This left me with most of a day to myself, so I went to the Computer History Museum for a couple of hours.

I think it’s reasonable for me to say that I was acquainted with much of the information they cover there–I’ve read a lot about the history of computing over the years–but, unsurprisingly, I hadn’t ever had a chance to see a lot of it; even the section at the Smithsonian for computing only has a small number of (admittedly, very significant) machines.

So yeah, that was a hell of a lot of fun. Never doubt that I’m a geek.

The silliest thing I think I saw was probably the ashtray in a Project SAGE workstation:

Most fun to see again, though was My First Computer:

(Which is to say, my Dad’s first computer, that I used)

During my pre-teen years, I had the sequence you had to type into the hex keypad embedded deep in my muscle memory. I did some spelunking around, and found a page that references it, but I think the person who wrote that up is using a more recent/hacked ROM, so it’s a little different from what I used to do.

Or, perhaps more accurately, My Real First Computer:

That is to say, the computer I used through high school and took to college–in fact, the computer I used until I bought my first IBM-compatible in late 1993, which means I was using Ataris of some strip for most of a decade (1986-1993).

The computer on which I first programmed in something other than BASIC (Forth, Modula-2, C).

The computer that introduced me to the Free Software community in which I am still deeply involved–I first used gcc and even g++ on this machine. I learned Emacs (admittedly, microEmacs) on it. I used a bash-like shell.

It is my impression that the Amiga community didn’t establish quite such strong ties to the unix-oriented Free Software community, so I’m actually profoundly grateful that I ended up with what was probably the less powerful, less idiosyncratic machine–it set me on the course I’m still heading down today.

Having shown the H-8, let me show the H-1, it’s analog predecessor:

I just don’t know what to make of analog computers. I probably understand the theory behind them as well as I do that behind digital computers–which is to say badly if at all–but their era was done long before I was doing this stuff, so they just seem like the Duck-billed Platypus of computing.

The final picture I got was less about what it was than about who it once belonged to:

The culture of Unix is my computing culture, and as a consequence I treasure my copy of Peter Salus’ A Quarter-Century of Unix, which is where I read about Joe Ossanna.

One of the things that distinguished Unix from many other contemporary systems was having fairly comprehensive on-line documentation, addressable with the man command.

One of the things that enabled this was having a markup system that could drive both printers and text output. This evolved out of the roff system that Joe Ossanna wrote, and then rewrote as nroff (new roff) and finally troff. And then he passed away at a relatively young age.

So not only was this a manual from one of the predecessors of the OS on which I’m writing this, it belonged to the person wrote the language in which it was presented, who never got the opportunity to see how this system, Unix, that he helped bring into existence, would eventually become wildly successful and still relevant 40 years later.

I figured John would know enough to realize that to not announce that there was going to be at least one more novel in the Old Man’s War series would be to put himself in mortal danger.

So I am very pleased to see that he’s announced that there will be a Season Two.

I don’t have—and I don’t think I will ever have—the relationship with movies that he had; while I find movies entertaining, I also own a T-shirt that sums up my feelings startlingly well: “The book was better.”

Roger Ebert bridged the gap for me. I enjoyed reading his reviews and essays enourmously. He made me want to be a better, more informed, member of the audience.

I have seen only a few of the movies discussed in his last Great Movies book, but enjoyed reading about such exotica as El Topo or Winter Light; movies that I will probably never see—frankly, have no intention of seeing—and yet were painted for me in a beautiful form that I could find appreciation for.

Seeing something through the eyes of someone so steeped in something, so passionate about its meaning and devoted to the expressive possibilities, is a powerful thing. To lose someone with that capacity to lay bare the depth and breadth of a subject, while still loving the magic and beauty of it,leaves us diminished.

If you haven’t read his memoir, Life Itself, you should.

I just watched Seeking a Friend for the End of the World last night, and I looked up his review of the movie. The last paragraph seems painfully apt:

The best parts of this sweet film involve the middle stretches, when time, however limited, reaches ahead, and the characters do what they can to prevail in the face of calamity. How can I complain that they don’t entirely succeed? Isn’t the dilemma of the plot the essential dilemma of life?

