Mark your calendars...

...because Armadillocon 30 is a mere 10 months away. And with this guest lineup, you won't want to miss it. I know I won't.



Just in case you've been under a rock for the past 40 or so years, here's the rundown... on second thought, never mind. Rather than invest precious time writing up bios about these folks, I'll just link to their websites and/or blogs, which will empower you good readers to educate yourselves.

John Scalzi
Dean Morrissey
Kelly Persons (sorry, but I couldn't find anything other than the scads of cons she's worked on)
Bill Crider
Joe & Gay Haldeman

There. That should distract you from work for a few minutes.

Management Secrets of KUBARK

In the "why am I not surprised?" department, comes this off the front page of today's NYT:

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations
By Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen
Published: October 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

***

I look forward to the appearance of the original document in glorious PDF. If you haven't read them, the previously released (and apparently kinder gentler) memos are masterpieces of invisible literature for the new century.



My favorite highlight when I first read this was Rummy's hand-written annotation of his approval in the winter of 2002 of new "Counter-Resistance Techniques": "Approved -- However, I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours? D.R." Nothing like a little dry wit, SECDEF style, to lighten up those lawyer memos.

Now, if you really want to go deep in on this stuff, you need to read the KUBARK Manual of Counterintelligence Interrogation, which may qualify as the Necronomicon of the Episcopal Inquistion. Written in 1963, declassified in 1997, reportedly still used as a core source by the illuminated. My personal favorite on this menu:



'Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd

'If there is reason to suspect that a withholding source possesses useful counterintelligence information but has not had access to the upper reaches of the target organizations, the policy and command level, continued questioning about lofty topics that the source knows nothing about may pave the way for the extraction of information at lower levels. The interrogatee is asked about KGB policy, for example: the relation of the service to its government, its liaison arrangements, etc., etc. His complaints that he knows nothing of such matters are met by flat insistence that he does know, he would have to know, that even the most stupid men in his position know. Communist interrogators who used this tactic against American POW's coupled it with punishment for "don't know" responses -- typically by forcing the prisoner to stand at attention until he gave some positive response. After the process had been continued long enough, the source was asked a question to which he did know the answer. Numbers of Americans have mentioned "...the tremendous feeling of relief you get when he finally asks you something you can answer." One said, "I know it seems strange now, but I was positively grateful to them when they switched to a topic I knew something about."'



New book pitch: A pop management tome for neighborhood chains and airport racks -- a book applying CIA interrogation and psychological warfare techniques to everyday white collar office environments. "Management Secrets of KUBARK."

Secrets of the Goatlab

Last year in my Christmas story about the Noriega Playlist, I mentioned English documentarist Jon Ronson's amazing book The Men Who Stare at Goats, about the contemporary history of paranormal and psychological warfare in the US military, from the spoon-bending New Age underpinnings of the "Be All You Can Be" Army campaign of my adolescence through the punishing blasts of Barney and Metallica in shipping containers converted into makeshift interrogation facilities at impromptu bases in far Anbar and Bagram.

Now, courtesy of the outstanding Daydreamthief, here's Channel 4's full television documentary version of same. Absolutely, mind-blowingly, un-fucking believable.



Like a cross between the X-Files and 24, with a healthy dose of Soldier of Fortune magazine, starring the cast of Monty Python, and filmed by Christopher Guest. Except it's all true.

As in, watch current Special Forces soldiers try to use telepathy to stop the hearts of goats.

Mandatory viewing for postmodern cultural literacy.

P.S. - Speaking of Daydreamthief, check out his wonderful riff on the echoes of Count Zero in the minions of Erik Prince.

I guess that's why, this morning, I can't get that tune from Before and After Science out of my head. It would make a great C-SPAN duet to be sung by Henry Waxman and the Veep, don't you think?:

"Blackwater!
There were six of us but now we are five
We're all talking
To keep the conversation alive
There was a senator from Ecuador
Who talked about a meteor
That crashed on a hill in the south of Peru
And was found by a conquistador
Who took it to the Emperor
And he passed it on to a Turkish Guru...

