Tick Take Three

I just blasted through the entire second half of the first season of the new Amazon series The Tick—6 half-hour episodes—in a single night.  It really is that good.

While the Tick is ostensibly a superhero (based on a comic created in 1986 by Ben Edlund), it’s really quite different from other superhero properties.  Sure, a lot of superheroes, such as Batman and Spider-Man, have shown up in various movies and televsion shows, with radically different takes on the characters.  But in the Tick’s case, it’s less like, say, Conan, where many different authors and filmmakers have different visions for the iconic character.  It’s more like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where every version is a manifestation of the weird brain of its creator, and yet they’re all different.  And, somehow, all lovable.

The first series based on The Tick (1994 – 1997) was an animated one, and it had a lot to recommend it.  It was insanely surreal (for instance, their version of Aquaman was Sewer Urchin, who lived in the sewers, had a sea urchin helmet, and talked like Rain Man), had wonderfully consistent continuity (e.g. when evil villain Chairface attempts to carve his name into the moon with a giant laser, he is stopped by the Tick and Arthur, but forever after that episode, every time you see the moon on-screen, it has “CHA” on it), and was just plain fun ... if you were into superheroes.  It was true to its roots in that it was primarily a spoof of standard superhero stories, and it was excellent at being that, but admittedly was not much beyond it.

The second series (2001) was live-action, and its primary claim to fame was the casting of Patrick Warburton, who is an actual actor who looks like he was drawn by Ben Edlund and brought to life in a mad scientist’s lab.  You may have seen Warburton on screen now and then (most receently as the titular Lemony Snicket in the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events), but mostly you will know him from the many thousands of cartoons and videogames he has done voice work for (e.g. Family Guy, The Emperor’s New Groove, Tak and the Power of Juju, Skylanders, etc ad infinitum), because his voice is large and booming and perfect for the Tick.  There will never be any actor better suited to play this character, both visually and aurally.  But, aside from that, the 2001 series did just about everything else wrong.  The comedy was too broad and campy: it almost seemed like the writers thought they were Eric Idle, elbowing me in the side and saying the words “wink wink” to me through the TV screen.  Simple example: the 1994 series’ version of Batman was Die Fledermaus, which is the name of a famous German opera and is German for “the bat.”  In the 2001 series, he’s a Latino gentleman named “Batmanuel.”  And that should tell you everything you need to know about the level of humor right there.

This new series (technically 2016, since that’s when the pilot came out) is quite a different take.  Peter Serafinowicz is still no Patrick Warburton, but he is a remarkably talented fellow, and manages to capture the essential weirdness of the Tick quite nicely.  But perhaps the greatest twist in this version is that, in many ways, the Tick is a secondary character in the show that bears his name.  This, for the first time, is really Arthur’s story.  The mild-mannered accountant who becomes an accidental superhero but refuses to adopt a nom de guerre now has a dark (and terribly interesting) backstory, and a sister, who is neither a superhero, nor a prop to be captured by villains and thus require rescuing.  (I think part of the success of superhero stories in the modern age is that they’re finally discovering that the non-superhero “support” characters are far more important to the stories than they’re usually given credit for.)  Oh, it’s still wonderfully silly and surreal—it couldn’t be The Tick otherwise—but there is real pain and loss here.  Like Bruce Wayne, Arthur has to witness the death of a parent at a very young age at the hands of a criminal, but he responds not by becoming Batman, but rather by entering a world of therapy, nervous breakdowns, and paranoid conspiracy theories.  Which, if you think about it, is a much more likely reaction to that sort of trauma than growing up to put on a costume and fight crime.

Anyway, this new version of The Tick is wonderful, and weird, and well worth watching.  You’ll appreciate it even more if you dig superheroes, as I do, but even outside of that demographic I think it has something to offer.  Check it out.

Adventures in Spirituality, Part I: The Nature of Agnosticism

[This is the first post in a long series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


The other day I was pondering what it means to be agnostic.  I often think of myself as having that outlook, although of course it’s a slippery word that means different things to different people.  Dictionary.com says:¹

a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

And that’s sort of what I mean when I use the term, but not exactly.  I absolutely feel that there’s an aspect of “unknowable” to the universe.  As evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane once said:²

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.  Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

and I certainly agree with that sentiment.  The certainty of religion has always struck me as being a bit naive; to trot out a few more quotes:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.  — Bertrand Russell

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.  — William Shakespeare

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.  — Confucius

To imagine that we fully grasp the nature of the universe because we’ve read a book or two that some other (equally fallible) human has designated as “holy” strikes me as the very height of human hubris.  Surely the universe really is stranger than we can imagine.

