Tagged: Elayne Riggs

ELAYNE RIGGS: Still Life with Gadgets

  • News
  • September 26, 2007

elayne100-8081772As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not exactly what you would call an early adopter. I’ve tended to view many modern trappings more like modern traps. I readily admit to being one of those mean people who applauded when Apple lowered the price on its iPhone, a product I anticipate never needing nor owning, nodding at the observation that the $200 extra for the debut version (sold to people who actually queued up to buy an expensive status symbol readily available in plentiful quantity in stores and online) should be considered a sucker tax. I believe our affluent society is way too dependent on and obsessive over technological conveniences which will either soon achieve sentience at which point we’ll happily welcome our electronic overlords, or will utterly break down at the next super-solar flareup and leave us with the self-reliance level of children.

That said, I have way too many of these evil machines in my own home.

I remember a time when I didn’t. During my first marriage to somebody as wary of tech as I was, we had a VCR with a wired remote, and a TV with rabbit ears where you had to actually get up to change the channel. (We lived in The Land That Cable Forgot to Wire until about four years after everyone else in NYC was hooked up.) Our computer and printer were hand-me-downs that my office was going to throw away. Usenet and email were nice, but the behemoths were still things on which I worked more than played. Even our kitchen, which of course wasn’t ours but the landlord’s, didn’t have high-tech things like a dishwasher or garbage disposal unit or broiler the size of an oven, and still doesn’t. (I still get annoyed at TV chefs who talk about adjusting racks in the broiler; to me the broiler is found all the way at the bottom of the oven and is about two feet high with the door that opens downward and one temperature setting — turning the oven dial all the way up — and you’re lucky if it works at all without causing the pan to burst into flames. Which still beats Robin’s experience, as he tells me they don’t have broilers at all in England.)

But now, a lot of things are different. My current husband, who can reverse-engineer gadgets as easily as he takes apart and analyzes comic book panels, was born to be a tech geek. If he weren’t such a terrific artist as well, some sort of tech geekery would be how he made his living. He’s the kind of person who was able to FTP pages to DC and Marvel before those companies were even set up to receive them! When Robin emigrated to marry me, he had to leave behind tons of electronics, as British outlets are different and it just didn’t make financial sense to bring over lots of things that required American adapters and doubtless would be obsolete by the time he got settled in. Yes, Robin’s one of those early adopter types whose first reaction to new tech is "Oooh, shiny and pretty!"

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Behind Closed Doors

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  • September 19, 2007

elayne100-9947208A few months ago, Google’s map section came out with a new feature called Street View, which had a number of people up in arms. "They’re spying on us!" came the cry. "It’s creepy and inappropriate! Our privacy is being violated by having cameras in public streets capturing possibly embarrassing moments for posterity!"

I’d lay odds that many of these advocates are the same people upset about the restrictions on their rights to, say, film or photograph things on public property in some cities. It reminds me of a line Peter Stone wrote for Ben Franklin in 1776: "…rebellion is always legal in the first person — such as ‘our’ rebellion. It is only in the third person — ‘their’ rebellion — that it is illegal." Google Street Views is "their" invasion, filming in NYC is "our" right.

But what can you expect? We live in a society that increasingly blurs the dividing line between the public and the private. My Mom uses a phrase to describe the kinds of romance novel plots she likes to read: "the ones that stop at the bedroom door." I feel the same way about most entertainment I prefer, as well as about most of real life. I’m not one of those people who believes that public displays of affection are somehow ickier if they’re between members of the same sex; I’m one of those people who believes that most overt public displays of affection are equally icky and belong behind a closed bedroom door.

