Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Dear Minnesota Orchestra Management:

Please stop sending me letters badmouthing your musicians. Stop sending them to my e-mail. Stop sending them (in duplicate copy, no less!) to my postal address. Stop calling me to ask for money while you are making this mess with your musicians, but particularly stop badmouthing your musicians. I have asked you this in private several times, and now I will ask you in public.

Do you know what you sell me, Minnesota Orchestra Management? You sell me tickets to concerts played by your musicians. If you succeed in making me think poorly of your musicians, I will not say, "You're right, darn those musicians! I should go to concerts with those crappy horrible musicians, but at whatever pay scale and benefits management wants to give them!" I will instead say, "I live in the Twin Cities area. Why would I go listen to crappy musicians? There are opportunities to hear good ones instead." But in fact I don't believe your propaganda. I've been to Minnesota Orchestra concerts. One of the musicians who is acting as a union spokesman is Doug Wright. Guess who has moved my stoic Nordic self to leap to her feet in spontaneous applause? Doug Wright. Guess what you've done in that direction? NOTHING. I don't even particularly like the trombone. It's not in my top five favorite instruments. And that man can play the trombone to make me jump up and shout, "Bravo!" I am not a shouter of "Bravo." But I shouted it anyway. Do you understand that at all? Have you had that experience of the orchestra you run? Do you remember that that's what you're supposed to be facilitating, at all? What do you think your letters are going to do to override that?

Orchestra patrons are not stupid. We know that an independent financial valuation is a reasonable thing for musicians to ask, and is the road to them knowing what kind of specific counterproposal they can make. Without one, you can just keep repeating, "That's impossible, do it our way," no matter what they say, no matter the facts. We also know that you are a great deal more replaceable than the musicians. So hop to it with the independent assessments. And stop harassing me about how it's all the musicians' fault. It's not true, and it would be counterproductive even if it worked.

In frustration,
mrissa

Dear fellow writers: SAKI IS NOT A BEVERAGE. SAKE IS A BEVERAGE. SAKI WAS A WRITER. THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL. GET IT RIGHT. Ahem. Thank you for your time.

Cc: copy editors.

There is a thing I say when people are being snobs from one part of fandom towards another, and that is: "If the Klingons were good enough for Mike Ford, they're good enough for you, buddy."

Occasionally I even mean this literally. I don't know anybody in serious Klingon fandom very well, but the Klingons I have met briefly and casually have seemed like awfully, awfully nice people, and...look. How different do we really look, from the outside? I don't have a prosthetic forehead that I wear on my real head. But at least half of you knew exactly what I was quoting with that last sentence, and friends, that is plenty nerd enough. If I go to my high school classmates on Facebook and say, "I am going to spend my Easter weekend at a science fiction convention," all the defensiveness in the world about how I write the stuff, and serious thoughtful stuff at that, how I R Srs Arthur, how I am not like the Klingons and the Slave Leias and the Sailors Moon will not stop them from thinking that I am like them.

Because I am like them. Because we are nerds who fixate on blue-sky ideas without regard to how crazy and silly they are, or sometimes because they are crazy and silly. And hey. Go that. Srs Arthur hat or prosthetic forehead, whichever. You have to know who you are, and I am, in fact, a nerd who stopped making stuff up about a teenage spy girl from Atlantis for awhile this morning in order to make stuff up about a family who lives on a space station in the Oort Cloud. I could posture about how I have had stories about quantum mechanics and yearning published in Nature, Nature!, and it would mean nothing to anybody who wants to sneer in the first place, unless they are anxious about their own place in the nerd hierarchy. Why bother. I have also written steampunk about an intelligent monkey. I get by better without clutching to myself a firm sense of my own dignity. People are messy, ideas are messy, and science fiction is about both. Better to wear something that washes easily.

But more importantly, I would rather dress up like a Slave Leia Klingon Sailor Moon* than neglect a brilliant idea related to it because I was afraid of looking stupid. You can't be afraid of the trappings that come with your crazy brilliant ideas. I don't want sparkly vampires, I don't want an adventuring party chance-met in an out of the way tavern, I don't want any of a number of silly-looking tropes--but even more than that, I don't want to talk myself out of writing things I actually believe are interesting because I'm afraid of looking stupid in front of the cool kids.

And so we get to Christopher Priest judging Sheri Tepper for her book having a talking horse in it. Seriously? Seriously? Of all the reasons to get judgy of a Sheri Tepper novel? The woman writes with substance. She writes things you can argue with. She writes things you can dislike with a vengeance--I know, because I have. But not Christopher Priest! No, he has to dislike the presence of a talking horse, not anything anybody might say or think in the context of this book except for one single pun. (God forbid we should pun. Piers Anthony punned once. Enough said.)

What is the problem with SF today? Is it that we don't spend enough time making sure not to embarrass each other in front of our cool brilliant genius friends? Bullshit it is. I have cool brilliant genius friends. You know what cool brilliant genius friends have in common? They are more interested in cool stuff than in making sure they never look mildly stupid or embarrassed. They will always ruin their metaphorical shoes wading in to see the slimy interesting thing. (Have you ever seen jonsinger wearing Manolo Blahniks? I rest my case.) They are more interested in whether the horse has anything interesting to say than in whether someone sees them reading a book with, oh noes, a talking horse.

