Imaginary Playthings (Under the Dome)

This past Friday night was pretty well consumed, for me, by finishing off the last hundred and fifty or so pages of Stephen King’s Under the Dome, the requisite checking-out for which my wife very sweetly and patiently endured. I absolutely believe that a lot of marital happiness derives from engaging with one another, even if it’s in as passive a form as watching a sitcom or a baseball game together, which means I try to save my solitary pursuits for times when I’m in actual solitude, such as when the little guy is abed and the love of my life is at work, but every once in a while I succumb to the all-consuming need to finish some massive book or another, at the expense of quality spouse-time. (Last time this happened was when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out.) And I appreciate her understanding.

I mentioned a little while ago how stressfully and exhaustingly trying it was to be in the middle of Under the Dome, emotionally invested in the fates of characters to whom bad things kept happening with no end in sight, or at least no end until I made time to read the words on the remaining pages, which was a feat in and of itself. The actual process of reading those words, especially as things escalated, was even more harrowing than walking around with the uncertainty. (Which may beg the question of why I do this to myself, which I can barely answer myself … it’s the good kind of harrowing?)

In order to really dig in here I’m going to need to talk about the end of the book, and along the way I’m going to talk quite a bit about the endings of several other Stephen King books by way of comparison so, you know, SPOILERS and all that.

When I was in high school and began delving deeply into the Stephen King back catalog (which has of course doubled or tripled in size since then), he provided me with my first real exposure to Books With Seriously Downer Endings. Sometimes I think this gets lost in a lot of people’s conceptions of old-school King. Everybody knows Carrie or The Shining or Cujo or Christine or The Dead Zone but people tend to key in on certain images from the movies (or USA Network tv shows, as the case may be) so Carrie is about Sissy Spacek getting blood dumped on her at prom and blowing up the gym and The Shining is about Jack Nicholson chopping down a door with an axe and Cujo is about a rabid St. Bernard (played by a big softie named Daddy, apparently) who … ok, people get the general Cujo pop-culture reference but I’m guessing very few could tell you what exactly the dog does for an entire movie. It’s pretty much what he does for the entire novel, which is terrorize a mother and her young son who have the misfortune of driving out to the farm where Cujo lives on the hottest day of the year, only to have their car battery die. So they’re trapped in the car with no AC, no food and water, and a murderously rabid dog waiting them out. And the little boy dies of heatstroke. So that may be the most egregious offender (and probably a big part of why Cujo is not as widely loved as some other King works) but just to sum up the others: Carrie dies at the end of her book, Jack dies at the end of The Shining (and in the book version that really is tragic because Jack is a much more sympathetic character, manipulated by the evil nature of the hotel, not the already-on-the-cusp-of-madness Nicholson take), Arnie dies at the end of Christine, Johnny dies at the end of The Dead Zone, etc. Having grown up on fantasy stories where the protagonists always triumphed, and then moved on to 80’s horror movies where some or most of the protagonists would get killed but eventually one would survive, it was still pretty shocking to me to invest the time and energy in reading a novel only to find out the protagonist did not survive – and in some cases with King’s work, like Christine or Pet Sematary, not only did they not survive but they didn’t even necessarily win the day. When Carrie dies, at least she takes her crazy mother down with her. In Pet Sematary, not only is Louis’s death undeniably implied in the voice of his wife’s reanimated corpse, but the thought of what will happen after that is honestly too terrible to even contemplate.

So why did I keep going back for second, third, ninth helpings at this Protagonist Dies At The End literary buffet? There is something about King’s style I find compulsively readable, his familiar, folksy “I’m just a guy telling some stories here” vibe. Some people get sick of that after a while but I pretty much eat it up with a spoon. And the stories are exciting, in the meaty middle parts; it’s fun to read about a psychic trying to plan an assassination to avert a nuclear holocaust he’s had a vision about. I suppose in that sense it’s like another activity I enjoyed as a little kid: walking my bike up a very long, very steep hill, climbing on, and coasting back down the hill, picking up speed until braking was essentially impossible. Most of those rides ended with painful wipeouts, but that didn’t stop me from pushing my poor battered bike back up the hill again and again.


