MG Farrelly
Librarian, Writer, Bon Vivant
Dancing in the Sky
Aug 18th
What an age we live in, that artists can dance on the sides of buildings, held only by hope and nigh-invisible wires.
Ambient Bieber
Aug 17th
If you slow down Justin Bieber’s music about 800% it becomes a beautiful symphony of ambient liquid noise.
No, really.
That’s…kind of beautiful
(via gawker)
Hope for Hitchens
Aug 15th
I disagree with Christopher Hitchens, but that is his own damn fault. 
It was just after 9/11, literally a matter of weeks if memory serves, when I first came across his book “Letters to a Young Contrarian” I remember distinctly buying it at the same Barnes and Noble that I had sought out on 9/11 as a refuge (since the library I was working at closed early) only to find a sign on the door that read “Due to the events in the world today we have closed for the day. We may open tomorrow based on developing news events.”
Ominous.
Hitchens is strong tea. He’s read a library and will gladly recite it to you to make his points. His viewpoints are wild, ranging from Marxist to psuedo-Imperialist and back to the front again. In some ways his evolution is that of his generation, from street-marching to boots on the ground in Baghdad. It’s not a clean and easy line, though he can draw one for you and make it sharp and neat. Hitchens disassembles God-botherers and has no patience for those who find refuge in the pseudo-intellectual, the half-measure. If Richard Dawkins is “Darwin’s Pitbull”, Hitch is the M1A1 of the Enlightenment.
He drinks and smokes, as all good Brits do, and makes no apologies for it, which too many Americans do. Speaking of his life he has said that he burned the candle at both ends and did find it ‘gave a lovely light.’
And now he’s dying. Cancer, the same kind that took his father, aggressive. Seen in that video he is balding from treatment, thinning. I was uneasy seeing the same cast to his skin that my Mother had during her cancer treatment. The look of pain held back by medication. Knowledge and suffering in the eyes.
He speaks so eloquently, so beautifully, on topics that others (the grunting know-nothings of the right and left) would reduce to mere trivia. He is suffused with knowledge and shares with style.
But I disagree with him. I’m a Unitarian Universalist, I believe in God (though I’m loathe to define or explain and would never think to proselytize) and my opposition to the war in Iraq and much of the “War on Terror” has been bedrock since that perfect blue September morning when the world fell in.
There are nonsense people out there praying for, and worse, against Mr. Hitchens. They pray to save his soul, they pray for his damnation or comeuppance or other wishlist foolishness.
I don’t pray for the man. I hope he has fine doctors. I hope he has friends and loved ones close. I hope he has good books to read and articles to write and the energy to do both. I hope he recovers, and if not that he is as free from pain as humanly possible. If there is some light beyond this life, I wish him fine drinking in good company in the great hereafter. If not, I hope he is remembered.
I hope this is a very preemptive bit of eulogizing. My maudlin Irish sentimentality can get the better of me.
I suppose I was moved to write this bcause when Hunter Thompson took his life a few years back, it deeply affected me. As a teen, he wrote back on a fan letter I had sent him. I had read his fantastic piece “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” and was inspired by it. He encouraged me to continue writing and “never be a bastard”.
This is my little fan letter to Mr. Hitchens, who I hope is too busy living to read it. A man who has made being a bastard, for the right reasons, such good fun.
Patriotism
Aug 13th
Let’s talk for a minute about patriotism.
It’s a corny idea to most folks. Love of country, love of nation. It slips and slides all too easily into nationalism. It’s the stuff of grubby-handed politicos and the punditocracy. Patriotism gets a pretty bad wrap.
I consider myself deeply patriotic.
I love the United States of America. I love the constitution. A document that guarantees rights, inalienable rights.
The founding fathers get intoned a lot these days by those on the right. Glenn Beck has been using like a whetstone to sharpen his talons for some time. The founders of this country are lumped in as a bunch of “dead white males” by those on the left who are just as lazy in their thinking as any Fox News pundit.
The founding fathers, the men who crafted the constitution, who fought tooth and nail with each other to form the bedrock laws of this republic, did something so remarkable it’s easy to see them as more than human. They failed to address the evil of slavery, that took a war to resolve nearly a century later. They were men, fallible men. But they made something beautiful.
