Sucker Punch
The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights.By Carlo Rotella

From SLATE

Cheap, ultraportable video technology has freed bystanders at street fights to do more than simply shout, "Fight! Fight! Fuck him up!" Now they can record the event for posterity, too. The result is a growing online video archive of informal fisticuffs. You can find these videos collected on Web sites that specialize in them—ComeGetYouSome.com, Psfights.com, NothingToxic.com, and others—or you can just go to good old YouTube and type in "street fight" or other evocative keyword combinations, such as "sucker punch" or "knock out." The videos that come up offer near-infinite permutations on the eternal street-fight drama of posturing, mayhem, and consequences.
The more of them you watch, the more familiar you become with certain recurring formulas: mean kid or kids nailing unsuspecting victim, drunk guy flattening drunker guy outside a bar, bully getting or not getting comeuppance, go-ahead-and-hit-me scenarios, girls fighting for keeps while male onlookers anxiously strain to find them hilarious, backyard or basement pugilism, semiformal bare-knuckle bouts, pitched battles between rival mobs of hooligans.
Some of the fights are fake, many are real, some fall in between. There's a lot of hair-pulling incompetence, but there are also moments of genuine inspiration in which regular folks under pressure discover their inner Conan. And, of course, there are a few very bad boys and girls out there who know what they're doing. (Some offer how-to lessons.) Watching fight after fight can grow dispiriting (look, another brace of toasted poltroons walking around all stiff-legged, puffing out their chests and loudly prophesying each other's imminent doom), but only when you have worked through a few score of them does the genre begin to amount to something more than the sum of its often sorry-ass parts. The various subgenres and minutely discrete iterations flow together into a cut-rate, bottom-feeding, mass-authored poem of force. Ancient Greece had its epic tradition, and classical Chinese literature had the jiang hu, the martial world; we've got YouTube.
I realize that this probably makes me a bad person, but I find the online archive of street fights to be edifying, even addictive, ripely endowed as it is with both the malign foolishness that tempts you to despise your fellow humans and occasional flashes of potent mystery that remind you not to give in to the temptation. There's an education in these videos—in how to fight and how not to fight, for starters (executive summary: Skip the preliminaries, strike first, and keep it coming), but also in how the human animal goes about the age-old business of aggression in the 21st century.
Here's the beginning of a guidebook, a preliminary sketch of some lessons to be learned in the land of a thousand asswhippings.
1) If you're going to pick a fight, or consent to such an invitation, know what you're getting into and be prepared for a fast start and a quick finish.
Squaring off for a street fight resembles questioning a witness in court: Like a lawyer (and unlike, say, an English professor), you should know the answer to your question before you ask it. The question is, "If we fight, who will win?" The answer frequently comes as a surprise to all involved.
For instance, this unfortunate guy picked a fight with the wrong motorist. Note the brisk elegance of the victor, who acts as if he's double parked and in a hurry and just has a moment or two to spare to lay out this fool. He doesn't even break stride before delivering the bout's first and only meaningful blow, a crushing forearm shot. Having just KO'd the big talker, he should spin on his heel, stalk back to his car, and depart, like some tutelary deity of street protocol making an instructional visit to Midgard. But he ruins a moment of gemlike concision by staying to rain follow-up blows on his helpless antagonist. They don't do as much damage as the first one, but they're a lot harder to watch.
These two louts don't exactly pick a fight, since they don't do any actual fighting, but they ask for the spanking they get. With an accomplice manning the camera, they appear to have picked the wrong victim for a "happy slapping" attack. Depending on whom you ask, happy slapping is either the fad practice of smacking strangers for fun that swept Great Britain and Europe a few years back, or it's a scare label applied by a nervous press to a few random incidents. (Either way, given the American tendencies toward violent touchiness and carrying concealed firearms, you can see why it didn't really catch on over here.) One of the pair contrives to bunt a passing woman in the face, and her escort punishes them with a whirlwind series of combination punches. Some of the blows don't land, but his form is always good, and some definitely do. Note the lovely around-the-shoulder-from-behind shot with which he catches the slapper, who has turned away in an occluded attempt to flee his wrath.
