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A letter to Lupe Fiasco.
Dear Mr Fiasco (if that is your real name, and I know it isn’t),
We go back, man. Way back. We were pretty tight. We grew apart for a while there, I know; you took unnecessarily loud breaths between sentences, I got annoyed and ventured into the back-catalogues of other rappers. But we were tight, man.
I thought you were the new standard-bearer of intelligent rap. Humble, poetic, more into the music than the image. One time, I cried on the bus while listening to you on my iPod; yeah, sure, maybe that’s lame, but you touched me, dude. Touched me deep. I even got that mix-tape you did with that guy from Linkin Park. It wasn’t that bad, I guess, but the point is: I actually purchased something involving someone from Linkin Park. I didn’t even do that for Jay-Z, bro. Not even for Jay-Z. But I did it for you.
Remember when I saw you at the Metro a couple of years ago? Yeah, I know you kind of showboated a little bit, and yeah, you did mess up a couple of verses. And yeah, you took your shirt off, but you kept your sunglasses on. Indoors. At night. But that was alright: the crowd loved it, and you were charismatic, poised, and skilfully on point. That night stuck with me, man, and since then, whenever live hip hop came up as a topic of conversation, I’d point to you as a prime example of how to do it right.
So when exactly did you start smoking crack?
That’s the only reason I can come up with your performance at Big Day Out. You were pompous, erratic, bewildering and yeah, maybe even a little scary. What happened, man? You used to be cool.
Okay, fair enough, I missed the start of your set, so maybe I didn’t get the contextual set-up for the finale… But my first thought when I walked into the weird slow jamz session with you pelvic thrusting on stage was, “Wow, I didn’t know R. Kelly was here.”
Standing at the centre of the stage, nodding your head like, “Yeah, I’m awesome”, and generally just revelling in your own glory for extended periods of time does not count as a performance. Unless you’re Kanye West, I guess, but you’re not. And that’s what I liked about you, man. That you weren’t like Kanye, even though you dudes were old Chi-town friends or whatever.
And so it was kind of ironic that you decided to close with a song about the vapidity of the hip hop industry, a song I used to think you believed in. But dude, yelling the lyrics, and missing every second line does not make the song more poignant. It makes it annoying. And it kind of makes you a shitty rapper.
But that wasn’t the biggest problem. Oh no. The biggest problem was that you are now, in fact, insane. What the hell was up with all that squirming around on the floor shit? What was that? Seriously, what the hell was that? Why did you lay on the floor of the stage with your legs raised perpendicularly in the air, and keep the beat by knocking your feet together in a scissor-like fashion? I don’t understand, man. Only ODB could have ever gotten away with that shit. You’re not ODB, man, not by a long shot. And if you wanted to be OMG SO ZANY, you should have been honest with me from the start. I understand that performers change and grow, but… no. No. No no no no. How you gonna play me like that?
That’s it, bro. I’m done. This is a betrayal I can never forgive. I’m actually glad I didn’t get a ticket to the sideshow this time. I’m not even worried about you retiring anymore. Oh, and I’m definitely not buying your next album.
I might download it, maybe, but only because I’m the kind of person who enjoys pressing my bruises.
The X-Men vs Immanuel Kant.
You’re right: I haven’t produced new content in ages, so here’s a few unproof-read, uncited, pretty much unsubstantiated snippets from a very, very early draft of a huge paper I’m currently writing. It’s supposed to be a jurisprudential study of ethics and morality in comic books, but like I said to my lecturer in a moment of panic, “OMG, IT HAS LIKE, NO LAW IN IT!!!”
Apparently, that’s not such a big deal! And though I risk annihilating what little dignity I currently cling to, I have to say: this is the most fun I’ve ever had writing an essay.
Now, how do I turn this kind of wankery into a full-time job like these good folks?
[…]
Generally, superheroes can be seen as classically utilitarian: despite being violent, brutal and at times even criminal, arguably even their most immoral actions can be substantiated as being for the greater good. That the theme of outlawed superheroes continuing their crusades against evil, despite being vilified as wicked themselves, recurs across comics of different eras, genres and publishers underlines the fact that for superheroes and morality, the ends generally justifies the means.
Moreover, the worlds presented within comics tend to be imbued with an acutely-developed sense of rights and wrongs, of good and evil, and — perhaps most importantly — an ever-pervasive sense of justice. It is for this reason that the most resonant stories present an injustice — ethical, if not legal, in nature.
