Covid Comedy Part Deux

OK, well. We can still get together on the Internet. Yes, we can. You seriously think that’s a great idea? Believe it or not, back in the 1980s, some Silicon Valley brainiacs actually did. Seriously.

The aging-hippy idealists who hotwired the Interweb imagined they were laying the foundation for a global town square that would bring humanity together in the not-too-distant future. Now we’re living in the not-too-distant future. Their hippy dream is now a reality—except the global town square is filled with an angry mob holding pitchforks and torches. Not just angry. Crazy, too. Thanks to the Internet, paranoid schizophrenia is now a casually communicated disease. In the pre-digital days, some nut wearing a tinfoil hat would be pushing a crap-filled shopping cart while constantly muttering to themselves ... 

“Conspiracy. Yeah. Them rich libtards and Hollywood bigshots got secret tunnels full of sex slave kids, uh-huh. The secret entrance is in that furniture store or maybe the pizza shop. And that vaccine they’re pushing? It’s a mind-control microchip. That there Bill Gates fellow? He’s behind the whole thing.” 

Yattayatta. The nut keeps muttering, nobody listens, and the delusion stays in his head. But thanks to the Internet, the nut can talk to other nuts. They can work on their delusional architecture together. Where do chemtrails fit in? What about the lizard people? It’s fun, kind of like World of Warcraft. Except when the nuts start killing people.

Why 1984 won't be like "1984." And 2021 will.

Macs are cool and futuristic. Still love 'em. But I'm starting to think it’s like an Eldorado Cadillac with fins. That’s cool and futuristic too. But despite the fins, it’s not really a rocket ship. You can’t fly to the Moon on an Eldorado Cadillac. It’s just futuristic on the outside. In a similar fashion, Macs (iPhones, iPads, iEtc.) are just bursting with elegant, world-of-tomorrow industrial design, most of it stolen from Braun, the rest from the Jetsons. On the inside, Macs are old-school, anal, counterintuitive, authoritarian control-freaks. It's like a Hitler Youth school crossing guard blowing his whistle and shouting, "Hey! You can't cross the street there! Go back to the curb and cross between the lines!" My main gripe being Apple file management. I'll single out iPhones. Photo files are the worst. On a f**king Android phone, you plug it into your computer, the device icon appears on your desktop, click, you navigate to the photo file, then drag the photos you want onto your desktop. Create a folder where you want, and put the photos in the folder. Then put the folder where you want! Simple.  iPhone? TWEET! No! Go back to the curb, user!” Plug the iPhone into your Mac. An icon appears. But it’s a meaningless black box. And you can’t even open that box. The box is locked and there’s no key. So, there’s no way to drag-and-drop my files? No, sir. There is not. So how do I get to my files? Ah. Each variety is a mystery of its own. OK, I’ll be specific. How do I manage my photo files? Can I drag them onto my desktop? No, sir. I believe I have mentioned that. “Dragging and dropping.” That is not the Mac way. So how do I do it? Well, sir. Connect your iPhone to your Mac with the approved Apple Lightning USB cable. Then go to Photos, which is the designated and approved Apple photography file management application. The icon resembles a pretty flower of many colors. Click on that. You may then access your photography files in the manner in which Apple intended. We will tell you where to store those snapshots. (Not the actual files, of course. Such knowledge is forbidden to you.) We strongly suggest you back up your photography files on iCloud. (Actually it’s not a suggestion.) We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. It’s as simple as playing a game of Twister and Limbo simultaneously while also working out a calculus problem. If that’s too much for your primitive intellect, ImageCapture is slightly easier. Does that answer your question, sir? No, but you blindly jump into it. Before long, iPhone is screaming at you. No more storage space! iCloud is screaming at you. No more storage space! With the cringing terror of a viciously caned British schoolboy, you instantly obey, and fearfully start dragging photos from your iPhone to your Mac hard drive. Can you do it in batches? No, sir. You can’t. One file at a time. That also is the Apple way. Ah. After an hour or two, you’ve finally cleared off a modicum storage space on your iPhone. But not for long. iCloud quickly restores all the deleted photos to your iPhone drive. Once again, your iPhone screams. No more storage space! You can always turn off the iCloud back up. Is there a toggle switch to quickly do that? Is there … I assume you’re joking, sir. But no, there is not. You can do it. There is a way. It’s no more complicated than programming a quantum computer while playing Jenga while holding a boiling fondu pot beneath your knees. Might I recommend the purchase of additional iCloud storage space?