Of course, I’m clearly in the minority here. I recognize that we’re a culture obsessed with having it both ways. We raise up a storm of protest at violations of our privacy by others, especially government authorities — "keep your laws off my body!" — and at the same time reserve the right to self-violate.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: On the same page

  • News
  • September 12, 2007

elayne100-3884567Just as with the Twilight Zone, I have a favorite Star Trek: Next Generation episode that’s stuck with me for years. It’s called "Darmok," wherein Picard & co. attempt to communicate with the Tamarians, a people with an incomprehensible language. Blogger Barbara O’Brien picks up the plot synopsis: "Captain Picard and Dathon the Tamarian have an adventure together battling an invisible beast, and during this adventure Picard has a ‘Helen Keller at the water pump’ moment and realizes that Tamarians speak in metaphors taken from stories. For example, ‘Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra’ refers to two enemies, Darmok and Jalad, who became allies at Tenagra. As a phrase, it means ‘Let’s put aside our differences and be friends.’ So after much suspense and drama and the death of the unfortunate Dathon, by the end of the episode Picard knows enough Tamarian to say, ‘Bye. It’s been real.’"

One of the reasons this show resonates with me so much is that I’m keen on the necessity of communicating, whether through stories or essays or conversation. I wouldn’t have majored in English and linguistics at college if this idea weren’t one of the driving forces in my life. I’ve always believed that there has to be a way of making myself understood to anyone — probably as futile a notion as my childhood ambition of wanting every single person I met in my life to like me, to never make any enemies. But you know, I haven’t necessarily given up on that one either! And as I’ve noted a number of times, much of my life has been spent in trying to find the key, the conversational Rosetta Stone, that would result in my late father finally being able to understand me — a quest at which I never succeeded, but which led me to become a writer.

Communication is the implicit goal of storytelling. If you’re not making some connection with your readers or viewers or listeners, you may as well be writing in a secret diary. Now, I’ve mentioned before that I have a small tolerance for things like Easter eggs and other pop culture references stuck into TV shows, comics, etc. as a wink between writer and audience; you’ll notice those stories are often the first to become dated as well because their references are so time-specific. But that’s a far cry from deliberately not communicating at all, but faking it in a way that makes your audience feel as though they’re stupid if they admit they’re not in the know.

Fortunately this deliberate communication breakdown doesn’t happen with most stories I read, as I tend to choose my entertainment rather than having it (and any accompanying trendiness) choose me. But it does happen in real life, particularly so in this century so far. I don’t think I have to tell you what series of events brought this on.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The PFVM Principle

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  • September 5, 2007

elayne100-2362892There’s been a flurry of posts lately in the comics blogosphere, including Glenn Hauman’s last column here, about perceived value for money (let’s just call it PVFM) when it comes to comics. The consensus seems to be, American comics periodicals from the Big Two are usually about 22 pages long and take mere minutes to read through, which is Not Good. Added to that the current buzzword in vogue for what used to be called "padding," now rechristened "decompression," and the PVFM aggravation level shoots way up as the time actually spent reading the thing goes way down. And the conclusion is, there just ought to be more words per page, and possibly more pages per pamphlet, so the reading time (and thus the presumed enjoyment time) increases and fans don’t feel like they’re being ripped off and more readers will return to comics and all will be well with the world. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually seen online comics pages where a writer/artist will put up a page of wordless story and apologize for the lack of dialogue on it!

Allow me to ask: When did PVFM become a condition upon which entertainment should be created? Do all stories have to be dense, or should all stories strive instead to be good?

Look, I understand PVFM. I frequent an all-you-can-eat sushi place, for cripe’s sake. The sushi’s very good there, or I wouldn’t frequent it. But I’ve been to lots of AYCE places that made me wish I paid more for less-but-better stuff. As anyone who’s visited a 99-cent store would agree, quantity isn’t always synonymous with quality.

Particularly where such a subjective experience as entertainment is involved. Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask this, what with my swiss-cheese retention abilities, but were all the stories you really remember fondly real long ones? I’ve been to some long, dense movies that were full of sound and fury and signified less than nothing; the concession candy had more fulfillment. And I’ve spent two minutes reading various pithy blog posts that stick with me far longer than the screens and screens of blather that, frankly, I usually can’t even make it all the way through. But okay, let’s be fair — comics aren’t blog posts, where brevity and getting to the point is often prized. And they’re not movies, where unspoken movement can convey so much that a constant stream of words isn’t necessary.

