Do it yourself
August 19, 2010
By Claire Carter
If you've picked up this week's print edition of Paragon VICE, then you saw my cover story about the living conditions and future prospects for Praetorian refugees living in Skyway City's "Refugee Row." You can guess it's probably a grim picture, but that isn't all there is to it; this is a lively bunch, somehow made more vibrant by the hard life--and the family, friends and loved ones--they've left behind.
This struck me most vividly in the music shared by the refugees: music from the home world, music they've created since coming here, and music from our world that they've appropriated for their own sensibilities. That kind of cultural spelunking wasn't within the purview of the cover story, but there was no way I was going to let it go.
Most immediately interesting is our how music has been assimilated into their lives. One refugee, a Monica Ramirez, told me that vigilante-turned-hero Felicity Bane brought over a few CDs to share with them when she did what amounts to a USO show there years ago. Monica only knew about two of those CDs: The Clash's London Calling and M.I.A.'s Arular. She said the Clash's album was so tremendously influential that there is now a Resistance cell that calls itself "The Guns of Brixton," despite there being, to the best of her knowledge, no Brixton in Praetorian Earth. Their music formats and players were completely incompatible with ours, but piracy--like hope--always finds a way.
The second album, Arular, was unfamiliar to me. But after listening to it and some of M.I.A.'s other tracks, I can see why she'd be such a big hit.
Praetorian Earth's music is a strange thing, and not easy to categorize. Our music industry never met a pigeon it couldn't hole, though, and some of the on-the-ground record label scouts have taken to calling what they're hearing "technopunk." (I mentioned the "cyberpunk" label in jest to a few Praetorian musicians, and got only mystified stares in response. If they run with it, blame me.)
And, sure, if you go to one of the live shows, you'll hear the sandpaper-dry bass lines and urgent, three-chord guitar riffs you heard in old-school punk along with an underlying groove more often associated with electronica. But there's more at work here: not just punk, not just electronica, but heavy doses of hip-hop and other, even more surprising genres have bled into the mix.
Take the Tyrants. They number anywhere from four to twelve members, but their core membership of four people (two men, two women) has made some headway in the local club scene and have played to progressively larger crowds. Their wardrobes are a mix of familiar and exotic rebellious garb, though their haircuts are straight out of the early-'80s punk playbook.
Their music is a sight to behold. Their keyboardist handles the drum beat. Their two singers--Keith Pile and Lizzie Gordon--play bass and guitar respectively, and yowl and growl and serenade and harmonize and rap. Their fourth member mixes beats and, I swear to god, even pulls out a trumpet for a few tracks to accent the music bridges with flourishes straight out of a spaghetti Western. The rest of the ensemble, if they decide to play a show, adds in everything from tamborines to bullhorns with sirens.
It's a heady mix, helped by the fact that the Tyrants don't seem to know how good they are. They don't have an ounce of pretension between them and don't know how to be anything but who they are. Locals love them for their exotic flavor; Praetorians love them for bringing stories of their world to ours. Everyone loves them for their talent.
The thing that appeals most to me about the Tyrants is their Do It Yourself aesthetic, which old fogies like me recognize from our youth. (Little did you know that your esteemed columnist's first foray into journalism was in 9th grade, xeroxing copies of a self-published 'Zine called Punk Snot Dead. This was in 1984.)
How does Do It Yourself work? In my day it was bad hand-lettering and the most outrageous photo collages you could clip from magazines run through a Xerox machine. After you ran off a thousand of these you'd go from dusk till dawn papering your neighborhood: telephone poles, mailboxes, phone booths, transformers, you name it. The idea was to be so ubiquitous as to make future archaeologists think the power company was called by your band's name.
The principle is the same now, and anyone who rides the PTA is noticing. The Tyrants have done the best job, plastering their Xerox'd and psychedelic flyers from Peregrine to Atlas and garnering a hell of a lot of attention in the process. Others have gone for more immediately visceral (and frankly hilarious) ploys; I think we all remember last week's humongous banners of --ah--men's private areas wearing Tyrant helmets for the Toxic Shock show. All of them are memorable, and measured by their one true gauge of success--getting your attention--they are total triumphs.
It's not often in our lifetimes that a cultural identity is transplanted into ours to flower into something new, and after my experiences in the early '80s I can tell you it's the sort of thing people talk about for decades afterward. This is a singular moment in time, never to be duplicated again, anywhere, in any culture.
