Burned Bridges

Ideally
when I think of me
and I often think of me
I see my life as a gleaming city
with bridges of connection from me
to a rich network of sister cities and brother boroughs
The towers of myself sparkling silver in the sunlight
My bridges to the others spanning the miles and years majestically
With caravans overloaded with ideas and love and charity ever-flowing
across strong and well-tended roadways from city to borough to neighborhood to township
in a never-ending stream of friendship, family, brotherhood, solidarity over the age of a lifetime

In reality
when I look at me
and I often look at me
I see my life as a sloppy city
with bridges of connection from me
to the cities and boroughs that will still trade with me
The towers of myself half-built before the workers grew apathetic
The bridges to the others held together with twine, most of the time
With caravans leaving intermittently as the economy in my city, and their city allows
when the chaos in our collective internal politics has windows of functionality and diplomacy
Avoiding the burned-out bridges to cities more chaotic and sometimes more gleaming than my own
In a never-ending stream of poor-planning, missed opportunities, gratitude and hope over the age of a lifetime

I do no regret abandoning the cities
that became actively hostile or subversive
to the stability of my half-assed metropolis
But every now and again
I stand at the at gates to my kingdom
Looking past the charred remains of suspension bridges
to the towers of past ports of trade
growing dim and hazy in the distance
over time and space
dreaming of a gleaming age

Bro of Steel

It's a bird!  It's a plane!  Oh, wait, it's just some guy.  And a flock of spoilers.

When I went to see Man of Steel the other night, I made the same mistake I've made with every blockbuster I've seen the last few years:  I believed the trailer and harbored the faint hope that I would leave the theater not feeling cranky at the current state of storytelling.  Alas, it was not to be.  To be fair, I should have known better.  I've seen this movie before.   Which is a shame, because I was really hoping to see a Superman movie this time.

Frankly, we've all seen this movie before over the last few summers.  It has the same metal ships, tentacles and robots menacing the hero, the same kind of gritty debris and explosions, the same kinds of plot holes, the same cardboard thin characters, the same disconnected scenes, the same lack of reasons to care about much of anything going on on screen.  This is a problem endemic in the industry right now, so it's hardly to fair to single out Man of Steel in this regard.  To be fair, I was expecting some of this anyway, but it's not really why I didn't like the movie.  I didn't like the movie because, in their rush to reinvent superman with as much spectacle as possible, they abandoned the core principles of the character.  It's a great movie about people getting punched, but it's not a great Superman movie.

It starts well enough, with Jor-El on Krypton.  The core story here is still the same, but this is probably the most interesting interpretation of Krypton I've ever seen visually (including Kelex!!) and sets up the most interesting plot elements in the story, although even then it's not super deep.  The basic rivalry between Zod and Jor-El is not terrible (although there are nits that could be picked), and I like that Zod, while the typical movie jerk, is at least a typical movie jerk genuinely attempting to save his culture.  It's shortly after baby Kal arrives on Earth that the movie starts to go off the rails for me.

Skipping 33 years into the future, we find Kal saving an oil rig crew quite heroically when the fishing ship he's working on happens by.  This seems to bode well for the kind of man he'll be in the future.  Alas.  His next job, after swimming to shore, is working at a diner, where he backs down from a bully for fear of betraying his secret, and takes his revenge by trashing the guys logging truck with super-strength.  This was my "uh-oh" moment.  For a 33-year-old, that's not so awesome.  I don't usually look up to people who "win" arguments by slashing the tires of people they don't like when no one is looking.  To be fair, similar scenes played out in Smallville and Superman 2, but it doesn't really fit there, either.  And at least in Smallville, Clark has the excuse of being a teenager.

The problem, as we've been learning in a series of childhood flashbacks, is that in this universe, Jonathan Kent doesn't have quite the moral center he does in his other incarnations.  It seems all right at first, right up until good ol' Pa Kent mentions that Clark should maybe have let his classmates die rather than reveal his secret.  And becomes utter bullshit when his father insists his invulnerable son take shelter under an overpass while his vulnerable father rescues the family dog.  And when this predictably goes awry, waves him off, in an effort to teach him that secrets and personal convenience are preferable to doing the right thing.  Which is a lesson so well learned, that Clark wanders the world aimlessly, with no apparent sense of purpose or responsibility to use his gifts to help people.  Although he'll graciously help people who happen to endanger themselves in his general vicinity.  What a nice guy.  Ish.

