I’ve never been a fan of reality TV. The Real World, Joe Millionaire, Who Wants to Fuck a Baboon for Money; none of them have ever done much for me except make me want to change the channel. The one recent exception, however, has been VH1’s new show Rock of Love, starring Brett Michaels. Brett is best known for being the former lead singer of 80’s hair-metal band Poison, as well as for having a tape floating around on the internet featuring him and Pamela Anderson awkwardly screwing. I never really thought that Poison (or any other band with androgynous guys wearing lots of makeup and singing shitty rock ballads) was very good, and while having sex with Pamela Anderson on camera is cool, the video came out shortly after the world was treated to her nasty escapades with Tommy Lee and his absurdly oversized circus dong. This was horrible timing, because instead of everyone being wowed by the fact that Brett was banging the hot chick from Baywatch, he instead just gets remembered as that other band guy whose junk wasn’t as big as the drummer from Motley Crue. I don’t really know what he’s been doing ever since people stopped going to his concerts, but I’d imagine it involves drinking a lot and excitedly answering the phone when record executives call to tell him they want to put together a multi-million dollar Poison reunion tour, then being crushed when they hang up laughing. This situation sounds traumatic, but fortunately for Brett, being a washed-up rockstar in today’s world is nowhere near as depressing as it used to be. This is because if a celebrities star has faded to a completely pathetic degree, they can still exploit the fact that people will want to mock how far they’ve fallen by having their very own reality TV show! This is a horrible trend that started with The Osborne’s on MTV and was recently propelled to the height of absurdity with Flavor of Love on VH1, and the wild popularity of these farces really is an accurate gauge of how retarded the American populace is becoming. Personally, I never liked either of these shows; I just don’t understand the appeal of seeing a pill-addled geriatric who can’t form coherent words shamble around his house, and I certainly have no desire to watch trashy hood women fighting over a tiny wizened gnome wearing a Viking helmet. Although I will admit the part on Flavor of Love where one of the girls unabashedly took an enormous dump on the floor during an elimination thingie was pretty funny. But despite my general detest for these kinds of programs, I have to say that for some reason, I can’t stop watching Rock of Love. I don’t know why; and to be honest, my enthusiasm is starting to scare me a little. I guess the main reason I’m writing this is to hopefully convince other people to watch it too; this way I won’t be alone with my shame. To that end, here’s a brief overview to help you better understand why watching Brett Michaels attempting to put his dick inside as many women as possible on national television is so massively entertaining.
The show itself is fairly formulaic, as most reality TV featuring women prostituting themselves out to an aging maybe-celebrity usually are. The contestants all live in a huge tacky mansion replete with stripper poles, Jacuzzi tubs, and a seemingly endless supply of alcohol. Every few days Brett’s henchman/security gorilla “Big John” will lumber into the common room and gruntingly deliver an astonishingly shitty poem written by Brett that describes some kind of radical competitive challenge he’s devised to determine which of the ladies loves him the most. The winner (or two, or three) of the challenge is chosen by a complex mathematical formula that seemingly involves Bret’s penis and whichever girl he thinks is most likely to do totally awesome stuff to it. The winner and Brett then go on a special “date”, where he has the chance to really, y’know, get to know the girl. And then maybe to fuck her. At then end of the day, all of the contestants are gathered in a weird gameshow auditorium where they do their best to look sultry while awaiting Brett’s arrival. The man of the hour eventually strides into the room with a solemn look on his leathery face, usually wearing what appears to be the fabulous skin of a gay farm animal he’s killed and made into a kickass trenchcoat/cowboy hat combination. He calls each of the girls down from the stage they’re perched on, and tenderly looks into their eyes as he explains his reason for keeping them around in his televised harem. As they gaze adoringly at him, he gives them a “backstage pass”, and asks if they’ll be willing to stay and continue to “Rock his World.” They giggle out something retarded and then proceed to accept Brett’s insatiable tongue as it’s forced past their still-smiling lips. Seriously, he mouth-rapes every single girl at the dismissal gatherings. It’s hilarious. Those that aren’t chosen are shown out by Big John, usually after Brett delivers a touching soliloquy about how totally cool they are even though he no longer wants to have sex with them.
