Well, they look great, but I really don’t think they have much choice in what they do.

Ya know, a lot of Western guys think like that, but they’ve got it all wrong.

Wha da ya mean?

Well, even the girls in the bars, you’d be surprised how many of them really like what they’re doing. They could leave anytime they want to, but they stay ’cause it’s what they want.

Ya mean they’d just go home and be brain surgeons?

No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Try to think of them as companions, not prostitutes.

Companions? What’s that supposed to mean?

Ya just don’t know ’cause ya never hung around with ‘em, but it’s an easy life for them. Shit, I even knew one girl who was taken home by a guy, but halfway home she decided that she didn’t like him. She paid him back and went back to the bar.

So what?

Well ya see, she likes some guys, she didn’t like him. If she doesn’t like a guy, she won’t go home with him. Besides, lots a them do it for free. I’ve got it for free lots ‘a times.

So what do they buy food with?

You’re missing the point, it’s what their bodies need. They’re not like those Western girls, all hung up about their bodies. If you hang around a bar ’til it closes, a lot a girls who don’t have a guys’ll go home with you for free.

Tell me why.

It’s ’cause they’re in touch with what their bodies want. If they can’t get someone to pay for it, they’ll do it with anyone for free.

So they’re sucking off some fat businessman ’cause they’re into it?

That’s right. It’s what their bodies need.

And you really believe this?

Ya, I know it’s strange isn’t it. But it’s true.

I was recently exposed to the idea that the Denver International Aiport is part of an intergalactic plot to take over the world. You can find a summary of these ideas here on Wikepedia. I know this sounds bizarre, but the idea is that when the airport was constructed, a secret base for aliens was built under the airport that you and I see. For some strange reason, the aliens constructors of what is called the New World Order left all sorts of clues they had taken over the world and are using the DIA as their base. If I haven’t already lost your interest, you can read more about this here and here.

Of course I think this is hogwash, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to address the issue of what all of this says about what a conspiracy theory is and how one gets spread. My contention is that conspiracy theories are just bad journalism. If the investigation is done correctly and the conspiracy is real, the conspiracy disappears and becomes real news. When a conspiracy theory exists for more than a little while, it is because the logical investigative leads that should be followed have not been. Let’s look at what’s being said about the Denver International Airport and try to get my meaning.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Denver International Airport is its murals. The airport provides this information on the murals, and here are some pictures of the more controversial portions. I’m not sure what the mural evidence is supposed to prove, but they are a part of the theory that attracts a great deal of attention. While I agree they are “pretty freaky”, I also think their role in a conspiracy of any sort could be handled by talking to the people who painted them. I’ve had it suggested to me that investigators have attempted this and the painters had been impossible to find. This is not true. In fact, based solely on the names provided by the airport and an Internet search, I was able to find extensive information about all of the painters, and I’ll send it to anyone interested.

The most controversial aspect of the murals involves figures that appear as stormtroopers. This mural was painted by Leo Tanguma. Mr. Tanguma is a well-known artist in the Colorado area. He has taught at School of Education and the Wisconsin Center for Education. A number of websites describe him as a “professor” at the University of Northern Colorado, although I looked through the school’s site and could not find him listed. There are a many photos of him on the Internet. Interestingly, the racist organization Stormfront has not commented on Mr. Tanguma’s alien connections, but members of its forum have expressed their outrage at the anti-White statement’s of his murals.

The point of this is that if someone wanted to find out why Leo Taguma painted what he did, it would be easy. I bet that if you really wanted to talk to him, all you’d have to do is walk into a high school anywhere in Denver and ask one of the art teachers where you could find him.

Another problem is this claim by Steve Snyder who is Public Affairs Office at the Denver  International Airport. Steve states that,

It is important to keep in mind that this airport was the largest, most scrutinized Public Works project in American history. There were cameras and reporters here documenting every single inch of dirt ever moved. If something strange was going on out here, hundreds of media outlets would have been all over it by now.

This is problematic because the interview published on this website states

AC: Well, we think that area is one that leads to deeper levels underground at the airport. But, it is surrounded by a chain-link fence and you can’t get in there. We think this is the area that one of the electricians kind of stumbled into that went down about six levels below the fourth level, and ran into some really weird stuff. He won’t talk about any of it now.

But this should be pretty easy to solve. The airport is really big and it would have taken a large number of people to construct and maintain the underground (alien) portion. Either that, or it was constructed and maintained by alien workers, and then a lack of accountable maintenance would be just as suspicious.

Returning back to the letter from Public Affairs Officer Steve Snyder, Steve claims another one of aspects of the airport’s construction that attracts attention is just a coincidence. Why is the airport called “New World” if it’s not part of the alien-run New World Order? Steve tell us that,

As for the “new world” designation, the New World Airport Commission was simply a group consisting of local business and political leaders who sponsored and organized a number of pre-opening events at Denver International Airport. The airport was to usher in a new era making Denver a world-class city, thus the New World name.

Is this true, though? It should be easy enough to confirm. All we need to do is – once again – locate those businessmen and ask them what’s going on. And since they’re local Denver guys, I figure that’d be pretty easy.

In fact, there should be vast numbers of people with little pieces to this puzzle. The hundreds of baggage workers who Steve claims work down in the tunnels should have seen something. They should know there are areas no one has ever been in; they should know all kinds of strange things about the deeper levels of the airport just by having been around there. For example, has anyone ever died or disappeared?

