step into your wake with your blood on my shirt

Many years ago, Bobby and I were playing Axis and Allies on one warm afternoon. We started joking about Germany’s terrible chances. Inspired by the board game in front of us, I commented, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if some Germany game company made a ‘Concentration Camp Management’ game while the Reich was in power? Like Puerto Rico or one of those other city-builders, only you have to manage an extermination camp?”

Bobby shook his head, chuckling. “You’d have to make sure your railroad depot wasn’t too far from the gas showers or you’d lose turnaround time.”

We both agreed that that would be uniformly twisted.

Flash forward about five years. Browsing through one of the transient dollar stores in the Arsenal Mall, I found the following gem in the Discount Software section: Prison Tycoon 3: Lockdown. If the title didn’t make it clear, I’ll spell it out: the cheery folks who gave you Roller Coaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon developed a game where you run your own prison.

Actually: they developed three of them.

What makes Prison Tycoon 3: Lockdown such a comically monstrous game? If I had to make a list:

• “Begin with a low security prison and build it up to a SuperMax.” I don’t know if I’d consider a SuperMax prison an “upgrade” from a minimum-security facility. They serve two entirely different functions - one to house non-violent offenders, the other to provide rigorous supervision and restriction. This is like buying a flight simulator for your computer that boasts “start out with a prop plane and build it up to a C-47.”

• “Hire trust-worthy prison guards and arm them with weapons, riot shields and guard dogs to maintain peace and control, but keep your eye on your budget.” Per the advertisements, budget is the only restraint on how brutal you can be with your prison population. Not your innate concern for civil liberties. Not the inherent dignity of the human. No, the only thing that’ll stop you from giving every guard on the block an autofire shotgun with rubber shells and full Kevlar is a lack of funds. Fortunately, you can augment your budget by building factories onsite - auto shops, print shops, metal shops, etc - so even that limit can be overcome. It’s a circle of some kind … begins with a “v” … I want to say “virtuous,” but I don’t think that’s it …

• “You determine whether to release your prisoners on parole or keep them locked down tight to protect society.” Rehabilitating prisoners gives you a cash bonus and (I suspect, can’t confirm this) improves your overall prison score. Releasing someone who goes out to commit another crime? No real downside. Don’t worry about rehabilitating too many prisoners, though - you’ll get another busload tomorrow morning!

• “Manage gangs and prisoner morale to avoid riots.” Like in the other Tycoon games, each individual visitor to your theme park prison facility has his own mood. Happy prisoners work eagerly in your shops. Angry prisoners start fights, which can escalate into riots through a cascading effect (one angry prisoner makes the prisoners around him angry, which makes their neighbors angry, etc). Managing prisoner morale doesn’t take much effort - simply dispatch a prison guard over to an angry prisoner. The guard will beat the prisoner with a nightstick until his mood improves to “passive.” No, I’m serious; that’s how you do it.

• “Interrogate military prisoners for vital intel. Earn extra bonuses by getting prisoners to provide crucial information.” … so.

Disclaimer: some of my intel came from an FAQ for the first Prison Tycoon game. My prior experience with the Tycoon series indicates that later games in the series don’t deviate significantly from earlier ones - they just add more gameplay options. If anyone who’s actually played this gem of a game wants to correct me, leave a comment.

god loves ugly

A quick one to start us off: my favorite workout at the gym - to observe, not to perform - is the desultory chin-up. That’s when a guy walks up to the bar and does one chin-up, maybe two, before remembering how hard they were. Then he drops to the mat and walks off like he has something else in mind.

Now to talk about how much reading sucks: I’m glad that the fantasy story trope of “your wish comes true, but it’s twisted” gets less play these days. You know the one I mean: I wish for a million dollars, but it comes in the form of a life insurance payment when my wife dies. Or I wish for time to read in peace and quiet, but I only get it after a nuclear bomb wipes out civilization. Also known as the “monkey’s paw” conceit, after the 1902 short story which spawned it, this slapdash shortcut has been worn into a faceless grit through overuse. Holy hell, it’s annoying.

