Now, I think, had I at that point said "Well, I liked him just fine, you're an evil evil Paul and you'll come to no good end", Paul would have dug in and vociferously given me chapter and verse on the wretchedness that is Spider, simply to be contrary. Paul is generally quite agreeable with most other people, but often cross with me, almost reflexively. I think it's adolescent rebellion against his eldest brother, or something idiotic like that.

However, I said "Right there with you, buddy, I loathed the prick".

Which, naturally, prompted Paul to defend Spider, which inevitably led to him berating me for being so judgmental and narrowminded and "not liking anyone".

And while it's certainly not true that I dislike everyone else in the world... there are many people I like quite a bit, some of whom actually read this goddam blog... still, I'm certainly not on the same level as Paul, who told me in no uncertain terms that "If someone likes me and wants to hang out with me, fine, they're cool as far as I'm concerned".

Ah. And speaking of cool...

Cool is the rule, but sometimes, bad is bad

Vanessa asked, in yesterday’s comment threads, exactly why I sometimes use the word ‘cool’ as an accolade, and other times, I seem to use it as an insult, as when I speak of ‘the cool people’ whom I despise. And it’s a cogent point. Vanessa’s pretty smart, even if she does think my opinions on early Stephen King novels are bollocks. (I’m not sure what bollocks means, in Britslang. It seems to vary from one context to another. But I’m pretty sure in this context it meant that Vanessa did not agree with my assessment, but did not feel moved to articulate precisely why.)

So let me explain. When I use ‘cool’ as an accolade, I am, naturally, speaking my own opinion. This is important. I am identifying something that I, personally, think is ‘cool’. I’m not necessarily attempting to vocalize anyone else’s opinion, and certainly, I’m not trying to claim that I speak for any sort of general consensus. In fact, I never speak for any sort of general consensus. Well, hardly ever.

Now, when I occasionally talk about the ‘cool people’ or the ‘cool kids table in the cafeteria’ or some such, in an obviously disparaging fashion, I am speaking of a social opinion. A consensus. A mass perception: “look, those people are cool”. Obviously, when I use the term in this manner, I do not agree that those people are cool.

That’s pretty much it. I don’t necessarily always disagree with society’s judgements… sometimes a member of the cool set is, actually, cool. But for the most part, I find nearly any consensus opinion is disagreeable to me, and a lot of times, out and out wrong (lots of people thought the Newly N’Sync Backstreet Kids On The Block were cool, for, you know, twenty minutes or so).

And that’s basically the dividing line for me. If someone measures how cool they are by how many other people think so, well, I’m probably not going to think they’re cool. But I may refer to them as ‘one of the cool people’. If I do that, I’m saying, lots of people think they’re cool, and they themselves think they’re cool, and, well, that all comes from the same source… an odd consensus that, indeed, this person is cool. When I use it in that manner, it’s not a compliment.

This pretty much means, by my standards, no politician can ever be cool, because all politicians have to live and die by what other people think of them. Which may well be the fundamental flaw with democracy. How can we possibly elect anyone remotely worthwhile to office, when in order to win an election, they have to truckle and grovel to make a majority of voters think they’re cool?

This may well explain why I vote for candidates like Ralph Nader, actually.

As a general rule, for me to think someone else is ‘cool’, they have to be someone who really just doesn’t care what other people think of them, or, honestly, whether or not most other people ever do think of them at all. Or, to put it another way, if you honestly give a shit what millions of utter strangers think about you or anything that remotely has to do with you, you’re not cool. I mean, nobody can be completely callous to everyone’s opinion (unless they’re a sociopath). You’re always going to care about what your friends and family think of you, to some extent. But when you find yourself fretting about exactly what the teeming masses in Iowa are going to think if they find out you’re dating a Hispanic guy, well, you’re not cool.

