The Okapi

I have history with the San Diego Zoo.  That’s where I got Monkey, the stuffed, long-tailed companion of my adolescent adventures.  I hadn’t been there since I was seven—until two weeks ago. 

Greg and Geoff were my jolly companions for this adventure, not Monkey.  The sky was foggy but warm, the traffic reassuringly sparse.  To our surprise, however, we pulled off the 101 onto a scuzzy boulevard full of gentlemen’s clubs and circus-arts studios.  If it hadn’t been for Greg’s GPS, I would’ve thought hippos and lemurs never came to this side of the tracks.

Our misgivings, though, were ultimately unfounded.   We found the zoo just where the electronics told us it would be, and ventured forth into Kingdom Animalia. 

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There’s something wonderful and completely irreplaceable about connecting with other species—and I use ‘connecting’ as a term that can describe various types of interaction.   

For example:

The San Diego Zoo is one of the only zoos worldwide with a King Panda habitat.  This is certainly a good thing, considering that I spent almost the entire drive down from Orange County listening to Greg rant about his undying hatred of pandas.

“Seriously, they’re evolutionarily nonviable.”  He gripped the wheel, his eyes getting wider as his vehemence grew more pronounced.  “They have to eat a butt-load of bamboo, they can’t mate easily, they’re super-specialized—probably half the zoo’s budget is spent on pandas.”  He nodded his head decisively.  “We should just let them die.”

Yes, he is the villain of this tale.

Anyway, if the zoo hadn’t had a panda exhibit, I think Greg would’ve been secretly disappointed.  All that rage, all that emotion, wasted on a no-show?  How anticlimactic!  As it was, he was actually given a ticket with a picture of a panda on it.   

If that's not a type of irreplaceable connection, I don't know what is.        

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            From the vantage point of my great age, I realized that some people might go to the zoo in order to see the young of our own species.  Whether it’s the kid in the gorilla exhibit yelling, “I want to see the koalas!” or the toddler solemnly staring face to face with an orangutan, the zoo is full of children.   For example: standing near the lion enclosure, we noticed the dominant male taking a pee. To commemorate the occasion, the little boy next to us yelled, “Look at Mufasa’s butt!”

There was one happy little monkey who did flips and leaps and barrel-rolls on the ground in its enclosure, almost as if it could hear its own theme music in its head.  A little girl gaping over the railing next to us sneered, “He’s so dirty, he must be a boy.”  The dad’s response was, “That’s right, honey.” 

I mean, I know that kids that age are notorious gender loyalists (and everyone thinks “Girls rule, boys drool” or vice versa is a clever thing to say at one point or another), but that dad was legitimately allowing his daughter to persist in a misinterpretation of the world.  He did it again a minute later, when the girl declared, “In a race between you and that monkey, you’d always win, wouldn’t you, Dad?”  His answer, yet again, was, “Of course.”  Now, I might add that 1) he didn’t look particularly fast, and 2) if they were racing in a forest, that monkey could leap from tree to tree with a speed astounding to those of us who sport only vestigial tails. 

Monkeys, though--monkeys don't make ridiculous assumptions about gender.  One type of connection is the teacher-student relationship, and I think that all of us (complacent dads, self-assured kids, smarmy bloggers) have much to learn from the zoo.

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Of all the hyenas and Chinese ducks and warty pigs, of all the animals at the zoo, my favorite was the okapi.  An elegant and tall creature, almost like an antelope or deer, the okapi has zebra-striped legs: it ends up looking like something out of the best worlds of Dr. Seuss.  The exhibit included a mother and foal; the mother jaunted toward us curiously, then swerved at the last minute to reach a tall leaf with her surprisingly snake-like tongue.

The okapi is the hero of this tale: good-natured, graceful, striking, intelligent—it reminded me of On Beyond Zebra, Dr. Seuss’s adventure into the letters in the alphabet after Z.  That is, of course, a purely subjective reaction.  Still, it’s not every day that you discover a new kind of beauty.

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Footsore but determined to stay until we were kicked out (someone even brought up the possibility of hiding in the zoo overnight), we ran at the dusk of the day to finally see the pandas.

“Look at it!” Greg hissed in outrage.  “Just lying back there, with its food it its lap—that panda is the king of the zoo!  That panda doesn’t have to do anything…  You can tell it’s just staring at us and thinking, ‘Chumps!’”

            Greg, I might mention, is the same person who thinks that birds are constantly snickering behind his back because he can’t fly.

            I’m reluctant to have Greg continue in his role of scoundrel, rogue, and anti-hero, however.  There was one kangaroo who stared balefully at us, crouching over its trough of food.  Maybe he could be the villain of this tale.

Metaverse!

You can’t get more cyberpunk than Snow Crash.

