The Oncoming Hope

Doctor Who and the Rings of Clara-khenaten

2013-04-07T10:35:00.001-07:00

I know that the latest episode of Doctor Who seems a bit slight on the surface, but like Gridlock, which had a number of thematic similarities, there are joys to found in the depths. It's been a long time since I could describe this show of having any subtlety whatsoever, but even while maintaining the usual loud tempo in the A-plot, the episode still offered little reveals about the Doctor, and more importantly, about Clara.

Despite the fact that this episode centered on the loss of a parent, there wasn't a big emotional crying scene. I've realized more and more that when the characters' histrionics overwhelm the scene, there's no room left for the audience to connect emotionally.

In just ten quiet seconds, we feel the weight of the moment when Clara's forced to give up her mother's ring. The Doctor asking her to make that sacrifice clearly plants a seed of doubt in her mind about him, and reminds us that no matter how much he walks the walk, he's not actually human.

Nor do we need a big dramatic scene to understand the significance of the fact that when asked for a physical totem of cherished memory, he can only offer his sonic screwdriver. That's even though he once brought his (assumed long dead?) granddaughter to this very place.

(And because you should see it if you haven't, the scene where the Doctor abandons Susan on Earth for Not!AdamScott is one of the loveliest moments of the classic series. Middleman did a riff on this scene, for those of you who enjoy such things).

I've heard it said on Twitter that the episode relies on the usual Doctor Who deus ex machina that is The Power of Love. For once, I think there's something far deeper going on. Clara doesn't feed the monster with love, but with the infinity of loss. It's neatly scientific, wrapped up in a human bow. People who are grieving don't tend to dwell on moments had, they think of moments missed, moments lost. Every time I miss my grandmother, for instance, I don't think about my youth spent with her, I think about how she isn't here, how she isn't sitting next to me, enjoying Doctor Who with me (and enjoy it she did).

There's an infinity of those moments, and you'd go crazy if you try to understand how enormous those missed moments are. No one can comprehend infinity. You just shut down when you go too far down the path.

Which is my long-winded way of saying, well done Who, for having an vaguely comprehensible ending for once.

OTHER STUFF:

Clara Clara Clara. SO MUCH LOVE. She's the first companion in the New Era who I'd actually want to meet, and can imagine myself befriending.

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life

2013-04-01T09:41:00.001-07:00

Imagine someone writing the novel described in Borges' Garden of Forking Paths. You lead a hundred different lives in parallel.

You're born, and then you die. You're born again, and then you die again, after ticking off a few more minutes of your lifeline. By the time you've met your hundredth death, you're old enough to understand what's about to happen. You may not always interpret the signs correctly this time, but you'll learn. Sometimes you learn when the wrong person dies. But at least you get another chance.

Our heroine, Ursula Todd, is duly plagued, which results in her taking on multiple fates, each of them tiny microcosms of the human experience: so much horror, so many delights. It's not so simple as Sliding Doors, we follow her through two wars, and many traps lie afoot. Some of her worst experiences have nothing to do with the war. Humanity's usually its own worst enemy, whether you're in bucolic England or in mid-war Germany.

These are difficult themes to maintain, and I'm still impressed at what control Atkinson held. Astonishingly, even through reset after reset, there are character through-lines that remain both consistent and heart-breaking. The lines around Ursula's life are so beautifully colored in that the reader can dive easily into each new storyline, at least once you get used to the conceit.

"Darkness falls, and so on."

But what will probably stay in my mind, once all the timey-wimey trickery fades into the distance, are visions of a ravaged London, a London so thoroughly decimated that the descriptions read like science fiction or dystopia.

She was cold. The water she was lying in was making her even colder. She needed to move. Could she move? Apparently not. How long had she been lying here? Ten minutes? Ten years? Time had ceased. Everything seemed to have ceased. Only the awful concoction of smells remained. She was in the cellar. She knew that because she could see Bubbles, still miraculously taped to a sandbag near her head. Was she going to die looking at this banality? Then banality seemed suddenly welcome as a ghastly vision appeared at her side. A terribly ghost, black eyes in a grey face and wild hair, was clawing at her. 'Have you seen my baby?' the ghost said It took Ursula a few moments to realize that this was no ghost. It was Mrs. Appleyard, her face covered in dirt and bomb dust and streaked with blood and tears. 'Have you seen my baby?' she said again.

This London remains stuck in history. The art of the time had strict rules, propagandic overtures that wouldn't bear any mention of the idea that the British were so badly beaten down during the war.

You find this struggle most baldly acknowledged in the stranges of places: Gracie Fields comedies and in Powell and Pressburger's delicious allegories, especially in Black Narcissus. Just as Deborah Kerr's nun struggles against poverty, illness, crumbling infrastructure and burning desire in the remote Himalayas, millions of Brits struggled with the same at home. But one could never admit that; the Dunkirk spirit held its sway. Only in photography could you find the reality; was photography even considered an art then, or just documentation?

Poetry and the visual arts gave way to the abstract; the human eye and the human heart were incapable, then, of processing the horror of being in constant danger of annihilation. Atkinson's choice, then, to draw out this most troubled time, to realize it in words, strikes you in the heart.

A woman wearing a mink coat had come out of the entrance to the Savoy, on the arm of a rather elegant man. The woman was laughing in a carefree way at something the man had just said but then she broke away from his arm to search in her handbag for her purse in order to drop a handful of coins into the bowl of an ex-soldier who was sitting on the pavement. The man had no legs and was perched on some kind of makeshift wooden trolley. Ursula had seen another limbless man on a similar contraption outside Marylebone station. Indeed, the more she had looked on the London streets, the more amputees she had seen.

A doorman from the hotel darted out of Savoy Court and advanced on the legless man, who quickly scooted away using his hands as oars on the pavement.

And so I found, not an answer, but at least an understanding of something that plagued me when I lived in London, wandering the streets and pondering the crazy mess of buildings that huddle up into some kind of city. When so much of the city is destroyed, why wouldn't you build it to plan for the future? Even after WWII, urbanization became apparent. Someone made the choice to rebuild so many devastated buildings as exact replicas of what they used to be, instead of acknowledging survival and moving on into the (somewhat) brighter future.

A partial explanation ties directly into the novel; you can't see into the future, and no matter what you do, you're always trapped by your past. If only we all had the opportunity to direct our own garden of forking paths.