So tell me, without looking: what’s your favorite comic book story, and how many words does it contain?

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Stupid — It Burns!

  • News
  • August 29, 2007

elayne100-7557489I’m sure most readers will agree that we all bring our own unique views to our entertainment experiences, our own desires and prejudices and lifetimes of baggage. And many of us try to partake of those experiences bearing that baggage in mind, allowing for it or disclaiming it or even using it to enhance our POVs.

For the average consumer, baggage is something you try not to let get in the way. But a certain subset clings to it like a badge of honor. That’s the portion of the crowd that brags of specialized knowledge, and will accept nothing less than that same level of specialization in their entertainment. Which is silly, in my opinion. You may be a rocket scientist, or a medical intern, or a lawyer, or even a secretary, but the people who write movies and comics and whatnot, well, they’re just storytellers.

This is not to say that a certain verisimilitude isn’t welcome. A story needs to be internally consistent, after all, to keep you involved in its world. But if you’re from Cleveland and the movie you’re watching is supposed to be set in that city and it’s pretty darn clear that it was shot in Vancouver, it can take a bit more effort to stay with that story when you keep going "But that’s not the street I used to walk to school on!" If you’ve just come home from a day in the newsroom, opened up the latest Superman comic and noted that the Daily Planet scenes don’t resemble your job in the least, I can understand the irritation. Many’s the time I’ve watched actors pretend to type or play a musical instrument as just something to do with their hands, not as though they were actually performing the task at hand. (By the way, how things have changed on the typing front since the advent of PCs and laptops; one of the things I love about the TV show The Office is how the actors actually type IMs to each other during filming; they look like they’re at their desks doing actual office work, just like me!)

But obsessing on these comparatively minor things to the point where they ruin your enjoyment of the story is, to my mind, just silly. It’s not seeing the forest for the trees. Even if they’re palm trees and the story’s set in a northern climate.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Wanderlust

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  • August 15, 2007

elayne100-2752123One of the side effects of "the internets" making the world a more accessible place for many of us is how it’s fueled my desire for travel.  But in truth, that was probably kindled when I was but a wee babe and my parents decided to drive across the country and back — pretty ambitious considering my mom was pregnant at the time.  I’m told my 1-year-old self experienced all sorts of national historic sites and sights, none of which I remember of course, but enough of it probably seeped into my subconscious and stuck that the idea of Going Places has appealed to me ever since.

I was pretty fortunate when I was a teenager, in that my family had both means and relatives overseas.  We made a pilgrimage in 1973 to Israel and then Romania.  I was so proud of going to a country with a foreign language that I was studying at the time!  I’ve never liked the stereotype of the Ugly American, and so I remain determined never to travel to a country where I can’t speak the dominant language.  Which lets out most of them, I fear, but to me it’s just plain common courtesy.  And common sense; I have no right to complain about people living (and especially running businesses) in the US who don’t converse at all in English if I refuse or am unable to converse in the prevailing tongue of my destination of choice.  Israel was to be my Big Test to see how well I did in Hebrew.  Imagine my frustration when, to a person, everyone I encountered heard my American accent and immediately switched to speaking English.

My mom went me one better — she spoke Yiddish both in Israel and Romania, and everyone with whom we had lengthy conversations could communicate with her in the "Jewish Esperanto," including my dad’s Romanian relatives.  I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of Yiddish, which I really thought I’d catch onto when we were kids as it was what Mom and Dad spoke when they didn’t want us kids to know what they were saying; but even being in the German Honor Society in college (Yiddish has more German words in it than just about anything else) didn’t really help.  And my Romanian was pretty bad too, sad considering it’s a Romance language and has a lot of the same words and grammatical rules as Spanish and French, with which I had a passing acquaintance in high school and college.  I miss those days when I was around 20 or so and majoring in linguistics and could passably get by in about five languages; nowadays I’d need massive Berlitz-type refresher courses to retrieve even a tenth of the knowledge I used to possess.