And at some points it seemed like King rediscovered the happy ending, or at least the bittersweet triumph-of-good-over-evil ending. Misery has one, ironically enough. So does It. And then there’s the whole universe of Gunslinger/Dark Tower books, the central series of seven books plus a bunch of King’s other novels and short stories which tie in to the Dark Tower in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways and those tend to tread water a bit without coming down on either side of happy or tragic endings, just because they all put off the ultimate resolution until the final installment. (Said final installment can be argued as a downer, or not; I choose to see it as not.) King still has the capacity to break his readers’ hearts, but very little that he’s done recently has matched the sheer gut-punching of his Early Modern Tragic period.

I guess I got somewhat complacent over the course of Cell and Lisey’s Story and Duma Key recently because as I got deeper and deeper into Under the Dome I suddenly felt like I was reading old-school King again, as the dread was mounting in a way I hadn’t really recalled in years. A small town in Maine is enclosed by an invisible, impenetrable barrier. Nobody knows how or why. People freak out. Opportunistic jerks try to manipulate the situation to their own advantage. Decent people try to see to it that cooler heads prevail, but the opportunistic jerks are able to fan the flames of the groupthink freak-out and turn the general populace against everyone who gets in their way. And the town is dying off in ones and twos, as some people get killed by jerks who feel like outside authority can’t touch them, and other people kill themselves to escape the terror of being trapped in a town with limited resources – especially food and air – and no way out but death, fast or slow. The race is on to find out what’s causing the Dome to exist in the first place, even as it becomes abundantly clear that the opportunistic jerks actually want the Dome to stay right where it is because it suits their purposes.

That synopsis is pretty standard thriller fare, with a heavy dose of psychological horror, but the sudden turning point comes when one of the good guys finally finds the piece of alien technology generating the Dome, and it becomes apparent that the technology is both inscrutable and indestructible. The thrust of the book stops being “find the Dome’s power source and turn it off before it’s too late” and shifts into “the Dome can’t be turned off, and everyone is going to die”. Or, at the very least, that becomes a very distinct possibility. The possibility become an even more pronounced odds-on favorite when, closer to the end, a number of subplots converge and a crystal meth lab’s stockpile of propane canisters ignites in the heart of a C4-fueled explosion during a botched police raid, starting a firestorm that consumes most of the town, most of the people in it, and most of the oxygen inside the Dome, leaving behind a depleted and poisonous atmosphere for the few remaining survivors. I honestly believed those survivors were going to die horrible asphyxiating deaths, there would be an epilogue about how the US government ultimately dealt with the after-effects of the disaster, and the whole thing would be a grim fable about the futility of struggling against the implacable mysteries of the universe (cf. King's short story The Raft). I braced myself for it.

And then, funny enough, it didn’t go that way. There are overt comparisons throughout the book between what the aliens have done to the small Maine town and what human beings (sometimes kids, sometimes not) do to bugs: putting wasps in a jar and shaking it until they fight, frying ants with a magnifying glass, etc. The alien technology had given people who touched it flashing visions of the aliens themselves, so in the end one of the survivors lays hands on the technology and uses the resulting psychic connection to beg for their lives, insisting that even if the aliens see humanity as tiny, mindless insects they are causing real suffering and should make it stop. Miraculously, the appeal to empathy works and the aliens lift the Dome and the remaining survivors do not die horrible asphyxiating deaths.

Cheap and manipulative? Maybe so, and maybe I’m a Stephen King apologist, but sometimes I enjoy being cheaply manipulated. I was, as I keep repeating, very (overly) attached to the protagonists and concerned about their fates, so I wasn’t going to look a gift deus ex machina in the mouth. At the time, I closed the book with nothing more than a sigh of relief. But as I reflect on the ending more and more, I keep wondering how I should really take it.