So now that you’ve got a fair idea of what the show consists of, I’m going to further my case about how great it is by trying to break down the first episode in detail. I watched it a couple of weeks ago and was distracted because I was literally laughing every five minutes, so I should warn you that this may not be a flawless recreation. But I think you’ll get the basic idea. The saga begins with Brett addressing his potential fuckbuddies outside of the gaudy L.A. mansion he calls home and having them say hello to Big John, who he explains will act as both enforcer and bodyguard. This is just like when they used to be on the road together, which was like all of the time because his band was really popular. It was called Poison; maybe you’ve heard of it? No? Nobody? Well, fuck. There are about 20 women who have traveled from around the country to vie for Brett’s affections, and each is wearing an outfit that best accents their fake plastic tits while they try incredibly hard to nonverbally convey just how happy it would make them to put Brett Michaels’ penis in their mouths. To set the classy tone for future episodes, Brett finishes introducing himself and his penchant for wearing ugly hats before having Big John promptly kick off five girls, who I guess weren’t slutty enough for his boss to bang on national television. On the surface, this looks like a totally rockstar move; I mean, the contestants now know that in the house of Brett Michaels, anything can happen, often to the Extreme and quite possibly to the Max. Rock N’ Roll, Bitches! Waaaahhh! But to the astute viewer, Brett’s intentions are betrayed as a cheap stunt even before Big John calls out the girl’s names and tells them to get the fuck off the lawn. See, while the camera panned around and got closeups of all of their desperate faces, it was painfully obvious that some of the women were far more unattractive than the others. And not just “Yeah, that blonde in the back has too many freckles” unattractive, but more “OH MY GOD! THE CREATURE HAS ESCAPED FROM DR. OPENHEIMERS LAB! KILL IT!! KILL IT BEFORE IT DESTROYS US ALL!!” unattractive. It was hard to watch; I mean, they all obviously had crippling self-esteem issues already; why else would they demean themselves by being on the show? It’s sad to think that most of them probably went home and killed themselves if they were smart enough to realize that they had been flown to California for the sole purpose of being the ugly chick Bret Michaels sends home during the first few minutes of his show to prove how much of a discerning sexual machine he is.
I really have no idea how many of the contestants were spared the terrible axe-blow of Big John’s cruel dismissal, because literally five of them had gigantic tits and retarded stripper names, which made them pretty much indistinguishable to someone who doesn’t understand the subtleties in telling one whore from another. I wasn’t about to take the time to learn how to tell “Brandi” and “Krystal” apart until they started fucking each other on the pool table or something, although to be honest, I probably wouldn’t care that much even then. The girls enter the house and giggle about how lucky they are that Brett chose them, and then proceed to start trying to make themselves more attractive by getting absolutely shitfaced. It’ll become apparent in later episodes that these women are drunk pretty much constantly, and in this regard you have to admire the brilliance of the producers. I mean, how do you make a show featuring attention starved harlots desperate to screw a middle-aged rocker even more hilarious? Why, by making sure their blood alcohol never falls below almost toxic levels, of course! After the girls have loosened up with a couple dozen shots apiece, Brett returns to announce that the first step in his grand plan to “get to know them better” involves lining them up so that he can take some sexy individual pictures. The first girl to try and look fuckable while Brett breathed heavily and snapped away with his camera was undoubtedly the luckiest, because at the end of each of their modeling sessions he demanded that they kiss him. And I’m not talking about a light peck on the cheek; every single one of them got a thorough probing from whatever dark and terrible creature lives inside Brett Michael’s mouth. These women all looked like there was a good chance they were the carriers of at least one type of VD already, and I’m surprised that the combination of their hooker saliva and whatever kind of unspeakable shit you get after being the lead singer of Poison for ten years didn’t cause the last chick in line’s head to explode in a massive shower of mutated hepatitis puss.
After his little photography session, which included a few of the girls interpreting the command to look “sexy” to mean “pull your tits out and grin vapidly”, Brett decides that he’s going to spend some time wandering around the house and getting to know his woman-stable a little more intimately. But while all of this hilarity is occurring, there’s trouble brewing outside of the House of Michaels! It seems that the ugliest of the contestants Big John booted earlier has returned and is banging loudly on the front door, apparently trying to destroy any lingering vestiges of her self-respect that somehow withstood her earlier humiliation and the fact that she wanted to be on the show in the first place. Big John steps out to see what she wants, and totally looks like he knows what he’s doing by crossing his arms and frowning while she delivers a rambling, semi-coherent plea to be given another chance at fucking Brett. I couldn’t decide if she was so hard to understand because her lips were swollen from Mexican botox or if it was due to the nine pounds of horse tranquilizers it looked like she’d taken, but she sounded pretty wrecked. Big John eventually shuts her up and tells her that she can come in, but sternly warns that she’ll have to sleep in the tub or something and will more than likely be forced to pleasure him sexually. While this implies that all you have to do to get past Brett Michael’s formidable rockstar security is to whine and ask a couple of times, I think the real lesson we learn here is that Big John’s nickname doesn’t come from his physical appearance….but, touchingly…. from the massive size of his heart.
