A Minor Trepidation About ConFusion
As it turns out, ConFusion will be the first convention I’ve appeared at in two years. Didn’t plan it that way; I’d intended to go to ConFusion last year but then medical issues kept me down, and the Geeky Kink Event in New England was shunted by an emergency with our goddaughter Rebecca.
I’m a little nervous.
Which is to say I’m socially anxious at the best of times, and always have a tinge of Impostor Syndrome whenever I show up at a con as A Writer, and this is the last major step in returning to my life after last year’s triple-bypass. After I do this, that’s finalizing the checklist of doing everything I did pre-heart attack (today’s the day after the anniversary of the surgery), and for some reason that makes me tremble. I have the feeling things will go terribly wrong – not because I can think of any reason, but because it feels like the horrid year of 2013 needs to take one final shot.
So if you see me, and you are so inclined, say hi. Don’t assume I’m too cool for school; I am, apparently, quite good at faking looking way social when I’m not. I’m looking forward to seeing you all, even as my brainweasels are telling me that you’ve all forgotten about me entirely. So if you feel kind enough to be kind to a guy who’s a little kinked-up inside, it’d be a goodness in the universe.
I might even buy you a beer. I do that on occasion.
(For the record, I do try to pay it back – if you’re ever at a con where I know people, feel free to follow me about. I’ll introduce you as best I know how.)
A Brief Thought On Monotony
My friend Indigo took offense when I said that “Slavery is monotonous.” So let me clarify:
Poverty is monotonous.
Never being allowed to change is monotonous.
Waiting around for someone else to do something to do you is monotonous.
Doing the same thing over and over when you get no satisfaction from it is monotonous.
The effect of most evil is monotony.
You know what’s not monotonous? Getting to make your own choices, moving up or down in society as you please, deciding on your own reward systems. Those are all awesome.
They’re also the first thing to get taken away when you’re in the underclass. The folks in charge don’t want you to feel like you have power. They don’t want you to feel like your decisions matter. And so they do that thing of removing all the relevant decisions from your hands, endlessly forcing you to ask someone else for permission, making you check in repeatedly for trivial stuff because they want you to feel like your day is nothing but a series of boring decisions.
If you fight back, you get a very exciting and brief period where they beat the shit out of you and maybe kill you and maybe hurt your family to boot. So you opt for the not-so-exciting path, which involves you checking in for a series of humanity-whittling checklists until they decide you’re too much trouble. Sometimes they shovel you and all your kind into an oven. Most of the time they just sort of throw your wrung body out with the trash.
Slavery was all sorts of horrid awfulness, with beatings and rapes and mothers being sold from their children and a million other indignities. But let us not forget that a lot of slavery was labor. Repetitive, unskilled labor. Going out to the fields, coming back again. Putting a thousand nails in wood for a house that won’t benefit you. Sweeping floors and beating rugs and washing nice clothes that you’ll never get to wear.
Their masters got to sip mint juleps and go hunting and choose fancy clothes. The slaves got all the work that nobody else wanted to do.
That is monotonous. It’s hard to tell a story about that soul-eroding sameness without becoming boring, so Hollywood usually doesn’t try. And it’s hard to explain that yeah, the whippings and the lynchings were the epitome of evil, but what was also bad was how millions of obedient slaves did the same thing day in and day out, dying inside because this was the same damn field they were in yesterday, and the same field they’ll be in tomorrow, and they’ll be in this field every year for as long as their legs hold out until they die and get buried twenty yards away from this field. Their future was their today was their yesterday, and if their dreams died enough then that was their best-case scenario.
That’s monotony.
That’s also evil.
Do not discount it.
Why I Don't Think "12 Years A Slave" Will Win Best Picture
I’ll say this with the caveat that I could be wrong, in that anyone who predicts an Oscar win could always be wrong. But 12 Years A Slave is on the rise right now, since it won the Golden Globe and now is officially on the Oscar list.
The problem is, 12 Years A Slave is kind of like Brokeback Mountain in that it’s a movie you feel like you should like. It’s got a great actor, deals with a Very Serious Issue, and is depressing as all hell.