For one thing, it seemed really rushed. Granted, once the apocalyptic inferno scoured the inside of the Dome, the clock was ticking for the survivors, but still, everything from that turning point to the aliens relenting went by in a blur. The air quality in the Dome gets so bad that a few major characters do die horrible asphyxiating deaths, but these happen off-screen, mentioned in passing, which struck me as narratively ... odd.

Another striking element of the climax is one of the phrases King employs to convey the alien perspective. There is an implied language barrier which the direct psychic connection can’t completely overcome, resulting for example in the pleading protagonist’s mind translating the alien’s regard as “You are toys from the toystore.” But another example is when the alien at first rejects the protag’s premise of having feelings and experiencing suffering; the alien thinks back “No, you aren’t real.”

Because if you take a step back and put on your Meta Reading Glasses, it wasn’t weird and creepy aliens who dropped the Dome and tortured the populace of a small Maine town, it was … Stephen King. And he does this ALL THE TIME. It is, in fact, his job. But it’s ok for him to slowly, horribly kill an entire town full of fictional characters, because they’re not real. Right…?

I have no way of proving this, short of interviewing the man myself, but it seems to me you could make a semi-convincing case that King set out to write another “everybody dies” blockbuster, and then as he got closer and closer to killing off the best of the good guys and the purest of the innocents … he chickened out (or had a change of heart, or however charitably you want to put it) and ended up with a breakneck conclusion that fixes everything as fast as possible. It’s like he was overcome with empathy for little creatures that made him feel godlike and amused, until they made him feel bad about himself.

Alternatively, though, there’s another way you could meta-read the whole situation. Again, King is the godlike alien, but the creatures suffering at his hands aren’t his characters, they’re his readers. The Dome is any one of his books, and when a reader opens the cover they become trapped in its self-contained world, and King can visit all kinds of mental cruelty upon them, pulling them back adn forth through the wringer at will, and there’s no escape, until King decides it’s time to release them. Although even once the book is over and the Dome is gone, anyone who survived its gauntlet will be haunted by it for a long time to come. Does King ever really think about his readers as people, as individuals who can potentially be gutted by an unexpected, unjust demise of a likable character? Or are they always just the abstract hypothetical Constant Reader, undeserving of much consideration given to the fallout from the words King gets paid to put down on the page? Could Under the Dome possibly be the apologia of a spinner-of-worlds who underwent a sudden shift from the latter to the former?

I mean, the guy's been writing for the better part of five decades. I'd be more surprised if all this written-work-as-symbol-of-the-writer stuff hadn't occurred to him than if it had. At any rate, it's an interesting riff.

Strike while the headline is hot

At the risk of starting up a running theme here, one wherein I don’t talk about things on the day that they happen, when I’m all a-tizzy about them, but rather wait a day or so, let me tell you about my self-inflicted suffering yesterday: I left the house for work without remembering to grab anything to read. I had finished a book on Friday afternoon (and another, different book Friday night, but we’ll get back to those later this week) and somehow let the entire weekend go by without tucking a new bit of reading material in my work bag so that it would be waiting for me to crack open Monday morning on the Metro. I was berating myself pretty heavily as I sat on the train, distractionless.

Despite the book-void, I still refused to take one of the Post Express papers handed out at the Metro entrance; it just strikes me as a gratuitous waste of paper (and besides, if I read the Express on the train, what would I read online when I got to my desk?). But many of my fellow Orange Line riders had copies, and in my boredom I caught a few glimpses of what was in Monday’s edition.

One headline in particular jumped out at me, about MLB’s opening day, which here in the DC area included the extra sizzle of President Obama throwing out the first pitch at the Nationals’ home opener, commemorating 100 years of presidential first pitches to boot. All well and good, but the headline referenced the “Unbeaten Nats”. That gave me a good laugh.