For one thing: if horror is really just a form of Gothic moralizing (the prince who taunts the Red Death plague gets infected; the girls who sleep around get their throats slashed; etc), then what lesson should the reader learn from this story? “If you get the chance to make a wish, phrase it very carefully”? Great lesson; I’m sure it’ll stick with me in the wish-filled future I anticipate. “Getting what you want without hard work will curse you with sorrow”? I can see that - kind of the Protestant work ethic with slick urban styling - but maybe there’s a better way to phrase it. Really, I see nothing but downsides to telling generations of impressionable children that “getting what you want will ruin your life.”

For another: note that the magical malefactor always picks a particularly ironic way to fulfill the wish. Irony requires intelligence - recognizing a pattern that matches in some ways but differs in others - so we have to presume that the monkey’s paw has, I dunno, some evil genie watching it and waiting to screw over the life of whoever holds it. Because if I had to grant evil wishes, and I felt particularly lazy, I wouldn’t be very creative about it:

Rube: I wish my boss hadn’t fired me.
Genie: Fine! Now your boss hasn’t fired you, or anyone else - because he’s dead!
Rube: I wish I looked just like this for the rest of my life.
Genie: Mwah-ha-ha! You’ll look exactly the same for the rest of your life if I kill you in five seconds!
Rube: So you’re not exactly granting my wishes as much as looking for an excuse to murder people, are you?
Genie: Just for that, I’m going to murder Jeff Probst! Ha ha ha ha ha!

And so forth.

Fortunately, sci-fi / fantasy is a great and terrible beast that eats its young and pits them against each other. Every trope worth naming in the genre has been established, re-hashed, deconstructed and reassembled in the 20th Century alone. Take time travel for instance. Ray Bradbury gave us the notion of the fragile past in “A Sound of Thunder,” in which stepping on a butterfly in the prehistoric past causes the entirety of Western Civilization to be rewritten. Fritz Leiber riffed on this concept, presenting a past that stubbornly resisted time travellers’ attempts to change it in “Try and Change the Past.” Alfred Bester did the same, but with a bit more style, in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” Rather than telling the same tedious story over and over again, sci-fi turned time travel into an open-ended source of inspiration.

Let’s do the same thing with “wishes.” Instead of a wish that twists the speaker’s words, how about a world where every wish comes true - a constantly fungible reality, alien and nightmarish, subject to the most recent whims of the greatest number? Or how about a world where warring nations use Monkey Paws like weapons? Drop a Monkey’s Paw in an enemy garrison, let opposing soldiers start screwing up their own lives until they run out of wishes, then send a black ops team in to mop up the chaos? I picture a hazmat team in full chem-gear, stalking through an outpost filled with titanium statues in tortured poses, carrying out a glowing orb in a lead container. “Let me guess - I’ll bet they wished to be bulletproof. Or maybe to live forever. Gets ‘em every time. Who’s paying for the beer, anyhow?”

In an unrelated closing observation: have you ever noticed how the questions “can you do me a tiny favor?” and “can you do me a huge favor?” mean almost exactly the same thing in requested effort?

make sure he a thug and intelligent too

Some life lessons, smuggled in the form of weekend anecdotes:

Learn Enough Dance to Dance to Funk / Soul; Everything Else is Wasted. Well, okay, and the bare minimum of dance required to get married in the States. But so few places bust out any sort of swing worth swingin’ to, and salsa can only be found in seedy gin joints with knife artists in sharkskin suits. But if you’re ever in Central Square on a Friday night - like I was for Rachel R’s birthday - stop by the Cantab and listen to Diane Blue and the Fatback Band lay down the oldest and greatest. “Dancing in September,” “Knock on Wood,” and maybe even a little James Brown for you. Really - all you need.

Pick a Party and Stick With It. I left Rachel’s celebration midway through to see if anyone had camped out at 90’s Night in Allston. Had I called ahead I could have saved myself the trip - the cool kids had been crowded out by the BU kids. After waiting in line for a minute and confirming the situation with Matthew, I returned to Cambridge and closed out the night at the Cantab. I probably missed a lot of prime dancing thanks to my indecision and I will regret it until the day I die.

