lovehate: Twilight - Vampire Stories Where Stakes Are Rare

Let me begin by saying that I do not dislike the first Twilight film. In fact, considering my expectations going in, I suppose it was a mild surprise that I was entertained for the 80, 90, 100 minutes? I don't remember how long it was. I will admit that I'm not rushing back to see it any time soon.

I do think, however, that Tiger Beat vampire cultures that are being spawned right now have more to do with slapping a cut out template onto a teen drama and little to do with the more traditional aspects of vampire literature.

Quite simply, Bram Stoker would be spinning is his daytime grave and Max Schreck would be flailing his arms wildly as the flash bulbs of a thousand teeny bopper cameras popped on the red carpet. I hardly think it would be too much of a stretch to expect Nosferatu 2: Dude Where's My Stake! pop up at a theater near you sometime soon.

The vampire mythos has taken a turn for the mundane. I know that Twilight is not the first or last story to bastardize all of the normal conventions that we believe about vampires, but it does seem a prime example of subjugating an archetype for sake of convenience at every turn. Why do I get the feeling that the first time Stephanie Meyer was confronted with questions about Twilight vampires not following the traditional conventions of the classic vampire character, her response was something along the lines of "well MY vampires CAN do that!"

And it's not that I mind predominantly female youth getting dragged into this quasi-vampire plotline. After all, I watched WAY worse films and WAY worse television in my time to ever have a right to pass universal judgement on anyone. It's simply that I fear that very soon the concept of Vampire 1.0 will be lost.

How many Twilight readers have read the original Dracula or looked up Vlad the Impaler? How many have come to discover vampires that could NEVER exist in daylight, or cast a reflection, or stand the smell of garlic. Hell, some vampires can't even be killed with wooden stakes anymore. What's a Van Helsing to do?

Vampires are supposed to live in creepy castles in Eastern Europe and scare the bejesus out of villagers with hypnotizing other in their charismatic thrall. Hell, the modern vampire is more likely to lust after a PSP than blood these days - which they can pick up at noon, in the middle of summer at the local mall because they're wearing some crazy ring or amulet or something that allows them to party in the sunlight... but are they really happy? No, they're all a bunch of gloomy angst-ridden teens that listen to My Chemical Romance.

And what the fuck is with the sparkling skin? Is everyone going out to a rave tonight in their "oh-so-trendy" Abercrombie and Fitch regalia?

Let's just run the list for my own gratification. I'm going to use Bram Stoker's Dracula as the comparator in this case, not because I believe it was necessarily the best vampire archetype of all time, but because it redefined the pop culture vampire of its time in a similar way to what Twilight is doing now.

Bram Stoker's vampires:

  • Fangs - YES
  • Reflection - NO
  • Shadow - NO
  • Kill with stake - YES
  • Kill by sunlight - YES
  • Decapitation - FATAL
  • Drowning - FATAL
  • Fire - FATAL
  • Garlic - WEAKENS
  • Crosses - WEAKENS
  • Running Water - WEAKENS

Twilight vampires:

  • Fangs - NO
  • Reflection - YES
  • Shadow - YES
  • Kill with stake - NO
  • Kill by sunlight - NO
  • Decapitation - ANNOYING
  • Drowning - ANNOYING
  • Fire - FATAL
  • Garlic - NOTHING
  • Crosses - NOTHING
  • Running Water - NOTHING

Welcome to Vampire 7.0 beta. Apparently it doesn't have all the annoying crashes the earlier ones had. The Blue Screen of Death has been replaced by a Facebook logo as new age vamps look for parties to go to with their sparkly skin. Apparently nothing can really kill them except each other and they can only be hurt by an angst-ridden broken heart. They also live in fancy Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the hills and have BBQs on Sundays.

Again, I want to assure you that I can't hate this evolution. After all Bram Stoker's vampires were a far off bastardization of "folkloric tales [where] vampires often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited when they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance." I guess I'm just unwilling to give up the vampire as a monster compared to some of the simpering, whining, high school seniors they seem to be now. Will the "traditional" vampire become, 100 years from now, equated with the Twilight archetype?

I get the entire vampire as an allegory for the struggles of teens growing up and coping in a modern society that alienates them and forces them to hide their true identities in their fortresses of solitude while secretly using their powers to save those that they love... wait... that sounds like Superman. Maybe Superman was a vampire. I think Superman should make appearance in a Twilight film just to shake things up. Then we could have Spock, Chewie and Gandalf come by to keep everybody happy.

To all those who lovehatethings with me...

