Tag: writing

Posted on

Why NFTs Aren’t Worth It for Artists (or Humanity at Large)

At some point during this year, you might have encountered the abbreviated term “NFT” on the Internet. Most often, this is in reference to the sale of digital artwork or other images being sold and purchased online for what can be colossal amounts of money. For example, an entire series of NFTs known as the “Lazy Lions” — all of them simple cartoon depictions of lions with assorted expressions and articles of fashion — has sold for 1.93 million US dollars in total, with the statistically average price for a Lazy Lion NFT approximating $5.6 grand. Over the course of 2021, the NFT market has ballooned, with websites such as Crypto.com and OpenSea being dedicated to the selling and auctioning of these images.

On the plains of Pleistocene Africa, an early Homo sapiens woman must fend off a pride of hungry lions!

As a professional digital artist myself, it wouldn’t be honest of me if I said that I wasn’t tempted by this trend at first. Full-time artists like myself commonly struggle with earning enough income to get through life as independent citizens, in no small part because customers willing to pay for commissions or printed copies of our work can be few and far between for most of us. If people are willing to pay several grand for simple cartoon portraits of lions (or, alternatively, apes) in NFT form, then one can be forgiven for thinking that selling our works on the burgeoning NFT scene might be lucrative for themselves.

However, I have since changed my mind. I no longer think NFTs are worth it for artists like me and can in fact have undesirable consequences not only for ourselves but also all of humanity.

But first, I must explain what an NFT is.

The term “NFT” is short for “non-fungible token”. Each NFT is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data that is recorded in a sort of digital ledger known as a blockchain. Previously, blockchains have been used as a basis for special “virtual currencies” (or cryptocurrencies) like Bitcoin, which have proven particularly popular with right-wing “libertarians” as well as criminals since they operate independently of any national government. Just as people would record transactions paid with cryptocurrencies in their blockchains, now they use the same technology to record NFTs they have obtained.

How does this apply to art? Herein lies the catch. When someone buys an NFT based on a piece of digital artwork, what they are buying is not the artwork itself, but a unique digital receipt saying they own that artwork which goes into their blockchain ledger. Nothing is printed and shipped to their home, nor is any new artwork created for their use as in a commission. All they have purchased is a little note that says, “I own this.”

If you think about it, it is not only the work an artist has produced themselves that can become NFTs. One could theoretically download any image from the Internet and use it to sell NFTs, and indeed many unscrupulous individuals have profited off making NFTs out of artwork they have stolen from others. We artists already have enough of a problem with thieves using our work to sell products without permission or compensation, and yet the rise of NFTs appears to have aggravated this ill even further.

This, by itself, might not deter an artist from making NFTs of their own work, any more than earlier forms of art theft have discouraged us from sharing and selling our work. Personally, I have decided that I am more honored by people buying a physical print of my work to exhibit at home or in public, or paying me to make new artwork, than I am by someone buying a mere digital receipt for their blockchain that claims they own a work I created. But, as I said earlier, I can see why other artists might want to take advantage of the NFT market.

Sahelanthropus, the earliest-known hominin?

There is still a fundamental problem with NFTs, and anything based on blockchain technology in general, and that is that the entire process of recording transactions on blockchains consumes a shockingly high amount of electric energy due to its computational complexity. One simple transaction on a blockchain platform like Ethereum (which is one popular with NFT vendors) can consume over 180 kilowatts of energy, exceeding six days’ worth of electric consumption for the average American household. The average NFT transaction can be even higher than that, reaching up to 340 kilowatts on some websites, equating to a typical resident of the European Union’s consumption of electricity over one month. One shudders to think of the collective footprint of all the NFTs that have been sold to blockchains all over the world.

In a world where we got all our electricity from nuclear or renewable sources, this might not seem so bad. In the real world, on the other hand, we are still predominantly dependent on fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and petroleum to produce our electricity (among other technologies). This continues to flood our atmosphere with an excess of greenhouse gases at a rate unprecedented over hundreds of millennia, with disastrous effects on our global climate that kill more than 150,000 human beings every year. Mind you, most of these greenhouse gas emissions (about 71%) are coming from the activities of only a hundred major corporations rather than all the NFTs combined so far. But, considering that NFTs amount to nothing more than glorified receipts in online ledgers, they are not worth the additional wounds they inflict upon our planet.

Every artist wants to profit from their work, but nobody wants to live in an overcooked world. So, while we are still dependent on destructive fossil fuels for our electrical needs, I would not recommend bothering with NFTs at all.

Posted on

An Artist’s Guide to Growing Your Style

Oshun, the Yoruba orisha of love and beauty, takes a bath in the Nigerian river that bears her name.

Once you begin a career in the visual arts — whether your chosen path is drawing, painting, sculpting, 3D modeling, or anything else — one of the questions that may be on your mind is, “How can I develop my own art style?”

Mind you, not every artist out there sets out with the goal of developing a unique style for themselves. Some are perfectly comfortable emulating other art styles that they admire. A lot of Japanese animation and comic books, for example, look similar enough in their visual style that we can speak of a distinctive “anime” style with everyone understanding what we mean. For that matter, many artistic traditions around the world and throughout time have artists producing works with shared stylistic traits to the degree that we can recognize which culture produced what artform. We all know what ancient Egyptian art generally looks like, for example, even though their vast corpus of work was produced by generations of different artisans over the course of multiple centuries.