This is also, most likely, a fundamental flaw in our star system. Those guys (celebrities, especially ones who work for a living) HAVE to worry about what people think of them. Audiences are fickle. If people stop liking a particular movie star, they will stop going to that star’s flicks, and that star will stop being offered parts, and then they aren’t a star any more, and by their particularly weird standards, their life will start to suck. (I call these ‘weird standards’ because any of these people have, at any given moment, enough money on hand to let them live a very comfortable life for, well, a very comfortable lifetime. Yet when stars stop being stars, they inevitably seem to go broke shortly thereafter, and worse, they just can’t stand it when the attention dries up, so, by their own weird standards, their lives suddenly suck, although by mine, they could still live a very good life if they weren’t so psychically deformed by attention and decadence addiction.) So these people HAVE to worry about what millions of strangers think of them… and thank God I will never be a movie star. I couldn’t live that way.

Anyone who hires a publicist isn’t cool. And publicists, themselves, aren’t cool. Nor are public relations people. Or advertising people. Or any sort of spin doctor, anyone at all who tries to shape public perception in order to make money off you, which is ultimately what all of them are doing.

Of course, I’m only speaking for myself and this is only how I use the word ‘cool’. Your mileage, as always, may vary. Maybe you enjoy having your perceptions screwed with by people who want something from you. I don’t know.

All my dreams are on the ground

Thanks to Scott’s DVD set, I’ve now seen every first season Smallville ep. And I can say with some authority: boy, somebody behind this show really likes Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I guess the parallels should have seemed obvious to me prior to this… super powered teenager living in a small town that is fraught with dark and evil weirdness, said super powered teen only wanting the normal life they will forever be denied. But let’s face it, if you’re going to set out to do something very similar to Buffy (and I think that was very much in the heads of the producers of Smallville when they pitched the project), the idea of using the Superboy concept as a beard is a brilliant one. Who can question the authenticity, the historical gravitas, of the Last Son of Doomed Krypton in any popular entertainment medium? The fact that basically the producers of Smallville no doubt set out to clone Buffy the Vampire Slayer in pretty much every detail, and succeeded down to very nearly the last decimal point, is deftly masked by the instant legitimacy they get from tapping into the nearly 70 year old Superman mythos.

But make no mistake, this is not Superboy, nor even young Superman as defined in other TV and film adaptations. Clark Kent, troubled young teenager with unwanted superpowers and a destiny to save the world and help the helpless, might as well have Chosen One written on his forehead in bright red letters. Smallville deliberately copies every element from Buffy’s first few seasons… the concerned mom, the older, wiser father-figure and adviser (Clark has two of them to cover any particular need; Pa Kent for wise, decent, law & order type advice, and Lex Luthor for rather cynical input on how best to manipulate the perceptions of others and maximize Clark’s own potential charisma), the small town atmosphere, the single overwhelmingly powerful and largely undefined plot device that justifies so much monster of the week weirdness, the teen angst high school backdrop that seems common to EVERY show these days that successfully targets that highly sought after young male demographic, the supportive Scooby Gang clique of snoopy pals, and, of course, babes, babes, babes, babes, babes.

Smallville has some differences from Buffy, and a few of them are indeed quite distinct and give Smallville a small shred of its own identity. Leaving aside the fact that Buffy was supernatural/occult/magical fantasy in essence, while Smallville is firmly grounded in science fiction/fantasy (a difference some have pointed out as crucial, but one that really doesn’t matter at all; Clark and Buffy still fight much the same menaces with much the same superpowers against much the same social backdrop), one of the few things Smallville has that we’ve never seen before is the fascinating byplay between young Clark and a nearly equally young Lex Luthor. In a scenario that could rather accurately be described as ‘before they were stars’, we find that Lex and Clark were apparently rather good friends during their younger days in Smallville (an element lifted from actual Silver Age Superboy continuity, although Lex has been made somewhat older for the TV series; in the comics, Clark, Lex, and Lana were all schoolmates who grew up together and then went their separate ways), and actually seeing that friendship played out may well be a first in heroic fiction. Nearly every major adult hero has an arch villain who was once that hero’s closest friend (usually in childhood) but the friendship is always simply so much backstory. In Smallville, we’re actually seeing that friendship, as well as increasingly ominous portents of how it will inevitably fester and turn dark. It’s a truly fascinating element, and one of a very few that make Smallville unique.