"His daughter
Was slated for becoming divine
He taught her,
He taught her how to split and define
But if you study the logistics
And heuristics of the mystics
You will find that their minds rarely move in a line
So it's much more realistic
To abandon such ballistics
And resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine."

Perhaps they could use that in the made-for-TV movie.

Guess I need to break out the vinyl tonight...

Long live the new flesh?

Pic: Videodrome (1983): Sleazy UHF broadcaster Max Renn (James Woods) finds himself recast in the pirate snuff channel of his waking nightmares.

Via Ballardian, a great Washington Post interview with David Cronenberg that explores the director's prescient knack for spelunking the dark, not-so-subliminal intersections of sex and violence lurking in our mediascape:

<<<[I]n "Eastern Promises," Cronenberg emphasizes the onus of severing a human throat -- an idea that occurred to him after watching a terrorist beheading video. The would-be assassin in Cronenberg's movie is "not very experienced at this," he explains. He discovers the human body is "a complex thing with sinews, muscles and tendons. It resists destruction to the last drop of blood. So it's not a nice clean cut. It's messy and horrifying for him -- and us."

...Cronenberg says he has not watched the grisly "Saw" or "Hostel" films, which he describes as nothing more than "torture movies" -- a theme he explored in his 1983 film, "Videodrome," in which a sleazy cable television owner (James Woods) broadcasts a pirated video of torture and mutilation, only to discover the violence on it is not staged. Cronenberg's work is different, in that instead of shock for shock's value, he's using the form subversively against itself, to promote nonviolence.

...The filmmaker is "unafraid of intimacy with violence and sex," says Holly Hunter, who played one of the characters in "Crash." "He takes you on the inside track of it, which is nothing to do with slickness or glamour, and it can actually be quite blasphemous and macabre. . . . There's a coolness to David's movies -- cool in temperature, I mean -- and in that way, they're not pornographic or thrill-seeking."

Told of Hunter's comment, Cronenberg responds: "I think people are curious, drawn, attracted, repelled and afraid, all at the same time, about violence, and they're right. There's an eroticism involved, certainly in 'Crash,' and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on. It was pretty obvious to me, though [the terrorists] would be in total denial about that. There are strange, perverse elements to violence.">>>


Pic: The auteur theory of the mujahideen hostage video? Still from the Alan Berg beheading (2004).

Eastern Promises is much more digestible fare than Videodrome or Crash, but a perfectly constructed thriller with subtle, lingering power. Now, imagine Cronenberg marrying these two threads of his work to explore the dark territories of the GWOT...

Postmodern Pulp Action!

The new McSweeney's 24 smells like cordite, having been assembled while fighting off the hordes of Comanches attacking the city. Perfect reading for that bar in Tenerife.

Having spent a good bit of time this year pondering what a proper Blackwater-infused slipstream might look like, imagine my pleasure at opening this placid blue cover and having it explode in my face like a surprise present from the Unabomber of the subconscious, with this perfect story by soldier/author Christopher Howard, "How to Make Millions in the Oil Market," a hyper-kinetic daydream that reads like Tom Bissell covering Generation Kill:

>>>

"They took a corner and a white Nissan pickup backed in front of them and stalled. The middle-aged Iraqi inside swatted the steering wheel in frustration.

Not another one of these idiots, Gerrera said. He braked. He considered the pickup and shook his head. What folly these primitives be up to. He'd give the pickup a few moments to restart before backing up and pulling around. Traffic had grown geometrically worse over the months since the official war ended.

You know what this place reminds me of, Duane? Gerrera said. That desert planet in that Star Wars movie of yours. Tattoo.

Tattooine, Wilson corrected him. Come correct or don't come at all.

He remembered watching the trilogy over three consecutive nights with Dana after the girls had been put to bed.

The smoke trail of an RPG lanced across the hood.