You Build a Surprise Party with 90% Discipline and 10% Innovation. I went to a surprise party with Kym from work on Saturday evening. Kym’s friend Allie had been planning this for about a month and had gone above and beyond to keep everything quiet. But it takes more than just secrecy to get a surprise party going. So, that afternoon, she recruited Kym’s landlord, who called Kym and told her that a burst pipe had flooded her closet. She hurried home and found us waiting.

Never Drink On An Empty Stomach. Seriously! Never! What did you think would happen? And no, two plates of tortilla chips and a bowl of creamy dip do not count! And no, a single slice of a pulled pork quesadilla does not count! How old are you? Have you learned nothing? Seriously! It’s like I can’t even look at you!

(But I had an excellent time at Bukowski regardless, helping Kate G. tick off the last few items on her beer card. If you go into the Inman Square dive and find the Charlotte Perkins Gilman mug off its hook, you’ll know she’s in town)

If You Have Time Alone, Enjoy It. I caught up with Jodi at the Grafton St Pub in Harvard on a cool Sunday afternoon, giving her the chance to vent about dealing with undergrads (apparently, the dumb kids at Harvard are just as dumb as the dumb kids anywhere). After seeing her off, I took the T to Kendall and walked to Kendall Cinema to get tickets for Redbelt. With two and a half hours to kill, I had an early dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company right around the corner.

The afternoon had hit that “magic hour” that photographers love, when the sun lights everything soft. The red brick of the CBC kept the inside warmer than the outside (low 60s), but the ceiling fans provided a gentle downdraft. Not quite dinner time yet, so I had a quiet corner of the bar to sit and read some Fritz Leiber while a perky bartender brought me a pulled pork sandwich and the house pale. Afterwards I walked two blocks and bought ice cream at a 7-11.

Don’t look too hard for those moments; that never helps. Just stay ready when they arrive.

there’s no one in here but the fighters

This weekend media blow drew the black marble:

Battlestar Galactica: I have been greatly impressed by the depth of writing this season. You can always count on BSG to throw in plot twists and sudden traumatic developments. That doesn’t take much in the way of skill. But the last couple of episodes - particularly “Escape Velocity” and “Faith” - have really floored me. Little details, like the offhand mention of the “Mithras cult” in the former or the understated symbolism with Anders in the latter, show me that the writers know what they’re doing.

The Office: Back up to speed in a strong way. I’m pretty happy with them. “… and then you said, Pam, Pam, Pam, and then you sneezed in my tea, but you said not to worry because it was just allergies.”

30 Rock: I think the shortened season hurt these guys more than anyone else I watch regularly. The last few episodes I saw seemed rushed and heavy on exposition. The penultimate episode - with the mystery sandwich shop, and Floyd’s random visits - felt so weak I worried that I’d recorded the wrong show. But the season finale won me over again. “There’s not actually a leak. We’ve done a study.”

Redbelt: So a David Mamet movie about jiu-jitsu instructors draws me in like black tar heroin, and I fulfilled my obligation this weekend. As with all Mamet movies, you get the impression that the intricately constructed ride would fall apart if it went off-road: one plot twist too many. Also, as usual, the lone women in this script must pay for the sins of their entire race in Mamet’s eyes, leaving only the steadfast men to defend principles, yadda yadda. That being acknowledged, Redbelt still shines better than any other movie you’ll see about martial arts, sports or Hollywood this year.

Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) owns a small jiu-jitsu dojo in southern Los Angeles. A chance encounter in a bar results in him saving the life of drunken action movie star Chet Frank (Tim Allen). This earns him an invitation into the world of high-budget movie production. The movie parallels the glamorous world of mixed martial arts tournaments - a world from which Terry deliberately abstains, despite much enticement - and the quiet tradition of self-defense, exemplified in Terry’s instruction of the timid and high-strung Laura (Emily Mortimer).