Nonetheless, I believe there is a certain honor to be found in developing an individual style that viewers can recognize as the artist’s own. In democratic societies like ours that place value on personal autonomy and freedom, it’s a commonplace sentiment to want to stand out from the crowd in one way or another, and having your own style is one way of accomplishing that. Furthermore, a recognizable style can go a long way in “building your own brand” if you want to profit from your work, as well as cultivating a loyal following of fans and patrons.

So just how do you get your own art style, anyway?

I cannot speak for all artists who have developed a style, but I can speak for myself. So, what I will tell you is the story of how my own style evolved.

I’ve been drawing since my kindergarten years, but it was in my high school years when I got more serious about it and set out to improve. The way I went about this, in the beginning, was to consult various art instruction books for guidance on drawing techniques as well as references for human and animal anatomy, poses, clothing, and weaponry, among many others. Particularly important was a series of books published by Watson-Guptill, with authors and artists such as Steve Miller and Bryan Baugh, that showed you how to draw subject matter such as dinosaurs and other creatures, martial artists, fantasy characters, and soldiers and military equipment. But I had many others as well, including works by Tom Nguyen, Christopher Hart, and even Marvel giants such as Stan Lee and John Buscema.

Antony and Cleopatra embrace along the shoreline of Alexandria, Egypt in 40 BC.

A lot of these instructional books had a comic-book theme, in that they said they would teach you how to draw Western-style comics, and the artists whose works were featured in them often had a background in comics, cartooning, or animation. So it is likely that I picked up a certain comic-book aesthetic from these artists. It wasn’t that I set out to draw my own comics specifically, but rather that I learned my way of drawing from comic-book artists.

However, these artists would not have been my only influence. Another would have been the animated movies I grew up watching, such as those produced by Disney and Dreamworks during the 1990s to 2000s. Probably the most important for me was Disney’s Tarzan, which I maintain is the most beautiful hand-drawn animated movie they have ever done, but I think there is a little bit of The Prince of Egypt bleeding into my depictions of ancient Egyptian people and culture as well. If my style seems cartoony to some viewers, those influences from Western animation are probably why.

As much as I may have been influenced by the media I consumed in my youth, I believe that, for the most part, my personal art style was something I developed not immediately but over time as I kept drawing. By far the most crucial ingredients in my artistic growth over the years have been regular practice, studying from life and references, and taking into account constructive feedback I have received from others. Without those, I would have never gotten to the level I am at today. The style I currently draw in is the result of an arduous journey that has lasted over thirteen years as of this writing.

I would advise any beginning artists to take the same route that I did if they want to develop their own style. Keep practicing your craft, with the aid of accurate references and feedback, and your style will develop on its own. In the beginning, your approach will be influenced by the media you take in, as happens to all artists. But, over time, the style of your work will become its own thing which you can call your own. Styles are not invented, they are grown.

Tyrannosaurus rex is smelling the air for breakfast on a foggy Late Cretaceous morning.
Posted on

Excerpted First Chapter from “Priestess of the Lost Colony”

1600 BC, in an alternate timeline

Itaweret moved her final pawn off the last square on the senet board. She straightened on her stool and crossed her arms with a triumphant smirk, victory assured in the game of passing.

“By all the gods, not again!” Bek slammed his hands on the ebony table, which knocked his two remaining pawns off the gameboard. “There must be some mistake!”

Itaweret laughed. “What mistake? That you’ve been losing the past few times? I keep telling you, Brother, you take these games much too seriously. You act as if the fate of all Per-Pehu depended on it.”

Bek narrowed his eyes as his lips curled into a snarl. “I might not be wrong, then. If I am to govern this colony, I must hone my strategic skills. How can I do that when I keep losing to a—a priestess?”

Itaweret didn’t take one grain of offense. If anything, his righteous anger amused her even more. “Remember what Father says. You do not need to succeed to learn.”

Bek opened his mouth for another retort but stopped, stood from his stool beside the table, and took a deep breath. His mahogany-skinned brow sparkled with sweat from the afternoon sunlight that descended upon the back courtyard. He stormed across the courtyard to an alabaster bench beneath one of the olive trees and plopped down to sulk in its shade.

As entertaining as her brother’s tantrums were at the end of every senet game, any pleasure Itaweret felt evaporated when she saw him wipe a tear off his cheek. Not since they were children had she seen Bek show such emotion unless he thought nobody was looking.

Continue reading “Excerpted First Chapter from “Priestess of the Lost Colony””
Posted on

Excerpt from “Priestess of the Lost Colony”

There were no torches burning inside the tunnel beneath the temple of Mut. Only the brazier Bek carried behind her drove back the blackness, and it was dimming with every passing second. Itaweret occasionally paused to search the floor for branches that she could toss into the brazier but found nothing but cold and damp stone.    

Finally, they reached a rectangular outline of light at the tunnel’s end. By the mercy of fate, the pair had not stumbled into any booby-traps, nor run into any dead ends branching off from the main passage. While dark, the journey was not as perilous as Itaweret had feared…

Hopefully, it would stay that way.

“How do you know this doesn’t lead to a trap?” Bek asked.

“Think about it. Why would Mut lead us into a trap? Don’t you trust her enough, brother?”

“Assuming that was Mut speaking to us. What if it was that Achaean demon she talked about, that Athena?”

Itaweret fought hard within herself to ignore him, and the possibility he raised. It was a valid point, if she were honest with herself, but it seemed unlikely that an Achaean deity like Athena could penetrate the sanctum of Mut. At least she hoped so. And hope was all they had left.

Itaweret walked up to the rectangle of light and pressed her shoulder against the surface, feeling the same cool stone texture as the tunnel’s walls. She pushed all her strength onto the door, groaning from exertion and the exhausting day, until it fell forward with a hard thud and crumbled outside.