Consider just what the declaration of independence says. It rejects the rule of the King of England. Royalty rules by divine right. In short, the power of God. Every King is, in some fashion or another, touched by the divine, ruling in their steed.
The founding fathers rejected this.
They embraced self-determination. That all men (expanded rightfully to included men of all colors and women) were created equal. That a king is not some special creature, some alien object.
I remember in grade school when I first learned about divine right. Something clicked. I realized just how much it had taken for those men to declare their independence. They were not only rejecting a ruler, but the very concept that certain people are ruled by fact of birth. No kings, no monarchs, no special privilege of birth. All are created equal.
That’s why I love this country. I love the constitution because it makes us a nation of laws, not of nationalities. We are a nation of equality for all. How can you not love that?
Perhaps when the love of country is turned to the fell purpose of denying others equality.
Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and all the other trolls have scampered out from under their bridges to shake fists about the menace of mosques. Of course they’re doing this solely as a means of scaring the hard-line white Christian base into voting their FEAR come this November. Like their hate-filled invectives about immigration or health care reform or the President daring to spend several hours a night actually asleep, it’s all part of their little vaudeville act of villainy. A sad pantomime played out by very rich people to get very poor people to vote against their every interest.
They have every right to speak. That’s the first amendment. The same one that 
guarantees all the right to worship (or not) as they see fit. This includes mosques. This includes Muslims. To deny them the right to worship freely, to ask them to kindly move their prayers as we see fit, to treat them as different, as less than, as not quite the same, goes against everything this nation was founded upon.
Those who promote such intolerance, who mine the headlines for events to be shocked and scandalized by, are thugs of the worst order. And in their ignorance of history, in their embrace of a polluted and diseased form of patriotism, they shame us all.
A frequent refrain is that you see above. “You can build your mosque near ground zero when Saudi Arabia allows a synagogue”. The tortured logic of this argument is painful. We are not a theocracy, we are not a nation ruled by a King, we are not a mono-culture. We are a pluralistic society. That makes our ideals stronger than those of a nation that forbids the free expression of ideas. For all the talk of “American exceptionalism” on the right, they seem to be missing the very core of what makes this nation exceptional.
Let me leave you with a quote.
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
This is from the Treaty of Tripoli. Signed in 1796-97 by the Bey of Tripoli and President John Adams. A treaty between a largely Muslim nation and the very young United States. This clause speaks to tolerance. It speaks to co-existence. It speaks, in a loud and clear voice to those who would demand bigotry replace our most precious liberties.
That voice says “Our freedom is stronger than your hate.”
What I’m Reading 8/8
Aug 8th
Oh you know you were just dying to know.
The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod
Ugh, this book was a pain to find, but a pleasure to read. It’s not published in the US, I have a 
theory on why, so I had to get it second-hand via Amazon. The prices varied from $8 up to $25 depending on the day. I got mine for $5, perfect condition. Silliness.
But the book itself, wonderful. Macleod creates a near-future world where “The Great Rejection” has pushed religion from the public square. No more God-talk in politics, secular government, general suspicion of the faithful. It wasn’t an easy change. “Faith Wars” raged, and God-Squads stamped down on the more vociferous religious protest movements. Much of the middle east is radioactive glass and both the Europe and the US are ravaged by climate change. And now someone is killing priests.
Macleod does not write a screed here. It’s a carefully considered look at how the end of religion in the public square would change society in any number of ways, some good, some dreadful, many of them simply unforeseen.
I don’t think this book has gotten published in the US because it would be a harder sell in the much less secular US than in the UK. It’s a shame, since this is just the kind of book to create dialogue between Theist and Atheist alike.
What can be said about this book other than WOW.
I’m n
ot a superhero fan. Working in a comic shop as a teen my head was jammed full of comic arcane lore (There are 7200 Green Lanterns who patrol 3600 sectors of space) regarding the spandex crowd. I tended to avoid the genre. But a book like this is built for changing minds.