Coming home from Anime Weekend Atlanta

"Here's looking at you, kid."

Monday, November 19, 1997

[My youngest son Drew and I are leaving Anime Weekend Atlanta to fly back home to Sarasota. He’s 14-years-old. I’m 42.]

 

Marriot hotel lobby. Drew and I stand. Suitcases packed with anime convention swag. Disgustingly early in the morning, but we’re awake. CJ is, too. [My cousin, Chris Jefferson.] We do the goodbye thing, and before we know it, we're driving away in the airport shuttle. Drew keeps saying, “We’ve got to do this next year, we've got to do this next year.” I keep saying, “We'll see.” It's still dark. The shuttle driver is listening to a gospel station — and going WAY over the speed limit. (Drew keeps his cool. But he looks like he's strapped into a roller coaster of certain doom.) The driver's eyes are on the next world — and at 90 mph, he'll get there pretty soon. And I was worried about the flight. Pretty damn ironic, huh?

Driving like a bat out of heaven, the Bible-believing driver takes us to the airport where Drew and I sit and wait in these scooped plastic chairs. 

 

In front of us, big glass windows show featureless buildings and drone-like dudes moving assorted crap around in these little carts. All at once Drew says, “There's the sun” and I look and yep — and there it is, a red crescent over the horizon. I’m thinking (and I know it's not original) How many more of these am I going to see before I’m dead? 40 sunrises? 100?

Crackling noise from the airport speakers. More grim warnings about taking bags from strangers on the PA system. “If a man wearing a turban hands you a free radio, do not accept.” The sun climbs, slowly. On one wall, there's an Orwell-sized poster with a giant eye inside a triangle like the one on the back of a dollar bill. The text below the giant eye reads:

 

TURN YOUR MERELY HUMAN

SALESFORCE INTO

SALESGODS

Huh. How do meet your sales goals? 

Ascend to the throne of the Almighty, of course.

“Shove off, Mr. Supreme Being. That throne ain’t big enough for two of us.” 

Pissing God off. Yeah, that’s exactly what you want to do in the airport.

So the line inches forward …

Then Drew and I are finally on the plane. 

Two business-suited businessmen are in the seats behind us. Can't hear what the one guy is saying, but his nattering companion is one of the most boring people I've ever overheard in my life. 

Everything he says is dead literal. There’s lots of agonizing discussion about the intricacies of investing; more agonizing discussion about conventions, hotels, badges, donuts, registration, luggage. No point. No joke. No humor. Just specifics. Like lots of little tinkertoy parts rattling around, but never put together...  

So Drew and I sit there in the f**king plane. A long wait. In the windows to our right, we can see a parade of more planes, too many to count, slowly, slowly rolling..   

Waiting. Waiting.

Then our plane finally rolls and thumps and bursts up into the air. Omens boil in my brain: the warnings about unattended bags, the blasphemous promise to create "Salesgods." Death awaits me with nasty sharp pointy teeth. Behind me, Businessman Blandboy is still going on with his chatter.

Businessman Blandboy: Look, lotta cars down there. That's the new stadium. They're really coming along on that stadium.   

Marty: (whirling around) SHUT THE F**K UP MOTHERF**KER! Death is waving his scythe in your face and the least you can do is show some respect. OK? 

Businessman Blandboy: OK. Sorry.

Just kidding, folks. I keep my mouth shut. Despite his bland appearance, this dude might be a Salesgod. I’m not taking any chances.

We fly — a little over an hour. Then we land. 

Tampa airport is as ugly as ever.

Review: "Tenet"

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. Made me think, it did—and thinking usually leads to talking. So what the hell do I say about this movie? Damned if I know. But I better get started ...

Okey-doke.

Based on trailer and track record, I was expecting a whiz-bang, timey-whimey movie. Like Inception. Except it’s time, not dreams. You figure some Big Bad in the future is screwing with decent folks like you and me in the present. The Protagonist will stop him. But there’s a twist, natch. (Heck, maybe the Protagonist IS the Big Bad!) Or something like that.