I get that after every team has played their first game, half of them will be unbeaten and the other half won’t. And after two or three games you’ll have fewer and fewer undefeateds, including a not-altogether-outside-the-realm-of-possibility chance that no one will be undefeated at that point. It’s really not that noteworthy to be 2-and-0 or 3-and-0, though, hence the headline-writing dilemma of most sports editors: do you hold off on using the “unbeaten” modifier until it’s really impressive, maybe when a club hits 10-and-0? Or do you pull the trigger sooner, because as soon as the club loses its first game “unbeaten” is completely inapplicable, and you don’t want to miss your chance?

Of course the only time in the season the Express could count on the Nats being unbeaten is before they’ve played a single game and had an opportunity to lose. An opportunity they generally take often, including at least 100 times in each of the past two seasons (not an exaggeration). And I feel kind of bad for the Nats because their home opener was against the NL-champion Phillies, and specifically the Phils’ newest acquisition, ace pitcher Roy Halladay. But bless the Express staff for pulling the “unbeaten” trigger and taking their one-and-only shot. I, for one, was amused.

Please don’t feel that I need to have it pointed out to me that as of this moment the Nats and the Yankees have identical records. I’m well aware. And the Nats have been known to take a series from New York in interleague play, so this is not a case of “the inferior local team makes me feel even more superior about my favorite team” or anything like that. My season as a Yankees fan will have ups and downs, and maybe the boys in pinstripes will acquit themselves well, and maybe they’ll disappoint. You could also say the same thing about being a Nationals fan, I suppose. But there are differences between following the exploits of the Evil Empire versus the lovable, luckless underdogs. I’m fairly glad that, through both choice and circumstance, I’m exposed to both.

In our own backyard

April is shaping up to be a month of very few free-and-clear weekends for our family, as it happens. As usual my wife has to work two weekends this month, although one of those involves attending a conference which is not terribly far away (Baltimore) but far enough that she will actually be staying at a hotel for the duration, which will be the very first time she’s spent the night away from both me and our little guy since the child was born. And on one of her few non-working weekends, I will be heading out of town for my own first encounter with a spouse-and-child-deprived experience in the form of my Little Bro’s bachelor party. All of that being what it is, we had opted to make as few plans as possible for Easter weekend and simply enjoy a relatively sedate couple of days of family togetherness before a long stretch lacking the same.

And on the one hand I feel like we were reasonably successful in achieving that goal, but on the other hand we managed to pack an awful lot into Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday we visited some friends, which was in theory a chance for the grown-ups to catch up and also for us to show off our one little guy and our friends to show off their two little girls, but man, I forgot how easy it is for a four year old and a seven year old to dominate a get-together if you’re not the “go away and play extra-quietly” type of misanthrope, which (most of the time) I’m not. So the visit was less “How’s everything going vis-à-vis our adult commonalities and shared interests?” and more “DO YOU WANT TO HEAR MY BARBIE SING HER SONG??!?!?!?” but that’s really fine.

On our way home from that visit we picked up our newly-rescued latest addition to the pet menagerie, a two-and-a-half-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who was originally named Buddy but who needs a new name because I already call everybody Buddy, including and especially our first dog and our firstborn. It’s proving difficult to name the new pup, though, because it’s a toy-sized breed, somewhat twee and arguably somewhat girly (there was, in fact, a period of some intense negotiation about whether or not I would ever be fully all right with my wife adopting a CKC because it would inevitably become our dog and I would sometimes take it for walks and there is something ever-so-emasculating about walking a toy-breed dog) but nevertheless still a boy dog, so although a name like “Silky” might be descriptive it’s not really gender-appropriate. On the other hand a name like “Goggles” is nice and gender neutral, not to mention evocative of the dog’s slightly bug-eyed, looking in two different directions aspect, but my wife’s kind heart resists the idea of naming the dog for a bit of physical imperfection which is in no way the dog’s fault. (I assume, but have not yet verified, that this means if we ever rescued a dog who had lost its tail because a train ran over it even though the dog knew better than to keep playing under moving locomotives, I could name him “Stubs”.) Also I am kind of an Old World pain about NOT giving pets names that would be equally acceptable for human children, so that limits the options considerably. Anyway, the dog – currently going by No Name, New Dog, and the occasional Weirdo – is incredibly sweet and very accepting of his place at the bottom of the pecking order under the dog, the cat, and the toddler (in no particular order). I’m sure he will be fine with whatever name we end up settling on.