These guys likewise commit the double error of messing with the wrong opponent and being unready for a fast start. As a general rule, if you pick a fight with someone who immediately assumes a relaxed but erect shuffle-stepping stance with his hands up and his chin tucked and a blandly businesslike expression on his face, you have probably just answered the question of the day wrong, even if you have him outnumbered.
2) If people are standing around smiling mysteriously and pointing cell phones at you for no apparent reason, you should get ready to duck.
This is an increasingly important rule of adolescent life in the 21st century because the era of wall-to-wall video has given new aesthetic vigor to the traditional mean-spirited sucker punch out of the blue. Here is a case in point. Here's another kind of after-school sucker punch. Let's pause to savor the reaction of the kid who was losing the fight and who suddenly turns into the winner when an ally intervenes. Having perhaps studied moral philosophy at the feet of Quentin Tarantino, he unhesitatingly switches on the instant from cringing submission to lording it over his fallen foe, as if he himself—and not his icy confederate, who may well go on to a distinguished career as an attorney or Capitol Hill staffer—had turned the tables with a brilliant maneuver.
3) There's a thin line between doofus and genius, and people often fight with one foot planted on each side of it.
Take, for example, this 81-second masterpiece. Listen to the crowd's response when the guy in the red shirt assumes his stance. It's as if they're exclaiming "Doofus!" and "Genius!" at the same time. Is Red Shirt a clown? Is he actually good at martial arts? Is he scared stiff and trying to bluff his opponent, or deeply serene and about to wipe the floor with him? The doofus/genius effect persists throughout the fight, which you have to watch to the very last second in order to appreciate its full import. On the one hand, Red Shirt displays competence: He keeps his feet from getting tangled up, stays focused on his foe but also checks for blindside attacks by additional opponents, remains relatively calm when warding off blows, and delivers a decisive shot. On the other hand, his performance takes on a certain awkward quality when the initial You Just Made a Big Mistake moment gives way to an extended sitzkreig that goes on so long the video-maker had to edit some of it out. When he does finally land the big blow, it looks more like a prayerful haymaker than an expert application of the Vibrating Fist of Death.
4) Street fights inspire commentary that's worth attending to.
Not that such commentary is unfailingly eloquent or surprising, of course. Usually, it's not. Combatants, onlookers, and especially the online viewers who post comments from a safe distance frequently repeat the same old hateful tribal hoots and grunts. Scan the online postings accompanying street fight videos, and you'll see a lot of "that ghetto bitch got a asswoopin HA HA HA LOL," "little white boy try to be bad gets owned," or the superheated Kurd vs. Turk rhetoric attending the three-on-one fight above.
But even at its most stupid or pathetic, the commentary can be bizarrely honest. For instance, noncombatants do not hesitate to stake an osmotic claim, no matter how unlikely, to a share of combatants' presumed manliness. Check out the post-fight repartee of the entourage of Kimbo Slice, a prolific online bare-knuckle pugilist. Once Kimbo has triumphed (having let his terrified opponent punch him in the face and then dropped him with a cogent bob-and-counter move), the members of his crew turn to the camera to proclaim their intimacy with the big man's power. They're oxpeckers perched on his broad back, and they want you to know that they've been nibbling vermin off him a long time, dawg, a long time.
Also, the atmosphere of violence emboldens people who want to be regarded as cool to come out and say so in plain language. I'm hideously fascinated by the sheer dumb enormity of this infamous sucker-puncher's belief that landing one of the most cowardly cheap shots in the archive confirms him as a man among men. He actually says, "I'm so cool"—and adds, somewhat anticlimactically, "I'm not the average motherfucker." As for his victim, what's more touching, his abject version of a prefight chest-puffing routine or his supine post-coldcock attempt to initiate what he hopes will play as a bygones-dismissing handshake between two proud warriors?