But I digress.  The thing I remember most about Romania — still under the yoke of Ceausescu at the time — was that I almost got arrested at the airport.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: World Enough and Time

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  • August 8, 2007

elayne200-8061372Everyone around my age seems to have a Twilight Zone episode that sticks with them the most.  For me, it’s the Burgess Meredith-starring "Time Enough At Last," which title I always misremember as World Enough and Time.  (Just my luck I’m about to become even more confused as that’s also the title of the new George Takei-starring Star Trek: New Frontiers episode debuting in two weeks.)  It’s about an obsessive reader who’s delighted he finally has time to pursue his favorite hobby after improbably escaping a bomb that wipes out the rest of the populace, only to have his glasses fall off his face and break, fade to black.

It was one of those episodes for which I refused to suspend disbelief because I kept thinking of all the ways Meredith’s character could remedy his fate.  What was preventing him from looking for new glasses?  If the NYPL building was still standing I’ll bet some optometry places were still around.  And after all, he had to go food-gathering to stay alive, he’d undoubtedly (and likely literally) bump into something.  And bombs tend to fuse things into lenses anyway.  All that aside, I refused to believe he totally couldn’t read without his glasses; my prescription is pretty strong and I’m to the point in life where, if I didn’t have bifocals, I’d have to remove my glasses to read.  And eyesight has been known to improve without the use of glasses, by means of various exercises and–

Well anyway, my point is, I went over all these machinations in my head for years because I could see a lot of myself in that character.  I love to read, always have.  Got it from my mom (hi Mom!); Dad wasn’t big on reading, but she’s always taken to it, as have her sister and brother, from whom I learned to like all sorts of genre stuff from the Happy Hollisters mystery series to fantasy and science fiction to fairy tales to the very occasional non-fiction foray.  Reading actively engages my mind like little else.  Reading has always been the way I found out about life, about myself.  Reading is dreaming using words (and pictures, if you’re talking about comics).

I’m never as happy as when I have time to catch up on my reading.  This week, for instance, I’m on "enforced" vacation — meaning that, because I don’t get to use up my allotted vacation time when I want to (due to my boss requiring me to be at my post whenever he’s in the country), I wind up accumulating too many days to carry over into my next service year and must "use or lose" them before my anniversary (next Monday).  As of the time I wrote this column I had no idea what I was going to do during this week other than read, read, and read some more.

And even then, there’s never time enough.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Prodigal Child

  • News
  • August 1, 2007

elayne200-4259023White Rabbits!  (Sorry, that supersition is how I start every month.)

So Robin and I were watching Godspell on TV the other day.  Yeah, every now and then I like to revel in the best of ’70s kitsch.  Godspell reminds me a lot of Finian’s Rainbow.  They’re both earnest, so very very earnest, in their attempted appeal to perceived hippie consciousness, and there are sections of each that I love to bits… but my gosh, they’re so charmingly dated, bless their hearts.

And I was remembering how cool I thought the songs were when I was a kid, and how silly all the wide shots panning out over NYC look — and gasping when I suddenly realized the ending of one number was shot on top of the then-newly-built World Trade Center, and the title of the number was "All For The Best" — and Robin was comparing it to the version he’d seen on stage in England, and they came to the bit where that cast member who looks disturbingly like Ron Jeremy and a few other cast members were acting out the story of The Prodigal Son.

And I’m kinda caught up in the film despite myself, because I’ve always been fascinated by allegorical fiction, which is what most New Testament stories are, and all at once something just didn’t seem correct to me.  It’s the same kind of "wait a second…" I did when I first realized the second most common interpretation of the moral of the Garden of Eden story was "always submit to authority rather than seeking to understand things for yourself" (the most common being "all dames are trash").  It made absolutely no sense to me that the prodigal son, who had sinned mightily and returned to his father’s fold, deserved the fatted calf more than the son who had dutifully loved his father and seen to his work and was a genuinely good person the entire time and who needed no prodding to be good.  It didn’t work for me as fiction, it just wasn’t a satisfying resolution, because it rested on the assertion that it’s okay, even preferable, to cheat.  And because so many people need an excuse to justify actions that in their gut they must know they shouldn’t do, that message is incredibly appealing to a wide segment of people.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Left Behind

