Joshuah Bearman

A moving and insightful eulogy for Editor & Publisher

Now I wish I had read it more when it still lived. 

Black Bears, Cocaine, and Bigfoot: Unholy Trinity?

Black bear ODs on cocaine. Let's just hope this thing doesn't find some narcotrafficking discards. Bigfoot + cocaine = whole new chapter in the drug war. Can you imagine strung-out Bigfoots rummaging through your garage, stealing your old RC cars to hock them at pawn shops, even for just a few bucks to go toward that next boost? Really bad scene. And what about rehab? Would Bigfoot even share at meetings? See what I mean? Whole can of worms here. 

 

I am going to guess that there is no file on this usage in Nintendo's Product Safety Department

You gotta respect it: dude knows what he wants -- and just asks for it.   

P.s.: Is he asking for a handjob with the hand that is actually wearing the Nintendo Power Glove? Because that takes it up a notch. And this whole thing was already up a notch!

(Courtesy Gideon, who, as always, is talkin' bout his generation.)

And they just keep upping the ante on cute kitties!

I think these guys might be confused as to the historical and cultural connotations of "Rough Riders."

I know it's a week later but I'm still proud of my applie pie!

Weekly Dose of Wonder

Martian Landscapes! In orbit 187 miles up, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is taking incredible photos of the surface of the red planet:

 

 

Here are dozens more equally entrancing images.

Weekly Dose of Wonder

Riddle me this, art-cognoscenti? Why is Frederic Church not as well known as William Turner? Does the Hudson not inspire as great art as (my alma mater) Heidelberg? Is it just that Church was American?

Twilight in the Wilderness:

Just like on Facebook: It's Complicated.

Such is the theme of a group show at Royal/T. In Bed Together is what it's called. I think it's metaphorical. Or, in the case of a signature piece in the show that also happens to be a painting that was presented upon my marriage, it may be partly literal. Some readers may have also been revelers at the vernissage thrown by Me, Ronni, and her twin sister, Marina, earlier this summer. Here is what I promised in the invitation:

To commemorate our nuptial adventure, Ronni's sister Marina has made a painting. That’s right: paint, canvas and stretchers — the old fashioned way of capturing epics afield for the audience at home. It is a huge canvas, one befitting the vistas of the Great Rift Valley. I do not what the canvas contains. No one does. It is a secret! But it is a secret that will soon be revealed — at the artist’s studio. Please join us for the unveiling. There will be red cloth and a gilded rope and singing horns. (Really; my brother is a brass master.) It will be just like when Manet unveiled Olympia. Except there are no nudes. Or maybe there are! Who knows? Not me!

That Saturday everyone was surprised when we pulled back the curtain on our very own personalized homage to Olympia! Everyone thought that my perspicacious goofing in the invitation meant I was in on the deal. I wasn't. Precisely because of my goofing, I was most shocked of all when I saw this:

As promised, the esteemed members of the Salon were scandalized.

And so now all seven feet of this painting now hangs on our wall. Or it did until yesterday, when it was borrowed to be featured in the show at Royal/T. It was requested for its depiction of a complicated relationship -- our complicated relationship: husband, wife, and twin, appearing together in symbolic  composition. What it means exactly I'm not sure. I might be afraid to ask. But it was chosen as the poster image, which was flattering to all. Such a thing happened once before, in Japan, when a painting Marina had made of Ronni wearing a fake fur panda hat was chosen as the poster for a big museum show that was opening while we were all three in Japan, resulting in the odd experience of us wandering the streets of Tokyo and looking up to see an anime version of panda-headed ronni smiling back down at us. Like so, but much bigger:

That was the handbill we took home. If we could just combine these to have Ronni nude in a panda hat -- now that would be one vigorous artistic hybrid...

One Stop Shop For Video News

I don't know who decided to use the embeddability of video news segments to collect them all in one place, or why they chose to call it Kobre, but it's a really great idea.

I Love This Kid!

Maybe he should run for governor of Arizona.

The Most Complicated Mechanical Clock in the World

Is something I'd like to see:

Among the 70 dials (and 122 indications) are: a perpetual calendar, leap year cycles; sunrise and sunset; local times at seventeen world-wide places; and animated tidal charts in eight different French ports.

Now that I am a seaside denizen of Malibu, and attuned to the ways of the waves, I appreciate such fine detail. Surfline is handy, but just doesn't have the charm of an intricate machine with 40,000 moving parts. All the Besançon timepiece needs is a dial for Pt Dume tides. And a window indicating the precise, universal and astronomically accurate arrival of 4:20!

Wasn't there a fairy tale about The Chimp and The Frog? (With advance apologies)

LA Times on Art Laboe

So there was a great piece in the LA Times last week about Art Laboe, an 84-year-old veteran radio host in Los Angeles whose long history and oldies show has forged a deep cross-cultural connection with the Latino community. Laboe may be old news to some, but that's all the more reason to say hats off to the LA Times for putting a story on him up front. Better late than never. (Even the LA Weekly hasn't done a cover on Laboe, although Ben Quiñones has mentioned him several times.) Esmeralda Bermudez's story was well-told and refreshingly written for the stuffy ol' front page. Human interest can have real heart. (As always, in Column One.) The piece could been longer, a real profile -- but, well, you know... Still, really satisfying:

Phone lines flash six nights a week inside a dimly lit Hollywood studio where Art Laboe sits before his microphone, faithful to his old-fashioned format: playing sentimental oldies and taking dedications. For more than 50 years, his deep, soothing voice has been as cherished among Latinos in the Southwest as Chick Hearn's rapid-fire staccato once was among Lakers fans.