On the other hand, “agnostic” is often taken to mean “indecisive.”  That, rather than choosing religion or atheism, I just can’t make up my mind and am constantly dithering between the two.  Interestingly enough, in my experience it is only those truly dedicated to one side or the other that seem to hold this opinion.³  Well, speaking as a confirmed agnostic, I can assure you that I’m not having any trouble making up my mind.  It’s already made up: I believe there is some sort of force running the universe, but I don’t know what it is, and I probably never will.  And I’m okay with that.

That’s what “agnostic” means to me: that, while the concept that we can understand everything there is to understand about whatever Higher Power runs the universe, and can influence Its decisions by means of arcane chants and rituals, is certainly absurd, the concept that there is no Higher Power at all and everything just happens by sheer chance is equally absurd.  My experience of the world has taught me that neither of those concepts meshes with reality particularly well.  So I prefer to live in the middle.

The amusing thing about being an agnostic is that you get to see both sides in an unflattering light.  The devoutly religious are often dismissed by atheists as believers in fairy tales, which honestly has a grain of truth to it, but is far too haughty.  Contrariwise, the entrenched atheist may be disdained by religious types as being amoral: obviously, without a Higher Power telling them right from wrong, they would have no moral compass whatsoever.  And, while there may be a tiny bit of truth lurking there too, it’s an almost perversely obtuse attitude to take.  What both sides seem to want to conveniently ignore is that the other side has millions (if not billions) of devotees, many of which are remarkably intelligent and learned individuals.  So any explanation that involves the other side being “not too bright” or “not too principled” is severely lacking.

I admire people of faith, and I also admire atheists with strong science-based convictions.  But they can go to extremes, and then it’s not as much fun being in the middle.  When it’s more like being a spectator at a tennis match, watching the logical arguments fly back and forth, one can afford a wry amusement.  When it’s more like cowering behind a rock while the bullets are flying, then it starts to be a bit scary.  My pet name for Christian extremists is “CCFs,” which stands for “crazy Christian fucks.”  This might make it sound like I have something against Christians, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The majority of them are wonderful people—just as are the majority of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and so forth.  But there will always be bad apples.  Did you know that Genghis Khan was a Buddhist?⁴  When I first learned that, it kind of broke my brain.  On the one hand you have a religion which holds all life as sacred—a religion in which some monks will not even kill an insect.  And, on the other, you have a conqueror who started out by killing his own half-brother and ended by killing (by some estimates) 1.2 million people in a single massacre, after he had already won the battle.  He was known to build pyramids of human heads as a symbol of a victory.  Also, he was a practicing Buddhist.  Now, of course, any Buddhist will no doubt point out that he wasn’t a “real” Buddhist, that he wasn’t actually practicing the “true” tenets of Buddhism.  Which is exactly what the average Muslim would say about a suicide bomber, or what the average Christian would say about people who bomb abortion clinics.

So it can get tricky.  When I see someone on television holding up signs saying that gay people are going to go to Hell, I can’t help but feel like that’s explicitly contrary to the message that Jesus was trying to get across when he said things like “love your enemy.”  Even worse, it really undermines the whole argument that religion provides a moral code to live by and atheists are therefore amoral.  If my choice is hang out with a bunch of people who have to hate entire swaths of the population because “God told them so,” suddenly the atheists are not looking so bad.

But of course the atheists have their extremists too.  In 2010 the government of France outlawed burqas (among other things); this was on top of the 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools.  Measures like this seem (to me) to stem from a misguided attempt to stem overt religion, on the grounds that religion breeds intolerance.  Which is of course true: historically Christians in particular have been remarkably efficient in exterminating people whose religion they disagreed with, even other Christians (see e.g. the Anabaptists).  If I may offer up one more quote:

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.  — Eric Hoffer

And yet, is forbidding Christian children from wearing crosses in school the way to solve that problem?  This now undermines the other side: the atheists are supposed to be the calm ones, the logical ones, the rational ones, but this starts to smack of hysteria ... and on top of everything else, it’s pointless and ineffective, as history should have taught us by now.  The Romans forbade the Christians from displaying their symbols and meeting in their churches, but it doesn’t seem to have done much to stem the tide of Christianity.  And then the Christians took over and tried to forbid—or, even worse: co-opt—the symbols of Druidism and paganism, and yet we still have Wiccans and many other flavors of neopaganism.  It just plain doesn’t work, so why are we still trying to do it?

