Traipse - Games Cycle - Monopoly

Monopoly is a perfect example of what happens when people who don’t understand the rules of a game begin to mess with it, and then complain that the rules they’ve introduced make the game less fun.

The two most popular house rules of Monopoly: eliminating the “auction” rule, and “all money from fines, taxes, etc. is placed in the center of the board, and is given to any player landing on Free Parking.

On the surface, these seem like good ideas. The auctioning rules are a bit confusing if you haven’t bothered to read them and don’t like the idea of being “forced” to buy a property you’ve landed on, lest it go to an opponent for a cheap price. Free Parking is a space on the board that literally does nothing, and giving it an ability feels like plugging the last hole of a lazy designer.

Unfortunately, both of these misunderstand what Monopoly’s core goal is: removing money from the player’s hands. One is ruthlessly and aggressively taxed, penalized, lawsuited, and rented nearly every turn. Players are encouraged to eliminate one another. The fantasy of holding on to thousands of fake bills and the deeds to fake property disappears.The less money introduced into the game, the fewer opportunities granted to players to hold on to their money, the quicker the game ends.

One of the reason’s most games of Monopoly drag on for so long is because of houserules like these. The faster every property is owned, the quicker rents skyrocket and money aggregates into the hands of one or two players. Without random and unrealistic windfalls of potentially thousands and thousands of dollars, the players go bankrupt faster. The game actually ends in a timely manner.

Now, of course, you complain, this removes any of the swingy elements that the latter rules introduces. The game becomes a foregone conclusion much quicker. The ruthlessness of having to mortgage properties and sell off everything you own to avoid bankruptcy, to stay in the game, to keep playing just a little bit longer... There’s so much less you can do to avoid it.

Which was the entire point. 

The game was intended by its socialist authors as an indictment of the real estate industry. In succeeded admirably is modeling the players treating one another abominably in order to “win”. Is the point the fantasy about being a millionaire real estate agent? or is it to expose the horrors of capitalism? In the end, neither turns out to be fun for most folks, and the former literally involves rewriting the rules to allow yourself to do so. There's a lesson there, I'm sure.

If only those lessons could be transferred into real life, and the game could get people to do something about it...

Traipse - Millar Cycle - The Secret Service

45(ish) Questions about The Secret Service

1. Is it ever possible to escape your origins?
2. Is it ever alright to change yourself?
3. Are societal expectations about appearance and behavior, despite being arbitrary, automatically negative?
4. Is James Bond still a useful male role model?
5. How about John Steed? John Drake, the Prisoner?
6. Are certain lifestyles and habits superior to others?
7. Is getting a better job and moving away more of a fantasy than any of the superspy gadgets and martial arts?
8. Would you rather live in a fancy apartment or a council estate?
9. Is the portrayal of the lower class men fair in this book? Are “not all men” like that?
10. Is the bit about “staying in and watching Supernanny” instead of going and becoming a super spy yourself a thinly veiled dig at Grant Morrison?
11. Is the suggestion that we take responsibility to change our lives and transcend our circumstances automatically a negative one because some people are unable and/or unwilling to?
12. When was the last time your worked out?
13. Paid attention to what you ate?
14. Do you think the outfit Gary wears to go pick up women with the other young recruits is a handsome one?
15. What level of responsibility do we have to our families?
16. Is it wrong for Uncle Jack to move his sister and nephew out of their neighborhood, rather than improving the entire area?
17. Did it occur to you that Gary’s family would almost certainly be among those killed by Dr. Arnold’s plan?
18. Why don’t you think that Arnold can’t watch the wedding party kill each other? Is fifty  too small a number to be a statistic? Has he not played enough video games or watched enough feature films?
19. Would you have enjoyed this comic a lot more if it had Grant Morrison’s name on the cover?
20. How do you feel about male role models? Do they provide us with adequate examples for young men to emulate?
21. Given the choice, would you rather they emulated the suave gentlemen like Jack, or the wife beating drunks like Dean?
22. Did it occur to you while reading that military service is often the only way out of lower class poverty for many young men?
23. How do you feel about the military?
24. Do you know how heavy a rifle is, and how much it kicks with recoil when you fire it?
25. How did you feel when Gary broke down crying and admitted that he didn’t want people to laugh at him for being poor anymore?
26. Do you think that rich people would be spared in an apocalypse, man made or not?
27. Is it right that none of Jack’s world saving accomplishments make the front page?
28. Is a life dedicated to silent public service and helping other people really the true masculine ideal?
29. If so, why do so many films and television shows and novels and comics extol personal glory, individual prowess, aggressive competition, and massive braggadocio? If not, what is? Assume performative gender roles as per Butler here.
30. Who teaches these ideals to the young men of the world? And why are so many of them apparently not learning the right lessons?
31. Grant Morrison said: “Hollywood doesn’t work that way, you can’t walk in a room, and he doesn’t… you know I live in Hollywood, I live here four months of the year and I can know what goes on, there aren’t 200 million dollars films being made, what can I say…  I don’t really want to say… I don’t want to come out against somebody who will see it as an attack, it’s all too easy to do.” about Millar’s seeming ability to walking into any room and make a film any time he wanted. The Secret Service was made into Kingsman: The Secret Service almost instantly, and director/producer/screenwriter Matthew Vaughn has a co-plotting credit on the comics. Is Morrison wrong about Hollywood, wrong about Millar, or is he just walking into the wrong rooms?
32. Would Grant Morrison be one of the people Matthew Arnold saved? How about Mark Millar?
33. How about Arnold’s janitorial staff?
34. Were the Star Wars prequels really the equivalent of the Kennedy Assassination for our generation?
35. If so, what does that say about our level of political engagement vs. fictional media engagement? If not, what is? 9/11 perhaps? What do you think Žižek would say about The Phantom Menace and its place in the franchise?
36. And if not, why does this kidnapper working for a cell phone billionaire who wishes to wipe out most of the world’s population think that they were?
37. What kind of movies would George Lucas make in a post apocalyptic situation like that?
38. Did you notice that everyone in the comic thinks that they are doing the right thing, and that their actions are completely justified?
39. Do you enjoy when media makes you think? or should it lull you to sleep and provide a break from how awful the world is? Do you dislike when you think you’ve got one and it turns out to be the other?
40. To what extent is schadenfreude a useful emotion?
41. What do you think it means that Rupert Greaves means to join Arnold in killing off most of the planet’s population, and Gary has managed to kill him accidentally simply because of how he was trained?
42. The film was wildly successful. Do you think there will be a sequel? What would it be about?
43. Would you have enjoyed the story more if Gary were a woman?