Street fights inspire astonishingly literal-minded dialogue because they are astonishing. "Damn, he just hit you," a voice from the crowd will say as the opponents tear into each other. "He just hit you again. He's beating your ass!" To whom is this commentary directed? Who benefits from it? Not the fighters. They already know who hit whom. Not others in the crowd. They're standing right there watching it for themselves. No, the commentator is just giving expression to the most visceral reaction of all to a fight—disbelief that it's really happening. Maybe that's what onlookers mean when they shout, like mynah birds, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" They can't get over the naked fact of it.

Carlo Rotella, Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (SLATE)
Nevermind those little alien guys—how about that suburban malaise!By Keith PhippsPosted Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2007, at 7:39 AM ET
Steven Spielberg became a household name with tales of action, adventure, and, beginning with Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, visitors from other worlds. It's a subject he would return to again and again, and one he approached with the zeal of a true believer. Prior to making his 1977 follow-up to the breakthrough hit Jaws, the young director had spent years clipping mentions of UFO sightings from newspapers, talking to ex-military men who believed in a cover-up, and befriending experts like J. Allen Hynek, whose scale of UFO encounter types gives the film its title. But take a closer look at Close Encounters, particularly if you haven't seen the movie in a while, and you realize the movie has a rather un-Spielbergian subtext. The protagonist, a young suburban dad penned in by the responsibilities of fatherhood, leaps at the first chance to leave those responsibilities behind. Given the opportunity, in the movie's final scene, to board the aliens' mother ship and fly away, he doesn't spare a thought for the wife and kids he's leaving behind. The stars await.
This from the director who has been ratifying the importance of family for a quarter-century now, in movies as diverse in their subject matter and genres as E.T., The Color Purple, Hook, Empire of the Sun, and Minority Report. Spielberg himself acknowledges that Close Encounters is a different kind of movie. "I would never have made Close Encounters the way I made it in '77, because I have a family that I would never leave," he said in a 1997 making-of documentary. "That was just the privilege of youth." But though he's twice re-edited the movie—in 1980 and again in 1997—each time casting a more skeptical eye on Neary's abandonment of his family, the act of abandonment still stands out. It's a glimpse of a different Steven Spielberg than the one we've come to know.
All three versions of Close Encounters are included on the new three-disc "30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition DVD," and in all three our protagonist is Roy Neary, a Muncie, Ind., electric company lineman played by Richard Dreyfuss (the actor Spielberg has often referred to as his onscreen surrogate). Roy becomes obsessed with aliens after seeing a UFO firsthand. Dispatched to investigate some strange outages, he gets lost along an Indiana back road and buzzed by a small, colorful alien ship. After returning home, Roy is able to focus on nothing else. He begins collecting newspaper clippings and turning every pliable substance he can find into a shape he'll later discover is Wyoming's Devil's Tower. When he eventually raids a neighbor's yard for chicken wire so he can build a living-room-sized sculpture of that landmark, Roy's wife, Ronnie (Teri Garr), packs their three children into the family station wagon and leaves both husband and film behind.
In the version seen in theaters in 1977, Roy's obsession takes hold of him like a fever. Returning from his first sighting with only his burned face as evidence, he whisks his family off to share what he's seen. But the aliens have disappeared, his family is incredulous (even the kids), and Roy is forced to choose between his growing obsession and his family responsibilities. It's not presented as much of a choice. In the 1977 version, we never get a chance to know him, or his family, before he's called away to check on those outages.
Save for this short scene and a few others of Roy at work, the movie shows us only Roy's post-UFO life. The 1977 version, however, wasn't exactly the one Spielberg wanted to make. He'd been rushed to finish by a cash-strapped Columbia in need of a hit for the holiday season. He began work on a new cut, and 1980 saw the theatrical release of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: Special Edition, a re-edit made years before director's cuts become common practice.