The driver's side window disappeared. Gerrera jammed his hand against his neck like slapping a mosquito. He stomped the accelerator. Wilson heard someone firing full-auto bursts, but the scenery was a blur. The Land Rover surged, smashing the corner of the pickup, sending it spinning. They teetered drunkenly as Gerrera lost control. The hood crumpled against ancient brick. Rainbow-shimmering CDs exploded across the interior.

There was a deep stillness as if the whole world was stunned.

A rifle bullet came through the windshield cleanly and slapped Gerrera's skull."

<<<

The other stories in the first half of the issue all share some kind of repurposing of men's adventure tropes, and the three I've read thus far are beautiful. The other half (literally, due to some ingenious kind of double binding) is devoted to the very worthy task of rectifying the insufficient attention given to Donald Barthelme.

The editorial note explains that the issue number -- 24 -- got them thinking of Kiefer Sutherland from their perch over Valencia Street "...and then all yelling 'Ah-ha!' at once and tumbling down, thousands of feet, executing perfect tuck-dives into pools of bright clear water?"

I anxiously await the upcoming Wholphin, which I am told will bookend this issue's Russian "Married with Children" with a lost episode of "24" ghost-written by Barthelme's ghost.

Go buy one now while supplies last!

Anthems for the earnest?

Week before last I had the good fortune to accompany a friend to the new and improved theatrical production of GET YOUR WAR ON by Austin's own Rude Mechanicals, back in town from taking the show on the road after a national tour and a well-received participation in Edinburg Fringe. First-rate smart-ass agitprop that gets away with shooting easy targets on the raw strength of its comedic insight. I was convulsed in even more intense paroxysms of laughter than when the production first appeared two winters ago. There may still be time to catch this iteration if you are anywhere near Espoo, Finland.



The play is an adaptation of the brilliant Internet comic by David Rees. In otherwords, a cover. Of a cartoon. An Internet cartoon, comprised of clip art and word balloons. What better minimalist foundation for budget-conscious indie theater than these three panel haikus that capture the feeling of American life for thinking working people during this grey collar apocalypse better than anything else out there?

The play also features a kind of cover, a playback within the play, of the David Bowie song "Life on Mars?" A song which, I suspect, was thrust into the consciousness of the cultural cogniscenti when Wes Anderson ingeniously got Brazilian Seu Jorge to do an acoustic Portuguese language cover of it (and an album's worth of other vintage '70s Bowie) for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou -- not just for the soundtrack, but as a character, a member of the ship's Calypso-like crew, playing the songs as part of the actual filmic setting, on the deck and the dock. In a movie which, as it happens, was basically a cover of a 1970s Jacques Cousteau documentary, as reinvented by a guy who grew up watching those undersea adventures in the forgotten world before cable (and uses the opportunity to add some of the elements his 12-year-old self would have wanted -- guns, pirate raids, topless French chicks, and so on).

"Life on Mars?" is also covered on this summer's release from The Bad Plus, Prog (along with Rush's "Tom Sawyer," Burt Bachrach's "This Guy's In Love," and Tears for Fears "Everybody Wants to Rule the World"). The trio's prior album, Suspicious Activity?, featured, as it happens, a cover by David Rees lifted straight from Get Your War On.



Looking at this very small sampling of recent cultural consumption of artistic product by like-minded members of a common generation, one might observe that it seems excessively reliant on the incorporation of winking references to pop culture of the 1970s and environs. You know, how much irony can you beer bong into your brain before the intellectual hangover finally hits? (I can relate, having committed such culture crimes in my own work as incorporating excessive references to bad 70s television into short stories that try to rework men's adventure tropes in service of political satire.)

At Do the Math, all three voices of The Bad Plus did an outstanding job of answering that question last week, in a short essay that addresses the issue in the context of their own work, but in a line of argument that I think would apply to many other artists. After quoting a bunch of reviews riffing on the band's ironic jazz covers of contemporary pop/rock standards from Iron Man to Smells Like Teen Spirit to Chariots of Fire:

'...these 10 quotes illustrate a basic misapprehension about the band, which is that we play the covers as a joke or in a non-serious way. This is not true. We are serious about all the music we play, the covers included.