Greg Rucka, of “Queen and Country” fame, writes a bold origin for this Batwoman. The big hubbub when she was introduced a couple years back was her sexual orientation, but Rucka doesn’t turn that into a “Very Special Ally MacBeal”. Rather he makes the fact that Kate Kane (Batwoman) is a lesbian simply that, a fact. She’s gay and has girlfriends and was kicked out of West Point due to the colossal stupidity of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. These are the facts of life for tens of thousands of gay and lesbian people. Rucka is working with truth here.
JH Williams is an artist’s artist. he creates whole new ways of reading comics right there on the page. A boring fight scene is turned into a sort of flip-book. The layout of a secret headquarters is shown in double page continuous panels. He varies style to match time of day, mood, even mindset of the characters. It’s comics are high art.
Cronin’s vampire apocalypse is handled largely off-stage. Apparently the next two books (cause everything is a trilogy now) will go back to this. We get the genre-apocalypse standards such as:
Evil military, dangerous virus, spooky kid, ragtag group of survivors, events and places in the post-apocalyptic world being Capitalized at Random to Emphasize their Import.
The vampires are plenty awful monsters, but for the first 3-400 pages they’re so vaguely described and rarely seen it’s hard to believe the whole world got iced by these creatures.
A lot of comparisons have been made to Stephen King’s “The Stand”, even the man himself heaped praise on Cronin’s work. Me? I just don’t see it. King ended the world in “The Stand” with such a tightening noose of terror. You watched character’s world unravel and you were let alone with them in a planetary graveyard. Cronin skips 90 years past the fall of humanity and gives us a whole new world, a tiny colony of survivors fighting day to day.
I just never got to caring about the characters all that much. Again, King made us look up to Stu Redman, fear Randall Flagg and feel pity for poor damned Harold. Cronin’s survivors feel flat on the page.
All that whining aside, it’s a damn fine written book. Cronin’s turn of phrase is lovely. His descriptions of a broken world are eerie and ooky, even if they fall a bit few and far between. I feel like the failings are largely editorial. This is a 300 page story trapped in a 700 page beast. Whole sub-plots and characters can just go. Though, again from reading interviews not the book, it appears that those characters who seemed extraneous will be revisited in further volumes. That feels like a cheat to me. Spending whole chapters on characters only to see them fade into the background to await their close-up in the sequel? A bit of an irritant.
Eminem: YA Author
Aug 7th
Here’s a true fact, young adult fiction is taking more chances than “literature” designed for adults. It’s true. Nothing against Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon, but Scott Westerfeld (“Uglies” “Leviathan” and Suzanne Collins (“The Hunger Games”) are putting out smart, fierce and relevant fiction at a pace that’s breath-taking. Julie Peters elegant books “Luna” and “Rage: A Love Story” stack up to anything I’ve read from the great literary lions of late. YA fiction is vital and lively, and not afraid of controversy.
That said, I think Eminem’s latest video is nothing short of a Young Adult masterpiece.
The song, sung with Rihanna, is about a couple who are in “love” but are really trapped in the death spiral of abuse. The video below is pretty masterful at conveying the power of the song. Eminem has always been a deft hand at the medium of music videos, but this is just amazing.
What makes this daring YA literature? Simple, it’s complexity. We all know that if someone hits you, belittles you, calls you names, takes advantage of you, in short, abuses you, that you LEAVE. That’s under-lined, in bold in the cultural narrative. GET OUT before they escalate and kill you.
But what does it feel like when you’ve got fresh bruises and your partner is crying in your arms begging for you to take them back? What does it feel like to love someone so utterly and completely and yet in a second, in a split/second, fear for your life?
Rihanna, who sings on the track, was a victim of domestic violence. Unlike the rest of the world, I’m not going to speculate about her state of mind, but she’s been in those dark territories where love and hate and violence and lust meet.
This video will speak to young people because it doesn’t talk in absolutes, but rather in the grays that are real life. Yes, you should leave him for slapping you, but he loves you and he needs you and he said he’d kill himself if you go. Of course, you shouldn’t put up with her slapping you in an argument or screaming at you and calling you names, but she’s your first and she curls up in your arms and tell you that she wants your baby.