The 84-year-old disc jockey helps them celebrate anniversaries, mourn their dead and profess their love. He is the intermediary who reconciles arguments, encourages couples to be affectionate, sends out birthday wishes and thank yous.

His program, which is especially popular among listeners 25 to 54 years old, has consistently ranked near the top of its evening time slot, according to the ratings firm Arbitron. The Art Laboe Connection plays in more than a dozen cities in four states and draws about a million listeners a week.

"His show was the first place a young Chicano kid had to air his feelings, the first place you could say something and be heard," said Ruben Molina, author of two books on Chicano music and American culture. "It was like an intercom where you could tell the world -- our world -- 'I'm sorry' or 'I love so-and-so' and everyone knew the next day."

...

When rock 'n' roll struck in the 1950s, Laboe launched a live broadcast from Scrivners, a drive-in restaurant in Hollywood. Masses of teens crowded around him to request songs and dedications, and his career took off.

He wanted to be a concert promoter, bring in big bands. But the city of Los Angeles banned youths younger than 18 from attending public dances and concerts. So he decided to host shows in El Monte, which attracted teenagers from the Eastside and its growing Mexican American population.

Latinos poured in to see Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis at the now-defunct El Monte Legion Stadium. Laboe played the rhythm-and-blues and doo-wop these youths craved. He compiled his fans' favorite songs on vinyl records, eight-tracks, cassette tapes and ultimately compact discs featuring Mexican American acts. He learned to pronounce Spanish names.

"It was never intentional," Laboe said. "The connection was there and when they came, I welcomed them with open arms."

Laboe became part of the emerging Chicano identity in Los Angeles, his voice and music the soundtrack of lowrider shows and nights spent cruising Whittier Boulevard. He is the only non-Latino selected as grand marshal of the East L.A. Christmas parade and is a favored award recipient among Latino organizations. At their functions, he says, he is often "the only white guy in the room."

If you want to see Laboe being the only white guy in the room, there is also a short slide show with audio.

Albert Speer Would Be Proud

Not to mention Leni Riefenstahl. If Berlin has no mountains, why not build one?

 

Architect Jakob Tigges suggests putting Berlin back on the monumentalist map by erecting a 3,000-foot mountain on the site of the recently decommissioned Tempelhof airport. Summer hiking, winter skiing, Teutonic myth-making -- all convenient to the S-Bahn! A nifty idea that will never happen, and not just because the architect's own video presentation features him, along with digital images of the Berg plan, set to Looney Tunes cartoon music. But that doesn't stop this imaginary mountain from tweeting! And the pictures are neat: 

I Guess I Finally Made It To The New York Times!

Exciting news: I have an article in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine! Yes, that's yesterday's paper. (I'm on Malibu time these days.) And no, I can't understand why my piece wasn't put on the cover instead of that Megan Fox either. Especially since there were such great art opportunities, like so:

Way better than Megan Fox. And since you asked, the article (my article, that is, not the one about Megan Fox) is a profile of the burgeoning independent video game developer scene.

Nutshell: technology and distribution has enabled a do-it-yourself, 'zine movement in video games. It's a raucous avant-garde, and wants to upset its medium's apple cart while also — dare one say it — making video games that aspire to artistic greatness.

This I learned at the Game Developer's Conference, during which the indie designers all convened in Room 131, in a far corner of the Moscone Center, to celebrate their own insurrection against the establishment. Which is where I saw an incredible lecture by a legendary indie gamer named Cactus. Sadly, this scene got cut from the article at the last minute. It happens! But thanks to the magic of the internet, the Director's Cut is already available. That slide above comes from Cactus' presentation, as does this slide: 

They were all that good. Want to hear more? Press SPECIAL FEATURES. Now press DELETED SCENES. Now press CACTUS! Here goes:

FROM THE BOWELS OF THE GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, MARCH 2009

Room 131 was filled to capacity when Cactus took the stage, flat drunk on Malibu Rum, to give his talk: How To Make a Game in Four Hours. Cactus is the handle of Jonatan Sondstrom, a 23-year Swedish amateur who has made over 100 video games over the past five years. For many of the people in the audience, this prowess made Cactus a folk hero. And he looked the part, in torn-up vans, red jeans, and green army cap. Cactus’ games are sensory overload experiences, where the player is thrust into a strange world of psychedelic imagery and must quickly resolve the ensuing confusion. This would also be a fitting description of Cactus’ presentation, which was mumbled, heavily accented, accompanied by colorful slides, and opened with a rudimentary animation of a digital turd. "DON'T MAKE GAMES IN FOUR HOURS IF YOU STINK," the text admonished. "END OF LESSON ONE."

Unlike Jason Rohrer, who programs in C++ — “I feel like I’m working with the grain of the machine,” he says — Cactus uses GameMaker, a drag and drop software tool that makes it possible for anyone to make a working game. GameMaker, which costs $25 for the “pro” edition, has allowed Cactus to spend his days in his childhood bedroom at his parents house in Gothenburg, Sweden, transmitting his bizarre output to the world for free.

Whereas Rohrer might start programming with a premise, Cactus and other designers like him approach each game as new experiment with no hypothesis. They start doing something, and see what happens. The process is somewhat algorithmic: constantly branching out, discarding duds, finding occasional breakthroughs. “You make a game a month, or every week,” a young Canadian designer named Chris Lobay later said, “And you’re going to have a few eurekas.”

Over the course of the next half hour, Cactus delivered what seemed at times like a mixed-media performance experiment in PowerPoint comedy. The aesthetic was like his games — crude but clever. The point: a video game can be anything. “Games don’t need to be fun. They can get intensely weird and freak you out.” He said from the stage. “More people should make games that are not for children, but for adults. And, like, mature people.” Cactus did not explain precisely how to do this (or make a game in 4 hours, for that matter), but he did say that anyone can try. His one caveat: “Don’t make games that suck.”