Problem with SF today, if in fact there is one other than people fussing too much about problems with SF instead of getting on with it, is not insufficient time spent making sure not to embarrass each other in front of the Srs Ppl, but insufficient exuberance. Solution to this is not whining about somebody else liking a book with a talking horse. timprov has been listening to an online philosophy course, and the fellow who is teaching it was trying to do a gedankenexperiment, and he was mentally transplanting Napoleon's personality to modern-day Michigan. Fine, he said, and then made it New York instead. Fine, he said, and then tried to make it one of each, and then he said, no no that's too ridiculous. And we said, "What? What? This is your line, this?" And that's where I am now with Christopher Priest. You were willing to write the novelization of Short Circuit--SHORT bloody CIRCUIT with the Indian guy who is NOT EVEN INDIAN and the robot who sings the who's Johnny song--and you cavil at talking horses? This, this is where you feel we have Gone Too Far? Napoleon in one place was all right but two is just too many, and if it was Napoleon in the body of a talking horse, well, not for the Clarke Award? Particularly not if he then had any kind of quest to achieve?

If he draws the line at talking horses, he has almost certainly not gloried in Digger. And then there's Beasts of New York and a dozen other things, not to mention the quests that have something interesting to seek. And that is not the way to a thriving and exuberant science fiction genre. If we can't articulate any problems with Twilight beyond the fact that there are vampires and they sparkle, we need to hang it up, because the fact that there are sparkly vampires is a mild matter of individual taste compared to the things that have gone wrong in that book. Is the talking horse an idiot? Is the talking horse a fascist, a nihilist, badly plotted? Is the talking horse boring? That's criticism worth talking about. Pointing out that it is, in fact, a talking horse is being a child at the zoo: yes, Christopher, horsey, well done, next week we'll teach you what a puppy looks like, since you seem to still be having trouble with that one.

*Those of you now picturing me as a Slave Leia Klingon Sailor Moon: you had better not be enjoying it, or you're now fired.

Byerly's has started to have store brand candy bars at the checkstands, and I looked, and one of them was "dark chocolate with berries." Hurrah! I said on impulse, and I threw one into my cart and home it came.

I decided just at random, before opening the thing, to check what berries were in it.

Friends, there are no berries in it. There are beet flakes dyed with natural raspberry flavoring. There is natural blueberry flavoring. There is natural blackberry flavoring. And do you know what the FDA requires of "natural [fruit] flavoring"? Absolutely nothing. No berries were harmed in the making of this candy bar. It is perfectly legal to write, "dark chocolate with berries," as the label on something that is only mildly dark chocolate with no berries whatsoever.

This came up before when markgritter and I went to Vancouver, and I got granola bars for travel breakfasts, and I found out that "blueberry almond flax seed granola bars" contained no blueberries whatsoever. They had put in dried cranberries that had been dyed and flavored with blueberry juice. Guess how much that tastes like a blueberry? Hint: not very. (It may taste enough like a dried blueberry that people who don't eat many dried blueberries could mistake them, in the way that someone who has been a vegan for four years will tell you that that cut of seitan totally tastes like beef, while someone who had a steak for dinner last night will say, really, not so much. I, however, have a bowl of barley porridge with dried blueberries, dried apricots, and pecans for my breakfast the vast majority of mornings. I am significantly composed of recycled dried blueberry parts at this point.)

I'm just not okay with this. I'm really not. I feel like if it says "berry-flavored chocolate," you cannot expect there to be berries, because "flavored" is a weasel word. But when it says, "WITH BERRIES," really, the expectation of berries has been produced. If you came to dinner and I said, "I have made chicken with dill and almonds," and then I produced chicken with oregano and tomatoes, I think you could justly claim that I had not only misled you but flat-out lied. I bought this chocolate bar on the understanding that while I might prefer that it was filled with the pick of the Oregon marionberry crop, or tiny little dried cloudberries--ooh, now I want that--or something of the sort, I would be willing to take really whatever cut-rate berries they were willing to shove in the thing. But actual berries. That part is key. Shavings of third-best cranberries: fine. Beet flakes--beet flakes! Why do I even need to say that this is not fine?

markgritter and I watched Watchmen last night and today--it was the director's cut, so it was three full hours of Watchmen. If you were underwhelmed by the theatrical release, I can't honestly recommend the expanded version, although I've never seen the theatrical release, so maybe it was awful enough that this was a vast improvement. I don't know. Not thrilled, is the short version.