A flood of daylight blinded her. Once her eyes readjusted from the subterranean darkness, she found herself on the summit of a grassy hill that sloped into a gravelly beach beside the sea. The setting sun gilded the crests of the waves, but the colors of the sky graded ominously, from dark red to black. Itaweret wrinkled her nose from the smell of smoke and burnt flesh.

Behind the hill, the city in which she had lived her entire life bloomed into a colossal inferno of flame. The fires that roared on rooftops, together with thick black rivers of smoke, obscured any sight of the carnage that, she realized, must have clogged and already begun to rot over the streets. Still, she could make out a stream of people being herded out through the city gate, prodded along by Mycenaeans in their bronze suits.

They were her fellow citizens of Per-Pehu. Her people, friends and neighbors, reduced to human livestock in one evening.

“How dare they!” Bek shook his fist while watching what she watched, quaking with rage. “We’ve got to do something!”

“We will, brother. We wouldn’t be out here if we weren’t going to do something about it. But we cannot fight now. Come on!”

She took his hand. They descended the hill to a dirt path that meandered northeastward. The cover of the olive and cypress trees alongside it, together with shadows that grew darker with each passing minute, would conceal them from any prowling Mycenaeans.

At least she hoped so.

Less than two hours later, the scarlet heavens faded into blackness almost as pure as that within the tunnel. Now their only light was the half-moon and dusting of tiny stars around it, giving off a faint white glow reflected upon the vegetation and stones. Itaweret huddled close to Bek as they hiked up the path through the foothills, pausing only to pick up sticks to feed the fire in the brazier. If there was one thing to praise the wilderness for, it was an abundance of cheap firewood.

They ascended higher into the hills, climbing until the open, scrubby landscape of the low plains gave way to oak and pine forests that girdled the mountains. They climbed over fallen logs and boulders strewn about with increasing density. If walking uphill had not already worn away at the strength in their legs, maneuvering around these obstacles in the terrain taxed their muscles to aching even more.

Underneath the soft fragrance of the pines, Itaweret’s nostrils flared, capturing another odor, more rancid and unpleasant. She traced the scent to the gleaming, red-spattered bones of a lamb, flies buzzing around the few scraps of meat that clung to it. She had seen cattle and goats sacrificed to the gods in the temple complex at Per-Pehu, but never witnessed their gory remains in a state like this. The sight almost shoved her last meal from her stomach into her throat.

“How could this have died?” she asked.

Bek crouched over the bones and ran his finger over one of five parallel scars raked across the ribcage. He pointed to a weathered impression in the nearby earth, broader than a human hand, with claw marks sticking out before each of its five toes.

“I would have guessed a lion, but cats in general don’t leave prints like this,” Bek said. “Normally they retract their claws, so they wouldn’t show like they do here.”

“Could it be a dog?” Itaweret asked. “Or a jackal? Or one of those gray monsters the Achaeans call wolves?”

Bek shook his head. “Much, much too big for any of those. Truth be told, I have no idea. It must be a kind of monster we’ve never seen in our lives.”

Back home, everyone inside Per-Pehu’s walls had heard travelers’ stories of the beasts that roamed the wilds beyond the colony. Some spoke of cannibalistic men with singular eyes or the heads of bulls, giant swamp-dwelling serpents, or fire-breathing creatures that were part goat, part lion, and part snake. Itaweret had always considered the descriptions too ridiculous to be real. More frightening were the accounts of hulking beasts with dog-like faces and claws like knives, giant cats with dagger-long fangs, and ill-tempered elephants covered in shaggy hair. Those stories sounded almost truthful.

Itaweret wrung her hands around Mut’s scepter, shivering with a dread colder than the nocturnal air itself. “Do you know whether it could be nearby?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Bek said. “The tracks are a little worn. It could have left here hours or even a day ago.”

Two glowing specks of yellow blinked behind a nearby patch of bushes. Leaves rustled and branches snapped as the specks drifted towards them. The furry outline of a thick, stocky body gleamed from the brazier’s firelight. The creature’s snout was long like a dog’s, but its ears were smaller and more rounded. As it panted and grunted, it exuded the same stink of decayed flesh as the sheep carcass.

Itaweret took a step back from the lumbering animal. “What do they call things like that?”

“A bear, I believe,” Bek whispered. “Stand your ground. That could scare him off.”

Itaweret forced herself to stay put and waved the scepter of Mut like a warrior’s staff as Bek shook the brazier back and forth at the beast. Rearing ten feet into the air on its hind feet, the bear curled its lips back, exposing pointed canines. It uncorked a menacing roar while brandishing clawed forepaws.

With a single swat, the bear knocked Itaweret’s scepter out of her hands. She jumped to grab it, but the bear seized the scepter in its mouth and tossed it into the darkness. It swiped at her bosom, raking through her linen cloth and skin with its claws. Sudden pain swept through her chest as she collapsed to the ground.

Bek thrust his brazier again, the heated ash landing on the bear’s backside. Now aggravated, the the bear turned away from Itaweret, roared, and charged him. The bear’s attack on Bek gave her enough time to crawl over and retrieve her scepter. Just as the bear was about to punch the brazier out of Bek’s grasp, she chucked the scepter into its shoulder.

Her blow distracted the beast for another second. Then it swung around and barreled towards her again. She had no another weapon to beat it aside.

Another roar followed.