Charlotte Armstrong and the Case of the Weird Sisters

2013-03-31T16:13:00.001-07:00

When I recovered from the relentless terror of Shirley Jackson's House on Haunted Hill, I searched for another novel that flies out of the gate like a rocket-powered robin, whispering horrors in my ear with the loveliest of voices.

A re-release of Charlotte Armstrong's Case of the Weird Sisters fell into my lap, and more than made the grade. Armstrong maintains a a fierce commitment to suspense and character, even as certain aspects of the narrative fall flat.

Alice Brennan trips lightly through a poorly thought-out engagement into the house of the titular weird sisters, each nursing a debilitating handicap and a desperation for cash.

As I read it, 3 other series came to mind: Hercule Poirot, contemporary Doctor Who and a whole body of self-referential film noir.

These may sound unrelated. They're not.

Each case relies upon an interloper who not only happens upon the mystery, but also ingratiates him (let's face it, usually him) self with the primary players in the case.

I love The Case of the Weird Sisters unabashedly, even though it lays bare some of the most problematic aspects of the type of storytelling I describe. Doctor Who, despite being a science-fiction yarn, may represent this storytelling best: it relies upon the viewer relating to the earthbound narrator, who controls the story until the Doc appears. At which point, the Doctor takes over all agency, and our earthbound audience stand-in becomes nothing more than an observer.

::experiences sudden worry that the Charlotte Armstrong reading audience MAY NOT crossover to the Doctor Who audience, but c'est la vie::

Armstrong belies this; Alice is the lead, through and through. In fact, you can practically sense editorial medding; the tale's too feminine somehow, starting and ending with her love life, so we have to introduce MacDougal Duff as the lead, even though he leaves five pages in, only to reappear at the 27% mark.

That's a sizable chunk of the novel, ample time to forget that Duff even exists. And when he commandeers the narrative, our emotional hook becomes less strong. He enters the scene without any real connection to the characters (his knowing Alice is a silly coincidence at best) and absolutely no stake in how events turn out - he can always just leave.

This sort of thing can be written off as a necessary evil in a weekly tv show, but in a self-contained novel, it's a curious choice, and one that robs the narrative of urgency. We want this to be about Alice. The eerieness of the House of the Weird Sisters perfectly reflects the cobwebs in her own mind. As she works to sweep them away, we want to be with her, not with the interloper.

All this notwithstanding, the novel was a great read, and I'd recommend it to anyone. Despite the weirdness of Duff's interruption, he's as entertaining as any of the other characters, and that's what saves the novel. Armstrong's greatest strength is crafting the atmosphere, and I have to say, I was sorry to leave.

On the Veronica Mars Kickstarter

2013-03-19T20:39:00.001-07:00

Duty dictates that The Oncoming Hope writes of Veronica Mars. For before The Oncoming Hope adopted a whole range of Doctor Who related aliases (aliasi?), all the internet handles (and the Oncoming fashions) were based on Veronica Mars (and as fans know, you can never just call her Veronica).

I actually can't believe I get to write about this show again. I discovered both blogging and fandom through it, and even though we obsessives eventually went our separate ways, we still run into each other in the darkest corners of the internet...

...or so it seemed.

For we were the few who watched the show when it aired.

But we do not begrudge those who found it after season 1, on the recommendation of one thriller writer whose name rhymes with Freven Ding.

We do not begrudge the Whedon-ites who found the show after prominent guest appearances by Willow, Cordelia, and Numfar himself.

We don't even begrudge the sorority girls who found the show after the CW cross-promoted it with guest appearances by Kristen Cavalleri (like...who?) and various other members of America's Forgotten Top Models.

But we do begrudge this:

Cause here's the thing about Veronica Mars. It was genuinely niche, a show for the geeks, from a time before geeks controlled the pursestrings. Marvel hadn't yet assumed its disturbing stronghold on Hollywood and geek culture, Doctor Who was still that weird show on PBS with tinfoil aliens and styrofoam sets, and Star Trek wasn't even a lens flare in JJ Abrams' eye. So being the first to watch it is meaningless; there's never been any kind of mainstream push behind it.

Few watched Veronica Mars when it aired, but we desperately wanted all our friends to watch it. Even TWOP couldn't hide its unabashed glee (and this was when TWOP gave positive reviews to NO ONE (before it was bought out)) at this weird little show that was technically perfect and wonderfully plotted (read the season 1 recaps if you think I'm kidding; "glowing" barely scratches the surface).

So when I think about this Kickstarter, I don't think about it as a means for the WB to test out new production models, I don't think of it as surrendering some private nerddom to the mainstream, I think of it as what it is; a bunch of super fans had the chance to fund something they love. This beloved thing was never going to get any mainstream or institutional support. This is not Firefly, which had twice the ratings of VM when it aired, and already had its shot at a movie.

I think of this as a paean to what the internet used to be. When fandom wasn't manufactured, when it depended on a small group of people desperate to love and to promote the thing they loved. They didn't need to own it, they didn't need to feel like it was their own, they just felt that it was special enough to be shared.

And so it is. Every one of my close friends from high school and college eventually caught up to it, on the strength of my love for it. They love it too, and I never feel like their love is worth any less than mine; I just feel grateful that they gave it a chance.

This Kickstarter, no matter the implications, will connect more people with a show that they're likely to love. And for that, I'm grateful. And for the first time, I opened my wallet.

An Early Human Rights Editorial

2013-02-10T06:54:00.001-08:00

The United States Democratic Review must be one of the strangest publications in our nation's brief history. A strong proponent of Jacksonian democracy (and the ugliest aspects of Jacksonian democracy - annexation and manifest destiny), it also published work by a number of humanist and transcendental thinkers. Despite an editorial position that constitutes the worst of American jingoism, brilliant (and prescient) pieces, like the one below, snuck in.

I've referred to the original periodical, and cannot find an attribution. The logical assumption, then, would be that the editor wrote it, but its strong support of human rights, and the rights of a "lesser species", suggests otherwise. The Sepoy rebellion is a classic case of the victor writing the history - as far as the British Imperialists were concerned, it never happened. But to everyone else, the act was plain - one man killed a missionary, and the British army slaughtered 30,000 Indians and called it "civilized".

You don't need to look far to see recent incidents that mirror this. Anyway, read it and play along in the comments.