The remainder of the episode is mostly given over to shorter segments showing Brett having quiet chats with one or two of the girls. This attempt at intimacy is so that he can begin the torturous mental process of deciding how he can know someone well enough to eliminate them from his show, despite the conundrum that he obviously can’t know them at all because he’s never put his penis inside them. But the touching insights into Brett’s horny mind are constantly interrupted by shots of the chick with swollen lips that Big John let back in getting totally, magnificently drunk and stumbling into things while screaming racial slurs at the black contestants. The saddest part is that at one point during her televised downward spiral of complete self-debasement, she mumbles something out about how she’s only on the show “for her son”. This is depressing because a drugged-out trainwreck like this should never be allowed to procreate, not to mention that it also means somebody was desperate enough to have sex with her in the first place. And what about the poor residents of whatever state she’s from? They actually end up suffering the most, because you know it’s going to be their hard-earned tax dollars that pay the salaries of the officers who finally take the kid away to an orphanage, and the subsequent years of required therapy he’ll have to go through to repress the images of his mom whoring herself out on national television probably aren’t going to be cheap either.
Anyway, while watching Brett wander around and try to learn about the girls he’s hoping to bang, one thing becomes very apparent: pretty much anything will make Brett Michaels horny. For example, he was talking to one of them, and it soon became obvious that while she was pretty hot, God had forgotten that beauty will eventually fade and neglected to give her the brain capacity to form simple sentences that she’ll probably need when she turns 30 and becomes ugly. Seriously, this chick could only smile and nod, and every time she tried to open her mouth and actually talk, a nonsensical mishmash of one-syllable words were all that came out. Far from being deterred by the fact that there was a distinct possibility that she was actually retarded, Brett said “Yeah, after talking to her, I got the impression that the lights were on but nobody was really home. And I’ll be honest, that kind of turned me on a little.” Or how about after being chased around the house by one of the big-titted stripper girls, who constantly kept talking about how her and Brett were totally dating and how much she’d love to have his babies? Instead of being freaked out that if he kept her around, she was inevitably going to stab another contestant with a broken beer bottle because she thought they were getting to close to her man, Brett just says “Yeah, she’s pretty nuts. But she’s got great tits; and I’m going to be honest, the fact that she’s insane kind of turns me on a little.” They really could have brought out a 90 year old albino woman with one leg and Brett would have happily gone on about how much pleasure he’d get from having nasty pale wheelchair sex with her. It’s amazing.
It’s the nearing end of the night and most of the girls are having difficulty staying conscious, so Brett decides that it’s time to wrap things up with some more eliminations. He kicks a bunch of the blonde stripper chicks off (because really, you only need like three for a good party), and makes sure to put his mouth all over the ones he’s decided to keep. The only surprise comes when he tells the shocked group that he’s letting the big-lipped drunk girl stay on even though there’s not a bed for her, something I’m sure his producers forced him to do because they know nothing says “high ratings” like watching someone abjectly humiliate themselves to such an insane degree on national television. She’s consumed enough liquor and pills by this point to barely be able to stand, so I don’t think it even really registered that even though she’s being allowed to hang around, she’s going to have to embarrass herself even further by crashing under the dining room table or something. The contestants all stagger out, each confident in their own minds that they and they alone will be the lucky girl who will eventually rock Brett’s world with their love. Or at least get to fuck him a couple of times. Whichever.
So yeah, this show is great. Besides the obvious entertainment derived from watching a faded “rockstar” trying to pork slutty women, the real joy comes from the seemingly endless amount of self-delusion that pours out of both the contestants and Brett himself. The girls all try their best to make it seem like they really want what’s best for the guy instead of the C-grade celebrity status they’re hoping to obtain from star-fucking him, and Brett, despite having to know that most of them weren’t even born when his band was popular, really seems to think these girls want to sleep with him just because he’s a hot musician. It’s sad, but boy is it fun to watch. Tune in and trust me, you might feel slightly dirty when the credits start to roll, but your stomach will hurt from laughing so hard.
Aug 15, 2007
Aug 14, 2007
Why I Have the Best Girlfriend Ever, Featuring Ninja Cakes
This is the cake that Noel got me for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. Despite Erin's racist assertion that it resembles a guy in blackface, it's obviously a kickass ninja, and it was as awesome as it looks. If asked to describe how it tasted, I would probably have to say that it was a delightful combination of chocolate chips, frosting, and silent shinobi death.
And this is why I have the Best Girlfriend Ever.
