After NAFTA: The North American Surveillance Zone

Over at my Tumblr, my translation of a fascinating news story from La Jornada of Mexico about the role of American drone and electronic surveillance support in the capture of Los Zetas leader Z-40.

Kaiju Theater: Pacific Rim

I'm a fan of giant monster movies from way back. A number of writer-types I hang out with during science fiction conventions fell in love with the form having first seen King Kong, but for me, Godzilla was my gateway drug of choice. The Saturday afternoons of my childhood were filled with hours upon hours of watching the "Creature Feature" on one of the Houston television stations, along with Friday evening's themed "Movie of the week" which often featured giant monsters going at it. This is how I first got exposed to King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera, Ray Harryhausen's work, THEM!, The Land that Time Forgot and the like. I also took in a steady diet of Ultraman, Battle of the Planets and a variety of anime, so when a movie such as Pacific Rim comes along, I am pretty much their target audience.

I am happy to report that Pacific Rim is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Guillermo del Toro is a magnificent director, and while this film isn't nearly as intimate as most of his other work, it still boasts a depth and character to it that is wholly lacking in other films of this sort. Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori (played by Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi) are both characters reeling from personal loss who need to overcome that trauma to help save the world. Mori in particular is an ass-kicking powerhouse occasionally crippled by her inner demons, and easily the most charismatic character in the movie. The commander of the Jaegers, Stacker Pentecost (played by Idris Elba) chews pretty much every piece of scenery around him, but remains fun to watch. Only Ron Perlman's black market Kaiju parts-dealer Hannibal Chau is too over-the-top for my taste, but given that Pacific Rim is very much a live-action anime, his character type is immediately recognizable and is appropriate for the role. Pacific Rim manages to be a smartly-written film whilst simultaneously embracing pretty much all the conventions of giant robots vs. giant monster films. That sounds weird, I know. There's rubber science galore in this film, but it's generally consistent and well-defined, enabling the willing suspension of disbelief.

I took my entire family to see this, including The Wife, Monkey Girl (14), Fairy Girl (12) and Bug (7). Monkey Girl loved it, picking up on all the anime references (and in truth, this movie is very much like a live-action anime with all the neon colors and over-the-top characters). The Wife mocked the cliches, although she seemed to enjoy it for the spectacle. Fairy Girl thought it was "Okay." Bug, the youngest, enjoyed the giant monster battles quite a bit, although his attention flagged during the human-centric buildup to the final mission. Historically, for me at any rate, the characters are always the weakest link during giant monster movies, filling time between the big monster smack-downs by sleepwalking through meaningless sub-plots. Pacific Rim does a much better job than most of tying the main characters' actions together with the big battles to make everything that happens relevant and engaging. De Toro doesn't radically alter the formula or reinvent or deconstruct the form. He takes the existing conventions and simply does them very well.

The story (if you don't already know) is set in the near future. Giant Kaiju monsters emerge from a dimensional rift on the Pacific Ocean seafloor and begin destroying coastal cities. It takes days of constant battle for conventional weapons to kill these monsters, so the Jaeger program--giant combat robots (otherwise known as mechs)--is launched to better combat the Kaiju threat. For five years, the Jaegers successfully intercept and destroy Kaiju, but abruptly the monsters start coming more frequently and get larger and more powerful. Jaegers begin to lose. Eventually, Kaiju are destroying Jaegers faster than replacements can be built. After seven years of battling the more powerful Kaiju, only four Jaegers out of a total of 51 remain, and the program is scuttled in favor of building a giant wall around the Pacific to keep the Kaiju from threatening population centers. Guess how well that works out?