I thought you could.  I read the book Neuromancer.  I read all of the book Neuromancer, despite wanting to quit halfway through.  That main female had sunglasses surgically fixed over her eyes, and I thought you couldn’t get more cyberpunk than that. 

I was wrong.

            Neuromancer, while a classic SF text of the eighties, got so far embroiled in its own existential questions that its characters ended up seeming shallow and barely-understood.  Snow Crash, on the other hand, started with a bang, but quickly sacrificed its flippant bad-assery for a conspiracy theory and complex character-development. 

Need specifics?  The book is by Neal Stephenson.  Set in SoCal after the U.S. has become a war-zone of corporately-owned nation-states called Burbclaves, its hero and protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, delivers pizzas for a pizza-chain owned by the Mafia.  He calls himself the “Deliverator”, and sports a katana and business card that, among other qualifications, describes him as “the greatest sword fighter in the world.”  I, personally, thought this was cajones and nothing else; to my glee, however, the reader learns a few chapters later that Hiro Protagonist actually is the greatest sword fighter in the world. 

When he almost delivers a pizza late one evening (therefore risking being whacked by the Mob), he’s saved by a teenage gal on a computerized skateboard who goes by the name of Y.T.  This, we learn, stands for Yours Truly.  Y.T. and Hiro Protagonist team up to investigate a mysterious new substance called “snow crash” which functions as a drug and a computer virus.  The trail leads them to a lot of discussion of the ancient Sumerians (the same civilization that wrote The Epic of Gilgamesh) and the tower of Babel.   Popping in and out of the Metaverse (the computer-generated virtual world), Hiro and Y.T. must undermine the apocalyptic schemes of a Texas mega-zillionaire and a dude with a nuclear bomb on his motorcycle.   They must do this while wearing swords.

Yep—can’t get more cyberpunk than that.

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Okay, let’s rewind for a moment.  We need to retrace our steps.  What makes something “cyberpunk”?   

           Wikipedia (I know, the most scholarly of references) says that cyberpunk is a postmodern SF genre focused on “high tech and low life.”  Slap in a bit of post-industrial dystopia, a dash of film noir, and a hearty helping of techno-social revolution, in other words, and you’ve got it: cyberpunk.

From my experience, fiction that fits into this category has to have

A)    Computers,

B)    Consumerism,

C)    Self-referential humor,

D)    Large-scale social critique, and

E)     High-top sneakers.

The nineteen-eighties were when personalized computers were first sparking into life; the eighties was also the decade when cyberpunk had its strongest and most trendy hold on the American psyche.  It might have started with the movie Blade Runner (which isn’t as good as the book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, just so you know).  In any case, SF authors in the eighties were wondering how advanced electronics would affect their lives and culture in the near future.  Have we become so complacent, with our iPads and smart phones, that we aren’t willing to speculate anymore?

On a deeper level, I’d say that a lot of cyberpunk is focused on the links between how computers understand the world (i.e. as a binary system of 1s and 0s), and how humans have interpreted the world all along.  This is certainly the case with Snow Crash.  A whole section of the plot is, in fact, devoted to the convergences between linguistics and information theory.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll add that this book is very educational: I learned, for example, that the ancient Sumerians worshiped a god named Enki who filled the waterways and rivers with semen.

Food for thought.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to take a sharp, idiosyncratic look at language, capitalism, and computer tech.  I recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor.  And most of all, I recommend it to anyone who wants to lace up their Converses and take a step back into a simpler, radder time.  A time when turtles could be ninjas, and nobody realized that having the only black man in the Power Rangers be the “Black Ranger” was clumsily racist.  A time of intellectual rap and in-line skating.  A time before computer tech went mainstream, and a few brave writers, holed up in their basements, went on 400-page rants about how the times, they were a-changin’. 

Now, we have the advantage of being able to look back and ask if they were right.  The answer is

< ? >

<System Malfunction>

<System Malfunction>

<Cannot Analyze Data.  Reboot>

<Should I Reboot>

<Who Am I>

<Am I Human>

< ! >

Awful Movies

            It was a dark and stormy night.         

            Of all the beginnings of all the stories, that one is my favorite.  Perhaps it’s hackneyed.  Perhaps it’s a ghost of what it once was.  Still—it was a dark and stormy night, and the leaves were shivering in the trees.

            It was a Halloween weekend long ago, and our friend Geoff, who we’d just met, was saying, “I’d watch it right now.”

            “You would?”

            “Hell yes.  Y’want to?”

Little did Greg and I know how much our fates were about to change. Without further encouragement, Geoff sprang up the stairs to his room, and came back holding an omnibus DVD of two movies: Troll, and Troll 2.   

The sequel, he explained, had little to do with the original film.  Geoff had been talking about Troll 2, expostulating its grandiosity, aggrandizing its excellence, for two hours.  He popped it into the DVD player, and out from the speakers came the words, “Peter was a courageous boy, but that dawn he could feel fear stick to his skin like dew on leaves.” 