The problem is that it’s depressing as all hell. And honestly, I don’t think it’s that great a movie. The acting is top-notch (which I always give a nod to the director for evoking in his/her actors), but the actual directing itself is kind of like a TV movie – competent, but not compelling. The pacing is endless, and aside from one absolutely brilliant narrative trick (for which I’d give the nod more to the screenplay than the director), the movie drags.
Which, some will argue, is the point. Slavery is monotonous. And I’d agree with you, but so were tours of duty in Vietnam, and most of those films manage to be entertaining regardless.
The thing about 12 Years A Slave is that there’s Oscar-depressing, and there’s depressing depressing. Schindler’s List is Oscar-depressing, in the sense that there’s a lot of misery, but the ending is uplifting. 12 Years A Slave is absolutely and rigidly monotone – there’s no uplifting anywhere to be found, it’s just two solid hours of brief hope and horrible downers and human wreckage. The emotional line of it is “Wow, slavery is terrible.”
Which slavery is, and that’s well-displayed here, and perhaps even the point of the movie… but that doesn’t make this pleasant. I think, like Brokeback, people nominated it for quality, but Oscars win for love. Maybe a misplaced and transitory love, like Crash was. But there needs to be a certain affection to win, and I think 12 Years A Slave is like kale in that you should eat it, and it’s worthy to eat, but nobody’s loving it.
(Cue the kale-lovers. You are legion, my friends.)
And yes, 12 Years A Slave won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, but against some weird competition: Captain Philips, Gravity, Philomena, and Rush. No American Hustle, no Wolf on Wall Street. I think with the vote split Oscar-style, 12 Years will be another upset.
(Cue me saying I wish we knew the votes on Oscar movies so we could see how close Brokeback came to winning. Cue me demanding the usual Best Stunt Work category, which is not at all related to this but dammit the stunt people deserve an Oscar. Cue this fascinating article on 5 reasons stunt work is harder than you’d think.)
Slavery films are tough, man. People have noted that there have been a billion films on the Holocaust, and only a handful of films on slavery (and I’d argue the best is still Roots, flawed though that is). They take this as evidence that Hollywood is pro-Jew and anti-Black. And there may be some truth in that, but I think the core reason is a lot simpler: it’s harder to make a film that people want to watch where the villain is us.
I could be wrong. It’d be nice if it won. But my money would be on Gravity or American Hustle. I’ll let you know when I see American Hustle.
Are You Born Polyamorous?
Someone asked me whether people are born innately polyamorous, or whether people can change from monogamous inclinations to become poly. And my answer is simple:
It depends on the person.
I think some people are polyamorous, and some people aren’t. And some people think they are one way, until they discover the right set of circumstances, and then they aren’t.
So I don’t think there’s some training regimen that will make everyone gay or poly or whatnot – I think some people will never be, some people will never be anything but, and a lot of people could go one way or the other depending on where they are at the moment and what’s deemed acceptable by their neighbors.
As always, the best way to find out is to ask this individual human you’re dealing with. And to pay attention to how they react to things. If you’re lucky, maybe you’re the sort of person who makes them feel amenable to your style of -amory or -exuality.
Or maybe you’re not. In which case, move on.
Movie Reviews: Man of Steel, The Conjuring, The Purge, We're The Millers
I’m feeling rather strung out and fragile today, but I have been watching a lot of movies thanks to my flu. And RedBox. When you need to watch a bunch of crappy movies right away, RedBox is my drug of choice.
Man Of Steel
I like the pitch of the movie, and I like the way the movie did it, but I don’t like the movie.
No, it is too much, lemme sum up.
The pitch of the movie was, “What if we forgot the Superman legacy at all, and just treated it like a First Contact film where the aliens could all knock over cities?” And from that perspective, Man of Steel is actually pretty insanely great. I love the way Zac Snyder said, “No slo-mo – everything happens at Kryptonian speed” so that we could sense the terrifying blur of super-powered fighting. I loved the disaster porn. I loved the battle sequences.
But as a Superman film, it didn’t satisfy me.
The problem is that the movie pretends to be about humanity, but humanity is either absent or dickish. If we take Lois out of the equation, humans are a bunch of narrow-minded thugs who should be hurled into the sun at the first available opportunity. And then they die in record numbers, as basically when you see Metropolis collapsing there’s been no warning bell, just buildings toppling over. It’s clear (even if not shown) that millions are dying.