The bulk of the new and previously excised material fleshes out Roy's maddening home life, including a considerably longer introduction to the Neary family. We see suburban Muncie as a sprawl of carefully arranged, nearly identical houses stretched out beneath a starry sky. But within those tidy houses, Spielberg finds chaos. Clutter piles on top of clutter in a family room that can barely contain its family. Conversations overlap but fail to drown out the television's blare. And at the center of it all is a man already half-mad from all the commotion, unable to focus on his toy trains and stuck with a family unable to appreciate the whimsy of Pinocchio.
Instead of a man perhaps taken from his family by forces outside his control, we see a man with his foot halfway out the door. If the kids can't appreciate Pinocchio, how are they going to understand what Roy's seen? Other additions include a harrowing scene of Roy, tortured by his need to sculpt Devil's Tower, breaking down and showering while fully clothed. Ronnie makes an apparently sincere offer for the family to seek therapy together, but as the kids start screaming, she lets accusations of selfishness and neglect fly.
The scene hews closer in tone to John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence than It Came From Outer Space. Garr plays Ronnie as a bit of a harridan, but who would react well if their spouse suddenly began following lights in the sky? And what did the kids do to deserve any of this?
The more context Spielberg provides for Roy's decision to leave his family, the less sympathetic that decision becomes. It's a flesh-and-blood family Roy abandons when he boards the mother ship. It's no wonder that when, in this version, we actually see inside that ship—a concession Spielberg had to make to get Columbia to let him tinker elsewhere—we find Roy standing by himself, alone, at last, with his bottomless capacity for wonder. Revisiting Close Encounters yet again in the 1990s, Spielberg removed the scene inside the mother ship but kept every frame of the scenes depicting the Nearys' domestic turmoil, and restored a few moments trimmed in 1980.
Spielberg has racked up a remarkably diverse filmography since Close Encounters, but in film after film he has circled back to the primacy of family, as if to apologize for Roy's departure. As early as E.T., released in 1982, Spielberg was reversing elements of Close Encounters. Elliott, the young protagonist of E.T., and his family take in an alien stranded in their suburban neighborhood. (They don't have to go searching for the wonders of the cosmos; the wonders of the cosmos come crashing down in their back yard.) And unlike Roy, they're restored, not undone, by this discovery. In fact, it's the elements of Elliott's middle-American life that allow him to befriend the alien—their trust formed with Reese's Pieces, their communication fostered by Sesame Street—and eventually rebuild his family.
His 2005 remake of War of the Worlds suggests an even more explicit reversal of Close Encounters. Here, instead of benevolent aliens whisking a man away from his bummer of a family, malevolent aliens threaten a family already destabilized by divorce. By film's end, they've learned that the only safety and comfort they'll ever know will come from one another, far away from twinkling stars, flashing lights, and the promise of other worlds.
The seeds of what would become the more signature Spielberg story line are present in Close Encounters. A subplot tells the story of a single mother (played by Melinda Dillon) desperately searching for a son abducted by the aliens. Mother and son end the film in each other's arms after the aliens release him and a few dozen other apparently unharmed abductees. But it's Roy's story that dominates the movie. And while the changes Spielberg has made to the film over the years have invited viewers to feel ambivalent about Roy's departure, Spielberg has never gone so far as his friend George Lucas (who softened Han Solo's nastiness by making Greedo shoot first). Roy still gets on the ship, fulfilling the fantasy of everyone who's ever wanted to leave everything and everyone behind, even if it's a fantasy his creator no longer shares.

Keith Phipps writes about movies for The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of the Onion.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Comcast sued over Web interference
By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology

A San Francisco Bay area subscriber to Comcast Corp.'s high-speed Internet service has sued the company, alleging it engages in unfair business practices by interfering with subscribers' file sharing.
Subscriber Jon Hart based his claims on the results of an investigation by the Associated Press published last month that showed Philadelphia-based Comcast actively interferes with attempts some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.
Hart's lead lawyer, Mark N. Todzo of San Francisco, said his client suspected before reading the AP report that Comcast was interfering with his Internet traffic.
"What the AP report did was just confirm to him that it wasn't just him who was suffering from the problem," Todzo said. "There was this confluence of events where everyone seemed to reach the same conclusion, which was that Comcast was engaging in this activity."