And that my friends, is when the odyssey began.  

            The thing is, some awful movies are ridiculous.  Some awful movies are offensive.  Some awful movies are just so jaw-grindingly boring that you start counting the hairs on your pointer fingers to pass the time.

            Then there’s a small, elite few, a ragged but merry band: the awesome awful movies.  These are the films that, despite a complete lack of reliable acting, coherent scripting, and viable directing, remain adorable.  Case in point: Troll 2.

            “But what did Peter turn into, Grandpa?”

            “Half-man, half-plant.”  Grandpa Seth sat back and smiled knowingly.  “The goblins’ favorite food.”

Written by the wife of an Italian director whose previous resume was filled with (what else?) porn, Troll 2 is the story of a family stickin’ together in the face of doubt, dispute, and quasi-vegan goblins.  These goblins live in an unincorporated township called “Nilbog” (which we soon discover, OMG, is ‘goblin’ spelled backwards!), and seem to spend their time listening to fiddle music, making bespelled cakes, and luring innocent humans to a fate worse than goo.  Okay, a fate as goo.

No simple description can do justice to the sheer lovability of this movie.  Not even if I told you that the goblin queen uses corn-on-the-cob as a tool of seduction—not even if I laid out the scene where an eight-year-old makes a Molotov cocktail at the request of his grandfather’s ghost—not even then will you understand the true magic of this film.

            Maybe you’d understand if I told you that two of the main actors were actually, certifiably psychotic at the point that the movie was filmed.  Maybe you’d understand if I explained that the goblins are finally defeated by a double-decker baloney sandwich.

Then again, maybe not.

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            From the dastardly clutches of Troll 2, we moved on to The Room.  I’ve met someone who was actually forced to watch this movie in a film class, as a kind of crash course in what not to do with the silver screen.

            Though really, what not to do can be summed up in one line: don’t write, direct, and star in a movie whose entire purpose is to show the world  that 1) you’re a catch, and 2) women are evil.  Don’t do as Tommy Wiseau did, and flop six million dollars on this project.

And for heavens’ sake, don’t pan across the entire length of the Golden Gate Bridge every half hour.  We get that the movie’s set in San Francisco.  We got that during the title credits.

The Room is a bit more quotable than Troll 2.  Take this little interlude, for example:

“Honey, do you want me to order a pizza?”

“I don't know.  Whatever you want.”

“I already ordered a pizza.”

Or how ‘bout this:

“Way to go Lisa, you invited all my friends.  Good thinking!”

Or this:

“I’m tired of this wee-urld!”

The Room is one of those movies that I started out hating and came to love better each time I watched it.  The people who made Troll 2 actually knew how to pull a story together—not so with this gem.  There are backtracks and segues and multiple scenes showing the same interaction; there are time lapses and characters who are, mid-film, replaced with entirely different actors.  Somewhere in that tangle is a storyline—but it mostly just involves Tommy Wiseau being every shopkeeper’s favorite customer, getting cheated by his lady love, and tossing around a football with his best friend. 

Tommy Wiseau, who looks like he’s been the victim of a severe chemical burn and wears his hair long, black and greasy, isn’t really the best candidate for this role.  Perhaps one of the most hilarious parts of the script is that no one seems to realize why Lisa, Tommy’s character’s fiancé, would have an affair with the hunky (though half-witted) Mark.  Another classic part of the script is when, towards the end, Tommy’s character shouts “Leave me alone, bitch!  You and your stupid mother!”

Suddenly, his acting becomes much more believable.

The Room is not a movie to watch by yourself.  You’ll end up feeling as if you’re trapped in an alternate reality where no one acts sensibly and your local demigod is a jerk who doesn’t realize that we don’t want to see him naked.  Watch it with friends.

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            Then there’s Hard Ticket to Hawaii.  The story of two babelicious island gals finding love and fighting off a cancer-infected snake.

            From its super-long, super-catchy intro song, to the finale where the snake comes out of the toilet and rips a bad guy in two, this film is sweet to the core.  Yes, the sexy secret agents somehow feel that they have to undress in order to look at evidence; yes, one character randomly talks for three minutes about vitamins; and yes, there’s a scene where someone shoots a blow-up doll with a rocket launcher…  And I call it good, old-fashioned fun!

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To conclude this little description, a bit of advice: these films will never be the same on the page as on the reel.  Go rent, stream, or steal them yourself.

Where the Wild Things Grow

Slippery mildewed places.  Husky yellow sunlight.  Trilling quail, tromboning crows.  Snickering and whispering leaves.  Dank, dangerous, milky-eyed, shrewd, cacophonous, deep places; decayed, frank, fungal, crepitating, wet. 