Quite a few reviews have lavished praise on the special effects of the film, and while that's often a way of damning with faint praise--the implications being that the rest of the film doesn't hold up--in this case the attention to detail adds a great deal to the film. The Jaegers show significantly diverse personalities for giant robots, reflections, no doubt, of their human pilots within. My biggest disappointment came from the fact that (Spoiler Alert!) the Chinese Jaeger, "Crimson Typhoon," and the Russian Jaeger, "Cherno Alpha," both met with pretty abrupt defeats despite coming off as the most badass of the surviving Jaegers. Cherno Alpha is a Mark I Jaeger, the oldest and most primitive, and has a magnificently industrial, blunt-force-trauma design to it. Crimson Typhoon, by contrast, is a spectacular three-armed Mark 4 Jaeger piloted by triplets. It has rotating blades for hands, and looks like an insane martial arts nightmare. The two surviving Jaegers--following the battle for Hong Kong--are "Gipsy Danger," a recovered and rebuilt Mark III model formerly based in Alaska (and the Jaeger of our viewpoint characters), and "Striker Eureka," an Australian Jaeger and the only Mark V model built prior to the discontinuation of the Jaeger program. Both of these Jaegers are fun, but their designs are too sleek, too clean (despite significant wear and tear). They're both cut from the same cloth, aesthetically-speaking, whereas the Russian and Chinese Jaegers were much more distinct even when standing still. Yes, I wanted more on the other Jaegers and their crews--who were introduced only long enough to be killed off. But that's a flaw this film shares with many others.

As for the Kaiju... well, they were okay. I'm not sure any rise to iconic status, although all are more interesting than the pasty, gaunt monster from Cloverfield. Despite insistence that the designers took pains to avoid paying homage to any historical Kaiju from old Japanese monster movies, one in particular--Knifehead, pictured bottom left--is for all the world a hard-core update of Guiron, a knife-headed monster that battled the flying turtle Gamera in 1969's Attack of the Monsters. On the other hand, Otachi and Leatherback, two Kaiju that attack Hong Kong, are physically similar enough in broad strokes that I had a great deal of trouble telling them apart during the battle. Part of it comes from the color schemes used--Leatherback has an EMP generator that flashes bright, neon blue, while Otachi spits a like-colored acid from a glowing sack in her throat. Both are big and bulky, and while one has hidden wings a long tail, it's hard to tell during the mayhen of battle that these creatures don't share all of these attributes. That's part of the problem with the battle scenes taking place at night and (often) in the ocean: For practical reasons, it's easier to animate a convincing giant monster in these conditions, as the darkness and water obscures much of it's body. The downside is that much of the monster is obscured, making it much more difficult to get a clear visual identification. The Kaiju shown during the day are mostly seen through stock footage or news broadcasts, and not engaged in battle. Likewise, during the final battle of the film, the two Category 4 Kaiju--Scunner and Raiju--both swim around so quickly in poorly-lit conditions it is difficult to tell that they are distinct types, and not duplicates of each other. The third Kaiju in the battle, Category 5 Slattern, is more easily distinguished by its immense size and three tails.

The finale of the film is probably the most disappointing aspect of the whole shebang. After the excitement of the battle for Hong Kong (which is a whole lot of fun) the battle at the Rift is a lot more by-the-numbers. Remember in The Avengers, how Iron Man closed the dimensional portal and destroyed the invading army bent on conquering the world? Well guess what? That's exactly the same as what happens here, a parallel made all the more striking by the fact that the Jaeger Gipsy Danger is essentially the Iron Man armor scaled up really big. Apart from that, the general thrust is one we've seen time and again dating back to Star Wars and probably before.

Despite the film's shortcomings, Pacific Rim is a whole lot of fun and infinitely better than the bombastic Transformers movies. It doesn't transcend or transform the genre, but accomplishes all the goals it sets for itself. I left the movie theater happy and buoyant, unlike Man of Steel, which left me overwhelmed and numb (and later, angry). There's not a lot else to be said for it. If you like action spectacles, if you watch the animes Mobile Suite Gundam or Neon Genesis Evangelion, if the names Godzilla or Gamera or King Kong make you smile, then this is a movie you're probably going to like. Is it Star Wars for a new generation, as some have breathlessly hyped? Hardly. But it's a good movie, one that's likely to take in more than $400 million worldwide even if it only grosses $100 million in the U.S. and is thus declared a "flop." This is a film that's going to sell lots of DVDs to those who missed it in the theaters, and grow in popularity over the coming years. It's good, solid entertainment that doesn't talk down to the audience, and for those of us who've been consistently disappointed by offerings in this genre (Godzilla 1998, I'm looking at you!) Pacific Rim goes a long way toward righting those wrongs.