All the children of Kemet could recognize that deep feline roar. Along with it appeared a pair of yellow eyes, set in a bright tawny form. The feline sprang from the blackness and landed on the bear. The two creatures rolled in the dirt in a chaotic melee of biting and slashing.

The battle ended with the bear’s growling breaking up into gagging, as if it were being choked. It fell limp, with a viscous river of blood gushing from its neck and more spilling from the cuts that had been slashed all over its body. The bear’s slayer stood over it and roared with a savage exultation.

Itaweret and Bek looked upon the largest lion they had ever seen, one with a thick dark mane and faint leopard-like spots on its flanks. She had heard stories of giant spotted lions that once roamed the countries north of the Great Green Sea, but according to those same stories, they had all died out centuries ago. Was this the very last of that breed, or did it have a whole pride behind it? If the latter, would they be seeking dinner too?

Itaweret could only hope the bear’s big and meaty carcass would distract them from she and Bek.

Then, a voice, a proud voice: “That’s a good boy, Xiphos!”

A young Achaean man in a sleeveless wool tunic walked toward them, carrying a wooden shepherd’s staff. He stroked the big cat’s mane as if it were a tame dog while it gorged itself on the dead bear. Much to Itaweret’s surprise, the lion tolerated the boy’s touch, rather than fending him off like any truly wild animal.

Itaweret brushed droplets of blood off her clothing and jewelry. “Xiphos? Is he your pet or something?”

“My father brought him in when he was a cub,” the Achaean youth said. “No need to fear him, my lady. He’s as gentle as a puppy unless you provoke him. Are you folks all right? It’s not every day we have black people come to these parts.”

“Why do you call us ‘black’ people?” Bek asked. “Our people are various shades of brown, some of us darker than others. If we are ‘black’, would that make you, what, ‘white’?”

The Achaean chuckled. “No use arguing over what we call each other. Trust me, I’ve heard far nastier names for your kind of people. Name’s Philos. And you two?”

Itaweret did not want to know those “nastier” names. “I am Itaweret, High Priestess of Mut from Per-Pehu. And this is my brother Bek, son of the Great Chief Mahu.”

“Aye, so you’re from the colony over the hills.” Philos looked up and down Itaweret’s body, his eyes following her contours in much the same gazing way as Scylax of Mycenae. “And, by Aphrodite, are you fine to look at, scratches and all! Nice curves, especially.”

Itaweret shook her head and grumbled. Achaean or Kemetian, white or black, men were all the same. Though she had to admit, the muscular young Achaean, with his flowing long black hair, wasn’t a wholly unattractive specimen.

“Anyway, either of you wouldn’t have seen a little ewe around these parts, would you?” Philos asked.

“We saw a sheep’s skeleton,” Bek replied. “We think the bear ate it sometime back.”

“Hades be damned, then! Xiphos and I have been looking for her the past couple of days. At least she was only one ewe. So, what are you two Kemetians doing out here?”

“In case you haven’t heard, Per-Pehu has been brutally sacked by King Scylax of Mycenae,” Itaweret said. “Our goddess Mut has sent us a quest northeast, one that will lead to Scylax’s defeat. We hope it does, anyway. She told us that we would find our answer in the first village over the mountains.”

Philos scratched his hair. “By Zeus, that’s my village! I don’t know why we’d know how to beat the king of Mycenae, out of all people in the world. But, if your goddess says so, I ought to help you the best I can.”

“How far is your village, anyway?”

“A few more hills to the east. But we ought to rest here for the night. Xiphos doesn’t like being dragged away from his meals, and I think we’re all damned tired anyway.”

Bek yawned. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

Itaweret nodded. Almost every muscle burned from straining, even beyond her wounds from the bear’s attack. Her stomach groaned with hunger. Once the lion filled himself, she wouldn’t mind cooking leftovers of the bear over a fire lit by Bek’s brazier. Never had she eaten bear meat, but food was food in uncivilized places.

She looked up at the treeline and caught the flicker of little eyes. They weren’t the yellow eyes of a bear, lion or other predator, but silver-gray eyes…familiar eyes.

Itaweret blinked. The eyes were gone.

Posted on

“King Kong” as a Horror Film for the Imperialist Age

King Kong battles a Tyrannosaurus rex in the rainforests of Skull Island

In the book Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), author Danny Peary declares the 1933 film King Kong “the greatest of all horror films” with “masterly special effects”. To modern audiences, even those that appreciate the original King Kong as an important landmark in the history of cinema, this might appear a hyperbolic assertion that sorts it into the wrong genre. While the film has more than its fair share of violence, bloodshed, and screaming characters, its almost non-stop action and bold fanfare score could not differ more from the eerie, quieter style of today’s entries in the horror genre.

Nonetheless, there can be no dispute that moviegoers back in the 1930s found it pretty scary. For example, one critic from the Los Angeles Times called it a “first class nightmare” and warned prospective viewers that “some of the horrors, it must be said, are a little strong.” (Morton 2005).

So what was it about King Kong that made it a horror film in the eyes of 1930s audiences? I will argue that this original perception is rooted in the film’s presentation of subject matter that the generation that created and consumed it, most especially Europeans and Americans of European heritage, would have generally perceived as horrific as a product of the imperialist culture they had partaken in.

First there is the subject of Kong himself, who for all intents and purposes is a gorilla that has evolved to gigantic proportions. Back when the film was made, few if any people in the European cultural sphere understood gorillas as the relatively peaceful, primarily vegetarian relatives of humanity studied by Dian Fossey (1983) and other primatologists. Beginning in the 19th century, the common European stereotype of gorillas was one of violent brutes prone to abducting women and attacking hunters in the Central African rainforest (Brightwell 2014). Such portrayals of course had less in common with these animals’ actual behavior than the Victorian-era appetite for exotic sensationalism and prejudices about how “subhuman” beings (including non-European people, as will be explained later) would act.