Aug 8, 2007
Why Harry Potter is Great, Featuring the Majesty of Neil Gaiman
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been bombarded by questions from my friends about whether or not I’ve read the new Harry Potter book yet. While this isn’t a surprising inquiry coming from those people who know me well and are aware that I’m almost compulsively drawn to any kind of fiction involving wizards and sorcery, I’ve been amazed by how many casual acquaintances have come up and asked “Hey, so that new Harry Potter book is pretty great, huh? Man, that part on page 267 was crazy! I didn’t really think she’d have the balls to kill off GLAAAKK!!” They never get to finish, because by this point I’ve thrust my hand into their chest and removed their still-beating heart for inadvertently attempting to ruin the plot for me, but still. I know that I have a fairly over-inflated sense of my own self-image, but do I really look like that much of a dork? I mean, I only wear my authentic Slytherin hat when I go see the movies, and I’m pretty sure everyone’s forgotten about that time I got drunk and jumped off the roof trying to ride a broomstick. Although I did dress like Harry a couple of years ago for Halloween, so maybe that’s where the association comes from:
I’ll go with that, and just assume it’s not because someone’s found out about my secret collection of online erotic Hermione fanfiction. And before you judge me, fuck off. She’s a hot chick who can do magic, and I think that wizards come of age at like 17. So she’s totally doable.
But anyway, the answer to the question is yes; I’m about three quarters of the way through The Deathly Hallows. My roommate pre-ordered it from Amazon, which was good because this way I didn’t have to drop $25 on a hardcover, but bad because I was forced to endure two weeks of Ian reading it on the couch and gasping dramatically whenever something cool happened. Just when I was considering bludgeoning him to death with the book while he slept, he finished and passed it on, and I have to say, it’s taking me a while to get through. Not because it’s dense or hard to read or anything, but because I simply don’t want it to end. I read pretty much constantly, and if a book is especially good, I’ve been known to stay up all night to finish it before going to work looking like I’ve been on a 24 hour coke/hooker bender and then passed out under a bridge. Which is what I tell people, because honestly, that makes me sound a lot cooler than explaining how tired I am because I just had to see if Harry and Ron could escape Voldemort’s nefarious clutches. But I’ve been resisting the temptation and trying to savor the new story as much as possible, although with the stuff that’s happening in the current chapter I don’t how long my resolve will last.
What I find the most interesting about the Harry Potter phenomenon is all of the hype surrounding it. It’s easy to see why there’s so much scrutiny; I mean, the latest book broke every single publishing record in the history of the world, with 10% of the entire British population buying it on the first day and an initial print run of 12 million copies for the U.S. alone. That’s fucking insane. Especially considering the entire saga was conceived by some random lady who wrote her first novel in a coffeshop during her spare time. By “random lady” I’m not trying to disparage J.K. Rowling at all; I have enormous respect for someone who went from living on welfare to having more money than the Queen of the country she lives in. I just think that what she’s accomplished is absolutely incredible.
And the funny thing is, she’s not even that great of a writer. I say that not to be a dick (I mean, she’s the creator of a literary phenomenon; I write a shitty blog that only my mom and like four of my friends read), but because I’ve read lots of books, the majority of which are in the same genre as Harry Potter. And there are authors out there who can paint a picture much more vividly and with a greater scope of beauty and wordplay than she can. This isn’t to say that she’s bad; not by any stretch of the imagination. I remember reading the third book (I’d initially skipped the first two because I’d already seen the movies) and thoroughly enjoying it, but making a concerted effort to pay attention to how she wrote. I would love to write a novel someday, and thought to myself “Okay, this lady has somehow written a book about child wizards that sells more copies than the Bible (Ha ha! Fuck you, Christianity!). How does she do it?” And the answer (or what I think is the answer, anyway) is that her writing itself is, at its essence, just functional. It gets the job done clearly, concisely, and with enough description so that the reader can get a clear picture of what’s transpiring. But there are authors out there who have ways of describing, say, a particular character’s facial expression that are so unique and interesting that I’ll go back and reread the same passage over and over again, marveling that there’s an imagination out there that’s able to think that creatively. J. K. Rowling isn’t one of these authors, and really, that doesn’t matter.
What really makes me (and the millions of other people out there who love the books) keep reading is the fictional world that she’s created. It’s well thought out, makes sense, and all ties together in a neat little package. But that’s not all. The best part is that the whole storyline is contemporary. There actually could be this whole secret underground world of magic and wizardry going on right beneath our noses. Kids love it because they get to believe there’s a chance, however small, that a loveable giant will come along and whisk them away to an enchanted school so they can learn witchcraft instead of being beaten by mommy’s new boyfriend, and adults like it because there’s enough creativity and depth that they can justify why they’re reading a children’s book when their friends laugh at them.
