Note: My husband typed this during his usual comics-consumption time. If it was important enough to interrupt that, you should definitely read it.
This is Not a Digital Revolution
or
You Won’t Believe What Watching The Runaways Taught Me About the Fight Over Manga and DRM
In my last year of high school, I wrote an essay that used the French Revolution as a model to describe the fall of communism in the U.S.S.R. as a revolution. The realisation that all revolutions follow such a similar, and relatively simple basic pattern was one of those mind-opening moments that has stuck with me ever since. What does this have to do with anything? Maybe nothing, but I’m going somewhere with this, so stick with me for a few pages and see what happens.
It starts Friday night with Cory Doctorow in the basement of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy. (I’ve linked to his signature in the Collection’s circa-1983 guestbook. While I was busy being born, Cory was already hacking — yes, hacking — the way clear for himself.) Cory is the emeritus member of my workshop, and he gave me my first national publication. The second time we met, he reached out and ruffled my hair. Seeing him always feels like seeing my older and cooler cousin, the one who blows into town during the holidays to say hi to the family and give you a hug before continuing his orbit through places that are bound to be both brighter and darker than home.
Speaking of which, my Friday night ended with this:
Yeah, I said it. Wu-Tang Clan vs. The Beatles. 27 glorious tracks of it, in fact, collected in Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. So far it utterly pwns The Grey Album, but maybe I just like Wu-Tang better than I like Jay-Z. Your mileage may vary. Special thanks to Kay Thaney, she of Science Commons fame, for recommending this.
Slipping on the glove, I felt a heady rush of temptation despite the way the fabric wilted from my too-short fingers. I suddenly understood Joe’s speedy conquering of time. His desire to leave his mark on every important date was completely natural. History spread out like a puddle begging to be splashed in. Grinning, I drew a door.
An Amazon review summarizes it best: “A pair of high school students experiment with what looks like Michael Jackson’s glove. It can create portals in time, but the catch is that the portals only go to famous dates in rock and roll history, like the days that Kurt Cobain and John Lennon died.”
Note to Hoffman Ma, the businessman who won the auction: to my knowledge, Michael Jackson’s glove will not actually grant you the power to visit important dates in the history of music. If someone at Julien’s tried to sell you on that idea, you have every right demand your hundreds of thousands of dollars back. Unless it works, of course. In that case, happy trails. Try not to fuck up the timeline.
…On a somewhat related note, I should add that when Jackson died, I was sincerely tempted to re-release this story in some way. Then I watched as his death overshadowed major news events like the revolution in Iran, and I decided that I didn’t want to participate in that. I still feel a little ambivalent about the issue. Jackson’s death lends a note of irony to the story that wasn’t there at the time that I wrote it, but I never intended for Jackson’s fictional involvement to be the central focus. I chose his glove because it was a kitschy, easily-recognizable fetish object from music history that was imbued with multiple layers of meaning (and therefore, power). The fiction is that it can transport the wearer to specific points of history, but the reality is that some objects always have this ability. Dig through that forgotten box at the back of your closet, and you will inevitably be transported to some other time or place in your own history.
If anything has changed for me with regard to the story, it’s that every performer who’s name-checked in the prose is now dead. When I wrote it, that wasn’t true. It was a quiet little realization I came to as I watched the non-stop coverage of Jackson’s death, especially speculation about what would happen to the Beatles catalog that Jackson outbid Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono for. I find it fitting that, in my story, Jackson’s glove was used in an attempt to save John Lennon’s life. I thought of it as retribution for a champion dick move on Jackson’s part — namely, buying Lennon’s songs (and their value) out from under his best friend, his widow, and his children, then using those songs as equity to maintain the very lifestyle and career stagnation that Lennon himself sought to avoid. But the purchase of the Beatles catalog is simply another moment in music history; perhaps if Mr. Ma travels back to see it, he can report back here and tell us how it all really went down.
And we did get lost. Not horribly. We just took a wrong turn. It was my fault, and I apologized, but I’m beginning to suspect that some other part of my brain will spit out fatally flawed directions if there’s just the briefest glimmer of a chance that the end result will be more time spent on dark country roads inhabited by ancient barns whose splintering timbers loom all the larger in the anonymous glow of headlights.
(That was a terrible sentence. I’m not fixing it. I’m just that reckless.)
DeathRay has a saying: “No one should ever cover The Beatles.”
Seen, and raised:
This is Sungha Jung, a 12-year-old boy from South Korea who now gets invited to the Seoul Jazz Festival by the likes of the Swell Season. He’s “fingerstyling,” which means that rather than focusing on a specific part of the song, the guitarist attempts to create a more dynamic, fully-rounded sound by multi-tasking the instrument. In other words, you’ll hear the whole song in there, even though there’s only one guitar and one guitarist, because one hand isn’t busy holding onto a pick. But you’ve watched the video, so you know that already.
What really gets me is that Sungha learned how to play this well in about three years’ time. After years of watching his dad play, he decided to pick up the instrument for himself. He devoted between one and three hours per day to honing what skills he had, and today it takes him about three days to learn and record an entirely new song. Recently, he’s begun composing his own melodies after recording and sharing covers of Beatles and Sting songs for his YouTube viewers.
The other day, Paul Graham Raven asked (via Twitter): “wonders why – when he actually manages to sit down and binge on writing – it ends up wiring him like a wrap of speed, sleepless and manic?”
I said: “It’s what you need to do; your body knows that. It’s what gets me out of bed, honestly.”
And this is why we do anything so foolhardy, really. Because we desperately want to. And if we stopped wanting to, we would no longer be ourselves. I explained this idea to a very generous listener this Thanksgiving, when he asked me if I enjoyed writing.
“Oh yes, very much,” I said. “I mean, I can’t stop.”
You do it because you can’t stop. In the end, that’s the only reason. There is no guarantee of success or even enjoyment or improvement. Rationally speaking, there may always be a “choice” to quit, but that’s like “choosing” not to be an alcoholic any more — you’ll always be an addict, no matter how long it’s been since you and Mr. Daniels broke up. The only choice you have is to not sit down and work at it. But the desire to do so will still be there, under the skin of your fingers, itching.
Mukokuseki (むこくせき) is a word meaning “without country of origin.” Since Koichi Iwabuchi started using it to refer to the statelessness of anime, the term has come into more common use among Western critics. Generally it refers to the way Japanese cultural products can be seen to erase national history and identity in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with a global audience.*
Or it could just mean “what happens when two shamisen-playing brothers from Hokkaido re-interpret an Italian composer who was himself re-interpreting American ones.”
*If you haven’t guessed, I take this up in my thesis. I’m not sure I entirely agree with Iwabuchi, but I also think that most of the planet is reaching for mukokuseki.
...is a science fiction writer, grad student, おたく, and immigrant. She has lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto, where she is now a member of the Cecil Street Irregulars and a contributor to both Tor.com and WorldChanging Canada. Her fiction has been published in Tesseracts, FLURB, and Nature.
