The Game - Neil Strauss

This post may appeal to the smallest subset of my readers so far. Nonetheless I have been claiming that I was going to read this for a while and I finally got around to it. The above image is of a man named Mystery (real name Erik James Horvat-Markovic) who is a pickup artist. He is mostly well known by the fact that he had a show of the same name of his occupation (The Pick-up Artist) and because of this book. A pickup artist is someone who develops certain lines, strategies and skills to be able to attract and seduce women. If this sounds creepy, it is.

The Game is the writer Neil Strauss' introduction to, and development within the pickup community. Strauss is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and was known before for ghost writing many books for rock stars. He starts out as an awkward average guy, who gets introduced to the pickup society by an article suggestion from an editor. What follows is a description of the characters and methods of the pickup society along with his personal development. I didn't read this book to try to learn the art of the pickup, but read it because I had seen The Pick-Up Artist and found Mystery to be equally ridiculous and fascinating. Just look at his outfits! He is very rarely seen without that large feathery hat, and often comes dressed in goggles, platform shoes (even though he is 6 foot 5), leather pants and various other ridiculous accessories. However he seems to be very successful with the ladies; at least when it comes to initial conversations at bars and clubs.

Most everyone found within the seduction community comes from the ranks of socially awkward computer (or otherwise) nerds. Many of them start off as virgins who have no idea how to talk to the opposite sex. Strauss wasn't that socially awkward initially, but admits to having some problems with the ladies. After getting his first taste of the seduction community, he gets sucked in until it reaches a full blown obsession. It seems that the first thing that someone has to do when entering the pickup community is to get a silly nickname, and Strauss chooses 'Style'. He starts to learn from many of the masters and eventually settles in with Mystery. He then proceeds to start teaching pickup seminars with Mystery and becomes his main wingman. These seminars involve them teaching a handful of young men how to interact with and pickup women. They lecture and give them notes, and then go out with the students into the 'field' and watch their interactions with women to give them further tips. This takes them all over the world (there is a pretty funny series of events that happen in Eastern Europe) and eventually settles them in as the head of the pickup community.

The techniques of the pickup community (at least the Mystery Method) focus on social manipulation of women and groups. The technique that grabs you immediately is their 'peacocking'. This involves wearing ridiculous outfits in order to stand out in a crowd (see above and below for a picture of Mystery and Style) and seems to work. Other techniques involve ignoring the 'target' (or woman of interest) in order to make her more interested in you, giving her backhanded compliments ('negs') in order to lower her apparent worth in comparison to yours, and many more sneaky techniques. The Method also develops a set of 'openers' or ridiculous lines in order to break the ice of groups. Their idea is that it really doesn't matter what you first say to someone, as long as it gets them interested in talking to you. Additionally Mystery himself uses sleight of hand magic tricks to charm women and has aspirations to be a world renown illusionist (thus his nickname).

After Style and Mystery seem to conquer the seduction world, they move into a house together with other pickup artists to make a pickup community called Project Hollywood. The group rent a large Hollywood mansion in order to organize their pickup seminars (in which they make thousands of dollars) and to have a place to party and bring girls. You can imagine what happens when a bunch of socially awkward misogynistic people get together to live under one roof. They almost immediately begin to backstab each other by stealing each others girls, pickup tricks, and just by being all around jerks.

Mystery is a complete mess throughout the book. The reason I decided to read this was because how ridiculous I think Mystery is, and was not disappointed. He has breakdown after breakdown in the book, needs various psychotic medication and has to be taken to a mental hospital multiple times. He also dates completely unstable women which doesn't help the situation. One of these girls causes the breakdown of Mystery and the entire idea of Project Hollywood by falling for one of the other guys in the house.

Because these men are socially awkward and insecure at the core, they are unable to have stable relationships after they get past the tricks and lines that get women to give them their number and on occasion into their beds. As the house falls apart Style starts to see how shallow and empty many of the men are in the community are and becomes distant from the other house mates (other than Mystery with whom he is still close). He starts to desire a real meaningful relationship, rather than a series of hookups and week long stands. After meeting and temporarily boarding Courtney Love, Strauss falls for one of her band mates. Realizing that all of his 'tricks' won't work on the confident guitarist, he acts like himself and eventually gets the girl (it should be noted that they are no longer together).