Anyway, I was pretty convinced we wouldn’t have to leave the house at all on Sunday, because our only plan was to hide (read: scatter in varying ground-level terrain features) plastic Easter eggs and then let our little guy run around and pick them up and put them in a basket. I think I’ve mentioned before that the boy’s Virgo tendencies sometimes shine through with astonishing clarity, and his attraction to picking things up and putting them in a container is a pretty good example of that. So he had a ball with the eggs, so much so that we ended up re-hiding the eggs and letting him re-collect them a few times Sunday morning, which gave us plenty of opportunities to snap some pictures and even record some video, something we’ve been utterly slack about for the past six months or so.

So that was our morning and then as the afternoon rolled along, after we had telephoned and wished happy Easter to our various families, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to go shopping and look into buying patio furniture. This must have been verging on imperative because we ended up finding a lovely glass-table and cushioned-chairs set at Wal-Mart which we acquired and wheeled out to our car, only to find that even a good-sized family sedan does not really have the trunk space for a large box of furniture. Amazingly enough, though, while we were puzzling out what to do next (read: whom to call and beg for help) the woman in the parking space next to ours, who was driving a small SUV, offered to load up the boxes and follow us to our house, which was less than five minutes away but still, the woman gets full lifetime Good Samaritan credit by us. So despite our near-disastrous poor planning we got home in time for dinner and still had enough time before the sun went down completely to assemble the four chairs, which means I’ll have to put the table together sometime this week. But our backyard as a hangout space is really coming together, and that’s an unalloyed good thing. We won’t really be able to do much hanging out until May, as I mentioned when I opened here, but, you know, all in good time.

Back-up shoes?

So it has come to this. In the whirlwind of the past few months our little boy Mebrahtom has gone from tentative first steps to thinking nothing is more hilarious than running away as fast as he can in the opposite direction from the one in which his mother or I am trying to herd him. He plays outside basically every day, and he actively wants to play outside every day, so over the course of these great-strides encompassing months he has gone from vaguely shoe-shaped baby foot coverings to legitimate (albeit still adorably miniaturized) shoes with stomp-resistant soles and everything. Of course Meb’s growing so fast, he’s bound to outgrow each pair of shoes before they wear out, so we know we’re in for purchasing multiple pairs over the course of the year, or possibly over the course of a season. But surely we can buy those shoes serially, one pair at a time, right?


Well, in theory, yes. (In theory, anything, because “in theory” is the most forgiving of qualifying openers.) But what this theory fails to take into account is a day in which I drive to the local VRE station to take the train all the way from hometown to work, while my wife on her day off takes Meb to visit some friends of ours who just had their second baby, and then around dinner time I take the Metro from work to a restaurant that happens to be right along the Orange Line, where other friends of ours are hosting a charity fund-raiser dinner, and my wife and son meet me there because the restaurant also happens to be in the same neighborhood as our friends with the new baby, and at the end of dinner I take Meb to the bathroom and change him out of his clothes (and shoes) and into pajamas and he and his mom and I get in the car in the parking garage and throw the stroller in the trunk and blindly toss my jacket and my work bag and my wife’s purse and the reusable shopping bag overflowing with Meb’s things (diapers and wipes and toys and books and sippy cups and the outfit he was wearing) in the back seat and drive back home and swing by the train station and pick up my car and drive both cars home, by which time the little guy has fallen asleep in his car seat, so I carry him up to his bedroom while my wife brings in everything heaped in the backseat footwells of the car and fortunately Meb stays asleep during the critical transition from carseat to crib but my wife and I are exhausted after juggling our dinners with trying to feed him and then chasing him around and keeping him from running into the restaurant kitchen so we pass out shortly thereafter. It also fails to take into account the following morning during which I get up and go to work like usual and my wife gets Meb up and ready for daycare as usual but can only find one of his shoes because the other one probably fell out of the hastily packed and just as hastily backseatward-flung reusable shopping bag and is most likely sitting in my car still, and with only one half of Meb’s only pair of real shoes in hand (and that effectively useless without its counterpart) my wife is forced to decide between the flimsy canvas slippers that have squeaky soles that BWEEP! with every step Meb takes, or heavy-duty rainboots. And man, on a morning like that, the thought that it sure would be nice to have a spare pair of everyday shoes for Meb to handle exact that kind of contingency sure does blow a big gaping hole in the theory that we only need one pair at a time for him, doesn’t it?