The character of Kong is nothing if not a scaled-up, one-dimensional embodiment of these originally Victorian myths about gorillas. His oversized fangs and bug-eyed glare, especially when contrasted with the dark coloring of his body in the black-and-white film, convey an appearance of predatory and inhuman menace further supported by his homicidal behavior towards almost every living thing he comes across. Not only does he kill every prehistoric beast that challenges him on the island, but he tramples and slaughters some of the local population and their dwellings after breaking through their gate, not to mention the equivalent carnage he causes when he escapes in New York City.

The only living creature he does not treat with violence on first impulse is the character of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), which he carries off after the islanders offer her as a sacrificial “bride”. However, given that the gorilla myth that Kong represents stated that they were prone to abducting women from “higher” races, it is doubtful that Kong’s treatment of Darrow was meant to be sympathetic or endearing. At most it embodies the film’s explicitly stated theme that beauty has a way of taming and even killing the beast within men.

For all the terror that he causes, Kong is by no means the only character in the film that audiences in the 1930s would have regarded as scary. He shares his jungle island with a variety of oversized dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that surpass even him in scale. These menace both Ann Darrow when she is in Kong’s possession and the team of rescuers that pursue her during the middle act of the film. It is not only the carnivorous Tyrannosaurus rex which Kong defeats in battle that poses a threat either, for even supposed plant-eaters like the Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus are seen attacking the human characters without apparent provocation. The wanton aggression of all these animals, whether flesh- or plant-eating, reinforces the theme that the island’s jungle is a particularly dangerous and uncivilized place even if one subtracts the brutality of Kong himself from the picture.

And then there is the matter of the island’s human inhabitants. Although the island itself is said to be located off the western coast of Sumatra in Southeast Asia, the islanders are all played by African-American actors and so are depicted as having dark skin and tightly curled hair. I consider it most likely that they are meant to represent a population of Melanesian or Negrito affinity. Regardless, they too were probably intended to be objects of horror for the film’s contemporary audience when you consider how they treat the character of Ann Darrow.

In the 1930s, the archetype of “subhuman” males lusting after women from “higher races” would have been forced not only onto gorillas and other non-human primates, but onto men from darker-skinned racial groups. The racist belief that men of African descent in particular found European women more desirable than their own and so pursued them aggressively was a major source of paranoia among European-Americans (Pilgrim 2000). Even black men who so much as whistled after white women could be savagely lynched.

To audiences of European descent watching King Kong in 1933, the scene where the islanders’ chieftain (Noble Johnson) offers six of his own population’s women in exchange for Ann Darrow must have appeared as ominous foreshadowing. And once a troop of the islanders climbs onto the boat to abduct Ann Darrow, wrapping their dark-skinned and bracelet-adorned arms around her, we can imagine how these same viewers’ racial fears would have been titillated. Of course, that the islanders bang drums interpreted by the European-American visitors as ominous, dress in stereotypical tribal attire such as loincloths and face-paint, and have a tradition of sacrificing young women to Kong further plays into European perceptions of dark-skinned peoples as uncomfortably foreign, superstitious, and barbaric. As symbols of faraway savagery, they would have counted as another element of horror in King Kong.

To understand why giant gorillas, dinosaurs, and Melanesian “savages” would have all been understood as horrifying, we need to consider the cultural context that begat the film King Kong. In the 1930s, European countries still controlled large swathes of tropical regions such as Africa and southern Asia which they had conquered over the course of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries. To justify their exploitative imperial projects, Europeans exaggerated the inherent savagery of the human and animal inhabitants in these regions, saying it was the “white man’s burden” to civilize them. Africa for example was stereotyped as a “Dark Continent” populated by cannibalistic natives and monstrous wildlife. Associated with this was the perception that tropical areas of the world represented a throwback to an earlier and more “primitive” era, with the indigenous people even claimed to represent an evolutionary “missing link” between Europeans and non-human primates.

The island setting of King Kong is the perfect realization of this imperialist vision of the tropical world. The presence of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic fauna creates the impression that the island is an anachronistic relic from a bygone era, a message reinforced by the Melanesian population with their barbarous and superstitious customs. The character of Kong himself, a subhuman brute who abducts women and brutalizes everyone else in his path, is a classic example of how post-Victorian Europeans and European-Americans envisioned gorillas and other creatures of the African wilderness. It is as if all the beliefs these audiences would have held about distant tropical countries have been rolled into one place that exemplifies their supposed worst attributes.

This is the reason King Kong counts as a horror film. The perception of horror in the film would have depended on the prejudices that Europeans and European-Americans would have developed and nurtured about the tropical areas they had conquered and exploited. By portraying the targets of European imperialism as innately dangerous and uncivilized, the film would have both aroused feelings of terror in its intended audience and rationalized the imperial projects that benefited them. It was very much an experience of horror for the age of imperialism.

Works Cited

Brightwell, Eric. “Gorillasploitation — Giant Gorilla Movies.” Amoeblog. July 8, 2014. Accessed November 13, 2016. http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2014/07/eric-s-blog/gorillasploitation-giant-gorilla-movies.html.

Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Shoedsack. King Kong. RKO Pictures, 1933.

Fossey, Dian. Gorillas in the Mist. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1983.

Morton, Ray. King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2005.