This lack of purpose and responsibility plagues his actions through the rest of the movie.  When the Kryptonians show up in Smallville, and an otherwise entertaining punch-fest ensues, Kal never once attempts to minimize the damage, or put people out of harms way as he's fighting.  It's all about the punching, civilians be damned.  And clearly, people are being injured and killed in this conflict given the extent of the destruction, even though they never show it.  He doesn't even help clean up.  What a guy.

Oddly, it's the cold Kryptonian Jor-El that tries to provide Kal with a sense of purpose and responsibility.  While Lois is burning alive in a bungled attempt to escape Zod's ship, Jor appears to Kal and tells him he can save her and, in fact, all of them.  "Ah!" I thought, "I judged him too soon.  This is where he figures it out."  Alas.  The lesson doesn't stick.  For a Superman, he has very little agency.  Or character.  Or personality. 

As the final battle begins, Zod has deployed his ship and a smaller terraforming machine on opposite sides of the planet, both of which are required to start a doomsday effect to terraform the planet.  Through a profound error in judgement, it's decided that the invincible flying guy is going to assault the machine situated in an unpopulated area on the other side of the planet, instead of heading to the one currently beating the everliving shit out of Metropolis, even though destroying that ship would be just as effective.  Leaving the military to a futile frontal assault against an alien army with technology vastly superior to our own, the plan being to drop Kal's weaponized cradle on the Kryptonians.  This goes as poorly as one might expect, although with a last minute save from Kal, they successfully kill most of the Kryptonians with a kamikaze run and large bomb with the Kryptonian symbol for hope emblazoned on the nose cone in large, friendly iconography.  Which seems oddly appropriate for the American military mindset post-9/11 now that I think about it.  "Don't run, we are your friends.  Can't you see the hope exploding from our weapons?"  And that's not the worst of it.

One of the reasons Kal's decision to tackle the less-dangerous terraforming machines is terrible is how much carnage Zod's ship causes in Metropolis while Kal's busy robot-wrestling half-way around the world.  The ship is releasing a gravity wave increasing steadily in radius from around his ship, which lifts everything up, and then smashes it brutally back down every few seconds.  It is clear from the footage shown that this is killing hundreds, if not thousands of people.  By the time Kal finally gets back, the staff of the Daily Planet is nearly dead, and the carnage and debris is incredible.  Kal, in his penultimate confrontation with Zod, has just destroyed a seed ship with the potential to grow new, not-psychopathic Kryptonians and save his race.  He does this with his heat vision, growling that "Krypton had it's chance."

Which sets up the second funniest moment in the movie.  The first funniest moment is the soldier in the military command center yelling that Zod has infected their RSS feeds.  Not even their blog updates are safe!  The second starts as Kal floats down to the ash-covered hellscape in what remains of the center of Metropolis.  One of the few survivors of the disaster says, absolutely glowingly, "He saved us!"  Well, he saved SOME of you.  There's tens of thousands who were shit out of luck.  And it's there, amidst the screams of the dying, injured and trapped that are not shown, but that he MUST be able to hear in the city around him for a mile in every direction, he kisses Lois, a woman who he's spent about 20 minutes talking with, and they have a completely unearned and unrealistic moment.  It's really a meet-cute situation.  They will one day tell their children that their first kiss tasted like the ash from the remains of mommy's co-workers.  But wait, there's one final indignity.

Of course, Zod has survived the crash of the seed ship, which leads to an epic series of punches that is really some of the best super-fighting I've seen in a movie.  Which might have been easier to take if they weren't obviously killing hundreds, if not thousands, more people as they fought.  Again, they don't show people dying, but they show destruction on such a scale that people HAVE to be dying, and again, Kal never even notices that people are endangered by his actions, let alone tries to get people out of harm's way.  It doesn't even cross his mind.  It all culminates with Zod in a headlock, trying to burn unlucky citizens with his heat vision, daring Kal to kill him to make him stop.  In a final act of brutality, Kal obliges, snapping his neck.  Kal, a man of many fantastic abilities, and therefore many non-lethal choices in that situation, chooses to be a super-murderer.  To be fair, they try and make it look like the decision pains him, for a few minutes at least.  But there is no lasting weight to the decision.  The next time we see him he seems unaffected.

When we next see him, he's throwing a crushed drone into the path of his military contact, and for one insane moment, I thought he might be about to make a pointed statement about drone killings, because he's just killed someone and he's learned something about the heavy cost of murdering someone, even a mass murderer, let alone people under suspicion because of how their movements look from a telescope.  But no, he's just mad that they're spying on him, and insists on unaccountability.  Because that's how his dad raised him.

