>SUPERVERBOSE, Page 2

The Watchmen Bestiary 32 – Time Pieces

On March 1, 2021

Spoilers for Watchmen are relatively plentiful below.

Like Watchmen itself, The Annotated Watchmen v2.0 is divided into chapters, and the beginning of each chapter’s annotations outlines its motifs, its focus, its cover, and the source of its title quotation. Thus it is that as we enter Chapter 4, we focus on its epigraph, which the annotations cite as “A quotation from Albert Einstein.” Specifically, the epigraph is this:

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
— Albert Einstein

There’s only one problem: Einstein never said this. As Leslie Klinger correctly points out, the source of this alleged quote has not been found, and professional quote verifier Ralph Keyes has flatly stated that “Einstein said no such thing.” (The Quote Verifier, pg. 53.)

Say What?

The “quote” is in fact cobbled together from various things that Einstein said or sort-of said, but assembled to imply a sense that is quite false to Einstein’s actual viewpoints. There are three fundamental pieces to the epigraph:

1) “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking.”

This part of the epigraph nearly matches a sentence that Einstein wrote in a 1946 fund-raising telegram for the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. The first two sentences of that telegram are:

Our world faces crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

In the context created by Watchmen, this first portion of the Einstein “quote” sounds a bit resigned. In its true context, however, and with its final clause restored, it’s meant to instill a driving sense of urgency. The telegram winds up with a pitch for money — two hundred thousand dollars for a “nationwide campaign to let the people know that new type of thinking essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”

Einstein passionately believed that atomic weapons were too dangerous to rest in the hands of individual nations, and that the information on how to create them should be held only by a “supranational” world government organization. This was the mode of thinking he wished to change — a focus away from nationalism, and toward a one-world philosophy. Away from competition, toward cooperation. Having lived through two World Wars and having seen a Holocaust perpetrated against his people, Einstein felt convinced that if individual nations held atomic weapons, they would certainly use them against each other. He saw arms control as humanity’s best hope.

Unfortunately, though the Emergency Committee promoted peace plans, gave speeches, and even produced a couple of short movies to support its peaceful message, that message failed to gain a foothold in a world whose international temperature was rapidly plummeting toward Cold War. The Committee disbanded in 1951. Incidentally, one of the groups it funded during its lifespan was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, also co-founded by Einstein, and more importantly for our purposes, creators of the Doomsday Clock whose iconography Moore and Gibbons weave into every issue of Watchmen.

2) “The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.”

The ellipsis in Chapter 4’s epigraph is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Normally that punctuation mark suggests that we’re skipping over some superfluous material to arrive at a later point in the same quoted document. However, this “heart of mankind” sentence does not appear at all in the Emergency Committee’s fundraising telegram. It instead paraphrases a sentiment that the post-WWII Einstein frequently expressed, one which was arguably most prominent in a June 23, 1946 article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled “The Real Problem Is In the Hearts of Men.” Note that here Einstein does not argue that the solution is to be found in humanity’s heart, but rather the problem itself.

This article leads off with a recapitulation of the “new type of thinking” quote from the Emergency Committee’s telegram, so it’s reasonable enough to assume that “this problem” does in fact refer to the change in thinking Einstein saw as necessary. He then goes on to argue that the bomb makes armies irrelevant, now that nations can wage war on each other with rockets while never crossing each other’s borders. Furthermore, science has no defense against this kind of attack, and therefore national military buildup has become an obsolete strategy to secure safety. This article has several versions of Einstein’s famous “We cannot simultaneously plan for war and peace” sentiment, in service once again of the world government proposal.

The problem, as he states it, is that humans must cooperate to avoid self-inflicted destruction, but that competition comes much more easily to us than does cooperation. “It is easier to denature plutonium,” he asserts, “than it is to denature the evil spirit of man.” And yet, his only option is to speak to our higher selves, hoping to persuade enough people to change their way of thinking. “We will not change the hearts of other men by mechanisms,” he says, “but by changing our hearts and speaking bravely… When we are clear in heart and mind — only then shall we find courage to surmount the fear which haunts the world.”

This topic comes up a lot in a book called Einstein and the Poet, a fairly low-quality retelling of some Einstein interviews in which “the poet” (as the author has dubbed himself) speaks with Einstein on four different occasions: once before World War II, once during, and twice after. In the later discussions, Einstein returns again and again to the theme that humanity’s only hope is to alter its own heart. A sample:

I agree with you, intellect has never saved the world. If we want to improve the world we cannot do it with scientific knowledge but with ideals. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Gandhi have done more for humanity than science has done. We must begin with the heart of man — with his conscience — and the values of conscience can only be manifested by selfless service to mankind. (The pages are unnumbered in this book, so I can’t cite a page number.)

However, while it’s true that Einstein saw this change as humanity’s only hope, his outlook was not optimistic. When “the poet” asks him, “Why is it that you stand so alone in your plan to create a supranational government?”, Einstein replies, “Because men don’t want to change their hearts. At the bottom of all problems stands the human animal, with his greed.”

If the need to change our way of thinking is the problem, than of course the solution must come from within us, but Einstein didn’t tend to see “the heart of mankind” as a solution, but rather as a problem which must be overcome despite humanity’s natural inclinations.

3) “If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

Here we come to the most problematic piece of them all. While it’s very difficult to prove a negative, no one who has researched this quote can find any place where Einstein expresses any wistful proclivity for making watches. More’s the pity (I almost said “Moore’s the pity”) for Watchmen, which relies on that sentiment to tie Jon Osterman the walking bomb to his watchmaking father, and to the clock motif of the whole book. The very chapter title, “Watchmaker”, relies on the one word of this quote that Einstein does not seem to have said at all.

Not only that, but where Einstein did express this sort of regretful sentiment (albeit always with other professions like plumber or cobbler), it was not in the context that this epigraph tries to present. In the “quote” of Chapter 4’s last panel, the “if only I had known” seems to refer back to “the release of atom power”, and “this problem” of needing to instill new thinking in old human brains. The suggestion seems to be that if Einstein had known his investigations into relativity would result in the atomic bomb, he would never have become a scientist at all. But while he did feel some amount of guilt for his role in the bomb’s arrival, he never tied that guilt to any hindsight renunciation of his scientific career. On the contrary, science remained the guiding light of his entire life through his old age, and he continued passionately to advocate on behalf of its search for truth.

Now, he was certainly known to inveigh against things that irritated him in the human or physical realm, and to do so by rhetorically making a retroactive change to his profession — just not about his role in the creation of the bomb. Probably his most well-known use of this formula was in an 1954 interview in which he was bemoaning McCarthyism’s effects on academia.

In pushing back against the politicization of his profession, he stated that if he were young again and had to decide how to make a living in 1954, “I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler, in the hope of finding that modest degree of independence still available.” In other words, he’d still pursue science, just outside the academic cloister that had become a target of the political right. (This assertion, by the way, won him an honorary membership card in a plumber’s union.) (Einstein: His Life And Universe, pg. 533-4)

Even thirty years earlier, in a 1924 letter to Max Born, he made a statement like this about his deep discomfort with quantum physics and its notions of using probabilities and uncertainties in its model of the physical world:

I find it quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will not only its moment to jump off but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee of a gaming house, than a physicist. (Ibid., pg. 325)

This is not a statement of regret or guilt, but more an ultimatum delivered to physics itself. Though he’s often mistakenly associated with relativism (rather than relativity), Einstein in fact believed wholly in a physics whose rules were certain and unvarying — in fact he nearly named his theory of relativity the Invariance Theory, due to its strict causality and its assertion that the relationship between space and time remains constant no matter from what perspective it is viewed.

Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, 1925

He spent the latter half of his career challenging Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr’s probabilistic model of the atom, frequently reiterating various versions of “God does not play dice with the universe.” Far from dramatically abandoning his discoveries, his letter to Born about wanting to be a cobbler or gaming-house employee was a rhetorical position that demanded the falsity of quantum theory in order for physics to retain Einstein’s allegiance. He remained loyal to his deterministic vision throughout his life, ironically displaying a reluctance to change his own mode of thinking.

The closest approximation I could find to any wish on Einstein’s part to revise his past because of the bomb didn’t invoke any other profession at all. In 1939, Einstein had co-authored a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, warning him that a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium could be made into an extremely powerful bomb, and that German scientists might be pursuing such a bomb. The letter suggested that Roosevelt may want to have “some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America.” Roosevelt agreed, and the result was the Manhattan Project.

After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the conclusion of World War II, Einstein was horrified by the moral dimensions of the bomb. Due to his letter to Roosevelt and his E=mc² equation demonstrating the relationship between mass and energy, the popular press tagged Einstein as “father of the bomb”, though he’d done none of the technological work necessary to bring it to fruition. He was deeply uncomfortable with this label, lamenting the Roosevelt letter in a 1947 Newsweek article: “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I never would have lifted a finger.”

Again, this quote does not in the slightest shy away from a career in physics, let alone yearn for one in watchmaking. Instead, his sense of regret spurred his quest for a world government. Meanwhile Truman, that leader so beloved by Rorschach, dropped the bomb “with little high-level debate.” (Ibid, pg. 484)

Pieces of Time

So okay, Einstein didn’t really say what Watchmen says he said. But Chapter 4 focuses on Doctor Manhattan, and even choosing Einstein as the figure for the epigraph, regardless of the accuracy of the words, feels like a rich connection. What light can Einstein shed on the good Doctor?

Well, for one thing, their personalities have some attributes in common. Einstein was rebellious where Jon is passive, but they shared a similar difficulty in dealing with humans, especially in Einstein’s childhood. Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson wrote, “To use the language of psychologists, the young Einstein’s ability to systemize (identify the laws that govern a system) was far greater than his ability to empathize (sense and care about what other humans are feeling).” (Ibid., pg. 12) This doesn’t necessarily mean that he was “on the spectrum” as we say now (though some have certainly argued that case) — in fact he became very socially skilled in his adulthood. But human beings did pose more of a puzzle for him throughout his life than other natural phenomena — he knew how everything in this world fits together except people.

Perhaps related to this sense of remove, Einstein seemed to share with Dr. Manhattan a certain indifference to death. Here’s a quote from his letter of condolence to the family of his dear friend Michele Besso:

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. (The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, pg. 113)

Not only does his quote (to a grieving family!) veer rather close to “A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles” territory, he also seems to echo Doctor Manhattan’s insistence that linear time is an illusion.

Chapter 1, page 21, panel 3 of Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan says, "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?"

From here, it’s probably worth a step or two into the theory of relativity, a theory that has some rather surprising implications for the Watchmen universe. I’m hardly an expert on the topic, and I’d welcome any corrections, but based on my understanding, the first piece of this theory that Einstein worked out, leading to his landmark paper on special relativity in 1905, was a realization about time. In the Newtonian model of the 19th century and prior, time exists in a pure form, detached from observation — Newton wrote in his Principia, “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.”

Einstein, however, asserted that time is not absolute, but rather localized to each individual observer, with no way to determine what observation is “correct”. What seems simultaneous to one observer may not be so to another, and those observations depend upon the observer’s position and movement through space, thus revealing time and space as dimensions of the same fundamental fabric.

Now, consider that realization in light of a universe in which one tall blue observer experiences all occurrences as simultaneous, independent of his relationship to space. Does this disrupt the relativistic model? Jon certainly seems to think so. In his frustration at how humans insist on on seeing the “intricately structured jewel” of time edge by edge, he strongly implies that his viewpoint is the correct one, whereas in a relativistic model, he might see that his experience of time is no more or less true than Laurie’s. The notion of time as an “intricately structured jewel” rather than a quality woven together with space seems to me somehow even more Newtonian than time as “absolute, true, and mathematical.” One wonders if Jon is mistaking his own observations for fact, just as Newton did before he was upended by Einstein.

But while Jon’s experience of a whole and “true” time may seem Newtonian, the idea that all of it is predetermined actually fits quite well into Einstein’s worldview. In a 1929 interview, Einstein stated plainly: “I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will.” In this way, his viewpoint comports well with Dr. Manhattan’s experience of reality. As Isaacson explains, “Einstein… believed, as did Spinoza, that a person’s actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet, or star.” (Ibid, pg. 391) For Einstein, everything was governed by natural laws, including humans. It must have been enticing to believe that if he could only discover the full truth of those laws, the future would be laid out before him, just as it is for Doctor Manhattan.

Spooky Action At A Distance

This is why Einstein was so deeply discomfited by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that, “an electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it… It asserts that there is no objective reality — not even objective position of a particle — outside of our observations.” (Again, summarized by Isaacson, pg. 331-32) This assertion undermined the strict causality in which Einstein believed, and further fueled the arguments he had been having with Bohr about the structure of the atom and, by a web of interconnections, about the fundamental nature of reality itself. Bohr’s theories and observations seemed to argue against the existence of laws that determined a strict system of causation, and therefore against the existence of an objective reality, and certainly against Einstein’s determinism.

It would seem a question more for philosophers than physicists, but the quantum theory of Bohr and Heisenberg stood against Einstein’s notions of invariance to pose the fundamental query, “Is everything in the universe predetermined?” In the Watchmen universe, at least as experienced by Doctor Manhattan, the answer would seem to be: yes! It would have to be, in order for the Doctor to perceive time as all one piece. Einstein insists that God does not play dice, and Dr. Manhattan’s experience proves him right. But in fact, it appears that in our universe, he is wrong. In our universe, Bohr’s rejoinder is relevant: that it is not for us to tell God how to run his creation.

Einstein refused to accept quantum mechanical theory throughout his life, asserting that at best it is incomplete — he steadfastly refused to believe in the “spooky action at a distance” its tenets seemed to require. Consequently, he devoted much of his brilliance in the latter half of his career to devising thought experiments that could undermine the foundations of quantum physics. He co-published one of the most effective of these with Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky, and it became known as the EPR paradox, after the initials of its authors’ last names.

An illustration of the EPR paradox, in which Alice and Bob are two separate observers.

Put simply, the argument asks us to consider two particles that have collided or been emitted from the same source, and whose properties are thus correlated. Quantum theory states that until these particles are observed, their position and momentum exist in multiple states at once. But once we observe the first particle, we know something about the second due to their correlation, without ever having observed the second. For Einstein, this meant that the second particle has a reality of its own which exists independent of its observation — otherwise the first particle would have to somehow communicate with the second particle faster than the speed of light, which would violate the theory of relativity.

Bohr responded by introducing the concept of quantum entanglement. Because the particles have affected each other, they are “entangled” despite their distance from each other, and thus part of the same system. To deal further with the EPR paradox, some quantum theorists introduced the notion of branching alternate histories. Isaacson:

In the case of the EPR thought experiment, the position of one of the two particles is measured on one branch of history. Because of the common origin of the particles, the position of the other one is determined as well. On a different branch of history, the momentum of one of the particles may be measured, and the momentum of the other one is also determined. On each branch nothing occurs that violates the laws of classical physics. The information about one particle implies the corresponding information about the other one, but nothing happens to the second particle as a result of the measurement of the first one. So there is no threat to special relativity and its prohibition of instantaneous transmission of information. What is special about quantum mechanics is that the simultaneous determination of the position and the momentum of a particle is impossible, so if these two determinations occur, it must be on different branches of history.(pg. 460)

Thus histories branch out from each other based on the “decisions” made by particles of their direction & speed. This “decoherent histories” view is fundamentally antithetical to Einstein’s determinism, and to Dr. Manhattan’s experience of time as a single coherent block. Yet the Doctor is no stranger to submatomic physics, locating gluinos & being muddled by tachyons. How can we reconcile his subatomic awareness with his encompassing knowledge of the future, which seems fundamentally hostile to the notion of probabilities and uncertainties?

