Tuesday, October 31, 2006

ghosts in the machines

Op-Ed Contributor

By NEIL GAIMAN

WE are gathered here at the final end of what Bradbury called the October Country: a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there’s mist in the crisp night air and it’s time to tell ghost stories.

When I was growing up in England, Halloween was no time for celebration. It was the night when, we were assured, the dead walked, when all the things of night were loosed, and, sensibly, believing this, we children stayed at home, closed our windows, barred our doors, listened to the twigs rake and patter at the window-glass, shivered, and were content.

There were days that changed everything: birthdays and New Years and First Days of School, days that showed us that there was an order to all things, and the creatures of the night and the imagination understood this, just as we did. All Hallows’ Eve was their party, the night all their birthdays came at once. They had license — all the boundaries set between the living and the dead were breached — and there were witches, too, I decided, for I had never managed to be scared of ghosts, but witches, I knew, waited in the shadows, and they ate small boys.

I did not believe in witches, not in the daylight. Not really even at midnight. But on Halloween I believed in everything. I even believed that there was a country across the ocean where, on that night, people my age went from door to door in costumes, begging for sweets, threatening tricks.

Halloween was a secret, back then, something private, and I would hug myself inside on Halloween, as a boy, most gloriously afraid.



Now I write fictions, and sometimes those stories stray into the shadows, and then I find I have to explain myself to my loved ones and my friends.

Why do you write ghost stories? Is there any place for ghost stories in the 21st century?

As Alice said, there’s plenty of room. Technology does nothing to dispel the shadows at the edge of things. The ghost-story world still hovers at the limits of vision, making things stranger, darker, more magical, just as it always has ....

There’s a blog I don’t think anyone else reads. I ran across it searching for something else, and something about it, the tone of voice perhaps, so flat and bleak and hopeless, caught my attention. I bookmarked it.

If the girl who kept it knew that anyone was reading it, anybody cared, perhaps she would not have taken her own life. She even wrote about what she was going to do, the pills, the Nembutal and Seconal and the rest, that she had stolen a few at a time over the months from her stepfather’s bathroom, the plastic bag, the loneliness, and wrote about it in a flat, pragmatic way, explaining that while she knew that suicide attempts were cries for help, this really wasn’t, she just didn’t want to live any longer.

She counted down to the big day, and I kept reading, uncertain what to do, if anything. There was not enough identifying information on the Web page even to tell me which continent she lived on. No e-mail address. No way to leave comments. The last message said simply, “Tonight.”

I wondered whom I should tell, if anyone, and then I shrugged, and, best as I could, I swallowed the feeling that I had let the world down.

And then she started to post again. She says she’s cold and she’s lonely.

I think she knows I’m still reading ....



I remember the first time I found myself in New York for Halloween. The parade went past, and went past and went past, all witches and ghouls and demons and wicked queens and glorious, and I was, for a moment, 7 years old once more, and profoundly shocked. If you did this in England, I found myself thinking in the part of my head that makes stories, things would wake, all the things we burn our bonfires on Guy Fawkes’ to keep away. Perhaps they can do it here, because the things that watch are not English. Perhaps the dead do not walk here, on Halloween.

Then, a few years later, I moved to America and bought a house that looked as if it had been drawn by Charles Addams on a day he was feeling particularly morbid. For Halloween, I learned to carve pumpkins, then I stocked up on candies and waited for the first trick-or-treaters to arrive. Fourteen years later, I’m still waiting. Perhaps my house looks just a little too unsettling; perhaps it’s simply too far out of town.



And then there was the one who said, in her cellphone’s voicemail message, sounding amused as she said it, that she was afraid she had been murdered, but to leave a message and she would get back to us.

It wasn’t until we read the news, several days later, that we learned that she had indeed been murdered, apparently randomly and quite horribly.

But then she did get back to each of the people who had left her a message. By phone, at first, leaving cellphone messages that sounded like someone whispering in a gale, muffled wet sounds that never quite resolved into words.

Eventually, of course, she will return our calls in person.



And still they ask, Why tell ghost stories? Why read them or listen to them? Why take such pleasure in tales that have no purpose but, comfortably, to scare?

I don’t know. Not really. It goes way back. We have ghost stories from ancient Egypt, after all, ghost stories in the Bible, classical ghost stories from Rome (along with werewolves, cases of demonic possession and, of course, over and over, witches). We have been telling each other tales of otherness, of life beyond the grave, for a long time; stories that prickle the flesh and make the shadows deeper and, most important, remind us that we live, and that there is something special, something unique and remarkable about the state of being alive.

Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses. You ride the ghost train into the darkness, knowing that eventually the doors will open and you will step out into the daylight once again. It’s always reassuring to know that you’re still here, still safe. That nothing strange has happened, not really. It’s good to be a child again, for a little while, and to fear — not governments, not regulations, not infidelities or accountants or distant wars, but ghosts and such things that don’t exist, and even if they do, can do nothing to hurt us.

And this time of year is best for a haunting, as even the most prosaic things cast the most disquieting shadows.

The things that haunt us can be tiny things: a Web page; a voicemail message; an article in a newspaper, perhaps, by an English writer, remembering Halloweens long gone and skeletal trees and winding lanes and darkness. An article containing fragments of ghost stories, and which, nonsensical although the idea has to be, nobody ever remembers reading but you, and which simply isn’t there the next time you go and look for it.

Neil Gaiman is the author of the novel “Anansi Boys” and “Fragile Things,” a collection of stories.

Monday, October 30, 2006

someone else's country

The Media Equation
American Tragedies, to Sell Trucks

By DAVID CARR

Before the second game of the World Series, the singer John Mellencamp warmed up the crowd with “Our Country,” a paean to American greatness. Sports fans could be forgiven for having a bit of déjà vu, having heard the same chorus in heavy rotation during college football, N.F.L. football and now the World Series, as a backdrop to a commercial to the new Chevrolet Silverado.

Consumers are used to General Motors wrapping itself in the flag, having been variously urged to “Keep America Rolling” for “An American Revolution” and to listen to “The Heartbeat of America.” But this new version of patriotism took on a more desperate air, all but setting the flag on fire to honor it.

As the commercial begins, an industrial history rolls out, touching the usual icons of the Statue of Liberty, busy factory workers and Americans at their leisure. But then a more conflicted narrative emerges, quickly flashing on bus boycotts, Vietnam, Nixon resigning, Hurricane Katrina, fires, floods, then the attacks of Sept. 11, replete with firefighters.

All that’s missing is a plague of locusts, until the commercial intones “This is our country, this is our truck” as a large Silverado emerges from amber waves of grain.

The message seems to be that, even though America has been in the ditch several times during its history, it has always managed to pull itself out. And what is true for the country must be true for General Motors. It could be pointed out that Detroit and General Motors are in a ditch mostly because they drove there, ignoring global competition and consumer needs in pursuit of quarterly profits. But the back story of the disaster is obscured by the universal need to rebound.

Critics have attacked the ad, in part because it also invokes Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to sell trucks. But something more subtle, perhaps more cynical, may be at work here: the image of America (and its leading auto manufacturer) as victim, mostly of itself, but still worth loving.

“The first time I saw it, I thought, holy mackerel, they are using negative images to generate positive emotions,” said Bob Garfield, the advertising critic of Advertising Age. “I have never seen that in a commercial.”

“I feel a little violated when I watch it,” he said. “I don’t mind when they have a tent sale on President’s Day, but those guys have been dead for 200 years. I’m not sure I’m ready for a Rosa Parks sale-a-bration.”

Kim Kosak, director of advertising and sales promotion at Chevrolet, said there was no thought given to drawing a parallel between the struggles of a nation and the struggles of a corporate icon.

“We never discussed that or thought about it,” she said in a phone interview. “The idea was that the pickup consumer is honest, hardworking, authentic and real. In order to be real and honest, we needed to show the scars and bruises, as well as the triumphs, of this country in order to be true.”

As a piece of television craft and song craft — I’m humming that sucker in spite of myself — “This is our country” is a gorgeous, A.D.D. version of Ken Burns’s best work. But it is landing with a thud in the advertising community, and not just because it achieved the impossible: making viewers nostalgic for Chevy’s last anthem, Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock.”

“The message seems to be, ‘If you don’t buy our truck, we will go bankrupt,’ ” said Al Ries of Ries & Ries, a brand consultancy. “The kind of people who buy trucks are not going to buy them because a company is in trouble. People like to buy from winners.”

Jerry Della Femina, who runs an ad agency in New York, says he believes the spot is something of a new low.

“You see all these moving images and at the end of it, all you get is a lousy Chevy truck,” he said. Mr. Della Femina called the ad “manipulative” and said it suggested that G.M. was “somehow coming up from the depths.”

National travail obviously touches the heartstrings and it’s hardly surprising that Sept. 11 became a theme in political advertising. At the Republican National Convention in 2004, Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose finest hour occurred during those attacks, recalled in his speech that he confided to Bernard B. Kerik as the towers fell, “Thank God George Bush is our president.”