Peary, Danny. Guide for the Film Fanatic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Pilgrim, David. “The Brute Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum. November 2000. Accessed November 13, 2016. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/.

Posted on

Why Tyrannosaurs Probably Didn’t Have Feathers After All

Artwork by Michael W. Skrepnick, showing a mother T. rex with its downy hatchling

I admit it, nine-year-old me would have cried at the idea of Tyrannosaurus rex, my all-time favorite dinosaur, sporting a coat of feathers like a bird.

I first encountered the above illustration in an issue of National Geographic back at that tender age. The issue had a whole article on then-recent discoveries of dinosaur fossils sporting impressions of feathers from China, with numerous model reconstructions and other artwork depicting how the animals would have looked in life. Mind you, I was already aware that some theropod (or “meat-eating”) dinosaurs were close relatives of modern-day birds, and that the “first bird” Archaeopteryx demonstrated a visible link between the two groups. What the new Chinese fossils demonstrated was that the prevalence of feathers among theropods went beyond Archaeopteryx and its immediate ancestors and covered groups once thought to be scaled like other dinosaurs, such as dromaeosaurids (“raptors” such as Velociraptor and Deinonychus), oviraptorosaurs (Oviraptor), and compsognathids (a family including, well, the tiny Compsognathus).

Seeing Velociraptor, the intimidating antagonists of Jurassic Park, portrayed as feathered like birds was already enough to ruffle my feathers (pun very much chosen with intent). But the most offensive illustration in that issue by far, in my juvenile eyes anyway, was the one suggesting that Tyrannosaurus and its cousins in the tyrannosaurid family would have possessed a feathery coat as well. It didn’t matter that the illustration contrasted a downy hatchling with its scaled adult. The very idea of my favorite dinosaur, lord of the jungle of Late Cretaceous North America, ever having the telltale body covering of a lowly, cowardly bird seemed a major downgrade. It was heretical enough to put me off the idea that any dinosaurs evolved into birds at all.

Twenty years have passed, and I have matured enough to recognize that some so-called “non-avian” dinosaurs did, indeed, have feathers, and that all of today’s birds represent an offshoot of these dinosaurs. The preponderance of evidence so far does suggest that, contra the Jurassic Park movies, that dromaeosaurids like Velociraptor would have been feathered by default, as would the flock of Gallimimus seen in the first film’s stampede scene (at least as shown by new fossils of its cousin Ornithomimus). I cannot dispute this, nor do I even mind it anymore.

My feelings about feathered tyrannosaurs, on the other hand, have come full circle. Beginning in the early 2010s, I have warmed up to the idea and was eagerly drawing full feathered coats on them between 2012 and 2013. It was after that period of my life that my skepticism of the concept returned. In the years since, I have lost any remaining love for it and, if anything, have grown even more sick of it than I ever was as a child.

This time, however, I have good reason to believe that neither Tyrannosaurus rex nor the other members of the family Tyrannosauridae ever had feathers. And not only because they look better without them.

Continue reading “Why Tyrannosaurs Probably Didn’t Have Feathers After All”
Posted on

Breakout for Home

Big Ben, one of the characters from this story

Philip J. Covington, CEO of Global Petroleum Inc., smirked when he strutted out of his limousine and laid his eyes on the new museum. It amused him how literally his contractors and architects had taken the word “museum” when designing the place. The building’s Romanesque portico of marble columns, gleaming silver from the moonlight, seemed more evocative of a prestigious old museum nested deep in his native London than a solitary edifice erected in the central Texas heartland. They had even gone so far as to decorate the premises with trimmed hedges and topiaries to reinforce the illusion of prestigious aristocracy. Or perhaps those were meant to disguise the distant landscape of prairie and pipeline tracks.

Not that Covington truly had a problem with any of it. He would rather feel at home than be reminded that he was in the rustic middle of America.

There was one feature he noticed that contradicted the structure’s predominantly Neoclassical pretensions. Poking up from behind the museum’s main body was the dazzling summit of a glass dome. Covington did not remember arranging for anything like that when he first ordered the building’s construction.

“Mr. Covington! You’re even more on time than I expected.”

Elias Marshall hurried down the museum’s front steps and offered his plump hand for a shake. Except for his weathered suntanned complexion, the Texan local appeared as a figure of glossy white, from his three-piece suit to his cowboy’s hat and boots of faux snakeskin down to the holster for his revolver. Even his hair had turned white to match his fashion sensibilities. It was all in stark contrast to his pale-skinned, dark-haired, and black-suited superior.

“That would be Sir Covington to you, Mr. Marshall,” Covington said, placing special emphasis on his English accent for the American’s hearing pleasure. “But I must say I admire what you’ve assembled together so far, at least from the outside. A bit incongruous with its surroundings, but I suppose a place like this could use a bit more, shall we say, class?”

Marshall chuckled with a slight touch of nervousness. “Trust me, sir, you haven’t seen what we’ve got in store inside.”

Covington was about to shake Marshall’s hand when a faint, prolonged moan reverberated from somewhere, followed by the apparent rattle of window panes. The noise reminded him of a whale’s song, except it eventually trailed into a rumble more like an elephant’s. At least it was a more pleasant sound than the country music his limo’s chauffeur had been playing all night.

“What the bloody blazes was that?” Covington said. “Some sort of machinery?”

“No, that’s from the big greenhouse we have behind the museum.” Marshall pointed over to the peak of the glass dome. “A little surprise we planned for you. The kids should love it way more than any of our other exhibits, for reasons that shall become obvious. May I give you a sneak peek tonight after our little tour, Sir Covington?”