I may discuss some spoilers for all of the above in the comments, so: proceed with caution.

there’s one more kid that’ll never go to school

Allergies have returned with a vengeance. A heavy medical cocktail - two snoots of Nasonex, 10 mg of Zyrtec and some prescription eye drops - have staved off the worst of it so far. This morning, I merely felt severely congested and only one eye looked red enough to merit suspicions of a drug test. Which I would have passed, thank you. Winners don’t use, because users don’t win.

The weather gizmo on my desktop says yesterday’s high was 78. Today’s: 58. New England - the cradle of our nation, folks!

Several people have asked what I think of the economy in the past week or so. I don’t have any insight that you couldn’t draw from reading any major paper. Things grow worse. Once I get some money to move around I intend to invest in a mix of ETFs from Vanguard. But you shouldn’t necessarily take my advice on where to put money. How the economy’s doing and how I’m doing don’t always go hand in hand - and that’s presuming I even get the first part right.

Plus, my ideas change constantly. I used to want to save up enough to buy my own place. But then someone (either Julian Sanchez or Will Wilkinson) made the point that young, single people rarely improve their lot by buying a house. Once you get tied to a significant investment of real estate, you can’t pack up and move on a month’s notice. Now’s the time I should be chasing job opportunities, crazy projects or hot blondes with a passion for Chandler novels, 70s movies and straight whiskey. Call the difference between my rent and a mortgage (less interest deductions) a flexibility premium. I’m happy to pay.

My point: listen to me if you like, but don’t follow me out onto the lake.

A rare end-week media blow: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I don’t suppose I need to lend my voice to the volumes of critical praise for this novel, other then: yeah, that. Flynngrrl had a post once about a Supreme Court decision on abortion. In it, she made the point that the question of abortion rights comes down to one fundamental fork in the road: either you believe a woman owns her body or you don’t. Either a woman has an inherent value outside of her social role as Childbearer, or she doesn’t. The Handmaid’s Tale gives us a world where this question has been decided.

I don’t think it presents a realistic view of how religious fundamentalists would seize control of the United States (I hardly think they’d need to gun down Congress). But it doesn’t have to. Good science-fiction doesn’t look for the most likely future outcome starting from today’s events. Rather, it starts from a What If (no matter how outlandish), grounds it in verisimilitude, then rolls from there. And Atwood pulls that off beautifully.

And not only does Handmaid move and inform and signify (yeah, yeah, trivial accomplishments, those), but Atwood’s style amazed me, too. She uses a remarkable economy of language to describe the protagonist’s conflicted emotions - her loathing of her captors, her fearful desire to obey, her absolute and paranoid despair, her nostalgia for an admittedly troubled past, and so forth. Finding a novel this powerful leaves an impression on you; finding a novel this well-written delights you.

rulers make bad lovers

Another look into the writing process:

My writing style tends to imitate whoever I’ve read most recently. This process smooths out over time, and if I read a lot of different styles in rapid succession, such that I’m no longer a total slave. Picture a blank canvas: you start with red strokes, fear the final product will have too much red in it, then add in more colors until the final product looks rich and real. Then you tear it off the easel, hide it in your closet behind the winter coats, and go play Bejeweled instead. Anyhow, take a look at the twenty-one books I’ve read so far this year, then try to guess what my writing sounds like as a result. Bonus points if your answer incorporates needless French expressions (e.g., melange, fait accompli, pret-a-porter, mise-en-scene, and so forth).

A significant portion of my ideas come from the unconscious: random word associations or images that flit into my mind at odd hours. I vividly recall floating in the hypnagogic haze between wakefulness and dozing during a presentation at The Company when the word library planet appeared in my head. Those of you who’ve read “The Archivist” will recognize the result. My current project, which some of you have seen, came to me from the phrase murder kit. What goes into a murder kit, I wondered? And who would come up with that list? And why?

When I start writing and really hit the proverbial “zone,” I find myself in a sort of trance state. I become hyper-conscious of the sensory content of the world I’m writing, as perceived by the narrator or protagonist. Some people write best with music on or in a coffeeshop; I can’t stand the slightest surprising noise. Traffic and birds and crickets, yes; doors opening and people talking, no.