Ciencia Ficción y Literatura en Oaxaca

See you this Friday night in Oaxaca, where I have the good fortune to join my friends and colleagues the Mexican writers Bef (Bernardo Fernández), Gerardo Sifuentes and Pepe Rojo for a talk about SF and literature at the Proveedora Escolar bookstore: "Libros para Todos."

The wonderful flyer for the event reminds me to ask: did they check Spock's papers? What about Kal El, Katar Hol, and J'onn J'onzz? Why are our American fantastic fictions so rife with illegal (space) aliens hiding in plain sight? Maybe we all secretly identify with the feeling of being a clandestine outsider at risk of discovery? With the notion that the idea of national origin is an illusory fiction? Or at least a socio-political construct deserving of rigorous interrogation? Are they going to deport Edward Snowden back to his home planet? Maybe he will meet us in Oaxaca?

Pretty good discussion of this issue in the context of Superman comics right here.

What does your Declaration of Independence look like?

Welcome to the Electric Panopticon

Some thoughts and links regarding the revelations of domestic telephone surveillance here on my Tumblr.

The occult detective quilters of Gee's Bend.

Like Jayme, I haven't contributed to No Fear of the Future lately. What can I say? I've been busy. Here's a sample of what I've been doing: 

Gee’s Bend. The fictional Gee’s Bend was created by “Elizabeth Keckley” and debuted in “The Witches of Boykin” (Colored Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Sept. 25, 1886). “Elizabeth Keckley” was the pseudonym of an anonymous African-American writer. (The real Keckley (1818-1907) was a successful African-American seamstress and autobiographer). The women of Gee’s Bend appeared in around two dozen stories in three magazines from 1886 to 1891.

The real Gee’s Bend, otherwise known as Boykin, is an isolated, African-American majority community located in southern Alabama. The women of Gee’s Bend have become famous for their quilts, which have become known as outstanding examples of American outsider material art. Quilting in Gee’s Bend is a practice which dates back to slave times.

The fictional women of Gee’s Bend, who are informally led by Grace Butler, are a version of the Occult Detective character--those private investigators, usually gentlemen rather than professionals, who specialize in cases involving the supernatural. Unusually for Occult Detectives, the women of Gee’s Bend let the cases come to them rather than searching them out–Gee’s Bend and environs are, in the stories, haunted by many supernatural creatures.

The Gee’s Bend stories develop thematically over time. In their debut they are approached by a white Occult Detective, Dr. Eldon, who needs their help with a case. He has heard of the power of the women of Gee’s Bend, and how the abstract designs of their quilts, in the shapes of bars, and squares act as prisons for demons, haunts, and other evil spirits, and appeals to them for help. There is a possessed man who Eldon cannot exorcize a spirit from. It turns out that the possessed man is Eldon himself, and Grace Butler, her particular friend Barbary Robinson, and the other women of Gee’s Bend only succeed in the exorcism at the cost of Eldon’s life.

Other stories in the initial spate of Gee’s Bend stories include the ghosts of the haunted Alabama River, a Stagger Lee-like “Bad Colored Man,” a Ku Klux Klan-like group of night riders, a haunted house in the next town over, a corrupt preacher, and the three devilish Tenyson brothers.

