Thursday, September 30, 2004
BOOKS: I just finished the audiobook of Fast Food Nation, a book I've been wanting to read for awhile but was somewhat afraid of. I'd heard interviews with the author, Eric Schlosser, and I knew generally what I was going to get from the book. Basically I didn't want to be scared away from what little fast food I eat. After reading the book, I'm not scared away from fast food by hearing what goes on with the food (I've heard it before) but I am pretty anti-fast food because of their business practices. I'm not an animal lover, I think we should kill animals without causing them suffering but I have no problem with the killing part. I like meat. What I do have problems with is when companies treat their employees like animals, unworthy of even basic human compassion.
I already knew that the pictures of food on the cash registers at McDonalds are not because the employees are that stupid but because McDonalds wants employees they don't have to train or that even have to speak English. That bothers me, especially when I learn that most fast food places take advantage of government money meant to train low-income workers at the same time they are trying their hardest to not train anyone, but it doesn't bother me as much as when I hear about meat packing companies who do not in any way care about the lives or physical well-being of people they hire. They go to great lengths to hire low wage, sometimes illegal immigrant, workers and then push them with little training into supremely dangerous jobs. People lose limbs, get diseases, and die and the companies all the way up and down the line from the corporate ranches that raise the cattle to the meat packing companies to the fast food chain offices do everything they can to avoid taking responsibility and avoid making any changes that would make things safer. Any one who is honestly looking at corporations should know by now that they are totally amoral beings, they don't care about anything but making money. If killing someone and taking a fine is less costly money-wise than making things safer, they will kill that person without thinking about it. But the things that happen behind the scenes of the fast food industry are so blatant that you can't help but be appalled. The whole system is designed to be as fast as possible and only as safe as absolutely imperitive. They lobby to keep wages low, to hire younger and younger workers and to work them as much as possible (without paying overtime of course), to reduce safety regulations, anything they can do to squeeze another penny (litterally) from consumers.
Since I don't pay much attention to the news, I have no idea if this book made any kind of splash when it came out but it should have. My cynical self says it probably didn't, that we're to the point where a book really has little chance of coming along and making substantive changes to society as The Jungle did when it came out and first exposed the horrors of the meat packing industry a hundred years ago. I hope I'm wrong, that people did pay attention because this issue needs attention. We spend so much time and money looking at horrors across the world when people are suffering just the same in our own backyard. People are always up in arms about child labor in eastern Asia but what about illegal immigrants brought here and made to work in much more horrible conditions? Is that unworthy of our attention? The fast food industry has destroyed many,many more lives with it's fast, unsafe, and unsanitary system than Nike and it's shoe factories ever have. Yes, kids sewing shoes for a dime a day is horrible but it's not worse than making a teenager spray down a moving, blood-covered conveyor belt with chlorine gas and then firing that person when they get sick from the inadequate breathing protection. The cost in human lives and dignity is not worth saving a nickel on a hamburger and yes, a nickel is all it would cost.
Monday, September 27, 2004
WORK: I've been reading a lot about marketing, business, and creativity recently in preparation for the launch of Hype! Comics, my soon-to-exist comic book publishing company. I've come to the realization that I don't just want to publish my own stuff like a lot of independent publishers in comics. I will publish my own work and even if other publishers put out my work Hype! Comics will exist to push it. I've always been an entrepenurial type and a writer so something like a comics publisher fits everything I've been about in my life. I even get to exercise my programming/geek muscles by making the website and computers a very important part of the business. But in thinking about Hype! Comics a lot and thinking about business, I've also had the worst business related experience I've had so far. I'm not going to get into details but needless to say I've learned a few lessons about running a business.