I never offer much in the way of description because I never go much for description in what I read. I frequently glaze over large blocks of text in order to get to dialogue; quote marks act as highlighter for me. Raymond Chandler and writers in his vein have proven the only exception, and you could make the argument that his particular method of description (”… the hole in her face where she unzippered her teeth …”) counts as dialogue anyway.

I never do a lot of research before I start writing, and I never break the trance once I get going. If I find something that I cannot reasonably fake, I’ll leave a note in brackets (”the total came to [[INSERT DOLLAR VALUE HERE]]; I paid in plastic”) and come back later. On occasion this gets me in trouble, as I’ll forget who I named what and pay for it later. That’s why I still need friends; that and the whole human thing.

Laptops work for some folks; not for me. At the end of an hour my lap feels too warm, and if I’m writing on a table I might as well have a desktop. I never write outside of my room (see above re: coffeeshops). I try not to write on my bed; it doesn’t have great lower back support when I’m sitting up and it confuses my body as to bedtime. And I prefer a larger screen and a higher resolution anyway: easier on the eyes.

I worry most about being melodramatic or grotesque, or about the picture in my mind being depicted clearly on the page. I worry least about being boring.

Two thousand words counts as a good night’s work for me, though I’m comfortable with anything over fifteen hundred. I can produce this in about an hour. Two nights of this a week means 3000-4000 words per week. Presuming you miss some nights and, on average, only stick to schedule 75% of the time, that’s still 112,500 words in 50 weeks. I give you two weeks’ vacation and one night in four off and you can still turn out a pretty thick novel in a year.

The best writing teacher I ever had, Dr. Vincent Fitzpatrick, always cautioned us against “writing abstractly about an abstraction.” I’ve just done that for about six hundred and fifty words here. All apologies.

I think his name was Chips Ahoy

Links for breakfast:

Jesus Made Me Puke: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone goes undercover at a Texas megachurch’s “Encounter Weekend.” The text speaks for itself:

“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?” He paused. “There are some people out there who will tell you it’s genetics. It’s in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it’s not genetics. It’s a generational curse!”

Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. “Take homosexuals,” he said. “Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created — by pedophiles.”

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a “rod of iron” to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a shit. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

A team of twenty of the world’s leading scientists wouldn’t be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.

Hillary Clinton Rejects Science, Reasoning:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the [gas tax] suspension?

CLINTON: Well, you know, George, I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans. From the moment I started this campaign, I’ve said that I am absolutely determined that we’re going to reverse the trends that have been going on in our government and in our political system, because what I have seen is that the rich have gotten richer. A vast majority — I think something like 90 percent — of the wealth gains over the last seven years have gone to the top 10 percent of wage earners in America.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?

CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.

Couple this with her support for the autism/vaccination link and we finally have the pure Anti-Science candidate that this country has been aching for since its inception.

(I kid, of course - none of them are that great)

Bridging the gap between mathematics and civil liberties, Radley Balko talks about the problem of DNA databases. Knowing that a test has a 99.9996% (or whatever) accuracy rate does not tell you all you need to know - you also need to know the actual incidence of what’s being tested for within the population. Few people know that. Hell, I still need to remind myself from time to time. Bayes’ Theorem in action.

Let’s say the U.S. adopts a Great Britain policy on collecting DNA–basically a move toward, at some point in the future, having DNA on file for everyone in the country. Well now the 1 in 1.1 million odds against the suspect in the L.A. Times case are being run against a database of 380 million people. The numbers say that you’re going to pull up about 345 matches in the U.S. alone. In the California case, the database is obviously much smaller than the entire U.S. population, and only one of those 345 people showed up from the 330,000-person FBI DNA database–the (admittedly unsympathetic) subject of the article. But any of the other 344 potential matches in the U.S. (or the 2,200 matches worldwide) could have committed the crime. They just weren’t in the database.