Good YA fiction doesn’t offer easy answers. It looks at the hard questions. YA fiction often lets characters be completely and totally wrong, lets them learn hard lessons, lets them make big mistakes.
The “controversy” about this song is that is glorifies domestic abuse. That’s pretty much insane. Listen to the lyrics. Listen to the characters, struggling to come to grips with the big ugly emotions that come with a relationship falling deeper and deeper into abuse and chaos.
Yes, the characters know better. They know they should walk away before it’s too late, but in being honest about that struggle Eminem and Rihanna are speaking to young adults in a way that a brochure or “very special episode” of some prime-time show never could. This isn’t glorifying abuse, it’s understanding just how hard it is for people to escape.
(Warning: The video does have some harsh language and some definitely strong, perhaps triggering imagery. That it’s deeply affecting is what makes it so startling.)
The Ghost Writer
Aug 6th
Roman Polanski’s "The Ghost Writer is a hell of a movie.
I’m not an apologist for the man, what he was convicted of, how he’s comported himself after his crimes, his comments on the case. It’s all rather horrifying. I think he should have gone to jail, for a good long time. I think he should be back in the US right now, owning up for his flight to Europe after his conviction. I think what he did, and the defense of what he did, is creeptacular.
Can we seperate the art from the artist? Of course. Otherwise you better burn all the Picassos, toss every Chaplin film into the pyre as well. Some of the most gifted creators have been dreadful human beings.
Ok, now can we talk about the movie?
"The Ghost Writer" never got a proper US release (see above) and that’s a damn shame. Movies aren’t just the work of one man. All those scrolling credits at the end? That’s who made the movie happen. Sure, Polanski gets the "film by" over the title, but everyone from the screenwriter to the key grips made the thing actually happen.
The Ghost Writer is a beautiful film. It inspires dread and menace as only Polanski can. Based on the novel by Robert Harris, it’s the story of a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to finish the memoirs of a former UK Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan). The PM might as well be wearing a little sign that says "Yes, I am Tony Blair" but don’t let that annoy you too much.
The previous "Ghost" died under nebulous circumstances on the cloud-shrouded and bleak American island that the PM, his wife and creeptacular staff (headed up by Kim Cattrall who is STUNNING because she reminds us that she has chops beyond playing a comic drag queen) are hiding out. Seems the PM did some very illegal things. The hows and whys are playing out in his autobiography and on the world stage.
The Harris book is a bit of ripping pulp fiction. Lots of whodunit and intrigue. Polanski adds doom and a sense of damnation to the story. Characters look out at the wild sea as if awaiting the viking raiders they know are coming. Almost every scene is either at night, dusk or covered by clouds. Gloom suffuses.
Brosnan is brilliant. He’s charismatic and charming, but it’s all superficial. At moments he reminds me of Rod Blagogevich. You really want to like him, then he does something awful and breaks your heart. It’s not a Tony Blair parody, not at all.
MacGregor is frumpily nerdy. He’s quite good at seeming put out by circumstances. Olivia Williams as the PM’s wife is marvelous. Why isn’t she in everything? I mean eveything, down to a "Muppet Babies" revival. She’s a mass of secrets and protects her husband while betraying him in the same sentence.
And again, Ms. Catrall just shines. She’s the guardian of the gate with nary a hair out of place. There are moments she looks fit to kill with a stapler. Just wonderful.
Watching the movie unfold, stylish, elegant and (thankfully) adult in it’s execution is just a delight. Best movie I’ve seen in just ages.
I watched Sex In the City 2
Aug 5th
And survived. Barely. I tweeted the experience. This truly is the worst movie ever made by humans. If it was made by humans. Which I doubt until proof of humanity is brought unto me.
ALL HAIL LEE!
Aug 5th
“Today, noted comic creator Stan Lee overthrew the Lord God and assumed the throne as King of Heaven and Dominion over All The Earth. Lee plans for a peaceful transition of power into his new role as Supreme Deity. Topping his agenda are renewed calls to end to Gamma-bomb testing, mutant rights and smiting Galactus, Devourer of Worlds.”