Given the meteoric success of the franchise, though, it was inevitable that some of the hype surrounding the books would be negative. The most ridiculous complaint, of course, comes from idiot right-wing Christians about how the novels are subversively promoting witchcraft and occult practices to our youth. How fucking retarded do you have to be to actually believe that? I mean, if you want to go the route that anything fantastic or supernatural is bad, why wasn’t anybody picketing the Spider-Man movies? Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive arachnid that mutated his DNA and gave him incredible superhuman abilities. This is obviously blasphemous, because if God had wanted our non-monkey DNA to incorporate attributes of carnivorous bugs, He would have shoved a tarantula leg or something into the pile of clay and ribs we were all created from. Spider-Man, therefore, must have received his powers from Satan and needs to be beaten with rocks until he’s no longer an affront to the Lord. Or how about the Matrix trilogy? The Wachowski brothers tried their best to cram as much religious iconography and allusion as they possibly could into the movies so that people would think they were deep and meaningful, and the result was an implied allegory between Keanu Reeves in tight leather and Jesus Christ. Why weren’t Christians pissed about that? I’m not even particularly religious and I find that offensive, but mainly because I personally think that Keanu Reeves is a harbinger for the apocalypse. It just comes down to the fact that most hillbilly evangelicals are terrified of anything that might cause their children to actually use their imagination. If that happens, it’s only a matter of time before one kid asks why they’re supposed to believe in a bathrobe-wearing hippie who can transmute water into wine but not think that it’s cool when a fictional teenager flies around on a broom.
The other drama that’s surrounded Rowling’s work has been the charges of plagiarism. This was bound to happen; whenever something becomes a cultural sensation people are going to come crawling out of the woodwork saying that they’re entitled to bags of free money because they totally told their friend Mark about this sweet idea they had years ago that’s just like whatever happens to be popular at the moment. The best example of this lunacy comes from onetime American author Nancy Stouffer. She sued Rowling and her publishers because, in 1986, she wrote a book called The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and then followed up with a children’s activity book called Larry Potter and his Best Friend Lilly. Her claims would be fairly credible, except for the fact that neither one of these works have anything to do with magic, wizards or anything else remotely similar to the Harry Potter world. Her “muggles” were tiny midgets who lived in shoes and rode around on bugs or something, and “Larry Potter” was just some kid who was sad because he had to wear glasses. Oh, and if the books weren’t just for sale in the Eastern United States for one year between 1986 and 1987. And if she had actually sold any copies of them. And for the fact that Rowling didn’t visit the U.S. for the first time until 1998. And if it wasn’t discovered that she’d retroactively gone back and added a trademark symbol to the word “muggle” in the supposedly original work she gave the judge. All of these revelations came out during the subsequent lawsuit, and instead of gleefully accepting a huge bag of wizard gold from Rowling’s defeated team of high-powered elf attorneys, Stouffer was forced to pay Time Warner $50,000 in addition to the cost of their legal fees for wasting everyone’s time with her idiocy. How stupid do you have to be to actually think that this would work? Did she honestly think that Rowling had secretly flown to America in the late eighties and broken into her house to rifle through piles of shitty unsold coloring books looking for literary inspiration to put in a novel she wouldn’t write for another ten years? I mean, I drew an awesome picture of a personalized flying hoverchair on my trapper-keeper back in seventh grade that I called the “I-Pod”, but I don’t think that I’m entitled to half of Apple’s yearly revenue. Stouffer’s claims were ridiculous, and now in addition to being a bad writer she’s also probably financially destitute. I'm imagining that her books were printed on pretty cheap paper, though, so maybe she can gnaw on them when she's no longer able to afford food. I think that she got off lightly; she’s lucky that Rowling didn’t use her dark magic to turn her face inside out and fill her vagina with poisonous scorpions.
Another accusation of plagiarism was leveled in early 2001 by British tabloid The Daily Mail, claiming that Rowling had copied characters and elements from the comic book series The Books of Magic. You’ve probably never heard of it; it was published in 1990 by DC Comics, and was written by one of the greatest authors who has ever lived, Neil Gaiman. You know those writers that I was talking about earlier, the ones that can use words with such eloquence and beauty that the reader literally feels like they’re a part of the story? He’s one of those, but better. If you haven’t read any of his work, go buy one of his books right now. Anything. Or call me, and I’ll lend you one of mine. Seriously, you’re life will be better for having experienced something he’s written. I realize that it kind of sounds like I want to make out with Neil Gaiman, but honestly, if I had to create a list called “People I’d Love to Meet, But Would Probably Just Stand There and Stammer Awkwardly at if Actually Given the Opportunity”, he’d be at the top. He’s the author of The Sandman, probably the single greatest comic book series ever written, and a number of prose novels that are equally awesome. His literary style is somehow simultaneously humorous, terrifying, and, above all, thoroughly engrossing. He’s great.