To put it another way: if I run an anabolic steroids test with 99% accuracy in a nursing home with 400 residents, I’m going to get at least 4 positive results. Does this mean that 4 octogenarians shoot themselves in the butt with parabolan every morning? Probably not.

Finally, for all my cheerleading about globalization, it helps to have a saner mind like IOZ put me right once in a while:

So, you know, on one hand “there were once nation-states,” but now there are “dynamos like India and China,” which are, what, anarchoprimitive agricollectives? The idea that some sort of stateless transnational borderless economic singularity is swiftly ripping away borders like stagehands rip up gaff tape on load-out is plain kooky. I am of course for the free movement of labor and capital. Call me the next time you hit Charles de Gaulle, or Beijing Capital International Airport for that fucking matter, without a passport. I’m just saying.

every little piece of your life will mean something to someone

# Waiting in line for a scrip at the Target Pharmacy, I glanced down the aisle and saw a sign for Insolence Aids. Useful little niche, I thought. Use Dr. Fulghum’s Patented Mollifying Tonic for Ages 3 to 13. Same great formula for over one hundred years. Guaranteed to cut back-sass, pouting and tantrums by fifty percent. Then I realized I’d conflated the words Incontinence Aids and Insoles in a hasty skimming, a mistake I can’t be the first to have made.

# I went to a co-worker’s party in Brighton on Friday night. Folks I never saw played Beirut (which I always clarify as “beer pong,” because I don’t know that everyone uses that name) in the kitchen, while I sat in on several heated discussions to the rules of Asshole in the living room. We watched the Celtics lose Game 6 (”you’ve got to go for the percentage shots,” I kept yelling at the TV). I danced to an amateur DJ’s relatively small 90s crate and smoked a clove cigarette outside. Good times.

# I have a variety of exciting new bruises on my forearms from jiu-jitsu on Saturday. One’s about the size of a White Castle slider; the second, maybe a silver dollar. Another student got nicked in the temple with the point of a wooden knife. It bled worse than it turned out to be but, if the divot below my right index knuckle indicates anything, he’ll have an exciting new scar in about a week. Look out, ladies!

# I attended a Kentucky Derby party on Saturday! I don’t know if I made myself a mint julep, but I combined bourbon, ice, seltzer, syrup and mint leaves in a combination I found tasty. Gentlemen lounged around in suits and ascots; ladies preened and cooed under floppy sun hats. I missed the entirety of the actual race due to the smallness of the living room, but had an excellent time regardless. I hope to see everyone involved again some time soon.

# Allow me to confess some petty larcenies. FIRST: while driving through a McDonald’s on Saturday morning, I arrived at the first pay window with a dollar held out expectantly. The lady inside didn’t even glance my way in the thirty seconds I idled, fussing with an umbrella. Presuming I’d picked the wrong window - sometimes the drive-through uses one window, sometimes two - I motored up to the next one, where a young man thrust a cheeseburger on me. So I got a McDonald’s double cheeseburger without paying. SECOND: I trust the laundromat on my corner enough to leave stuff in the washer or dryer without sitting in front of it. You can always see a staff member hovering inside while the ‘mat has its doors open. On my third and final trip to the ‘mat on Sunday, the shy Asian lady behind the counter shuffled up and pressed a crumpled dollar bill on me, nodding and smiling. I looked at her in confusion until another customer translated: “you left it in the machine.” “Thank you,” I said, unsure how to explain to someone who apparently spoke no English that I hadn’t laundered anything that day other than bedding. So I’m up $2 on the weekend.

# I somehow took the exact same Red Line train car to and from Park Street on Sunday night, four hours apart. How do I know? The train compartment smelled vaguely of shit; it got so I didn’t mind it. That’s the worst thing that I can confess.

# “Does the bet still pay off if they shoot the horse?”
“Yes, it does.”
“The system works!”

# Finally, congratulations to ImprovBoston for holding a fantastic date auction at Venu on Sunday night. IB raised, if Sasha’s math can be trusted, just over $6000 from the auctions and raffles alone. Special congratulations to Serpico and Christine, friends and regulars both, for their fund-raising efforts. The whole night really felt like a grown-up prom, with classy folks parading on stage for the crowd’s approval and a late night dance party in formal wear. I had to practically tear myself away at 11:30 but could have stayed later.

he was turned to steel in the great magnetic field

This week’s media blow incorporates the latest in Stark repulsor technology.