But what works in politics may be dangerous in commerce. Who didn’t feel a little dirty participating in the group hug watching the first N.F.L. game in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? And while Robert De Niro’s commercial about New York — including his reference to ground zero as “my heartbreak” was evocative — it was used as a branding moment for American Express.

And now we have Mr. Mellencamp, who’s done some rebranding of his own, having dropped the “Cougar” from his name back when his image needed a folksy turn. His political values seem equally elastic. He and his spouse once wrote a jeremiad against the Bush administration that said, in part: “It is time to take back our country. Take it back from political agendas, corporate greed and overall manipulation.”

That was in 2003. Now he’s sitting on the fender of a Chevy truck, strumming a guitar and singing, “Well, I can stand beside ideals I think are right, and I can stand beside the idea to stand and fight.” He can also stand beside a nice shiny truck, if the fee is right.

A few days ago, Gawker, the Manhattan media site, ran a picture of a bar advertising, “The happiest happy hour south of ground zero.” Whether or not the statement is clinically true — a bit tough to measure, that — the message was beyond crass and deserved our contempt.

When it comes to selling bars, trucks or even politicians, you can wave the flag or you can drape one over a coffin. You can’t do both.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

trick or treat

11 Things: Trick or Treat

Thursday, October 26, 2006

1. Partying in the streets of San Francisco on a Halloween night. (An annual treat with very few rivals.)

2. How your head feels the next morning when you get up to go to work. (An annual trick with very few rivals.)

3. Fresh fruit such as bananas, blueberries, Fuji apples, guava, Japanese pears, kumquats, mangosteen, oranges, papaya, passion fruit, pineapples, star fruit and strawberries. (Uncompromising treats).

4. Rotting vegetables such as beets, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, eggplant, lima beans, radishes, spinach, squash and zucchini. (Merciless tricks.)

5. Captain Sensible's new Blah! Party (www.blahparty.org) and the Damned playing Slim's in mid-November (www.officialdamned.com). (Wonderful timely treats).

6. Changing habeas corpus to habeas corpse and hoping no one notices. (A not-so-clever trick.)

7. British street artist Banksy (www.banksy.co.uk) and his use of anonymous -- and often hilarious -- covert operational art to communicate his politics -- and social mirth. (Poignant T-shirt-worthy treats.)

8. Brangelina actually spending $370,000 on Banksy artwork last month. (A hilarious, ironic trick.)

9. The Ghost Kite Flying event at Ocean Beach this weekend: ghost kites, four bands, social mingling, sky and ocean (see Enders for details). (A treat, as long as the weather cooperates.)

10. Taking Muni to get to the Ghost Kite Flying event at Ocean Beach this weekend and expecting to somehow arrive on time. (A definite, definite trick.)

11. This sentence, allowing treats to defeat tricks 6-5 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. (A clear and definite treat, by definition.)

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/26/NSG4PLRPU81.DTL

Thursday, October 19, 2006

delicate etiquette

11 THINGS: Delicate Etiquette

Thursday, October 19, 2006

1. Elevators: Ladies first, ladies first -- unless the lady is a feminist; then you both exit at exactly the same time and apologize simultaneously.

2. Escalators: For the love of God, please move to the right. Don't you understand that the 1,743 people behind you are attempting to pass you?

3. Meanderthals: If you're walking three to four people wide and three to four people are a foot behind you, this means they'd like to pass you but can't because your group is in the way.

4. Restaurant reservations: People expect to be seated when they arrive (not 20-30 minutes later).

5. Restaurant customers: Arriving late means you have lost your right to your reservation. Do not make excuses or complain. Nobody cares.

6. Telemarketers: It's quite all right to hang up on telemarketers. If it's an automated political telemarketer, it's considered polite to never vote for that candidate or proposition again for the remainder of your time on earth.

7. Cell phones: Talking on your cell phone during a film? Expect that phone to be destroyed before the film ends.

8. Movie theaters: If you insist on showing 10-20 minutes of ads before every film, do not be the least bit surprised when the screen gets pelted with your overpriced candy.

9. Highways: If you are driving the speed limit between San Francisco and Los Angeles, don't even think once about using the fast lane.

10. Airplanes: Seated next to someone with headphones on? This means he's not as interested in your life story as you'd like him to be.