Abuses of Victory - British Morals in India (Dec. 1858, in the United States Democratic Review)

In exploring the annals of history, on almost every page is seen a record of the triumphs of one nation over another nation - of one race over another race. If this record is prepared by the victorious party, it is filled with exaggerations of the magnitude of its triumphs; teems with eulogy of the victors, and with detractions from the vanquished. If, on the contrary, the record emanates from the defeated party, a very different picture is drawn; then the pencil of the artist paints the character of the victors in deep crimson, and the pen of the historian draws black lines around their memory. In this manner successful brutality and force may be placed before the world in the light of heroism and patriotic achievement - sometimes even robed in the mantle of Christianity - while an unsuccessful effort to maintain the right, and defend the innocent, is stigmatized as barbarous and infamous; - and this is history. Prejudices as deep as these, it is feared, have controlled English writers in recording the events consequent upon the war of their country with India.

The history of that war, while it does but simple justice to the bravery of Englishmen, is a sealed book to the impartial truth of what has really been enacted in that distant country by British officers and soldiers. An occasional account of the doings of the English army in India reaches us through other sources than their own, and a recital of their deeds chlills the blood of the most cruel, as did the statements of the butchery by the infuriated Bengal Sepoys of foreigners who were in India at the commencement of hostilities.

The halo of glory that should have decked the brows of the heroic Havelock, Lawrence, Neill, and Nicholson, was dimmed by the blood of a hundred thousand defenceless natives in the subsequent conquests and brutalities by the British army. The wrath and indignation of the civilized world were justly aroused when the barbarous Sepoys waded through seas of Christian blood to secure the heads of two or three missionaries whom they regarded as their enemies; but no word of reproach is heard against the British soldiery when they form a catacomb of the corpses of thirty thousand Sepoys, whom they slaughtered in cold blood, for no other cause than that one of their number was guilty of a barbarous murder; and he had been delivered to the English for execution when demanded, but this could not appease their thirst for revenge.

Were the true history of this devastating war written, many barbarous exhibitions of this kind would be recorded to the shame of British victories in India. After conquering their degraded and imbecile foes, they assume or acquire the instincts of the blood-hound, and trail them wherever they flee, until the native soil of India is saturated with innocent blood - and this brutality the proud nation of Britain calls "civilized warfare. To use their own language, they

"Through SOFT degrees
Subdued them to the peaceful and the GOOD."

If the British historian who attempts to illustrate the humanizing and christianizing influence of the war in India, by the lines just quoted, was a mere satirist endeavoring to create in the public mind the most sickening disgust for the inhumanity and heartlessness practised by the conquerors of India, he coul d not find two lines better adapted to his purpose. "Through soft degrees" indeed - through the cannon, sword, rifle and the bayonet - they "subdued them to the peaceful and the good!"' Such hypocritical cant was never before employed by any writer claiming respectability, in discussing a subject of such solemn importance as that attached to the extinction of a nation, who, although not far advanced in civilization, were enjoying a large share of independence and contentment, until invaded by British rapacity, and by unscrupulous adventurers, who first sought their wealth, afterwards their liberty, and finally, their lives.

The writer referred to, and who penned the lines above extracted in eulogy of the British administration in India, admits that the nations, at least those inhabiting the country of the Five Rivers, were in the enjoyment, at an early period of their history, of a system of government well adapted to promote their interests as an independent people. He says, "Its form of government was a federation of chieftains, each independent of others, who met together at intervals to provide for their common safety, and furnish each his armed contingent for the public service." Their motto was Wa Gooroojee ha Kalsa - Victory to the state of Gooroo. In their religion's creed they taught that all men were equal in the sight of God - that distinctions of caste were not a principle of faith - that differences of religion did not debar men from a common charity. Socially, they occupied a fair position,--industry and frugality were visible everywhere among them. This, in brief, seemed to be the condition of the people of India previous to being oppressed by taxes, and despoiled of their lands and their liberty by the conquering army of England, urged on by a ministry as false to its own nation as it was heartless and cruel to the inhabitants of India.

But it is not our present purpose to enter into a discussion of the merits of this war, nor would we have referred to it at this time, except for the fact that the latest advices from India seem to present a condition of moral degeneracy among the people, growing out of British influence and conquest, which is unparalleled in infamy in the the most barbarous ages.

H.G. Wells on Teddy Roosevelt on The Time Machine

2013-01-24T05:56:00.001-08:00

Why people don't talk about Teddy Roosevelt more saddens me. His biography is full of baffling and wonderful surprises (such as this incredible tale of reading and reviewing Anna Karenina while chasing bandits down a frozen river in the Dakotas).

For example, H.G. Wells (quoted from Edmund Morris's essay on Teddy in This Living Hand: And Other Essays):

He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of a pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must culminate and pass, he could not deny that possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so. He mentioned my Time Machine...

He became gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying the pessimism of that book as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden movements of his he knelt forward in a garden chair -- we were standing, before our parting, beneath the colonnade -- and addressed me very earnestly over the back, clutching it and then thrusting out his familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.

"`Suppose, after all,' he said slowly, `that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. THAT DOESN'T MATTER NOW. The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's worth it, even so.' . . .

"I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying, `The effort -- the effort's worth it,' and see the gesture of his clenched hand and the -- how can I describe it? - - the friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind at that, as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence, amidst complexities and confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting -- and his setting is the White House with a background of all of America.

I always enjoy how nearly every account of meeting Teddy Roosevelt is narrated in the style of a seduction; he's a man who leaves a powerful impression on all he sees.

And besides, can you think of another President who would not only read but have thoughts about contemporary science fiction?

Oscarbait 2012: Silver Linings Playbook

2013-01-23T06:07:00.001-08:00

Silver Linings Playbook earns its ending in a way few movies do, let alone recent ones. The film concentrates on something that's usually treated as a simple waypoint in other movie journeys: finding a way to peek your head out from behind the Sisyphean boulder, even when all the signs suggest you should continue to hide. The boulder causes continuous crushing pain, but at least it's pain you're familiar with.

And speaking of crushing pain, do not be mistaken; the first 30 minutes of the movie are profoundly uncomfortable. You will be squirming in your chair, especially when "the incident" is revealed, the moment that lands Patrick Solitano Jr. in the mental hospital.

Patrick (and who knew there was an actor hiding inside Bradley Cooper?) gets out of mental hospital, only to land in a more abstract prison. He suffers from dreams he can't let go, he's oppressed by his parents, he's written off so often that when anyone shows him kindness, he can't even recognize it (and notice that these moments are when he's most explosive).

