Partially Clips
by Robert T. Balder
Updates about three times per week

One of the wonderful things about the internets is the wide and varied formats they introduce. A storyteller is truly free to wend the otherwise-unnavigable fjords of his heart, following their emerald clover-bedotted shores until a sort of artistic nirvana has been achieved. The pursuit may be casual, or relentless, but the result is almost always Modern. As Sean “Puffy” Combs has said more than once of his own creative endeavors, “can’t stop / won’t stop.”

Imagine if you will, figures dramatically trapped in time, a potent reminder of the tenuous grip we each have on our own personal coil mortalis. When our finger-strength fades, only our non-existent Creator can say. But these moments happened, and they are a part of time, worthy of existence, and are captured here, as some long-forgotten insect in honeyed amber.

Partially Clips poses a fascinating question. What if the insects could speak? Their protracted, time-dilated existence doesn’t prevent these everyday figures from holding conversations. And their conversations often cut to the core of what it is to be human — and humorous.

Common themes include wildly-imagined demons, weekend sports enthusiasts, and self-defecating college professors — moments from everyday life (although I was never quite reminded of my own college days). Still it goes to prove McLuhan’s axiom, that the medium was never the message. I would expect nothing less from the Partially Clips Motion Picture than a series of static shots, offering the expectation of motion where none occurs, the hesitance in which so many live their daily lives.

Take a hint from this reviewer and spend a few still moments of your own enjoying what Balder has crafted here. It’s life, beautifully framed.

It’s love.

Several hundred people have written in to me in stark, jagged tones regarding the entry our Miss Belpheger made regarding the ending of the Webcomics Examiner. Opinions of the MHA staff members are just that — opinions. And opinions have to be allowed to happen, no matter how unpopular. That’s what an opinion is.

But allow me to step in and provide a counter-opinion, which may calm some of our irate readers. I do not share Isobel’s opinion. The Webcomics Examiner was an institution. Through its splash-page pageantry and brillianty-executed composition, the webcomic genre of entertainment was elevated beyond an art form to a pure, rarified science. Their razor-edged criticisms slid between the ribs of their targets like a surgeon’s hammer — and they did it in a way which elicited the creators to say “thank you.”

The critical review game is a pungent one, rife with impossibilities. Any entry into the field is a welcome one — even the Modern Humor Authority is aware of its tenuous position at Number One. When I topple, it will not be with a curse or a shout, but a welcome smile as my lifeblood ebbs away into the sea which I have been pushed.

Who’s next on the chopping block? I answer with another question: who’s next to hold the axe? It may even be you.

And what a glorious day that would be.

It is with regret some of our affiliate groups mourn the recently-announced “indefinite hiatus” of the Webcomics Examiner.

While many would be satisfied to eulogize, I believe in a different approach. Is it really a shame to thin the field? Webcomics are a new frontier. At the outset, many pundits believed it a positive sign that so many new organizations had cropped up to “cover” them, as it were. Now one of those original critics has folded up shop.

Perhaps webcomics are coming into their own now, and this signifies the end of compassion. A mediocre review site closes, and a single tear falls from each bleary, onlooking eye? I did not mourn the loss of my malignant right ovary when its time came.

A great book says “if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” Competition has plucked one diseased eye from this field, and it is no Cyclops. Who is next? Websnark? Comixpedia?

What difference does it make?

Bjork
Cocoon (music video)
2002

I only recently discovered this video. It was being projected on the wall at a dance club I frequent, and I had to ask the manager what the title was. A little searching on the internet got me the rest of the information, and a net-viewable copy.

This video has never been shown on the usual music video outlets due to its bold imagery. To the best of my knowledge, it is only viewable on-line. I’m sure there are several venues on which it is available. I happened to watch it on iFilm.com, but that statement is not to be construed as an endorsement or advertisement for that site.

The video begins with a series of naked Bjorks standing in different poses. The J-card notes say that these figures represent Bjork’s various sexual aspects. I don’t need coaching to figure that out. I’ve seen enough metaphoric art to realize that a series of one naked woman repeated many times in different poses represents the different aspects of her sexual nature. It’s like a language — “metaphoreze” — after a while you can speak it like a native.