So yeah, I’m a fan.
Anyway, the article claimed that Neil had told the fine journalists at The Daily Mail that he was pissed at J.K. Rowling for stealing his ideas. I’d originally read The Books of Magic probably a year or so before the first Harry Potter book came out, and there are some definite similarities between the two. The comic tells the story of Timothy Hunter, a young English boy who’s plucked from his troubled family life and told by four mysterious strangers that he has the potential to become the greatest magician the world has ever seen. He embarks upon a journey through the past, present and future of magic in the DC universe, and along the way even acquires a pet owl to assist him in his adventures. That’s not that bad, right? I mean, comparing the two because they both have a young protagonist who doesn’t know he’s a wizard and likes to hang around with nocturnal birds is like saying the Transformers ripped off Knight Rider because they both have talking cars. But then you see what Timothy Hunter looks like:
Hmm. Or how about a more obvious comparison?
It's like looking into a mirror, kind of! They’re almost identical, in the sense that they're both male, wear glasses, and have Beatles haircuts, but so do most of the annoying hipster kids that stand in the back of shows and nod morosely along with the music. It's really not much to go on, but it’s still a mark of how unbelievably cool Neil Gaiman is that as soon as the article was printed, he immediately started bashing The Daily Mail who, it turns out, had never actually bothered to call him and make sure he’d said everything they’d already made up and printed. His opinion was that sometimes when an author writes, they have a specific idea of how a character is supposed to look in their mind, and seeing as how there are only about four different human hair colors to choose from, the staggering coincidence that two fictional people both have dark hair really isn’t that big of a deal. He went on to say that if Rowling had truly meant to copy his work, she probably would have been smart enough to at least make Harry a blonde kid with an eyepatch and pet howler monkey or something. He also pointed out that having a young boy unaware of his magical heritage being tutored by a wise old mentor and being accompanied by an owl wasn’t really something that he had come up with himself; rather, it was the work of T. H. White in The Once and Future King. How awesome is that? I mean, I’m no expert on the law, but I’ll bet that if he had wanted to, he could have gotten some kind of settlement out of her and her publishing company. But he’s been nothing but supportive of Rowling and her work, saying “I love the Harry Potter thing, I think it’s wonderful.” I’m right there with you, Neil, and your unequivocal support of your fellow authors has made me want to have your babies even more.
Harry Potter is great, and I’m looking forward too/dreading finishing up the last book. But I guess there’s still a couple of movies to anticipate, and after those are done I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before the chick who plays Hermione is desperate for money and gets naked in Playboy or something. So I'll have that to keep thinking about when I'm done with the book at least.
I’ll go with that, and just assume it’s not because someone’s found out about my secret collection of online erotic Hermione fanfiction. And before you judge me, fuck off. She’s a hot chick who can do magic, and I think that wizards come of age at like 17. So she’s totally doable.
But anyway, the answer to the question is yes; I’m about three quarters of the way through The Deathly Hallows. My roommate pre-ordered it from Amazon, which was good because this way I didn’t have to drop $25 on a hardcover, but bad because I was forced to endure two weeks of Ian reading it on the couch and gasping dramatically whenever something cool happened. Just when I was considering bludgeoning him to death with the book while he slept, he finished and passed it on, and I have to say, it’s taking me a while to get through. Not because it’s dense or hard to read or anything, but because I simply don’t want it to end. I read pretty much constantly, and if a book is especially good, I’ve been known to stay up all night to finish it before going to work looking like I’ve been on a 24 hour coke/hooker bender and then passed out under a bridge. Which is what I tell people, because honestly, that makes me sound a lot cooler than explaining how tired I am because I just had to see if Harry and Ron could escape Voldemort’s nefarious clutches. But I’ve been resisting the temptation and trying to savor the new story as much as possible, although with the stuff that’s happening in the current chapter I don’t how long my resolve will last.
What I find the most interesting about the Harry Potter phenomenon is all of the hype surrounding it. It’s easy to see why there’s so much scrutiny; I mean, the latest book broke every single publishing record in the history of the world, with 10% of the entire British population buying it on the first day and an initial print run of 12 million copies for the U.S. alone. That’s fucking insane. Especially considering the entire saga was conceived by some random lady who wrote her first novel in a coffeshop during her spare time. By “random lady” I’m not trying to disparage J.K. Rowling at all; I have enormous respect for someone who went from living on welfare to having more money than the Queen of the country she lives in. I just think that what she’s accomplished is absolutely incredible.