Although the motives of many of the men in this book are suspect, there may be something useful to be found in the seduction community for awkward men. It teaches them how to approach women, and how to have the confidence to interact with them beyond a predetermined set of lines. The moral issues come in when men use these techniques to bed woman after woman while treating them like objects. The community does frown strongly against using drugs or alcohol to try to pick up women as well as lying (beyond the initial silly lines), but they end up treating women no better than many of the douchebags that picked on them back in high school do.

This book got a little graphic at times so it's not for someone who wants to avoid the occasional sex scene. It's fairly well written for a book about the seduction community, and is broken up into small chapters making it easy to read. The look of the book matches the ridiculousness of the characters within; it has a leather cover with gold rimmed pages and a red satin bookmark, just like the bible. Strauss is able to walk to line between being the journalist who is an outsider, and someone who is ingrained as an important part of this society. He obviously cares about the seduction community, and thinks it teaches mean important things about themselves and others. While at the same time he is able to critique the people within the community and the ways that the techniques that he has helped develop can be misused.

So ladies, when men dressed in ridiculous outfits or accessories come up to you and ask 'if you believe spells work' walk away. Just walk away.

Blue Velvet - David Lynch

A little less than a year ago I started watching David Lynch's films as guided movie watching. I hadn't seen any of them, and knew I was late for the party as a mid 20's movie fan that likes to think he's a little 'hip' and 'with it'. This was what got me started thinking about possibly writing a blog. I liked viewing things in a directed fashion, as if it were the syllabus for a film class, and I especially enjoyed discussing them with Lindsay afterward. I moved on to do the same thing with anime (a little bit of hit and a whole lot of miss), John Carpenter, and possibly in the future David Cronenberg. So far I think the David Lynch 'class' has been the most successful. He has a pretty wide catalog, but not too big as to be overwhelming. His movies are also all worth watching (except maybe Fire Walk with Me the terrible Twin Peaks 'prequel') and also usually elicit a pretty strong response (which may or may not be positive).

Blue Velvet may be the best place to start if you were interested in getting into David Lynch. I first watched Eraserhead which although spectacular in it's own way, isn't really for everyone. The only rival to Blue Velvet in terms of being a good introduction into the world of David Lynch would be his best film (in my opinion), Mulholland Drive. Blue Velvet is probably his most straightforward film in terms of genre and plot. Sure, a fair amount of weird things happen, but the story is mostly a film noir about a young man coming home from college and getting into some trouble with local mobsters.

The young man in question, Jeffrey (played by a young Kyle MacLachlan) comes home to his hometown during a college break because his father is having some health issues. Passing through a field on the way back from visiting his father in the hospital he finds a severed ear. David Lynch uses his patented technique of making the ear much creepier than it should be by having the camera zoom inside the ear, which is accompanied by a loud deafening rumble. After taking the ear to a detective, he decides that with the help of the detective's daughter (Laura Dern) he wants to investigate the case himself. Eventually this involves breaking into a local lounge singer's house (Isabella Rossellini, whose current role is portraying bug sex acts) where he sees some weird shit involving a mobster played by Dennis Hopper, and eventually gets caught up with Dennis Hopper and his crew.

Blue Velvet seems as if it's another piece of media where we are introduced to a small sleepy 'perfect' suburban town, only to realize the horrors that lie just underneath the surface. This is telegraphed right from the beginning when David Lynch (who's middle name is not subtlety) pans from a beautiful well cut yard of grass to the bugs that are infesting the soil that lies underneath. However, this film is not in the same vein as say American Beauty where the suburbs are displayed as a soulless place where everyone is screaming with rage on the inside. There may be crimes and criminals that exist in this 'perfect' town, but not everyone has a secret or is rotting from the inside. Most of the town, including the detective that Jefferey turns to for help as well as the men who work in his dad's hardware store are stand-up people. This may be the result of Lynch growing up in a small city (Missoula, Montana), so he's not as dismissive of middle and small town America as are most artists from the coasts.