First, treat people like people. I firmly believe that part of the reason people are so inclined these days to take advantage of everyone else in every way they can and to treat people like shit in such a casual way is that's how a lot of businesses treat people. If your boss treats you like crap and the business takes advantage of everyone to their own benefit, people start to think why shouldn't they do that too? "Why shouldn't I steal this thing? Those giant companies on the news steal from everybody and nothing happens to them." One of the big reasons the fast food industry is the industry most robbed by it's own employees is that the entire business structure of a company like McDonalds is designed to treat people like a commodity and thus, like expendable trash. Treat people right and you'll attract people who like being treated right. People who have self-worth are more valuable to any organization because they have ideas they will share. Even if it's just an idea to sell more fries, someone who you treat right will help you sell more fries. Someone you treat like a button-pushing monkey will not. And even if treating someone right in some small way doesn't benefit you directly, it makes you a better person and that's just as good. Kim and I make Allison say please and thank you even to us because it makes her a better person, not because it impresses other parents.
Second, not everybody has the same ideas about work. If you have a way you like to work, make sure others know that. I like to multi-task; to have a few browser tabs open, 2 different projects, etc. This lets me flip back and forth between things I'm doing if one is in a waiting state or I just need a break from one thing. This works fine for me, I get things done this way. Other people might not have the same opinion about it. Make sure that the way you like to work is okay with your bosses. And believe me, even if they don't say anything about it, they have opinions and might think something completely different about it. A lot of managers and business owners think they own your brain from the minute you walk in the door and if your way of working makes them think you are being an independent person during work hours, you could have trouble. And if your way of working doesn't jive with the company you're with and you can't get comfortable doing something else, find somewhere else to work. Immediately. That leads to the next realization.
Always trust your instincts. If you smell a rat when you meet a person or feel weird about a company, trust that. Yes you could be wrong and your first impression might be mistaken but usually not. Our brains are nothing but pattern-matching systems and if your brain starts making matches to experiences that give you a funny feeling about something, even if you can't say exactly what it is, trust it. Our little pattern-matching computers have millions of years of evolution behind them and most likely doing something you feel weirdly about will come back and bite you in the ass.
WEIRD SONGS: Due to some unavoidable and unfortunate problems my ISP was having for the past few weeks, it's been hard to update the website. I'm making up for it today though, with probably my favorite (well, in the Top 5 at least) Weird Song. It's a cover of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" by Johnny Cash. Mr. Cash's last few albums were widely acclaimed cover albums and resulted in some of the finest songs I've ever heard (Cash's version of Nine Inch Nails's "Hurt" is also one of the best cover songs of all time). This version of Rusty Cage is somehow all Cash while not getting rid of the hard Soundgarden sound. In two words: It rocks.
Friday, September 17, 2004
MUSIC: I've been listening the hell out of the new album by The Killers, Hot Fuss. If I had gone back in time and described it to myself, I never would have said I would like it. Luckily for me, if I had a music time machine I would go back and erase all memory of almost all the music I listened to until Nirvana and Pearl Jam came along, not go back a month and tell myself about The Killers. Hot Fuss is everything that was cool about British rock in the 80s and early 90s all jammed together into one hell of an album. The weird thing is, I didn't even remember that there was this much good stuff about 80s British music until I listened to this band from Las Vegas, NV. Besides the music, I love that the album is fairly long. As much as I like the new Hives album (Abra Cadaver hooked me in 10 seconds flat, no kidding), it's only 30 minutes and that's barely enough to sink your teeth into. This album is close to an hour, a large enough chunk of time so that you're not hearing the same song over and over. There are, as always, some songs I could listen to over and over (Mr. Brightside being my favorite) but none that I would actively skip. Bottom line: another in a long line of quality bands I've been listening to recently (god bless whoever decided rock music was coming back into style in the music industry) such as Franz Ferdinand, Jet, Kings of Leon, The Hives, end even the new Strokes album (which is my least favorite due to it's generic songs but awesome in comparison to most other crap around these days).