One of the naked Bjorks seperates from the others and then spends the rest of the video standing alone in a featureless white nowhere. As she sings, red strands of silk emerge from her nipples as if they were a spider’s spinnerets. This is a metaphor for her expressing her sexuality, and also a visual pun - a woman whose breasts are producing milk is said to be “expressing” milk. The woman in the video is “expressing” her sexuality in the same way.

As with all metaphoric representation, this must be viewed on two levels. As you watch the allegoric version of events, you must interpret the “secret” meaning and imagine the literal events in the background. The phrase “the woman expresses her sexuality” works on both levels, it’s just that there are two definitions of “express” being used here. In the non-literal vision presented, her sexuality is represented by floating, dancing red fibres with a mind of their own.

Bjork waves her hands and arms, and the silk responds. She’s directing its movements, but not directly controlling it. The implied meaning is that a woman cannot directly control her own sexuality. One can try, of course. One can make an effort. But how “sexy” you end up being is often a different value, greater or lesser, than how “sexy” you intend to be. That is one of the many messages of the video.

Bjork occasionally flaps her hands rapidly throughout the video. At first I thought she was shivering - after all, she was standing naked in a cold studio - but then I realized that the character she’s playing was nervous. She’s thrilled, of course, with her new-found sexual freedom, but also nervous, scared. Her face contorts. She is simultaneously thrilled and frightened by her sexuality.

The song which accompanies the video, by the way, consists of a particularly flowery description of the sexual act. I’ve been reviewing poetry for years and this type of poem never fails to disgust me. Women - and it’s always women - going on and on about how wonderful and beautiful sex is and it’s all flowery and joyful and good and… Please! You go in, you do it, you pay, you leave. There’s nothing beautiful or special about it. It’s a physical thing and it leaves you hot and sweaty and icky. End of story.

Anyway, back to the video.

The red fibres, thanks to modern-day CGI, swirl around her, and begin to bind her legs together. This is to represent the hobbling that can occur to a woman who’s sexually active. When a woman begins expressing her sexuality, certain doors are closed to her by society. Yet the woman in the video appears happy, as if she is unaware that she is losing her mobility and freedom.

Eventually the fibres cover her completely, head to toe, thus the title “Cocoon”. The woman is totally hidden, and all that can be seen is the red fibre. The cocoon rises into the air as the song ends.

This refers to the process by which a woman who is sexual all the time is soon seen to be nothing but sex. People no longer see the real woman underneath, they see only sex. Sex, sex, sex from all angles. However, she is “elevated” by this, as she is now held in higher regard, albeit by a much smaller audience.

It is obvious that Bjork herself conceived of the idea for this video. She is, of course, no stranger to visual allegory, having worn a faux stuffed swan to the 2001 Oscars in order to protest the death of other performing arts at the hands of the cinema. “Cocoon” is clearly her effort to both explain how sexuality works in the popular media and simultaneously cash in on it.

In the latter, of course, Bjork is doomed to fail. Even stark naked, she’s not the most impressive-looking female. Very few males will be drawn to this video by the promise of naked female flesh. Ironically, this video will also fail to damage her career. Most women would be shooting their careers in the foot by appearing naked in a music video, but unlike the character she plays in the video, she has not become a sex object in the eyes of the public. The bottom line is that most people already perceive Bjork as being such a dingbat that to hear that she’s made a video like this will cause them to only shrug and move on.

The Aviator
Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale

Martin Scorsese plummets from his dizzying peak with Gangs of New York, with The Aviator, an abortive potboiler auto-romantic biography of airplane magnate Howard Hughes. It’s not normally my style to begin a review with a barb so levelled, but to see the film is to experience something akin to nausea confined solely to the mind — unpleasant at moments, but with a singular, purposeful rush, and at least there’s nothing to clean up.

Characterization ranges from dead-on (Gwen Stefani is a striking Jean Harlow, accurate down to the Betty Boop-meets-Annie Lennox coo) to sheer caricature (Alec Baldwin’s proposterous, blustering head of Pan Am). DiCaprio is, well, DiCaprio, although here appearing with a mint julep-steeped Southern Boy accent. It’s enough to seduce the ear, but it’s not why we came to the theatre.

It would appear — from the opening shot of the picture, no less! — that our unlikely hero was molested by his single mother. The audience is walked on from this point with the sledgehammer pseudo-assumption that all of Hughes’ mental illness — and genius — arose from that single moment in time.