You can read me talk about them. You can watch the news reports. You can listen to the superheroes about what's "really going on" in Praetoria, and how that affects us.
Or you can spot a flyer, spend $5 at the door and hear the Praetorians tell you about it themselves. Listen to the songs, buy some merch, strike up a conversation with one of the refugees. You'll be changed by it.
It was fun.
Cloak and Dagger at the Pocket D
August 31, 2010
By Claire Carter
There's something strange going on, and I think everyone can feel it. It's like something, somewhere, was broken -- though it's too early yet to tell if that's a good or bad thing... or a total wash. Metahumans formerly thought of as villains now saving lives in Paragon; Paragon's edgier heroes robbing banks and executing criminals in the Rogue Isles. On top of all that, the refugees coming in from Praetorian Earth are no longer regular civilians. They're metahumans, too.
Nowhere is this blend of uneasy alliances and total unknowns more apparent than the Pocket D night club. Thanks to some owed favors, I've been able to get myself a VIP membership to the Pocket D, which, if you don't know, is quite literally a massive night club suspended in what appears to be a pocket dimension. Everyone from our earth is welcome there, though the patrons tend toward the super: Back Alley Brawler can be seen there most weekends, and even Scirocco, fearsome lieutenant of Lord Recluse, can be seen there from time to time.
It's neutral ground, so no fights break out -- the proprieter sees to that. And ever since the doors were opened to our dimension, it's been a haven for cross-faction alliances, discussions, and other, more secretive meetings. (The rumors about exclusive, by-the-hour rooms-for-rent are true.) The Pocket D is both perfect and terrible for covert information exchange; it's not unusual for anyone to talk to anyone, but quiet corners are hard to come by, and now there are rumors that there are spies sent there simply to spy on spies.
And just when this wheels-within-wheels espionage game threatened to cripple the genuine night life of the place, the proprieters saw fit to open the doors to Praetorian Earth's metahuman population, Loyalist and Resistance alike.
The nights have been pretty wild since then. I admit, whenever I'm not working evenings, I'm there; walking among a crowd of Praetorians is like being an American in Australia. Your cultures seem very similar, until you run up against the stuff that's very, very different.
As our earth had "first dibs" on the place, our most notable heroes and villains are allowed to walk freely in the club; Praetorian Earth's Praetors, seen by almost everyone outside their dimension as antagonistic, are not allowed inside. The effect is freeing on even the most staunch Loyalist; one highly-ranked Praetorian Police Department officer now co-hosts a vigorous but peaceful roundtable with a Resistance sympathizer and whoever else feels like showing up.
That's not to say cliques don't form. They most assuredly do. But their numbers are few, and the Pocket D's ground rules -- no fighting, have a good time -- are more liberating than you might imagine. Faction lines are crossed, enemies buy each other drinks, rivals share the dance floor and sometimes beds with each other. For its frequenters, the Pocket D may be the best club they've ever been to. Could it also be the place a new kind of peace and diplomacy--for our world and others--is born?
It was fun.
[As part of her duties in her new gig as a freelance writer for Paragon City's top alt-weekly newspaper, Paragon VICE, Claire Carter explores the larger ramifications of living among meta-humans.
This is familiar territory to Carter, who, back before she accepted a buyout at the Paragon City Times, wrote a weekly Metro column about the cracks, fissures and grey areas between everyday life and "super" life -- often highlighting and ferreting out corrupt public officials, corporate entities and masked "heroes" who were abusing their positions and power.
These days Claire writes for the VICE, is working on her investigator's license to begin full-time work at Crawford Investigations, and moonlights as an unlicensed, as-yet unnamed vigilante.
She uses her post at the VICE blog to draw attention to issues that most people avoid or ignore; for instance, her series on "undocumented" vigilantes has gotten her awards, acclaim, and the hairy eyeball from the FBSA. Recently, her attention has turned toward the influx of refugees from Praetorian Earth. ]
The Dawning of the Age of Praetoria
August 15, 2010
By Claire Carter
If you've been reading the news lately, you too have noted the dramatic upswing in refugees from Upsilon Beta 9-6--known colloquially as "Praetorian Earth" or "Praetoria"--to our dimension. And while these refugees represent perhaps the defining humanitarian crisis of our time, their numbers and their stories point toward other, less obvious but no less groundbreaking changes in fields as diverse as sociology and game theory.