They are NOT a joke.

***

With the rare exception, TBP doesn't choose to improvise on music written from 1920 to 1965. Instead, we find it really interesting to search for ways to make rock, pop and electronica songs vehicles for contemporary improvisation. One reason that this material is not "standard" is that you can't call "Iron Man" at a jam session and pull off a mediocre interpretation of it the way you can with "All the Things You Are." There simply isn't a common language for it.

But just because the non-original songs we play can't be called at a jam session isn't the reason 10 English critics think it's a joke. Why do they think it is a joke? There are two possible reasons:

A) The original music itself is a joke: in other words, Nirvana, Blondie, Aphex Twin, ABBA, Neil Young, The Police, David Bowie, Burt Bacharach, Tears for Fears, Black Sabbath, Pixies, Vangelis, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Radiohead, Bjork, The Bee Gees, and Interpol is just inferior and not at the level of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Implied is the phrase "rock is not worthy of the jazz tradition."

B) The way we play the covers appears like parody or at least highly ironic.

Both are wrong.

It follows that if TBP loves these songs, we love playing them. As far as irony goes, let's dismiss our versions of Nirvana, Bowie, Aphex Twin, and Pixies right now: there is nothing but respect in our reworkings of them. But at least three of our covers could generate confusion: "Tom Sawyer," "Iron Man," and "(Theme from) Chariots of Fire." Until you hear us play those three pieces, it is fair to think we are being totally ironic.

Tom Sawyer. Rush is unsexy and Ayn Randian. (The lyrics to "Tom Sawyer" are an easy target.) But Rush is also feel-good music: when this song comes on the radio, even girls like it. And we respect Rush for creating a universe with their bare hands, carving out their Monstrous Math Rock from the granite quarries of Toronto. There is also an intimate connection between TBP and Rush, since Reid Anderson and Dave King bonded over them when they first met. Face it: whatever you dig at 13, you will dig for the rest of your life. (See also this post for more of Dave on Neil Peart.)

Iron Man. OK, this is a pretty weird choice: Science fiction lyrics (He was turned to steel/In the great magnetic field/Where he traveled time/For the future of mankind) and the original Birmingham headbangers. Look, though, that is a powerful riff. When we kick this song, we AREN'T JOKING. We really try to bring the doom with just our poor little acoustic instruments. Our earnestness was rewarded with the ultimate compliment: Geezer Butler put our "Iron Man" on the Black Sabbath iTunes "celebrity playlist" with the comment, "Has to be the most original cover version of any song ever! Saw them at the Knitting Factory in L.A. -- mind-blowing!"

(Theme from) Chariots of Fire. Choosing to play this song is unquestionably ironic, especially if you check out Vangelis' original video, one of the corniest things ever made. But there is more than meets the eye here. First of all, this was one of Ethan's showpieces when he was 11. He loved it then and he loves it now. Also, it IS really a good tune. Soho the Dog just wrote about it:

"If you're a really honest composer, then you know that the question isn't so much whether or not you'd give up a body part to write an earworm as indelible as the theme from Chariots of Fire, but rather, how many, and which ones."

Finally, our exploration of "Chariots" is an embrace of grand drama to express complex emotions. After the blackest, most dissonant free jazz we can play, the tune rises at the end in a mighty crescendo. The feeling is "WE CAN WIN!" There is no irony in this feeling. It's one of those moments where you can put a lot of people together on the same page: We remember an outdoor performance of "Chariots" in Prospect Park for several thousand people that went particularly well. The massive roar of the crowd afterward was not "that was a successful snark, guys!" but one of pure joy.

Irony -- and its allies: surrealism, sardonicism, and dementia -- do occasionally play roles in our music, just as it does in the work of many artists we admire. Consider some famous performances of jazz standards: What is more ironic than Thelonious Monk's "Just a Gigolo?" What is more surreal than Duke Ellington's trio version of "Summertime?" What is more sardonic than Charlie Parker's quote of "Country Gardens" at the end of many ballads? And what is more demented than Django Bates' "New York, New York?"