And it’s just not good enough to say that people keep quiet. Groom Lake and Area 51 are other installations rumoured to be associated with space aliens. I doubt this is true and believe that the area is a test facility for new military aircraft. Regardless, I can still tell you all kinds of stuff. The Internet is full of photos of the place. I know the names of some of the civilian contractors who have worked there because they have tried to sue the US Air Force. Investigators have followed civilian contractors and identified all kinds of interesting things about them. Code names for the flights they take to and from the base have been identified and are regularly watched. I even recall reading news naming the hotels stayed at by Groom Lake contractors. While there is something going on at Groom Lake that I don’t know anything about, at least I know who’s doing it.

So let’s compare this with the Denver International Airport. I also know the names of countless officials and artists associated with the place. I know how to find them if I wanted to. I know an endless amount of information about the layout and organization and official story about the airport. On the other hand, I have not seen one piece of real evidence that would suggest there is anything out of the ordinary going on there. All I see is pictures of strange art in the airport waiting areas. No one knows anything about the aliens. I do not know the name of anyone who has reported strange things at the airport. I do not know any of the strange things that anonymous people have reported. That’s it.

There are real voices that should be speaking about this and they could be easily identified, yet no one who says there’s a conspiracy even seems to know their names. Great reporting that is. And just think about how powerful the claim is – aliens right in downtown Denver. Wouldn’t you want to be the reporter breaking that one?

But then, think of what the real claim is, because it’s not just about aliens. The real claim is about what you need to do to find out what’s really going on, to find the news that’s affecting your life. It doesn’t matter that the Republicans mismanaged Hurricane Katrina. It doesn’t matter that almost half of all Americans have no health insurance. In fact, it doesn’t matter where you live or who you vote for. No sir, you don’t need to excuse the fact that you’re lazy and would rather surf porn than read the news. The real stories aren’t in the news. The real news is badly researched, two-bit claims that no one can verify. And so little is know about them that it takes about 5 minutes to read everything there is about the most important news ever written.

Wow, the world really is simple, isn’t it. And that’s what a conspiracy theory is.

Defying captain’s orders, a band of hardy adventurers make their way to the bottom of the capsized ship to reach safety. At one point, the team is forced to ask a young boy to reach through a vent and unscrew a bolt. He is successful, but only because his fingers are small enough fingers to fit through the vent. My wife’s response to this was…”They’re lucky they had the boy with them”. But of course they were. It’s America, the home of the system that puts the right man (or person, in this case) in the right place just when they’re needed.

I first realized this about America in 1988 while I was flying back to school during the Christmas Break. I was reading the The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancey. It’s ideal for airplane travel. You can skip 200 pages and not miss a beat in the plot. At the end of the novel, Arab terrorists have detonated a nuclear device murdering the president of the United States, and the vice-president is on the verge of launching a retaliatory nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It’s then that CIA analyst Jack Ryan, in the words of the source of all things true,

The crisis is averted when Jack Ryan, after receiving forensic evidence that the bomb originates from the U.S., gains access to the Hot Line and manages to defuse the situation by communicating directly with the Soviet president and helping to engineer a stand-down in Berlin.

But what is this mysterious “forensic evidence” that Mr. Ryan produces? It is the radioactive signature of the plutonium used in the bomb exploded at the president’s assassination. And how is this arcane evidence interpreted to gain access to the Hot Line? As it turns out, the Marine officer guarding the access to the phone has a graduate degree in nuclear physics and by chance did his graduate work at the very same reactor where this plutonium came from. With this highly specialized knowledge, he is able to tell that the plutonium in this particular bomb was American and not Soviet.

Amazing? Not in the slightest. In the world of Tom Clancey, there are highly competent scientists and engineers everywhere. The Soviets are in no sense devoid of talent; Clancey is clear on that. The difference is that, in their command economy, scientist and engineers are not where they want to be. As a result, while there is technical competence, it is never the the person who should be there when they are needed.

Now the significance of this was not lost on me. As it turned, during 1987-8, I ate lunch almost every day with the graduate students in the Physics Department. By one of those Tom Clancey flucks of luck, my high school Physics partner had done an undergraduate degree in Engineering-Physics and then gone on to do a PhD in nuclear physics at the very same school as I. So it was that I ate lunch with him and his classmates almost every day. After reading how the marvels of nuclear physics had saved the world, I asked them about the reality of this. The verdict was that none of them would be able to do such a thing, ever my friend who had written programs that describe nuclear explosions. It seems this knowledge was far too distant even for these doctoral candidates.

I can understand. Afterall, we are Canadians and the threat of nuclear war far away even for our military. But then, really, isn’t all this just what you would expect in the system that puts the right man (or person) in the right place at the right time? And that’s what made America great.

Grace Quek (That’s her real name) started this all with what now seems like a tiny number. She claimed only 251 men, having been forced to stop when she cut herself. More recent attempts at her record quote huge numbers. Within months, Jasmine St. Claire was claiming 300 men. Now even that seems paltry. Hundreds more are claimed now; 400, 500, the minds spins at the thought. It took Grace 10 hours to do her 251 guys, how can anyone do 500?

It’s all in how they did it. If you watch Annabel Chong, it’s a free-for-all. It’s no surprise that she never got paid or that the producers didn’t keep their promise about protecting her from AIDS. It looks more like a party with a motorcycle gang than a movie. If you compare it with any of the other movies, they look like well choreographed dances. The difference is that Grace Quek did get gangbanged. She got treated like the town slut. There was no movie: 251 guys passed her around, and there was a camera running.