I've just started up a new podcast - finally deciding on the third blog I will try to maintain at Posterous: www.bestepisodeever.com

Best Episode Ever will be only podcasts to start. Each week I hope to take a trip down memory lane to fondly remember some of the great television shows that shaped my formative TV watching years.

This week's episode is WKRP in Cincinnati.

I hope, if you like lovehatethings, and follow the blog and podcast, you'll consider following Best Episode Ever AND if you're subscribed to the lovehatethings podcast iTunes, you'll check iTunes in about a week to subscribe to Best Episode Ever.

thinglets: Other Musical Thoughts About A Sesame Street Anniversary

Take a moment to think about the love that people had for Jim Henson and remember some of the characters he brought into the world while enjoying the next couple of video clips. It's been 19 years since Jim Henson died and I remember his characters more affectionately than almost any character from a film or novel. These voices were laced with innocence and inspired fantasies and awestruck countenances.

lovehate: H1N1 Fear Mongering Eh?

I certainly can't attest to the way that H1N1 is being shilled around the world. I've only been subject to some of the Canadian PR and some of the American PR. And after watching the ongoings for the past few months is... WOW!

We have finally reached the point of the ridiculous. Provincial, State and Federal Medical Officers are scrambling to justify the ridiculous amount of paranoia they've inspired in a populace that is driven by cable news and microblogs. As of this writing "more than 1000 people have died from the H1N1" in the United States. This is since the spring. From April to November (half a year), 1000 deaths in a country of 350 million.

In the same period of time, in the US, over 17,000 people die annually of Septicemia, 22,000 of Nephritis, 60,000 by accident, and 28,000 die of the regular flu. The first wave of H1N1 in Canada, Spring and Summer 2009, resulted in 13 deaths. 13 deaths in a country of 33 million people constitutes a "wave". The Canadian government could pull troops out of Afghanistan and avoid 13 Canadian deaths over the next few months. Instead MY government paid 400 million dollars to Glaxo Smith Kline for 55 million shots that we HAVEN'T EVEN RECEIVED YET as "wave" number two rolls across the country. My government is also paying 5 million dollars to sell the vaccine THAT WE DON'T HAVE!

On top of this, the "early" vaccines that have come in for Canadians, probably purchased through some crazy pharma black market, contain adjuvants. The high-risk patients are the only ones getting the vaccine in Canada, yet pregnant women are not supposed to take adjuvants, so some of the most high-risk individuals in Canada cannot even get vaccinated until the "wave" is over. On TVO's The Agenda tonight, Ontario's PR Doctor, Arlene King, looked so uncomfortable over answering some of the questions that at points she was spewing meaningless drivel. Essentially saying that it would be good to get the H1N1 vaccine, even though it's going to be useless for the 2nd wave, because we still have the 3rd wave to worry about. To date, including the 1st wave, there have been 101 H1N1 deaths in Canada.

I certainly don't mean to disregard the tragedy of any death, but many of the reported H1N1 deaths are tied intrinsically to other illnesses - i.e. medically-fragile people. Quite simply, healthy adults may get H1N1, but they don't die from it. And we have 55 million shots sitting in a Glaxo Smith Kline warehouse while chemical cocktail adjuvants are being pumped through the veins of people who line up at clinics like lambs to the slaughter or Steve Jobs' disciples waiting for a new iPhone.

On the aforementioned broadcast from earlier tonight, King maintained that just because the vaccine was fast-tracked, doesn't mean that GSK didn't do proper testing. Are we really supposed to believe this. Drug companies make billions at getting product to market as soon as possible. To say that short timelines still allow "proper testing" seems ludicrous. Could it be that the reason the vaccines are not available yet is due to the fact they're still testing it? Could it be due to the fact that while GSK was willing to take 400 million dollars for 55 million doses, even though they knew they couldn't produce the vaccine on time without adjuvants, that the screw up would be far more embarrassing to the government who frittered away our tax dollars? Upon being asked if it was a mistake to purchase ALL of Canada's vaccine from a single source, King dodged the question THREE times. She further miffed my sensibilities by insisting that it was more important that the medical and government communities spoke with a common message than it was for people to understand the message... Buh!?! Is this ignorance disguised as honesty or the other way around?