(Incidentally, my wife opted for the rain boots today. She and I think the bweeping shoes are hilarious, not to mention handy in that we can turn our back on Meb for a couple seconds and hear immediately if he decides to bolt for the stairs or something, but we didn’t want to inflict them on Meb’s daycare providers for an entire day; we strive not to be “those parents” who aggravate the daycare staff overly much.)

Date disclaimer

Yes I am well aware of today's date and the significant uptick in foolery one should rightfully expect these 24 hours. I actually love April Fools Day and I especially love the various manifestations it takes online - Google's logo says Topeka today! And the Gmail login page is missing all its vowels! - and I'm actually somewhat impressed by the dedicated bloggers who actually change their entire blog, from layout to fake posts, just for April Fools. Obviously I'm not that dedicated myself.

But just in case you were wondering, because the post below this one is also dated April 1, if I really do actually like the character Jade or if it was a dessicatingly dry prank post attempt at irony, I assure you the subject matter and the date are unrelated. I really am a big goober who thinks fictional super-powered chicks with Dickensian biographical arcs are inherently rad. If there's any punchline to be found, that is it.

Maybe next year I'll punk the blog, but not today.

The Lady in Green

Yesterday was new comics day and the final chapter of the Blackest Night saga running through Green Lantern comics was released, and I picked it up so that finally, after eight months of the story unfolding, which came on the heels of literally years of build-up, I could get the conclusion. So, was it worth a mid-day Metro ride to the closest comic book store, which happens to be at the Pentagon City Mall?

In a word, yes. Not YES!!! But, yes. It was satisfying, it made me smile, it didn’t directly cause me to feel like I was wasting my life. All in all, a win. But there was an additional bit of unexpected surprise that really helped put it over the top.

(Spoilers, I guess? It’s a minor thing but technically gives away a plot twist of sorts. Not that anyone whom I know for sure reads this blog also reads GL comics, but on the off chance some random internet denizen has surfed his or her way over here … don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The whole upshot of Blackest Night ended up being literally a matter of life and death. The Black Lanterns, an army of zombies, were in the thrall of Nekron Lord of the Unliving and trying to eradicate all life in the universe, and only the combined power of every color of Lantern Corps plus the heretofore unknown White Lantern power could save the day. And whereas Nekron’s Black Lantern Corps consisted of reanimated corpses, the White Lantern was able to bring dead heroes fully and completely back to non-icky life.

This happens in comics all the time, of course, characters that were dead come back to life, sometimes in the metaphorical “you only THOUGHT I died because you left me for dead!” sense and sometimes literally in the supernatural cosmic intervention sense or the time travel paradox sense or whathaveyou. So the fact that there were a bunch of previously dead characters standing around looking hale and hearty at the end of Blackest Night was not exactly earth-shattering, and not even necessarily any less arbitrary than any number of other returns from the grave. But I was delighted because of one resurrection in particular.

Jade is back.