But what’s she doing now? After she got gangbanged, she did a host of interviews for alternative magazines. And then, following an appearance on the Jerry Springer Show, she was involved in a documentary about her life. The one thing that sticks out in her appearances is the repeated claim that porn stars have an intellectual side — or at least some of them — like her, I guess. After all, she did graduate from the University of Southern California and study in a whole bunch of other places. The documentary has her speaking at the Cambridge University Debating Club. All of this was years ago. The documentary was released in 1999, and the ‘event’ itself happened in 1995. What’s Grace been doing since then to demonstrate to us that she is more than just a messed young girl who let a lot of guys bang her while a camera was running?

The answer to this is not so clear—at least not from the Internet. Typing her name into the Internet was very revealing. When I first did this search back in 2005, I found several commercial sites using her name to sponsor products. Some sites took me through a catalog of her movies. It is not altogether clear whether Grace got any benefit from this though. I found bio information that has her being born in China, which is incorrect. Another site claimed to be the“official web site”. Interestingly, this site began with the question, “Whatever happened to Annabel Chong?” It stated that Annabel is bored with the porn industry and now works as a “web developer and consultant”. It claimed she makes “a pretty decent living” doing this sort of work and quoted major American literary figures to show that talent and genius is found in all kinds of unexpected places. There was even a link to a page that allowed you to order an autographed version of her now infamous movie.

I looked at all this and I thought to myself, why isn’t she writing books? Why didn’t she get that doctorate that she once claimed she wanted? Why is she hiding behind an anonymous website working in the newest of home industries? She could be keeping the promise she made to her mother in Singapore as the cameras whirled to leave the porn industry.

And then again, she may have been just one screwed girl who couldn’t tell the difference between being wild and being crazy. I’d have to say that I’ve read a lot of interviews with her, and even though she’s fond of quoting French philosophers, I was never impressed with her intellect. Maybe porn is the only thing she really knows how to do, but now that she’s a bit older and a bit wiser, she knows that she wasn’t just being wild, and that everyone else thinks she’s crazy.

So let’s go back to the original question that brought me here in the first place. What is Annabel Chong doing these days? The answer appears to be that she is doing nothing. Or at least nothing that anyone else couldn’t do. While it may prove F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong, it’s still no demonstration that intellectuals can be found in all kinds of strange places—including the porn industry.

An Afterthought

Here we are a year and a half later. Annabel Chong has sunk into obscurity, even in the porn world. This post has moved way, to the fifteenth page of a Google search for her name. Perhaps, as the porn-intellectual’ Pete said in a comment to the original posting of this article, she has just found the anonymity that she seems to want.

Oh…and anyone looking for a more recent photo of her might want to check out this site.

Readers might be interested in this related blog post.

The book itself is very short. My copy published by Henry Holt and Company is 208 pages long, but the text of the story doesn’t begin until page 11. Much of the text is quotation, so many of the pages are really filled with only half a page of printing. I read over 100 pages the first day I got it and could probably finish the book in a day if I had more time to read. My guess is that there’s not more than a 120 pages of full text in the whole volume.

When all this started, I imagined a huge grassroots cult of white, middle-class, American kids out there worshiping Tyler Durden and his fight club. Now, more than ever, I just see it as a white, middle-class, American cult. While the film grossed over $100 million (that’s 15 million tickets at $6 a pop), I no longer see the Fight Club cult as huge. In fact, the largest source of writing on the book is, by far and away, the market of pre-written term papers for university undergraduates. It is shocking to see the number of such papers available for a fee. My point is that while there have been many, many reviews of the movie staring Brad Pitt and a host of names Hollywood says you should know, almost everything about the book is aimed at undergraduate students – students willing to pay for those words so they can claim them as their own and hand them in for grades.

This point is significant because it means there has only been a very poor understanding of the story developed. For example, I have been unable to find any exploration of its literary roots or inspirations. There is little in the way of deep analysis available. There is no interpretation in a comparative perspective. There is nothing but a bunch of undergraduates and movie critics spinning of-the-cuff ideas about a very abstract story. And here I am responding to it like a Marty McFly clone.

Much of the style of the writing does not seem original to me. I am not extremely widely-read, but I do read a lot and taught essay writing for many years. Most of what I read now is non-fiction, essays, technical material, and that sort of thing. I used to read a lot of fiction and theatre, but these days I am more interested in the presentation of the factual world and the description of personal experience. And in this context, the words that appear on the pages of Fight Club seem borrowed from some place else. For example, Fight Club tells us, “Which is worse: Hell or nothing?” and “If you could be God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?” But this seems remarkably similar to the 1667 classic Paradise Lost where we are told it is, “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.” Fight Club teaches us that, “On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” But economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Fight Club tells us that, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” James Dickey, the authour of the 1970 novel Deliverance, tells us,  “Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything.” And then the mother of all ripped off quotes, from Fight Club

I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need, blah, blah, blah…

and from perhaps the greatest poem of modern times,

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix

Aside from having many of the same quotable bits as other famous literature, Fight Club is written in a style I have seen previously in hard-boiled detective novels. It is very punchy and fast moving. In hard-boiled detective novels, there is a reason for this that lies in the kind of story being told. I am not certain of the history that took this style from its original genre for use in a story like Fight Club. Evidently no one else is either because there has been almost no scholarly discussion of the book.