11. Etiquette: It's rude to tell newspaper types they're being rude.

Tim Sullivan, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/19/NSGTBLNJCM1.DTL

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

america

8 Soldiers to Be Court-Martialed
- By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

(10-18) 11:43 PDT Evansville, Ind. (AP) --

Eight soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division will be court-martialed on murder charges stemming from their service in Iraq, including two who face a death sentence for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl and killing her and her family, the military ordered Wednesday.

The Fort Campbell soldiers facing the death penalty are Sgt. Paul E. Cortez and Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman. Both are accused of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi in her family's home in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, then killing her along with her parents and younger sister.

Spc. James P. Barker and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard are also accused in the rape and murders but will not face the death penalty, the military said in a statement.

Former Pvt. Steven Green, who was discharged for a personality disorder and arrested in North Carolina, will be tried in federal court in Kentucky. Green has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and four counts of murder.

Military prosecutors have said the five — all from the division's 502nd Infantry Regiment — planned the attack from a checkpoint near the family's home, changed their clothing to hide their identities and set the girl's body on fire to destroy evidence.

Four soldiers from the division's 3rd Brigade also will be tried in a separate court-martial on charges of murdering Iraqi detainees in northern Iraq's Salahuddin province during a raid on a village.

Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber are accused of murdering three Iraqi men taken from a house May 9 on a marshy island outside Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.


URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/10/18/national/a114308D38.DTL

Thursday, October 12, 2006

superstitious superstitions

11 THINGS: Superstitious Superstitions

Thursday, October 12, 2006

1. Black cats: Nocturnal voodoo witchcraft in the United States, yet considered good luck in the United Kingdom and Japan (clearly because the Brits and Japanese drive on the wrong side of the road).

2. Broken mirrors: Mirrors represent the future. Don't want to mess up your future? Well then, don't break the mirror.

3. Don't walk under ladders: As close to common sense as anything on this list (primarily because three is my magic number).

4. 4: Japan, Korea and China avoid 4 the same way America avoids 13 or 666 ... and so on and so "forth" ...

5. Curse of Payrod: Since Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, Alex Rodriguez has gone 5-for-46 in the postseason. His number? 13. The number worn by his former high school classmate playing for the Red Sox at the time? 13. Clearly, it's all related.

6. Government superstitions: Nancy Reagan and astrology quickly spring to mind, but, in the spirit of bipartisanship, FDR was also known to have issues with the number 13.

7. Feng shui: My feng shui expert needs to be fired. The problem? I need to ask him the best time and place to do this.

8. Cross your fingers: I'm crossing my fingers that no one writes in to complain about me adding feng shui to the mix.

9. God bless you: Nobody knows if the evil spirits are entering or exiting when we sneeze, just that "God bless you" is meant to stop them.

10. Salt: A pinch is thrown over the left shoulder to ward off the devil -- and bad luck. (Please take this with a grain of itself.)

11. Friday the 13th: Might it all just be in your head? Something to ponder while driving along Funston Avenue, or sipping your beer at Lucky 13 on Friday night.

Tim Sullivan, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/12/NSG9KLHJSE1.DTL

Thursday, October 05, 2006

i am not tim sullivan

11 THINGS: I Am Not Tim Sullivan

Thursday, October 5, 2006

1. Not a columnist: This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife and I most certainly do not write for the San Diego Union-Tribune. www.signonsandiego.com/sports/sullivan.

2. Not the former president of match.com: Nor have I ever been involved with Ticketmaster. www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tim_Sullivan.

3. Not a local artist: Although I must admit I do enjoy some of my more recent work. www.timsullivanart.com.

4. Not an actor: Nor did I begin my career pumping fake blood for "Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn." www.imdb.com/name/nm0838374.

5. Not a soap opera character: Although I did play one on TV. www.imdb.com/title/tt0752684.

6. Not a former model yacht commissioner: And please note: I don't want your model yachts. www.sullboat.com.

7. Not a composer: Or a percussionist. But, in theory, I am a theorist. www.timsullivan.info.

8. Not a good hobby source: For Dayton, Ohio. Hell, I'm not even a good hobby source for San Francisco. www.timsullivan.net.

9. Not a former university president: In fact, I have yet to announce my resignation from William & Mary. www.wm.edu/sullivan.

10. Not a comedian: Nor will I eat green eggs and ham. www.comedyoasis.com.

11. Not an inspiration: Can't take any credit for the Tim Sullivan Endowment for Creative Writing, although I'm starting to believe they really might be on to something. www.stetson.edu/english/creative/endowment.html.

John Malkovich, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/05/NSG1SL9C1H1.DTL