By the time it was over, Cactus’ talk was already becoming a matter of GDC legend. He personified the indie game movement’s anti-establishment cultural ethos, and although his actual games don’t speak to a broad audience now, the example he set for relentless innovation excited the room. “If you were talking about music,” said one indie designer, “then this would be like seeing the Ramones play for the first time.” Cactus left the stage, and was quickly surrounded by a posse of like-minded indie designers and admirers. “Let’s go get more drunk,” he said, and wandered off. It was 4pm.

If you like that, check out Cactus' games. And the article, if you haven't already. 

Fan With a Van: An Airbrush Tragedy/Masterpiece

This right here is some shit that I seen with my very own eyes:

Believe it! A real rarity, this beautiful mobile relic, with homemade artwork faded, and invaded by rust (some would say patina), and gloriously unchanged since '77 (I would guess, as the imagery is unadorned with any sequel references). Note the clever transformation of the rear porthole window! And yes, the mural circles the entire vehicle:

I guess that's Luke below the door handle? And If you're wondering who that weird cross-eyed dude next to Chewbacca is, how about a close-up? Han Solo, obviously:

I didn't realize Han Solo had a Roman nose, or that he broke it boxing. So maybe the artist had a little trouble with humans. But he's good at robots!

And I think that placement of our old friend R2-D2 is situated by the disintegrating wheel well out of solidarity for when R2 gets all jacked while co-piloting with Luke in Return of the Jedi. 

Speaking of which, aww shit -- here comes the Empire on the flip side!

Weekly Dose of Wonder

Frederic Leighton's The Return of Persephone:

I'm STILL Not Ashamed to Say That I Bought Lars and The Real Girl

Hook, line and sinker, despite what my old pal Manohla said, and the fact that my other onetime LA Weekly pal Ella Taylor piled on, because I have been vindicated by reality. Even if you don't know from Lars and The Real Girl, listen to this segment from Radiolab about Stu Rassmussen, a transgendered man from red-state, small-town, Main Street USA, who is not only accepted by his town but elected as Mayor and then defended when right-wing crazies show up to make a fuss. It's twenty minutes. Do it when you can really focus. It's just great, although it feels more like a top-notch TAL story than Radiolab -- but who cares. And so Ella -- I'm talking to you! I know you love radio. Don't miss this one.

Everyone Loves a Caper! Especially a Teen-Criminal-Escape-Artist Caper With 2 Stolen Boats and 3 Stolen (and Crashed) Planes!

Full (and very entertaining) story at LA Times.

And don't forget the Facebook Fan Club!

I Like It When the Drunk Ewok Humps The Ground!

Maybe I Actually Do Approve of Gimmicky Art Installed in Boutique Hotels

Because this video mural, installed in an elevator in the new Standard in New York, is mesmerising:

Civilization by Marco Brambilla from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Build Your Own Rivendell

Like these guys:

Or visit Auerworld Palace. 

Charismatic Megafauna = Less Charismatic Megapoops = Ultra-Charismatic Megascarabs

Such as once existed in Pleistocene-era South America.

I've Always Wanted to Appear on CNN in a Tank Top

And now it's finally happened!

Border Volleyball, aka Walleyball refresher.

Search Engine Referral Hit Parade, Volume V

Always fun. Some recents:

man fucking kangaroo
It's a good story even if it isn't
sasquatch versus unicorn
awesome animals you should know ... but don't
Dr oz farts per day

But here are the best four consecutive search terms so far:

My (Hopeful) Addition to the Best of Wikipedia

Looks like they don't have Noël Godin covered. I love a scoop! So I submitted the following:

Godin is a writer and critic but is best known for throwing cream pies in people's faces. Since 1969, Godin has planted cream pies on the novelist Marguerite Duras, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and Bill Gates. Godin is somewhat like a Van Helsing armed with baked goods to the eternally self-important dandy (and thinker too, I guess) Bernard Henri-Levy, whom Godin has "entarted" many times over the years.

Here is video of a classic BHL "entartage":

Why Do Serial Killers Always Keep a Scrapbook, Or Talk in Riddles, Or Compose Weird Rhymes About Their Crimes?

This story, by this great writer, is like a real life Silence of the Lambs!

Let There Be Light

Did you know that for 800 million years after the Big Bang there was darkness -- until the re-ionization of the gas throughout the universe enabled the first rays of starlight to shine? It's true! Until recently, we hadn't been able to see much from this dark period. And then some gamma rays revealed a giant cosmic explosion from about 630 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant and oldest celestial discovery. We never saw it before because the radiation from the event/object took all those billions of years to make it this far. When did that high-energy evidence arrive? Oh, they showed up around last April. Hello!

Yeti Researcher Reconsidered, By A Smarty Pants English Student

 

I guess I finally rode McSweeney's coattails into a graduate English department: McSweeney's 17 forms a key part of the honors thesis of one Flora Feltham, at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Some time ago, she emailed me the following:

The section I'm currently working on is about the blurry distinction between fiction and non-fiction in the issue and how the dynamic between the fictive and the non-fictive informs our relationship with a potentially literary text. What I would love to know, then, is what degree of authenticity your fantastic Yeti Researcher has?

Of course, I love over-intellectualizing my own work — I mean, who doesn't, really? — so I will admit that I was thrilled that someone else decided to pile on. I answered Flora's questions, and a little while ago, she sent me the relevant chapter of her thesis. Incredibly, Yeti Researcher is mentioned in the same breath as Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden, part of which is a scientific work in the form of a poem:

This combination of “metaphor and scientific material” (Emery, 1) – a tangle of fictional rhetoric and factual content – is, obviously, uncommon to both literature and scientific writing. About 200 years later, “Yeti Researcher” jumbles up the conventions of fiction and non-fiction in an equally atypical style. The difference is that Darwin was writing demonstrable scientific information using the medium of poetry, whereas the editorial-board at “Yeti Researcher” uses the conventions of scientific prose to write about a fictional creature in the context of a literary magazine.