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  • July 25, 2007

elayne200-3862826It’s the day before the biggest convention in an American comic fan’s year — the San Diego Comic-Con International.  Just about every one of my ComicMix colleagues is heading out there.  (Don’t ask me how they got hotel rooms, it’s still a mystery to me.)  I’m not.  My boss told me a long time ago that I can’t go on vacation when he’s in the country (yes I know, but it’s still better than being unemployed and sans health insurance), and even if I could I just don’t think I could work up the enthusiasm any more for something so expensive and exhausting.  The closer I get to pushing 50, the more 50 pushes back harder.

I vaguely remember when I used to have the energy for Events.  When I was in college I enthusiastically queued up for a couple hours to see The Empire Strikes Back and was severely disappointed because I was expecting a movie, complete with a resolution, not a chapter.  (When Robin expressed much the same sentiment years later on Usenet, I responded with "Marry me," and the rest is history, sort of.)  I get the idea of wanting to be a part of a phenomenon bigger that one’s self, wanting "bragging rights" to fill your anecdotage.  (I wish I could say I coined that word, but I didn’t, I got it from a Fred Astaire movie and goodness knows where the movie’s writer picked it up.)  When it’s organic and unexpected, the Event phenomenon can be quite fun.  But what’s really organic today?

San Diego grew out of comic fans’ love for their medium and the people who toiled therein.  And then it just grew, and grew, and grew.  It’s nigh unto unwieldy now.  Before Wizard took over the Chicago Comicon, it too was centered around the comics artform; now it’s just another notch on the WizardWorld bedpost.  The more cons grow, the more the fans can convince themselves of the comic industry’s health — but the growth ain’t about comics, it’s about product.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Nothing common about it

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  • July 18, 2007

elayne200-6762509The older I get, the more Einsteinian I become in my concept of time. It’s like I’m watching a vehicle moving at light-speed, Dopplering like crazy, when it’s all I can do sometimes to make it from point A to point B. I’m just a 20th century gal in a 21st century world.

Which isn’t always a bad thing. I retain a viewpoint that I honestly think is foreign to many around me, one that relies greatly on the ideas of common sense and common courtesy. Don’t spend more on your credit card than you have money to pay it off. When you’re out to dinner, stack your plates in a way that makes them easier for the server to handle. If you’re responsible for someone who can’t care for themselves, their needs supercede yours. Behind the wheel, do everything you can to facilitate traffic flow, don’t do anything that distracts you from driving, and always let aggressive drivers pass you so you’re well rid of them. Don’t do anything in public that will cause discomfort to others around you, unless they’re more politically powerful and intending you physical harm. Listening is more important than talking. (Okay, I don’t have that last one down quite yet, but I’m working on it!)

Two of my conclusions after almost fifty years on this planet come down to "sex is private" and "violence is abhorrent." I don’t know why people who wish to regulate media keep pairing the two, as the former affirms life while the latter negates it. And to tell you the truth, while I’m not that big on regulation myself, sometimes I think it may just be needed in certain circumstances. Because, once again, I see so few people around me any more exercising common sense and common courtesy.

While it’s true that societal mores, like language, are an ever-evolving phenomenon, it’s not that difficult to suss out what might discomfit the majority those around them — if they cared to. But selfishness often wins out over courtesy. So while a kiss on the lips may be quite continental, no matter who’s kissing whom, when that public kiss turns into major gropage or heavy petting it’s time for the participants to think about getting a room. As my mom is fond if saying regarding the romance novels she reads, "I prefer the ones that stop at the bedroom door."

Or the bathroom door, for that matter. Bodily functions are nothing of which to be ashamed; neither are they anything to show off. If you’re planning to go beyond a simple exchange of saliva, do consider a more intimate and less public venue, one with doors between you and the general public. That goes for feeding your baby straight from the source as well. But hey, maybe that’s just me. I see enough fluids around me as it is, I don’t really want to deal with other people’s. It’s beautiful, it’s natural… it’s private, mmmkay?

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