Besides Lynch's distinct direction, the thing that really makes this movie is the acting by Kyle MacLachlin and Dennis Hopper. MacLachlin's character seems to be a younger more naive version of the character he plays in Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper. He has the same wide-eyed optimism, toughness, and thirst for solving crimes that Dale Cooper does. He also attracts younger women and gives off an aura of collected cool. Jeffrey may be a little wet behind the ears, and a little foolish, but you can almost see how his brush with the evil incarnate Dennis Hopper would push him into the FBI. Speaking of Hopper, holy cow! This was the role that he was born to play. After watching this movie the first time, I couldn't help but think that every other crazy, off the rails, yelling incoherently Dennis Hopper character was just a toned down take of Frank Booth. From his weird sexual desires to yell at Rossellini's crotch while having his face stuffed with a patch of blue velvet, to his drug fueled rage issues and his ridiculous costumes it just seems that no one else could have played this role.

Just the other post, I was complaining about a lack of theaters that show older movies in the way they were originally to be seen. Thus I was really excited when I found out that the Plaza Theatre here in Atlanta was going to have a showing of Blue Velvet. This theater shows lots of indie and small movies, along with having some interesting horror and gore shows if you're into that. I really love that it exists. That being said the crowd really got on my nerves.

The show was sponsored by PBR and thus I didn't mind the promoters giving out free PBR merch/advertisements at the beginning of the show. What I minded was the attitude that the majority of the crowd came in with. This being an independent theater near little five points that was showing a David Lynch movie, I expected a lot of hipsters. I knew that hipsters had adopted Lynch as their movie director, but I didn't understand their reaction to the movie. At the beginning of the movie there was a pretty energetic buzz of the movie, and I was happy to be in a room full of people excited to see this movie. The movie starts out as pretty innocent, with some ridiculous Lynchian lines and shots that are admittedly pretty amusing. Additionally, some of the scenes in the middle of the film with Dennis Hopper are definitely laugh out loud funny. However, as the movie went on they began to laugh more and more even though none of the scenes warranted it. I understand that seeing a movie in a theater is an interesting experience because of the crowd, but laughing because Laura Dern is crying, or because the characters are being emotional on the screen doesn't make any sense. It also kept pulling me out of the movie which had a negative effect on the experience. I know hipsters have to love things only if they're 'ironic' but why can't they just like something in all sincerity? Maybe people in the theater may have really liked the movie, but it seemed like they had to laugh and make sounds because of the developed sense of awareness that being a hipster requires. For once I wish this new group of 'counter culture' could just earnestly like something, without having to laugh or make fun of it in order to still seem 'cool' to the people around them.

My rant being over, I still really enjoyed seeing Blue Velvet on the big screen. It's an interesting movie that is thrilling, dark, and terrifying while still being weird. While it's a little slow and not my favorite of Lynch's films, but it's still an effective piece of cinema that everyone should see at least once.

The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins

(Homo Habilis skull. The oldest known member of the homo genus)

Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not become dulled by familiarity: the very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction. - Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins gets a bad rap. It is generally agreed by those who read him that he is equally gifted as both a scientist and as an author. However this is not how most people know him. Most people know him by his book The God Delusion and his public appearances following that book. He was so much in the public eye that he was satirized in a multi-part South Park episode that lampooned both him and zealous atheists. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss his other works just because you find his God bashing distasteful. There is something to learn from his writing even if you do believe in a god (as long as you're accepting of the theory of evolution).

The Ancestor's Tale is written as a backward pilgrimage to discover the ancestors of human beings and eventually the ancestors of all life. The structure is vaguely based on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales but I'm not really that familiar with Chaucer so I won't comment on it. The pilgrimage starts with modern day man and then traces our ancestry back until we reach multiple rendezvous points with other species. The evolution of man, or any species, can be seen as starting from the beginning of life, and branching off in a tree-like fashion as organisms speciate. This forms a tree similar to the one shown below for eukaryotes (plants, animals and fungi). For those interested, this tree was formed using DNA comparison analysis, and the length of the branches roughly marks the difference in the DNA. Note how on this scale humans and chimps don't even qualify as having separate branches.

