby solemnly resolve to add in more silly photoshopped pictures to my articles. How's that for a resolution? NO ONE MAN SHOULD HAVE ALL THAT POWER!

ALIEN SEX!

7. FERTILE GROUND 

AAAH SCARY DEMONICALLY POSSESSED FRENCHWOMAN

This article, that started out being about a weird video for an obscure sort-of-goth avant garde band, turned into an article about music video history and French music videos in particular. I kind of love how that happened, and again, I'm really pleased with the result even though not many people ended up reading it. (For the record, my sister is not among the people who ended up reading it. Dammit.)

I really love digging up this kind of thing. I do a lot of work with modern music videos but there's all kinds of old, great videos that have fallen by the wayside over the years, and I think I'm going to devote some time to digging those sorts of things up. So, my seventh resolution is to do some more digging around in the histories of things like webcomics, music videos, flash games, and so on--things that haven't had their history written just yet.

8. IS THE VIDEO FOR BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY MAKING FUN OF ITSELF?

I think I drank too much. Everything is a Blur. Haha. Blur. Geddit??

I really hate the title of this article. That said, it's another one of those articles that was just a blast to write. The premise is simply that the video for Bittersweet Symphony is an ironic parody of the song's lyrics. And once you see it you pretty much can't unsee it, judging by the reactions I got to the article. It's as pernicious as the song's string sample. Just try to get those violins out of your head.

I loved writing this because it was a quick article about a relatively small subject matter that I thought was fairly easy to explain but that had a high relative impact on the reader's understanding of the work. Call it minimal force, maximal output writing, maybe. It took less thought for me to put together but it was still something I could be proud of.

Either way, I want to do more pieces like this in the new year--short, sweet, to the point kinda pieces that are easy for me to write and edit but aren't really fluff. I actually don't think it'll be that hard, I just have to start willing myself to put those together rather than agonizing over the big blockbuster works.

9. SING IN THE NEW YEAR 

Happy New Year to you too, Ayatolla of Rock And Rolla.

I'm honestly not sure this article makes sense to anyone but me. Which is sort of the reason I like it so much. It's just such a bizarrely wandering metaphor that ties together way too many things, and I love it to death. And what's more, it's about this strange German band that sets medieval lyrics to electro-goth music. It's just a giant mass of inaccessibility.

And you know, I like big masses of inaccessibility, it turns out. Communication is important, of course, and clarity is kind of the name of the game when I'm explaining Liberal Arts concepts, but sometimes my tastes are, well, inaccessible. I truly do love strange works of art, but I've often chosen not to write about them because, well, less people care about Ingres and Goya and the contrasts between their style as reflective of their thematic preoccupations than they do about My Little Pony or Avatar. Unfortunately.

I suppose the final resolution I have is that I'm going to start writing about some more of the weirder things that I love. I mean, if I like this stuff, surely it's worth sharing, no? And perhaps if I build upon the ideas I've already established through other articles, I can get some other readers enthused about the weird stuff I watch and read and listen to. Then it won't be so inaccessible anymore.

Here's to a new year, full of the most ridiculous articles I can come up with. Here's to more tortured pub metaphors, more photoshop collages, more fawning adoration of Mad Max Road Warrior, more fake reviews and avant garde poetry.

Here's to the 99 articles on that ivory wall, and many, many more.


You can follow me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper or on Twitter @SamFateKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

Incidentally, if you want to see my REAL artwork, through a sequence of events too idiotic to describe I now have a YouTube-based portfolio. Check it out here. In particular, check out that last piece. Does that look familiar?