And if you ever wonder why I got into metahuman journalism, readers, ledes like that one are why.
The foremost thinkers and researchers at Portal Corporation, who got us into this situation in the first place, used to think Praetorian Earth was a "mirror universe" -- that its residents and basic historical events were symmetrical to our own, except everyone was an "opposite" version of themselves... and not in the Bizarro Superman way. It wasn't that your Praetorian self wore red all the time because you wear blue all the time, but that your Praetorian self still possessed some fundamental element of you that they then turned to a completely different end. Thus their Statesman was not a benevolent protector but rather a fascist dictator. Both possess the same powers and are called heroes; only one of them actually is.
The "mirror universe" notion, backed up by a lot of circumstantial evidence and a natural inclination to think everything in the universe is about us, is certainly attractive, and it influenced much of our thinking about what other dimensions held and how they operated. Really, this is nothing new; paternalistic attitudes have been present every time a colonist population encountered a native one all throughout world history, with predictably catastrophic results.
And, much as we (too late) discovered that native populations had their own way of living and weren't just "doing it wrong" all along, the latter-day refugee reports have led Portal Corporation's thinkers to acknowledge that Praetorian Earth is not just a mirror dimension, but rather a dimension with a very similar history to ours that branched sharply some fifty to a hundred years back. It's not a mirror universe but a twin one, sharing much of our genetic and historical stock while having its own life.
Questions of our responsibility for this dimension raise their heads again. Politicians who try to spin the current in-world immigration problems with folksy (and useless) catchphrases and draconian (and equally useless) punishments don't even know where to begin with a problem of this scale. A few jaded politicians and pundits have fallen back on the simplistic and unhelpful "**** 'em" stance, but no one else wants to engage the problem.
But that's a subject for another column. In the wake of this crisis other questions raise themselves, ranging from mathematical causality to geneaological science. If it's true, for instance, that Praetorian Earth was much like our own until about fifty years ago, why then is so much of their under-50 population identical to ours? The same parents would still have to meet, the same genes would still have to dominate or recess, and for the most part the nature/nurture combination of their rearing would have to be the same ... no mean feat for a world that was apparently on the edge of total annihilation at the hands of Doctor Hamidon while ours was enjoying the double-edged boom of the nuclear 1950s.
Several prominent researchers, university departments and even the Mormon Church have stepped forward to tackle the conundrum, but the scale of it--which involves gathering geneaologies for both Praetorian Earth and our own--makes the task either monumental or simply impossible. Which people exist on both worlds? How did those people come to be under wildly different circumstances? Which people are unique? Comparison of "twin" psychologies would likely be immensely helpful to the science of psychiatry, but for now the task is almost too daunting to fully comprehend. All of which neatly sidesteps the fact that refugees are people, not test subjects.
On a more personal scale, the tales the refugees are telling to anyone who will listen paint a pretty scary picture for our twin dimension. Their Statesman--called Emperor Cole officially, and Tyrant unofficially--did indeed beat back an apparently unstoppable Hamidon menace, only to then assume the mantle of absolute power. His empire is peaceful, or so they say, but at the cost of all privacy and trust. The propaganda that's made it to our side of the dimensional divide paints Praetorian Earth as a utopia; refugees call it a paranoid police state riddled with traitors and double agents.
Some skeptics naturally respond, "well, political refugees would say that." True enough. But it's clear that something is going on there, something very wrong. Consider the regular rotation of earth-shattering peril we face on a yearly basis, and that our citizens still want to stay put. That's how dangerous Praetorian Earth apparently is. And all indications point to even more refugees in the future, in greater numbers... and not all of them will be everyday citizens.
There's a lot to be learned here, if we're smart about it. We can learn so much about genetics, history, sociology, causality and probability if we know how to look, but the true test Praetoria presents to us is a test of our own moral fiber: not only if we're willing to care for the alien in our midst, but if we're able to shed the blinders of our own inborn superiority complex and see our twin world--and its people--for what it truly is. Will they be "good" or "evil"? Or will they be something else? And will we, so used to living in a binary world, be able to accept a new way of thinking? Will we attempt to learn about their world on their terms, or will we charge in blind, drunk on the idea of being the saviors of all worlds?
History offers a grim answer, time and again. But the hope that we'll rise above what we once were never dies, not completely.
It was fun.