Are alternate histories a way out? Perhaps what the Doctor thinks of as his single jewel of perceived time is only one of an infinite array of such jewels? I think this line of reasoning shuts down rather quickly. Doctor Manhattan doesn’t just know or predict the future — Chapter 4 demonstrates clearly that he experiences the future even as he experiences what the rest of us would call the present and the past, all simultaneously. If there were any uncertainty involved, he’d be experiencing a range of possible futures all at once, not just one. His experience still stands with the theories of Einstein, shutting down those of Bohr.

Schrödinger’s Future

But wait. We may be able to reconcile these two seemingly antagonistic theories through the work of one more quantum physicist: Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger, like Einstein, had his doubts about the prevailing interpretations of quantum theory, and also like Einstein, loved a good thought experiment. In fact, his most famous thought experiment by far was directly influenced by Einstein, both his work and Schrödinger’s discussions with him. I’m referring of course to the unfortunate feline known as Schrödinger’s cat.

A brief summary: Schrödinger posited a cat inside a closed, opaque box, in which there is a tiny amount of a radioactive substance, one which has a 50% chance of decaying in the course of an hour. If the substance decays, it emits a particle which causes the cat to be poisoned. If it doesn’t, the cat is safe. The prevailing quantum theory of the time (called the Copenhagen interpretation) asserts that the particle’s behavior is governed by a probability waveform until such time as its behavior is observed, at which point the waveform collapses into an observed behavior which conforms to classical mechanics. Thus, until the box is opened, the cat is (according to the Copenhagen interpretation) both alive and dead at the same time.

A photo of a cat in a box, with superimposed text: "In Ur Quantum Box... Maybe"

For us humans, the future is rather like that closed box — indeterminate and existing in a variety of possible states at once, until we observe what actually occurs. As it becomes the present and then instantly the past, its waveform collapses into a single, clear reality. Up until November 22, 1959, that’s what the future was like in the Watchmen universe too. But on that day, Jon Osterman reassembled his components in the correct sequence, and became the fully fleshed Doctor Manhattan for the first time. On that day, he became aware of all times simultaneously, experiencing them as a coherent whole. On that day, he opened the box.

Might it be the case that Jon’s incarnation as Doctor Manhattan is the event that collapsed the waveform of the future into a single reality? And if so, knowing that his powers also allow him to control that reality down to its smallest particle, what part might his consciousness have played in the shape that future took? In becoming unmoored from linear time, could his sudden awareness of the future have created that future? At the end of the book, Jon decides he’s going to go to some less complicated galaxy and create some human life. But what if he already has?

All the living and dead cats and other beings of Watchmen snapped into a single observed reality in that one November moment. What influence Jon had over them, it’s obviously impossible to say. He was an oddly passive 20th century man, a frustrated watchmaker and a reluctant physicist. The course of his life was forcibly altered by his father, based on the existence of the atomic bomb. He had recently experienced the profound trauma of having his body dismantled down to the atomic level, then putting it back together for himself. If he decided the future, might it look like a confused horrorshow that somehow does stop the bombs from falling? Perhaps it might.

But if Jon truly is the observer of the open box of time, there are some things we’re hard pressed to explain given the evidence of the text. There are several times we witness limits to Jon’s understanding, superior though it may be to any human’s. What are we to make of his drive to search out particles and add them to the bestiary? Surely if he’s aware of every infinitesimal piece of reality, he’d already know where all the gluinos are, wouldn’t he? So there must be a frontier of his awareness at the subatomic level. Furthermore, his awareness of the single jewel of time must be incomplete if he can be muddled by tachyons, right? There must be parts of the future whose waveform is still intact, still within that closed box, shielded even from his sight.

This is the level at which Watchmen itself begins to decohere. For all its astonishing structural integrity, the early issues of the book were released before the final ones had been written. Moore himself has affirmed on numerous occasions his surprise at some of the deeper levels that he and Gibbons found themselves reaching as the creation continued. Thus are inconsistencies introduced, and although Moore and Gibbons do a marvelous job of spackling most of the cracks, they don’t get them all. If Watchmen were a true “graphic novel” — created as a single whole and released as such — rather than a Dickensian serial collage, perhaps we wouldn’t bump into these logical problems with Doctor Manhattan.

In the world of comics, we call these continuity problems — the way something established in an early issue grates against something in a later one. People loved to write into Marvel and point them out, and Marvel decided to give those people a little award made of words only, literally called a “no-prize”. Then they got even cleverer, crowdsourcing solutions to these problems by saying that they’d only give no-prizes to those readers who not only find the problems but find an explanation to solve them.

So let me take my own shot at a Watchmen no-prize, with this suggestion about Doctor Manhattan. On the day he becomes himself, he experiences all his times at once, and perceives himself as knowing how he’d act in all of those times, and how others would too. But his understanding is more limited than he knows it is, and his freedom less limited than he believes. He could in fact choose to behave differently than he experiences himself doing, but if he did, he wouldn’t be Jon Osterman anymore, the man whose moves are all made by other people. His fate isn’t pre-determined, but rather calculated on a scale that is precise but not infinitely precise. He is still vulnerable to thermodynamic miracles he wasn’t expecting.

Next entry: The Morality of My Activities
Previous entry: Part Of The Legend

A Crack In The Shell

By Paul O'Brian

On January 1, 2021

In Uncategorized

It’s January 1, and that means it’s time for another year-end music mix. As always, this is a year-end mix I make for some friends — full explanation on the first one I posted in 2010. It’s not all music from 2020 (in fact, my backlog of music to listen to pretty much guarantees that very little on here is timely.) It’s just songs I listened to this year that meant something to me.

As terrible a year as 2020 was, I spent much of it feeling pretty lucky. My job was able to smoothly transition into working safely at home, and I never felt the economic threat that hit so many people. (Laura’s job wasn’t quite so smooth, but she still has it at least.) I love the people I live with, and even after being in close proximity for much more time than usual, we still have a great time together. Our house has enough space for each of us to do our thing remotely if that’s needed.

Also, I’m so grateful that Dante is in high school, and therefore can pretty much self-manage everything he needs to do while we’re working. My colleagues and friends who have young children at home have it much rougher. For that matter, I’m grateful that school and work can even happen remotely. It’s hard to imagine how much more disruptive a pandemic like this would have been in pre-Internet days. I’m even able to virtually get together with friends for things like trivia, board games, and the occasional celebration, thanks to the Jetsons technology we all have now.

Still, god, what a year. As good as we have it, I defintely felt my share of disruptions, and one of those was in my life with music. The Album Assignments project went on pause, as Robby took on the daunting task of educating 5th graders remotely and I transitioned into a very different way of working. In the course of that transition, I found myself listening to music much less than I had before. My previous time with music was mostly spent on my commute, which evaporated after COVID-19 hit. I also worked a lot with music on, but that dried up too as I acclimated to working from home, with other people around.

Finally, sometime in June, it hit me that I was desperately missing music, and I made some changes. While I still listen to podcasts on my walks, I switched over to music while doing the dishes, cooking, and other household chores. I figured out ways to integrate it back into my work life, and I made it a part of the time I spent with Dante, including an awesome music trivia habit where we quiz each other on our favorite musical canons so that we can each learn from the other. (His are all instrumental videogame music, definitely not a strong genre for me.) We also found ourselves doing a lot of text adventures and board games (physical and virtual) together, activities which lend themselves to background music.

In any case, when it came time to make this mix, I was picking from a much shorter list than usual. Nevertheless, I’m very happy with how it came out. Here are some musical highlights from a pretty tough year.

1. Jonathan Coulton – Pictures Of Cats
How 2020 are these opening lines? “All at once, it fills up my feed / More bad news that I didn’t need / I can’t stop reading but I wish that I didn’t know.” I had that experience over and over this year, and definitely ended up doomscrolling through Twitter plenty of times when I should have just switched over to looking at pictures of cats. Strangely, I listened to this song before the full 2020 of it all hit the world, but when I reviewed the list, I knew there was no better song to kick off this mix.

2. Aimee Mann feat. James Mercer – Living A Lie
Like almost all of these tracks, this one was written prior to 2020, and in fact came out before the Trump era. And I don’t think it was ever intended politically — it’s about a relationship — but I felt like it perfectly captured a mood this year. When you’re stuck with a frantic liar, you have no choice but to live inside a lie. That was never more clear than in 2020, when the President’s relentless need for self-aggrandizement and seeking short-term advantage had him undermining and upending every single institution that any of the rest of us could trust. It got to the point where we couldn’t even be sure our own Centers For Disease Control were able to provide us reliable information. Often it felt like all we could do is wait for a crack in the shell. Thank god one came at the end of the year.

3. Richard Thompson – Keep Your Distance
I listened to a fair amount of Richard Thompson (and Linda too) toward the beginning of the year, so I wanted to include a song of his in this mix. When I looked over the list, the words “Keep Your Distance” jumped out at me. Once again, this is meant in the relationship sense, but “keep your distance” is so 2020! This was the year that simple trips to the grocery store felt like foraging expeditions into deadly territory, not helped by the wingnut contingent who wear their masks under their noses or not at all, because freedom or whatever. Keep your distance, wingnuts! (And sadly, everyone else too.)

4. Frank Sinatra – Mood Indigo
This was from one of the few 2020 album assignments, Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours. (Well, actually the tail end of 2019, but my listening year goes November-October, so it’s 2020 to me.) This was a concept album of sadness, and Sinatra’s smooth reading of this wonderful, melancholy Duke Ellington tune felt like a good summation of the story so far. Also, “Indigo” was particularly important this year, but more about that later.

5. Aretha Franklin – Chain Of Fools (unedited version)
And here’s the turn. I vividly remember waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store when this version of “Chain Of Fools” came into my ears. I’d never heard it before — it came up on Spotify or something. The slow, soulful intro — “the sound of pain” — suddenly bursting into “chain chain chain”… BLEW MY MIND. I’ve always loved the single version of this song, and having it set up like this made little fireworks of joy go off in my head. When I finally figured out in June that I needed to bring more music back in, Aretha’s Lady Soul was the album I started with, and it worked perfectly. I will never forget giddily dancing around the kitchen to these songs, like some kind of solo remake of The Big Chill, blissfully losing everything else in music and simple tasks.

6. Prince – Little Red Corvette
Lady Soul was the first album that brought music definitively back into my life. The Very Best Of Prince was the second. Prince hit big in the early ’80s, ages 12-14 for me, and I didn’t know how to process him. I think he scared me, honestly. I had friends who were fans, but all that sexuality, androgyny, and funk — I couldn’t deal with it. I pushed it away. This year, I invited it back in, and found that I love it now. Like a lot of parties, I’m very late to it, but having a great time now that I’m here.

7. Stevie Nicks – Stand Back
Anytime I hear “Little Red Corvette”, I’m pretty much always going to think of “Stand Back.” That’s because Stevie has a story she’s told many times, of driving on the highway towards her honeymoon of a short-lived, ill-advised marriage, pretty much the opposite of “a love that’s gonna last.” When “Little Red Corvette” came on the radio, she was inspired. She found a tape recorder, and composed her own song on top of Prince’s. Then, when recording “Stand Back”, she found the courage to call him and tell him this story, and in response he showed up and played the synth riff on it. “Stand Back” is the love child of ’80s chiffon royalty’s king and queen.

8. Stevie Nicks – Crying In The Night (live 2017)
You can hear that story, and many others, in Stevie’s concert film from her 24 Karat Gold tour. Despite the pandemic, I found my way to a movie theater twice this year. Once was for The New Mutants, a superhero movie that features my favorite Marvel character of all time, a Scottish mutant codenamed Wolfsbane. Having loved this character since I was 12, there was simply no way that I was going to miss seeing her played by Maisie Williams on the big screen. The movie had plenty of flaws, but it got Wolfsbane right, and for that I will always love it.

The other movie I showed up for was Stevie’s aforementioned concert film. It’s a filmed version of what I called “the Stevie Nicks show I’d been awaiting for 30 years.” In it, she told lots of stories like the one above — seriously, the movie is 2 hours and 15 minutes, and I think about 30 minutes of it is storytelling. She also sang songs she’d NEVER sung before in concert, including this one from the Buckingham Nicks album. That album isn’t even available on CD! What a thrill it was to hear her sing it in concert, and the movie brought back that thrill. Totally worth braving the virus.

9. Prince – Kiss
The next couple songs are just more sweet memories of my “soul kitchen” moments this year. “Kiss” is a super fun song on its own, and I can’t help hearing it in my mind juxtaposed with the version that The Art Of Noise recorded featuring Tom Jones. I thought about including that version in this mix, but after I went back and listened to it, I found that Prince outstripped it so dramatically that its inclusion could only feel disappointing after the real thing.

10. Aretha Franklin – (Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone
There’s not a lot to say about this one, except that it’s another standout moment from Lady Soul. My thick socks sliding around on our wooden kitchen floor, with this song playing in earbuds, led to great moments of happiness this year.

11. clipping. – All Black
Conversely, there is a lot to say about this one. First, some explanation of who this band is. The vocalist is Daveed Diggs, who has a bunch of credits, all of which are far overshadowed by the fact that he originated the roles of Jefferson and Lafayette in the Broadway production of Hamilton. clipping. is an experimental hip-hop trio in which Diggs joins producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. Their album Splendor & Misery was the last album assignment I wrote, posted just a few days before everybody went home and stayed there. Listening to it now, the music feels shockingly prophetic of what was to come. First of all, most of the story on the album is about a guy who is alone in space, first captured and then in control, but exiled from the world he knew. There have been plenty of times this year where I felt like I was in a space capsule, well-furnished and supplied with plenty of entertainment, but orbiting Earth rather than on it.

Secondly, the album and in particular this song is centrally concerned with Blackness and oppression. As it turned out, so was the summer of 2020. I wrote about this in the album post, how “all black everything” partakes of many layers of meaning, including as an allusion to other hip-hop songs that take it as a declaration of pride and strength. Those two images together — all black everything but isolated from everywhere — bundled up a lot of 2020 for me.

12. Jonathan Coulton – All This Time
Here’s another sci-fi song, albeit one in a vastly different musical mode. “All This Time” is from Coulton’s album Solid State, which I listened to a lot early in the year. It’s a wonderful album of thoughtful power pop about surveillance, technology, and love, and this is one of the standout songs. However, my attachment to this song in this year was more about its video than the song itself. That video was in the form of a text adventure — it’s by far the best text-adventure-themed video ever made, no disrespect to MC Frontalot’s “It Is Pitch Dark”.

That fits this year perfectly, because this was the year I jumped back into my passion for interactive fiction. Part of that was creating a new blog to house the many IF reviews that live on my old web page, and another big part of it was revisiting many games from the Infocom canon, but this time with Dante guiding the play. Together we replayed (or in his case, played for the first time) all the Zork and Enchanter games, and had a fantastic time doing it. I may write about it in the new blog at some point, but even if I don’t, I’ll treasure that experience. This year, many things were taken away in exchange for all this newfound time, and sometimes we made the most of it.

13. Genesis – No Reply At All
Some of those losses, though, had a really negative effect on me. Here’s one that I didn’t expect, until I understood how much I counted on what I didn’t have anymore. I found myself dealing with a pretty shocking (for me) level of insecurity this year. Uncharacteristically, I found myself frequently fretting about my relationships with pretty much everybody who doesn’t live with me, especially co-workers. Absences of replies, or even delays, had me worrying I’d somehow done something to upset whoever my anxious mind chose to focus on. It turns out that I really depend on mundane social interactions at work to provide a normalizing effect that reassures my brain that everything is okay. Take those away, and throw in a round of really stressful and destabilizing layoffs, and suddenly I become Anxious Guy.

By the way, I absolutely adore the bridge to this song. (The part that starts “Maybe deep down inside…”) I find bridges fascinating in general, the way they’re like a miniature new and different song inside the bigger song, and this one just really grabs me.