The story itself is not hard to follow and, as I have said, could be read in its entirety on a long bus ride. This does not mean it’s a simple or straightforward story. The meaning is not at all obvious, nor is it clear there is an intended meaning. It is punchy and full of quotable lines with moral lessons, but in this way, it reminds me of The Bible. In fact, like The Bible, it appears to be so full of symbols and hidden meanings you could interpret it pretty much any way you want.  Certainly authour Chuck Palanhuik himself contributed nothing to answering this debate when he stated the book “…is entertainment first.”

None of this has stopped our intrepid undergraduate experts from espousing their authority. Comments posted to my original review of the film scolded me that the story is “more or less an existential look at current trends in post-modernism and feminism,” although I’m not sure what this means. It appears to be ripped off from an essay published in many different Net locations comparing Fight Club with the comic series Calvin & Hobbes. This essay tells us that, “it depicts what happens when you take someone weaned on dreams and limitless possibilities and jam him into a cramped cage confined by rules and regulations.” Perhaps related to these is the interpretation that tells us, “The book is a modern horror story about how populist fascism can flourish here, and about why this is the perfect time for it.” The blog Kulterblog tells us that really, “despite its name and its singular popularity among men, this movie is really just another sentimental chick flick.” Lateral Action thinks the meaning of the story is that, “At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there.” One of the true scholarly interpretations of the book by sociologist Adrienne Redd entitled Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club tells us that “Fight Club is really about what it is to be a man who serves others (as women have traditionally) and how such men construct identity and meaning in their lives.”

Another scholarly analysis appeared in the journal Postmodern Culture (Volume 13, Number 3, May 2003) entitled, A Generation of Men Without History: Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom. I have not been able to read it, but since it was published in 2003, I can only assume it was really inspired by the film rather than the book. But as I have said, the vast majority of writing about the book appears to be ready-made term papers for undergraduates and I have no interest in paying Top Term Papers for more half-baked analysis.

On a slightly more serious note, the most noticeable point for me regarding the book was how it contrast with the film. While it is true the film pretty much reflected the content of the book, they in some sense vary significantly. The fighting activity of the actual fight club is a small almost insignificant aspect of the book. There couldn’t be more than 5 pages of actual description of fights. This stands in sharp contrast to the film in which some portion approaching one-quarter or one-third depicts fights. In fact, the book is written in such a way that you could keep faithful to it and still tell the story many different ways. It is not written in a way that is straightforward or obvious. It is full of metaphor and parables. It’s entertaining, but it is not clear which parts of the story are ‘important’. As such, the parts of the story that were chosen for the movie’s ‘accurate depiction’ tell us much about the message 20th Century Fox wanted to convey in their script; one of which evidently is that Brad Pitt can be a tough-guy action hero, too.

I would still not recommend that anyone see the movie, especially if you have not read the book. But the book itself is short, inexpensive, and easy to read. It is good for a long bus ride or a day when you’re trapped at home by bad weather.

Other links about Fight Club

What I Think about the Movie Fight Club

What I Think about Chuck Palahnuik

I also highly recommend this piece from the film review blog Bright Lights.

Starting back in the 1980s, youth humor took a turn. I’m not saying a turn for the worse, but I am saying it took a different direction. Jokes about bathroom behavior and scatology became very much a part of the mainstream. Flatulence become funny and significant portions of a film became orchestrated around the flatulence of a protagonist, the same way that in the past a star might have burst into song or dance. In addition, films contained jokes about forbidden sexual acts created by the pornography industry to market their products. Talking about forbidden subjects became – not only OK – but funny. Keep in mind that none of this has made such behaviours appropriate for polite company, even among its fans, the same way that curse words had became acceptable by their overuse in the media. It was still forbidden, yet delivered in a very particular way it is supposed to symbolize a place where you laughed and claimed enjoyment, even liberation. But it was still rude and inappropriate and certainly not the sort of conversation or behaviour you would allow around your parents or grandmother. And it is in this world of jokes about flatulence and normalized pornography that Chuck Palahniuk is a pioneer.

Palahnuik is the authour of the story that led to the well-known Hollywood blockbuster Fight Club. The film stars Brad Pitt, Edward Albert Norton, and a host of others whose names Hollywood has taught us to recognize as excellence. I wrote a review of the film a while back. A number of comments left on the post urged me to find out more about the book it was based on and the controversy surrounding it. One of the things I found was that Chuck Palanhuik is the figurehead of a cult following of his writings. In addition to Fight Club, he has published a number of other controversial stories. He is also a very accessible celebrity and the Net has made available a large number of interviews and readings of his work at books stores and other authour events.

The work of Palahnuik is taken very seriously by its fans. It has inspired university-hosted conferences, university-level courses, fan-based websites, and on-the-street-level clubs of men who hit each other as an intellectual experience. I was moved by all the emotion being spilled out onto my blog and so, in homage of this fan effort to inform me of the missed brilliance, I went out and got the book Fight Club. I have posted here about my experience reading it. But in addition to reading the book and watching the film, something else happened along the way. I learned all about Chuck Palahnuik. It is very hard to understand what Fight Club is about without ending up immersed in a world dominated by Chuck Palahnuik. In fact, I would say that the fame of Fight Club or his other books is not about the stories per say. I doubt they would have attracted nearly as much attention if they were not all written by the same authour and that authour was not able to connect to his fans personally in the way that Palahnuik does. The phenomena is not Fight Club or any other book he has been involved with. The phenomena is Chuck Palanhuik himself.