Covington nodded. “Why not take me there straight away? I’ll inspect the rest later.”

Together they went through the museum, following corridor after corridor that lit up automatically with their entrance. The exhibits they passed ranged from diagrams explaining how fossilized marine organisms became petroleum over millions of years, models depicting the process of extracting, refining, and transporting the oil, and then screens and walls of text explaining how the new pipeline nearby would be far safer and more environmentally friendly than those silly tree-huggers, social justice warriors, and restless “Native American” savages would have the public believe. Of course, the language the displays used was far more politically correct, but Covington had always wished he could throw far viler terminology at those troublemakers.

The last hallway he and Marshall went down ended with a closed doorway twice as high as the rest, framed by blocks of dark stone that tapered towards the top for an almost Egyptian-looking slant, unlike the straight Greco-Roman pillars that prevailed elsewhere in the establishment. Little braziers mounted on the sides flickered holographic flames while the entablature above had bold red letters impressed into it that read, “Welcome to the Fossil Age”.

Covington snickered. “What do you have in there, Godzilla?”

“Not quite, sir. Just wait and see.”

Marshall clapped his hands, and the doors opened with a grinding sound effect playing alongside a looping track of tribal drumbeats. Out wafted a gust of humid and balmy air that carried with it the fragrance of tropical flora together with the mustier odor of decaying leaves.

They passed through the open gate onto a wooden walkway held up on stilts over the ground, with pairs of tiki torches providing genuine firelight along the railing. Overhead arced the dome of glass that Covington had seen earlier, but only upon entering its interior could he appreciate its vast and towering scale. The space it enclosed would have easily dwarfed the rest of the museum! Speakers hanging interspersed between the glass panes played the unending chorus of a primordial wilderness, with bird-like squawks and screeches punctuating the chirping of nocturnal insects.

And then there returned the echoing moan Covington had heard earlier, but louder and deeper than before. His flesh trembled all the way down to the bone.

Beyond both sides of the walkway grew a verdant savanna of ferns with scattered cycad, tree-fern, and monkey-puzzle trees. Dragonflies fluttered around little ponds fenced with horsetail reeds while flies buzzed over balls of wet rock mottled with white fluid and shreds of leaves. At least Covington hoped those were only rocks. They had more than an uncanny resemblance to bird droppings and exuded a much more potent, pungent odor.

“You sure spared no expense on the scenic authenticity, Mr. Marshall,” he muttered. “I could’ve sworn those were real dung.”

“Oh, those are real, all right.” Marshall pointed up ahead, where the path ended in a circular plaza like a cul-de-sac. “Look over there.”

Covington squinted past the railing on the walkway’s end until he caught a glimpse of a broad and scaly surface rearing up from the other side, shimmering like a wall of pebbles from the torches’ light. As he traced the contours of the form before him with his eyes, he could hear the crackling of soil beneath heavy footsteps and the rustle of leaves attached to creaking trees.

His pace slowed to a stagger until he gave into the paralysis of incredulous shock. The only muscles Covington could move were his blinking eyelids.

He could confuse the hulking behemoth for nothing else. The long and tubular neck with a tiny head, the rotund torso supported by four legs like pillars, and the even longer tail that hovered over the ground with the tip twirling like a lasso. All in all, the beast must have surpassed all but the very largest whales in mass.

Covington would have taken it for an animatronic like one would find in countless museums and theme parks around the world. But then, with a smooth fluidity too flawless for any machine, the animal craned its neck up to browse from one of the monkey-puzzle trees.

“What the bloody hell is…that?” Covington forced himself to say at last. “Is that real?”

“Every bit of flesh, blood, and bone in him is real, I tell you,” Marshall replied. “Like you said, we spared no expense. Not even when it was more expensive than the museum itself.”

“I can easily imagine why…but why? Why would you bring a bloody dinosaur, of all things, into this?”

“Why not? We deal in fossil fuels after all. Of course, as you know, most oil comes from tiny sea critters rather than dinosaurs. But if you’re going to win hearts and minds over to your new pipeline, you might as well win them over with the kind of fossil they love. Most of all the kids.”

The dinosaur turned away from its meal and lowered its head right down to where Covington and Marshall stood, examining them with little coppery eyes while sniffing them like a curious dog. Covington froze still again when the creature’s snout brushed against his suit.

“At least it’s the plant-eating kind,” he said. “What do you call them, Apatosaurus?”

“Actually, mate, this one’s a Brontosaurus excelsus. Closely related, but the paleontologists now consider them different genera again.”

It was a woman who had addressed Covington. Her khaki shorts and top hugged her tall and slender, dark brown figure while wavy black hair streamed beside her face underneath her slouch hat. She marched down the walkway up to the Brontosaurus and gave the cracked scales on its muzzle a gentle stroke of her hand as if it were a horse, murmuring soft words into its earhole.

“Sir Covington, I’d like you to meet Charlotte Elanora, a tough Aboriginal gal from down under,” Marshall said. “She led the team to capture our big attraction back in the Jurassic, and now she’s its primary caretaker.”

“His primary caretaker,” Elanora corrected him. “I named him Big Ben, after my old man. Ain’t he a handsome bloke?”

“A Brontosaurus named Big Ben…it’s alliterative, at least,” Covington said. “How can you tell his gender though?”

“Easy. You can’t see it so well in this lighting, but the males tend to have brighter purple stripes than the females.” Elanora tapped the nape of the dinosaur’s neck behind its head. “Though if we’re going to keep him penned up here, I think we ought to get him a mate soon. Wouldn’t you want that, Big Ben? A nice and pretty sheila to keep you company?”