In this way, the viewer is conditioned to see Hughes as a swordless samurai warrior, wearing his armor on the inside, unable to comprehend his role in the monoramaic Rashomon that is his life. In other words, the postman always rings twice, but Hughes hears three chimes.

An effective storytelling viewpoint, and points to Scorsese, but it makes for a heavy-handed biopic. What should have been a hard look at an uncompromising magician of the mid-century skies becomes emotional pornography.

And all the bottled urine in the world won’t fix that.

Now that “Team America: World Police” has narrowly escaped its threatened “NC-17″ rating in the U.S. (equivalent to Canada’s “R” rating — it received an “18A” rating throughout most of Canada), perhaps Ivo Petrov’s “The Green Dollhouse” will finally see daylight.

Petrov created “The Green Dollhouse” by taking a low-budget porno movie, “The Green Room,” and re-creating it, shot for shot, camera angle for camera angle, with Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures.

In Petrov’s movie, the dolls make pretty much the same motions as the actors and actresses did in The Green Room, only this time they’re assisted by off-screen human hands. For the soundtrack, he simply hijacked the original. The Green Room’s soundtrack plays over Petrov’s movie, so when you see Barbie’s friend Lea having an orgasm, the moaning and screaming you hear is porno actress Kelly Glean.

When I saw this movie in 1998 at a college film festival, some of the audience members thought it was supposed to be a comedy. Others saw it as a genuine porno flick. Some others simply squirmed uncomfortably in their seats through its twenty-nine minute length.

Of course this spurred some of the same types of discussions which are now going on as a result of “Team America’s” release. The question now the same as it was then: Is it pornographic?

To answer this, we first have to step back, and take a look into the world of fine art.

Exploring fine art, one quickly discovers that nudes are not difficult to find. Paintings depicting naked females hang, on public display, in art museums throughout the world, where anybody, even children, can walk in and see them. Children are actively encouraged to seek out fine art, even if such art includes nudity. Why? Becasue it’s not real. A painting of a naked woman is not the same thing as an actual naked woman. It’s only an abstract representation of a naked woman. As such, the “woman” exists only in our minds, and only when we are looking at the painting and imagining that it represents something real.

By the same token, a drawing is even more abstract. A drawing is less realistic, and requires a greater degree of imagination on the part of the viewer to picture a real woman in the place of the drawing. From there it follows that a cartoon, being a series of drawings, is also nothing more than an abstraction. To say that such an abstract collection of lines could be considered pornographic is absurd. There is no such thing as a pornographic cartoon! I find it unbelievable that “Fritz the Cat” received an X rating (Canadian R) in 1972. Good grief, the people in that movie aren’t even human, they’re cats!

The bottom line is that the events depicted in a movie or cartoon are only as real as you allow yourself to believe they are. If I allow myself to get “sucked in” to a Hitchcock thriller, I will find myself becoming genuinely scared. On the other hand, if I constantly remind myself that these are just actors speaking rehearsed lines on a movie set, I feel no fear. A movie is all fake, and everybody in the audience knows it. Nobody would think to “blame” Alfred Hitchcock for “scaring” people with one of his movies. That’s ridiculous. Obviously, a filmmaker cannot be held responsible for what goes on in the hearts or minds of the people watching his movie.

By the same token, I suppose the measure of whether or not something is “pornographic” is whether or not the audience gets “turned on” by it, but properly speaking that’s a measure of the audience, not the movie itself. As an experiment, I tried wacthing a real porno movie and concentrating on NOT getting turned on by it. I succeeded.

When I watch The Green Doll House, if I close my eyes, I can’t tell the difference between this movie and an actual porno movie. Of course, that’s what the soundtrack actually is. And when my eyes are closed, I do — I admit it — get turned on by it. In fact, with my eyes open, if I allow myself, I do find myself getting turned on by it.

But to say that it’s pornographic is ridiculous.

The internet, and the webcomics community especially, is today inundated with crappy reviews and untrustworthy sources. On top of this, webcomic popularity can be a red herring when the sophisticated Modern Humor Authority reader attempts to find a new webcomic of choice. How, then, does an intelligent reader sate his lust for quality? What are the true criteria that he should use when selecting what to honor with his steadfast gaze?