And what do I think of Chuck? I think of him as that college professor we all wish we had. He’s hip and in touch with the minds of youth. He can effortlessly help you explore all those embarrassing things young people want to know but feel uncomfortable talking about in the highly middle-class world of their families. He’s edgy enough for you to expect a serial killer, but with his soft features and quite voice, he can spin this into the feeling of cool. I suspect young naive students find him very sexy. He’s the sort of college professor you’d expect to see at the center of a house party attended by professionals in a small working-class town where almost everyone is on welfare.

Certainly I can understand why some find Palahniuk enticing. He brings elements of pornography and other forms of marginal literature to the mainstream. This must seem incredibly daring, but I suspect those who find him daring are overwhelmingly young, naive and middle-class. His writing is very American. It is very young, very inexperienced, and – most of all – very, very White. It is not a coincidence that everyone associated with Palanhuik is White – absolutely everyone – in the audiences of lectures, book signings and authour events, or in fan videos commenting on his books – absolutely everyone is White. I have watched dozens of videos associated with Palahnuik lecturing in classes and videos of fans reading his books; while I have seen a few women, I have not seen even one person who is not White – not even one. The actors and actresses portraying his novels are almost all White. Understandably so; I can not see his writing generating much interest among cosmopolitan students from India or Europe or even in the black community of the USA. He is very much a phenomena among the young White men and women of America.

But it is not all White people to whom this world of normalized bathroom humour appeals. It is a special kind of person created by the modern world. It is that group I once referred to in conversation with the term ‘downwardly mobile middle-class’. While this is frequently used to describe Black Americans, it could also be used to accurately describe segments of White society. There is a whole class of White kids from successful working-class lineage whose parents toiled to send them to college. While they now have the literacy skills and qualification to enter the professional workplace, they lack that collection of skills sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as habitus. They’re that kind of person who just feels out of place in the world of suits and ties. They are that kid with a master’s degree working in a warehouse or as a waiter somewhere. It’s the guy who sits during break time reading his book and not talking with the other guys or who never joins in after work when everyone else goes for a beer. It is this group I suspect that finds cultivation in Chuck Palahnuik.

But don’t take my word for it. Dennis Widmyer, who runs www.chuckpalahniuk.net, has this to say on the topic,

The typical Cult member is a teenager…”They’re young, they’re naive, and their first dose of literature, real literature, is a guy like Chuck. And it’s very liberating for them, and almost turns into a religion.

Karen Valby, who writes for Entertainment Weekly and attended one of Palahnuik’s authour events, described them this way,

His fans — many of whom are young men, unemployed, or making do on minimum wage, tattooed and pierced, with black Sharpie pen on their nails and cut-off Dickies and red laces through their Chuck Taylors

Wikipedia, the source of all things true, tells us the film of the book Fight Club was viewed by an overwhelmingly young and male audience.

The gender mix of audiences for Fight Club, initially argued to be “the ultimate anti-date flick”, was 61% male and 39% female, with 58% of audiences below the age of 21.

Keep in mind, this is specifically not how the Palahnuik crowd views themselves. Their self-image describes someone edgy, daring, walking in the shadows of the truly dangerous. To quote Amy Dalton, the organizer of a Palahniuk conference at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania,

…I’m a little bit afraid of some of these people [that would come to the conference]. I try to think that they’re just like me, and they’re interested in this writer. But they’re people on this other [online] message board who are really ‘fight clubbing’ it.

The reality of the conference was a little different, however. As Salon.com pointed out when they covered the event.

Among the attendees, mostly in their 20s, are obvious devotees of the self-destructive heroine of “Fight Club,” Marla Singer — goth girls in faded prom dresses, black boots or pink hair…mixed in with the Tylers and Marlas are people who look more like graduate students, as well as writers and literature buffs who’ve driven and flown from as far away as Arizona, Oklahoma, Michigan and Long Island, N.Y…there is a certain degree of geekishness that can’t be ignored…Most of the men in attendance look like they haven’t been in a fight since the schoolyard bully called their mother a bitch in the hall after science class.

Watching the fans talk about his work and listening to his readings, you can sense the feeling of young adventure out there trying to make sense of the pleasures they’re tempted by without really putting themselves in danger. Palahnuik is entertainment for inexperienced kids grown numb on video games and cinema that depict torture and suffering as a spectacle. Palanhuik is a roller coaster. He’s a zoo. He’s the pretentious pornography of Annabel Chong that he cites in this talk about his novel Snuff.

While writing, I was reminded of a party I once attended that was hosted by graduates of an elite East Coast liberal arts college. This was the crowd from the school rugby team and they were supposed to be edgy, but their interpretation of edgy was pretty tame and was limited to playing heavy rock and drinking far too much. In fact, they acted much like the high schools kids that I grew up with in – what was then – a very blue-collar logging town. But they weren’t. They were rich kids headed for a life of power and influence. There was no part of their life that would ever be blue-collar unless they pretended it to be. And that’s what all this Chuck Palahnuik stuff makes me think of; it’s a bunch of undergraduates from comfortable middle-class backgrounds pretending to be rough and edgy. It’s blue-collar humour dressed up as a book reading. It’s the sort of stuff that if you talked about without the trappings of high culture, your friends would tell you to shut up. It’s Bevis and Butthead read with the cadence reserved for poetry.