I'll admit, I love a good conspiracy theory. And I'll also admit that I rarely have the time or energy to come up with such things on my own. I do admit, however, that in the light of all of the colossal fuckups and media whoring that I've seen over the past half a year, I've started to ask questions:

1) When I follow the money, where does it lead?
2) What's being done by governments while everyone is fretting over a flu strain that kills less people than seasonal flu?
3) What does it say about mass media that ONE H1N1 death becomes the top story, above-the-fold headline once a week and useless stats get rolled out every night?
4) What does it say about our gullibility that, as a society, we're buying into fear prompted by government-paid full page newspaper ads, tv spots, brochure drops, and fancy websites like www.fightflu.ca?

The government got conned in a game of "you better cover your ass or they're gonna blame you" by big pharma. Now they have to convince us to buy into the con, or else tens of millions of vaccines will expire in a federal warehouse sometime next year and people will wonder why the hell we spent so much money, during a recession, on an unused inoculation that could have created 8000 jobs paying $50,000 a year. Maybe, with a good-paying job, and good nutrition, some of the medically-fragile children they're "saving" with this vaccine, wouldn't have to be so medically-fragile in the first place.

Yeah, I know. In the tradition of this blog, I've glossed over half of every argument and probably got a whole bunch of people pissed off at me... just wash your hands before you punch me.

a literary lovehate: Jay Sean's "Down"

Just because a song has a repetitive banal dance beat, and an autotuned vocal track to boot, doesn't mean the lyrics can't by high literature. I offer up the current Number One Billboard Radio Song as an example of a lyric that contains all of the thematic complexity of Shakespeare and Siddhartha. Why can't you people bow down and acknowledge lyrical genius when you read it? I heard that on his next album there will be a song trilogy that sums up the key elements of Camus, Proust, and Ezra Pound.

Down
by Jay Sean

Baby are you down down down down down,
Downnnnnnn, downnnnnnn,

Obviously calling upon his Marxist teachings of class warfare, Jay Sean calls to mind how struggling lower class infants not only are trapped by their predicament within a modern capitalist society, but that the slippery slope becomes inescapable as echoed by the persistent repetition of the title.

Even if the sky is falling down,
Downnnnn, downnnnn
Ooohhh (ohhh)

Calling upon the children's literary reference "Chicken Little" Sean expresses the deep-seeded fear felt by young children confronted a society where everything seems crumbling around. A clever allusion is also apparent whereby Roots' protagonist Chicken George is melded with Canadian elder statesman impressionist Rich Little in illustrating the hypocrisy involved in the illusion of rising up without action to back it up.

You oughta know, tonight is the night to let it go,
Put on a show, i wanna see how you lose control,

A cry for a needed self-examination of the internal walls put up around the empowerment of the lower class. Sean sits back as the provoker/reporter who recalls many a standard Shakespearean metaphor about the deconstruction of life as play. Here he asks the everyman youth to abandon class-based expectations and act outside of themselves in an effort to assess the potential for an eventual revolution against the upper class.

So leave it behind ‘cause we, have a night to get away,
So come on and fly with me, as we make our great escape.

In an obvious homage to bleak outlook of life under a capitalist oligarchy, Sean encourages hallucinogenic experimentation as a means of escape and empowerment. As the sky falls down around the disenfranchised, only by letting go inhibitions will they be able to exceed the social parameters they've been forced into.

So baby don’t worry, you are my only, 
You won’t be lonely, even if the sky is falling down,
You’ll be my only, no need to worry,

In recalling the struggle of the underclass, Sean asserts a subtle, yet meaningful appreciation for the formation and galvanizing effort of urban guerrilla squads where affected youth can gather under shared roofs of poverty and fear while relying on each other for support. Within these impromptu families, those who have been abandoned by society or their families can gain strength under a unified cause while not having to constantly worry.

Just let it be, come on and bring your body next to me,
I’ll take you away, hey, turn this place into our private getaway,

In evoking the pastoral tones of McCartney's Let it Be, Sean seeks to share his strength in a effort to not only respond to the insurgent threat that seeks to shatter his domain, but also turn revolution into assimilation. By turning the place into a private getaway, Sean admits the temptation embodied in a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous attitude of co-opting that which is depressed and omnipresent around him into a place of exclusion and privilege.

So leave it behind ‘cause we, have a night to get away,
So come on and fly with me, as we make our great escape,
(So why don’t we run away)

While recalling the sense of chemical escapism from earlier, Sean, in a clever turn, brings the fantasy back down to reality by acknowledging the folly of flying to make an escape. His acceptance of the crushing world coming down upon him will not allow him to fly. Flying to him has been the refuge of fantasies and the dreams of a perceived move to a state in which he would become "hyperhuman". Instead Sean's realization that flight is folly, leads him to the conclusion that sometimes the most prudent escape is just to run away. The dreams of flying will have to remain just that.