When he meets Jennifer Lawrence's Tiffany, the real fireworks happen (and not the good kind). They need each other's help, but it's dark and desperate - Pat can't see beyond his own need to reconnect with his estranged wife, and Tiffany never loses sight of her own needs for even a second (take THAT manic pixie dream girl meme). She's not gonna put up with his blindsided bullshit, and if that's the side of himself he brings to work, she doesn't hesitate to manipulate him outright.

It's a complex situation with no easy solutions, and would have been a disaster without Jennifer Lawrence's nuanced performance. Also stay tuned for Robert De Niro, who actually acts for the first time in thirty years (and he's just as terrific as you remember him being).

Mental illness is often treated as a plague upon other people - an affliction for the weak or the mutated or the poorly raised. But when it comes down to it, who hasn't felt the atmosphere become so tight, so oppressive, that you feel like space is literally closing in? When you can't see anything inside your head, let alone outside of it? We write those moments off, "I was stressed," "I haven't gotten enough sleep lately," but as soon as a doctor puts a name to someone else's bad moment, we cease to treat it as a natural part of human experience, but as an unforgivable failing.

At the end of the day, you still have to live, you still have to function. But that isn't easy, and Silver Linings Playbook doesn't pretend it is. Go see it. It deserves all it's Oscar noms (and if there's a God in the academy, it will win Best Picture).

Poem(s) for the New Year: DH Lawrence's New Year's Tryst

2012-12-31T11:35:00.001-08:00

D.H. Lawrence, now mostly remembered for Lady Chatterley's Lover and the censorship trial that followed, also had a stellar career in poetry (which many regard as superior to any of his novels). They possess an animal vibrance that stands in sharp contrast to his more cerebral contempories (T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was published in the same year, 1917).

One can easily imagine that the narrator of the two poems below would not only dare to eat a peach, he would eat it off his lover's body and spit it in the face of his enemies. Kick off your new year with a little bit of passion. Enjoy!

"New Year's Eve" by D.H. Lawrence

There are only two things now,
The great black night scooped out
And this fire-glow.

This fire-glow, the core,
And we the two ripe pips
That are held in store.

Listen, the darkness rings
As it circulates round our fire.
Take off your things.

Your shoulders, your bruised throat!
Your breasts, your nakedness!
This fiery coat!

As the darkness flickers and dips,
As the firelight falls and leaps
From your feet to your lips!

"New Year's Night" by D.H. Lawrence

Now you are mine, to-night at last I say it;
You’re a dove I have bought for sacrifice,
And to-night I slay it.

Here in my arms my naked sacrifice!
Death, do you hear, in my arms I am bringing
My offering, bought at great price.

She’s a silvery dove worth more than all I’ve got.
Now I offer her up to the ancient, inexorable God,
Who knows me not.

Look, she’s a wonderful dove, without blemish or spot!
I sacrifice all in her, my last of the world,
Pride, strength, all the lot.

All, all on the altar! And death swooping down
Like a falcon. ’Tis God has taken the victim;
I have won my renown.

Oscarbait 2012: Les Miserables

2012-12-27T20:21:00.001-08:00

Every review I've read of Les Miserables compares it to the musical that birthed it, which feels slightly like comparing Texas to Louisiana without any mention of the rest of the United States, let alone the world. So I'm gonna be the nerd who talks about the book, which only seems fair since, at the end of the day, the movie is a translation to a new medium, just as the musical was a translation from a novel, which in turn was translated and mistranslated from the original French.

What we're seeing on screen, ultimately, is the videotape of the videotape of the videotape. They've taken the original text and carved it up into strangely shaped pieces, excising character and context and leaving in the glossy bits. This approach worked fine for Mamma Mia (disagree in the comments) because at least Mamma Mia was a fun romp. Oscarbait Les Miserables is a series of soul-destroying set-pieces grounded in not even an iota of human agency.

It finds a humanity with its side characters (Thenardiers, Enjolras, many other nameless revolutionaries) that it never matches with the leads. There goes Anne Hathaway's snotty nostril, there goes the ever-pinkening bags under Hugh Jackman's eyes, and Cosette? Oh Cosette. I never knew you (though I knew you so well in the novel).

What frustrates me most is how little this film paid attention to the prime rule of film - economy in storytelling. Now, economy doesn't simply mean cutting out portions of the text, it means that you boil the story down to the essentials.

Character Slaughter

At the end of the film, here's what I'd have thought of the characters if I hadn't read the novel:

1. Jean Valjean is a Panglossian do-gooder whose relentless commitment to "morality" has no foundation in reality (which couldn't be further from his character in the novel, who's deeply conflicted at all turns. If you remember, when Jean Valjean goes to the battlements, he's undecided whether to save Marius or to kill him).

2. Marius is the shallowest romantic on the planet (this hurts, because Novel Marius was my first great love, the literary reflection of my idealistic/suffering 12-year old self). Seriously, what a wet wanker is FilmMusical!Marius.

3. Cosette? WHAT COSETTE? All I see is an OBJECT who is barely even half of a person (In the novel, she gets her own book for a reason. She's the optimistic striver who is tired of being an object, and makes choices. CHOICES). This hurts even more because Amanda Seyfried sounded TERRIFIC. Couldn't you give her a role, you guys?

Les Miserables as a Film

There's plenty of commentary elsewhere on Les Miserables filmic failures (oh those closeups. What really burns me is that Tom Hooper actually had multiple cameras on each actor, AND STILL CHOSE THESE DAMNED CLOSEUPS. Like, "Guys, forget the plot. What we really need now is an establishing shot of Eddie Redmayne's nasal freckles.").

Guys, this burns me to say. I really looked forward to the movie, and am sad that it isn't something I can rewatch over and over. But quite frankly, by the time we hit Valjean's seventh song, I was ready for him to die, and die swiftly (and don't get me started on Russell Crowe's "singing").

I've seen the musical, and I don't remember it being such an poorly thought out adaptation of the novel. But perhaps this is a reflection of the rule of Chicago - you can't just film the damn stage musical, you have to alter it to fit the new medium.

Oncoming Hope out. Play nicely in the comments.

Charles Dickens' Christmas Drinks

2012-12-24T14:50:00.001-08:00

This Christmas, we wanted to add some literary spice to your drinking.

Part of what made Dickens's work come so vividly to life was his attention to small details in small lives. This Christmas, you too can drink like Scrooge and Cratchit.

1. "Charles Dickens's Own Punch"

The man himself wrote the instructions for his eponymous punch in an 1847 letter to one "Mrs. F." (aka Amelia Austin Filloneau):

Peel into a very common basin (which may be broken in case of accident, without damage to the owner's peace or pocket) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin and with as little as possible of the white coating between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a double handful of lump sugar (good measure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass of good old brandy; if it be not a large claret glass, say two.