Superman is many things to many people.  To some people he really is super-bro, the ultimate bully, whose sole virtue is that he is stronger than other people.  And if that's your thing, you'll probably like this movie.  But to me, even though I have some problems with the character, what I've always found most powerful about him is that's he's a tiny, alien god, in a world made of cardboard, who takes great care every day to solve his problems the tediously moral way, instead of taking the simpler, more brutally expedient route.  He has so many choices, including ruling Earth with an iron fist, but instead chooses to do the right thing, the KIND thing, even though it is frequently personally inconvenient to him.  

I didn't like Nolan's Batman, because I thought he changed the core of the character, when he portrayed him as a man who gives up pretty quickly.  I don't like Snyder/Goyer/Nolan's Superman for the same reason.  They change the core of the character by making him someone with no sense of responsibility, no personal vision of a better world, no apparent motivation outside what other people tell him to do and a casual acceptance of the idea of collateral damage.  Warner Bros, who thought they might as well completely miss the point of Christianity while they were completely missing the point of Superman, actually attempted to market Man of Steel to churches and pastors while delivering the LEAST christ-like version of Superman ever put on screen.  Sure the symbology is there, but in giving us the form  (he's 33, he's here to save us, he has a beard, and here's some cross imagery to seal the deal), they completely fail to deliver the underlying philosophical substance of each.  In the same way that a guy dressed like Jesus isn't Jesus unless he's preaching hope, forgiveness and compassion, a guy dressed up like Superman isn't Superman just because he punches people really hard.

Look, I understand at least part of the spirit of the age.  Our institutions are failing us, we're undergoing a deconstructive movement philosophically and Superman is the next too-good-to-be-true statue we're pulling down into the nitty-gritty with the rest of us.  But a gritty reboot of Superman doesn't work for the same reason a gritty reboot of Christianity wouldn't work:  it destroys the core of the story.  You can't paint a symbol of hope on a guy and make him as flawed as the rest of us.  And you can't put him through a story where he learns nothing and holds to no higher standard and tell us he gives us something to hope for.  You can't have the villain give a speech about how Superman's weakness is his morality, and then prove it by requiring Superman abandon his ethics and adopt his enemies' values to "win".  You certainly can't call it hopeful.  

This is Superman as envisioned by Lex Luthor:  an unaccountable alien menace who's no better than the rest of us.  It's a cynical attempt to bring him down to our level, because we find the idea of an american icon NOT using "bad guys" as a cynical excuse for collateral damage, summary executions and hope bombs too uncomfortable to contemplate.  

I think we can dream up better heroes.  I think we owe it to ourselves to tell ourselves better stories and challenge ourselves to be better people ethically and philosophically, not just physically.  And while I wouldn't put any money down on the existence of Jesus or Superman, I don't see how things get better unless we strive for the ideals they represent.

We could aspire to be super instead of merely steel.

Important Results

Wow, that pornbot must have loved that poem.  It's clicked the link 15 times!

Omphaloskeptical Odyssey

In the beginning, there was a mind
or perhaps it was a body
or perhaps a summation of the two intertwined.
The point is:
there was a body and it had a mind
or there was a mind and it had a body
And, oh gods, it was self-aware.
 
And awareness was a delicious smorgasbord of knowledge, intent and curiosity.
And the so the body gloried in dew-dripped fields,
and the mind reveled in new information yields.
Until, one day, out of nowhere, a mind/body died,
ceased to be,
gloried no more in fields of any sort.

And the body/mind's eyes bulged.
And the mind/body's breath quickened.
And it understood that it too would, one day,
Cease to be and know no more.

While the body/mind ticked quietly towards its doom,
the mind/body went quietly insane,
reluctant to reveal the depths of its pain.

"What a tragedy, this inevitable end of me!
I must exist, I want to BE."
And the mind/body despaired.

For the mind, while aware that it had not been aware,
before it was aware.
and aware that it was not aware for most of the night,
did not, in fact, want to be aware that the glorious confusion
and profusion of experience would not, in fact, go on forever.

Unless, maybe it could?

And so the mind gathered its body, and set off to cheat doom.

In the passing of time and space,
the mind body discovered other body/minds,
who were willing to sacrifice more of their kind,
because they believed that would stay their own end.

So they would draw on their charts
and cut out some hearts
and offer them up the sky.

Because someone once said
in this book they once read
that it is water, wind, fire and stone
that turns a body/mind into some bones.