Traipse - Millar Cycle - Kick Ass

(The planned post isn’t quite ready, so we’re doing this instead. Sorry that it messes up the transition in the Gilgamesh post, but it still follows thematically)

Because Mark Millar gets it. As a matter of fact, Mark got it way before the rest of us.

-- Rob Liefeld, Introduction to the collected edition of Kick-Ass

A Jack Kirby Transplant

The literature of male impotence is a strange beast, especially when it disguises itself as the opposite.

Ostensibly a power fantasy about a young man turning himself into a superhero, the book portrays protagonist Dave Lizewski as a disturbing and disgusting loner, venting his anger and hatred on the minories that the police don’t care to investigate too hard. If, in fact, the events of the book are really even happening as he portrays them, as his unreliability is established early on in a scene where he stalks a girl he has a crush on to the local tennis club (note how the grip on his racquet echoes the grip of his baton). The book is full of Dave being degraded with sexual insults, his testicles injured, his sexuality being questioned, and all of his reactions are precisely those of someone awful, someone we cannot sympathize with. He is a “nice guy”. Rather than talk to the girl he likes, he stalks he, he pretends to he her “gay best friend”, he dresses up in a costume and shouts at her bedroom window in the middle of the night. Rather than work on his social skills, he digs himself deeper into the online subculture he is invested in, getting dramatically upset about minor details in superhero lore and choosing which jobs to take in the hopes that the women will reward him with sex. He is terrified of African-Americans. In this, Dave is actually in a very strong tradition of masked racists dating back to the early 1900s, when Birth of the Nation presented the KKK as heroes, a band of masked and caped vigilantes who “saved” the south from those horrible freed slaves that were going to ruin the government by voting and putting their feet up on the table.

I had twenty-eight different requests in my inbox, but this one really jumped out at me for some reason. The girl sounded nice. Like maybe she’d go out with me if I sorted this out. That’s all I could think about the whole way over. Supposing she was really, really hot? -- Kick-Ass, Issue # 3