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Where Are We Now? is not my favorite David Bowie song. Really, not by a long shot.

Favorite or not, though, I’m happy to see him making new music—I had all-but given up hope of ever hearing the words “new music from David Bowie” used in a sentence together, and that made me sad.

It’s interesting to see him revisiting Berlin, the site of the creation (with some involvement of Tony Visconti, who is being credited as producing the new album) the three of his albums (Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger) that would seem to most effectively bridge the gap between the avant-garde leanings he’s always shown and the trim, effective pop songs he’s always been so good at producing. So I’m interested to see where it all ends up.

Incidentally, I am amused by the mention of KaDeWe in the lyrics of the song. I remember the one trip my family made to Berlin when we lived in Germany, back in 1983. My grandfather bought a pair of Zeiss binoculars in KaDeWe. It’s interesting to note that that same trip came up in a post here almost 10 years ago (and that on the 10th of February of this year, this blog will be 10 years old).

And then there comes the penultimate paragraph, that—from my observation point outside of any religious group, Christian or otherwise—seems to me to cut to the heart of why such groups throughout the ages end up being so petty and unkind:

You ask, if we change our way of interpreting the Bible on this issue (my words, not yours) “- what else will happen next?” Here’s what I hope will happen. After acknowledging the full humanity and human rights of gay people, I hope we will tackle the elephant in the room, so to speak – the big subject of poverty. If homosexuality directly and indirectly affects 6 – 30% of the population, poverty indirectly and directly affects 60 – 100%. What would happen if we acknowledged the full humanity and full human rights of poor people? And then people with physical disabilities and mental illnesses and impairments? And then, what after that? What would happen if we acknowledged the spiritual, theological, moral value – far beyond monetary or corporate value – of the birds of the air, the flowers of the field, of seas and mountains and valleys and ecosystems? To me, Jesus’ proclamation of the reign or commonwealth of God requires us to keep pressing forward, opening blind eyes, setting captives free, proclaiming God’s amazing grace to all creation.

That is a vision that, at some rational level, should scare the crap out of anyone. If you’re not intimidated by that idea—of making a categorical choice to love, respect and care for everything—then I can only say that I don’t think you’ve really thought about what it entails.

You have few choices if this is what your religion is building up to, and only one of them—owning up, doing the work, accepting your failures and the failures of others, getting up dusting yourself off and doing it again—is going to leave you a healthy, happy human being. All of the rest of them seem to me to lead to trying to draw arbitrary lines where you say, “We don’t have to care about them“, or “They don’t deserve it”…and once you’ve done that, you’ve impoverished your soul. That’s not a state I think anyone wants to come face to face with.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Of course, any cover of “Master of Puppets” has to be judged by the sheer heaviness of the lead-in to the big guitar solo (in that video, seen at 5:36), which should sound like it is about to roll over you and crush you under its wheels.

And, sadly, that’s where the one shortcoming both Mistallica and Iron Maidens suffer from is on full display—although their instrumental prowess is significant, even with Bruce Dickinson’s famously large vocal range, most of Iron Maiden’s tunes generally skirt the low low end of most female singers vocal ranges. It’s even worse with James Hetfield, to has spent most of his career barking more than singing.

I think they express their issues concisely and amusingly in this proposed theme song.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Personally, I thought many things about it were very beautifully presented—the chase that opens the movie may be the finest one ever done in a Bond film; it certainly takes my breath away—though the overall plot is…weird. Not the “water is the next great resource to control” part, which actually makes sense to me, but the “there is a great big pervasive conspiracy” bit that is supposed to drive the whole film, but doesn’t quite cohere enough to work as its engine.

I should also point out that I think the point of the title is quite obvious in light of the last scene of the movie. Am I the only one?

Via

I remember discussing the original Ringworld with Chet a couple of years ago, as he picked it up for the first time. Parts of it have those antiquated gender role assumptions that so often succeed in annoying me, though not quite as ferociously patronizing as, say, Heinlein regularly evinced. But mostly, boy it goes by fast. It (along with Rendezvous with Rama) is among the first Big Dumb Object stories, and there is a blessed lack of a sense of need to attribute meaning to it—it just is.