"Maybe if you proffer
some gore in a coffer
the elements will leave you alone."

So hearts they uplifted
and entrails they gifted
but never their friends or their own.

But no matter the bodies offered in death
no other bodies were given more breath
and the mind/body cried
as innocents died.
So, cloaked in shame and darkness, the body/mind left.

And the mind/body wandered.

And soon enough it found
bodies prostrate on the ground
in front of statues of marble and clay.

"What you've stumbled upon
is our august pantheon!"
a believer sidled closer to say.

"We worship mind/bodies of terrible powers!
Certainly powers greater than ours
and, in return, they keep death at bay."

So the mind/body stayed
and every noontime it prayed
to the gods of hunting and sunshine and rain.

And it looked for signs
from the mighty god minds
and found them in the storms and the seasons
and the stars and the seas.

And sometimes the signs,
with respect to other minds,
said to enslave or to kill or repress other kinds.

And sometimes the signs said to dance in this way
and to sing in the spring
and to speak words aloud
in sync with a crowd.
But the bodies of believers continued to die.

And sometimes the signs said you have to believe
or go to war with all Steves.
but still bodies died and no boon as received.

And sometimes the signs said give gods your wines
and perhaps tasty food
and make more marble statues
of us in the nude.

But despite all the signs
and the gifts and the rest,
their bodies still ended in perpetual rest.

The statues would not speak
and the strong still killed the weak

So the mind packed up its body and moved on.

After a time, it met a new mind
different, but not, from the last.

"The problem," they said, "is all gods are false,
except for THIS one,
who is terrifying, all-powerful and kind.
and while we must still look for signs
we must be resigned
and submit to the one true god mind today."

"For if we repent of our past
and surrender at last,
the God mind above,
stuffed chock-full of love,
will give us the immortality we ask."

"And woe and beware
to any mind who would dare
to refuse such a generous gift.
For they will suffer and die
and eternally fry
in a burning subterranean rift."

This was confusing
this loving abusing
but the mind decided to try.

So the mind, for a while,
went along in this style
and practiced submission and faith.

But through all of the love and the guilt
and the churches they built
the bodies of minds continued to die.

And it wasn't enough
the believing and stuff
and an afterlife up in the sky.

The believers and such
were not happy that much.
And with no visible gain
from this strictness and pain
the mind's faith faltered,
and the body moved on.

A ways down the line
it met a new mind:
quiet, at peace and serene.

This mind wouldn't say much
about religion and such
except that it thought it was kind of a crutch.

"The trick," said this mind, "Is to try to accept
that at living forever, we're kind of inept."

It bad the mind's body to sit
and to draw some deep breaths
and to contemplate the concept of inevitable death.

So the mind's body sat
on a simple reed mat
and reluctantly admitted that the body would die.

Breathing through fear
it was eventually clear
that thought the body would die
it hadn't quite yet.

"Perhaps," thought the mind,
"It is the goal of our time
to be conscious and kind
and to give a leg up to those coming behind."

And while there was peace
in this conscious release
the bright world outside
would not be denied.

So, in time, the mind's body walked on.

The mind travels still
its body goes where it will
to explore with the time it has left.

And all that it knows
is the body will go
and the fate of the mind can't be guessed.

And while it hopes there is more
beyond that black door
it's okay not to know what, just yet.

All it can do
is to mind's self be true
and hope in the meantime,
before it meets death
that the body it loves
is not wasting its breath.

Extra Special

"It's a funny thing about birthdays." he said without preamble.

I was on the red line to the airport on my way to a red-eye flight to a meeting that everyone thought was a waste of time when he made his way up the car and sat down next to me.  The one thing I hate about mass transit is random weirdos who want to talk to me.  So of course, he chose me.

But I was bored and he seemed harmless.  "How so?" I asked, feigning interest.

"Well, it's funny how not everyone has one," he said, looking at me expectantly, as if to gauge my reaction.

I chuckled.  Oh lord, the people you meet on the proletariat chariot.  "Well that can't be true.  They exist don't they?  They have to have a birthday."

"Well, you would think," he said, "but things can get complicated when you're dealing with irrational math."  He was still staring at me a little too intently.

"Oh, of course, math ruins everything," I said good-naturedly.  There was no reason not to humor him and by god that was tweet-worthy. "It's just that I've never met anyone without a birthday before, so I haven't thought much about it."  I grinned, "And I certainly haven't done the math."

"Ah, you jest," he said, grinning widely, "but you would be surprised.  You strike me as someone who doesn't think of birthdays much anyway, would you say that is true?"