Flattered!

Fletham later goes on to offer an analysis about how stylistic prose choices helped define Yeti Researcher as a distinct form of "non-narrative fiction," which itself is situated in turn in the grand sweep of literature and fiction in our fragmented (super-post-)modern culture. Whew! And by way of my answers, Feltham addresses the question most often put to me back when Yeti Researcher first came out:

“[T]he idea was to make something that McSweeney's readers would think is amusingly, fascinatingly compelling and that bigfoot researchers would be able to read with satisfaction” (Bearman, e-mail). Thus, though their intention was fictional, every step of the research and writing process was subject to rigorous fact-checking in accordance with the pseudo-scientific field they were working within: the information in “Flores Man and Sumatra’s Orang pendek” could “have survived the fact-checking process at a real magazine." They did not make-up any of the information, insofar as, according to common-sense it was not already made up. “[T]he information in the articles is real. By which I mean we didn't make up any bigfoot sightings, records, theories, etc. It was all researched and cited.”

OK, so the ads were fake. And the Classifieds. And Jim Shepard's contribution, which was clearly a piece of fiction masquerading as a real document inside a magazine of fiction masquerading as a real document! And there may have been a few other fudged things. But otherwise, YR (as we at the Society for Cryptic Hominid Investigation like to call it) stands by its work. Which, I'm now reminded, was really fun to put together. Does etiquette say that four years is too late to publically acknowledge Mark Sundeen, Jim Ruland, John Silver, Jim Shepard, Erik Bluhm, Eli Horowitz, and Brian McMullen? Hope not!

All this nostalgia made me go back and take a look at the fine writing and designing and editing that went into YR, which, if you don't own that pile of ingeniously disguised fake junk mail that was issue 17, is hard to come by. Which is why, if anyone is interested, I'm going to make the whole thing available right here!

Journey's With George (Saunders), or Why Magazines Should Hire More Fiction Writers, Part 2

A while back, as a nice gesture, my pal Sean McDonald gave me George Saunders' (at the time) new book, The Braindead Megaphone. It was in galley, since Sean edited it. I was excited. Here in my hands, was one of the few perks of being in a publishing-related field — an advance copy book! And free! Plus, I like that George Saunders guy too.

But I had no idea how much more I would like Saunders when I read his non-fiction, nor did I even know that he wrote non-fiction, since I had entirely missed the fact that GQ had stolen a page from the early 90s Harper's playbook by sending an idiosyncratic and wildly inventive fiction genius on major journalism assignments, which, collected, now formed (in my opinion) the best part of The Braindead Megaphone.

Reading them, I got the sense that Saunders' non-fiction stories were the first real conceptual challenge to the magazine article since David Foster Wallace's expansive, footnoted, densely erudite and analytically observational opuses shed entirely new light and cruise ships, state fairs, and Presidential campaigns. Like Wallace, Saunders also appears in his own journalism as the bumbling, inexperienced journalist, but Saunders is more believable as a bumbler, which is to say that he is a bumbler, which is part of the charm. And the narrative drive too. While Wallace feigned ignorance as he supplied copious reporting, Saunders seems to do very little reporting, eschewing most external detail for his own empathetic internal conflicts and observational experience among, say, The Minutemen, or in Dubai.

That was the first piece I read, at which point I thought: of course! Why did it take so long for someone to think of this? The almost supernatural-seeming and vaguely sinister techno-consumerist Potemkin fantasyland that is the real Dubai seems like a fictional place cribbed from a George Saunders short story, so why not send him there to blow his mind?

The result was an incredible read, as Saunders attempted to resolve the tension between the reality of the un-reality of the place out loud, or at least on the page. (Although on the reporting front, Saunders did punt on the shady finances that coax the mirage of Dubai from the desert.) My favorite piece was another GQ story, "The Incredible Buddha Boy," in which Saunders goes to investigate a claim that a boy in Nepal had been meditating for seven months without any food or water. What follows is true greatness, which you'll have to get the book to experience.

Notice there are no links above, despite that the two articles references are from GQ, a large-circulation, fancy glossy magazine that surely must have a website! Yes, there is such a website, but it is so bad that most of the stories are not available there in their entirety, and those that are are split into so many screens, with fussy type, and bad colors, and such generally poor design that the stories are basically unreadable.

Which is why, even though I had a link to George Saunders' latest non-fiction epic, "Tent City, U.S.A.," in which he lives for a week in a homeless encampment in Fresno, I couldn't bring myself to read it, as it was split by GQ into twenty seven screens. Until, that is, someone went to the trouble to combine all 12,000 words in one place.

To whomever got down to business with Tumblr: thanks a million! I love this story, although I was skeptical at the beginning of the format, which frames the article as a pseudo-sociological field study. For some reason, it didn't sit right with me at the very start, despite that I could tell how much fun it was as a writer to refer to oneself in the third person as the Principal Researcher (PR). But the PR's eye for detail and presentational capabilities are irresistible, especially when combined with his confessional asides, as in this scene where he meets a guy named Ernesto:

ERNESTO'S ADVICE

the pr looked good. Too good. Ernesto himself tried to look not too good. The PR better park that van somewhere else. There were crackheads living up in here. After dark the crackheads would break into the van and steal everything. Even the van. This was not a good place. These were not good people. The PR better take off his wedding ring. They’d come in the night and steal it, taking the finger if necessary. The PR would see tonight how wild it got. A friend of Ernesto’s had stayed out here once, to learn about the homeless. After two weeks, he was dead.