Thursday, September 09, 2004
WRITING: Sometimes I get so fed up with my chosen fields of comics and science fiction that I could scream. I stumbled on a page talking about something called "The New Weird" in science fiction which is apparently a new sub-sub-genre for work like Perdido Street Station (PSS for my laziness' sake) that doesn't neatly fit into any one catagory. This type of obsessive catagorization is one of the things that just gets my goat about science fiction. Even being a nerd and an SF writer I can't get into this weird block people have about putting things into catagories. Is PSS science fiction? Yes. Is it fantasy? Yes. It's both. It's not something totally new, it's science fiction and fantasy. Is "The Time Traveller's Wife" science fiction? Yes. Is it also a work of moving literature? Yes. Is it a love story? Yes. It's all of those things. No new classifications need be created for it. We're not entemologists trying to correctly classify everything. It's writing. The questions should be: Is it good? Is it bad? Is it worth reading? That's all.
There is no need to keep trying to put everything into these tinier and tinier catagories. It just makes genre fans more and more worthy of the contempt people already heap upon us. Science Fiction, Space Opera, Hard SF, Speculative Fiction, Sci Fi, New Space Opera, Dark Fantasy, Horror, blah, blah, blah. Does Jonathan Franzen complain that The Corrections should be labeled "family fiction" instead of literature? No. In fact, in non-genre literature the idea of applying these strange little catagories to everything is looked down upon. James Wood calls books like The Corrections "hysterical realism" and people go nuts. Someone like China Mieville tries to stretch his literary arms out and write without a box and SF people go into convulsions trying to classify it. Lay off. Stop trying to put everything in little holes. The fact that people are recognizing that it's okay to go outside the little walls that little talents put up is good. It should be rewarded. If someone writes a good science fiction novel, great. Put the word out. As soon as someone tells me that a book sucks because it's 'space opera' I stop listening to them. A book is good or bad on it's own merits. The fact that a book has been defined by some tedious person as space opera has as much to do with it's quality as a work of fiction as the font that was used to print it. Splitting up our little ghetto into further smaller and smaller sub-ghettos does no one any good and frankly serves only to further the mainstream idea that science fiction is for nerds. Next time you have a thought, even a fleeting one, about whether a book you've written or are reading is a certain sub-genre or another, put the book down and go outside. Take a deep breath, ask yourself if the book is worth reading/writing and go back to it. That's all there is to it.
Friday, September 03, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
I read quite a few books and I read pretty fast but the last book I absolutely didn't want to put down was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I read that one on a weekend car trip and was thinking every hour about how I could pick it up and read more of it. I had the same reaction to Perdido Street Station. I couldn't wait to pick it up and keep reading. It surprised me just how much of a fantasy book this was, I had always considered it science-fiction just by what I heard about it. The thing about this type of fantasy is that it's very grounded in a science-fiction style world. There's magic, but it's run by clockwork machines and is a part of the world, like electricity.
The only problems I had were where Mieville comes right up on something super imaginative (the cactacae, living cactus people) but then stops himself (they have breasts and bones just like a human). There are a ton of sentient species on the world of Bas-Lag but they're all fairly human. He tries to give them strange abilities (watercraeft) or laws (choice-theft) but when it comes down to it, they're basically just humans who look like birds. I have a pretty low tolerance for failure of imagination in SF books (which is why I never wrote a review of the craptacular I, Robot movie) so it's probably just me.
The thing I really liked about PSS is that it felt like it was written in one long rush of imagination, which I'm sure it wasn't. I like the feel of a book that seems like the author was caught up in the crazy world he was creating and just threw things around to see what worked. It doesn't all work but most of it does. And of what does work, there are chunks of mind-blistering originality, both of prose and of ideas. I bought Mieville's followup to PSS, The Scar, on sale sometime back but never read it for wanting to read PSS first. Now that I've read PSS, I had to discipline myself to read a library book before going on to The Scar. Finishing a book and salivating about getting to move on to the next one is a rare pleasure and one I thank China Mieville for providing with Perdido Street Station.