So my position as a self-confessed agnostic often puts me firmly in the middle, or perhaps in a sort of no-man’s land, not really able to identify with either side.  I’m often put in the position of sending out emails (or blog posts) that try to straddle this line; for instance, when writing about my son’s heart surgery, I included this line:

For those of you who know us personally—and/or who just feel so inclined—we will gratefully accept your positive energies, be they in the form of prayers, rituals, spells, or just good vibes, should any of those be a thing you believe in.

This was a very carefully crafted sentence, one that I put a lot of thought into as regards how to best appeal to those of my friends who might be so inclined to want to pray for us—and I will gladly take all the prayers you care to give, regardless of whether I subscribe to your brand of “God” or not—as well as to those of my friends who might be inclined to roll their eyes at the concept of begging an invisible man in the sky for favors.  But, you know, there is now ample scientific evidence to support the idea that positive thinking can impact your health.  Oh, sure: they call it “dispositional optimism,” because that sounds fancier and more science-y, but it all comes down to the same thing.  So I’m happy to receive positive energy from any and all who are willing to send it my way.  And, if you don’t believe in that sort of crap no matter what the scientific studies say (or you’d just like to point out that extrapolating the power of positive energy from studies on one being optimistic for oneself to beneficial outcomes for being positive on behal of others is not really supported by the extant evidence), that’s fine too.  I’m okay either way.

You may recall ever so long ago that I said that I believe most fervently in balance and paradox.  And that’s no less true of my approach towards spirituality than anything else ... in fact, it’s probably more true.  After all, I sometimes (somewhat flippantly, granted) claim that “baladocianism” is my religion.  So, as a baladocian, I certainly believe that the truth lies somewhere in between religion and atheism ... and also that they’re both true.  My approach to spirituality is somewhat complex, and it’s been shaped by my experience (naturally), and, as I pondered what it meant to be agnostic, I also thought about what brought me here, and I thought that maybe it might be interesting to share that journey with you.


Next time, I explore the flavor(s) of Christianity I inherited from my parents, and where I left them along the way.

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1 Dictionary.com, if you’ve ever wondered, is based primarily on the Random House Unabridged, although it includes content from other sources as well.

2 In 1927, in Possible Worlds and Other Papers.  Thank you Wikiquote.

3 Just as, in my experience, only the most staunchly heterosexual or homosexual adherents will condemn bisexuals as fence-sitters.  But I suppose that’s a sentiment belonging to a very different blog post.

4 This is a mild exaggeration—he was raised a tengrist, which is a form of animism.  But he often practiced Buddhism, and consulted Buddhist monks, and so forth.

R.I.P. John Perry Barlow

A long time ago—in 1994, the Internet tells me—I read an article by one John Perry Barlow, who my subsequent reearch infomed me was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF.  At that time, I didn’t really know who Barlow was, or what the EFF was, even.  But the article (which you can still read online) piqued my interest, as did the entire concept of the EFF, which is a non-profit organization devoted to Internet civil liberties—that is, they fight to keep the Internet free, for everyone.  I’ve never forgotten that article, or the EFF, whose name has popped up more and more often in the intervening years.  And I’ve never forgotten about John Perry Barlow, from whom I read many more articles and statements, and who is an articulate, passionate, ardent freedom fighter for a thankless cause for which he will never receive proper recognition.

Or, at least, he was.  John Perry Barlow died this week, at age 70.  I never had the pleasure of meeting him, although I have met a few folks who knew him personally, and by all accounts he was exactly what he projected in his writings.  In the EFF’s obituary, executive director Cindy Cohn wrote:

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more.  As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth.  Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good.  He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it.  So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”

So the man was not only articulate, passionate, and ardent, but also crazy optimistic.  I’m not even entirely sure I realized how much I admired this guy until I found out he had passed away.  So tonight I say, rest in peace, John Perry Barlow.  The world will miss you, even though it will probably never quite figure out why.

Cantosphere Eversion I

"Where Time Becomes a Loop"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

There are people who like music that pushes the boundary of what “music” means.  Some of these people like experimental jazz, and some of these people like no wave, and some of these people like proto-industrial, such as Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle and the ever-inventive (and ever-impenetrable) Einstürzende Neubauten.  I am not one of those people.  If you’re interested in playing “wrong” notes (by which I mean playing simultaneous notes that deliberately diverge from what most people understand as a chord, particularly when the result is discordant to the ears), or perhaps just combining various noises with no notes at all, then you’ve lost me.  I understand, intellectually, that there are artists who are extremely talented and produce such work.  But, emotionally, I just can’t respond to it.  I’m sure it’s a personal failing.