14. Adele – Cold Shoulder
Continuing the insecurity theme, this felt like the right Adele song to pick for my 2020. It’s not even that people were giving me the cold shoulder. (I don’t THINK?!? :P) I just spent way too much time worried about it. I’m still working on coping with that one.

15. Buffalo Springfield – For What It’s Worth
What is all this anyway? It’s paranoia, that’s what. So here’s “For What It’s Worth”, the best song I know about paranoia. On the personal level, my paranoia strikes deep, but isn’t really justified. On the larger cultural level, I’m not so sure. There’s the erosion of trust I talked about in #2. There’s the general bone-chill about how much support there still is for the lying, bullshitting, racist, bullying Toddler-In-Chief and the party that bent its knee to his every whim. As Bruce Springsteen said in a recent interview, “Overall, as somebody who was a born populist, I’ve got a little less faith in my neighbors than I had four years ago.” And then, of course, there are the police.

The comparison that keeps coming to my mind, that I haven’t heard anyone else make yet, is to the Catholic church. Both the church and the police in America are these institutions that many of us (at least, the “us” at less danger of victimization) grow up seeing as helpful, honorable, and virtuous. In both cases, there are some fundamental problems with the concept and structure of the institution itself, but they also perform a great deal of good in the world. In both cases, becoming part of the priesthood or fraternity requires an amount of self-sacrifice that is reflexively seen as noble, but that carries within it seeds that can bloom into full-blown evil.

In the movie Spotlight, there’s a moment that has always stuck with me. The team of reporters is just figuring out the scope of the abuse that has happened in the Boston diocese, and they’re on the phone with a researcher (a former priest and current psychotherapist) who has spent years gathering data about it. The researcher says “Look, the church wants us to believe that it’s a few bad apples, but it’s a much bigger problem than that.” How much bigger? “Well, based on the research, I would classify it as a recognizable psychiatric phenomenon.”

That’s big. I think something similar is at work with cops, race, and violence. In both cases, the evil behavior (I don’t think there’s any reasonable way out of that descriptor) is so shocking and repugnant when it comes to light that it permanently cracks my ability to ever trust that institution again. But even worse than that, in both cases, the institution does absolutely everything it possibly can to ensure that the perpetrators of that evil escape detection and escape the consequences. Over, and over, and over again, to the tune of thousands of cases. Thousands of innocent victims raped, molested, traumatized, killed. How in the hell is anybody supposed to trust them after that? In both cases, for me, that combination taints the institution so thoroughly that I don’t think it can be redeemed. We have to demolish it and start over with something fundamentally different.

Now, I know there’s about as much chance of doing that with the police as there is with the church. But I believe that there’s a version of it that could be as much a godsend to the police as to marginalized communities. What if we had another kind of first responder, someone trained to deal with issues of mental illness and addiction? After all, we don’t send police to fires. We don’t send them to epileptic seizures. We don’t expect a single kind of responder to have to deal with everything. What if we saved the police for, y’know, CRIME, and created a new role to take over some of the stuff we’re currently asking armed, uniformed officers of the state to take on, despite the fact that they’re trained much more for situations that require force, and therefore tend to bring it to situations that don’t when they’re sent there?

Okay, that was a long digression, wasn’t it? Anyway, great song, right? Moving on.

16. Indigo Girls – Pendulum Swinger
Amy and Emily were crucial to Laura and I this year. For a while there, as Look Long was getting ready to come out, they were doing weekly or near-weekly livestreams, and for each one we would joyfully gather ’round the screen, find a way to turn up the music, and feel like we were hanging out with old friends. The one they did where they were “playing for tips” to raise money for their crew, was an utter high point for me. Hearing them play stuff I’d never heard them do before — Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, Elton John’s “Love Song” and “Holiday Inn” — OMG it was so wonderful.

They featured this one in their “parking lot” concert in October, with Emily introducing it as just, “This is a song about change.” It felt like a little prayer, or a little wish that came true.

17. Amy Ray – Tear It Down
This was another special moment from that concert. I love how Amy here grapples with how she genuinely loves where she grew up and the traditions that shaped her, while still unshakably rejecting the racism and hate that is inextricably interwoven with that past. The studio version is a little sweeter and more subdued, but her solo acoustic live performance of it was just electrifying.

18. Mudcrutch – I Forgive It All
The Mudcrutch albums are hidden gems in Tom Petty’s catalog, and this one in particular is special, because it’s the last studio recording that Petty did before his death. For this mix, the Indigo Girls lift me out of fear and paranoia, into hope and resolution. Petty provides the final piece: forgiveness.

19. Stevie Nicks – Show Them The Way
Hope, resolution, and forgiveness all blend into Stevie’s 2020 song. Besides “All This Time”, this is the other song in this mix that I strongly associate with its video. That video, directed by Cameron Crowe, blends black and white footage from the 1960s into black and white footage from 2020 and points in between, drawing a clear line from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Lives Matter movement. And over it all, Stevie prays for all of us to find our way to a better future. Invoking the icons of 60s dreams — JFK, RFK, MLK — she tries to dream us back to ourselves. And Crowe, piling powerful images on top of each other with increasing urgency, ends with a simple message: “Vote”. In October of 2020, it felt like exactly the magic we needed.

20. Prince – 1999
When it came out, this song was about an apocalyptic future. Listening to it now, it feels like Prince was only 20 years off with the “party over, oops, out of time” description, and 1999 sounds like a pretty good place to be. The mood of it is of jubilation even through devastation, and I think we could use a little of that. Here’s to a brighter 2021.

The Watchmen Bestiary 31 – Part Of The Legend

By paulobrian

On November 2, 2020

In Uncategorized

[GM Note: There are spoilers in this article for Watchmen and the Watchmen-related materials produced for Mayfair Games, as well as HBO’s Watchmen series. Readers who don’t know this material and encounter these spoilers must make an INT action check against an OV/RV of 9/9 with a two column shift penalty or suffer 5 APs of disappointment.]

In 1972, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had an idea. What if you took the rules and mechanics of the board wargames they both loved, and adapted them so that players would control not only pieces, but actual characters in a story? The result was a new beast, a “role-playing game” (RPG) called Dungeons & Dragons, which gestated slowly throughout the 1970s and by 1980 blossomed into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. In 1982, D&D even showed up in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, still one of the most successful movies of all time.

So of course, as the Eighties rolled on, everybody wanted a piece of that sweet D&D action. Sure, the trailblazing game was set in a fantasy milieu, but no doubt there would be lots of other fun genres in which RPGs could romp, right? D&D‘s publisher TSR Hobbies was already on that train, producing Top Secret (a spy RPG), Gangbusters (1920s crime), Star Frontiers (sci-fi), and Boot Hill (western), among many others. Superheroes were ripe for development, but unlike the aforementioned genres, they were more dependent on character than on setting, and the dominant sets of character IP were owned by the Big Two comic book companies, DC and Marvel.

TSR solved this problem in 1984 by acquiring the Marvel license and producing the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. But they could hardly play both sides of the field, so that left DC to partner with one of TSR’s many competitors. They found a match in Mayfair Games, which had started out publishing railroad-building boardgames, but ventured into the RPG craze with Role Aids, a line of adventure modules and supplements advertised as compatible with D&D. (Not surprisingly, this marketing tactic later got them into legal hot water with TSR. At least they never got sued by Rolaids.)

Be Part Of The Legend!

Thus it was that in 1985, Mayfair released the DC Heroes role-playing game. That game’s tag line was “Be Part Of The Legend!”, and its cover (gorgeously drawn by George Pérez) featured some marquee Justice League heroes along with the New Teen Titans — DC’s hottest team at that time — battling a legion of villains.

This game faced a daunting design challenge, because some of that era’s DC characters were ludicrously powerful — for instance, Superman once destroyed a solar system by sneezing. How to represent such off-the-charts power alongside guys like Batman, who was essentially a peak athlete with wonderful toys? Designer Greg Gorden ingeniously married these extremes by introducing a logarithmic scale for game stats. Everything in the game gets measured in Attribute Points (AP), and every attribute point is worth twice as much as the one before it. As the manual explains, “Therefore, a DC Hero with a Strength of 6 is twice as strong as a DC Hero with a Strength of 5.”

So Batman has a strength of 5 (roughly 8 times stronger than an average human), while Superman has a strength of 50 (roughly 18 trillion times stronger than Batman). The two of them can exist on the same scale without having stats that are so long they run off the page. Of course, that mind-boggling gap also points out some of the structural problems of the DCU in those days — many of its heroes were so staggeringly powerful that it was almost impossible to place them in dramatic jeopardy. DC would attempt to solve those problems with its Crisis On Infinite Earths, a universal reboot that set DC characters back to more reasonable power levels. In the 1989 second edition of the game, Superman’s strength was down to 25, a mere 16-million-fold increase over Batman. Well, a little more reasonable anyway.

Crisis was also a 1985 event, a 12-issue “maxi-series” that ran from April 1985 to March 1986. In fact, the DC Heroes RPG got released right in the middle of the series, which put Gorden in an awkward position. Mayfair couldn’t wait a year for the series to complete — they needed to get their game out in time for the ’85 Christmas season — but releasing before Crisis was over meant that some of the game’s information would be drastically wrong almost immediately. In fact, Gorden had to include a section in his (charming) designer’s notes entitled “What about Crisis On Infinite Earths?”, which explained that he was bound not to include details in the game that would spoil developments in Crisis, some of which DC hadn’t decided yet anyway! Nevertheless, he assured us that he’d been working extensively with DC editorial, and that “The information in the game, concerning characters and places and events, are compatible with my latest information as to how things will be when Crisis is over…” mostly.

The yearlong story arc of Crisis wasn’t the only thing making DC Heroes‘ timing awkward. It also came out just before two other epochal publications that would change the tone of comics for years to come: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and another little series called Watchmen. Mayfair had followed up DC Heroes, as any good RPG publisher would, with a blizzard of supplements — adventure modules, sourcebooks, atlases, and so forth. How could they incorporate these radical new visions into the game’s generally sunny tone?

Well, Miller’s Batman was grizzled and futuristic, but he was still Batman, and could be addressed as a kind of “imaginary story” scenario. The Watchmen characters and their universe, though, were brand new, and would have to be statted up in new publications. Mayfair took three shots at this:

Who Watches The Watchmen?, a 1987 module by Dan Greenberg — set in 1966 of Watchmen time,
Taking Out The Trash, another 1987 module, this one by Ray Winninger and set in Watchmen‘s 1968, and finally the
Watchmen Sourcebook, also by Winninger and containing loads of background information for the characters and their world.

In 2019, DC very helpfully — no doubt motivated by Watchmen‘s latest media juicing on HBO — collected all three of these artifacts into a volume they call the Watchmen Companion. (It also conveniently includes that issue of The Question that “guest-stars” Rorschach.)

The supplements have a fascinating history, especially considering the fact that Alan Moore actively collaborated with their authors. This was before his contract disputes with DC, and obviously well before his current vituperation of all things superheroic. Back in the Mayfair days, he was just another DC creator, excited about the possibilities of exploring his fictional universe. Dave Gibbons also participated, contributing original art to the modules.

It’s worth noting that Moore and Gibbons’ participation makes these RPG materials the only extensions of Watchmen ever created that could reasonably lay claim to any kind of “canonical” status. Greenberg rejects this notion, saying, “Only the Watchmen series itself is canon. My game is only an adaptation — reflected light and not the source.” Similarly, Winninger considers his work “a little footnote in the Watchmen story.”

Ultimately, I think the question of this material’s canonicity is kind of a silly one. Did these stories “really happen” in the Watchmen universe? Are they “really” part of the legend, or aren’t they? Well, does it matter? Would it change anything about the series if they are, or aren’t? As Moore writes in his script for the 1986 final issue of Superman Volume One, “This is an IMAGINARY STORY… aren’t they all?”

Who Plays The Watchmen?

In any case, RPG modules aren’t really stories, but rather frameworks within which a variety of stories could take place. For Greenberg’s module, that meant exploring what might have happened after the failed attempt by Captain Metropolis (aka Nelson Gardner) to create the “Crimebusters” with the book’s six main characters in 1966. The module’s story picks up immediately after this meeting, with Nelly scheming a way to persuade the heroes over to his side.

Echoing the plot of Watchmen itself, Captain Metropolis decides that his would-be Crimebusters must have a common enemy to confront. He disguises himself as a mysterious underworld boss called only “M” (thus rather ingeniously linking not only himself and Moloch, but also two Fritz Lang references), and hires underworld goons to arrange kidnappings of people close to each of the characters, such as Hollis Mason, Sally Jupiter, and even his own mother, Matilda. Still more nefariously, Gardner ties the kidnappings to a civil rights group known as the American Negro Alliance, thus focusing superheroic attention on all that “black unrest” he was so worried about at the meeting.

He calls the heroes together, and asks them to work as a team to help find all the missing victims, since the kidnappings seem to have targeted the not-really-Crimebusters as a group. What happens next? Well, that’s up to the players. Interactive narratives can allow the story to travel down a number of different possible roads. Depending on the range of interactivity available, the story may be more or less “on rails”, but in a tabletop RPG, players are generally offered a very wide range of action. So maybe the characters look into the kidnappings, or maybe they look into why Captain Metropolis is the one to bring them together, or maybe they decide to write the whole thing off and go on patrol, or go to Antarctica, or go back home. Heck, maybe they’re homemade heroes who aren’t even the characters from Watchmen at all.

The module assumes that they are the Watchmen characters (though not Dr. Manhattan, it should be noted), and that they do decide to investigate the kidnappings. It’s up to a Gamemaster (GM) to decide how much to rein the players’ choices into what the module covers. Assuming they do decide to chase down the clues, how much they find depends on their ideas and their dice rolls.

If the players and their dice rolls cooperate with the story’s framework, and/or a GM engineers events such that players proceed through the module as written, they’re likely to visit the offices of the American Negro Alliance, the apartment of an underworld figure called “Mole”, and/or a counterculture rally in Battery Park. The GM is encouraged to play Captain Metropolis as uptight, whiny, and racist — challenging ANA workers for being “uppity”, or complaining at the rally, “That isn’t music! It’s noise! And to think they are playing on the same stand the Air Force Band and the Singing Sergeants play on every Fourth of July. There is no justice.” Even if the players don’t suspect him, they’re sure to dislike him.

Finally, they’ll be led to Moloch, who has indeed been funding more radical protest groups, since their activities draw the attention of the police, thus distracting the cops from Moloch himself. If defeated in battle, Moloch will (truthfully) deny any knowledge of the kidnappings, though, and Gardner will find a way to “discover” a note with information as to the whereabouts of the missing people. If the rescue goes well, the players may believe that Moloch was behind the whole thing. If it goes badly, Captain Metropolis may have to reveal his secret in order to keep his mother alive.

Do the heroes find out who’s been pulling their strings? Do they come together as the Crimebusters after all? Do they splinter again, no different than they were before the beginning of the module? How it goes will vary from one gaming group to the next, an ambiguous outcome which is not only in keeping with the spirit of RPGs, but of Watchmen itself. The last page of the game deliberately echoes the “I leave it entirely in your hands” last page of the book, in the section describing a confrontation with Gardner:

What the Players elect to do with Captain Metropolis is their matter. They could turn him over to the police, ostracize him from hero society, or they could view his act as a noble, if dangerous, one and consider maintaining their allegiances. The decision is theirs.