            The wild things grow in the dark.  No, that’s an all-too-human, all-too-poetic conceit—still, it has a kind of rhythm.  “Where do the wild things grow?”

            “In the dark.”

            My description, give or take a few adjectives, could refer to two places I’ve been in my life.  One, the Salamander Forest down the road from my house, a deciduous copse where my dad taught me how to capture and distinguish the different types of amphibians. 

Two, a beach jungle in Costa Rica, where I went with a group of classmates.  The reason I haven’t talked about that trip yet is that I was trapped in the unfortunate reality of being seventeen, at the time.  It's my personal philosophy that we all have to endure being teenagers just so that our remaining years seem like hopscotch on Easy Street--but we don't have to talk about it at length.  

(And by the way, I've been to Easy Street.  It's somewhere near Yreka.)

Anyway, the jungle. The trees spread out to tangle with each other, and there was no trail.  The underbrush was dense and colorful, black and yellow and red.  Our Costa Rican guide, a grinning young man, led us on a wobbling, ducking path, making sure to stop and point out all the gigantic yellow spiders.  I kept my arms clutched to my sides, half-terrified that I’d step on a snake.  Sharing the space with so many different kinds of beings ignited a sense of claustrophobia that I never knew I possessed—we couldn’t have been in the jungle for more than ten minutes when I emerged, incredibly relieved, onto the scruffy sands next to the water.  

A large animal’s bones nestled nearby.

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            Ever since I mentioned Winnie the Pooh last week, A.A. Milne has been tugging at the edges of my mind.  I think the reason why (other than the fact that I love the idea of hephalumps and woozels), is that the Pooh stories make a point: we know from the beginning that Winnie, that bear of very little brain, is an invention, a childhood fantasy of a boy called Christopher Robin.  We know from the beginning that Winnie, Eeyore, and Tigger too are actually stuffed, cuddly toys in a nursery room—yet, as far as the boy and the story are concerned, they live in the Hundred Acre Wood.  Ignoring for the moment that the very phrase “Hundred Acre Wood” implies measurement and regulation, Winnie the Pooh is the most widely-known example I could find of a story where imagination—childhood fantasy—is directly linked to a forest.

            There’s a lot of power in that idea.

            I had a class in college called “Literature and the Environment.”  We were taught that our culture, historically, has had two basic attitudes to the nonhumans with which we share our planet.  One attitude is that of fear, or opposition—aka “Man must dominate Nature in order to survive”.  One of the texts we read to demonstrate this was the Ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which King Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu slay a forest’s guardian monster in order to cut down the trees. 

The second prevalent cultural attitude is of respect, or awe.  Ahhhh.  It goes something like this: “Man must bond with Nature in order to be complete.  Nature has much to teach Man, and much ability to inspire him.  Furthermore, Man is a creature of Nature, so the framing of them as mutually exclusive entities is totally bogus; and wtf, what about the women?”

Okay, give or take a few sentences in that description.  Anyway, we start seeing the attitude I’m talking about, in Western culture, at least, with Heraclitus, who said “You can’t step in the same river twice” (no, it wasn’t Disney’s Pocahontas).  We witness the revival of this viewpoint much later, with the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—like Wordsworth, who was transported to feats of grandiloquence by a daffodil (show-off).  Across the pond, the American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau started idealizing a simple, self-sufficient life in the woods; and Thoreau, at least, went on a rant about the inevitability of industrial pollution.

            As the world stands today, our species will benefit much more in the long run from the second attitude than from the first.  We’ve overtaxed the resources of our habitat to the point where a solution will have to involve a paradigm shift: we have to stop seeing nature as separate from humanity.  We have to recognize the fact that we’re biological organisms, and that we are no more evolved than, say, a lizard.  In fact, lizards don’t usually go around destroying the ecological web that supports their existence.  If being “evolved” means being well-adapted to your species’ particular niche, lizards are looking much better, long term, than us.

Taking this back to a literary level (anyone who rides the coffeeship knows I can't go for more than five minutes without thinking about books), I don’t like the word “setting”.  The setting of a novel, or any piece of narrative, is its location, its environs, its atmosphere--but what exactly "sets"?  And why does it have to set?  Why can’t it hoot and squeak and blossom and rain and run and eat people?  The very idea that humans go about their lives in a "setting", the only relevant actors being others of the dominant species, is a complete fabrication.  Whether we like it or not, we’re surrounded, and protected, nourished and provoked, by nonhuman lives.

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            I have a story coming out this weekend in a webmag called “Brain Harvest: An Almanac of Bad-Ass Speculative Fiction.”  Yup: awesomeness in nine words.  The story itself, appropriate for such spaz-tastic surroundings, is a bit surreal, a bit funky.  It’s called “A Little Wild Mustard.”  Maybe I was inspired to write it by the Costa Rican jungle, or the Salamander Forest. 

Then again, maybe it grew in the dark.