If there is one truth on the internet, it is that most critics are pompous assholes striving to impress readers with superfluous rhetoric. Unless you are this particular type of asshole, I recommend that you, the intelligent reader, stay away from websites such as Comixpedia and Webcomics Examiner. Or if you do visit, prepare to be led astray. You see, these so-called reviewers tend to cater towards that which is popular, and popularity is no more than a penile length measurement in online form — one reason why you shouldn’t trust readership as criteria in the first place, but I’ll get to that.

The minds of Critics, by nature, are never like standardized rulers, and so in trying to gauge the popularity and quality of a strip or artist they can never come up with a collective length which is to be trusted. Keeping this in mind, it’s not like reviewers measure a strip’s content at all, but that they try to measure the e-penis and report such frivolity back to the masses in order to gain the most amount of positive attention from the most amount of people. Thusly they only serve to fellate the engorged members of such hack artists as Scott Kurtz, Randy Milholland, Chris Crosby, and Aeire Doon.

This brings me to my next tidbit: there is no reason for the sophisticated reader to dull his palette on the tripe-comics of the masses. As any political election will show you, the will of the majority is almost never right, and it is the same with webcomics. Just because a pandering blowhard can steal $30,000 from his fans doesn’t mean that his (or her) comic is any good; it just means that he appeals to the lowest common denominator. The entire Modern Humor Authority staff would not trust the opinions of a single flab-gutted slacker on the net, much less a few thousand of them, and neither should you. They wouldn’t know a large e-dick if it bit them in the ass.

In the end, when you find it necessary to cut through the bullshit and the phalli, there is only one knife to suit your needs, and frankly, that’s people like us. We are the professionals; the men and woman dedicated to giving our readers the unadulterated truth. When it comes to popularity and readership, you can always trust our ruler to be of standard, unchanging units. We don’t buy into hype, or feel beholden to give verbal rimjobs to any artist.

At least I don’t.

Blood Canticle
Anne Rice
hardcover, 30.95 USD

With fatted tick-like teats filled with sanguine and clotted liquor, Anne Rice has returned to nurse her avid readers with latest offering from her dripping coppery pen. Her heart surging and in proper beat with her natural voice she is writing to her own ear.

This, the latest and purportedly last offering of the Vampire Chronicles, follows the pattern of most of her other works; and longtime Rice readers will have no jarring surprises waiting for them as they turn the leaves. Lestat is the narrator in this outing, and this brings the writers’ perspective and her inner mind’s workings into sharp focus. With the Interview we can only hear about the protagonist second-hand, now we can hear Rice speak in first person through the mask and role of Lestat with a minimum of outside convention. I will fall short of pronouncing this a completely masturbatory work on Rice’s part, but her hand does stray and caress rather heavily in several places. As a last work it falls short of a Gotterdammerung, appearing more like a Life-day Special.

Taken as a work, Blood Canticle is more interesting as a dissection of the writer’s state rather than a tale of a shadowy and velvet world of self-absorbed and angst-filled immortals. Casual murders and teacup tempests of morality, seductions and undead dances are metaphors for what is going on behind the words of this self-compassed potboiler. The narrative appears to be more of an enabling work than a tale spun.

Writers can write for many reasons, as it must stand. You can write for the public, your critics, your friends, yourself, or even your characters. This particular effort seems to be shot through with more of the latter rather than that of the former. At some point in a hot house of dark orchids bound by long rainy afternoons an artist will seize totally on the inner visions and follow them to their turgid rest. It must be a truly liberating feeling to compose your own worlds while in a Berlin bunker or Guiana retreat without those mongrel Allies or fact-finding Senators hovering about.

Do not let Anne Rice’s backlash poison you against the work. It might appear that her blood smeared jowls and bared fangs might have had a little more rabid foam dripping from them than might be erotic or even fashionable, but this matter is clearly something close to her heart. The work is something from Anne Rice, la femme. Most writers get their hackles up when their ego gets savaged, though usually the barbs should be more cutting the higher in one’s craft one achieves before blood gets drawn. Very rarely is a money-back guaranty offered in this day and age, as rare as a woman who writes of sexual predators and obsessive personalities swift to publish where she sleeps.