The Harlot’s Curse Taking Out The Trash

Winninger also cared very much about staying true to the spirit of Watchmen, a fact which shines through several different aspects of his module, Taking Out The Trash. For one thing, it tries to be just as atmospheric and reference-heavy as Watchmen itself. DC Heroes modules are broken up into “encounters” (scenes, more or less), and the title of every encounter in Taking Out The Trash references a pop song — “The Sound Of Silence”, “Sympathy For The Devil”, “I Am the Walrus”, and so forth. (Or at least, most of them do — I couldn’t find a clear referent for a couple.) Not only that, the GM is encouraged to open most scenes with either a snippet of Rorschach’s Journal or an excerpt from William Blake‘s poem “London”. One of the main antagonist groups scrawls graffiti everywhere that quotes from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven And Hell. A literary quote accompanies each main character’s stat block and history, pulling in authors like Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Sir Phillip Sidney. You get the picture.

The module also uses a similar storytelling technique to the back matter in Watchmen issues, providing exposition and background via newspaper clippings, interview excerpts, or “found” documents like a letter to Adrian Veidt from his head of marketing. With a smile and a wink, this letter purports to accompany “the manuscript the guy from Chicago turned in for the second adventure in the ‘Ozymandias Role Playing Game.'” Winninger, let it be noted, got the call to write this second Watchmen module while still a student at Northwestern.

That “manuscript” includes a historical breakdown of the Watchmen world, with a writing credit shared between Winninger and Moore. Now, based on everything Winninger has said about the process of creating these supplements, I don’t believe that means that Moore actually produced any of this module’s text at his own typewriter. Rather, I suspect that Winninger (and Mayfair) provided him a co-writing credit because this section of the module was a summary of the work Moore had already produced — with some extra details added here and there. This is different from the rest of the module, which was much more original to Winninger — the Blake-quoting street gang didn’t come from Moore.

In fact, that gang is an example of how the module’s references aren’t always handled with Moore’s grace — they often feel troweled in, or just tacked on. Then again, as Winninger notes in his introduction to The Watchmen Companion, he was all of 20 years old when he wrote the thing, so fair enough. The form and content of the entire adventure represent a bold grasp at the kind of ambition that marks Watchmen throughout. That includes the plot, which finds the main characters at the 1968 Republican convention, working to prevent Moloch from assassinating Richard Nixon, and (if they succeed) thereby ensuring the beginning of the Nixon presidency that continues all the way into Watchmen‘s 1985.

Or, at least, that’s what Winninger intended. Mayfair unfortunately took an editorial machete to Winninger’s manuscript, derailing much of its historicity. He tells it best:

Mayfair editorial excised all its references to real people and places and replaced most of them with goofy parodies. Oliver North became “Findlay Setchfield South.” Max’s Kansas City became “Mex’s Indy City,” home of the “Velour Underground.” Nixon is known only as “the VP,” confusing readers. (Hubert Humphrey was Vice President in 1968; Nixon was VP a full 10 years earlier.)… Worst of all, the book was hastily retitled “Taking Out The Trash.” My title, “The Harlot’s Curse,” was pulled from the William Blake poem that serves as an epigraph to the story, following the template Alan established in naming each of Watchmen‘s 12 chapters.

Now, in fairness to Mayfair, when your market is likely the parents of adolescent boys, having the word “harlot” in your title probably represents an unreasonable risk. Nevertheless, all of Mayfair’s changes do have a significant negative impact on the module, and signify the struggle that they had with incorporating Moore and Gibbons’ dark vision into their world of Teen Titans and Justice League. The “Velour Underground” and “Findlay Setchfield South” feel very mainstream DC, a bit like Metropolis and Hub City.

Mayfair editorial could have helped in the department of fact-checking and proofreading, but several prominent errors remain in the book. The overall plot summary (captioned “The Big Picture”) cuts off mid-sentence, about 70% of the way through. (This error wasn’t created by the The Watchmen Companion‘s reprint — it exists in the original module.) Rorschach gets called “Joseph Walter Kovacs”, when in fact his correct name is “Walter Joseph Kovacs.” The module refers to Hooded Justice throughout as “The Hooded Justice”, or sometimes just “The Justice.” Perhaps it’s a misnomer acquired via Eighties DC comics’ habit of saying “The Batman” rather than just “Batman”?

In any case, the story of the module follows the heroes’ discovery of a gang called the Bretheren (the Blake-obsessed criminals), who turn out to pose a threat to the convention, which in the Watchmen game universe takes place in New York rather than in Miami. An NYPD captain and a Secret Service honcho ask the heroes to provide security for the convention, and players can find a number of clues that help them track down the gang. After a climactic battle on the convention floor, successful players may discover that Moloch was directing the Bretheren’s attacks, in hopes that he could eliminate the competition for a candidate called Ken Shade, who had essentially “sold his soul” to Moloch’s organized crime network in order to pay gambling debts. They may also choose to take down the gang once and for all at its headquarters.

Strangely, there’s a subplot running through the module that involves only The Comedian. In these scenes, The Comedian follows “Findlay Setchfield South”‘s orders to eliminate a different rival to Nixon. I haven’t logged the world’s most RPG hours myself, but I’ve played my share, and the experience is almost always a group one. Having a GM play out a separate series of scenes with just one player, especially when those scenes are meant to be interleaved with the main action and kept secret from the other players, seems like it would require a pretty unusual gaming group dynamic. I wonder how many of the GMs who ran this module ended up just jettisoning the extra Comedian stuff entirely?

As always, there are plenty of ways for the story to end, depending on what directions the players chose and how well the dice cooperated with their intentions. In the module’s epilogue, which assumes that they’ve successfully foiled Moloch and The Bretheren, the characters watch on television as Nixon (or rather “The VP”) accepts his nomination, and then the GM reads out a final Blake quote, this one incorporating “the youthful Harlot’s Curse” and how it “blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.” Even in success, players get a very downbeat ending, in keeping with the mood of Watchmen itself.

Back To The Source

The third Mayfair Watchmen publication isn’t an adventure at all, but what the game calls a sourcebook. Here’s their explanation:

A sourcebook contains game-related and background material on a certain subject relating to the DC Universe, most often a specific group of heroes, a certain location, or a special genre. GMs who prefer writing their own adventures will find sourcebooks especially helpful, since in addition to characters’ statistics, sourcebooks contain historical, organizational, and reference material about the sourcebook’s subject.

By 1990, when this book was published, Mayfair had produced plenty of sourcebooks — Batman, Superman, Doom Patrol, Justice League, Apokolips, et cetera. These books tended to be detailed breakdowns of the characters in question, plus articles about their gear, their headquarters, their supporting casts and rogue’s galleries, and so on. The Watchmen sourcebook took a different tack.

Rather than just writing article after article about Watchmen characters, Winninger took a page from Moore’s book (often literally) and provided background in the spirit of Watchmen‘s back matter — newspaper clippings, correspondence, psychiatric reports, ID cards, excerpts from Under The Hood and so on. I say he literally took a page because maybe 25% of the sourcebook is reprints of Moore’s back matter itself, often reformatted or parceled out into different pieces, but otherwise intact.

Some of the new material reinforces the book’s story (such as a newspaper clipping whose headline reads “Nite Owl breaks Rorschach out of Riker’s Island!”), but much of it builds on tiny hints in the book. For instance, we get full stats and descriptions for every villain or joke-villain that even gets a whisper of a mention in Watchmen — Captain Axis, Underboss, The Twilight Lady, The Screaming Skull, and so on — with a brief origin story, a “whatever happened to” section, and even the most famous crime pulled by each. The book has a full writeup of the “Owlcar” that Dan and Laurie walk by in his basement, complete with budget and possible issues (“Standard Tires are woefully inadequate. Tires must be armored against damage.”) There’s a floor plan of Minutemen headquarters.

Page 85 of the Watchmen sourcebook, which lists RPG details of the Owl's Nest and Owlcar

Winninger managed to throw in a few jokes himself. For instance, in the Rorschach section, we get a scrap of Rorschach’s journal proclaiming that he has “at least one ally here in the lair of the weak”: a taxi driver. It seems Rorschach was fleeing the police when a cab driver offered him a ride. “Told me I was his hero. Told me he was compelled to war against the sinners and the politicians and the false prophets as well.” Winninger’s insertion of Travis Bickle (obviously) into Rorschach’s backstory draws similar conclusions to what annotators would be arguing for in years to come.

He also took open questions from the text of Watchmen and closed them. For instance: who killed Ursula Zandt, the Silhouette? Hollis Mason in Watchmen only tells us that “she was murdered, along with her lover, by one of her former enemies.” Winninger names this enemy in Taking Out The Trash: it was apparently “the Liquidator.” The Sourcebook gives us a description of the Minutemen’s battle with this Liquidator, his hospital report after the battle (including his real name), and the section of her biography that details the murder scene.

In a similar fashion, Winninger nails down the identity of Hooded Justice, which brings us at long last to the Watchmen web annotations. In their endpages notes for Chapter 3, those annotations state:

Hooded Justice was likely killed by the Comedian. (If Mueller (sic) was Hooded Justice. There is no evidence for this anywhere in the comic; but the Mayfair Games DC Heroes Module, “Taking Out the Trash,” agrees with this assessment, in the section co-written by Moore.)

This note resolving Hooded Justice’s identity is ironic when it annotates a page where Hollis Mason writes, “Real life is messy, inconsistent, and it’s seldom when anything ever really gets resolved.” Mayfair’s Watchmen materials are messy at times, but they’re pretty consistent, and at least when it comes to the sourcebook, they resolve a lot. Hooded Justice’s section of that book has immigration documents for Müller’s parents, police reports of their domestic violence cases, a note from Rolf’s father leaving his mother, ads from his circus strongman career, newspaper clippings, the New Frontiersman smear on him, and more.

It’s wonderful stuff, full of story hooks for enterprising GMs, but from today’s vantage point, at least for someone who’s watched the Watchmen HBO series, its neat resolutions have acquired some competition. I couldn’t help reading all the Rolf Müller stuff with a sense of disappointment, because while that take on the Hooded Justice story is fine, I found Damon Lindelof’s alternate origin of Hooded Justice as Will Reeves to be orders of magnitude more compelling. Perhaps it’s because the Watchmen sourcebook is an invitation to creativity, but the HBO series is an outpouring of creativity, a response to Watchmen‘s questions that, like the original, constructs a crystalline and multi-layered story that works on a myriad of levels.

It’s difficult, maybe impossible, for an interactive narrative to meet that standard, and that’s one of the fundamental problems with trying to make any aspect of Watchmen interactive. The book is a self-contained universe, a precision timepiece whose pieces fit together exquisitely, allowing for no deviation. Where all the other DC books (with the possible exception of The Dark Knight Returns) just go on and on and on, Watchmen has a very clear stopping point, after which most of the characters are either erased or so radically changed that they’re basically starting from scratch.

Consequently, when Mayfair wanted to create interactive experiences in the Watchmen universe, they had to go back into the past — 1966 or 1968 in their two attempts. Of course, because Watchmen is only 12 issues, and only part of those detail the past, there’s not a large menu of options to choose from — hence both modules’ reliance on Moloch as a villain. Similarly, the sourcebook pours a lot of effort into detailing character histories, but by the time Watchmen ends, most of those histories have ended permanently. To play through any scenario that matters with them, you’d have to go back into the past.

That’s what made Lindelof’s choice to go forward instead such a brilliant one. He was able to still make use of some of the book’s characters, but he accepted the challenge of starting anew. Could Angela Abar’s story play out in an RPG? I can’t say it’s impossible, because there’s a world full of creativity out there, but I think it’s fair to say that the structures of the story inherently resist interactivity, because the way they travel through time, the way they reveal themselves gradually, and the sense of inevitability around them, is just too precise.

Doctor Manhattan personifies this inevitability, which is why he’s quickly written out of both modules. Well, that’s not quite true. Greenberg’s module allows for the possibility that Dr. Manhattan could be a player character, one with knowledge of Captain Metropolis’ plan, but cautions:

It is vital, however, that the Player not act on this information and confront Captain Metropolis because, in his timeline, Dr. Manhattan did not confront Captain Metropolis in the past, is not confronting Captain Metropolis in the present, and will not confront him in the future. Dr. Manhattan is tied to his timeline, and while he knows the future, he cannot alter it.

But in this case, really, what’s the point of role-playing? Not only that, unlike the Dr. Manhattan of the text, it’s completely impossible for an RPG Manhattan to see all eras simultaneously, because he’s not in a text. In a book or show where every narrative turn is already worked out, such a character is like someone who’s already read or watched the whole thing. But an RPG is tied to time far differently – not even the GM knows how things will work out.

I would argue that Watchmen inherently resists expansion, and all the projects that have tried have all had to find ways to escape the original’s gravity. I haven’t explored them all, and I don’t plan to, but reading Mayfair’s material makes it clear to me that another self-contained dramatic effort has a much greater chance of success than an open-ended interactive one. RPGs, like William Burroughs’ cut-ups, explore the way randomness can drive narrative, but Watchmen leaves nothing to chance.

Next Entry: Time Pieces
Previous entry: Triangolo des Vigilantes

[Acknowledgements: In preparation for writing this post, I watched Vincent Florio’s video explanations of the DC Heroes game, lurked on the DC Heroes facebook group, listened to the Hero Points Podcast, and checked out the All-Star Games show on DC Universe. All of these resources were extremely useful for helping me understand the game as it’s played, and I’m grateful to everyone who had a hand in their creation!]

PSA: WordPress.com Deceptive Marketing

By paulobrian

On October 31, 2020

In Uncategorized

Those of you who have followed this blog over the years may have noticed that it had ads on it for a long time, and was at the address superverbose.wordpress.com. Then, last September, the ads went away and the address became just superverbose.com. Now the ads and the old address are back. Why? Well, there hangs a tale.

I started this blog in 2004 on LiveJournal. LJ was a great home for a long time, but in 2011-2012 it started to feel like it was falling apart. I got more and more of a feeling of impending doom… which I guess turned out to be wrong, because it’s still running and hosting the old version of this blog, but in any case I moved over to WordPress.com in 2012. I’m careful to call it WordPress.com because there is also a WordPress.org, and they are apparently two very different things. People have strong opinions about the differences between them.

Well, I’ve loved being on WordPress.com. It makes having a blog extremely easy, it handles all the hosting stuff, and I think it looks great. Plus, the basic level of it is free and pretty good, albeit ad-strewn. So as I wrote more and more — Album Assignments, Watchmen, Geek Bowl, etc. — and got more and more visitors, I felt like it was time to pony up. Mainly, I wanted to get rid of ads, and the fact that I could have my blog on its own domain (rather than a subdomain of wordpress.com) was a bonus.

So in September of 2019, I decided to buy a “Personal Plan” — basically a bare-bones subscription that did what I wanted. When I bought it, the site seemed to offer me a free upgrade to the “Premium Plan” for a year, which I really didn’t need or care about, but hey, free, so why not?

Fast forward a year. I keep getting notices that my Premium Plan is expiring, but that’s fine — I’m happy to let it expire since I still have another year of the Personal Plan remaining. But then I notice — I’ve been switched to the free plan! A glitch, I guess. So I write the “Happiness Engineers” (yeah, that’s what WordPress.com calls its support staff) and say, “…now that the Premium has expired, it seems like WordPress has forgotten about my second year of the Personal plan. Can you please reinstate me to the proper status?”

The reply I get back tells me no no no, I didn’t get a free upgrade to Premium. I traded my two-year plan for a one-year plan. That was my “free upgrade”. WTF?!? I would never have traded two years for one if it had been in any way clear that I was canceling one plan and choosing another. In fact, my billing history shows full payment for two years of Personal, and another $0.00 for one year of Premium, which is why I thought I had a free one-year upgrade as a promotion, hoping to entice me to continue at a higher level. In my experience, plenty of subscription services offer such free temporary upgrades in hopes that customers will enjoy the higher level of service so much that they’d continue paying for it after the trial period expires.

Nope, after multiple back-and forth exchanges with multiple “Happiness Engineers” (who did not engineer my happiness very well at all), WordPress.com insists that they never offered any such promotion, and that they “understand that you might’ve missed that information while checking out on the upgrade.” ARGH!