They killed him? the PR said.

He killed his own self, Ernesto said. It made him so sad to see how the people are living. He stayed a couple nights. Then two weeks later, he kill himself. I don’t want that to happen to you.

The PR observed with some interest that his reaction to the clarification that Ernesto’s friend had not been murdered, but had only killed himself in despair, was relief.

And here's Saunders' first real encounter on his first day:

Wanda was a woman of uncertain ethnicity between 30 and 50 years of age whose face consisted of a series of sun-darkened red-and-purple rounded structures, like rosy cheeks, but located in places on her face where cheeks would not normally be found. Nevertheless, Wanda exuded a wry joviality, as if aware that there were comic aspects to the fact that she was seated, sunburned and barefoot, on a street of houses made of garbage, wearing what appeared to be a set of maroon hospital scrubs.

How are you? the PR inquired.

Could be better, Wanda responded.

Wanda reported that she had recently been hit by a train. (The Study Area was located illegally on railroad land, and its western border was a busy switching yard.) She’d been trying to cross the tracks with her bike. That train could have at least honked, she said. Wanda inquired as to whether the PR would give her a hundred dollars. The PR demurred. Wanda asked whether the PR would give her a kiss. The PR demurred. Wanda stated that the PR “looked rich.” The PR protested that he was not rich. Wanda looked pointedly at the project research vehicle, a late-model rental minivan. Wanda showed the PR her train-injured foot, which was red, glazed, and infected. Her big toe was bent at a right angle, as if someone had snapped the big toe at the joint and set it ninety degrees from the correct orientation.

The PR expressed his desire to put up a tent of his own.

Wait, you staying here? Wanda said. How long you staying?

Maybe a week? the PR said.

You married? Wanda said.

Twenty-one years, the PR said.

I’m a rape you, Wanda said.

There's a lot more where that came from, and none of it feels exploitative, since Saunders is such a softie  and humanist (like me!) that he wants to do justice to every single person he meets. He even wants to help them himself, but knows he can't. And he wrestles with that in the piece, giving the tragic humor of a marginalized wasteland some poignancy for balance. Saunders also confesses that he knows — and regrets that he knows — that he will not think about these people much once he's home and never has to come back. In the meantime, Saunders has a chameleon-like ability to tell their stories in their voices while also inserting his own, which manages to humanize his subjects along with himself. It is quite something: funny, moving, and very real — so real from the tact you don't even need to see the one worthwhile link at GQ, a slide show of the real people of Tent City, U.S.A.

Weekly Dose of Wonder

 

From the free hi-res Hubble gallery. That last one was filed under The Universe section. Nifty how the vastness is like a giant disco party!

Travel with Wells Tower, or Why Magazine Should Hire More Fiction Writers

Travel writing is mostly bad. It's partly the fault of the form; contemporary travel magazines are filled with 10 Best New Hotels/Bars/Spas on Yet Another Tony Exclusive Island or How to Eat Fabulously in This Most Glorious Setting You WIll Never See. Sometimes, quality sneaks in. And every so often the glossies still let Paul Theroux into the works so as to keep their bonafides burnished. But even he (I'm going to guess) doesn't get 15,000 words any more, which is what you really need to tell a story about a really far off place. Instead, we get magazine pages full of short and trite pastiches of breathtaking vistas, italicized delicacies, and instantaneous eurekas. This is the opposite of the actual experience of travel, which is both contemplative and confusing, internal and external, a messy surge of sensations both exciting and frustrating. And that includes the dynamic with travel companions, which can be the messiest of all. The point of good travel writing, it seems, is to mediate all that for the audience in a way that draws them into the writer's experience. Rather than spin a thin fantasy of something that will never happen (the reader lays out on St. Barthes), why not woo them with what did happen (George Saunders goes gonzo in Dubai).

Such is the mode of Wells Tower's "Meltdown" in Outside, in which he tells the tale of his and his father's (and ornery brother's) family trip to Iceland and Greenland. Tower's travel dispatch is fundamentally non-traditional: he doesn't know much about where he is, and doesn't really try to find out. The story is mostly about how Tower and his father, who survived cancer several years ago, have made an annual trip to celebrate his father's beating the odds. The trips are all ill-conceived, difficult, and, according to Tower, have often been nearly lethal themselves. Here's the set up:

Eight and a half years ago, when the oncological bookmakers gave my father three years to live, we sat together in his hospital room and vowed that, if he survived, the two of us would take a trip each year to celebrate his outliving his expiration date by another twelvemonth. When we cooked up this scheme, I think we both privately thought we were merely following timeworn etiquette that calls for grand travel fantasies when someone is dying. (Think Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck to Ratso Rizzo in extremis: "When we get to Miami … .") But when Dad surprised us both by beating his rogue cells into remission, it would have been a thumb in the eye of St. Christopher to go back on our vow.

Tower is such a good prose stylist and humorist that you forget the story is not about the traditional travel poles of chasing a destination, or the destination itself, but how his bizarre familial relations are thrown into relief by plopping them down in some of the world's most inhospitably population locations. I could have used about 5% less jokes, but jokes are hard, and the others are so good that they compensate. Witness the lede:

In the Inuit village of Tasiilaq, on Greenland's east coast, in a bar whose name, as far as I can tell, is Bar, people are enjoying themselves as though the world will end tomorrow.

There are maybe 30 folks in here, few of them women, nearly all of them catastrophically drunk. Two men who look fresh from a seal hunt are locked in a dance that is part boxer's clinch, part jailhouse waltz. One of them falls. I can feel his skull hit the floor through the soles of my boots.