Yep. Something like that. 

But not that fun.

Tenet reminds me of the flaws in my own writing. That’s not a bad thing. It actually gives me hope.

Aside from his Scrooge McDuck levels of personal wealth and amazing creative accomplishments, director Christopher Nolan and I have a great deal in common. I’m a science fiction writer. He’s a science fiction writer. I’m fascinated with time. So is Nolan. And we’re both also fascinated with complicated, paradoxical plots.

My typical SF story is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, shrouded in an enigma, inside a tiny Russian doll with wheels-within-wheels spinning in its pointy little head. (There’s also a tasty hard candy center.) In a short story you can get away with it—all you have room for is one PhilDickian surprise. (Christ! I am the robot! Auggh!) In a novel, it’s like driving a ten-ton dynamite truck over a tattered rope bridge.

Late in life, I’ve discovered that Joe Reader has limited patience with this Nabokovian nonsense. Especially when it necessitates mind-numbing passages of expository dialog.

“The Cosmic Egg. That’s the key—but they’ve got it all wrong.”

“You mean the Cosmic Chicken came first?”

“No—it’s deeper than that. It’s … Before the Cosmic Chicken … Before that …”

“Take a breath baby.”

“… there was the Cosmic Chicken Ranch. Before that …”

“The Cosmic Colonel Sanders?”

“Yeah. But who’s he working for? Who’s he selling his “buckets” to?”

After ten pages of this, Joe’s eyes roll back in his skull. He immediately pitches backwards in his chair, gouges the back of his skull on a stainless-steel Ikea coffeetable, and has to go to the Emergency Room.

Joe, like the middlebrow non-English-Major slob he is, gives less than a shit for brainy, paradoxical puzzles. This mouthbreather cares more about the mysteries of the human heart. Characters he can relate to and all that shit. 

Knowing this painful truth, I fight to keep the yattayatta to a minimum. To that end, I ask myself a series of painful questions: Is this scene going on too long? What can I cut? What Darlings can I bury in unmarked graves? How can I shake this dull passage up with some left-field surprise? Is Joe getting bored? How can I keep that sumbitch entertained?

Nolan, unwashed phenomenon that he is, has stopped asking himself these questions. 

The scenes go on too long. And then they keep going. 

INT. APPRAISAL ROOM. Protagonist chats with Young Woman. There’s a Goya drawing in a Harrod’s shopping bag. It’s a fake. The Young Woman sold it to her husband the evil Russian something something lover didn’t know something something Plutonium 231 backwards time something.

Sorry, what?

Don’t get me wrong. The movie’s problem is boredom, not a lack of clarity. If you pay close attention, you'll know exactly what’s going on. Nolan is very clear. From premise to conclusion, he builds his logical artifice like an OCD kid with a new set of Legos.

For all its temporal paradox, this is a very linear movie. 

That’s a weakness, not a strength.

Imagine what Quentin Tarantino could do with this material. His hypothetical film opens in the middle—Reservoir Dogs-style. No warning! The Protagonist (yeah, that’s what he is in the script) is waist-deep in some life-threatening shit. Whoa! That car is driving backwards! You have no clue what’s going on—then find out in economical flashbacks. 

This material could also work with the approach Martin Scorsese used in After Hours. Send the character on a pell-mell trip like Alice down the rabbit hole. What the f**k is going on? You’re on the run. There’s no time to answer that question.

Yeah. Two cinematic possibilities, free of charge. But that’s not what you get.

Nolan's movie, for all its puzzle-master, egghead brainyness, is too damn predictable. No misdirection, no swerves. The film’s rhythm creates an expectation—and never violates it.

The fight scenes and action sequences are cleverly choreographed … and fail to grab you by the heart and gonads. The Protagonist is so ultra-cool-competent, he never breaks a sweat. Never lets on: Shit, this could all go wrong. Nah. The man doesn’t worry. You don’t either. 

What’s left is a puzzle. An insanely brilliant puzzle. It's a great idea—entirely self-consistent. I’m in awe of Nolan’s mind. 

But the trailer was better. Hell, if they’d hired me as a script-doctor, I could’ve made this movie better.

And that gives me hope.