Set this on fire, by filling a warm silver spoon with the spirit, lighting the contents at a wax taper, and pouring them gently in. Let it burn three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to time. Then extinguish it by covering the basin with a tray, which will immediately put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boiling water. Stir the whole well, cover it up for five minutes, and stir again.

This would be the punch that young David Copperfield offers Mr. Micawber:

“But punch, my dear Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, tasting it, “like time and tide, waits for no man. Ah! it is at the present moment in high flavour.” (Chapter XXVIII - Mr. Micawber's Gauntlet)

2. "Smoking Bishop"

"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!" (A Christmas Carol)

Smoking bishop was not actually a Dickensian creation. It was a popular tavern drink, which Dr. Johnson defines as "a cant word for a mixture of wine, oranges and sugar." I'd give you the recipe but there's a variety on the web, from Jonathan Swift to Dickens' own father.

3. "Negus"

"Mr. Feeder, after imbibing several custard cups of negus, began to enjoy himself." (Dombey and Son)

Negus might be found all over English literature (Jane Eyre drinks it when she heads to Thornfield Hall, it features at a Mansfield Park party, and it's ALL OVER Dickens).

But the definitive version comes from Mrs. Beeton herself, who describes it as "a beverage usually drunk at children's parties." If that were the case today, I imagine children's parties would look a hell of a lot like Buster Bluth on grape juice:

Let's just say, the drink's not exactly virgin. Per Mrs. Beeton:

INGREDIENTS: To every pint of port wine, allow 1 quart of boiling water, ¼ lb of sugar, 1 lemon and grated nutmeg to taste.

DIRECTIONS: Put the wine into a jug, rub some lumps of sugar (equal to ¼ lb) on the lemon rind until all the yellow part of the skin is absorbed, then squeeze the juice and strain it. Add the sugar and lemon-juice to the port wine with the grated nutmeg; pour over it the boiling water, cover the jug, and, when the beverage has cooled a little, it will be fit for use.

Enjoy your Dickensian drinks, and a happy holiday to all!

Music Video of the Day: Free Winona!

2012-12-18T09:10:00.001-08:00

The song may be balls, but watching Craig Roberts perv out over a deanimated Winona Roberts is more than a little mesmerizing.

In The Killers' "Here With Me," Winona Ryder's actress character slides in and out of doll-hood, a prisoner of one young man's Pygmalion-esque fantasy. You may have seen Craig Robert's remarkable performance in Submarine (if not, get thee to your Netflix queue), as an overeducated teenager in 1970s Wales.

If only the song were half as interesting. Watch it anyway:

The Worst Movie Review Ever, or, Fire This Reporter Now

2012-12-16T09:00:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, the once venerable Guardian published an execrable pile of garbage entitled "Will America be able to stomach the Les Misérables film", by a hack named Hannah Betts (a list of her credits include other such useful commentary as "Why I'm happy to wear fur," and "Feminism and flirtation are by no means unlikely bedfellows").

In a piece that even 13 year old bloggers would be ashamed to write, Betts tags her piece: "The new Les Mis film plays down the bromance and plays up the pox, boils and bad European teeth."

God forbid a socio-realist novel about French poverty attempt to look somewhat authentic!

But it gets worse:

I'm not sure how it's going to play in the US, though. For a start, the bromance is subdued for a nation that brought us Top Gun's bros riding bros' tails.

Moreover, the various poxes, STDs, boils and not just British but also French teeth are likely to inspire hysteria in the neurotically sanitised US of A. And this before the male leads spend several scenes literally covered in shit. Still, it will serve to confirm everything Yanks feel about contemporary Europe.

Has Ms. Betts been lying in a coma since 1984? Are there no movies between Top Gun and Les Miserables? And who the hell think there's a bromance between Javert and Valjean?

Finally, what does this film have to do with what Yanks may or may not feel about contemporary Europe? The only thing this article serves to confirm is that Hannah Betts should be banned from the printed word. The Guardian should be ashamed of itself for allowing such tripe to bear its name.

As a side note, the Guardian appears to have some sort of vendetta against Les Miserables, running a "trailer review" that perfectly complements Ms. Betts in wretchedness and sour grapes. It's not even worth quoting, given that Stuart Heritage appears to never have heard of the book, the musical or Victor Hugo before being paid, somehow, to write a bit of unfunny nonsense.

Videogame Company Fights the Diversity Fight

2012-12-09T07:27:00.001-08:00

Life-affirming pleasures often come from the strangest places: in this case, Gaslamp Games' blog on a new project based on the Victorian era:

We feel it’s important to have people of all colours in the game, basically. I’m not going to get into the exceedingly grim history of 19th century colonialism here, but I assure you we’ve had a lot of internal discussions about how we can possibly approach making a game vaguely based on the Victorian era without being ridiculously offensive.

I've written elsewhere about how writers seem to choose to set their work in certain eras because they want to pretend there was a world before integration, where white men could be white men and society celebrated even their worst excesses. But as David Baumgart points out, that world NEVER EXISTED. It's heartening to hear Gaslamp engage with the issue, even though I have no doubt that the outcomes won't be perfect.

I've only recently began to engage with the politics of the video game world. To tell the truth, until I played Half Life 2, I had no idea there was a place for lead characters who aren't white male jocks. I recall years of playing Goldeneye as Natalya, the only character in any video game who felt in any way relevant to me (and she's still white, so really not that relevant), given that she looked like an actual scientist and not, let's say, Lara Croft (or Mileena/Kitana, or Chun Li, etc).

Happily, this ignorance allowed me to enjoy years of games like Zelda 64, which are almost completely intolerable when looked at through any kind of feminist lens (look at all the women who exist only to coo at Link or be rescued from their fates!).

But I'm glad to see a new world where developers are actually thinking through how world-building impacts audiences who play their games. Would you really want to spend 40-60 hours in a world where no one looks like you? Why would you spend that kind of time in a world that explicitly gives zero thought to you? In this day and age, those are safe spaces for the writers to exercise their own privilege, where they don't have to engage with messy issues like gender and race.

The SNL Sketch that Ate Homeland

2012-11-28T21:04:00.001-08:00

I've never taken the time to write about a Saturday Night Live sketch. Commenting about parody seems like an exercise in preposterous meta-analysis. But reader, I cannot lie. SNL's Homeland spoof has pretty much ruined the show for me.