But the more I looked into this Chuck Palahuik phenomena, the more I came to think I’d seen this all before. In this interview, Palahniuk tells us that fiction is read almost exclusively by middle-aged women.

I was told that 85% of all fiction sells to older middle-age woman. 85%, my God! I just felt like I was really cutting my throat to write a book that wasn’t about an older middle-age woman to fall in love. Somehow I knew there wouldn’t be a market for it, but what else am I going to write. I think it’s more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There’s a reason men don’t read, and it’s because books don’t serve men. It’s time we produce books that serve men.

Could this possibly be true? Certainly it was one of the points that bothered me the most as I was researching this post. If it’s true, then no matter what else is, Palahiuk truly has been a revolution in reading.  But then I stumbled upon this page from the official Chuck Palahiuk site www.chuckpalahiuk.net. The site features reviews of books linking Palanhuik to ‘grindhouse‘ and ‘exploitation’ as a genre of fiction. Now if this is the fiction that Palanhuik is referring to that men don’t read anymore, then he is very much wrong. In fact, this page mentions reviews by the magazine Fangoria. Fangoria was around when I was in high school and Wikipedia, the source of all things true, tells us it was founded in 1979.

But let’s take a step back. Fangoria is only one example of a whole series of printed materials that deal with subjects almost exclusively read by men. This would include Conan and other superhero comic books, the books that these comics are based on, sports fiction, etc. In fact, I was a huge consumer of these when I was in high school. If this is to be considered the reading of fiction, then Palahiuk is simply wrong that fiction is consumed by middle-aged women. What I think he means to say is that books in bookstores are bought primarily by middle-aged women.

And if this is the case, then the Palahnuik phenomena is a whole different thing. The big scoop on Chuck Palahnuik is then that he has helped the commercial print industry bring the comic book market back into the bookstore. One of gravest crises that Capitalism faces in our time is the saturation of markets. In this battle, Chuck Palahnuik is a hero. He’s helped legitimize genre of print and forms of entertainment that previously were marginal and bring them into the same market as your mother and grandmother. He’s not a sell-out. He sincerely seems to believe what he’s saying and that he’s educating people about the evils of consumerism. I don’t doubt he means well. But he isn’t some revolutionary thinker. He’s not the Anti-Christ of literature. He’s a cog in a corporate machine being used to handle a crises of Capitalism. When he does battle with the big-time critics that newspapers and magazines tell you to read, it’s just a show put on to make you feel like there’s conflict. It’s a scam that big-money culture runs to make the rebellious buy their stuff. It’s no more a culture battle about principles than the cage matches of the UFC are duels over personal honour.

One of the great things about modern Capitalism is that ideology is so complex it’s hard to figure out where you really are. I have no doubt Palahnuik and his fans can continue to tell themselves stories about mixing it up with the forces of mainstream culture. But the truth hurts. And the truth here is that they’re all a bunch of dupes.

What I Think about the Movie ‘Fight Club’

What I Think about the Book ‘Fight Club

I also highly recommend this piece from the film review blog Bright Lights.

Or that’s what you and I’ll think. Chinese guys will tell you a different story. It’s widely understood among local guys that the girls dating foreigners are always the ugliest. When I asked my girlfriend about this, however, she told me this was just “sour grapes”. Both she and many of my female students agreed that these women are in fact the most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated women around.

That’s the plus side. Here’s the down. Chinese society is very conservative. Dating is strictly serious business aimed at achieving marriage. If that 3-letter word beginning with “s” should show up, you can be sure that the 8-letter word beginning with “m” will follow (‘marriage’ that is, if you haven’t got me). The conservative nature of Taiwan society can make dating as fun as pulling teeth. As one of my students put it, “The first time a guy asks you out, you have to say no.” It is no understatement to say that you might have to ask the same woman out every day for six to eight months before she’ll even agree to see a movie with you. In the worst case, months and months of meeting in coffee shops and going to movies will precede your first kiss, much less anything more exciting. It’s got nothing to do with what she wants. It’s more like, and again, as one of my students put it, “How can I be sure if he really likes me?”

Once that ‘s’ thing starts to happen, don’t think all your troubles are over. Depending on the woman, they may have just begun. A lot of women live on their own, but more likely, she lives with a roommate and then where are you going to go? If she lives at home, even if she’s 33 and teaches at a college, she might have to be home by 11 O’clock. Maybe not, but maybe. Just remember what it was like when you first started dating, back when you were 15 or 16. That’s Taiwan at 30.

It’s not all like this. Younger women are much more “Western” in their attitudes. I’m including in this group the high school girls who grabbed my bum on a crowded train and then asked my girlfriend to tell me how sexy I looked. But don’t overestimate how liberal the Taiwanese woman of the 21st Century has really become. A more likely source of your one-night adventures will come from the class of people that back home you’d call the mentally ill.

You’re bound to hear all sorts of stories about those wild girls. You may live in a hostel where guys are bringing girls back and having sex with them in the dormitory. You may even be one of those guys. Don’t think that a little thing like a smucky personality, lack of looks or even body odor will be a serious impediment. Your white skin and English language ability make you a star on par with famous sports or entertainment personalities. You’ll hear the names of women over and over; Wendy, Kim, who care only if you’re white and speak English. It may be expensive, but the disco scene could provide you with a rocketship to transport you into the fantasy of your dreams.