Mind you, Buffy had a chance to do something equally bold before Smallville got there by permanently turning Willow dark and transforming her irretrievably into Buffy’s most deadly and lifelong arch nemesis… a chance that was wimped out on eventually, most likely because Whedon and his writing crew, whatever else they may have going for them, can never really find it in them to do anything to a character they love that they really don’t want to, no matter how powerful a story it might make. So Smallville remains unique in this regard, and given that most agree that the most fascinating thing about the series is Lex Luthor and his rather twisted friendship with Clark Kent, it’s no doubt the one thing the show has managed to do really well.

Smallville also plays the destiny card well, something that Joss Whedon perhaps heroically restrained himself from doing with Buffy. While Rick Berman’s various Star Trek franchises seemed to nearly constantly give us glimpses of various undesirable futures in which the various Trek characters labored under tons of pancake make-up to undo the one mistake they’d made in the past that had inevitably led to the dissolution of the Federation and the destruction of the entire human race, Whedon stuck resolutely to the present day. Smallville, however, has a built in Great Destiny element… we all know Clark is going to grow up to become humanity’s greatest hero, and Lex is going to be his arch nemesis, and pretty much everyone knows the various different elements of the Superman mythos that the Smallville creators play with constantly… always dressing Clark in blue or red (or occasionally, a red jacked draped capelike over a blue sweatshirt), showing us the seeds of what will one day become Clark’s journalistic profession, giving us hints and portents of just what is going to cause Lex and Clark’s friendship to sour at some point in the indefinite future, and occasionally bringing in various other characters from established Superman continuity, like the recent introduction of crimelord Morgan Edge.

The only time this backfires is with the central Clark-Lana relationship. Playing the Great Destiny card as relentlessly as they do, the producers are unable to have it both ways… while constantly reminding us that Clark is fated for bigger things, it’s impossible to make us forget that Lana is not actually his soulmate or his true love; that job belongs to Lois Lane. Lana is Clark’s childhood sweetheart and that’s fine, but lately they’ve been doing more and more episodes that seem to be trying to make us emotionally feel that Clark and Lana are, indeed, destined to be together… and, well, they’re just not. All of which means we know this relationship can’t really ever work, and that’s a problem on TV, where ultimately, the audience always wants whichever particular couple was in place when they started watching a show to eventually get together, no matter how hard it is, or how many times they try it and break up. (There are still people pissing and moaning about Chandler marrying Monica, and pining for Monica to get back together with that Tom Selleck guy. I know, it’s insane, but they’re out there. There are probably still people who want her to get back together with that Jon Favreau idiot, as well.)

So, essentially, what sets Smallville apart is the Superman mythos. But this is a Superman mythos that is only used as a convenient façade. Nearly every other factor in Smallville is directly copped from Buffy and it shows very nearly every minute of every episode.

Whole plots are lifted whole from Buffy: Just this season, Clark found himself drawn into the dreams of a sleeping girl who was being victimized by an invincible monster figure that only she could defeat, in a plotline very nearly identical to one Buffy had to go through in her first season. And there are a lot of other plotlines uncomfortably reminiscent of various Buffy episodes... something weird going on in a high school athletic team, so the hero has to sort it out, something weird going on with bugs, an invisible menace, a male supporting character falls in with a crowd of super powered thugs… in too many Smallville episodes there are persistent echoes of previous Buffy episodes, and worse than that, the Smallville episodes are never as good as the Buffy stories they were obviously inspired by.

One crucial and puzzling difference between Buffy and Smallville is the element of sex. Actually, the lack of anything remotely like a sex life for any of Smallville’s teen characters… we rarely even see anyone kissing… is something that differentiates Smallville from nearly every other teen drama ever produced.

I imagine this is simply because Clark Kent is a very wholesome icon and there’s a sense among its producers that depicting a young Superman who is as horny and sex obsessed as, say, Dawson, or Pacey, or Brandon or Dylan, or any of the other endlessly priapic so called teenagers in the many, many other teenage comedy/dramas we’ve been subjected to over the last 20 years, just wouldn’t be proper somehow, and since Clark isn’t going to get laid, well, none of his buddies can, either.