And the funny thing is, she’s not even that great of a writer. I say that not to be a dick (I mean, she’s the creator of a literary phenomenon; I write a shitty blog that only my mom and like four of my friends read), but because I’ve read lots of books, the majority of which are in the same genre as Harry Potter. And there are authors out there who can paint a picture much more vividly and with a greater scope of beauty and wordplay than she can. This isn’t to say that she’s bad; not by any stretch of the imagination. I remember reading the third book (I’d initially skipped the first two because I’d already seen the movies) and thoroughly enjoying it, but making a concerted effort to pay attention to how she wrote. I would love to write a novel someday, and thought to myself “Okay, this lady has somehow written a book about child wizards that sells more copies than the Bible (Ha ha! Fuck you, Christianity!). How does she do it?” And the answer (or what I think is the answer, anyway) is that her writing itself is, at its essence, just functional. It gets the job done clearly, concisely, and with enough description so that the reader can get a clear picture of what’s transpiring. But there are authors out there who have ways of describing, say, a particular character’s facial expression that are so unique and interesting that I’ll go back and reread the same passage over and over again, marveling that there’s an imagination out there that’s able to think that creatively. J. K. Rowling isn’t one of these authors, and really, that doesn’t matter.
What really makes me (and the millions of other people out there who love the books) keep reading is the fictional world that she’s created. It’s well thought out, makes sense, and all ties together in a neat little package. But that’s not all. The best part is that the whole storyline is contemporary. There actually could be this whole secret underground world of magic and wizardry going on right beneath our noses. Kids love it because they get to believe there’s a chance, however small, that a loveable giant will come along and whisk them away to an enchanted school so they can learn witchcraft instead of being beaten by mommy’s new boyfriend, and adults like it because there’s enough creativity and depth that they can justify why they’re reading a children’s book when their friends laugh at them.
Given the meteoric success of the franchise, though, it was inevitable that some of the hype surrounding the books would be negative. The most ridiculous complaint, of course, comes from idiot right-wing Christians about how the novels are subversively promoting witchcraft and occult practices to our youth. How fucking retarded do you have to be to actually believe that? I mean, if you want to go the route that anything fantastic or supernatural is bad, why wasn’t anybody picketing the Spider-Man movies? Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive arachnid that mutated his DNA and gave him incredible superhuman abilities. This is obviously blasphemous, because if God had wanted our non-monkey DNA to incorporate attributes of carnivorous bugs, He would have shoved a tarantula leg or something into the pile of clay and ribs we were all created from. Spider-Man, therefore, must have received his powers from Satan and needs to be beaten with rocks until he’s no longer an affront to the Lord. Or how about the Matrix trilogy? The Wachowski brothers tried their best to cram as much religious iconography and allusion as they possibly could into the movies so that people would think they were deep and meaningful, and the result was an implied allegory between Keanu Reeves in tight leather and Jesus Christ. Why weren’t Christians pissed about that? I’m not even particularly religious and I find that offensive, but mainly because I personally think that Keanu Reeves is a harbinger for the apocalypse. It just comes down to the fact that most hillbilly evangelicals are terrified of anything that might cause their children to actually use their imagination. If that happens, it’s only a matter of time before one kid asks why they’re supposed to believe in a bathrobe-wearing hippie who can transmute water into wine but not think that it’s cool when a fictional teenager flies around on a broom.
The other drama that’s surrounded Rowling’s work has been the charges of plagiarism. This was bound to happen; whenever something becomes a cultural sensation people are going to come crawling out of the woodwork saying that they’re entitled to bags of free money because they totally told their friend Mark about this sweet idea they had years ago that’s just like whatever happens to be popular at the moment. The best example of this lunacy comes from onetime American author Nancy Stouffer. She sued Rowling and her publishers because, in 1986, she wrote a book called The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and then followed up with a children’s activity book called Larry Potter and his Best Friend Lilly. Her claims would be fairly credible, except for the fact that neither one of these works have anything to do with magic, wizards or anything else remotely similar to the Harry Potter world. Her “muggles” were tiny midgets who lived in shoes and rode around on bugs or something, and “Larry Potter” was just some kid who was sad because he had to wear glasses. Oh, and if the books weren’t just for sale in the Eastern United States for one year between 1986 and 1987. And if she had actually sold any copies of them. And for the fact that Rowling didn’t visit the U.S. for the first time until 1998. And if it wasn’t discovered that she’d retroactively gone back and added a trademark symbol to the word “muggle” in the supposedly original work she gave the judge. All of these revelations came out during the subsequent lawsuit, and instead of gleefully accepting a huge bag of wizard gold from Rowling’s defeated team of high-powered elf attorneys, Stouffer was forced to pay Time Warner $50,000 in addition to the cost of their legal fees for wasting everyone’s time with her idiocy. How stupid do you have to be to actually think that this would work? Did she honestly think that Rowling had secretly flown to America in the late eighties and broken into her house to rifle through piles of shitty unsold coloring books looking for literary inspiration to put in a novel she wouldn’t write for another ten years? I mean, I drew an awesome picture of a personalized flying hoverchair on my trapper-keeper back in seventh grade that I called the “I-Pod”, but I don’t think that I’m entitled to half of Apple’s yearly revenue. Stouffer’s claims were ridiculous, and now in addition to being a bad writer she’s also probably financially destitute. I'm imagining that her books were printed on pretty cheap paper, though, so maybe she can gnaw on them when she's no longer able to afford food. I think that she got off lightly; she’s lucky that Rowling didn’t use her dark magic to turn her face inside out and fill her vagina with poisonous scorpions.