I'm on vacation with my father, Ed Tower, an ebullient man of 65 with a belly that strains his parka nearly to the point of rupture. We are not handsome men, but, as a result of their near-lethal intake of Tuborg beers, the few local females (none under 50 or so) have taken a shine to us. My father is flanked by two. One looks like Ernest Borgnine; the other, Don Knotts...

..."Do you dance?" the woman asks Dad. "Why not?"

I can think of several reasons, actually. One, those men by the bar are not looking at us kindly, and, it should be noted, you can buy guns in the grocery stores over here. Two, my father, survivor of an exotic strain of lymphoma, is still in delicate shape from a bone-marrow transplant a couple of years back, and I'm not eager to see him shake his fragile moneymaker on a dance floor that looks like a fourth-down blitz. Three, and most important, is the fact that, in my father's company, trips have a tendency to spiral into disaster. The mishaps are sometimes large and sometimes inconsequential, but the specter of calamity always rides in his sidecar. Here, on our ninth day, we are both still in one piece. We fly out tomorrow. The smart thing, it seems, is to quit while we're ahead.

A grinning elderly woman approaches me unsteadily. I hold out my hand and she falls over, bashing her face on my shin. I help her up. She thanks me, lists hard to starboard, and capsizes again.

It's so good for the most part that I could blockquote the whole thing! I won't. But do read on!

If M. Night Shyamalan Were to make Indian Thriller: The Movie, He Could Play The Lead Himself:

I

What it's Like to Dog-Sit in Malibu

Here's me, in action:

 
  

I Refuse To Let Summer Slip Away

Which is why I made this:

There Will Be Gas

More reading catch up! This time, I'm just learning about the vaporous gold in them there Catskills! This from a New York magazine piece last year by David France. Basically there's a gas rush going on in New York and Pennsylvania, beneath which sits the Marcellus Shale, a 385-million-year-old seabed that now holds 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Extraction just got cheap enough to make it economically viable and so this untapped fossil fuel source, and the undeveloped country land above it, is now subject of a sudden and intense competitive prospecting craze. As France discovered from a note on his own bucolic property, "landmen" are cruising the back roads, furiously signing up land, strategically contiguous if possible, so as to corral competitors and make plans for pipeline routs. France follows one Daniel F. Glassmire VI, a 26-year-old, My Morning Jacket-listening, David Foster Wallace-reading, newly minted landman, as he tries to close prospects for his concern, Cabot Oil & Gas. Glassmire doesn't make a pitch with his partner, H. W. Glassmire VII, but maybe he will in the coming HBO series!

Halloween!

Marina wins!

 

Runner's up:

RoRo, Mistress of the Sea:

Snowman on vacation!

Sexy sparkly seventies lady and her friend/pimp/dealer.

Osama bin Sexy, Lizzy Borden, Slutty Alvie Singer, etc.

Duets with the Taliban

Just getting around to reading David Rohde's epic, five-part series on his capture by, and escape from, the Taliban, which — along with the nifty interactive add-on feature — is as gripping as one might expect. I hate to say it, but what a lucky break — from a writing and reporting perspective. Months face to face with the Taliban yields a much richer picture of such an enemy than could otherwise be gleaned from regular reporting, no matter how dedicated and diligent one might be. Spending time in close quarters yields unique detail, such as the Taliban's use of Hannah Montana-branded bedding (Rohde's own blanket was a Barbie comforter), and their predilection for The Beatles. The best part of the piece is sort of an anti-Stockholm syndrome, where Rohde hates his captors, but is forced by monotony to sing for them — Sinatra, Springsteen, and the Fab Four:  

After dinner on many winter nights, my guards sang Pashto songs for hours. My voice and Pashto pronunciation were terrible, but our guards urged me to sing along. The ballads varied. On some evenings, I found myself reluctantly singing Taliban songs that declared that “you have atomic bombs, but we have suicide bombers.”

On other nights, at my guards’ urging, I switched to American tunes. In a halting, off-key voice, I sang Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York” and described it as the story of a villager who tries to succeed in the city and support his family. I sang Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and described it as a portrayal of the struggles of average Americans.

I realized that my guards, too, might have needed a break from our grim existence. But I felt like a performing monkey when they told me to sing for visiting commanders. I knew they were simply laughing at me.
I intentionally avoided American love songs, trying to dispel their belief that all Americans were hedonists. Despite my efforts, romantic songs — whatever their language — were the guards’ favorites.

The Beatles song “She Loves You,” which popped into my head soon after I received my wife’s letter from the Red Cross, was the most popular.

For reasons that baffled me, the guards relished singing it with me. I began by singing its first verse. My three Taliban guards, along with Tahir and Asad, then joined me in the chorus.
“She loves you — yeah, yeah, yeah,” we sang, with Kalashnikovs lying on the floor around us.

Halloween at Bernie's!

I really wish I'd thought of this:

The Best Zombie Story of the Year

More than forty years after George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead made critics question the future of a culture that could produce such a thing, that future is here – and it is full of zombies. There are zombie comics, zombie conventions, Rob Zombie Inc., and a Simpsons episode in which Bart informs Lisa that the zombies prefer to be called “living impaired.” There is even a growing movement of participatory fan-fueled performance-art “zombie walks” — BYOB (Bring Your Own Brains!) — where people don elaborately shredded clothing, powder themselves into a pall with makeup, add lots of blood, and spontaneously shamble together in public places.

