Day: December 4, 2011

Sunday

Today was the usual Sunday mix of the crossword puzzle and some free-writing:

War is hell. But that’s okay. I’ve been to hell and they know me there. It wasn’t so long ago that they were calling my brother The Devil, capital T, capital D. It wasn’t so long ago that they were calling him the boss, and I was down there in hell what seemed like all the time. My brother didn’t go in for the whole pointy horns and pitchfork act like the guy before him — some traditions, Frank said, are worth keeping and some ain’t — but there wasn’t anybody down there with the guts to cross him and, by extension, me. Times may change, and war may be hell, but hell’s still where most of my real friends hang their hats.

And, anyway, it’s where she is, the last time I saw her. Not like I could leave this place even if I wanted to.

Nowadays, Frank’s down in the Pit, getting tortured, which is a demotion any way you slice it — even if the things that live in the Pit didn’t spend all their time slicing into him. The crew the board hired on to replace Frank after the whole mess has been looking for a way to get us out of this war he started, but I don’t know if they’ve been looking too hard, if you catch my meaning. It’s easy to bad-mouth Frank and the hole his policies maybe dug us into, but it’s a lot harder to turn your back on the opportunities a war like this presents. Nobody likes the war, but seems like everybody likes profiteering from it.

I couldn’t really tell you what the war is all about. Even me, a bona fide damn hero by some accounts, and blood relation to the guy who declared the war in the first place… Even I don’t have much sense of it anymore, what we’re fighting for — beyond some board member’s hypocrisy and greed — and even who the enemy is supposed to be. Was a time, not too long ago, when I would’ve said it was the first demons, the ones who got here long before me and Frank were even a twinkle in our dad’s eye topside. Except, truth be told, she’s a demon, or at least she was living with them, in their nomadic camps. And I’m not really prepared to start thinking of her as my enemy, much less enemy of all of hell, not with everything’s that gone between us. I haven’t seen her in months, maybe almost a year now, but I can’t see me putting a knife to her throat or a gun to her head like I’ve done to a hundred dozen demons since this damn war started.

I’ve been back in the capitol city for about half a week now; in theory, I’m on leave, but I’m really here to pick up supplies and manpower and new orders, before heading back out into the flames. That first day back, I found myself standing at the edge of the Pit — it’s carefully guarded deep in the citadel, and I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I know a guy — and I found myself talking to Frank even though everybody knows you can’t hear anything when you’re down there. It’s like being in a coma, except you’re being flayed alive over and over instead of lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Still, I found myself talking the same way you would with a coma patient, asking for advice, telling him what was new on the front lines, that sort of thing. And I found, despite what I’d promised myself, that before long I was talking to Frank about Sarah, even though we’d never talked about her when he was still in charge, and as far as I knew Frank didn’t even know she existed. It’s not like Frank was anti-demon — it was a war of necessity, he’d liked to say, even after the board was stripping him of his office and casting him into the Pit. But he didn’t know I’d fallen for one of them. I wasn’t even sure myself if that’s what you’d call it. But I needed to talk.

Neither one was entirely satisfactory, but I think I got more enjoyment out of the writing.

The week in podcastery

I’ve been enjoying Alec Baldwin’s new podcast, Here’s the Thing, although I don’t think he rehabilitated Kris Kardashian Jenner‘s image quite as much as he seems to think in his latest offering. I have no doubt they’re genuine (if unlikely) friends, and Jenner doesn’t come across as one of the world’s most horrible people — which is probably the image her family’s reality television ubiquity most presents. But nor does she come across as particularly interesting or worthy of attention. At best, Baldwin convinced that, for all their faults, the Kardashians themselves are probably not pure evil. High praise indeed. His earlier interview Michael Douglas is a lot more interesting.

Jordan Jesse Go! took a page from Golden Girls with their 200th episode and offered up a clip show. This might be a good place to dive in if you’re new to the show, though keep in mind that the pair and their guests work a little bluer than Alec Baldwin. (Even this Alec Baldwin.) But they’re genuinely funny, and JJGo is easily one of my favorite guys-just-talking-about-stuff weekly podcasts. (Along with its Canadian counterpart, Stop Podcasting Yourself.)

Although I think I preferred Community‘s “clip show” better.

And finally, there’s Studio 360, which I genuinely enjoy, although I was deeply disappointed in host Kurt Andersen’s recent interview with Robert Levine about the Stop Online Piracy Act. I tried posting this as a comment at their site, but even logged in I ran into problems. Perhaps the post is closed to comments now that the show’s a week or two old, I don’t know. At any rate, I thought the rest of episode was quite good, but the one segment left a lot to be desired:

Let me just add my resounding disappointment with the piece. It’s not that Robert Levine (or even Studio 360) has a particular point of view on this contentious issue, much less one that’s antithetical to my own. It’s that no dissenting view is heard except in passing, to be dismissed as fear-mongering, exaggeration, and/or spurred by questionable and monetary motives.

Levine makes a reasoned argument in favor of copyright and anti-piracy legislation, but sweeps aside justifiable concerns that SOPA and its Senate counterpart are absolutely terrible tools in this regard. They will do little to protect the copyright of artists (or the corporations who ostensibly represent them) — who are already protected by a bevy of existing law such as DMCA. Rather, they will almost certainly open the doors to many of the “chilling effects” that Levine is so quick to dismiss. The language of the bill is vague and wide-sweeping and dangerous — not to pirates, but law-abiding businesses and users on the internet.

But, regardless of whether or not Levine — and Studio 360 — agrees with that argument, to present only one side of a thorny, ongoing public policy debate is, at best, an oversight and, at worst, irresponsible journalism. I expect more from Studio 360 and was therefore deeply disappointed.