It's possible that the sketch just happened to coincide with a downturn in the show's believability and quality, but with every passing episode, the parody forces me to question whether the show was ever that good.

Few would ever have described the show as a soap opera, but as the sketch perfectly conveyed, maybe that's what Homeland is, and if not, it's certainly heading that direction, as it spends more and more time on Brody and Carrie's "romance" ("It's ok! It doesn't have to make sense! She's bipolar"). As a soap opera, it utterly fails, covering up its inability to craft convincing relationships in cloaks and daggers.

In season one, the relationship between Brody and Carrie made a most peculiar sense, as it was entirely premised on discovery. But now there's at least one scene a week which conveys how strongly Carrie wants Brody to leave his family, of how she's willing to compromise missions to save him, of how her love saves him from the edge (lately, we're getting all three of these in every episode).

This has the double effect of reducing the stakes of the ongoing terror plot (it's ok! Love will save us all!) and of infantilizing the moral questions that plague Brody.

***SPOILER FOR LATEST EPISODE***

I'm especially concerned after the twist reveal that Estes ordered Quinn to murder Brody after they stopped the terror plot. The preview indicated that Saul would resolve the issue with thoughtful machinations, but I predict a mess of hysteria and chin-quivering.

If Homeland dials up the emotions to 11 in every single episode, it risks distracting the viewer from what actually made it interesting - how circumstances warp our ideas of morality, and how that mutation affects not just our own lives, but the lives of those around us.

Skyfall's Troubling Gender Politics

2012-11-25T08:32:00.001-08:00

There's no way to discuss this without talking about the ending. In other words, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

Let me start by saying that I loved Skyfall. I can comfortably state that it's one of the top two Bond films (I'm unable to declare it better than Goldeneye without seeing that old favorite again). Skyfall finds the perfect balance between acknowledging the tropes that make Bond such a treasured film commodity and acknowledging their quaintness.

But the problem, as the film so ably points out, is that Bond (and the whole of MI6) can't be judged by its activity in the past, but must be judged by the needs of the present. As a result, it becomes impossible to ignore that Skyfall gives us the most regressive gender politics since the Sean Connery era.

Two female characters are bedded and disposed of (quite literally in one case) with zero fanfare or sentiment. One is LITERALLY TOLD TO SHUT UP by her male colleague during a court proceeding. Meanwhile, in series regular territory, we're back to having a posh toff male heading up MI6, while our clever and highly competent field agent suddenly reveals her life's aspiration to be "sexy secretary". That's zero for five, Skyfall.

Let's start with Eve, who inspired this post. She spends the entire film being punished for a small mistake she makes under M's orders, while Bond goes around screwing up so badly that he can't even pass the physical fitness exam. Even worse, despite saving Bond's (and everyone's) lives twice in the interim, she somehow decides that she's not competent to be a field agent, simply based on a throwaway comment from Bond. The kiss of death? It turns out that she not only decides to be a secretary, she's actually gonna be that secretary (you remember the one. In fifty years of Bond films, she's notable for alternating "sexy" and "nagging" and "why don't you ever return my calls?".

To be honest, if she started the film as a secretary who went out into the field and then decided she wanted to stay behind the desk, I might have hand-waved it. But to invite the audience to smile knowingly as a capable agent surrenders her power to a man who was once her equal palls.

And why the hell did she end up shaving Bond? Is she his wife? Fail.

The head of the government inquiry may have been a touch long-winded, but her points were neither hysterical nor invalid. And as any student of the British government knows, long-windedness is not an affectation, but an expectation. Mallory's flippant shutdown of her right to speak (she's the fucking head of the inquiry!) is both against the way government inquiries work, and just flat offensive. And also, the audience is supposed to laugh. Women talking too much! Hilarious!

The whole Séverine subplot was incredibly bizarre. Bond finds her both traumatized and full of fear from being sold first into sex slavery and then to Silva, and nonetheless chooses to have her by sneaking up on her in the shower. Of course, James Bond is basically male privilege made flesh, but come on dude, she's TERRIFIED. She doesn't want your dick. Also, if he was so desperately taken with her, one would think he'd have slightly more of a reaction to her death-by-dick-measuring-contest. But la-di-da.

M comes closest to success, but we've spent enough time with her to know her pretty well (remember her fantastic introduction in Goldeneye?) Nonetheless, she dies pretty stupidly. She has no facility with a gun, knows it, but still sits out as a target, despite a wonderful escape route? Sure, she set off some exploding chandeliers, but what was the plan here? She's the head of the MI6, not some domestic terrorist. So we not only get Mallory accusing her of incompetence, she proves him right. M, who never makes a false step, makes a series of them in Skyfall. So she dies, freeing Bond of the only female who can stand up to him in every regard.

After the women are handily put in their places, Skyfall leaves us with the image of Bond and Mallory talking shop, drinking whisky and smirking about a job terribly done (guys, the head of MI6 is dead! I don't know how you define a job gone horribly wrong, but I am PRETTY SURE THAT'S ONE OF THEM). Mallory failed to track Silva despite Q's technical wizardry, and he still ends up boss. All the women end up dead or demoted, and the men get promoted.

I haven't even discussed the queerification of Silva ("Sure, he's killed a lot of people and blown up buildings, but what's really horrifying is that he might be homosexual!"), but that may be a topic for another day.

So long and thanks in advance for your polite, well-reasoned comments.

Filling the Gaps: Black Narcissus

2012-11-23T12:13:00.001-08:00

I didn't set out to watch a "Black" film on Black Friday, (nor do I wish to pretend that "Black Friday" deserves codification as anything other than a commercial black hole). An interview with Martin Scorsese, who described a certain moment in the film as the one that forced him to become a filmmaker, led me to pluck Black Narcissus from the quicksand of my Netflix queue.

Like me, dear reader, you may have the wrong impression of the film (and the Netflix description certainly doesn't help, with its vague intimations of a crisis of faith in exotic lands, tagging the film in the "faith and spirituality" bucket).

Black Narcissus has elements of horror, romance, and the subtly erotic (the horror scenes are perhaps the most unexpected, and the most beautiful). It's more in the vein of In The Mood for Love than of the "stiff upper-lip" films that transfixed post-war Britain. Sex and desire are ever-present, even through our leads spend most of the film wearing nun habits.

Five nuns, led by Deborah Kerr's Sister Clodagh, move to a remote palace in the Himalayas, kindly lent by an Indian general in exchange for providing schools and medical services to the local children. The sisters are forced to rely on Major Dean, a Brit who know his way about the locals. Needless to say, sparks fly in many directions.