The movement has been on the lurch since movies like 28 Days Later took zombies mainstream for the first time, and was followed by near-simultaneous appearance of the Dawn of the Dead remake and the homage-comedy Shaun of the Dead. That paved the way for George Romero’s first big studio release, Land of the Dead, a roaring comeback that garnered a standing ovation when his entrail-devouring cannibals finally debuted at Cannes in 2005. The next year, Mel Brooks’ son, Max, went on tour with his book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a “Studs Terkel approach” to zombie conflict that is headed for the cineplex. Then came the literary mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And don’t forget the endless video games: Resident Evil’s many versions (and their movie spin offs), Dead Rising (which was reviewed with by me for the LA Weekly with such incredible insight that the text has been partly cannibalized (Get it?) for this little item), and Left 4 Dead, with its new, improved and unpredictable zombies. Topping it all off, the comedy horror flick Zombieland closed out the summer with a surprise $68m (to date), the highest box office for a Zombie movie yet, prompting more re-heated trend stories about how zombies finally, really, extra-for-certain have hit the cultural big time.

I guess they missed Will Smith’s I Am Legend, which came out in December 2007 (just in time for the holidays!), which was based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, the proto-zombie anxiety tale of a sole survivor facing an infectious pandemic while barricaded in his home in Los Angeles and made $256 million – but, really, who’s counting? (Will Smith’s version was relocated to New York for effective apocalyptic atmospherics, which was then effectively undermined by the zombies, who looked like retarded motion-filtered, clip art monsters when they finally showed up.)

But since we’re talking origins, let’s peel it way back, to the first hints of human civilization: in the irrigated marshes of the fertile crescent, the Sumerians charted the heavens, erected stepped pyramids, and pressed their styluses into clay to record the Epic of Gilgamesh, a collection of myths that includes Ishtar threatening to knock down the Gates of the Netherworld and “let the dead go up to eat the living!” Every culture since has registered the same basic fear, from medieval Europe’s revenants to Haiti’s trodotoxinated zonbi, from which the word zombie originated.

And that brings us to Mischa Berlinski’s real-life trip to the real zombie underworld.

Yes, the best Zombie-related story in recent memory is not a comic, gore game, publishing coup, or blockbuster – it is an article in Men’s Journal. I often forget that Men’s Journal, like its Wenner Media companion, Rolling Stone (where I have written), is oneof the few publishing places where the glossy cover and glossier ads support solid, long form, narrative writing. And so when I picked up a copy at a friends house and leafed passed "Boys and their Toys" (or whatever was on the cover), I was glad to discover an epic, 8,000-word expose that promised “Voodoo, Sorcerers and Lost Souls.”

The piece is a detailed look at the elaborate system of secret societies, ritual magic, and pharmacologically-induced human trafficking that is the Haitian zombie culture. It is incredible. Even if you are familiar with Wade Davis, or have read The Serpent and the Rainbow, or seen the mediocre movie, Berlinski’s story is still incredible. Unlike Davis, who was doing research in his field, Berlinski just wound up in the Haitian countryside, started hearing about zombies, and looked into it. He had no thesis, or grantors to satisfy. He just decided to get to the bottom of something that sounded impossible. His story opens:

I moved to Haiti in the spring of 2007, when my wife found a job with the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission there… She was assigned to Jérémie, a small town on Haiti’s southwest coast….About a month after I arrived in Jérémie, a rumor swept through town that a deadly zombie was on the loose. This zombie, it was said, could kill by touch alone. The story had enough authority that schools closed. The head of the local secret society responsible for the management of the zombie population was asked to investigate. Later that week, Monsieur Roswald Val, having conducted a presumably thorough inquiry, made an announcement on Radio Lambi: There was nothing to fear; all his zombies were accounted for.

Hooked! The rest of the lede turns the reel even more:

I was eager to meet a zombie for myself, and began making appropriate inquiries. Several weeks later, my wife came home from a judicial conference. Making small talk, a local judicial official mentioned the strange case of zombification that his courtroom had seen not several months before. The case was, he said, “un peu spectaculaire.”

I met Judge Isaac Etienne a week or so later at his unfinished concrete house in the village of Roseaux…The judge was a boyish-looking man of 42, slender, wearing baggy surfer shorts, flip-flops, and a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt.

The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said — but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.

With so much space, Berlinski gets a chance to include a succinct primer on how one comes is (putatively) zombified in Haiti, which I’ll make more succinct like so: poison; paralysis with full consciousness; live burial; psychological trauma of such burial; retrieval by sorcerer; application of hallucinogen drugs by sorcerer to perpetuate mindless state. Add to that the cultural context: Haitians believe in zombies, and so they are psychically susceptible to the conditioning. They think they’ve died and will be rejected by the living who have seen them be buried. And then they are so rejected. And this is how, Wade Davis argues, real people become zombie slaves to “sorcerers.”

If that’s hard to swallow, then how about the sorcerers’ system of secret societies that governs much of Haiti beneath the thin veneer of governmental institutions. Berlinski details the byzantine world of zombie administration, which sounds like an episode of Trueblood, with regional hierarchies of Chief Sorcerers and Departmental Chiefs and Presidents and Emperors and Queens and their sorcerer secretaries. Not to mention the zombie passports — documents that allow one to create, hold, or move your zombie from region to region. (Yes, such things exist; there are pictures.) Berlinski follows Madame Zicot, a woman trying to track down her zombified daughter, Nadathe, by navigating her way through the secret societies. (And yes, they do accessorize with candle-topped skulls and convene at midnight.) It is gripping as an occult procedural, and heartbreaking as a story of real tragedy. Eventually, Berlinski notes that if you take away the spooky magic, the zombie world is an institutionalized form of human trafficking, which prompts him into a well-intentioned form of gonzo journalism:

I am not wealthy by American standards, but this article will probably pay me more than Madame Zicot could hope to earn in a decade. I wondered whether this money would not be sufficient to buy Nadathe’s freedom, if she were still alive. Strip the story of its exoticism — replace the word “zombified” with “poisoned, kidnapped, drugged, and enslaved” — and you have a brutal crime. To profit from her enslavement, not having done all I could to liberate her, seemed to me to cross that narrow frontier that separates curiosity from exploitation.