Take, for example, the character of Charles Xavier from Marvel’s X-Men series. As the founder of a school for young mutants, Professor X has traditionally been presented in canon as having a deeply-ingrained deontological ethical stratagem: for Charles, the ends never justify the means. In building an elite task-force of mutants to promote inter-human relations and the general welfare of the world, Charles has generally been fundamentally opposed to killing and the use of excessive force, and treats his capacity as a telepath with supposed ethical acuity. That’s not to suggest that he shies away from conflict; rather, he grapples with these opportunities to denigrate immorality. His teaching methods are founded upon the desire to propagate moral absolutism as an ideology. […]
Charles […] arguably becomes a more compelling character when his dealings in morally ambiguous areas come to the fore. Eventually, his deontological facade gives way to an unmistakeably utilitarian core, and this is presented as a kind of fall from grace. […]
His actions in themselves are not necessarily wicked — in erasing others’ painful memories, in using his power to fetter the undeveloped powers of others, in lying and falsifying, his intention to do good is ever-pervasive. However, it his deception in hiding these actions that gives rise to a duality of character, which seems inherently wrong — even evil: Charles has treated the people around him as a means to an ends, and not as ends in themselves. Though his actions may not constitute wrongdoing when seen through the filter of consequential ethics, his downfall — or wickedness — is compounded because of his misleading self-representations of moral absolutism.
With his mind rebuilt and the majority of his memories lost after a near-death experience, Charles is forced to reflect on his ethical practice. […]
Clearly, Xavier has become a utilitarian, and for fans of the series, it comes as a strange kind of tragic loss. Indeed, in the Legacy storyline, Scott Summers’ initial reluctance to allow Xavier a modicum of trust stems from this duality of the character: Summers can no longer act in reliance of Charles’ representations, and his motivations and justifications cannot be substantiated from Summers’ perspective, which is paradoxically a deonotological one acquired through habituation at Xavier’s school. (As a side-note, fuck Scott Summers.)
[…]
No, the fuck Scott Summers part didn’t stay in the essay… THOUGH IT SHOULD.
Procrastinators, take note! (If not now, maybe later…)
I find it particularly difficult to engage with self-help guides. I blame my year 12 English teacher for making us study You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation as a core text (more like bore text, amirite?), and also the subliminal connection I draw between Dr Phil and wasting endless days of unemployment at home in front of the TV. To me, self-help has always seemed the most bourgeois form of pop psychology: stripped bare of any real root in science, and watered-down to make us all feel a little bit better about being shit at living effectively.
Yeah, it hurt falling off that high horse, but boy, did it hurt good. Rob Hanly’s ADDUCATION: Living the ADD Lifestyle is self-help at its best: motivational, not pretentious, and full of tips that are actually practicable and allow you to, y’know, help yourself. Hanly describes the site as “the first education resource for mature ADD people who choose to improve their life.” But there’s more to it: chronic procrastinators (who don’t necessarily have ADD) like me will find a new perspective on time-management and self-control, particularly on how to turn flashes of inspiration into reality.
I’m far from running out and booking myself into a Tony Robbins seminar (seriously, would that guy just please gtfo?), but now I’m fairly confident I won’t find myself playing SPORE when I should be doing something productive.
Maybe.
What is waiting for me on the other side of exams?
KILLER FUCKIN’ COCKROACHES.
Vertigo’s The Exterminators has issued its final tradie in a 30-issue series. After waiting nearly two years to close this story, I’m saving it as my post-exam reward.
I’m not sure how I feel about this final cover by Tony Moore; it feels a little too rendered, and not entirely representative of some of his more amazing pieces. But how could I not love a guy who lists his hobbies as “watching horror movies, getting fat, sleeping, and “maintaining” this crappy website”? We have way too much in common.
In other awesome news, apparently the production team behind Dexter, the show about a serial killer with a heart of gold, is going to bring The Exterminators to the small screen. Like the comic, the television series will “revolve around the Bug-Be-Gone crew, an extended dysfunctional family of exterminators whose greatest enemies aren’t the insects and rodents they meet and kill on a daily basis but rather their own self doubts, vices and inner demons.”
I’m pretty sure that there is no possible way this combination will be anything less than radical, but I can’t help but wonder if this blurb means that the show won’t incorporate the book’s more wildly sci-fi/fantasy tangents. It would definitely be a neater, tighter story better-suited to television without the weirder elements; the grimy depiction of the depths of the human condition set against the death throes of urban living would make for compelling viewing. Indeed, the storyline’s heavy reliance on the occult has the potential to translate into a ridiculously cheesy TV show — although without it, it just won’t be the same. But I should probably reserve judgement ‘til I get my grubby little hands on the final bit of the story.
“Tired of Washington.” There’s a sly hipster syncopation to his cadence, “Been stuck there for a while.” But the folksiness pretty much disappears when he starts answering questions. Obama’s actual speaking style is quietly conversational, low in rhetoric-saturated fat; there is no harrumph to him.”
Procrastibation.
Now that the assessable component of this blog is over, I’ll be frank about what has been consuming a large hunk of my time over the past few weeks: GIANT PENIS MONSTERS.