I should speak to one point though. Anne Rice might wish to find a true editor to work with. I admit that I have not waited with coppery breath for the next installment of the Vampire Chronicles; but I, an admittedly casual reader of her shadow plays, find tangled thickets and sticky copses where there need not be. Were I Anne Rice, this writing would conform to my psyche and brain’s verbal/textual center; but for those not born and perfectly crafted as Anne Rice herself there are understandable disconnects. True editors are loving adversaries that winnow the chaff and render the fat from a finished work. Whatever then is left is put under the harsh glare of the audience and the critics. Neither ensemble cast or virtuoso performance ensures the perfection that is found with the acceptance of those in the darkness or names at the by-line.

Blood Canticle is all right. It is not perfection with neither a word more, less, or ill chosen. It is Anne Rice writing a story that she has shared with her paying customers, backed by a return for money-back offer if not completely satisfied (less shipping and handling I suppose). My copy was handed off to an acquaintance at the gloomy teahouse, and there it will probably remain. In thirty years or so I might stumble upon it in some bargain bin or on eBay. I might reread it to see if it aged any.

Interpol
“C’Mere”
3 minutes, 11 seconds

It’s always too late to be locked inside yourself. It’s something that the band Interpol innately understands — they’ve recorded what amounts to a two-chord opera (or operetta, given the pop single length) in “C’Mere,” with undeniable allure. If I hadn’t known it to be Interpol, I’d have said Joy Division headed to 1970s Germany, backed by The Rosenbergs and Jesus and Mary Chain, with a magic microphone hewn from Jim Morrison’s headstone. (At times, that headstone seems wrapped around itself, tube-like, and singer Paul Banks shouts through it as a megaphone.)

We are right there with them through spellbinding lyrics like “Now season with health / Two lovers walk on Lakeside Mile / Try pleasing with stealth, rodeo.” Each stanza is a journey. “C’Mere” tells of hope springing eternal — each high-energy strum as alive as Frankenstein’s monster after a fresh jolt of electricity. Imagine murderer Phil Spector’s wall of sound stripped bare, and replaced with liquid oxygen rockets. This is music to live to, that doesn’t stand in the way with a message, or out of the way without one. (White Stripes, are you paying attention?)

I’ll be honest. I don’t know what it means to season something with health.

But I want to.

I doubt Interpol minds the images it conjures even in the mind of a relative layman such as myself — a young turk, nose-piercing in its box, hidden from parents’ judgmental eyes, tear-streaked after losing his first love, re-entering the kitchen of the self and stirring the pot with renewed vigor. Tenderly. Tastefully.

The Ramones are looking down from heaven and smiling upon Interpol. Now it’s your turn.

The Sims 2, Maxis’ sequel to the best-selling computer game of all time, has already moved one million in its first week. Is there anywhere to go but up? It is one of very few games that can claim true cross-market appeal, joining the ranks of Super Mario Brothers and Tomb Raider in terms of sheer visibility. The blank-faced “sim” is an icon unto itself, which begs the question of how it’s possible to have an icon be defined solely by its viewer. Plato would have had a field day.

Perhaps some of its broad-spectrum popularity can be attributed to the fact that it technically isn’t even a game. In a game, there are points to be won, levels to be attained, and a goal. An ending. The Sims offers the first two, but when your original sims die, their children carry on. The Sims is as meaningless as human existence itself, and it’s through this prism that the light of consumerism is shined. There’s a rainbow in there, although the colors look faded through the filter of reality.

But these points have been enumerated and elaborated upon in countless other reviews, for the original game. The sequel brings two new, long-awaited features: the aforementioned childhood, aging, and death, and a true three-dimensional interface. (The Sims previously employed a static, three-quarters isometric view.)

In permitting the use of true 3D, with its endless rotation and zooming features, Will Wright has done something truly astonishing — made The Sims 2 yet one step closer to the Orwellian ideologue the first attempted (and all but succeeded at). Despite my column in Canadian Gamers Magazine, I’m not much of a gamer, but The Sims 2 enthralled me from the first moment I discovered I could trap a sim in a tomb of stone or water and watch them slowly die. Poe would have had a field day.

In short, The Sims 2 gives us walking, talking army men to train our childhood magnifying glass upon, but gives them a domestic bent that blows open our childhood paper-towel-tube spyglass. Our inner authoritarian now has a worthy playground. In a world with adult responsibilities and duties, how truly fulfilling it is to be able to die. The miles to go before we sleep have become mere yards.

But Will Wright shouldn’t let it go to his head; that kind of morbid domestic arena has existed for hundreds of years. It was known as a dollhouse.

Ibsen would have a field day.