Protector turns out to be the background for all that follows, and perhaps my favorite of all the books—it’s more like two novelettes packaged together, and they’re both interesting and fast-paced. A reminder, really, of what the new generation of SF writers meant in the 60′s and 70′s.

And it promptly becomes the basis of a multitude of enormous retcons to the Ringworld.

That’s not to say that I didn’t like the books—there are many worse ways to spend your time—but from The Ringworld Engineers the action becomes increasingly baroque, and at a certain point, I just didn’t care to work hard enough to follow it. By the last half of The Ringworld Throne, I don’t have the patience to try and fight my way through all the thrusts and counter-thrusts. It doesn’t feel worth my time to try and figure out which protector is allied with whom, etc. I’ve read that book at least four times, and I still feel in the dark. Ringworld’s Children just magnifies the problem in all directions.

The new “* of Worlds” books are at least clearer, but again, I just don’t have any real investment in the characters, even the ones that have shown up in earlier books that I actually liked. And when they start trying to reconcile the already-complicated timelines of the two series’ so that they can sync up for the last book…well, obviously, they got my money. But my heart just wasn’t in it. I felt like I could skim without missing anything of real importance. It all felt kind of empty.

It doesn’t have to be that way. At all. But I think these big end-of-life tie-it-all-together books that some SF writers seem to move toward are always going to feel somewhat hollow. They are, necessarily, more about tying things off than starting things anew. In fact, I think most sequels are like that, except perhaps where the author is willing to leave no bridge un-burned in the service of a new story that needs to be told.

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At the age of 17—the year he died—my most favorite author in the whole world was probably Robert Heinlein. I don’t think anyone else came anywhere close. I had read just about everything he had ever published, and (with the exception of Farnham’s Freehold), I loved it all.

Some of these books had enormous implications for my attitude toward the world—Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers being the most obvious. They marked me indelibly. They helped make me who I am today.

Which is why, for about the last fifteen years or so, I’ve not understood why I couldn’t pick up one of his novels and read it without getting…annoyed, often downright pissed-off, even as I could recognize how this or that passage or scene had had some specific impact on me.

It’s not that I was disappointed to find that they were badly written—to this day, I rarely have problems with Heinlein’s prose, or even his plots; he was good at the craft of writing. Hell, I recently re-read The Sword of Shanarra, a book I had a great deal of affection for at 14, and found that, yeah, it was actually worse than I had expected (not just wan pastiche of Tolkien, but, truly, badly written to boot), and that didn’t piss me off. So it wasn’t that.

I think I finally found the answer the other day.

I was thinking about something—I don’t even remember what about, probably something political—when I said to myself, “Well, of course, that’s just a social construct.” And I started considering where I had been taught to look at things that way, to try and see the way so many things we are told are “the way things are” are really just things that we as a society have chosen to privilege, and should be open to being questioned and, ultimately, changed.

And as I thought about it, I realized that that was something that I almost certainly got from Robert Heinlein. It is, in fact, a huge theme throughout his work—almost all of his characters question social conventions, defy them, reshape them, mock them and generally point out how instrumental they are in keeping people down, and often unhappy.

What I realized annoys me is that, having established that social conventions and mores are things to be regarded with suspicion and contempt, Heinlein then proceeds to tell you how if you did it his way, everyone would be better off.

That’s chutzpah.

I think the problem was that as I became an adult, as I started to move into the real world, I ran up against the realization that his vision of what would make everyone better off comes off as somewhere between quaintly backward—right up until his last novel, he has a sort of Madonna/whore complex that comes off as alternately protective and patronizing toward women—and Ayn Rand levels of ignorant of actual humanity. Even when I agree with him, the way he presents these notions makes me cringe, because they’re presented in such a paternalistic way, in circumstances that are so absent from real life.

In effect, as I internalized what I think was his greatest lesson—and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for that lesson, it has stood me in good stead all my life—I was being set up to not actually be able to enjoy his writing.

I can’t decide if it’s a shame, or it’s a natural progression, the realization that eventually people do run out of things to teach you, or that you have to sort through the lessons yourself to understand what really matters.