But, strangely, I am okay if what you want to mess with is the structure of the song.  Perhaps you want to take notes and play them “out of order,” or you want to combine random noises along with the notes, or you want to throw random samples and loops into the mix, or perhaps you just want to throw several completely different songs together and see what happens.  You can get some interesting (and very weird) music this way, and of course there will still be people who see it as not-quite-music, but for me it’s very different than the types of music I enumerated in the first paragraph.  It’s pushing borders, but pushing completely different borders ... perhaps we could even say it’s more rearranging internal borders than truly breaking through external ones.

When you take a sphere and turn it inside out, that’s called sphere eversion.¹  Well, to me, the music I’m talking about today involves turning a song inside out.  It’s a cantosphere eversion.

Now, the absolute masters of this form, in my book, are the Art of Noise.  While they have produced some perfectly “normal” songs (like their version of “Peter Gunn”) and some songs which contained some outré elements (like the inimitable “Paranoimia”), their best work, in my book, is that which pushes a bit beyond the conventional structure.  I’ve included 3 tracks from AoN (although 2 of them are quite short), all off of their briliant album In Visible Silence.  “Opus 4” is our opener, just as it is on IVS.  It very much sets the mood for what is to come.  “Beatback” is just over a minute, serving as a bridge into the volume’s middle section.  And “Eye of a Needle” is a wonderful, longer piece, that anchors the volume’s final third.

But really I would never have been able to properly appreciate Art of Noise when I finally discovered them if it hadn’t been for Yazoo.  I’ve talked about my love for this 80s synthpop miracle before,² but all those times I was going with their more traditional fare.  But as soon as I knew this mix was going to become a reality, the very first song I reached for was “I Before E Except After C,” which has always fascinated me.  It’s weird and nonsensical, and many people absolutely hate it, even when they love the remainder of Yazoo’s output.  But I was always entranced by it, and I’m so glad I finally found a happy home for it here in my mixes.

Now, as much as I love “I Before E Except After C,” it’s not actually the mix starter.  What really kicked this mix off was learning of the existence of Animal Collective, who played the absolutely magnificent “FloriDada” on Steven Colbert’s show one night back in May of 2016.  As soon as I heard it, sounding as it does like 3 entirely different songs being played by the Collective’s 3 front-men, I was enthralled, and also instantly reminded of the Art of Noise, which I hadn’t listened to in quite a while.  It’s no surprise that the first 3 tracks on this volume are AoN, Animal Collective, and Yazoo.  By the time you get to end of that triplet, you know exactly where this mix is going.

Probably the next most obvious choice for this mix was “Revolution 9” by the Beatles.  A great deal has been written about this track and what it could possibly mean.  Personally, I’ve always just thought it was the lads having a bit of fun.  There are quite a lot of strange noises and brief snippets of dialogue that fade in and out, as if you were traveling very fast and just hearing snatches of conversation as you passed by.  This is the same basic model used in “Let’s Talk About Cars” by the Butthole Surfers, although the latter at least has some semblance of a melody running through it.  The Surfers, of course, offer quite a lot of choices when it comes to experimental songs, but I’ve always been partial to Electriclarryland, which is certainly their most accessible album.  This track, though, proves that “accessible” is always a specturm for the Buttholes.

Of course, there are quite a few tracks on this album that are experimental primarily in the sense that they consist of just a few phrases repeated over and over.  First and foremost is Orbital’s classic “The Moebius,” which is, as Lieutenant Worf tells us repeatedly in the song, where time becomes a loop (and that also handily provides our volume title this time out).  But we also have John Standing giving us a list of “Elements,” with backing by Lemon Jelly (who are also sampling some of the music on that track), and German downtempo artist Naomi reading us a list of cities interspersed with the repeated word “Rainfall.” In fact, I like Naomi so much that I let them do essentially the same thing twice: they show up on the back half of the volume repeating some nonsense about a “Butter Worker.” These are the tracks that almost didn’t make the cut ... well, except for the Orbital tune, which I was always eyeing, for the perfect title drop if nothing else.  They’re not really in the same ballpark of “inside-out-ness” as most of the remaining tracks here.  They have real melodies and everything.  But, in the end, I decided to let them stay.  In some sense, they provide a little break from the weirdness of the rest of the volume.