Other users claimed they had seen interference with some file-sharing applications. Subsequent tests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the AP's tests, which showed that Comcast is causing software on both ends of a file-sharing link to believe the connection has been dropped.
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars formally asked the Federal Communications Commission early this month to make Comcast stop interfering with file sharing. Two of the groups also asked the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber.
Comcast is the country's largest cable company and second-largest Internet service provider with 12.9 million Internet subscribers.
The company denies it blocks file sharing. But it acknowledged after the AP report was published that it delays some of the traffic between computers that share files.
Comcast said the delays are designed to improve the Internet experience for its subscribers as a whole. A relatively small number of file sharers is enough to slow down a network.
Hart's lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, alleges Comcast misleads customers by promising "mind-blowing" speeds and "unfettered access" to the Internet in advertisements while hindering the use of certain applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing. It seeks unspecified money damages.
Todzo is seeking class action status for the lawsuit.
Comcast and its subsidiaries "intentionally and severely impede the use of certain Internet applications by their customers, slowing such applications to a mere crawl or stopping them altogether," the lawsuit reads. "This class action seeks to end (Comcast's) practice and seeks recovery of fees paid by customers who paid for services they did not receive."
A Comcast spokesman reached late Wednesday said the company hadn't been served with the lawsuit yet and could not comment.
Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.

A genuine servant of compassion!

Rev. Chad Varah, Anglican Priest Who Helped the Suicidal, Dies at 95
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
The Rev. Chad Varah, an outspoken, publicity-sly, sometimes cantankerous Anglican priest who started a telephone hot line for the suicidal after concluding that loneliness is the most heart-rending anguish, died Thursday in Basingstoke, England. He was 95.
His death was announced by Samaritans, the suicide-prevention charity he founded.
From his initial rush to the aid of a despairing mother in November 1953, Father Varah’s mission to give hope to the perhaps fatally depressed grew to 200 branches in Britain and Ireland and 200 more in 38 other countries. It became a model for crisis hot lines.
Father Varah’s vision began in 1935, when, as a 23-year-old deacon, he brooded bitterly after the first burial service he conducted for a girl, who, by varying accounts, was 13 or 14. She had killed herself because she wrongly feared that the onset of menstruation meant she had a venereal disease.
“Here was a life that could have been saved if only there had been an intelligent person she could bring herself to talk to,” he said in an interview with Church Illustrated magazine in 1959.
As he moved from parish to parish, Father Varah found that many people he helped with sexual problems, his emerging interest, were suicidal. He learned that in the London area, an average of three people killed themselves each day. He began to dream of an emergency telephone line where those in despair might “get some love from a stranger.”
The opportunity came in 1953, when he became the rector of St. Stephen Walbrook, a church in London built by Christopher Wren. The church is just behind the Mansion House, where the lord mayor, the church’s only parishioner, lives. That meant that Father Varah could largely devote himself to what he called “the parish of despair.”
As Father Varah told the story, he was digging through the church’s rubble-choked vestry when he found a telephone that had survived bombing by the Germans and still worked. He called to ask for a new number, suggesting “Mansion House 9000.” It turned out that that was already the number.
“I took it as a sign that God wanted me to go ahead,” he told Church Illustrated for an article that was condensed in The Reader’s Digest in 1960.
The first call to the number came from a woman who, with her four children by three fathers, was about to be evicted. As reported by The Independent in 1992, Father Varah left his post, something he later never allowed. He found the woman with two of her children in a hotel room.
He placed one child with his wife and rushed around London in a taxi scrambling to find someone to take the baby. Eventually, the taxi driver and his wife did.
There was one more call that day, but soon they were coming in at the rate of 100 a day. Clients ranged from paupers to millionaires, teenagers to octogenarians, and people in all manner of occupations and professions.
Samaritans got its name from a headline in The Daily Mirror. The reference to the biblical story did not please Father Varah, who was adamant that all religious teaching should be avoided when helping the desperate. Nor could the police be informed of anything that clients discussed confidentially.