There is no known way to explain the character Jade without sounding like a crazy person making things up as he goes along, but I’ll make the attempt nonetheless: the original, World War Two era Green Lantern (who either does or doesn’t have any connection beyond the name to the Green Lantern Corps of alien peacekeepers I’ve expounded on previously, depending on which writer is currently re-interpreting the character) had a fling with one of his femme fatale nemeses and ended up fathering fraternal twins, Todd and Jenny-Lynn. Todd was born with shadow powers and Jenny-Lynn was born with green skin and hair and green light powers. They grew up in an orphanage but became superheroes themselves, Obsidian and Jade, younger contemporaries of the Hal Jordan space cop Green Lantern. By the time Hal Jordan was replaced as Green Lantern by Kyle Rayner (the result of a long story in which Hal went power-mad, killed a bunch of Green Lanterns, and seemed to commit suicide but would return later as a villain and much later as a redeemed hero, but in the interim the one surviving Guardian of the Universe gave the Green Lantern power ring to Kyle – this was around the same time Superman died (he got better a year later, see what I mean?) and Batman had his back broken and comics in general were gratuitously dark, aka the ‘90s) … right, by the time Kyle was Green Lantern, Jade was semi-retired from being a hero but she ended up romantically involved with Kyle, and also got to be Green Lantern herself for a while when Kyle went on a vision quest in space and deputized her to hold down the fort. And then, a few years ago, during another big storyline, Jade died heroically in the line of duty. Kyle and Jade were a pretty heavy couple (Kyle even proposed at one point but Jade thought the time wasn’t right) but he eventually got over it and has recently been romantically involved with a girl named Soranik who just happens to be the current Green Lantern Corps successor (by planet of origin, not by temperament) of good old diabolical traitor Sinestro.

Jade is just a character I adore. She is part of a heroic legacy that includes both literal bloodline heritage and thematic echoes and romantic entanglement, all within the particular heroic legacy that is my all-time favorite in comics. She has a cool look and cool powers and a cool personality (upbeat, confident, sense of humor, noble) and a cool back story. Granted, she’s got a lot of soap opera-esque elements in there, but I would be a big old liar if I said I minded the soap opera-esque attributes of superhero comics. (In fact, not only do I not mind them, I kind of dig them.) When Jade died, and the Kyle/Jade romance-for-the-ages died with her, I was bummed.

But now she’s back, huzzah! And the soap opera-esque can be turned up to 11: who will Kyle choose, Jenny-Lynn Hayden or Soranik Natu? The green chick or the magenta one? Will there be a Melrose Place style catfight, or one woman simply flying off like a broken-hearted green-energy shooting star?

Actualy, I went to the Wikipedia page on Jade to do some quick fact-checking for this post and it turns out that rumors are already out there about a potential romance between Jade and Starman, so it looks like Kyle will be sticking with Soranik. Damn, Wikipedia, how about a little spoilers warning next time?

Primitive Video Gods

A buddy of mine and I are collaborating on a pop-culture cataloging project, the end goal of which would be a simple and fun web interface for slicing up all the entertainment arts into personally meaningful lists. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the fact that this reveals the following things about me: I am the kind of person who is capable of evaluating web interfaces themselves as ‘fun’; I also consider coding databases and GUIs in my spare time both ‘fun’ and ‘a good use of my time’; I am so all about pop-culture that I overthink it into taxonomies and hierarchies all the time anyway and computerizing or webbifying the process is an utterly natural evolution.

Gah?

Having shuddered involuntarily at the giga-geek in the mirror, let’s get back to the idea of the project itself, which is basically that the things you like (or dislike) are important parts of who you are. Of all the books or movies or albums or websites or whatnot ever produced by humankind, a certain segment are the ones I think are the best, or the ones I think everyone else should be exposed to, or the ones I find personally inspirational. And a social forum dedicated to sharing and riffing off those specific sub-groupings of our common culture seems like a good idea.