A step above these tracks are those which are musically not so strange, but lyrically just consist of screeching or grunting.  My favorite of these is probably “Cry of the Vatos” by Oingo Boingo, in which Danny Elfman and the boys sound like they’re doing imitations of caged animals, but “Cthulhu’s Night Out,” by favorite of my Paradoxically Sized World mix³ Ugress, with its odd cross between wordless crooning and creepy chanting, is fun too.  “Christianity” by Skinny Puppy gives us what might be demonic chanting.⁴  And let’s not ignore Odyssey, by Canadian electro-house artisan OVERWERK, which somehow manages to sound like a Wagnerian opera as performed by cartoon characters.  Normally this latter style—similar to popular fare by Daft Punk and deadmau5—doesn’t really appeal to me.  But something about this track really pumps me up.

There are also a few more songs here that seem, like “FloriDada,” to be a couple of different songs going on at once.  “Pirhana One Chord Boots” by Transglobal Underground is a good example.  It’s not really too far off of normal, but the background music and samples never quite match up with the foreground vocals, giving the tune a mildly shizophrenic quality.  Which is also a great description of my choice from Devo.  I sort of assumed that Devo would be rich fodder for this mix, but they actually don’t mess with a good pop song structure nearly as much as you might think.  “Too Much Paranoias” is the obvious exception, and it somehow serves as a musical expression of its subject matter.  And there’s certainly a lot of weirdness going on in “The Voice & the Snake,” even for Enigma.  While most of their output is more suited to mellower mixes,⁵ this one is just ... strange.

Cantosphere Eversion I
[ Where Time Becomes a Loop ]

“Opus 4” by Art of Noise, off In Visible Silence
“FloriDada” by Animal Collective, off Painting With
“I Before E Except After C” by Yazoo, off Upstairs at Eric's
“Rainfall” by Naomi, off Pappelallee
“Revolution 9” by the Beatles, off The White Album
“All Mink & No Manners” by Big Audio Dynamite, off Megatop Phoenix
“The Moebius” by Orbital, off Orbital
“Odyssey” by OVERWERK [Single]
“Beatback” by Art of Noise, off In Visible Silence
“Pirhana One Chord Boots” by Transglobal Underground, off International Times
“Cthulhu's Night Out” by Ugress, off Reminiscience
“Christianity” by Skinny Puppy [Single]
“Elements” by Lemon Jelly, off Lost Horizons
“The Voice & the Snake” by Enigma, off MCMXC a.D.
“Cry of the Vatos” by Oingo Boingo, off Good for Your Soul
“Let's Talk about Cars” by Butthole Surfers, off Electriclarryland
“Eye of a Needle” by Art of Noise, off In Visible Silence
“Butter Worker” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“Too Much Paranoias” by Devo, off Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
“Is Yours Working Yet?” by Big Audio Dynamite, off Megatop Phoenix
“Gin and Tonic Blues” by Reverend Horton Heat, off The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat

Total:  21 tracks,  79:18

For bridges, I was inspired by the interstitials from Big Audio Dynamite’s Megatop Phoenix.  These are strange little snippets of samples and bits of stray music stitched together and jammed in between BAD’s poppy, reggae-influenced tracks, where they sound a bit out-of-place.  Here, on the other hand, they fit perfectly, sounding like just shorter versions of some of the Art of Noise tracks (especially “Eye of a Needle”).  “All Mink & No Manners,” which bridges our opening third with the center stretch, is probably my favorite.  But “Is Yours Working Yet?” (which bridges into the utter insanity of the final track) is also pretty fun.  As Alfred Hitchcock says at the beginning of the latter, “I trust that everyone is enjoying the music.”

Finally, in the category of “songs that sound like they’re being slowly dissolved in an acid bath,” we close the volume out with “Gin and Tonic Blues” by the Reverend Horton Heat.  I originally tried to slot this track in Bleeding Salvador, but it’s just too much even there.  It’s not just lyrically surreal—it’s musically strange, and perhaps even a bit disturbing.  But here it works well, and the way it ends up sort of consuming itself until it abruptly falls off a clifff makes it a perfect closer.

Next time, we’ll look at yet another volume of contemplative, autumnal fare.

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1 Click that link and then watch the video on the Wikipedia page; it’s a bit mind-blowing.

2 Specifically, on Darkling Embrace I and Totally Different Head I.

3 In fact, we’ve seen him on volumes II, III, and IV,

4 And, if you know anything about Skinny Puppy, that’s pretty much exactly what you expected from them.

5 Such as Numeric Driftwood III, which is where we’ve seen pop up before in this series.