Because, I would suggest, they didn’t understand the character’s value. I have a vague memory of a review—I thought it was Roger Ebert, but a quick check suggests not—that suggested that watching a guy who feels like he can’t get mad get chased around was going to be fundamentally boring.

In fact, I think this deleted scene from the Avengers may do a better to explain why the Hulk as a character has the potential to matter.

The initial “Sage or Butterfly” exchange is funny, but the substance is at the very end:

Watch this video on YouTube.

“I know where I can do the most good, but it’s where I can do the most harm.”

“Well, that’s no different than anybody else.”

To do good requires changing things as they are—but anytime we are a force for change, there is the possibility that we won’t be successful, that the changes won’t take the form we wanted, or have the outcome we desired. That, in the end, we will end up being a destructive force. The Hulk is merely this truth writ large—which is why I think the other movies failed: the alternatives Banner was always being presented with were to do nothing, or be destructive, never to effect change for good. They were only ever showing half the coin.

I estimate that I did my first install some time in late 1995, perhaps early 1996. I haven’t really used anything else as my day-in-day-out OS since. I’ve never had a Mac of any stripe, and haven’t used Windows with any frequency other than for World of Warcraft since ’99.

I can pin my first contribution to Debian with far more accuracy: September 3, 1996. That’s the date on the first Debian changelog entry in the libwww-perl package, which was, I believe, the first package I ever made. It still exists in Debian and Ubuntu (and other derivatives) and if you have it installed, you can look at /usr/share/doc/libwww-perl/changelog.Debian.gz, and right down there at the very end, you’ll find my grubby little fingerprints.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill—I am, to some extent, to blame for the fucked-up naming convention (with its poorly-sorting use of a -perl suffix) of every Perl library package in Debian, and probably by extension, the similar poor choices in the -java and -cil groups. Even the PHP guys were smarter.

As I remember it, having packaged libwww-perl (which is the actual name of the package as it exists on CPAN, so I just used that as the package name), I discovered that for some things—FTP support, I believe—it required the libnet package, which provides a lot of Net::* modules. But when I announced that I was going to package it someone (I want to finger Rob Browning, but cannot in be certain, and I don’t know if the Debian archives go back that far, and can’t be bothered to check, really) said they were about to package the libnet C library, which would conflict, so maybe I could call it libnet-perl, like libwww-perl, which I did. And then the next thing I packaged I ended up calling lib<whatever>-perl for no good reason, and it all went to hell.

Bleargh.

Almost 16 years later, we have ~ 3000 Perl packages in the repository, all with that damned -perl suffix. So, um, sorry.

My other big accomplishment of any note, I think, was to finally get the 64-bit Alpha port to a self-sustaining state. This started with a bootstrap that someone had done from a set of RedHat binaries before, and gradually pulling along various bits of the system until we had a self-hosting system.

Along the way, I was responsible for another unfortunate bit of “engineering”—@libc6.1@. Again, I don’t think I was totally alone in putting this forth (David, David…um, I forget his last name, and the libc6 changelog.Debian doesn’t go back that far), but it probably would have been better to bite the bullet and avoid all the gymnastics it required.

As I remember it (this was, err, ’97? So I may have some details wrong), RedHat had pushed their first Alpha release using a libc with a SONAME of 6, based on a pre-release glibc-2…and then the 64-bit ABI was changed when glibc-2 was released. Our versioning tools for shared libraries were much more primitive at the time, and we wanted to keep compatibility with RedHat, since that’s where a lot of the heavy duty engineering was going, so we had to follow them in changing the library SONAME to 6.1. This entailed a lot of churn at the time, most of which I’ve blocked out. I did a lot of mechanical patches on a lot of packages.

I did spent a lot of time doing fixes for 64-bit-isms in various packages, and I can remember the flush of pride I had when Alan Cox mentioned that he’d gotten a bunch of 64-bit fixes as well as the conversion of the @mh@ mail client to use an ELF shared library from the Debian package, because that was my work.