Big Daddy shooting his daughter in the chest to toughen her up

Chris Kyle, in CRAFT International garb

Big Daddy, the violent evolution of Dave, is every bit the monster. To give his daughter an “interesting life” he kidnapped her and turned her into a psychopath with no regard for other human beings. He gives her cocaine to snort before fighting, under the auspices of it being a special scientific formula to help her combat skills. She’s sure to call the Italian mobsters she’s fighting “dagos”, yet another racial insult. He pretends to be a cop who lost his wife in a tragic accident, but he’s really just a nobody with an expensive comic collection. Dave compares him to the Punisher, Frank Castle, an apt comparison in terms of aspiration, if not actual details. Castle was also the idol of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, whose unit was called “The Punishers”. Kyle hated all Iraqis with a violent passion, and spent a great deal of his service time essentially roleplaying as The Punisher, believing that it was his God given duty to deal out justice to those “savages”. He also details in his autobiography traveling to New Orleans with his brother shortly after Hurricane Katrina, setting up shop on top of the Superdome to kill “looters”. He claims to have killed about 30. Millar’s opinion of Big Daddy doesn’t seem terribly high, as, after being revealed as a huge fraud, is quickly dispatched with a quite graphic shot to the back of the head, echoing the execution of Tuton by Midnighter in one of Millar’s Authority issues.

This rejection of the superheroic encroaching in our world seems a direct reaction to that of his old writing partner, Grant Morrison, who views superheros as the greatest thing ever and cannot wait for their arrival through the vortex into our dimension (more on this to come). Such an optimistic view, while noble in aim and aspirational in sentiment, ignores that the vast majority of superhero comic output much more closely resembles Dave’s battle to feel better about himself: a masked vigilante takes justice into his own hands, beats the shit out of someone they see as a criminal, and leaves the police to clean up the mess, off panel. The reason that, say, Jack Kirby’s New Gods stand out so much is because they deviated from this formula and presented a bizarre take on religion and philosophy alongside said beatings -- which were conveniently all given to the members of an organized crime syndicate or the soldiers of an evil invading planet, so you don’t have to think too hard about the victims (except in a few notable instances, where, for example, the slaves being freed are given the position of prison guard and immediately turn just as bad as their captors). Morrison sees us taking flight alongside these wondrous gods and transcending high above the world; Millar opens his book with a mentally ill man in a Kirby style outfit killing himself trying to fly. The reality is much more likely to be Chris Kyle than Clark Kent. 

But, like a murderer, simply fantasizing would only cut it for so long. --Kick-Ass, Issue #1

In the end, what does Dave’s work amount to? Essentially nothing. Some random mobsters are dead. One guy stopped from getting mugged. A cat saved from a burning building. Big Daddy is dead. A new fashion trend is popular, and inspires an unintentional suicide. He gets beat up by the girl he likes' boyfriend. None of it has come to anything at all. He’s still the same pathetic little monster he was before all of this, jerking off alone in his room.

Whether you like this message or not, Millar’s argument is well made: people like Dave will not be improved by setting themselves up above others, by granting themselves moral authority above others, by presenting themselves as the Savior who deserves your adulation. They aren’t doing it for the right reason. Until they get over the resentment and the anger and the basic shittiness that characterizes their outlook, they’ll never be superheros. Dave is happiest driving around with a pothead, talking about all the great things he’s going to do. Cosplaying is a fun hobby, but planning out the violence you and your pal are going to commit on whatever socially appropriate victims you can find is pretty sick.

A Young Jeffery Dahmer

This is only part of why having John Romita Jr. as the artist is such a coup. I’m not sure who made the decision to draw Dave to look like a teenaged Jeffrey Dahmer, but it works disturbingly well. And as the long-time penciller of Spider-Man, who may as well be the flagship character for whining male sadness, the implied comparison only manages to make Dave look worse. Peter Parker complains, oh yes does he complain. But he also does something about it. He tries. He puts in effort. He has interests outside of his hobby, attending class, studying science, graduating college, becoming a school teacher... He actually talks to women, even. For all his numerous faults, Peter is everything Dave wants to be and isn’t. Dave isn’t proactive enough. Dave won’t grow and change as a person. Everything is someone else’s fault, everything is the world fighting against him, nothing is ever his fault. Peter can’t help but always blame himself for every little thing, and literally his origin story (the real one with Uncle Ben getting shot, not the incidental details about the radioactive spider) is about consequences and taking responsibility for your actions.

It’s strongly implied at the end of issue 1 and in opening parts of issue 2 that the entire series is just a fever dream. Dave finds himself naked, rather than in costume, and his recovery time is remarkably fast and complete for someone having undergone that much  trauma. I haven’t read Kick-Ass 2 or 3, so I’ve no idea if this is expanded on or not, and it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. If it is “all a dream,” it’s still a very sad one.