Benny rumbled and then let out another of his moaning bellows. The volume of the call almost burst through Covington’s eardrums now that had had gotten so close to the dinosaur.

“Truth be told, I think he’s homesick,” Elanora went on. “Though I suppose he’ll be safer in captivity. You can’t see it from this side, but on his left thigh he has some scratches from an Allosaurus attack. Allosaurus, by the way, is one of the big meat-eating dinosaurs, though they’re a bit smaller and nimbler than the Cretaceous T. rex.”

“Good thing we don’t have one of those in here, then,” Covington said. “Now this is all lovely and magnificent, but don’t you think it might be, well, a bit of a challenge to keep him in this place? We’ve all seen those movies, if you know what I mean. Not to mention, the sheer cost of maintaining a beast that big…”

Marshall wrapped an arm around Covington’s shoulder and laughed. “Like I said, it’ll be the biggest draw we can throw at them. The admission tickets alone should pay for everything. And besides, the Brontosaurus is a gentle plant-eater. What could go wrong with his kind?”

Continue reading “Breakout for Home”
Posted on

Arrows of Alodia

Maia of Alodia, the protagonist of my short story “Arrows of Alodia”. By the way, Alodia was the southernmost of three Christianized kingdoms that sprung up in Sudan during the Middle Ages, after the fall of the kingdom of Kush.

Japan, 1500 AD
The walls of the castle glowed pale yellow before the face of the setting sun, with blue shingles sparkling on its stacks of curved roofs. This radiance conferred onto the structure the semblance of a tall gold crown encrusted with lapis-lazuli gems. Atop a wooded hill it sat, overlooking the fields, forests, and scattered peasants’ villages like an emperor surveying his rural domain.

A young woman hiked up the series of stone steps which zigzagged up the hill’s northern slope, cradling in her arms a yew chest. Her hooded waist-length kimono and trousers, both dull green like the trees sheltering the path, protected her both from the evening’s damp chill and from any eyes which might be spying on her. Not that the woman had noticed anyone giving her a second glance so far, but nobody in her line of work could afford to let their guard down.

She reached the summit of the hill, strolled across the short bridge over the castle’s moat, and then paused to gaze over the countryside sprawling behind. The verdant beauty of the Japanese landscape would never leave her eyes in entirety, yet years of experience had scraped away much of its original allure. For underneath its lush and tranquil veneer lay a cutthroat and lawless world of cruelty and treachery. This would be the last evening she would spend in this land. The next day, she would set sail for civilization.

Among the irregular mass of rocks which built up the castle’s base, there stood a more rectangular slab as tall and wide as a man. The woman inserted her fingers along its edge and pushed it aside as if it were a regular Japanese sliding door. Ahead ran a narrow corridor lit with paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, a small courtesy she had not expected.

Underneath the more pleasing scent of the cherry blossoms, there leaked the stink of dead flesh through the chest’s lid. The woman hugged it against her breast, with queasy nausea swelling in her stomach. Grisly as the odor was, it was only part of the price she had to pay for her upcoming escape.

Continue reading “Arrows of Alodia”

Posted on

The Elephant Joust

The gong rang and reverberated, and the gates to the arena ground open. In rode Huan Xi, Imperial Prince of Zhongguo, on his elephant Longwei. Both he and his mount glimmered with platelets of polished leather armor under the afternoon sun, with bronze blades glinting on the elephant’s tusks. Spreading a proud smile across his pale yellow-brown face, Huan Xi waved with lance in hand to the audience that filled the terraced seating to his right.

Everyone on that side of the arena waved back with cheering and hooting of his name. These men and women were all Zhongguans, Huan Xi’s subjects, come to see him joust for the prize he desired more than anything else. From the lowermost seating there watched the Empress herself, his mother, with a bright pink robe of silk and cherry blossoms in her bun of graying hair. Her eyes twinkled with both Imperial pride and maternal love, but Huan Xi noticed her wringing her hands together with nervous anticipation.

He would make her so proud. This he swore by Zhongdi, Lord of all the Heavens.

Another gong rang from atop the arena’s far end. Afterward there thundered exotic drums as an opposite pair of gates began to part. The right side of the arena fell silent, but the spectators seated along the left erupted into cheering and chanting in a very different language. These other people, dark brown-skinned with brief garments of white linen, hailed from the ancient kingdom of Khamit far to the southwest of Zhongguo. On their lowest seating was their old Pharaoh Kahotep, with his blue- and gold-striped crown and braided goatee. He flashed a smirk in Huan Xi’s direction.

The Prince of Zhongguo searched the Khamitans’ ranks for a glimpse of Berenib, the Pharaoh’s lovely young daughter. It was over her hand that the joust had been arranged, yet Huan Xi could not make her out anywhere. He could not even find her next to her father or any of his officials. From what he knew of her character, she did not seem like the type of woman who would avoid the sight of blood in the arena, but he was at a loss to explain her curious absence otherwise.

Maybe Kahotep had meant to present her only after the event, for whatever reason. Regardless, as long as Huan Xi had the memory of Berenib’s exquisite beauty in memory, he did not need to be reminded of why he fought.

Longwei the elephant raised his trunk with an anxious rumble. Huan Xi patted his brow while whispering the most soothing words he could muster. In spite of their size, elephants could be skittish animals, but the Prince had to wonder what had intimidated his steed all of a sudden.

Continue reading “The Elephant Joust”