Edward Chad Varah was born on Nov. 12, 1911, at Barton upon Humber, Lincolnshire, England, the eldest of nine children of Canon William Edward Varah, vicar of St. Chad’s Church there. He graduated from Oxford with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics, then from Lincoln Theological College. He served in a string of parishes before St. Stephen.
Father Varah added to his income by writing scripts for comic strips and became known for the liberality of his views on sex. He refused to condemn adultery in all cases, promoted abortion and gay rights, and served on the board of a sexually frank magazine. He said he was called “a dirty old man by the time he was 25,” and, years later, “Britain’s oldest sex therapist.”
When he was summoned as a witness in the obscenity trial of Linda Lovelace, the star of “Deep Throat,” a famous pornographic movie, he was asked about the Seventh Commandment, on adultery. “Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?” The Times of London said he answered.
Almost from the beginning, Father Varah fought with others in Samaritans. He left the organization in its second year, but served as director of its London branch. He became very active in the international efforts of the organization, which, after several permutations, is now called Befrienders Worldwide.
Father Varah’s wife, the former Doris Susan Whanslaw, died in 1993. She was president of the Mothers’ Union, the Anglican Church’s principal women’s organization. He is survived by their daughter and three of their four sons.
In 1963, Father Varah conducted the funeral service of Diana Churchill, Winston Churchill’s daughter. She had worked as a volunteer for Samaritans before she committed suicide herself. In 1994, he officiated at the marriage of Lady Sarah Chatto, the only daughter of Princess Margaret. Until he retired in 2003 at 92, Father Varah commuted by public transportation.
His penchant for incendiary statements was evident in 1993, when in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph he castigated Pope John Paul II for his opposition to contraception. “It was a great mistake to make an ignorant Polish peasant into a pope,” he said.
Father Varah, who was said to be able to recite every poem he had ever heard, was more curious than concerned about death, because of his belief in reincarnation. His favorite three words of advice were intended to provide a sense of proportion: “It doesn’t matter.”

Astronomers find system with five planets
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets.
The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday.
Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight planets, said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University.
Life could conceivably live on the surface of a moon that might be orbiting the new planet, but such a moon would be far too small to detect using current methods, the astronomers said.
"The star is very much like our own sun. It has about the same mass and is about the same age as our sun," Fischer told reporters.
"It's a system that appears to be packed with planets."
It took the researchers 18 years of careful, painstaking study to find the five planets, which they found by measuring tiny wobbles in the star's orbit. The first planet discovered took 14 years to make one orbit.
They said 55 Cancri is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, a light-year being the distance light travels in one year -- about 5.8 trillion miles.
The newly discovered planet has a mass about 45 times that of Earth and may resemble Saturn, the astronomers said.
HARBORING LIFE?
It is the fourth planet out from the star and completes one orbit every 260 days -- a similar orbit to that of Venus.
"It would be a little bit warmer than the Earth but not very much," said Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.
The planet is 72 million miles from its star -- closer than the Earth's 93 million miles, but the star is a little cooler than our own sun.
"If there were a moon around this new planet ... it would have a rocky surface, so water on it in principle could puddle into lakes and oceans," said Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
But the moon would have to carry a lot of mass to hold the water, he said. Water is, of course, key to life.
"This discovery of the first-ever quintuple planetary system has me jumping out of my socks," Marcy added. "We now know that our sun and its family of planets is not unusual."
Marcy and other astronomers strongly believe that many stars are hosts to solar systems similar to our own. But small objects such as planets are very hard to detect.
Technology that would allow scientists to detect planets as small as Earth is decades away, the scientists agreed.
The researchers have been looking at 2,000 nearby stars using the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
They have posted images of what the planets may look like on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/telecon-20071106/.
The inner four planets of 55 Cancri are all closer to the star than Earth is to the sun. The closest, about the mass of Uranus, zips around the star in just under three days at a distance of 3.5 million miles.
(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)