Of course, for my buddy and I to get this project off the ground, we have to standardize the points of reference. OK, technically, we don’t have to, because we could accomplish the minimal goal of getting people talking about what seemingly benign movies totally gave them nightmares as kids or what kind of playlist would be essential for driving cross-country just by e-mailing a bunch of people and asking them to hit Reply All when answering the question. But if we want to not only get the conversation going and keep it going but also break it all down along the way with nuggets like “78% of people really do think Happy Days is an overrated TV show!” then we need to start with a standardized database so we can take advantage of computer processing of data instead of figuring it all out by hand. (To me this seems pretty inherently obvious because leveraging data in databases is my whole wage-earning job, so I’m just going to leave it at that assertion. If you don’t quite follow, just trust me on this one.)

(Also I’m all for job creation in order to stimulate the economy and all that but why is the 2010 census not being conducted mostly online? Seriously?)

So my buddy and I are still working out the details of our grand plan here, which seems like a good idea on paper but may or may not be tenable in execution. One thing we’ve been wrestling with is the following scenario: we pose a question like “what movies are your equivalent of comfort food for your brain?” and encourage people to answer it, and some people have ready answers but others might need a little thought-prompting. So, logically, we would give them the ability to browse the database of movies we set up ahead of time. Except … what’s the best way to browse a list of (ideally) “every movie ever made”?

I have no answer to that question at the moment. But what I do have are some childhood memories that I hadn’t thought about in ages until that scenario came up. Childhood memories of the dawning of the VHS era and the Age of Video Stores.
It’s strange to recall given the improbably deep reserves of material available via every outlet from Netflix to Amazon, but when VHS was first catching on, retail businesses had to build up their stocks from nothing. The scope of a mom-and-pop video rental store’s collection might be vast or slight, and even for the ones that somehow quickly built up to vast territory faced another challenge, which was how to convey the vastness. Hundreds, even thousands of VHS cassettes stored spines-out on narrowly spaced industrial shelves didn’t take up that much room, but at the same time weren’t very inviting. On the other hand, putting a bunch of clamshell cases on the wall face-front made perusing the offerings a bit more enticing, but if the video store was in a strip mall, space was at a premium, and there was no way the entire stock could be shown off that way.


I have a distinct memory of being at my grandparents’ house at the beach, and my parents planning to go out for the evening to take advantage of Grandma and Grandpa as babysitters. My brother and I were allowed to pick a couple of movies to rent to amuse ourselves (and presumably make G&G’s caretaking task that much easier). My grandparents, like my parents, were pretty early adopters of technology like cable tv and VCRs, so Grandma already was a steady customer at a local video store, and had brought home a copy of their catalog, which I also distinctly remember. It was black and white, printed on really low-grade newsprint, in two or three columns of teeny-tiny text, like the phone book. (Hey, remember phone books?) It wasn’t terribly hefty, maybe about the size of the TV Week that comes with the Sunday newspaper. But, as I mentioned, the text was dense. And it was just an alphabetical listing of every movie the store had a VHS copy of, categorized along the lines of “comedy”, “romance”, “action”, “children’s”, etc. And I remember poring over this list scanning for titles of movies that I wanted to ask Grandma to rent. I also remember my Little Bro taking one look at the cramped columns of titles, uninterrupted by pictures or anything, and saying “Ugh. You do it!” and shoving the catalog at me. It really was a cumbersome and onerous way of going about picking a movie, but I took to the task with great seriousness, because that’s just the kind of little geek I apparently always have been. (To be fair to the analog technologies of yesteryear, I know the print catalog system was not really designed with indecisive children in mind. Presumably an adult would think to themselves, “I’d like to watch The Sting tomorrow night, I wonder if Beachcomber Video has a copy?” and flip to the appropriate page for a yes/no verdict. But as a kid who’s most frequent response to “what do you want?” was “what do they have?”, I made use of the information available in the format provided.)

As if my young geekiness cred needed any more burnishing, I’m pretty sure the movie we ended up renting was TRON.