The thing that really annoyed me about it, though, was after starting with a fight scene set to Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable," which was awesome, the people who put together the soundtrack apparently said, "Right then. That's enough interesting use of music for us," and proceeded to phone it in with every single other musical selection for the rest of the movie. The 99 red balloons song? "Halleluia"? Really? "All Along the Watchtower"? Really? Memo to apparently everyone on the planet: there are songs in existence that are not, in fact, "All Along the Watchtower." You can use them in things. What are you people, 15? It's not that I have anything against 15-year-olds. I'm very fond of one. But the nature of being 15 means that she has not had enough time to read things and watch things and listen to things that she's always clear on what's an awesome new thing and what's the same "wouldn't it be awesome" idea that thousands upon thousands have had before her. This is not anything against this particular 15-year-old, who is wonderful and smart and very much loved. It's just that before I let her do the entire soundtrack to a major motion picture, I would have somebody who was not 15 look it over. Just in case they had a perspective on the utter original awesomeness of using "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" for a credits montage. (I hate to bag on the opening credits, because they belonged to a much better movie, one I am much more interested in watching. But seriously: in case we were wondering what the times, they were a-doin'? Was anybody unclear on that?)

For me the "I have used up my cell minutes for the month with all the phoning it in I am doing" moment came with the Wagner. It is not cool, it is not funny, it is not meta-funny. "The Ride of the Valkyries" was used for meta-funny in The Blues Brothers. Which came out in 1980 a few weeks before I turned 2, when Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected President. The meta-funny there: it is over. People who use "The Ride of the Valkyries" in soundtracks: you are like the guy who shouts, "Free Bird!" at rock shows. There is no way to make shouting, "Free BIRRRRD!" awesome at a rock show. Its awesomeness has been used up for several generations now. By the time it regains any awesomeness, it will be like shouting, "Twenty-three skiddoo!" at someone, which is I guess sort of the bee's knees, but for awhile there, not so much. "But I was referencing--" No. Just stop. Find another song. Do something else.

I have just been saying, over on sartorias's lj, how much more interesting it is what people like than what they dislike. But I am tired and unable to refrain from the snarking here, because this was just sloppy and pathetic.

1. Baby powder
2. Crushed-up Pez

Fail fail fail fail fail.

And now the three unopened bottles I bought last night, when I was steady, will go to the local women's shelter, and I will have to ask my mom to haul my wobbling self around Target on my big PT day so I can do the ensniffening all over again and pick a new body wash that does not smell like baby powder (which is at least reasonable, just not me) or Pez (not a reasonable smell for body wash! just not!).

Our library paid somebody to come up with a slogan, and now they're putting it all over everything: "Dakota County Library: Come to Know." As far as I'm concerned, the only slogan they needed was, "Dakota Country Library: we're the library that's in Dakota County," or possibly if they wanted to get fancy, "Dakota County Library: books you already paid for."

I am already skeptical that there's any value in most kinds of marketing/branding people seem to take for granted. I don't believe it's automatically worthless or automatically morally suspect--the best of advertising brings people to realize that there is something they actually do want or need, possibly at a better price than they had hoped to pay. But really, how will the library benefit from having the slogan, "Come to know"? It's not like it sparks a million ideas about programs and groups they could host at the library. Mostly at my house it prompts snarky remarks about coming to no good. Do they hope that this will make people think, "Oh yes, we must continue to fund the libraries at previous levels or higher, they're where we come to know things!" Or alternately, "Oh yes, we must continue to fund the libraries at previous levels or higher, they have such a nice slogan!"

Can anybody tell me why this is not a stupid waste of time and money?

"It works as long as nothing goes wrong," translates into real live English as, "It does not work."

Oh hair conditioner manufacturers:

Why why WHY did you have to change the formulation of your conditioner so that it smells exactly like the "Barbie and the Rockers: Diva" doll I had when I was 8? What could possibly have motivated this behavior? And how did you pick that particular doll over Malibu Barbie or Skatin' Fun Skipper? Or Cabbage Patch dolls or Strawberry Shortcakes? Was there a contest? Because I'm pretty alarmed at a contest for which this is the result.

Okay, fellow SF writers: Asian-Americans have been a part of America's rich tapestry since before their contributions to the railroads in the mid-1800s. They are us. They are totally normal Americans. Get used to it.

What does "get used to it" mean? It means that you be extremely careful in describing Asian-American female characters using the following words and/or references: exotic; inscrutable; dragon lady; or any martial arts metaphors. When you hit all four in less than ten pages, I will put the book down and gape like a fish. Why? Because the technical term for this is racist bullshit.* And if it's because of a character's viewpoint rather than the authorial viewpoint, you need to show us that fast, lest everybody run screaming from the racist bullshit.

When I pick up a Kim Stanley Robinson novel -- published in this decade, for heaven's sake -- I am totally not prepared for that sort of thing. It caught me completely off-guard. "We need to fix climate change!" -- that I expected. "This inscrutable dragon lady would be a great person to work on that problem!" -- uh, no. Nononono. Seriously, just -- no.

I'm going to give this book a chance to get past this, but it's a worse mismatch than "think of these characters as if they were movie stars!" for me to have such a relentless message that I am to think of this character as foreign and other -- even though she's clearly "good other" rather than "bad other." There is a lot of getting past to be done here. Uff da.

Seriously, "exotic"? No American in ordinary American clothes is exotic, whether her ancestors were from Yokohama or York or Yola. Just -- not.

Aiiiigh.

*You do not get bonus points for avoiding geisha and porcelain doll references; that avoidance is elementary civilized behavior.