No, it’s not some Freudian fantasy gone horribly awry (or horribly right, depending on how gross you are); it’s SPORE, Maxis Software’s latest successful effort at destroying my soul.
SPORE is like Age of Empires meets The Sims: it’s utter shit, but totally addictive. The game’s Wikipedia entry describes it as “a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse”, but it’s best summed up as a complete waste of time. You begin the game as a single-cell organism, swimming ‘round the evolutionary sludge, chomping down lesser organisms and earning tokens and points that allow you to evolve into some ungodly freak of nature in the user-controlled Creature Creator. The next thing you know, it’s seven hours later: you’re sweaty, confused but strangely satisfied, and you’ve evolved your species into a space-faring civilisation.
Putting aside the ability to create phallus-monsters and other awesome opportunities to let your inner child wreak havoc, SPORE is appealing because of its choose-your-own-adventure style of gameplay. Each seemingly insignificant decision dramatically changes the available outcomes of the game. For example, if you choose to be a carnivore in the primordial ooze stage, it will affect what you can evolve into in the creature stage, which in turn affects available options in the subsequent tribal and civilisation stages. This presents seemingly limitless storylines and optimum replayability.
Funnily enough, this is also what makes the game mind-numbingly boring. With no real sense of cathartic completion and with its cutesy graphics, SPORE remains a game better suited to ten-year-olds. Maxis has cleverly attempted to overcome this by creating a complex playable online universe into which hardcore SPORE players can transpose their own creations, but I’m not pathetic enough to have ventured that far. Yet.
I don’t know what it is about repetitive and menial open-ended gameplay that gets my motor running. Maybe somewhere in my psyche, I have a buried Messiah complex that fills me with the urgent desire to make entire species bend to my will, and it’s best exercised only in the virtual world. Or maybe I just like wasting time. Either way, Maxis has definitely perfected the formula for the never-ending game: with an expansion pack already due for release this November, they’re making massive coin out of procrastibators like me.
But with over 41 million user-created entries in the SPOREpedia, it’s at least a tiny iota of comfort to know that I’m not the only idiot wasting my time.
One of the only times “Oh, snap!” is a tolerable reaction.
Remember Emma Frost in Grant Morrison’s run on the New X-Men? Before she turned soft and somehow fell for the foppish, whinging bag of snot that is Cyclops? Remember? When she was awesome?
Image scanned by me, because yes, I am that lame. From Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s E is for Extinction.
Because I don’t know how I ever forgot. Flipping through the newly-released collated omnibus of this series at the book shop (because I’m on a budget, okay?), I realised that Morrison’s run on the New X-Men was one of the first comic books I ever read in earnest. Through the nostalgia, I remembered that Emma Frost was a cornerstone for the beginnings of my fascination: a smart, “sexy”, multi-dimensional female character who used humour to mask her overriding desire for self-preservation and who could figuratively and physically throw punches with the toughest dudes. Plus, she could turn into diamond — awesome.
Double extra cheese.
Tits & Guns by flood. Image courtesy of Jeremy Prondoso.
IS IT PORN, or is it art? The age-old question is one that you should be afraid to bring up around feminists and/or skeevy old dudes, but I’ve always thought it was simple: it’s just porn. But flood’s installation at the second stage launch of Extra Cheeese showed that even gross old porn can be part of art, too.
You might remember me blogging about it when it was in the planning stages, and now the Extra Cheeese collective’s second foray into the world of recycling rubbish into art has been and gone. It showcased some of Australia’s most exciting artists, and with contributions from Eamo, Minigraff, Apeseven, Beastman and Kareena Zerefos, flood’s artfully arranged stack of old lady porn magazines wasn’t the only thing getting punters at Redfern’s Medium Rare Gallery a little hot under the collar.
And as the some 400-strong crowd at the exhibition’s opening night will tell you, cornering artists and designers with such a challenging limit to their creativity creates some interesting results. Katherine White’s clever reuse of spent Polaroid film cartridges in her monochromatic installation Expired created a ghostly, ethereal piece which jolted the viewer into an immediate sense of nostalgia. On the other side of the spectrum (and indeed, the other side of the room), James Jirat Patradoon’s piece Untitled suspended in midair a child’s gridiron helmet in a frenzy of surreal, hypercoloured comic book-style fantasy. Meanwhile, Daryl Prondoso and Nic Warnock’s mixed media collaborative effort FOAD brought misappropriated (and inappropriate) cross-stitch to the table: what would your granny think if you embroidered ‘Fuck off and die’ over her favourite cross-stitch panel?
And it’s exactly this kind of culture clash that makes Extra Cheeese such an interesting artistic exercise. It blends the old with the new, the high with the low, and harnesses creative ability into thinking outside the box. Even if the box in question is just full of old porn magazines.
You can see more images from the night in this gallery by Nathalie Sun.