So now they’re insisting I have to pay for a second year, when in my mind I’ve already paid for it. As the old Alison Moyet song goes, “I feel I’ve been had, and I’m boiling mad.”

I’ve gone round and round and round with these guys. No luck. The best offer I’ve gotten from them (the only offer I’ve gotten) is a code for 17% off their “two years for the price of three” deal. I can’t quite swallow that right now. So the ads are back, and I guess I chalk it up to a learning experience. I’m posting this for anybody thinking of paying for WordPress.com. Don’t fall for the same trick that swindled me!

One last note. My day job is as the product owner of a web site that provides critical services for college students. We have a User Experience (UX) team whose entire mission is to prevent ridiculous snafus like this. So in my final email exchange with the Frustration Engineers, I said this: “From your side, here’s what I’d request or suggest: you guys have a UX team, right? Will you please pass along my experience to them? I think a tweak to the UX when it comes to upgrading could avoid this entire issue. For instance, if in the process of claiming my ‘free’ upgrade, I’d gotten a message like ‘WARNING: You are cancelling your two-year Personal Plan and exchanging it for a one-year Premium Plan. Do you still want to proceed?’, I could have been saved many headaches and you could have been saved many emails.” Grrrrrrr…

A radiation symbol in black on a yellow background. Underneath are stenciled words: DANGER QUARANTINE AREA. The stencil for "AREA" is held by two hands at the bottom of the frame. A dialogue balloon pointing off panel reads "Walkin' on... Walkin' on the moooooooon"

The Watchmen Bestiary 30 – Triangolo des Vigilantes

By paulobrian

On May 20, 2020

In Uncategorized

Ee yo, ee yo, ee yo, yo, yo, yo, YO, the following article contains spoilers for Watchmen.

I’m all reggatta de blanc today because of this panel, from page 19 of chapter 3:

The radiation symbol appears on the cover of chapter 3, and reverberates throughout the issue, including this panel and the one immediately preceding it on the previous page:

However, where the preceding panel juxtaposes the symbol with the words from Tales Of The Black Freighter and the dubious sagacity of Bernard the news vendor, the quarantine panel brings in a different overlay. Web annotations, do your thing:

The symbol, this time being painted on their bedroom door. The singer’s rendition of “Walking on the Moon” by the Police foreshadows Dr. Manhattan’s trip to Mars.

Leslie S. Klinger, in Watchmen Annotated, takes the analysis a step further:

The song’s first line, “Giant steps are what you take,” is an ironic preview of Dr. Manhattan’s imminent departure, first from New York and then from Earth.

And yeah, that’s pretty much how this is working on the surface level. It’s a clever and mildly contemporary pop culture reference — “Walking On The Moon” came out in 1979, seven years prior to this issue of Watchmen. Its lyric about giant steps connects with Jon’s teleportation, and its lunar imagery resonates nicely with the iconic final image of this issue — Dr. Manhattan sitting alone in a cratered landscape against a backdrop of stars. That image also fits in well with the mention of quarantine. Talk about your social distancing.

But here’s the thing about references in Watchmen. Paying close attention to one is like closing your eyes and listening to a song on repeat, through really good headphones. Suddenly all this detail appears, little effects buried deep enough that you didn’t notice them before.

If you listen to “Walking On The Moon” like that, you’ll hear weird sci-fi sonics sliding by in the deep background — some kind of analog synth, or maybe a guitar note filtered through one of Andy Summers’ many effects pedals. And with the images of space, you’ll also hear lots of… space. Nigel Gray, the co-producer of this song, explains it thus:

“Walking On The Moon” has two guitar parts, but there are long gaps in it where you’d expect an extra guitar to fill in — and there’s nothing, just the groove. They get the backing track, add the vocals and one or two overdubs, then have the faith to leave it. If anyone else had recorded “Walking On The Moon” it wouldn’t have been a hit — it’s what the Police do to it that makes it special.

(L’Historia Bandido, pg. 61)

The first thing you’ll notice is that the song doesn’t start cleanly. There’s a stray bass note suggesting that things have already happened, a bit like the in medias res opening of Watchmen. Then the ticking drums, three notes of bass, and what Andy Summers calls “a big shining D minor eleventh chord that acts like fanfare to the subsequent get-under-your-skin melody.” (One Train Later, pg. 208).

Listen on repeat and certain parts will establish themselves as dominant, foremost of which is the groove. “Walking On The Moon” is loping, distant, spacey. Sting’s bass gives it an anchored and calm feeling, a confidence that takes us through the empty spaces. It’s the same few bass notes, over and over, for the first minute and a half of the song.

Behind the vocals, the bass, guitar, and drums begin to braid together. There are only three players in The Police, but they are more than the sum of their parts. They interweave to form a strong tripartite structure, like the three parts of this chapter. The news vendor’s story, Dr. Manhattan’s story, Dan and Laurie’s story. Sting, Stewart, Andy. A triangle.

Cover of the "Walking On The Moon" single

In his memoir Broken Music, Sting describes what he learned about working in a band with this configuration: “By playing as a trio I would learn the value of space and clarity between musical frequencies, which larger bands can’t help but fill.” (pg. 179) That’s that space we hear in “Walking On The Moon.” But there was a bigger triangle in Sting’s life.

Young Gordon Sumner’s mother Audrey was married to his father Ernest, but she was in love with another man, a man named Alan. Ernest owned a dairy, and Alan worked there for a time, enough time to entrance Audrey and himself into a bond that would last their lives. For decades, she would go out on Thursday nights, under the threadbare excuse of visiting Nancy, one of the assistants at the dairy. Ernest knew it was a lie, but couldn’t bear to leave her, and instead hurled sarcastic taunts as she left, then wept miserably while she was gone. The terrible tension of this triangle would thread all through Sting’s childhood, as his home life turned into “a series of squalid, ugly conflicts” (pg. 64).

Eventually, almost inevitably, he found himself repeating that tension in his own relationships, both as the victim and as the transgressor, his father’s role and his mother’s. It’s all over his music, too — for every giddy-in-love “Walking On The Moon”, there are plenty of “So Lonely”s and “Can’t Stand Losing You”s, lots of lonely messages in lots of bottles.

Triangles loom large in Watchmen too. As the symbol for Pyramid Deliveries, one appears on the very first page of the book, and they repeat themselves throughout. Adrian’s picture in Nova Express is credited to Triangle Inc. Joey badgers Bernard into hanging up a poster for the band Pink Triangle. There’s a triangle around the Buddha at the crime scene that detective Fine investigates in chapter 5. They are all over Adrian’s costume, and his fortress.

In fact, the very panel we’re examining today features triangles, albeit in a more subtle way. The top of the radiation symbol and its diagonally-jutting lower parts form a triangle, and the angled lines of each section leading toward the center suggest alternating black and yellow triangles. Those three black shapes around the central disc echo these trios. Sting, Stewart, Andy. Laurie, Jon, Dan.

The central romantic triangle of Watchmen began forming in issue #1, as Dan and Laurie dine together without Jon, but it takes shape much more clearly in this issue, as Laurie leaves Jon and shows up at Dan’s door. Like Sting’s mother Audrey, Laurie pushes away from her cold and distant provider to connect with someone more down-to-earth, setting up a tension that lasts all the way through to the final scenes, where Jon releases them both with another giant step away.

As I listened to “Walking On The Moon” over and over, seeking keys to its connections with Watchmen, my imagination began to superimpose the characters over the musical parts. The skittering, restless energy of the drums, trying to push the song open: Laurie. Spaced out bursts of guitar, perfectly timed, with quavering pulsar textures behind: Jon. Repetitive, broken-record bass, occasionally leaping into heartfelt melodicism: Dan.

And then there are the lyrics — powerful, vulnerable, joyous, detached, confident, nervous, all at once: all of them encompassed. The triangle itself. Giant steps are what Dr. Manhattan takes, but surely he’s not worried about broken legs. The vulnerable, human concern for injury belongs more to Dan and Laurie. Forever belongs to the godlike being, but together does not — he ends up alone, where it’s simpler, contemplating his own creations, while Dan and Laurie end up together, visiting Nepenthe Gardens.

Sting traces the inspiration for at least some of these lyrics back to his first love, Deborah. “[W]alking back from Deborah’s house in those early days would eventually become a song,” he writes, “for being in love is to be relieved of gravity” (pg. 96)

In Watchmen, only one character is ever relieved of gravity, the one to whom this panel refers. And even he keeps finding himself caught in the tangle of people’s lives, pulled back to Earth from his extraterrestrial retreat, until he finally leaves this galaxy for one less complicated.

Everyone else is resolutely Earthbound. Some, like Hollis Mason, Edward Blake, Walter Kovacs, and millions of New Yorkers on November 2nd, 1985, return to Earth in death. All the rest can do is hang on to each other, and try to keep it up.

Next Entry: Part Of The Legend
Previous Entry: Lonely Planet

Introducing >INVENTORY

By paulobrian

On April 28, 2020

In Uncategorized

I’ve created a new blog called >INVENTORY. It will (eventually) house everything I’ve ever written about interactive fiction. I’m planning to add to it every day for the next… couple hundred days at least? We’ll see. The first post explains why.

Geek Bowl XIV answer recap

By paulobrian

On March 16, 2020

In Uncategorized

Here now, the Geek Bowl XIV answers!

Geek Bowl XIV question recap

By paulobrian

On March 16, 2020

In Uncategorized

Saturday! With the Geeks! I think it was the seventh of March! Actually, scratch that, I know 100% it was the seventh of March — put that down and let’s move on to the next question.

This year’s Geek Bowl was in Chicago, hence my attempt at a Chicago parody up there. Our team name was a Chicago parody too, albeit a different Chicago: “When You’re Good To Mothra, Mothra’s Good To You”. We also had a bit of team tumult this year.

Mothra-morphosis

Larry Ferguson, who had been a member of my Geek Bowl team for all 10 years I’d participated in the event, was unable to join us in Chicago this year for medical reasons. This was hard news, and precipitated a whole lot of Mothra discussion about how to fill the gap. In the end, we were able to recruit one Jason Freng, who brings these qualities among others:

Co-founder and former president of the CU Boulder quiz bowl team.
Serious dedication to trivia — dude has a plan where he focuses on a new topic each month for five years. Like, in March he’s learning one new pop music artist a day. Prior to that he watched a movie a day for two months.
24 years old, and dialed into the last 20 years of pop music, much more so than the rest of us.
Most of all, the ability to focus on fun rather than ego, which helped him mesh beautifully with our team — nary a squabble in sight. He’s a great teammate, which is the number one thing we were looking for, even above covering any missing pieces from our knowledge domains.

You can’t really replace someone on a trivia team. All you can do is occupy the void they left and hope that the new team approaches the synergy and skill of the last one. On that count, Jason was a fantastic addition, and was super fun to hang out with on the rest of the trip too. We ended up placing 13th out of 231 teams, which was amazing but not amazing enough to be in the money winners, since prizes only go to the top 5 teams. (I think it’s high time Geeks Who Drink spread that prize pool out a bit more, but more about that later.)

Also, by my count we scored 93 points, but the final tally showed us at 92. Hmmmm. It doesn’t really matter since that point wouldn’t have gotten us into the money, but it is confusing. In any case, we had a blast and placed very respectably, considering how stacked with talent Geek Bowl has become. For myself, Geek Bowl 14 contained both my happiest moment of any Geek Bowl and my most disappointing — details about both in the answers post. Dear readers, I give you the 2020 Mothra team, “When You’re Good To Mothra, Mothra’s Good To You”, wearing blue ribbons in honor of Larry:

Team pic of When You're Good To Mothra, Mothra's Good To You

L to R top row: Jonathan, George, me. Bottom row: Brian, Don, Jason

Our shirts say, “Are You There Godzilla? It’s Me, Mothra” — possibly my favorite Mothra name ever but one we haven’t used yet at Geek Bowl because people keep thinking of brilliant city-themed ones.

There was plenty of fun to be had before Geek Bowl too. After our flights got in on Friday, we headed to an airbnb in Bronzeville where most of the team was staying. Teammate Brian set up Playshow Jeopardy via his Apple TV, which replays actual Jeopardy! episodes and lets players buzz in via their phones and speak the answers (uh, questions) into the phone itself. It was glitchy, crashy, and had some design flaws — felt very much like a beta — but also tons of fun when it was working.

After that, most of the team converged on a cool arcade bar called Headquarters, where an amazing listener of Brian’s podcasts not only bought appetizers for the whole gathering, but paid for our bar tabs too! WOW. On top of that, the whole place is stuffed with arcade games and pinball machines set to free play mode. And let me also throw some love to the very kind manager who took pity on me after I realized that I’d taken out my ID to show with my boarding pass at the airport, stuffed it into my luggage, and left it in Bronzeville, a 40 minute Lyft ride away. Whew.

After a while we found our way to the much quieter 25 Degrees, where we quizzed each other with old Trivial Pursuit cards. We’d been doing this all day, actually — it’s a warmup method that offers the added challenge of keeping in mind that every question really starts with “As of 1981…”

On Saturday, Jason and I had breakfast together while Don & Brian headed to Fadó to watch Don’s beloved Norwich City F.C. play Sheffield United. (They lost — “boo hiss” as Alex Trebek would say.) The full team converged on Pizzeria Due for a fantastic warmup game written by George, and then headed to dinner at Safehouse, an incredibly fun spy-themed restaurant. It was there that the annual reading of the rules took place.

Mothra’s Rules Of Pub Trivia

Our team has been playing together, in one configuration or another, for many years now, and in that time we’ve had lots of opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them. At Geek Bowl 9 in Albuquerque, George formally codified some rules we’d all been talking about, and ever since then we’ve made it an annual ritual to read these rules.

We also tend to modify them a bit every year, continuing to refine what we discover among the many pitfalls of team trivia. In the weeks leading up to Geek Bowl 14, we ran a team Discord server, which was a superb way to discuss strategy, coordinate practice meetups, and quiz each other. That process yielded a few changes to this year’s rules:

Read/listen to the damn question.
1. Read it again.
2. Pay attention to the category.
Don’t interrupt the question/audio; let it finish before guessing out loud.
1. If you know the answer with 100% certainty, you can indicate that silently while the question is still being read.
If you think of an answer, say it/write it.
1. Make sure at least two other teammates hear/see it.
2. If you heard a teammate suggest a good possible answer that’s not being discussed, throw it out there again.
Everyone look over each answer sheet before turning it in.
If the answer is a name and surnames are enough, we don’t need to write the first name.
If spelling doesn’t count, don’t sweat it. Likewise for punctuation.
If an answer is used once in a quiz, nothing prevents that answer from being used later in the same quiz (the Quincy Jones Rule).
Avoid facetious answers (the Ernie Banks Rule – so named after we got a question wrong in a practice round when somebody jokingly said that Ernie Banks, aka “Mr. Cub”, was “obviously from the Mets,” and then our non-sporty scribe dutifully wrote down “Mets.” Heh.)
Put an answer for each question, even if the whole team believes it’s probably/certainly wrong. You can object to that bad answer, but be specific about why it’s wrong, and try to provide an alternative.
If you are 100% sure that your answer is right, say so.
1. For that matter, try to indicate your confidence level on all answers.
2. One team member with partial certainty about an answer, seconded by another team member, is as good as one team member with 100% certainty, barring objections.
Focus discussion on answers that aren’t “locked”.

After dinner, it was off to the main event. Geek Bowl this year was held at the Aon Grand Ballroom, which is part of a larger attraction called Navy Pier, basically a bunch of shopping and restaurants and rides and boat stuff. And a ballroom. The ballroom was a beautiful venue, and while 231 tables with six chairs each were pretty well jammed in there, it had the advantage of no fixed seating, unlike the arenas of the past few years, while retaining good sightlines and audio quality. Plus, the whole gaming area was circled by bars and concession vendors, which was cool. It wasn’t nearly as dark as Vegas had been, but even if it were, Brian found some awesome pens with built-in lights to help illuminate things.