Iron Man: Dude. Iron Man. Dude. Iron Man.

Dude.

Jon Favreau directed perhaps the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen (short of The Incredibles). I suspect he pulled this off because he made a priority of making a good movie first, and a superhero movie second. Favreau wandered through the same minefield that every superhero movie does but emerged unscathed. Let’s take a look:

Tedious Origin Story: Robert Downey Jr, as playboy millionaire Tony Stark, spends the first half of the movie inventing his suit, testing its powers and reveling in his new identity. Why does this work, when it failed for other movies? Because Tony Stark makes Iron Man. He didn’t wake up one morning with super-strength and wall-stickiness. He didn’t get struck by lightning after being dosed by chemicals. The process of experimentation and forging invests us more than following the blithe adventures of a lucky idiot.

Wacky Villains: When you adapt a comic book to the big screen, you realize that guys in blue tights or villains in green and yellow costumes look ridiculous in the real world. Seriously. They look like cartoons. No one would take them seriously. Favreau avoids this by retaining the same names and general ideas, but completely revamping them for a modern story. I won’t spoil the connections for comic book purists - just pay close attention to what people say.

I … Will Avenge … You: As fun as Spider-Man was, I had a hard time with a movie where everyone took everything they said so seriously. Tobey Maguire couldn’t tell someone he needed milk from the store without a wistful look in his eyes and stern resolution in his jawline. But Downey, Terence Howard and Jeff Bridges talk just like regular people talk. They talk over each other, sometimes. They throw off-hand remarks. They’re regular people who just happen to have access to incredible weaponry.

Well, My Work Here Is Done: I never realized how weak the traditional superhero origin story sounded until walking out of Iron Man. Okay, I have super powers. I’m going to put on a costume to avenge my parents’ / family’s / neighbor’s death. Having finished that, rather than return to a normal life, I’ll keep doing this, going after lower and lower stakes until I die or get tired of it. Stark’s purpose in becoming Iron Man doesn’t stop after the first film’s villain buys it, though. He has a clear goal in mind: ridding the world of the weaponry his company created. That goal may expand (it’ll probably have to, to keep the franchise going), but at least he starts with a logical reason for superheroics.

Flip the Script: In addition to surviving and improving on all the standard superhero movie tropes, Iron Man flips several on its head. These will not only entertain your average comic book fan, but will keep the casual moviegoer from rolling their eyes at the awkward suspension of disbelief.

I recommend this film without qualification.

I may discuss some spoilers in the comments, so tread with care.

pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass me by

For this week’s Friday Feedback, I want Songs That Tire You After The First Forty-Five Seconds:

My top picks:

Enter Sandman - Metallica. That mildly dissonant riff, followed by the pounding drums after a few measures, really ramps up my adrenaline. Then the song becomes, well, the foundation of every metal song for the next 20 years, and I lose interest. Bonus points: James Hetfield may be a cool motherfucker, but in this video he’s everything that’s wrong with the 80s. “Say a prayer / just for once / or I’ll tow your truck / from the Arby’s parking lotttttt-TA!”

Sweet Child of Mine - Guns ‘n Roses. Really? Can you get that excited to hear Axl Rose sing? Really? Admit it - this song coasts off of enthusiasm after Slash rocks us all the way out in the first minute. It never really reaches those heights again until the “Where do we go-wo” part near the end.

Hot’lanta - Allman Brothers Band. Starts off really strong, then descends into the unidentifiable mish-mash of every jam session. Better than the Grateful Dead, at least.

Now that I’ve made my half-assed attempts at music criticism, I’d like to hear yours. What songs never live up to the promise of their first few seconds? List a song that’s not even worth downloading off iTunes so long as there’s a free sample. Take your shot.