Just remember to be careful what you wish for; some of those dreams are nightmares. You know that movie, Fatal Attraction, where Michael Douglas sleeps with a woman he meets at a party and she follows him around trying to destroy his life. In the movie she was Glen Close; in reality she’s Taiwanese. Take T, for example. His girlfriend is the beautiful graduate of a major national university. She lives on her own and is trying to become an airline cabin attendant. The problem is that when he tried to break up with her she went crazy. Now, she follows him around to his classes threatening to kill him. At one point she strangled him with a hair dryer cord. Another time, she searched through all the hostels in Taipei and finally found him at the Taipei Hostel at 4 in the morning. She dragged him out of bed and back to her place where she forced him to have sex with her. He later told me that he had to or she’d have hurt him even worse.

From my experience,  T‘s story isn’t even that extreme. Lots of you out there may know worse. So when you start hearing — or telling– all those great babe stories, you just sit back there and listen to yourself. If your friend told you this story back home, and it wasn’t all just part of this groovy scene hanging out in Taipei and having fun, would you think it was a cool ‘getting laid’ story? Or would you think he was one desperate guy to be hanging out with a chick like that? Would you think it was cool bangin’ a babe cause she missed her meds? Do you troll for pussy at the bars next to the psycho wards? You thought that was just for characters out of Kill Bill, but it’s every day here in Taiwan. Just ’cause she has brown skin and doesn’t speak English too well, anything goes. Right?

I know you’ve heard about all those wild local girl things. We all have. And while you don’t have to admit anything here, rest assured that no matter what you say, I know you know.

Fight Club is a 1999 Hollywood movie staring Brad Pitt and Edward Albert Norton that describes the exploits of a group of men who find meaning through participation in an underground fighting club. As the club grows, it becomes the backbone of a revolution of ordinary guys against the established order. In fact, I have seen Fight Club. I saw it when it first came out. At the time, I though it was very hard to follow and I couldn’t quite understand the point. I just watched it again and to be honest, parts of it were interesting. I especially liked the beginning and the almost poetic way in which our protagonist sees his empty life. Some of it was quite beautiful. It was almost worth watching until…well… until they started fighting.

Shahwati asked me about the movie because I actually belong to a real life fight club. Or to be more accurate, a group of loosely affiliated men who fight as part of their recreation. We live in Taiwan, so we don’t get to do a lot of punching. We do a lot of what you’d call wresting, but most of us have fought cage matches and we want to fight more of them. I played a lot of contact sports before this. I played rugby union as a kid, playing again from 1990 until a few years ago. And you know, in all the years I have been involved in combat sports and the years before that in which I played rugby union, no one ever talked about Fight Club. This is not quite true. One of the members of my BJJ club in Taipei (that’s Brazilian Jiu-JItsu) once mentioned he had seen the film and that there was some aspect to it he thought was interesting; something about walking down the street and sizing up strangers for a fight. But that’s it. That’s the end. No one watches Fight Club. No one talks about it. No one even seems to know the movie exists, although I know they do.

This is not to say that real life fighters don’t watch films. They love watching them. These guys get together and watch Bruce Lee movies all the time. They quote Bruce Lee on their websites. They use his Chinese name (李小龍) as their Chinese signature and there was even a brief period where everyone was talking about the recent hit The 300. They just don’t watch Fight Club.

And why would they? It’s a stupid movie. It’s got nothing to do with the things that guys who fight in their spare time fight about. It’s not about people who want to fight. Guys who want to fight for fun really are the way you think they are. They may be nice, Christian folk, but they’re nuts. Have a listen to this interview UFC champion BJ Penn following his victory over Jens Pulver – who is a born-again Christian.

All those people who would do steroids and then complain about people cheating in the ring to win a fight with them – come on. Anybody who does steroids to smash my face in personally, while I’m playing by the rules, I got a serious problem with that. Grow some balls and fight BJ Penn without steroids. That’d be cool…when I go into the Octagon, I’m ready to die… I’m ready to die, and you come in and you kill me somehow and you cheated, I mean where’s the honor? Where’s the whole thing?

BJ is speaking about UFC lightweight champion Sean Sherk who tested positive for anabolic steroids. You don’t need to be shocked by these words. I’ve heard the same things from Penn’s personal friend Enson Inoue,

There is no better way to die, than to die in the midst of a battle, fighting to the very end……like a man.

whose gym in Tokyo uses Japanese military slogans (大和魂) as its motto. Or from Ken Shamrock, once called the most dangerous man in the world.

I will get my respect or I will die

In fact, this neo-Bushido talk is the norm for full-contact fighters. For more psycho quotes from MMA fighters, see this link. And if you want, compare them with some memorable quotes from the movie Fight Club.

In a sense, the realism of the fights in the movie and the people involved in them shouldn’t be an issue. The fights themselves are just a metaphor for rebellion. But this hasn’t stopped the critics. Take a look at Rotten Tomatoes if you don’t believe me. In a ridiculous masturbatory fantasy from vultureculture.net, Tom Block tells us that, “While watching the men knock each other’s teeth out in Fight Club, some women may find themselves eying their lovers and wondering, “Is some part of guys really like that?” Mr. Block goes on to clarify the world of Fight Club. “It’s only fair to point out that Fight Club is about womenless men”, he confides in us. And he is right. Fight Club is a make believe world where men are men and women are just on the sidelines. It’s sort of a Rambo and Bruce Willis-type-thing, but it’s not Clint Eastwood and the anger of a Dirty Harry changing the world. Instead it’s your anger turned into rage against the machine. It’s the pornotopia of kicks and punches. It’s prison without the sodomy.