Another accusation of plagiarism was leveled in early 2001 by British tabloid The Daily Mail, claiming that Rowling had copied characters and elements from the comic book series The Books of Magic. You’ve probably never heard of it; it was published in 1990 by DC Comics, and was written by one of the greatest authors who has ever lived, Neil Gaiman. You know those writers that I was talking about earlier, the ones that can use words with such eloquence and beauty that the reader literally feels like they’re a part of the story? He’s one of those, but better. If you haven’t read any of his work, go buy one of his books right now. Anything. Or call me, and I’ll lend you one of mine. Seriously, you’re life will be better for having experienced something he’s written. I realize that it kind of sounds like I want to make out with Neil Gaiman, but honestly, if I had to create a list called “People I’d Love to Meet, But Would Probably Just Stand There and Stammer Awkwardly at if Actually Given the Opportunity”, he’d be at the top. He’s the author of The Sandman, probably the single greatest comic book series ever written, and a number of prose novels that are equally awesome. His literary style is somehow simultaneously humorous, terrifying, and, above all, thoroughly engrossing. He’s great.
So yeah, I’m a fan.
Anyway, the article claimed that Neil had told the fine journalists at The Daily Mail that he was pissed at J.K. Rowling for stealing his ideas. I’d originally read The Books of Magic probably a year or so before the first Harry Potter book came out, and there are some definite similarities between the two. The comic tells the story of Timothy Hunter, a young English boy who’s plucked from his troubled family life and told by four mysterious strangers that he has the potential to become the greatest magician the world has ever seen. He embarks upon a journey through the past, present and future of magic in the DC universe, and along the way even acquires a pet owl to assist him in his adventures. That’s not that bad, right? I mean, comparing the two because they both have a young protagonist who doesn’t know he’s a wizard and likes to hang around with nocturnal birds is like saying the Transformers ripped off Knight Rider because they both have talking cars. But then you see what Timothy Hunter looks like:
Hmm. Or how about a more obvious comparison?
It's like looking into a mirror, kind of! They’re almost identical, in the sense that they're both male, wear glasses, and have Beatles haircuts, but so do most of the annoying hipster kids that stand in the back of shows and nod morosely along with the music. It's really not much to go on, but it’s still a mark of how unbelievably cool Neil Gaiman is that as soon as the article was printed, he immediately started bashing The Daily Mail who, it turns out, had never actually bothered to call him and make sure he’d said everything they’d already made up and printed. His opinion was that sometimes when an author writes, they have a specific idea of how a character is supposed to look in their mind, and seeing as how there are only about four different human hair colors to choose from, the staggering coincidence that two fictional people both have dark hair really isn’t that big of a deal. He went on to say that if Rowling had truly meant to copy his work, she probably would have been smart enough to at least make Harry a blonde kid with an eyepatch and pet howler monkey or something. He also pointed out that having a young boy unaware of his magical heritage being tutored by a wise old mentor and being accompanied by an owl wasn’t really something that he had come up with himself; rather, it was the work of T. H. White in The Once and Future King. How awesome is that? I mean, I’m no expert on the law, but I’ll bet that if he had wanted to, he could have gotten some kind of settlement out of her and her publishing company. But he’s been nothing but supportive of Rowling and her work, saying “I love the Harry Potter thing, I think it’s wonderful.” I’m right there with you, Neil, and your unequivocal support of your fellow authors has made me want to have your babies even more.
Harry Potter is great, and I’m looking forward too/dreading finishing up the last book. But I guess there’s still a couple of movies to anticipate, and after those are done I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before the chick who plays Hermione is desperate for money and gets naked in Playboy or something. So I'll have that to keep thinking about when I'm done with the book at least.
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