As the stories progressed, however, certain themes became more pronounced. The interaction between the white world and Gee’s Bend disappeared and was replaced by the interaction between Society Montgomery and Society Atlanta. More typically dime novel villains, like the mad farmer Loulie Brisco, were replaced with more women-oriented antagonists: a femme fatale who was seducing husbands away from wives, misbehaving daughters gone astray, a demon of crowd hate, and a femme fatale hairstylist/poisoner in Atlanta (the closest the Gee’s Bend characters have to an arch-enemy). References to other fictional characters–“that man in New York” (Francis Worcester Doughty’s Old King Brady) and “that man over in London who came to visit” (Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes)–disappeared. Gee’s Bend, the town, became a sort of character in its own right. The supporting cast of characters was expanded, and the plots became about more than the central mystery.

The Gee’s Bend stories are interesting on a number of levels, not least because of the mystery of the author’s identity. The Colored Library catered toward African-American readers and featured the work of African-American authors. (This was a rarity, and was only possible during the late 1880s and early 1890s, the peak period for dime novels and a time when publishers were trying out a variety of dime novels in an attempt to cash in on the craze). Presumably the author of the Gee’s Bend stories was African-American. Presumably she was a woman (another rarity among dime novels), based on the content of the stories. Presumably she was located in Atlanta or Montgomery or Birmingham–the stories show an awareness of both popular literature and Gee’s Bend, something a more rural or Northern author would not have had. And presumably she was politically active or at the least aware: she has Grace Butler voice a version of Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech in the first Gee’s Bend story, but also is consciously developing an African-American alternative, and a female-oriented one at that, to the white, male detectives of popular literature, especially the dime novels.

Even more interesting is the way in which the themes of the series become predominant. The author creates a series very much by a woman for women. Gee’s Bend is a very homosocial atmosphere, all about mothers and daughters, with men in a secondary role, either as villains or husbands, who are either supportive and absent or bad and present. In a symbolic sense, the protagonists are symbolically female–communal, supportive, group-oriented, resolution-oriented–as opposed to the stereotypically male protagonists of most dime novels–individualistic, oriented toward conflict.

Likewise, Gee’s Bend is a series for African-Americans by African-Americans. During the initial series of stories the white world is presented as the alternative to Gee’s Bend, lesser but still present, just as white characters appear as antagonists or supporting character. But during the later stories the white world disappears altogether. Gee’s Bend becomes a kind of early African-American utopia, a community of freed slaves who have nothing to do with whites. The outsiders become the high class blacks of urban Montgomery, Birmingham, and Atlanta, rather than whites.

The Gee’s Bend stories are early examples of a number of characters and tropes: early Occult Detectives, following J.S. Le Fanu’s Doctor Hesselius (“Green Tea,” 1869) and preceding E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low (1898); early female detectives, following several in the dime novels in the early 1880s and preceding C.L. Pirkis’ Loveday Brooke (1893); early feminist characters, anticipating the New Woman literature of the 1890s and reacting to First-wave feminism of earlier in the century; and early American horror fiction, following Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fitz-James O’Brien but preceding the commercial authors of the 1890s.

It might be asked why the Gee’s Bend stories have been so thoroughly forgotten. In part this is because of the ephemeral nature of the dime novels–Old King Brady appeared in 830 stories, and who now remembers him? But the larger reason is that the Gee’s Bend stories were a reaction to the Booker T. Washington school of thought, of accommodation with the white world, so that the stories were not popular with Washington partisans–but were not nearly confrontational enough for the W.E.B. Du Bois supporters of the 1910s. As a black utopia Gee’s Bend was a unique creature, neither fish nor fowl enough for African-American political ideologues, and it is no surprise that the stories were completely forgotten, when they were not in disrepute, by the time of the Harlem Renaissance.

About that Chicken Ranch thing...

It's no secret that I haven't contributed a whole heck of a lot to No Fear of the Future lately. The reason, some of you may or may not know, is that I've been completely consumed by a non-fiction book on the infamous La Grange Chicken Ranch I've been writing. That's a one-time brothel in Texas that inspired the Tony Award winning Broadway musical, "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," (which is very good) and subsequent Burt Reynolds/Dolly Parton movie (which isn't very good).