 

Does Millar hate comic fans? I don’t think so. Other comics by him display a reverence for noble characters like Superman and the ideals he embodies. Dave is a very specific type of fan, the toxic, short sighted, mean, bitter, and quite awful type we’ve probably all met online or in person. The book empathizes with him to the extent of allowing him to tell his story, of allowing the reader to make their own judgements rather than outright condemning him from omniscient third person panels (“The story you are about to read could happen to you, comic reader!”). If anything, the book is a call to do better, to not be Dave Lizewski. Don’t get caught in petty jealousies, don’t sublimate your hatreds into violence, don’t project your inadequacies onto others... Come to terms with your problems and work on them. Read comics, but don’t make reading comics an elaborate fantasy world you retreat into to avoid dealing with the world.

Why? Because there’s worse on the way if you do. If this is what happens to the type who style themselves superheroes, what about those bastards who decide that being gritty 90s anti-heroes is everything they ever wanted?

Traipse - Myth Cycle - Gilgamesh, The Epic of

I imagined that you would look like a god.
But you look like me, you are not any different.

We begin at the beginning. Well, a beginning.

“He who saw the Deep” is a translation of the standard version’s title, taken from the first line of the poem, but probably not the one any of us are familiar with. Gilgamesh slots it better into the tradition we understand, much like The Odyssey is about Odysseus, The Iliad is about the Trojan War (Ilium being another name of Troy), The Aeneid is about Aeneas... And much like those, the version we have today, and the version being considered today, is all about Gilgamesh himself.

The earliest story recorded on clay tablets, baked in buried, and dug up thousands of years later. A story which is remarkable in itself for being a story at all, as the vast majority of written texts it was found alongside were prayers and records. An epic story we have cobbled together from multiple versions of multiple stories written over two thousand years, and excavated another two thousand years after that. All about a king and his best friend and a flood and what the king brought back after looking at the darkness.

Said synthesis is not unlike that undertaken by adaptor Stephen Mitchell himself, who does not speak Sumerian (he “only” speaks Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, English, and Danish), but instead synthesized the various versions already in existence into this poem. This is not at uncommon: Ezra Pound did the same, for example. Mitchell was understandably criticized for taking some liberties with the text, though why, precisely, yet another academic translation of the poem would be a necessary addition to the canon is a question rarely considered by critics. The work done by Andrew George is among the most comprehensive ever done by any academic, and his two volume analysis and translation of every existent fragment is unlikely to ever be surpassed in English. It is not as if Mitchell isn’t completely up front about his method and his intentions in his introduction. It’s subtitled “A New English Version”, not “A Translation”, after all. He was writing a shorter, accessible version for the public, not a thousand page academic treatise. (It should be noted that George did publish his own shorter, popular translation of the poem, which came out a few years before his massive academic one.)

The other main criticism, completely justified, is that Mitchell makes Gilgamesh into an epic hero in the mold of Odysseus or Achilles, hacks the poem up as if it were a Greek epic, and utterly mangles the distinctly Babylonian flavor of the tale. But, as mentioned above, the most remarkable things about the poem is that it exists at all: the area barely produced any poetry, let alone hero stories. The vast, overwhelming majority of written documents we have from the area are either prayer tablets or dry historical records. They did not seem to be a people given to fanciful tales; they recorded what happened to their kings, and they recorded their entreaties to their gods. And yet here we have a hero story, not quite history, not quite fantasy, but also much too fantastic and narrative compared to the record of events that make up most of the other kingly documents.

And then, we must consider which Gilgamesh would be best? How many gaps in the damaged tablets need to be filled? Or should we publish with all the lacunae left in, 100% fidelity to the tablet, with no consideration to readability? Which tablets have priority over others? Sîn-lēqi-unninni’s Akkadian version is considered the most authoritative, but his twelve volume version was assembled at least 900 years after the earliest surviving five Sumerian poems, each an independent and unconnected adventure. So what Mitchell has given us is yet another version of the story. New wine mixed from the old vintages bottles, to mangle the saying. And despite the message of parable, no reason we can’t wash and reuse the bottles too. these days. Ours are made of glass, not leather. Same with patching up an old garment with new cloth, if you know what you’re doing with preshrunk cotton or wool, but at that point, we’re perhaps being a bit too literal, given the condition of the documents we’re working with, aren’t we?