But this makes for a strange contrast with Buffy, where a predominantly female cast used to get it on with great regularity and, if you listened closely to Anya’s dialogue (or just watched Willow and Tara and/or Buffy and Spike) in a lot of fairly non-mainstream positions and combinations, as well. What’s interesting about this, of course, is that our society still generally perceives it to be okay for guys to have sex, but not at all okay for girls to. Thus, Clark seems rather iconoclastic in this regard… or, he’s just a bit of a prig. Which is a pity, since while I doubt the equally stuck up Lana would ever give him any, Chloey is obviously just dying to provide Clark with full access to any of her orifi, anytime, any place, any way he wants.

Smallville also walks this moral line with enormous delicacy. For all that Clark’s small town life and decent, nuclear family upbringing is obviously meant to appeal to the conservative element, the writers are very careful not to bring in anything that might alienate a more liberal audience segment, as well. Thus, Clark’s parents have a happy, quite conventional marriage, and Clark has no sex life at all (and other than one episode where his heat vision turned on, no apparent sexual urges, either), nor do any of his friends… but glaringly omitted from this happy Midwestern apple pie portrait is any mention of religion. If Clark goes to church on Sundays, we’ve never seen it. Similarly, if Jonathan and Martha voted for Dubya in the last election, they’ve never mentioned it. Smallville is its own odd little world, where small town life from some mythical American Golden Age seems to have survived intact, other than for brief incursions by Kryptonite powered non-conformists every week or so that that nice Kent boy always puts a quick stop to. Yet this is a Golden Age American small town with no churches, apparently, and no national political parties to stir things up. Even the Luthors, who just HAVE to be big Dubya campaign contributors, never talk about politics. It’s very strange, but, also, rather normal for TV… very few other shows mention politics or religion al that much, either, unless those shows are deliberately cultivating a conservative audience.

The worst thing about realizing that Smallville is, for the most part, just a rip off of Buffy is coming to grips with just how poor a copy Smallville is. I suspect it’s just the writing quality. Smallville, like Buffy, seems blessed with quite a gifted cast (especially given that half of them were models before they got this gig), but while the dialogue is all quite workable and competent, and the scripts establish and even occasionally develop characterization in a fairly interesting (if usually predictable) fashion, and the always necessary exposition is often worked in fairly seamlessly… nonetheless, the dialogue doesn’t crackle. Nobody’s quoting Clark Kent’s clever quips on Internet websites, because, well, they ain’t that clever. There’s really no memorable dialogue at all from one Smallville episode to another, and, in fact, there’s pretty much no sense of humor at all. Everyone is painfully earnest, nearly all the time. The only character who remotely even seems to have a sense of humor is Lex Luthor, and his is rather dry and seems a bit twisted. What wouldn’t the average Smallville watcher give for a transplanted, 16 year old Xander Harris to show up and make some ironic comments on just how deeply whacked out all these plot shenanigans are? Even Chloey seems dreadfully somber about the Wall of Weird, and jesus, if there was ever fodder for some Xander Harris style wisecracks, that thing has to be it.

And sometimes, a Smallville script is just groaningly hard to take, like the one for the ep I watched yesterday in which Clark encounters a blind old lady in a rest home who can see the future, and… yes, yes, wait for it… whose name happens to be Cassandra. It’s without a doubt one of the worst episodes this series has ever produced, with the ‘menace’ (for lack of a better word) being an elderly sociopath who, via the usual Kryptonite plot device, is somehow restored to his youth, and who sets out to, for no sane reason whatsoever, kill all the descendents of various people who pissed him off when he was a wee young lad.

Fortunately, not all Smallville episodes are that horrible, but, well, the average isn’t a great deal higher than that, either.

And, having now seen the DVD set’s little episode guide booklet, I’m aware that all Smallville scripts have one word titles, which honestly just seems really pretentious to me.

Now, having said all this, I will add that while I often find Smallville boring to watch, I’d just love to live there. Are you kidding? Every single woman in town other than the residents of the old folks home and the sheriff is totally hot, and hey, all you have to do is dig in any random corn field to turn up some green glowing meteorites that will conveniently give you amazingly cool superpowers (after which I, being sensible, would promptly move away to, I don’t know, Europe, where I would very very quietly use my new superpowers to make myself fabulously wealthy, while simultaneously being extremely careful to ensure that Clark “Interfering Busybody” Kent never so much as heard the merest whisper of my name).

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.