Some months back, I was contacted by Bob Mauldin of Expedition Texas about participating in a segment on the Chicken Ranch for that television show. How could I refuse? I met up with Mauldin and the current owner of the Chicken Ranch property to take a tour of the infamous brothel's ruins back in February, and the episode aired this past weekend. Not many people realize it yet, but 2013 marks the 40th anniversary of the Chicken Ranch's closure by Houston television personality Marvin Zindler. Miss Edna Milton departed La Grange not long after, and the intervening years were not kind to the old farmhouse. A series of subsequent owners worried more about profiting from the property's notoriety than historical preservation, and the result is... well, you can see in the videos below.

There’s a Zucker born every minute

[Pic: $200 million Tumblr wundrboy David Karp]

Tumblr Flickrs out just when it's getting good. Twitter evolves into a big media cacophony filled with commercial stalkers working it for an angle.  Facebook works on cracking the human genome of product placement, helping the advertising bots infiltrate the few remaining social relationships that aren't just transactions in disguise.  How is it that we are allowing our self-expression and our friendships to be harnessed as the wageless fuel of the new platforms of our commercial exploitation—as both workers and consumers—without any real resistance?

[Pic: Sergey and Larry and their adult supervision, sharing the wisdom their algorithms derived from your shopping habits.]

Contemporary American culture venerates the entrepreneurs who create the new corporate commons in which we now spend most of our work and leisure time—the mall inside our screens. The Founders who make it all the way to an exit—whether the kind of exit investment bankers talk about, where you get liquidity in your founder’s stock through an IPO or sale at some stratospheric valuation that defies rational valuation metrics, or the kind they talked about at Steve Jobs’ funeral—receive a kind of beatification into a peculiar category of neo-capitalist celebrity beyond reproach.

[Pic: The Founder, shortly before the moment of his canonization.]

Now matter how saintly the founders seem, the development of these new arenas of network life as for-profit ventures is inherently conflicted and corrupted. A “community” founded on the fiduciary duty to maximize the financial self-interest of its owners is not a community. It is a business that has tricked its labor force and suppliers into thinking they are its customers. Why does the future need to follow the robber baron model of organization? Do our new communities in the clouds really need to be structured as business corporations, which have the pyramidical governance structure of military warlord bands? Why can’t they be structured as cooperatives, in which the users are also the owners, and the governors? Or maybe an entirely new model founded on a socio-economic contract compatible with the operating system of the network and the diverse interests of its participants?

There appear to be a few folks trying to explore this idea, but none that’s really nailed it. We need to think about social media platforms as incipient polities instead of capitalist cults. As we digest the mass media supplication to David Karp’s personal redemption through the accumulation of $200 million of fuck you money selling this beautiful platform he built to the barons of Silicon Valley, we should be looking for alternative paradigms to the hypercapitalist founder cult. Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gates, Dell, Musk, Brin/Page aren’t the only models, no matter how much cool stuff they are funding with their fortunes. One place to start is the mostly abandoned thread that followed the thinking of people like Robert Owen.

[Pic: Robert Owen, 1854.]

The antebellum cooperatives were experiments in utopian socialism, and mostly ended up in the graveyards of other failed American utopias. But there are surviving models that seem very healthy—enterprises like REI, Amana (before it ultimately went corporate), and the housing coops of NYC. If the movements of the Arab Spring could overthrow their governments without charismatic leaders or figureheads, why can’t the online multitude experiment with collective ownership of the realms where we incubate our own 21st century identities? Surely it’s at least worth trying to develop some user-controlled alternatives, letting them compete with the corporates, and see how things play it.

[Pic: New Harmony, a real manifestation of an alternate Indiana.]

Or we could just resign ourselves to live in a world that looks like an endless wander through the corporate-branded hallways of LinkedIn—the kind of world where we all wear clothing with the logos of our corporate employers when we’re out with our families. Zo long, Zuckers!

Recommended reading: MacKenzie Wark in The Guardian, May 22: Who dares to dodge Google's information tax? In exchange for giving up our personal data, we get to watch each other's cat videos, while Google becomes the new state.