The Geek Bowl Format

This is the part where I copy and paste (mostly) the same information from previous years about how Geek Bowl works. For those of you who already know why there would be 231 tables with six chairs each, feel free to skip to the Tiebreaker section. For those who don’t, read on.

As I’ve done in previous years, I’m going to recap the questions and answers here. A few caveats about this, though. First, the Geeks are pretty careful about their intellectual property, and the agreement we’ve worked out is that I won’t post these recaps until at least a week has elapsed since the Geek Bowl. (Though all things considered I’d have a hard time getting this together in less time anyway!)

Second, I consider these recaps a tribute to the excellent question writers of the Geek Bowl, and an advertisement for a really fun event, but I am in no way officially associated with Geeks Who Drink. However, thanks to Geeks editor-in-chief Christopher Short, I have been supplied with question material this year! Prior to Geek Bowl 12, these recaps were based off notes, memories, and photos of question slides, and in fact many of my descriptions will still suffer from this circumstance, but at least the wording of the questions will be correct. Huge thanks to Christopher for the help, and anything remaining that sucks is my fault, not the Geeks’.

The GWD question material leans heavy on pop culture and light (though not zero) on sports. In between, there is plenty of academic trivia: history, geography, science, and so forth. For years, their tone was what I called “self-consciously edgy”, but they’ve really left that behind. Instead, the questions are written in a freewheeling style, certainly not afraid of a little toilet humor or an f-bomb here and there, but no rounds of vintage porn or penis-themed rebuses wedged in there anymore. In my opinion, Geeks Who Drink now just writes their questions to be as fun as possible while covering a wide range of topics and retaining just the right amount of clueing and precision, and they do a damn fine job of it.

Here’s the format: each team has its own small table, with 6 chairs. Quizmasters read questions from the stage, and the questions are also projected onto large screens on either side of the stage. One round is all-video, meaning that rather than anyone reading questions, the whole round is encapsulated in a video presentation on the screens. Once all the questions in a round have been asked, a two minute (usually) timer starts, by the end of which you must have turned in your answer sheet to one of the roaming quizmasters.

The game consists of 8 rounds, each with its own theme. Each round contains 8 questions. Usually, each question is worth one point, so there’s a maximum possible score of 8 points for each round. However, some rounds offer extra points — for instance, Round 2 is traditionally a music round, with 8 songs played, and one point each awarded for naming the title and artist of the song. (Though this year our answer sheets were labeled “Song” and “City”. Hmmm.) In a regular GWD pub quiz, it’s usually only Round 2 and Round 8 (always the “Random Knowledge” round) that offer 16 possible points. However, in this year’s Geek Bowl, Round 4 also offered 16 possible points.

Finally, a team can choose one round to “joker”, meaning that it earns double points for that round. Obviously, you’d want that to be one of the 16-point rounds, unless you really believed you wouldn’t score above 8 in any of them, which is highly unlikely. We discussed our jokering strategy ahead of time, and decided on thresholds. Our threshold for the music round was 14, and our Round 4 threshold was 13. Failing either of those, we knew we’d have no choice but to joker Round 8.

Tiebreaker

7pm was showtime, and host Jenna Riedi took the stage, saying, “Hello, and welcome to America’s last public gathering!” (It was funny at the time, but now it’s just over a week later, and this line feels pretty much perfect.) An opening number ensued — Riedi parodying various songs from the musical Chicago, including her name in lights, a la Roxie. Riedi is an able and appealing host, as evidenced by the fact that she keeps doing it — this is her third Geek Bowl as host. And despite the joking self-adoration of her song, she’s clearly there to serve the event rather than the other way around.

After the opening number came the tiebreaker, read by the Geeks’ charity partner for the year, a group called Women Employed, a Chicago charity whose mission is to improve women’s economic status and remove barriers to economic equity. A couple of WE representatives got to read the Geek Bowl XIV tiebreaker question.

The format for this question is to take a few questions, all of which have numerical answers, and combine them into a formula. Some of these questions are nearly impossible to know exactly, so you have to approximate. The Geeks then use these answers to determine placement among teams whose overall scores are identical — the closer you get to the correct final number (on either side), the better.

As is often the case, this question was tied to the host city, and with it the question recap officially begins! As always, I’ll describe our team’s experiences inside [square brackets], and provide the answers in a separate post.

Take the number of regular-season games won by the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. Subtract from that the current age of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Multiply that difference by the total number of airports you can fly to on United or United Express. Take that product and divide it by the number of Oscars won by the 2002 film Chicago. Or, expressed as a formula:

([B – M] x U) / C

Where B = Bulls regular season wins, M = Michelle Obama’s age, U = United/United Express airports served, and C = Academy Awards won by Chicago.

See the answers

After that, it was time for…

Round 1: “Second” City

Chicago is known as the Second City. Some claim this is because it rose from the ashes after the 1871 fire, but the Chicago Reader seems to establish pretty definitively that the nickname, coined by New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling, meant “in second place to New York.” In any case, for this round, we were told, every answer would have the word “second” in it. This allowed us to invoke rule 10(b) 8 times in a row, saying “I second that answer,” which never stopped being funny.

1. According to the American Lung Association, 41,000 annual U.S. deaths can be attributed to what stuff that’s also known as “sidestream”?
2. Smokey Robinson showed a good working knowledge of love and parliamentary procedure, in what hit 1967 single?
3. Ask Natalia Makarova: What’s the name of the stance where your feet are pointed 180 degrees from each other, with a small step between them? [Jason was first to the gate on this one.]
4. A high schooler eventually won an Ig Nobel Prize, after confirming the scientific validity of what dropped-food guideline?
5. Smack-dab between “velocity” and “jerk,” acceleration is the most commonly cited real-world example of what calculus operator? [Thank you Jonathan for jumping on this one.]
6. Sweden, the Maldives, and Estonia are among the countries that have maintained actual embassies in what Linden Lab virtual world?
7. Garret Hobart’s wife Jennie may have been the first to use what title, also held by Ilo Wallace and Muriel Humphrey?
8. In the Disney movie, Peter Pan says you can get to Neverland by following what 10-word directions?

[A pretty easy round overall, and we aced it with 8 points.]
See the answers

Round 2: Here Come The State Capitals!

Round 2 is always the music round, and in Geek Bowl, that means live music. They’ve had some great acts in the past, but they really outdid themselves this year by booking They Might Be Giants! Not a Chicago act, but certainly one beloved by geeks and Geeks. TMBG came out to raucous applause and delivered a round based on their “Here Come” series of children’s albums.

Here comes the concept: Each question takes a song and changes the lyrics. The new lyrics describe a state capital. The song itself is by an artist who comes from that state capital. Our mission: name the songs for one point each, and the capitals for another point each. Each song would be played only once, but the lyrics would appear on the big screens at either side of the stage.

I hope the Geeks post video of this round at some point, but until they do, it’s going to be pretty impossible to avoid giving away at least the song. So for now, I’ll list the lyrics, and indicate what the song was in spoiler text — if you want to try to recognize the song based on the cadence of the fake lyrics (and may the trivia gods bless you if you do), go for it. Otherwise, highlight the spoiler block to see the song name, and apologies to those using screen readers. The cities will appear in the answers.

1. (To the tune of “Hey Ya!” by OutKast)
Clark Gable don’t mess around when he sees Vivien Leigh up on that second floor.
He’s gotta go fight for Dixie, but when he comes back, they gonna do-si-do.
Real soon their daughter’s gonna try to jump her horse, and break her neck for sure.
Too bad that Scarlett figures out that she loves Rhett when Rhett just knows that he’s not happy here.

2. (To the tune of “School’s Out” by Alice Cooper)
Well, I got Trump’s pardon
For my felony
Election Day you’ll see
Civil rights ain’t free
I’ll lock up illegals, I’ll help build the fence
Round up reporters, and put ‘em in tents
I’m Joe Arpaio!

3. (To the tune of “That’s What I Like” by Bruno Mars)
Got Tom Selleck out the Navy
Beach bum on the daily
Moki serve Campari
Higgins, bring the Ferrari
‘Cause he’s solvin’ all the drama, solvin’ all that drama
Magnum solvin’ all the drama, it’s all orchids and mahalo now

Put on the Tigers hat
(Meet me at the Robin’s Nest)
Call up T.C.
(He’ll fly us out to Diamond Head)
You deserve it, baby, you deserve it all
And I’m on CBS Thursdays for you

4. (To the tune of “Do You Realize??” by The Flaming Lips) [And shining moment to George for both recognizing the song and immediately knowing the hometown.]
And instead of saying, “that’s a boring town,” let them know
There’s roses at Will Rogers Park
The Skydance Bridge glows in the dark
And if you still have your per diem
You can visit the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
And there’s lots of cows.

5. (To the tune of “Girl Crush” by Little Big Town) [Don picked up on this song very quickly as the rest of us were just looking at each other.]
First, brine your chicken
Then take buttermilk and
Some hot sauce that’s kickin’
Coat it like so.
Then while that’s fryin’
Take butter and cayenne
Brown sugar and onion
Cook it real low

And here’s what you do next:
Rest your cooked chicken while
You take the sauce you made
And add in some frying oil.
Whisk it till it’s combined
Use it to coat that bird
Serve it with pickles, sliced
And maybe a piece of bread
You’ve got hot chicken

6. (To the tune of “Candy Girl” by New Edition) [Another big contribution from Don, who recognized New Edition right away, debated between two different songs, and then settled on the right one.]
My boy’s like Teddy, he rakes so hard
He knocks me out when he goes yard
He’s so productive as can be,
He was the 2018 MVP!

Mookie Betts,
He’s the best it gets
You know he rules
With all five tools

But the very day
I wrote this down,
Mookie Betts
He just left town.

7. (To the tune of “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill)
That girl thinks she created Portlandia
I’ve got news for you – she did!
She’s in a band with Corin Tucker
They’ve sold like a half a million albums!

Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney did not write this song
Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney
It bears repeating: This is not their song.

8. (To the tune of “On The Road Again” by Willie Nelson)
All this barbecue
Can’t stop eating all this barbecue
“Keep it weird” is something someone else can do;
We’re just eating all this barbecue.

All this barbecue—
Keep your Stetson hats and bats and Longhorns touchdowns
Every afternoon,
We’ll be crushin’ Shiners by the Whole Foods downtown
To wash down
All this barbecue.

[As usual for Geek Bowl, we had 2 minutes to turn in our answers. The unusual part was that TMBG played loud during those two minutes, which made discussion extremely difficult. I hope this was a mistake — Geek Bowl has never had loud music during answer periods before, and it kinda sucked. In any case, we felt very confident about 7 of our 8 state capitals and 7 of our 8 songs. This met our jokering threshold, so we jokered. As it turned out, we got the capital right (there were really only a couple of choices we were debating between) and the song wrong (since we didn’t have a clue about it), for a total of 15 points for this round. Doubled that makes 30, so our new point total was 30 + 8 = 38.]
See the answers

Round 3: Crossing Jordan

For years, Round 3 at Geek Bowl was 50/50 questions, sometimes combined with a speed round or, God help us, that one time we all had to sniff horribly scented dick-shaped candles. Last year the Geeks upped the ante with a very clever blackjack-themed round, but this year they truly outdid themselves, for one of the most memorable Geek Bowl rounds ever.

The quizmaster took the stage and announced that taped to the underside of one team member’s chair, we’d find a bag of Scrabble tiles. This obviously set off a bunch of scrabbling under chairs to find these bags and empty them onto the tables. The tiles themselves were gorgeously made, with a Geek Bowl logo on the back and everything. The quizmaster explained that for this round, we would use all of those tiles to form our answers, and that each answer would add up to 23 Scrabble points in honor of #23 Michael Jordan. Consequently, for this round only, spelling counts.

In addition, there would be one blank tile, which would be used just like a blank tile in Scrabble — as a wild card to stand in for any letter. On our answer sheets, we were to put an empty square where we’d used the blank tile. This was a fantastic concept for a round, but I do have one criticism of it, which is that this rule about the empty square was a) needlessly picky (would putting a square around some letter really have indicated the meaning any less?), and b) announced while everybody was grabbing tiles from under chairs and clattering them onto tables. If you want to enforce a brand-new and unusual convention, it needs to be followed up on multiple times, and reinforced in big text beside the end-of-round timer countdown.

That’s a minor gripe overall though, and I don’t mean to take anything away from how fantastically fun this round was to play. Now, if you like to play along with these recaps, this round is a bit more challenging to recreate than most other Geek Bowl rounds this side of scented candles. If you really want to do it, I suggest you print out the image below of all the tiles we were given, cut them out, then set your kitchen timer for like 12 minutes — after the questions were read, we had an 8-minute countdown to turn in our answer sheets.

1. Who played sudden numerology enthusiast Walter Sparrow in The Number 23?
2. In 1966, young activist Maulana Karenga created what weeklong end-of-year celebration? [I jumped in first on this one.]
3. More than 180 feet tall and 1,000 feet long, what haunted-ass Cunard Line ship now lies moored as a hotel in Long Beach?
4. The title roles in Ma and the upcoming Madam C.J. Walker are both played by what Oscar-winner from The Help?
5. Naturally, there’s no epitaph on the Vermont grave of what quiet U.S. president who died in 1933?
6. Also the host of many U.S.-Mexico games, Mapfre Stadium is the home pitch of what Midwest MLS charter team? [Thank you Don for knowing soccer.]
7. In Roman numerals, Master Archie Mountbatten-Windsor was born in what year?
8. According to country musician Greg Bates, “We could [conspicuous pause] with each other on the river bank. I’ll leave it up to you, baby.” What’s the title of that song?

[We aced this round — more details in the answers post. Our total now stood at 38 + 8 = 46 points.]
See the answers

After this round came a scoring break and some more TMBG numbers, including a scorching trumpet/trombone performance by Curt Ramm on “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”. There was also a comedy bit with Riedi putting ketchup on a Chicago Dog, to the horror of locals.

Finally, the scoring was done and the rankings rolled — we were in 9th place. On to more questions!

Round 4: Welcome to Midway

This was the other 16-point round. The concept: the Geeks would provide the midway point in a list, and we needed to give the first and last entries in that list, for one point each. So, for example, if the clue was “The Lord Of The Rings trilogy: The Two Towers”, our two answers would be “The Fellowship Of The Ring” and “The Return Of The King”.

1. Official languages of Belgium, by number of Belgian speakers: French.
2. Members of Migos, alphabetically: Quavo. [Thank you Jason for knowing the Migoses!]
3. The original Seven Sisters colleges, listed alphabetically: Radcliffe. [Jonathan really saved us on this one.]
4. Major sections of the small intestine, starting at the stomach end: Jejunum.
5. Words in the body text of 1984, not counting chapter headings and “The End”: Only.
6. Queer Eye’s current Fab Five, alphabetically by first name: Jonathan. [Oh dear. This was a knowledge gap for us.]
7. U.S. Olympic gold-medal gymnasts in the Women’s Individual All-Around, chronologically: Nastia Liukin.
8. Big-screen Shafts, oldest to youngest: Samuel L. Jackson.

[We thought we had 13 on this round, but a last-minute shift (detailed in the answers post) took a point away, so we ended up with 12. Our new point total, 46 + 12 = 58.]
See the answers

Round 5: Take The “L” Train

As usual, Round 5 was a wonderfully clever video round, this time with a wordplay angle along with its Chicago theme. And lucky for me, the Geeks have posted the video.

Fair warning: answers are included in this video, though thankfully not interspersed as they’ve been in previous years. The answers start at 5:49, so pause there and give yourself two minutes if you want to recreate the Geek Bowl conditions.