Clodagh's studied restraint sits against the animal attraction between the Indian prince and Kanchi, a lower-class girl rejected by her family for being too open in her many affections. Rather than suggesting that this is some native savagery, Sister Clodagh comes to envy their youthful impetuousness, troubled by regrets of her own.

Now, despite being set in the remote hills of the Himalayas, Black Narcissus was fully filmed in Britain, at the Pinewood Studios. Which perhaps accounts for the one jarring weakness in the film.

Despite carefully researching the architecture, the climate and the foliage of its remote setting, the powers-that-be still chose to brownface the female Indian lead, Kanchi.

In an incredible scene, we see Simmons do traditional Indian-style dancing, and to her credit, she's very good at it. But why not hire an Indian actress trained in classical dance? Which, as anyone who's seen even a single Indian movie knows, is literally every Indian actress (I could explain the reasons for intersection of dance and theatre in both classical and modern Indian culture, but I'll spare you).

It's even more jarring when you consider how carefully the film deals with "otherness". Certainly our good nuns believe they're bringing enlightenment to the savages, but Powell and Pressburger make no such judgment. In fact, with one line from our extremely handsome male lead (WWJD), the filmmakers reveal the inherent silliness of such beliefs, that if bringing the "light" means turning a man against his own family, it cannot possibly be more righteous.

(Clodagh and her sisters do come to recognize this, and certainly this contributes to their turmoil. If the motives of the Holy Order could be so wrong about one thing, why can't they be wrong about others, especially the right of a woman to be a woman?)

Basically, the filmmakers are saying that being one of the darkies is in fact a perfectly acceptable (even beautiful) human condition, unless of course you're in a mainstream movie. In which case, bust out the brown foundation and raven-colored hair dye.

Powell and Pressburger's film is well regarded as one of the first masterpieces of technicolor filmmaking, and I'd go so far to say that it's still one of the most beautiful films in existence.

Despite its one great failing, Black Narcissus still stands up as a great study of what makes us human, even under the most stringent rules in the most trying of circumstances. Go watch it, then come back and play in the comments.

Tana French's "Faithful Place", Or, Murder Goes Very Very Irish

2012-11-20T06:09:00.001-08:00

Having purchased it years ago, I'm embarrassed to admit that I've only just got to Tana French's wonderful Faithful Place, a magnificently propulsive murder mystery set in the forgotten spaces of a swiftly gentrifying Dublin.

In Nick Hornby's slightly hysterical call for a quota on "literature about literature" in The Polyphonic Spree, he elucidates why novels like Faithful Place are so impressive:

"Writing exclusively about highly articulate people...Well, isn't it cheating a little? McEwan's hero, Henry Perowne, the father and son-in-law of the poets, is a neurosurgeon, and his wife is a corporate lawyer; like many highly educated middle-class people, they have access to and a facility with language, a facility that enables them to speak very directly and lucidly about their lives (Perowne is "an habitual observer of his own moods"), and there's a sense in which McEwan is wasted on them. They don't need his help. What I've always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren't themselves smart, or at least don't necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states....It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things."

So here we find ourselves, with Frank Mackey, back in Faithful Place, where working class" still counts as mere aspiration. Faithful Place has a very particular geography, all secret paths and abandoned buildings and dangerous cellars. And like most communities within communities, it has its own set of rules, blunt and simple:

"No matter how skint you are, if you go to the pub then you stand your round; if your mate gets into a fight, you stick around to drag him off as soon as you see blood ... even if you're an anarchist punk rocker this month, you go to Mass on Sunday; and no matter what, you never, ever squeal on anyone."

In a street of bruisers, its all too easy to let the characters go undefined, to have them inhabit archetypes of thugs, thieves and scoundrels that readers are all too familiar with. But that's where French's easy facility with language comes in. She takes us on a tour of Faithful Place and introduces us to Mackey's estranged family members one by one, his abandoned friendships, the very conversations that polluted the air during his ill-fated romance with Rosie Daly.

The mystery of who kills Rosie Daly certainly has its own interest, but the characters really shine here. Faithful Place is also very funny:

"My parents didn't like people with Notions; the Dalys didn't like unemployed alcoholic wasters."

I know I'm late to the party here, but if you somehow missed Faithful Place over the past couple of years, I highly recommend picking it up.

Keep Brooklyn Weird: Fulton's Rather Mad Hatter

2012-11-15T17:59:00.001-08:00

In a space that now houses Gran Electrica, Dumbo's foray into fine Mexican food, there once lived a haberdashery with a rather bizarre marketing strategy. While we can all thank Lewis Carroll for introducing us to the effects of mercury on lonely haberdashers (twinkle...twinkle...little...bat...), the reality of this particular mad hatter seems a trifle darker.

Can you explain how 2 chickens fighting over a frog could possibly convince the New York public to purchase new hats? (please invent your own captions in the comments)

And to think that you'd receive a free copy of this non sequitur just for gracing Turnbull's house of mercury poisoning? Keep on, dear reader, for the chicken-fight may be the most sensical of Mr. Turnbull's ads.

"Turnbull's hats turn dentists into vigilantes!"

"Turnbull's hats make cartoonish minstrels into cartoonish minstrels."

"Turnbull's hats give errant cats psychic control over the universe!"

You may enjoy many more ridiculous (and also beautiful) ads in the Brooklyn Public Library's digitized archive.

Teddy Roosevelt Reviews Anna Karenina While Chasing Thieves (He is JUST that cool)

2012-11-08T06:18:00.001-08:00

Teddy Roosevelt once chased some bandits down a frozen river, captured them, and then found himself (and them) trapped on the frozen river for eight days. Being a forward-thinking man, he'd brought along Matthew Arnold's poems and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

In the course of being stuck, he not only managed to keep watch on his prisoners, but read both books completely, and even wrote a letter to his sister reviewing the book. ALL WHILE STUCK ON A FROZEN RIVER WITH THREE DANGEROUS BANDITS WITH NO FOOD BUT DRY FLOUR.

Sorry, I just had a case of the vapours ::fans self::

Ahem.

Basically he shares my essential reaction to the book, which might be summed up as "Anna! Stop being so cray-cray! Oh yay, thank goodness for the sanity of Levin."