Even if the sky is falling down like she supposed to be,
She gets down low for me,
Down like her temperature, ‘cause to me she too raw degree,
She crawl all over things,

In taking us on a cycle of flight to walking to crawling, Sean encompasses the entire pattern of the evolution of life. His personification of the sky lends credence to the parallel he draws between the struggle of one's relationship with society as being analogous to one's struggle in a relationship. His evocation of the classic madonna/whore paradigm from the angelic woman in the clouds to one crawling at his feet reveals his confusion at the complexity of interpersonal dynamics in a world where class  presupposes humanity.

I got that girl from overseas,
Now she my miss America,
I can’t help be her souljah pleaser,
I’m fighting for this girl,

In an effort to overcome the confusion over his role in relationships with the opposite sex, Sean redefines the archetype by narrowing the field. The allusion to the soldier away at war who, by the symbolism of uniform and mission, can become a de facto hero to the citizens he's trying to liberate becomes a dark irony when recalling the same types of downtrodden attitudes felt by the same people back home. An obvious moment of Sean shining the light on the hypocrisy of military recruitment in lower class communities where the mission becomes escapism as a uniform and gun becomes equated with power, only to evaporate upon the return home.

I’m in battlefield love,
Don’t it look like baby cupid sent his arrows from above,
Don’t you ever leave the side of me,
Indefinitely, now probably, and honestly get down like that, be proud of me,
Yeahhhhhh

Sean surrenders to this role of leaving home to become imbued with a sense of power by a rifle and a rank. Where, back home, the sky was falling down,while serving overseas there is now arrows of love showering down from the skies. We begin to realize very quickly that the woman in the song was really just a foil for his own sense of diffused empowerment. While he surely may have found a way out of the circumstances that he found himself in under the class struggles of a constricting economic system back home, the defined militaristic life has replaced that crutch with a new one: dependency. The duality of powerlessness rings true as the protagonist has substituted social dependency for personal dependency. 

The supposed escape has failed. Sean moves the protagonist from one failed system to another. It's at this point we realize the eloquent refrain of the title throughout this song in spurring a reminiscence of the old wisdom which acknowledges that while you can climb out of a hole, you cannot dig out of one. In so doing, Sean completes this tragic tale with a faint recollection that seems more Beckett than Biggie.

thinglets: The Perfectly Preposterous Peter Puck

via youtube.com

When Canadian broadcasters had to try to explain hockey to American audiences in the mid-70s, Brain McFarlane, former CBC sportscaster, conceptualized Peter Puck to introduce the basics of the game.

Iconic - yes.

Cool for kids - yes.

Insulting to Canadians who already knew the game - probably.

As insulting as the glowing FOX puck in the 90s - not even close.

Go retro and dig Peter Puck - a great part of my childhood.

thinglets: A T-Shirt to Love and Hate

Thanks to @vincedeon for alerting me to this partial namesake t-shirt of the blog. I wonder if they make these in fat ass cynical bastard sizes. If so, I'm in! Click on this link if you want to order one of these, and every time you wear it, remember me well, or at least get drunk so you have an excuse to forget. 

Isn't being drunk the most natural state of the lovehate. When inebriated one has the unique ability to hate a person one second and be hugging them next, while throwing up on them a minute later. Don't know where I'm going with this, but I dig the shirt. 

lovehate: Social Search and the Law of Diminishing Discovery

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Serendipity.

While I've posted on a similar topic before, I found last week's announcements regarding Google's social search and Bing's full pipe search of Twitter and Facebook APIs cool, yet, at the same time, also a bit disconcerting.

In as much as one the greatest downfalls of early search algorithms was the assault of flotsam that was returned with every query, it is precisely an aspect of that muddled result that I fear losing. A great characteristic of the early graphic web was serendipity. 

We're talking Web 1.0 here. It was a time before the great permeation of referral engines and aggregators, when a reader had to scour through fathoms of muck and mire NOT to find something good, but often just to find something of interest. If it was good, that was an added bonus.

There were regular occurrences of finding fantastic useful and interesting stuff, that enabled you to expand your horizons and knowledge, which had nothing to do with your original search term. Such is one of the great benefits of raw research; you don't only hope to find what you're looking for, you hope to find a whole bunch of other bizarre, eclectic, and brilliant knowledge as well. Click this webpage randomizer link five times and tell me that, by the end, you haven't learned something.