[This round was almost easy, but we slipped up a bit on one question, for a total of 7 points. New point total: 58 + 7 = 65.]
See the answers

Round 6: Deviled In The White Cities

Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City looked at the serial killer who attacked the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Geek Bowl round 6 took a little lighter approach, focusing on egg recipes and, uh, white cities.

1. Tart up a hollandaise with vinegar, shallots, tarragon, and chervil, and you’ve got what traditional steak sauce?
2. Brandon Teena was born in Lincoln, Nebraska – as was what actress who won an Oscar for portraying him?
3. Which came first, the Egg McMuffin or Moons Over My Hammy? [This sparked an entertaining debate, with significant contribution from George, who worked at McDonald’s in 1977-78. 🙂 ]
4. Lexington, Kentucky native Thomas Hunt Morgan was known for his genetics work with the melanogaster species of what fruit fly genus? [Jonathan slam-dunked this science question.]
5. Popularized by Filipinos, what fertilized egg snack takes its name from the Tagalog word for “wrapped”?
6. She never wanted anyone like this: Set and shot in Spokane, the 1985 film Vision Quest was renamed in some markets for what Madonna song? [Brian was all over this.]
7. If Miley Cyrus were salsa roja, Liam Hemsworth were salsa verde, and their respective fried eggs were separated by some beans, they’d be what variation on huevos rancheros?
8. Madison, Wisconsin-born Stacey Abrams served as student government president at what all-female HBCU in her current home state?

[Another 7 for us on this one, giving us a total of 65 + 7 = 72.]
See the answers

At this point it was time for another scoring break, more They Might Be Giants, and more Riedi comedy at the expense of Chicago foods. They also showed the traditional “In Memoriam” video including both real-life icons and fictional characters. TMBG played “The End Of The Tour” behind this video, which was surprisingly touching.

The Geeks usually post this video, but they haven’t done so yet. I’ll be sure to include it when they do.

At the end of the scoring break, we stood in 16th place.

Round 7: Fuck It, We’ll Do It Live

Something I love about Geek Bowl is that they are always experimenting. Every year they try new ideas, from a youth dance troupe re-enacting movie scenes to street performers, uh, re-enacting movie scenes. This year in the re-enacting movie scenes category, they leaned into Chicago’s improv tradition, with a round wherein improv performers had taken suggestions from the audience via Twitter and performed fresh scenes around them. The twist is that each of these scenes would have inserted three verbatim quotes from a movie. We had to name the movies.

As an additional level of clueing and Chicago-ing, the 8 movies were themed around the 8 groups that see Ferris Bueller as a righteous dude, according to Edie McClurg: sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and dickheads. Lucky for me, the Geeks have put this up on video too, because I couldn’t possibly recap those scenes — I was too busy focusing on the quotes, which also appeared on the screens as the scenes played out. This highlights the weakness of this particular experiment — I think the improv parts were largely ignored by teams who saw them as basically distraction in the way of the actual question. But like I said, respect to the Geeks for experimenting — they can’t all be home runs.

[We got all of these, for a new score of 72 + 8 = 80]
See the answers

Round 8: Random Knowledge

Round 8 of Geeks Who Drink is always, always just “Random Knowledge.” In a regular pub quiz, 16 points are spread out irregularly through the questions, but in Geek Bowl they’re pretty much always two points each. This year, there was just a little extra twist, as will become apparent in the answers post.

1. a) Since around 1960, what seven-letter plural has referred to a type of rubber rain boot? b) Since around 1980, what seven-letter plural has referred to an everyday plastic shoe?
2. a) Dribble was a pet turtle swallowed by Farley Hatcher, that literary character known by what nickname? b) Ghost gal Kayako Saeki made Americans dribble out pee for the first time in what 2004 film?
3. a) A Game Boy sequel subtitled “Six Golden Coins” was the first appearance of what sometimes-villain? [Brian had this almost immediately.] b) The online game Simraceway was co-developed by Ashley Judd’s then-husband, a four-time IndyCar champ. What’s his first name?
4. a) What American figure skater was 15 when she won Olympic gold at Nagano? b) What Russian founder of abstract painting didn’t even start art school until age 30? [I’ve been working on art as a category, and was proud to know this, but it turns out I didn’t even need to, because Don got there first.]
5. a) Traditionally, what type of bread do Jews eat at the beginning of Shabbat? b) What ceremony marks the end of Shabbat? [We were only Jewish-adjacent enough to know one of these, sadly.]
6. a) In 1981, slavery was finally officially outlawed in what Atlantic-huggin’ country that’s spooned by Mali? b) What Baltic-caressin’ country launched a 2018 tourist campaign touting its capital as “The G Spot of Europe”?
7. a) An L Word bathroom makeout sesh was inspired by hotly discussing what Autobiography of Red author? b) Sexuality and race are themes in what Harlem Renaissance author’s Passing?
8. a) Politicians are always fighting over the taxation of what term for profits made by liquidating an investment? b) “All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.” So said what influential British economist?

[13 points for us on this round, for a final score of 80 + 13 = 93. Like I said at the top, the Geeks’ final score tally had us at 92. I’m very curious where that discrepancy happened, but likely will never know, and in any case it doesn’t affect anything but pride of placement.]
See the answers

Once the final score tallies were displayed, we were in 13th. Which was great, but not great enough to get us up on stage with the money winners. The final prize ceremony was also handled a bit weirdly. In past years, all five teams got up on stage and their placements were announced one-by-one, though of course announcing second place pretty much implies first place, so one would rapidly follow the other. This year, for whatever reason, they brought the teams up on stage one by one, so when second and first were announced, both teams were still offstage, where they were grouchily told, “Stop hugging and get up here!” This didn’t work. Geeks, please go back to having all teams on stage for the placement announcements — watching people experience joy is vicarious fun!

And as long as I’m throwing out unsolicited recommendations for Geek Bowl adjustments, let’s talk about that prize pool. Geek Bowl prizes have grown year over year. When we won Geek Bowl 5, I think the prize was around $3,000. For Geek Bowl 8, it was $6,666. This year’s top prize was $14,000. Second place got $7,000, third place $3,000, fourth $1,500, and fifth $600. So that’s just over $26,000 in prizes. I think there was also an amateur prize, and maybe some cash associated with that one.

I think the amateur prize is a great idea, but beyond that I feel like the prizes have grown and grown but stayed concentrated among the same number of winners. Would it be so bad to offer, say, $12,000 and $6,000 (which by the way splits way easier among six people) to the top, then give the top ten winning teams at least enough to cover their entry fees? And yeah, I acknowledge that this is often Mothra’s finishing place, so I can’t claim to be unbiased. Still, the event is lots of fun and very successful, and I’d love to see it become just a little more rewarding for say the top 5% rather than the top 2%. End of speech.

After all the offstage hugging was over and the prizes had been distributed, there was one more thing: the now-traditional video announcing next year’s location. There were some shots of buildings I didn’t recognize, but which caused excited cheering from a few tables. Then we heard a new version of “All This Barbecue,” (with extra lyrics!), sung by Geeks EIC and esteemed author Christopher Short. So I’ll see you next year at the answer to Round 2, question 8!

Album Assignments: Splendor & Misery

By paulobrian

On March 9, 2020

In Uncategorized

[This review is indebted to the transcribers and annotators of Genius.]

It’s been a very good decade for exploring the African-American experience via genre metaphors. We’ve got Janelle Monáe and her stories of Cindi Mayweather the android. N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Hugo awards for her extraordinary Broken Earth trilogy. In movies, Jordan Peele uses horror tropes to incredible effect in the brilliantly written Get Out and Us, while Black Panther proved that not only is there room in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for an Afrofuturistic superhero, there is an incredible hunger for it. In another corner of the superhero world, the HBO Watchmen series pulled off a succession of astonishing narrative feats by putting race at the center of the Watchmen universe and rebooting the ways we can think about it.

Then there’s clipping., the experimental hip-hop group from Los Angeles, with a period at the end of their name. They’re fronted by Daveed Diggs, who’s best known for playing Jefferson and Lafayette in the original cast of Hamilton. While not as high-profile as the examples above, they too have been twice nominated for Hugo awards, in a category usually reserved for television episodes and long-form music videos. This album, Splendor And Misery, was the first of those nominations, and it absolutely belongs in the conversation with every example from my first paragraph.

Splendor & Misery starts with a low, spacey drone and scattered static. (Static recurs throughout the album — more about that in a bit.) A distorted voice (guest vocalist Paul Outlaw) sings a thesis verse:

I’ll follow the stars when the sun goes to bed
Til everything I’ve ever known is long dead
I can’t go back home ’cause I want to be free
Someone tell the others what’s become of me

Then in comes Diggs, rapping at a furious pace in a calm voice. He’s a ship’s computer, narrating the fact that “a member of the cargo” has woken up. A member of the cargo? Yeah, this is a slave ship. Before a sedative can be pumped through the vents, the “cargo” has found an access panel and is taking control of the ship. (“Remember that these beings were selected for their strength”, chides the computer.)

That leads into the bedrock story song, “All Black”. It begins, “Warning: mothership reporting / Cargo number 2331 has commandeered the vessel / Warning: mothership reporting / Cargo number 2331 is armed and he is dangerous”. It goes on from there, still in the computer’s voice, to tell the story of that seizure, returning over and over to the phrase “all black everything”. Those three words are an incredibly rich centerpiece for the song. They hearken back to a verse on Jay-Z’s “Run This Town”, which was then expanded upon by Lupe Fiasco in an alternate history song that imagines a world where slavery never existed. In the Splendor & Misery context, they variously mean the emptiness of the ship, the defiant war cry of the rebelling slave, the endless reaches of space, the darkness of artificial night, and the consciousness of the ship itself.

Within that consciousness, a surprising turn happens in the course of the song. In watching the psychological torment of Cargo #2331, as it sees him experience “the gift of freedom wrapped in days of rapping to himself / until his vocal cords collapse”, the ship begins to fall in love with him. It sees his loneliness and recognizes its own, saying “If only he realized this ship is more than metal / There’s friendship in the wiring”. By the end, the ship has reversed its initial message:

Warning: mothership reporting
This will be the last report, turn back, everything is fine
Warning: mothership reporting
Cargo number 2331 is not a danger, let him be
Warning: mothership reporting
If you continue to pursue there will be no choice but to destroy you
Warning: mothership reporting
This love will be defended at all costs, do not fuck with it

Thus begins a strange relationship that lasts through the album. The story becomes a little harder to follow after this. 2331 (who never gets any other name) appears in several interludes, rapping freestyle behind heavy static. That static, a bit like the Black Keys’ distortion, creates distance. It’s an audio cue that the signal is far away, barely strong enough to reach us.

In “Wake”, 2331 seems to decide not to try to return home, opting instead for travel via hypersleep. That song ends with that same verse that opened the album, which leads immediately into “Long Way Away”, which adds another verse with that same melody, ending each with “It’s a long way away / It’s a long way away / And I’m all alone / Along, along a long way”.

So here we have the premise. The machinery of slavery uproots innocents from their lives, but when the slave rises up, the machinery becomes infatuated with him and what he produces. For the slave himself, the price of his freedom is total isolation, except for the complicated relationship he has with his (former?) oppressor. No matter what, he is forever severed from the home and life he knew, and rage, depression and violence must ensue. But there is hope at the end — “A Better Place” once again brings in the “long way away” melody and motif, but sees 2331 and the ship setting a course for that better place, with a spark of belief that they can find it.

There’s more going on here than a self-contained story. For one thing, the album very consciously engages with a science fiction literary tradition, and particularly a Black SF tradition. In a freestyle rap, 2331 references Orwell’s 1984. In another, he says “got a pocket full of stars”, referencing Samuel Delaney’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. “Air ‘Em Out” references Delaney, Octavia Butler, M. John Harrison, and Ursula K. LeGuin. “True Believer” name-checks a character from Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. The title of the album itself appears in “A Better Place” as the computer muses that 2331 is “missing the splendor and misery / Of bodies, of cities, of being missed” — The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities is the planned but never finished sequel to Stars In My Pocket.

That intellectual engagement is wonderful and thrilling, but there are other, more mysterious levels at work here. Take “Story 5” for instance. This track seems totally out of place on the album, in multiple ways — not only does it seemingly have nothing to do with the 2331 story, it’s also a pure gospel tune. It tells the story of a woman named Grace who fought in a war, uncovered some shady information, and was subsequently run down by a taxi and killed. What? Also, “Story 5”? What happened to the other 4?

Well, it turns out that there’s a song called “story” on clipping.’s debut album midcity, which tells the story of the taxi crash from the viewpoint of an onlooker named Randy. “Story 2”, about a former criminal, appears on their next album. Story 3 is missing, but Story 4 appears, for some reason, on a remix album by alt-J, featuring different characters but images that echo the other Story songs.

So apparently “Story 5” is part of a thread running through various clipping. albums, more than an organic part of Splendor & Misery. But there are layers upon layers here, because in the middle of “True Believer”, the static comes in staccato sequence, which turns out to be Morse code. (Which code gets referenced in “Air ‘Em Out” as well.) The coded message says: GRACEISRANDYSSISTER. Grace is Randy’s sister.

Even more mysterious, the song “Interlude 02 (Numbers)” imitates the style of a numbers station with a long string of NATO alphabet letters: “Foxtrot, Uniform, Whiskey, Romeo, Whiskey, Charlie, Oscar, X-Ray”, and so on. Gibberish? Not on a clipping. album. As the incredibly dedicated Genius user TheRingshifter figured out, this is a code too, a Vigenère cipher which requires a keyword. “Air ‘Em Out” yields the secret in its verse:

Come up off your smooth talk, playa this raspy (ahem)
You stuck on Morse code, playa, this is ASCII
Your birthright make you scared to get nasty
The keyword is Kemmer, that’s what yo’ ass need

Plugging the keyword “kemmer” (itself a LeGuin reference) into the cipher yields the text “THETARGETISAMYCLARK”. The target is Amy Clark. Who is Amy Clark? We don’t know… yet. Though there is a “Doc Clark” referenced in “Story 2”. There’s a clipping. album subsequent to Splendor & Misery, and while its “Story 7” (again skipping the multiples of 3) tells us more about Randy and a character from “Story 4”, there’s no Amy Clark.

To unravel this puzzle, we’ll just have to wait for more clues. With clipping., the deeper you dive the more you find — there’s so much more to discover in this all black everything.

The Watchmen Bestiary 29 – Lonely Planet

By paulobrian

On February 20, 2020

In Uncategorized

Attention, people of Earth! This article contains spoilers for Watchmen. In addition, there are spoilers for the novel and movie This Island Earth, and very minor spoilers for the HBO Watchmen series.

In Chapter 3 of Watchmen, Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk walk over to Hollis Mason’s apartment together. As so often happens in the book, Moore and Gibbons intercut this scene with another scene, in this case Dr. Manhattan preparing for his TV interview with Benny Anger. Juxtaposition abounds — on the top of page 11, panel one shows a receptionist overcome with existential nausea at Dr. Manhattan’s sudden materialization. “They’re not paying me enough for this…” she says. Then panel two:

Watchmen chapter 3, page 11, panel 2. Dan and Laurie walk towards the camera in the rain. To their right is a poster (mounted on something freestanding) reading "PIA CINEMA" at the top, showing a mutant with an exposed, oversized brain and hollow eyes, with the title "IS ISLAND EARTH" showing. To their left is a fragment of the same poster, showing "UTO" at the top and "THI" as the title. Behind them is the Institute for Extraspatial Studies. Superimposed over the image is a caption reading They're not paying me enough to handle monsters from outta space

Watchmen, up to its usual tricks, superimposes the dialogue from the previous panel onto this one and emphasizes two parts of the image to tie it to that dialogue: the Institute for Extraspatial Studies and the movie posters for This Island Earth. Both parts evoke “monsters from outta space” in a different way. The Institute for Extraspatial Studies operates more as foreshadowing for the final chapter (as well as an explicit reference to “outta space”), but the movie poster on the left serves up a great big monster on its face. The posters advertise a movie playing at the Utopia Cinema — we can tell that’s the name because the left-hand poster gives us the “PIA” while the right-hand poster has the “UTO”. This theater is apparently some kind of sci-fi revival house — as the web annotations helpfully point out:

The Utopia Cinema, which is showing “This Island Earth,” reappears later.