My time as an active Debian contributor was not always a smooth one—I wasn’t always as attentive about keeping things up to date or doing triage on bugs as I could have been. I think I finally formally recognized that I wasn’t able to keep up around 2002, which was probably a couple of years later than everyone else had realized it.

Ironically, I probably maintain more packages now, for our internal company purposes at Ironic Design, than I ever did as a developer; the tools have made the maintenance at least of the sorts of packages I do (libraries and simple applications) incredibly easy.

I maintain ~ 20 production Debian servers, with a handful of dev servers and a couple of home systems, including the laptop I’m writing this on, with basically no problems on a day to day basis. It has its warts, but I have boxes that have been continuously upgraded over a span of half a dozen years with no appreciable problems. I am able to be productive and use the environment happily. I remember the rough spots at the beginning (the move from a.out to ELF, for instance), but what Debian provides now always surprises and delights me.

So kudos to those Debian maintainers, former and current, who have contributed to such a great software system.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Incidentally, did you know she underwrote Massive Attack‘s first album? I didn’t.

Anyway, that reminds me of one of my few regrets from college—the time I didn’t go see Michael Hedges. This would have been in 1990, right after the release of Taproot—my favorite of all his albums.

There were plenty of good reasons not to see the show, like 1) I didn’t really have the money for it, 2) I didn’t hear about it until the day of the show, and couldn’t get tickets 3) it was more than an hour away in Birmingham.

The stupid reason that I actually ended up not going was because I was too cheap to pay for parking so I could go see if there were any tickets or scalpers. Yes, I drove all the way to Birmingham, circled around within a few blocks from the arena, couldn’t find a space free space, gave up and drove back to Tuscaloosa.

When Mike Nix got back the evening, he told me that, in addition to a number of other covers he was well known for doing, Michael had performed “Buffalo Stance”.

Well, 20+ years later, I’ve heard his rendition:

Watch this video on YouTube.

It’s a little heavy on the piezo quack, but otherwise pretty wonderful. For good measure, I leave you with him doing The Who’s “Eminence Front”:

Watch this video on YouTube.

It’s good, though I don’t think it’s quite as good as the real thing:

Watch this video on YouTube.

But what I really like is that he’s done a series of videos on youtube taking an absolutely beautiful guitar from start to finish. It is fascinating.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Watch this video on YouTube.

“From Bavaria.”

Anyway, I was, no kidding, looking through some Guitar Center catalog I got in the mail, and saw an Ibanez 8-string guitar being endorsed by this guy whose name rang absolutely no bells at all. And I kind of wrote him off, because it seemed like senseless “more is better”-ness.

And then he, and his band, Animals as Leaders started showing up in my YouTube feed.

So, what the Hell, I watched one. And then another, and then a third. And for the last week I’ve been doing occasional bits of spelunking around.

I’m not going to pretend that everything he does interest me—a lot of it would have appealed to me more 20 years ago, when I was more interested in stuff that carries a lot of aggression. But he’s wickedly articulate:

Watch this video on YouTube.

And some of the things he does solo I do find sometimes startling and beautiful (the first bit he runs through in this clinic is wonderful, the rest of it interesting but not entirely compelling to me):

Watch this video on YouTube.

And finally, he can also operate well out of his usual milieu very comfortably:

Watch this video on YouTube.

He has an album that he describes as more jazz-oriented that I’m thinking of—in the hopes that it will have more of what appeals to me and less of the noisy-double-bass-at-180bpm of Animals as Leaders that leaves me cold.

So I picked it up last Tuesday and spent a week getting through it. Re-reading it was interesting.

I was impressed with Morrison’s ability to set himself up at the very beginning with things that weren’t going to reach fruition for a while. For instance, there’s a moment in the second issue where Cassandra Nova injects herself with nano-Sentinels that I had never before noticed as the moment setting up the nano-Sentinel sickness that becomes of importance…well, all through the series. From the early sickness that afflicts all the X-Men that ultimately leads to Beast’s downfall at the end of the series.

In fact, it is this very deftness that leads to the one great disappointment, which is, of course, the big reveal of Xorn as Magneto. A lot of people say they see evidence from the moment that the character is introduced that Morrison planned it that way, but if that’s the case, it’s too subtle for me, because I find it all but impossible to make it fit as seamlessly and clearly (in retrospect) as so many other thing in the series.