And Superman’s not really concerned about them. That’s grim and gritty, yes – he’s got Kryptonians on his gail – but it also removes a main modus operandi of Superman, which is that he’s really deepy concerned about the ordinary guy. The movie makes stabs at that characterization, but we don’t see anyone we can root for (except arguably Lois and definitely the army guy with the knife), leaving it in this weird botch where the only humans Superman meets are ingrateful dicks, they’re dying in record numbers, and Superman’s only concerned about this small group of three people near the end.
As a first contact movie? Sure. But Superman’s big S carries a little heft to it, and while I’m fine with interpretations, this one didn’t gel for me. To me, this felt like a novel that needed one or two more drafts – a few positive interactions with humans to show us why Kal-El treasured people, a few attempts to save people in mid-fight before realizing that, sadly, the best tactic was to let Metropolis crash until he could get rid of the Kryptonians.
It was a better movie than I thought it would be. But the message was muddled, and I don’t know if Kal-El is anyone worth contrasting to Batman at this point.
The Conjuring
I usually don’t like horror movies because most horror movies suck.
Which is not to say this is different from most other movies – most dramas suck, most action movies suck, most comedies suck – but when horror movies suck, they suck in a way that sickens me. When you treat people like walking blood bags to be popped, it makes it seem like slaughtering people is somehow a good or entertaining thing. Which isn’t to say that there’s not a pleasure in watching awful things happen, but the sadistic bent of creating poorly-made characters only to saw their limbs off is a failure mode I’m not entertained by.
The Conjuring, however, is a nice change-of-pace. It’s a very slow movie to start – basically, the first half an hour is establishing a pretty normal family doing the normal family stuff of moving into a house. There’s no real Character-Establishing Moment, but rather a nice series of small interactions that makes you feel like hey, these guys are affable neighbors, complete with very realistic-feeling kids and parents.
Then creepy stuff starts happening. This isn’t gore-porn – it’s the kind of reality-twister stuff popularized by The Ring, and when the scares come they’re far between and very memorable. It’s the kind of film that’s not afraid to set up normality so when the world spins off its axis, we do feel terror – not squick, an entirely separate emotion, but the terror that we thought we knew the rules and holy crap we do not.
It’s a little film of modest scope, and maybe it’s a small ballpark, but goddamn if it doesn’t hit a home run.
The Purge
The Purge, on the other hand, is the bad kind of horror movie. It has a killer concept: once a year, for twelve hours, you can commit whatever crime you want. This cathartic killing (and implied culling of the poor) allows America to be strong the rest of the year.
Realistic? No. First thing people would do would be to say, “Well, if you kill your boss you’re fired,” and social implications would be back again. And as Gini pointed out, it’s not like the “You splurge once a month!” diet works for most people in real life.
Still, there’s a compelling core here of what happens to “normal” people when they’re expected to be placed in a life-or-death situation once a year, and all the issues of class and race and family fractures, and… The Purge doesn’t really know what to do with all of that. It swings wildly, coming close to making a statement on, say, how we treat the homeless, but then doesn’t punctuate it. People have urges to kill almost at random, without conceptualizing the aftereffects (“I want my girlfriend’s dad to approve of our marriage, so I’ll shoot him dead in front of her! That will win her heart!”), and then slaughter out of random greed.
What we wind up with is a disjointed Die Hard where we’re rooting for nobody in particular. This is the kind of movie I favor remakes for; George Romero in his prime would have served this rich meat up in wondrous ways. Surely there’s someone better suited.
We’re The Millers
It’s a reasonably funny comedy, but comedy is kind of easy to do. It’s easy to have funny moments, as Despicable Me 2 did. What’s hard is doing the business of hooking those funny moments up to a plot that people care about.
And We’re The Millers is like a predatory plot, feeding on our deep-seated needs. Are we shown four loners who can’t function in life? Well, if we throw these arbitrary personalities into a box, we want a family. We need a family. We crave seeing them come together to become a unit. And I don’t know where that desire springs from, if it’s genetic or something in American culture or just our own internal loneliness leads us to crave family structures… but We’re The Millers knows this is what we crave, and shoves us in that direction where the fake family becomes the real family, and that provides a depth to what would otherwise be a pretty disjointed comedy.