So what’s the story? Gilgamesh, two thirds god, one third man, is a shitty king who oppresses his people, raping the women and doing something to the men (perhaps exhausting them via athletic games, the tablets are damaged). The gods punish him by sending an animalistic badass to punish him. He appears in the forest and starts bothering the hunters. They ask their lady friend the priestess Shamhat what to do: she says to get the new guy laid, so he’ll become human, and she volunteers. Enkidu becomes civilized, and ends up a nightwatchman, and interrupts Gilgamesh for taking his droit du seigneur with a newly married woman. Gilgamesh, can’t beat the new guy, Enkidu, up. They fight to a stalemate. Afterwards, the two guys become the best of friends, perhaps lovers also. They pal around, beating up monsters and smashing down evil goddesses, until Enkidu dies of a mysterious illness, the curse for having killed the monster Humbaba. Gilgamesh sinks into a deep depression. He goes off to seek meaning and eternal life, which proves to be a dangerous adventure in its own right. He meets the oldest man, from before the Great Flood, who tells Gilgamesh of the creation and the world and the gods. But Gilgamesh messes up getting the magic flower back home -- it is eaten by a snake, which sheds its skin and is reborn. Eternal life is lost to him and his people, and Gilgamesh must live with this and move on. He must accept the reality of death, no matter how powerful he is. As he sees the walls of the city, he weeps, realizing that though he may die, the city will live on, and he should live, regardless of what may happen tomorrow -- the lesson the ferryman tried to teach him before he crossed the river of death earlier in the story.

A remarkably complex and multilayered story, with even more episodes than I have mentioned in the brief summary, all of which are ripe for interpretation and analysis, and which bristling with mythic resonance and epic deeds writ large. Books and books have been written about it since its rediscovery in the 1850s. Every element feels familiar, because we’ve seen all of them before. For an old story, it is a familiar one. And yet it is the example we are familiar with that come later, not this tale.

Is there a definitive, authoritative, “correct” version of the story? Of course not. There are definitive translations of particular versions, but the idea that one version of Gilgamesh is the exact right one is ridiculous. He was a heroic figure who learns to be civilized, to act correctly in society, to rule as one ought to rule, and many tales were told of his adventures. They are all true, in some sense, whether turned into a baseball satire or a science fiction horror anime.

And that same searching for the definitive, the final, the “correct” version of the story, brings us to...

Traipse - Prospectus

It isn’t difficult to make the argument that all things are connected. Everything that “matters” is on the planet Earth, it has been observed by human beings, can be described in at least an approximation of words, belongs to at least one or more sets of things, etc. And as such, every piece of media is a reaction to, contains references to, comments on, or otherwise draws from the rich and expansive history of stories and objects which exist in the world.

The usual tack taken by folks of this ilk is to systematically analyze every episode of a given series, every book by a given author, every issue of a given comic, etc. in direct order, with occasional digressions to discuss political or social situations relating to their creation, or to speak about other works which were influential or were influenced by the main topic of discussion. For one such as myself, down that path lies madness and ruin. I have tried and failed. I am to obsessive when it comes to detail, yet too easily lead astray, and too frustrated by incompleteness and the fragmentary nature of such things.

Thus, instead, what is proposed is a traipse through media of all sorts. A drunkard’s walk, a Poisson distribution, a bouncing ball to follow across the lyrics at the bottom of the screen so the audience can sing along. We will begin at the beginning (of sorts), and we will proceed through whatever is available, whatever is connected to whatever, high and low, print and video and sound and stationary and temporary and lost forever. Sometimes we will look at an entire movie, book, or television series. Sometimes a particular comic issue, television episode, or song. Sometimes a single panel, painting, or chapter. It might appear random, but there will always be some slender thread of continuity. Who knows when we will end?

What we will often attempt will be a holistic view, considering all points of view at once, considering a reading so we can tear it down and then tearing down that reading and tearing down that reading of that reading. Sometimes not. There is no particular philosophy being embraced in toto, in the sense of a “Marxist reading” or a “postmodern reading”, save that the project itself is by its very nature poststructuralist and due to the “continuity” hopelessly mired in historicism. It could move neither forwards nor backwards without them. But it is hoped that the works themselves will get discussed, rather than simply critical theory.

I will contradict myself. I will infuriate myself. I will revisit myself.

I will update when updates are ready; no schedule could be set. Some works take 22 minutes to consume, some take weeks to read, other seconds to listen to. I am a notoriously slow reader, and refuse to do anything else while watching things. This temporarily induced monomania itself will perhaps be a topic of discussion some day.

Words/phrases which will appear frequently: evolution, opinion, on the other hand, mirror, context, considering, change, life, window, Other, technology, cutting, water, viewpoint, picture, image, shaman, World Spirit, divide, externality, multifaceted, box, philosophy, hostile, ontology, permission, outside, compulsion, infinite, magic, obsession, considered, printed, framing, disorder, But then, So, because, and, a, the, then, with, also, because, why, in, that, have, I, for, not, on, go.