(Eukaryotic evolutionary tree. Taken from Science issue 199, 1978)

Often Dawkins tries to imagine what our common ancestor (or as he terms it concestor) with another branch looked like. One the chart above this would be the intersection or 'branching point' between two lines. I found this exercise to be utterly fascinating, if occasionally disappointing. Often when trying to imagine what our concestor looked like, Dawkins postulates that it looks exactly like the creature we were joining! When humans (and all those who branched off with us) join the lemurs, he images that our concestor would be lemur! When we join fish, you can guess again what he imagined that concestor to look like.

The most fascinating thing about this book to me, was the order in which we 'joined' other species. Are we closer to reptiles, birds or amphibians? Did we evolve from single celled organisms like you might see today or are they a sister group to us? Did we come from bacteria or again are they sister to us? (Quick note on this one, no one knows!) As new branches and groups of species join us on our journey Dawkins often uses a 'tale' about one of the joining species to elucidate something about the way evolution works, or just to point out something cool. These 'tales' help keep the book from being too technical and really keep it moving.

Dawkins also uses his time to help explain how we determine these rendezvous dates and figure out which other species share a more recent concestor with us. He discusses fossils and radioactive dating in rocks to be sure, but the most interesting technique he goes over is the widely used DNA comparison analysis. People who question how we know any of this stuff, and wonder how fossils can tell us so much about our past, should really try to understand how important DNA analysis between contemporary species is in helping us pinpoint our evolutionary roots. His introduction to this is technical enough to satisfy my scientific interests, but I'm sure it's a greatly dumbed down description. I imagine that this book could be possibly dull for an experienced zoologist or geneticist, but it was perfect for someone with general (but not specific) scientific knowledge.

Although the order of concestors closest (most recent) to us is pretty well known once we start going back into the Pre-Cambrian things start getting trickier. Dawkins makes his best guess, but makes sure to reiterate time and time again that he is making an educated guess. To me this is the difference between the scientific and religious way of thinking, and what makes something like the theory of evolution vastly superior to the theory of creation. Evolutionists will freely admit when they don't know the answer to a particular problem, where as creationists will just once again fall back on their old arguments. I don't want to turn this into another evolution/creation debate but reading books like this that help elucidate the wonders of evolution and nature make it hard not to get frustrated with the creationist point of view. Dawkins offers his (non-inflammatory) feelings in the quote below.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

Space Seed and The Wrath of Khan - Star Trek

'Space Seed'


Like most people my age I had seen The Wrath of Khan many times before sitting down to watch the first season Star Trek episode that spawned the titular character. Although when the movie came out it was almost impossible to watch the old television episode as a refresher (this was before the days of torrents and DVDs), watching them in succession improves them both.

'Space Seed' starts the way many episodes of Star Trek do: there is a rudderless spaceship adrift with seemingly no humanoid pilot. Thus the crew of the Enterprise decide to make an away team to see what's up. This is a very popular plot device in science fiction, another example being the Firefly episode 'Bushwhacked' (which is interesting because the way that Khan disposes of some scientists in the film is reminiscent of the way the Reavers hung up bodies in this same Firefly episode), but this being the original 'Star Trek' series it doesn't yet seem cliche. The Enterprise crew discovers that this ship is from the 1990's (where's my spaceship, 90s!?!) and contains a fairly large crew in suspended animation.