This is the movie where I finally got some overdue respect for Jennifer Aniston. I didn’t like Friends all that much (which is ironic, considering Friends has all the same flaws that now plague How I Met Your Mother), and her prissy tabloid portrayals in the wake of Brad Pitt haven’t helped. But after seeing her in Horrible Bosses and now this, I have to admit she not only has some damn fine comedy chops, but a willingness to go with whatever works to make the scene work. It’s the Barry Manilow moment where I may not always like the end result, but I gotta respect the ethic of the guy making it.
There Is No Okay In Poly
My wife and I have been happily polyamorous for over seven years now. She’s the light of my life – my “primary,” if you will – and we have tons of rules and regulations that we’ve adopted to make our relationships run smoothly.
So people email us to ask: “Hey, how do you do poly? We want to know how to do it right.”
And I ask, “So if you liked the way I dressed, would you put on my clothes?”
Of course you wouldn’t. Chances that my pants would fit you would be – well, the opposite of slim, as I’m a pudgy dude. My shirt would probably be wrong for your body type, and the bright colors might make your skin tone look sallow. My hat, so carefully chosen because I have a face like a waterfall of chins, would probably dwarf your features.
By the time we finished squeezing my boots onto you, you’d look ridiculous in an outfit that made me look dapper.
No. What you’d be better served doing is asking the hard questions of, “What about my clothing appeals to you? What tricks from my dress can we steal to adopt to your body type?” And then go from there to design an outfit that’s not going to bind you in the crotch.
Polyamory is not off-the-rack.
It is bespoke.
Look, the agreements I’ve come to with my wife have all been hand-crafted, often asymmetrical, in order to patch over the weaknesses that we have as unique people. I would never tell you that these are necessary. They’re only necessary to us.
Everything about our poly is addressing some issue that we have. Is she my primary? That’s because we’re married, and divorce is off the table, and though we do our best to not stonewall people, we feel it’s only honest to acknowledge that if there’s an emergency then we may need to pull back to focus on us. (Hasn’t happened since we started, but you never know.)
Do we have rules for who I can date? We do, but that’s because I tend to fall in love before questioning compatibility, and I’ve plunged head-first into dating women who were ultimately pretty bad for not just us, but me.
Do we have limits on how many people we can date simultaneously? We don’t, but that’s because making people feel valued in a short span of time is a strength of who we are.
All those things you see us doing? We’re doing them because they benefit us, not because there’s some sort of objective path. There’s plenty of poly relationships that have no need for a primary model, or a hierarchy at all. There’s plenty of well-balanced poly people who don’t clear their relationships with other people. There’s plenty of good poly relationships who have limits on how many people they can date before their dance card becomes full-up.
Now, in programming, there’s what’s known as “bad code smells” – coding patterns that generally indicate that someone hasn’t thought it through, indicating a design that’s going to cause problems at some point further in the process. And there are those in poly – I’m deeply suspicious of the one-penis policy, for example, as most of those relationships I’ve witnessed have been selfish men telling their partners how “free” they are to do whatever they want.
But there are doubtlessly some one-penis poly relationships that work wonderfully. Just as there are “bad code smells” that, when investigated, turn out to be the best solution for this edge case.
There’s no objectivity here. There’s only what fits your needs.
Now, if you’re asking me how I do poly because you have a similar dynamic and think you can steal a few techniques, then by God I support that. Or if you’re asking because you’re exploring the universe of options available to you, seeing what feels comfortable and what feels wrong, then hells yeah, bring the noise. Or if you’re asking because something’s changed in your relationship and you’re trying to figure out what alterations you need to make to your agreements in order to feel comfortable, fire away.
But stop asking me, “Is this okay?” There is no okay in poly. There’s only what you and your partners are comfortable with. Maybe you select something off the rack at first, but the end goal is to not emulate some other happy couple, but to become one yourself.
This is all custom-fit. Try a lot of stuff on. Look around the shop. Get some alterations, walk around the shop doing the New Shoe Shuffle.
Ultimately, it’s your body. Maybe this looks good on me. But if it doesn’t fit you, it’s useless.