Indeed, we find it in Chapter 5 playing the movie Things To Come, and from Chapter 8 onwards playing The Day The Earth Stood Still (at least until the epilogue, in which it has become the “New Utopia” and shows a Russian cinema double feature.) Subjects for future posts, no doubt. For now, though, let’s focus on This Island Earth.

Universal Appeal

By 1955, Universal Pictures (named Universal-International at the time) was finding its successes in some odd places — Ma and Pa Kettle, Abbott and Costello, Francis the Talking Mule… and science fiction. The studio already had a stable of classic and beloved horror icons — Lugosi’s Dracula, Karloff’s Frankenstein, Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man — and was working to capitalize on a new sci-fi/monster craze kicked off in 1950 by Destination Moon.

Producer William Alland and director Jack Arnold had turned in a couple of big black-and-white hits: It Came From Outer Space and The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Arnold had also directed Revenge Of The Creature (a Black Lagoon sequel) and Tarantula, both of which did reasonably well. The studio felt it was time to make a “prestige” science fiction picture, and saw its chance in the novel This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones, the rights to which had been purchased by director Joseph M. Newman. Newman had commissioned Edward G. O’Callaghan to write a shooting script from the novel, but had failed to raise the necessary money to make his movie independently. Nevertheless, when Universal-International decided to buy the rights and engage Alland as the producer, those rights came attached to Newman as director and O’Callaghan as screenwriter.

U-I made some big investments in this movie. For one thing, they decided to shoot it in Technicolor, which was significantly more expensive than black-and-white stock but brought with it a “wow” factor, especially for sci-fi spectacle. They also brought in Franklin Coen to rewrite O’Callaghan’s script. Coen was not a science fiction writer, but knew how to focus on character and theme. His revisions brought some weight and depth to O’Callaghan’s original treatment. U-I may have also recruited Arnold to reshoot some of Newman’s work in the last act, though sources differ as to the extent of Arnold’s involvement, or indeed whether he was truly involved at all. Finally, the studio devoted quite a budget to visual effects, creating elaborate miniatures, matte paintings, fire, explosions, and (to Coen’s chagrin) a monster.

Prestige picture or no, This Island Earth was science fiction, and in Universal-International’s eyes, they’d never hook the teen and preteen audience they needed for it without a creature. As actor Jeff Morrow, who played the sympathetic alien Exeter in the film, later recalled, “the Studio felt that a Sci-Fi film had to have a monster”. (Universal Filmscripts Classic Science Fiction, Volume 1, pg. 15)

This monster from outer space was the Metaluna mutant, whose image we see on the Utopia Cinema’s poster in Watchmen. The mutant was invented wholly for the film — it doesn’t exist in the novel at all. And even in the movie, it feels pretty tacked-on. Nevertheless, the mutant is today the most famous and enduring aspect of This Island Earth (well, aside from the fact that this movie was somewhat unfairly chosen as the object of ridicule in the theatrical version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but that hadn’t happened yet in 1985) and it may be the primary reason why Moore and/or Gibbons chose the film to feature in the “monsters from outta space” panel. Certainly the mutant is one of the all-time iconic 1950s Hollywood space creatures.

A still frame from This Island Earth, showing the Metaluna Mutant

Reassembling The Components

There’s more resonance here than appears in that panel, though, and to understand it we need to explore This Island Earth a little further. The book and the movie share a premise, but diverge radically about halfway through their stories. At the beginning of both, though, is Cal Meacham. He’s the kind of omnicompetent man common to 1950s sci-fi, a Scientist who does Science but who is also no stranger to action and fighting, plus he’s pretty good with the ladies. He receives a mysterious replacement part from a supply warehouse: a capacitor much smaller than he was expecting and with much greater capacity.

This leads to a catalog full of these mysterious parts, from which he orders the pieces for something called an “interociter.” Using his Science smarts, he builds the interociter, which turns out to have been his unsolicited audition for a mysterious outfit whose stated goal is to “put an end to war.” They fly him in a pilotless plane to their remote compound, where they’ve gathered other scientists like him, including PhD Ruth Adams (psychiatrist in the book, physicist in the movie), and entice him into working for them.

Something doesn’t feel quite right, though, and the same curiosity that drove Cal to build the interociter spurs him to investigate his benefactors. Before long, he discovers the truth: they’re aliens! Their purpose on Earth is to recruit humans to help them build tools and weapons for a war they’re waging against an implacable enemy.

From this point, the book and the movie diverge completely. In the book, the interociter turns out to facilitate telepathy, and it allows Meacham first to read his alien mentor’s mind, then to absorb the full context of a war between an affiliation of planets called the Llannan Council (i.e. the good guys) and another affiliation called the Guarra (bad guys.) Intrigue ensues, including a scary encounter with lizardlike Guarra agents.

Earth is destined to become a battleground between the Llannans and the Guarra, and the Llannas have decided to let it be overrun, until Cal goes before the council and argues that they’ve been executing the same plans (determined by a computer) for decades, and that their predictability has been their undoing. He persuades the Llannans to defend Earth, and ends the book looking forward to returning home with Ruth (to whom he’s become engaged in the course of the story.)

The movie, on the other hand, follows Cal’s discovery with an action sequence in which he and Ruth flee the compound with another scientist, played by Russell Johnson of Gilligan’s Island fame. Johnson’s character gets vaporized by some kind of space ray, and Meacham and Adams try to escape via plane, only to have their plane sucked into a flying saucer commanded by Exeter, leader of the alien compound. Exeter and company turn out to be from a planet called Metaluna, which is under relentless assault by another race called the Zahgons, whom we never see apart from their ships.

Exeter wants to bring Meacham and Adams to Metaluna to help create machines to power its defenses, and in the process of bringing them there we get to see a lot of those fancy visual effects that Universal-International paid for, including one in which Meacham and Adams step into tubes that put them through a mysterious process meant to help their bodies cope with the greater atmospheric pressure on Metaluna. What this looks like is some crazy lighting, and then the consecutive appearance of various anatomical systems — nervous, circulatory, skeletal, muscular.

Scene from This Island Earth: Cal Meacham and Ruth Adams in tubes being prepared for travel to Metaluna -- their bodies show a nervous system, then skeleton, then musculature.

For readers of Watchmen, it’s a familiar set of images:

Watchmen chapter 4, page 9, panels 4-7. Panel 4: two frightened men's faces in the foreground. One is looking back, screaming, at a brain and nervous system suspended in the air. Panel 5: caption "It's November 10th now. There is a circulatory system walking through the kitchen." The art illustrates this. Panel 6: caption "November 14th: A partially muscled skeleton stands at the perimeter fence and screams for thirty seconds before vanishing." Again the art is a straightforward illustration of the caption. Panel 7: caption "Really, it's just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence." Art is wristwatch pieces laid out on a black cloth. Young Osterman's hand is picking one up with tweezers.

Given that This Island Earth gets name-checked in chapter 3 of Watchmen and Dr. Manhattan’s system-by-system reconstruction of himself appears in chapter 4, it’s not beyond reason to wonder if the movie’s visuals influenced Moore and Gibbons’ portrayal of Osterman’s process. Certainly both sequences suggest bodies deconstructed and then reconstructed into something greater than they were before.

In any case, by the time Exeter and the humans reach Metaluna, they find they are too late to save it. They encounter the mutant, who inadvertently and unsuccessfully impedes their escape a couple of times, and then they are back on Earth — Cal and Ruth in their airplane, and the mortally wounded Exeter plunging his saucer into the sea.

We Have Met The Enemy

The plots of these stories differ — largely because the latter half of Jones’s book wasn’t visual enough for the movie producers, and introduced too much complexity to fit into a film. But they do have a metaphorical underpinning in common. In each of them, the people of Earth find themselves part of a greater galactic context than they’d imagined, and are exploited by extraterrestrials who are themselves at war.

1955 was a mere decade past the end of World War II, a war in which the Allied and Axis forces battled on many fronts, including islands in the Pacific whose indigenous people had no idea of the greater context of war around them. Those indigenous people were often recruited to build airstrips or help in the manufacture of military supplies. The novel’s version of Exeter calls out this parallel explicitly, in a line of reasoning that explains the title:

These primitive peoples… had no comprehension of the vast purpose to which they were contributing a meager part, but they helped in a conflict which was ultimately resolved in their favor.

(This Island Earth, pg. 93)

“Earth is an island,” he says, “which can be by-passed completely, or temporarily occupied if need be.” (pg. 98) Similarly, film historian Robert Skotak, in the DVD commentary for the movie version, explains Joseph Newman’s intention with the film:

One of the themes that the director had in mind was to show the love of our planet and how valuable our planet is and how it is just a mere island in the vast infinity of space. And, if we aren’t careful, we could destroy ourselves — using Metaluna as… a metaphor for what could be us. This was made not too many years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the detonation of the hydrogen bomb, the Soviets getting the hydrogen bomb, the Cold War. So fears of the end of the world were on the minds of many artists, many people, and that was one of Joe Newman’s main themes.

Now, these readings are a little bit different from each other — one emphasizes Earth’s unawareness of the larger universe, and the other emphasizes its fragility and irreplacability. But in both of them, the story’s aliens stand in for humans. At the metaphorical level, we are both the exploitative aliens and the humans they exploit, two groups separated by facts of geography, culture, and technology.

Watchmen literalizes this metaphor further, by having a seeming alien invasion that is in fact a front for one human exploiting other humans for what he sees as the greater good. That’s the thread that ties This Island Earth to the Institute for Extraspatial Studies, more than just “monsters from outta space”. Here’s Joseph Newman one more time, explaining his first impressions upon reading the novel:

I think the overwhelming thing that came into my mind when I purchased Jones’ novel was to illustrate, as the title of the book suggests, that this planet is in reality a small island in an extremely vast and unknown universe, and that it is to the welfare of all the inhabitants of this island, Earth, to eliminate and submerge their petty hatreds of any of the many groups of human dwellers on this tiny island of matter. Our concerns might be, in the not-too-distant future, I thought, forces and elements beyond the present-known universe…

(Universal Filmscripts, pg. 19)

This is exactly the point that Adrian Veidt hopes to make as well, submerging the mutual hatred of the USA and USSR in the face of forces and elements beyond their present knowledge. It’s just that where Jones and Newman make their point through art alone, Adrian writes his fiction into the world as an enormous alien invasion hoax. As I mentioned in the Revelation post, Veidt authors his own apocalypse to resolve the unbearable tension between what he sees and what he desires. In doing so, he reframes Earth as an island subject to occupation, hoping that this new perspective brings all the natives into line.

Book cover for This Island Earth, showing the title, author, and a drawing of an alien against a field of stars.

Stories, Masks, and Trauma

Just as Veidt’s hoax is a kind of authorship, so I would argue are the masks and identities of Watchmen‘s costumed adventurers. In HBO’s excellent Watchmen series, Laurie Juspeczyk says this:

People who wear masks are driven by trauma. They’re obsessed with justice because of some injustice they suffered, usually when they were kids. Ergo, the mask. It hides the pain.

But hiding the pain isn’t all that masks do. They also tell a story, a new story, about the traumatized people behind them — rearranging their faces and giving them all other names. In this new story, the masked people aren’t powerless, but powerful. They exist to carry out their own agendas, rather than having their agency taken away from them. The new story told by the mask exists as an attempt to help mask-wearers process and relieve their trauma.

Well, isn’t this the function of art? Through the things that we create, we seek to understand our world and its inhabitants. At an individual level, it’s well-documented that the creation of art can channel grief, trauma, and heartbreak into some new form, transforming it via creative alchemy into something that briefly assuages those emotions both for the artist and the audience. That’s the catharsis that Aristotle describes in his Poetics.

But grief, trauma, and heartbreak don’t just exist at the individual level. There are larger versions of trauma that transcend the personal. Granted, using the term “trauma” becomes more metaphorical beyond the individual level, but I believe that a family can be traumatized, a school or workplace can be traumatized, a town can be traumatized, and a culture can be traumatized. And if we accept that trauma can exist at a cultural level, I think it becomes very clear that the art it produces functions in part to help process that cultural trauma.

This Island Earth, and 1950s science fiction movies in general, are an example of this. World War II, and in particular the enormity of the atomic bomb, was a massive cultural trauma. The rapid escalation of both calamitous bomb technology and tensions between the superpowers quickly brought us face to face with our ability to destroy ourselves. Hitler’s concentration camps made plain humanity’s capacity for barbarism. Not only that, the process of the war itself and its aftermath changed America radically — women had new roles after stepping into professions vacated by men, racial politics mutated after Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, and the 1944 G.I. Bill introduced a tremendous amount of new class mobility into society.

75 years on, we can see these changes as unalloyed benefits, but at the time they were just as frightening to some as the bomb and the Nazis. 50s B movies told stories of invasions, of incomprehensible malevolence, of science and technology run amok, of venturing into the unknown, of humanity’s warlike nature, and so forth. It’s not hard to see cultural anxieties projected onto those aliens, giant insects, and monsters from the deep. It’s a genre obsessed with unexpected consequences.

So if 1950s sci-fi movies were processing the cultural trauma of World War II, what set of cultural traumas does Watchmen meet? Well, some of this isn’t really subtext. 1985 was peak Nuclear Anxiety time, and Watchmen obviously means to grapple with that. In this way, it’s a direct descendant of stories like This Island Earth.

Watchmen chapter 3, page 17, panel 2. Dreiberg walks down the street alone at night. Behind him is a large poster advertisement for The New Frontiersman. Some of the letters are cut off but we can infer that it says "In your hearts, you know it's right." Underneath "right" a graffiti artist has scrawled "wing".

But there are other, more festering wounds at work in Watchmen too. The clash of political Left and Right, so strident and polarized now, had been climbing since the days of Goldwater vs. the counterculture, but hit a new level during the Reagan/Thatcher years, and found its Watchmen expression via Nova Express vs. The New Frontiersman. Even more than those two competing media sources, the superheroes themselves in Watchmen interrogate the competing values of individual action vs. social action. American culture reveres the lone principled individual, but in Watchmen the two individuals who best fit that description are Rorschach and Ozymandias. Though politically they are opposites, temperamentally they embody the same extremist impulses, and Watchmen shows both as deeply problematic.

This isn’t the Cold War. It’s closer to the Civil War — an ongoing series of battles in an America deeply divided against itself, with good and bad actors on both sides, plus a whole lot of grey in between. It’s part of why Watchmen remains relevant and powerful today, powerful enough to inspire the whole new story that appeared on HBO last fall.

I’ve called Before Watchmen and Doomsday Clock “fan fiction” — meant gently — and in a way Damon Lindelof’s HBO Watchmen is no different. It’s an extension of intellectual property that has been taken rather than granted. The only ones who could really “officially” continue Moore and Gibbons’ story are Moore and Gibbons, or successors anointed by them, regardless of what corporation owns the rights. But what made Lindelof’s work so compelling, so true to the spirit of Watchmen, was its singular vision and its engagement with the cultural trauma of our time. In the HBO series’ case, that trauma is race in America rather than the Cold War, but its medicine is just as strong.

Next Entry: Triangolo des Vigilantes
Previous Entry: Mutiny, I Promise You