But just like with those artists, irony is just a small part of the story in The Bad Plus. Here's our real story: We love songs. We believe in the power of song. We write songs as well as we can. There is not anything in TBP's repertory that is not based on melody, originals included. Thinking that we are not serious about the melodies we play is incorrect.

Once, a very straight-ahead jazz player came up to us after a gig and said, "You know, I'm surprised! 'Heart of Glass' is actually a good song!" Hell yeah it is.'

<<<

In otherwords, earnest irony? Right on. Turn it up and pass the cathode ray beer bong.

Making "The Makeover Men"

I've written here before about my admiration for the writings of James Tiptree, Jr.. How her stories--classics such as "The Screwfly Solution" and "The Women Men Don't See" and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"--really struck a chord in me and opened my mind to a whole other range of possibilities of what science fiction could do. Not everything Tiptree wrote was great, by any means, but she was a very honest writer and invariably a thought-provoking one. I appreciate that.

So it comes to pass that the one story I've ever written that is blatantly, if not shamelessly, influenced by by Tiptree has been published. You can read it now, in fact. Just click on over to HelixSF and take a look-see. I'll wait. Or, if that seems like too much effort and you remain unconvinced, here are a few of the opening grafs, to give you a taste:

Four billion years. That's how much the universe had invested in crafting women into the epitome of perfection.

So I could be forgiven, I think, for taking a certain well-founded pride in the fact that every day I did evolution one better.

Hell, who was I for false modesty? I did evolution five or six times better. I loved women with a driving passion, and it showed in my work.

Kris St. Joy, for instance. When she first came to You-Genes, Inc., she wasn't hard on the eyes by any means, but nobody was mistaking her for a model, either. Now, eighteen months later, she could turn every head from Houston to El Paso without breaking a sweat. Her breasts were particularly gorgeous, with areolas that sported complex bioluminescent Celtic knotwork.

I didn't mind admiring my work, even bragging about it. My portfolio was filled with my patients' success stories. Kris, for instance, went with our popular Courtesan package — general vaginal tightening coupled with a fifty percent labial reduction and a hundred percent clitoral enlargement. She also opted for a refinement of her buttocks, to create a more "heart shaped" profile (her words), as well as an extra two inches added to her legs, increased joint flexibility, and an overall five percent metabolic reduction in bodyfat — brand-new tits and ass excepted, of course.

In my younger days (back when I had a social life) I got to be casual friends with a bartender at one particular night spot I frequented on occasion. One evening, I witnessed a terse, icy exchange between him and an attractive woman who'd just ordered a drink. The night before, apparently, they'd met, gone home together, had a prodigious amount of sex and parted ways the next morning. He was indignant and insulted by her obvious regret. "What does she want from me?" he groused. "I asked her phone number this morning--not that I was ever going to call her--and she wouldn't give it to me. What a bitch."

He was offended because she saw through his insincere facade of chivalry. Or rather, what passed for chivalry in his worldview. I found the whole affair depressing, a feeling which has intensified over the years as I've slowly come to the realization that I, myself, am capable of the same brand of self-centered cruelty and perpetrated such behavior more often than I care to admit. Nothing so ham-fisted and crude as by former bartender friend, but no less unpleasant.

"The Makeover Men" was (and remains) the most difficult story I've ever written. Technically difficult, because it took years to write. There were untold numbers of blind alleys and discarded drafts written before I hit upon this final form. I gave up on it several times, but it kept calling me back. More than that, however, was the psychological difficulty of it. To make it work, I had to force myself into some unpleasant places that I don't like to admit exist.

All writers expose themselves to a certain degree through their work. There's no denying that I invest parts of myself into everything I write, be it "Cyclops in B Minor" or "The Final Voyage of La Riaza." But this time, perhaps because the work in question is considerably more confrontational than what people would normally expect from me, I feel correspondingly more vulnerable and exposed. Not unlike that woman from the bar all those years ago. I just hope my efforts are worth it in the end.