I paused.  "I suppose?"  I admit, I was a bit taken aback.

"Well," he said cautiously, watching me, "that's because you don't have one."

I sat there for a few seconds, processing that statement, and then laughed.  "Oh don't I?  Of course I do.   You know, I think I might have misheard you earlier, did you say you were good at math or meth?"

"Meth?" He held up a finger, "One second, please," and fished a curiously shiny smartphone out of his pocket and typed rapidly with his thumbs.  He squinted at the display and then looked at me, "Ha, no not meth." he squinted at the display again, "You can tell by how good my teeth are."  He gave me a big, toothy grin to demonstrate.

"Ah, well that proves it!" I affirmed, glancing at the arrival time.  We were 2 minutes away from the airport.  Saints be praised.

He noticed my glance.  "Look, I know you think I'm crazy.  And I promise I'll leave you alone if you just answer this question:  What did you do for your last birthday?"

Finally, a chance to exit this conversation gracefully.  "Well, that's easy, I . . . " I trailed off.  What had I done?  Was it drinks with Steve and Emily?  Or had my sister made me a cake?  Wait, maybe I had gone to see my parents?  I honestly didn't know.  I never thought about birthdays much.

"You can't remember, right?"  He cut off my objection, as if reading my mind, "And I can tell you, it's not just because you're not the kind of person who remembers birthdays.  Can you even tell me when it is?"

I sat there thinking, and realized with some consternation that I could not.  The MAX had pulled into the airport station, and I started rustling around getting myself ready to leave, avoiding his eyes, trying my damnedest to remember my birthday.

"You can't, can you?" he said, not unkindly.  "Look, I know you have a few minutes before your flight leaves, and I know you think I'm strange, but can I buy you a drink at the bar to explain?"

"Well . . . " I hemmed, I was pretty sure I just wanted this conversation to end, strange gaps in memory notwithstanding.

"I get it:  this is weird, and you're upset that you can't remember your birthday.  But aren't you curious why you never think about your own birthday?  Have you ever wondered why no one else ever asks when yours is?  Have you ever really looked at the birth date on your driver's license?"

Ah, of course, this would settle it.  We left the train car, and stopped on the side of the platform.  I pulled out my wallet, flipped it open, pulling out my license with impatience.  "You see?  It's . . ." I trailed off again.  It was blank.  The part labeled "Birth Date" was just empty.

The strange man who was ruining my evening let it sink in and then quietly asked, "Do you want to know why?"

To Live and Blank in L.A.

Mr. Blank
by Justin Robinson

It's the end of the world.  Again.  Maybe.  In any case, it's quite possibly the end for Mr. Blank, the nameless agent who moonlights as a henchman for every secret group in L.A..  Why?  Because they put ads in the paper and he has to pay the bills.  Which is problematic, when half of them are at war with the other over arcane artifacts, alien technology and ancient grudges.  Somewhere around the time a manchurian candidate tries to smash his brains in with a curious home-made meteor hammer on a routine delivery, it seems the jig is up.  From there, the chase is on as Mr. Blank follows the trail of the one conspiracy aimed at removing his head in a sea of routine and malevolent L.A. conspiracies already in progress.  Have the servants of Shub-internet, V.E.N.U.S., the Masons, the Templars, the Clone Wolves, the russian mafia and, of course, the Little Green Men finally caught on to his game?  Or are they patsies in some larger conspiracy that only he has the perspective to untangle?  Mr. Blank uses all his henching, fast-talking, cryptid-taming and dame-rescuing skills to keep his bosses at cross purposes, off balance and disinclined to kill him while he desperately sorts fact from fiction in order to put it all together.  Who is Mr. Blank?  Which conspiracy wants him dead?  The only thing we know for sure, is it isn't the vampires.  Because, as everyone should already know, vampires are bullshit.

- - -

Mr. Blank was a whole lot of fun.  The conspiracies were clever, both in name and description, and the action relentless.  One of my favorite things about Justin Robinson's writing is his focus on keeping the plot moving, taking time only to snark when appropriate.  And considering this is a story about a sardonic, skeptical henchman on the run from the fantastic, the snark is fast and facetious.  And I loved the end, the who in the "who done it" which I won't spoil.

The dark, secret side of L.A. is considerably stranger, more dangerous and more incompetent than you might imagine.  Buy this book today and find the secrets that only a conspiracy insider would know.  But maybe use cash.  You never know who's watching and the truth can be a dangerous thing.