When Social Network algorithms become integrated into your average Google or Bing query, your results will be throttled tighter than they ever have before. And I'll be the first to acknowledge that's probably what most people want. We love the idea of not having to wade through the morass of Web 1.0 where it sometimes took hours to find what we wanted. We lust after authority-based aggregation and recommendations that will point us in the right direction so that the content-drenched world of Web 2.0 won't swallow us whole.

There is a little part of me, however, that enjoyed the search and the discovery that went along with it. There is a piece of my brain that expanded by being forced to make connections in wondering why, when I queried one term, would I get a result that included this specific link. Don't we all have a small part of our brain that yearns for the open road, not caring where we're going or how we get there; productivity be damned! Don't we wish that upon being asked "where you goin'", we could just say "not here"?

One of the things I love doing is going to a site like StumbleUpon and doing random "stumbles". But, even then, they aren't completely random. They are a subset of the users of service, who, by themselves, are a generally pretty savvy group of web users. It is still fun nonetheless.

The search tools are necessary. There are plenty of times that I need to really find something, and swimming around in the trillions of bits and bytes of information trying to find one piece would be useless and foolhardy. It's the evolving pattern that is beginning to scare me a bit. The pattern dictates that as information multiplies, search results become more focused.

When static web pages ruled, results were more widely varied, partially due to the fact that web communities were less automatic and SEO was above the head of the average Geocities or Lycos user.

When social networks emerged and blogging ballooned, subjective content resulted an exponential explosion that threatened to muddy up you average search, but, conveniently enough, technology allowed the results to get even better. SEO, easy tagging, and a more educated internet-savvy content creator was being bred, and we found what we needed easier.

As "social search" and like-minded approaches start to filter into user habits, every search will now pass through yet another filter, distilling the purest result to the end user. This is great for answers. This is a boon to productivity. This is what everyone wants when they search for something. This is what I want when I search for something. But has serendipity died online? Does filtering a search through ever-increasingly effective algorithms which factor in popularity, and adding a filter of authority based on a list of people I have on Facebook or Twitter allow me to expand my horizons or does it effectively quash them.

If you walked into a bookstore and in the first room there was only one shelf with "Books You Will Like", would you be tempted to forage beyond the curtain at the back of store to see what's being hidden?

Maybe it's just the adventurer in me, but sometimes I like the open road, even with the occasional undercooked Stuckey's chicken and glaring billboards for adult stores and firework warehouses.

thinglets: Thinking of Mitch... All Together

I don't know why, but every month or so I think of Mitch Hedberg. I can't say that Hedberg was the greatest comedian of all-time, or that his style was particularly unique, but his compact humour always sort of struck me as beyond common one-liners. Even though the material was about all things mundane, it didn't seem forced. Sure, sometimes the delivery was stilted, but I always got the feeling Mitch just saw the world differently. I guess Steven Wright is the only other stand up artist who I really believe sees the world close to how he tells it. While someone like George Carlin was a brilliant observational comic, I always got the feeling he arrived at his observations through a much more purposeful intelligence. Hedberg was different - probably high - but certainly different.

My perception may be completely wrong, but four and half years after Mitch Hedberg's death, for no other reason than I've been laughing my ass off to YouTube clips for the past half hour, here are 20 of my favourite Mitch Hedberg observations. You're not forgotten Mitch - unlike the Dufresnes.

  1. A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer. 
  2. An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. 
  3. I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring. 
  4. I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that. 
  5. I had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality. 
  6. I like Kit-Kat, unless I'm with four or more people. 
  7. I like refried beans. That's why I wanna try fried beans, because maybe they're just as good and we're just wasting time. You don't have to fry them again after all. 
  8. I recently took up ice sculpting. Last night I made an ice cube. This morning I made 12, I was prolific. 
  9. I saw a human pyramid once. It was very unnecessary. 
  10. I used to be a hot-tar roofer. Yeah, I remember that... day. 
  11. I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I got a cake. 
  12. I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit. 
  13. If I had nine of my fingers missing I wouldn't type any slower. 
  14. If my kid couldn't draw I'd make sure that my kitchen magnets didn't work. 
  15. My belt holds my pants up, but the belt loops hold my belt up. I don't really know what's happening down there. Who is the real hero? 
  16. Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something. 
  17. The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall. 
  18. This shirt is dry clean only. Which means... it's dirty. 
  19. Wearing a turtleneck is like being strangled by a really weak guy, all day. Wearing a backpack and a turtleneck is like a weak midget trying to bring you down. 
  20. You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don't want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something.