Berlinski, it is nifty to note, is allowed to make his case among the secret societies only because of Obama’s magic; the international goodwill created by his election makes them open to entreaties from an American. As he gets drawn deeper in himself, Berlinski pauses to wonder if the zombie culture isn’t some kind of mass delusion, a false institution that is really just another layer of politics, an intricate system that allows people to exploit one another. The societies may be that too, but Berlinski thinks they’re not fooling:

You either believe in zombies, or you don’t.

For my part, I believe that a young woman named Nadathe Joassaint was poisoned, buried alive, stolen from her grave, drugged, transported, and enslaved. I believe that she is alive to this day and in the possession of a man I know only as Monsieur 17, in a region of the Grand’ Anse I feel better not naming in print.

There’s a reason for that candid (and journalistically refreshing) statement, but to explain why would reveal the kicker. I won’t spoil that, other than to say that there is a not-so-surprising surprise ending that is well worth reading the whole article to experience.

Happy Halloween!

When an Easter Peep catches a whiff of Anima Mundi

It become the cutest robot ever. 

And an argument in favor of the robot uprising?

I Think I'm Dog-Sitting

Christopher Johnson:

Attention Marcel Dzama

Your Halloween Cake is ready!

(via Poo-chaaay!)

Another Bold Declaration About The YouTube Mash-Up

First, it ascended to high art with Kutiman's assemblage of unrelated music clips into original jams. Now the ante has been officially upped by Darren Solomon, who combined twenty YouTube music clips into a sprawling, interactive, personalized Steve Reich-o-tron, right in your browser. As if that wasn't nifty enough, the conceptual coup-de-grace is the instruction to use the volume sliders as an equalizer for your own mix!

I'm Not Ashamed to Say That I Bought Lars and The Real Girl

Hook, line and sinker. My old pal Manohla thought it was a "well played con" that delivered a fake, nostalgic "shrink-wrapped America." Well, consider me happily conned as I tore open the cellophane! Perhaps I just wanted the cinematic equivalent of a Drake's Cake at the moment. But I saw it again recently and felt the same. Maybe I just love that Ryan Gosling; I also went apeshit for Half Nelson. Maybe apeshit isn't the word. But I sense a trend line among the data points, the latest of which is this, which I'm also buying: 

No Wonder I'm Rarely Groomed By The Group

I'm not the one with the box of apples!

Posts CAN Be Polished, Part II

Now here's something you don't see every day: a thoughtful, historical essay several thousand words long on the Huffington Post. The piece is a concise history of terrorism, or rather, of the modern chapter of terrorism, beginning in the nineteenth century, when political dissidence was first expressed as violence not just against the state but also citizens. The culprits then were anarchists, the pince-nez and mustachioed kind whose bombs really were big round iron balls with fuses, just like in the cartoons. Along the way, the article draws a convincingly qualified parallel between the extremists and reactionaries of yesteryear and today, and between the morale of both stories: blunt repression always makes it worse.

At first I thought: well, if the Huff Po can produce writing like that, maybe this unpaid blogger free-for-all isn't so bad after all. Then I realized that reason the piece is so good is that the writer, Johann Hari, is a wunderkind political columnist in England. And the fact that he chose (or had no choice other than) to contribute a moderate-length essay to the Huff Po rather than a magazine that can pay him (and where such writing might stand out as something worth reading) only sends me right back to my suspicious concerns about Huff Po. Nevertheless, I guess it's nice that such thoughtful work can find it's place alongside Tara Reid's plastic surgery scars. 

See? A Post CAN Be Polished

Tim Kreider's post on the NY Times' Happy Days blog about what he calls The Referendum -- the point when people start comparing their lives to those of their friends, and the ambivalent feelings such comparisons yield -- went around a couple weeks ago, but I just happened across it again, and achieving so much in just a thousand or so words, both on its own points and by providing a fine example of why blogging may not be the end of the world for well-crafted prose and actual ideas. Cheers! It's so good, it can't really be quoted, so here it is in full, with my favorite parts bolded:  

Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”

It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?

My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”

To my friends with children, the obscene wealth of free time at my command must seem unimaginably exotic, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.

It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.

I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.

What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.

A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating

I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.

But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.

Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”

One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.

Par-Don-My-Ro-Bot-Voice-It-Is-A-Side-E-ffect-Of-Light-Ning!

From a paper in  Neurology: "Lightning-induced robotic speech" (1994 May;44(5):991-2.): 

The force of a lightning strike threw a 20-year-old roofer to the ground from the truck in which he was standing. Panicked, he immediately began to run. A numbness and weakness of his arms and back cleared after several days, but the more striking abnormality was a profound alteration of his speech, which he described as having become robotic. Each syllable was clearly enunciated with a slight pause between syllables, so that while the flow of his speech was slowed, he was able to communicate well. His speech was actually easier to comprehend than that of some normal persons. His brother had indeed complained that the patient's premorbid speech had been too rapid and word-jumbled; that speech was transformed to robotic speech, with fine diction and super-clear enunciation. Each morning, his speech was "normal" until shortly after he began to talk, when it reverted to the robotic pattern for the remainder of the day. The neurologic examination was normal except for right upper extremity hypalgesia. Brain MRI was normal.

Via Mind Hacks. 

(And yes, that is a still from the scene in Superman III where that lady gets sucked into the machine and turned into a robot, which made a deep impression on me as a wee one.)