But when all is said and done, Fight Club is one of those ads in the back of a comic book selling the human growth hormone (HGH) my brother-in-law claims he bought, used, and grew 3 centimeters. But he didn’t. HGH has serious side effects on grown people that are very quickly noticeable. And so does getting in fights. You get hurt; you get really messed up. There is no part of the man next to you that’s like that, if only because he’s afraid of getting hurt too much. There may be in his fantasy, but there’s a reason why he stayed where he was born and things in his life continue to run pretty much the way they did yesterday.

But the twisted thing about the movie is that in the end, it wasn’t an underground club of White men and their buddies banding together in a desperate struggle for humanity that truly shocked our world. It wasn’t a White man angry at the meaninglessness of his job and his life who really had the dream of making tomorrow radically different from today. Instead it was a bunch of religious nuts holed up in some cave in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a claims adjuster frustrated at airline meals and silly conversation who had the balls to finally say, “Hay, the way you’ve been living your life is wrong, and I’m going to do something about it.” It was Osama bin Laden and the crew that George Bush Jr. calls terrorists who really made your tomorrow different from today.

People for whom violence is no fantasy have always known this. Fighting doesn’t set you free. It hurts. The fighting in Fight Club isn’t about fighting. It’s about stupid White guys who are too chicken to live the life they really want. It’s a movie that makes being a stupid White guy seem heroic instead of just the boring thing that it really is. Fight Club goes beyond boring into a whole new dimension of stupid. And that’s where I want to leave it.

I didn’t like Fight Club, not the first time I watched it and not the second time, either. I don’t recommend that anyone watch it.

Other links about Fight Club

What I Think about the Book Fight Club

What I Think about Chuck Palahnuik

I also highly recommend this piece from the film review blog Bright Lights.

Anyone who has played rugby union has played with Australians and knows that there’s something different about them. Perhaps it’s the cannibals that every Australian tells us they personally aren’t descended from but whose blood we all suspect flows in their veins. Perhaps it’s the relationship they have with Asia that some Australians tell us makes them Asian. Regardless, it took my Austro-Asian colleague Glenn Reeves to point out that there is a real Ironman and he is an Australian.

But first, Australia has a long and deep involvement in the robotic history of superheros. I originally learned about this from my brushes with the Ultraman. Ultraman was born in Japan, but at some point was relocated to Australia for the making of his recent films. Glenn has informed me that the Ultraman is not the only Japanese robotic Japanese superhero to make it all the way Down Under. A whole generation of Australians were weaned on the heroics of Gigantor who was originally spawned in Japan. You might enjoy this clip from the original series in which Gigantor slaughters an evil whale who is sinking ships.

Ironman is the robotic superhero that I wrote about in this review, and it is no surprise with their long history of robots as superheros we find that the real Ironman is in fact Australian. What struck Glenn with his nostalgic appeal was Tony Stark emerging from the cave into a hail of harmless gunfire from the pseudo-Taliban gang of Raza. While watching the the official Ironman trailer with Glenn, he commented that this scene was a direct rip-off from the life of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly. Apparently, the Kelly Gang, while waiting for a train load of police to show up and arrest them, were involved in the construction of armoured suits forged from dismantled plow shears. Wikipedia tells us that…

At about dawn on Monday 28 June, Ned Kelly emerged from the inn in his suit of armour. He marched towards the police, firing his gun at them, while their bullets bounced off his armour.

See here for the whole account of the gun fight.

Wikipedia, the source of all things true, tells us about the development of the Marvel comic concept of Ironman.

Iron Man’s premiere was a collaboration among editor and story-plotter Stan Lee, scripter Larry Lieber, story-artist Don Heck, and Jack Kirby. In 1963, Lee had been toying with the idea of a businessman superhero.^[1] He set out to make the new character a rich, glamorous ladies’ man, but one with a secret that would plague and torment him as well.^[2] Lee based this playboy’s personality on Howard Hughes,^[3][4] While Lee intended to write the story himself, he eventually handed the premier issue over to Lieber, who fleshed out the story.^[2] The art, meanwhile, was split between Kirby and Heck. “He designed the costume”, Heck said of Kirby, “because he was doing the cover. The covers were always done first. But I created the look of the characters, like Tony Stark and his secretary Pepper Potts“.^[3] explaining, “Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-billionaire, a ladies’ man and finally a nutcase”.

So Ironman is based on Howard Hughes, we are told. But elements of the movie have been lifted from a wide range of imagery. For example, on an HBO special that discussed the making of Ironman, special effects technicians talked about the way in which imagery for the automated dressing of Tony Stark in the Ironman armour is based on the concept of samurai being assisted while donning their armour. I can’t escape the impression that Tony Stark’s fight as he left the cave is based on the Kelly Gang’s gunfight at the Glenrowan Inn. However this comparison has escaped almost everyone except my Australian compatriot. Even reviews like this one, that acknowledge the similarity with Kelly, stop short of suggesting that the the movie is copied from there.

Well, I’m not going to stop there. Edward Kelly is the real Ironman, and I am certain the ideas used in the movie come from his historical gunfight.