Besides that, I find it most interesting to view this through the lens of Morrison & Quitely’s Absolute Superman.

New X-Men reads like a dry run, in some ways, for that book—the sense that the value of the events is to shine a light on the characters, to let their most vital essence show through, the willingness to acknowledge what has come before without being bound by it.

The moments at the end for Jean Grey—when Logan kills her in an effort to try and spare her a painful death, and the surrender in her final statement to Scott Summers, “I’m always dying on you.”—carry a lot of emotional weight while still acknowledging the fundamental unseriousness of death in comic-books, and set the scene for an emotional component that Morrison succeeds in sustaining throughout Absolute Superman.

I’m not going to suggest everyone go out and spend the $71 that Amazon charges (in contrast to Absolute Superman, which I would suggest everyone read), especially since this ends up being a true doorstop of a book—it’s a little unwieldy. But if you have any affection for these characters—if you grew up with them in their heyday of the late 70′s and early 80′s, you should really consider reading this, even if you just borrow it.

Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon is definitely in the latter camp. Though it certainly takes the periodic table as its jumping-off point, it’s really a broad overview of the formalization of chemistry and physics as their own, separate disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries, seen through the lens of our relationship to the not-as-fundamental-as-we-think (or, for that matter, most of the scientists being discussed thought) components of our universe.

Some of the endnotes are pretty interesting—the scientist who nearly didn’t get his Nobel Prize because he nearly died from a Staph. Aurea infection that degraded into necrotizing fascitis, for instance. And, truthfully, it’s easily read in small bites, which fits with the time I have available to devote to reading right now.

If you’re into this sort of collection-of-anecdotes sort of book, go for it; it’s an excellent example of that sort of book.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Watch this video on YouTube.

In fact, I assumed that they were a joke, they were so weird and creepy. I assumed that the web site would be a big put-on.

But as far as I can tell, it’s not. It’s a real ice cream place.

Now normally, this would not be enough for me to blog this. But I know people in Philadelphia. I am more or less demanding that you go check this place out and let me know if it’s as much of a nuthouse as the commercials suggest. Please. I have to know.

Via

Watch this video on YouTube.

The payoff, such as it is, is at 5:23.

I remember having a great deal of affection for it a couple of decades ago, when it first came out—though I probably haven’t even thought of it since college—so it seemed worth watching.

It’s certainly not without some virtues; the story isn’t as quite as fluffy as you might expect (however you might regard the Pythons, they’re not intellectual lightweights, just silly), and the actors do what they can with a script that is certainly geared for laughs—the moment when Erik and company are trying to take in the differing notion of life on Hy-Brasil is played a little broadly, even though the point it’s making about cultural assumptions is pretty funny.

“What, all the time?”

I do remember thinking at the time that no one as attractive as Imogen Stubbs should have as old and frumpy a name as that. I still believe this to be true.

It actually reminded me, in production quality, of another film, from another Python, from the same year, that I had recently watched again. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen showed up on Amazon Prime not long ago, and one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago I watched it.

The commonality is reasonably strong. I think it’s fair to say that both embraced their limitations, and decided that if absolute realism was not possible, they would dispense with it entirely.

In fact, the Dragon of the North Sea reminds me of nothing so much as the leviathan from Baron Munchausen.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that, upon reviewing it, Baron Munchausen no longer seemed as amazing and riveting as it did 20 years ago. Seeing Uma Thurman 19-year-old tits was as delightful as might be expected (however briefly), but otherwise, the scatter-shot quality of the storytelling seemed much more apparent to me than it did in 1989.

Still, it’s amusing to see some of the people no one knew then who were in the films. Of course, Sarah Polley was the little girl in Munchausen, and she’s gone on to do a thing or two. And I actually remember Joie Brun pointing out Sting’s cameo.

More surprising to me was recognize Ray Cooper, whom Chet and I were to see playing on tour with Eric Clapton the next year. And finally, Erik includes a young Samantha Bond in what appears to have been one of her first movie roles.