Khan is the leader of the ship and is the first one re-animated. After figuring out his current situation and recovering on the Enterprise, he then quickly starts to plot to overtake the ship and crew. We learn that Khan is the leader of a group of genetically engineered humans who attempted to control the planet back in 1996 (where's my superman, 90s!?!) who then escaped in a ship to attempt to take over some alien races in the distant future. Kirk makes sure to compare Khan to Napoleon at least 4 times so we understand that this guy means business, and that he's bound to try to take over the ship. Khan actually succeeds briefly (with the help of a starry eyed earth historian who has a Napoleon/Alexander the Great jonze) but our captain eventually takes him out with a sweet karate kick or two. Kirk then gives Khan the option of punishments, and Khan takes the 'deserted on a habitable planet to surely cause trouble in the not so distant future' option and away he goes.

Like all Star Trek episodes this one has its amount of camp. Almost all of the scenes with the historian and Khan are pretty ridiculous, and it's impossible not to laugh at Kirk's fighting style. Even so, this episode maintains a pretty heavy tone, which is really helped by Ricardo Montalban portrayal of Khan. Although it is only one episode in the first season, one can't help but feel it was being set up for a sequel (in TV or the movies). One of the final lines, in which the episode title comes form, from Spock to Kirk lets the audience know that this battle is far from over.

It would be interesting, captain, to return to that world in a hundred years, and learn what crop had sprung from the seed you planted today.

The Wrath of Khan


I find it impossible to fathom how The Wrath of Khan got made. It's a sequel to a boring, slow movie that didn't do that well critically or financially, which was itself a spin off from a canceled television show. Furthermore, the end of The Wrath of Khan pretty much demands a sequel, which is pretty ballsy for a franchise in the state that Star Trek was in after The Motion Picture. However it got made it's good that it happened, because The Wrath of Khan is one of the most well known, and influential movies in American cinema (at least when it comes to sci-fi).

I won't go into as much as a plot summary as I did above, because I figure most everyone has seen this film. Having not viewed it in a while, I forgot how smooth it flows and how quick it moves. The movie doesn't feel dated at all, it has the somewhat 70s outfits and old looking spaceships, but the pace and direction feel like they could have come from a movie today. The film is also helped by the fact that all of the actors improved considerably in the 15 years that elapsed. (An interesting side note, I never knew that the crew of the Enterprise was constantly in flux. I was used to TNG where the crew stays pretty constant. Sulu and Chekov were not in the above episode and in fact Chekov is in less than half of the total episodes and Sulu in just over half. That being the case I feel less bad that they aren't given much to do in any of the movies.) In addition, the movie just looks and feels darker than the tv show. The bridge is cast in shadows and doesn't have that bright and shiny feel found in the series. I think this helps give the movie a little more weight which definitely helps improve it from the series. Watching the TV episode on which this movie is based really helps give you a sense of history between Kirk and Khan and really improves the film. Again Montalban's portrayal is excellent as Khan and the war of wills between him and Kirk is very believable because of the personalities involved.

Khan has its share of memorable moments and one of the most memorable movie moments of all time is shown below so you don't have to go looking for it (I know you'd have to look it up. Also sorry for the annoying panning and annotation, there isn't a 'normal' clip out there that I found).





Although this movie is one of the better sci fi movies ever made, and probably the best trek movie it has its share of problems. One of the main problems I found was the multiple plot holes. If Chekov wasn't on the ship on the previous episode, why would Khan remember him when they first meet on his desolate planet? The planet that Khan was stranded on was initially habitable but became a desert after a nearby planet blew up. How does a planet just blow up? When Khan inserts the mind controlling desert slug he claims that it will make them susceptible to suggestion until the slug grows so big and the host dies. Why then does it just leave Chekov's head randomly at just the right time? I'm not one to be a nitpicker so I'll let the previous problems slide, I just figured they should be noted.

Of course I have left off what might be the most moving scene of the whole movie, Spock's death. Even though now we know that Spock obviously makes a return (the existence of the sequel The Search for Spock gives us a hint) his death is still affecting nevertheless. His quote to Kirk 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one' is one of the movie quotes that has followed me ever since childhood. His sacrifice and the efforts and losses that Kirk goes through to get him back in the following film is what defines the best part of 'Star Trek' to me. Although they are very different 'people', they have formed such a bond that they would do anything for each other. Kirk and Spock might be the best and most pure 'best friends' of all time.