I’m not saying that either one is a bad way to spend a couple of hours, but as with so many things, the intervening time hasn’t been entirely complimentary—whether because my tastes have changed or become more sophisticated, it’s hard for me to say.

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Update. OK, maybe this cover of Soundgarden‘s “Black Hole Sun”. But I think “Hanging Tree” still wins, just because is a more obscure song.

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Apparently Brad Mehldau is making something of a career of this sort of thing. Here’s him covering Radiohead‘s “Everything in its right place”. There’s a beautiful moment in it right at 2:18:

Watch this video on YouTube.

Needless to say, youtube has links to many others.

When I have five minutes, I sit at my drumkit and play Golden Age, because it is currently my favorite song in the whole universe:

Watch this video on YouTube.

And yes, that is the weirdest, most fucked-up video I think I have ever seen. Isn’t it glorious?

But what I love is that this is not a band that is static, that is just reproducing a record. Consider, for instance, these three performances of “Will Do” (which I find a lovely song by any standard):

First, the album version:

Watch this video on YouTube.

Then a performance from Letterman, (just a few days after their album was released and just six days before their long-time bassist died of cancer) which is obviously the same song, but not a reproduction of the album by any means:

Watch this video on YouTube.

Then, this version from SXSW, a few months later:

Watch this video on YouTube.

Even this song off their just-released album, is still evolving. They’re in no rush.

Or, even better, a song off an older album, “Dirtywhirl” (which gets points in my book for being about Durga), which in this 2006 performance starts with them looping Tunde Adebimpe beatboxing:

Watch this video on YouTube.

Versus the original album version:

Watch this video on YouTube.

I am in awe of their brilliance.

But none of that is really what stuck with me.

The idea that a large percentage of make-a-wish children want to meet Elmo makes perfect sense to me–if he’s so firmly associated as a source of gentle, physical, unconditional love, and you’re sick and in pain and everyone around you seems unhappy, of course that’s what you would wish for. And yet the idea of doing that even once would terrify me for reasons that I suspect many could understand: what if I couldn’t provide what a child needed? How could I stand knowing that this child will be gone before his or her time, and soon at that?

You know. Cowardice.

It reminds me of a piece Peter Sagal wrote a few months ago about visiting Walter Reed, and how, visiting the first soldier he was scheduled to see:

As I listened, I tried to focus, and control my own feelings of horror and dismay, and my growing urge to walk out of the room and tell the Sergeant, patiently waiting outside, that I could take no more and needed to leave now. (The sergeant told me later that this does happen.)

His story is a bit of a tough read, but it’s well worth it, too.

I found the main story to be a fun little meta-fictive romp, and not a lot else. In tone it very much reminded me of his earlier novel, Agent to the Stars–deeply aware of, if only to have fun with, genre conventions. As utterly unconcerned with the “science” part of “science fiction” as its purported source material.

There are certainly far worse ways to spend a few hours, though there are many better ones as well.

I was intrigued, though, by the three “codas”. Obviously, John felt it necessary to write a little apologia for it. And I was doubly intrigued when a review I read of the book a couple of days before I got to it myself suggested that the codas were a waste of time.

In fact, I think the codas–specifically, the second coda–are the best part.

Now my gut reaction to writing in the second person is something in the general neighborhood of derision. Tell me you’re doing it, and I will suggest you are making a mistake. Tell me you’ve already done it, and I will make a note to avoid your book. Admittedly, if you get me to read your book anyway, and I might actually like it (thank you, Mr. Palahniuk), but my default assumption is that it is going to be annoying and precious.

But I can’t imagine the second coda to Redshirts working as well from any other point of view. To ask the reader–especially one who has some idea what might be coming–to empathise with the weirdness of the situation the character finds himself in pretty much demands something as jarring and weird and annoying as second person narration. So I think it not only worked, but was the only way it could work. So I actually found myself more satisfied after the codas than before.

I’ll note, just because I’ve started paying a little more attention to this in my fictional choices, that I believe the book fails the Bechdel Test. I think there are only two female characters in the whole thing, and they never talk that I remember. Just so you know.