Anyway, I'll let him speak for himself:

“I took Anna Karenina along for the trip and have read it through with very great interest. I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it; the connection between Levine’s story and Anna’s is of the slightest and need have existed at all. Levine’s and Kitty’s history is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but it is also perfectly healthy. Anna’s most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent passions, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother Stiva; Uronsky had some excellent points. I like poor Dolly, but she should have been less of a patient Griselda with her husband. You know how I abominate the Griselda type. Tolstoi is a great writer. Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history--a fault which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone; together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers. I was much pleased with the insight into Russian life."

Check out the original letter.

If you want more of an account of the actual bandit-chase, you can find it here in Teddy's own words.

Most importantly, read Edmund Morris's amazing biography.

Anti-Suffrage Ads of Yore: The Threat of "Petticoat Rule"

2012-11-06T10:07:00.001-08:00

"Housewives! You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout!"

Published by the Albany Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage. What makes this even more odd is that one of the main contributors to this organization was Mary Arthur, better known to you as the sister of President Chester Arthur.

The Good Wife Season 4: "Waiting for the Knock," or, Eli Gold Learns What Hubris Meant to the Greeks

2012-11-02T16:37:00.001-07:00

The Good Wife's "Waiting for the Knock" felt like the middle section of a very long novel - the writing's sharp as ever, you're still having a great time engaging with it, but you can't help but feel like the writers are taking a little bit of a breather before they get to the really juicy stuff.

That said, I'm more than intrigued by the new tone the show's adopting. The show's always been happiest in the moral grey area, but its ethos always centered on Newton's third law - every action leads to an equal or opposite reaction - which, in The Good Wife, means that even the direst consequences stem from an action taken, even if those actions are long-forgotten.

But then, most of the driving factors from the episode centered from something that didn't happen, a void of an intern who seems to have a black hole in her head. That Peter didn't actually sleep with her turns the narrative into a Greek tragedy - Maddy found the excuse she needed to turn on Peter (indeed, it seems like she was looking for that excuse from the start), and the blogger hurls away from the void in his own rocketship, powered by grist from the rumor-mill.

But we're not Greeks, and we know that the gods don't actually punish us for our hubris, and yet, it's the only explanation. Without Eli's arrogant response to the journalist, without his quickness at employing the heavy hand of Lockhart Gardner, without his incorrect belief that lying to Maddy would be the right way to keep her on board, none of these need have happened.

It's strange for a mainstream CBS show to use such subtleties to drive its narrative, but of course we know that our show possesses those characteristics in name only - it really is a most uncommon show.

TRAGIC IRONY THY NAME IS GOOD WIFE!

OTHER

-Welcome back, Cary! I've missed your pretty face so! And kudos to the Kings for manufacturing hilarious homoeroticism between you and NATHAN LANE of all people. And thusly a thousand fanfics were born...(gif credit to fyeahcaryagos.tumblr.com)

-Diane would totally get into a dick-measuring contest with an opposing lawyer of any gender. Just one of the trillion reasons that we love her so.

-Kalinda, oh Kalinda. Stop involving thyself with douchebags, whether female FBI agents or British faux-thugs.

Finally, just posting photos of Cary Agos because hello! He finally had a role! And more because the gym trainer is clearly jealous of the love he shares with Nathan Lane.

Halloween Must-Watch: Suspiria

2012-11-01T08:54:00.001-07:00

"The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92," reads the tagline for Suspiria, Dario Argento's accidental adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Our heroine encounters three impossible things before breakfast, though it takes until dinnertime before she believes them.

Death, sorcery, witches. Our human tendencies prevent us from accepting a description of death as it truly is -- utterly mundane. Death is simple; expiration. Suspiria pretends at creating horror at the manner of death, while Argento knows (and shows) that the real horror is loss. We feel that undercurrent running through every action in the film; loss of control, loss of power, loss of sanity, loss of love. When you reach that point, there's nothing left. Just more death. Everyone reacts to the first loss in the film. We never meet her, but we can figure her out by the way people miss her.

Argento fuses German expressionism (think of the side-eyed angles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) with a gleeful bloody mindedness the likes of which I've never seen. 35 years have passed since Suspiria came out; no horror movie shows such originality in its set-pieces. Argento takes full advantage of your visual senses, using color and design to great effect.

Suzy Bannion trips lightly through this rabbit hole, a ballet school where students mysteriously disappear and horrific accidents happen to all who cross the tightly drawn Madame Tanner. Part of the surreality of the film comes from Bannion's "curiouser and curiouser" attitude to the awful events that surround her. Even as the ballet school descends further and further into the pit of despair, she's mostly unaffected, which is for the best. Otherwise, the audience would be sitting in constant despair.

Suspiria takes horror back to its roots: nightmares. Think of your nightmares; even the most terrifying are more rooted in whimsy than in terror. The terror, in fact, plays in almost incidentally to the strange narratives our minds plant in our dreams.

After you see it, come back and tell me your thoughts. And that's an order!

Trivia

The building filmed as the dance academy actually exists, including the loony exterior:

The Haus zum Walfisch can be found in Freiburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, and was known as the House of the Whale when it was built in 1516.

E.B. White on Hurricanes and Mass Media

2012-10-31T07:15:00.001-07:00

A day before Frankenstorm, one could practically see the mainstream media rubbing its fingers together in delight. "At last!" they cried in chorus, "Something to distract us from the electoral snooze-fest permeating the airwaves!" And thusly began 24/7 coverage of issues both related and tangential, like damage, cost, and "HOW WILL OHIO COPE???".

The anticipation was so feverish that, despite this being one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the country, poor Sandy still couldn't live up to expectations (for this one to live up to expectations, Sandy would have needed to produce a hurricane, a snowstorm, an alien invasion and a resurrected Osama Bin Laden).

Well, if it's any consolation, the mainstream media set impossible expectations long before cable news networks had 24 hours of programming to fill. One well-known writer produces the evidence.

E.B. White, known to many of you as "the guy who wrote that book about the pig becoming friends with a spider", was a prolific essayist, contributing regularly to The New Yorker and Harper's Monthly. I bought his book of essays after reading some particularly profound words about NYC (Here is New York) at a time when I still sought my place within this urban Wonderland.

In "The Eye of Edna", 1954, he documents one reporter's abject disappointment at the fact that Hurricane Edna did little more than moisten Long Island:

It became evident to me after a few fast rounds with the radio that the broadcasters had opened up on Edna awfully far in advance, before she had come out of her corner, and were spending themselves at a reckless rate. During the morning hours, they were having a tough time keeping Edna going at the velocity demanded of emergency broadcasting. I heard one fellow from, I think, Riverhead, Long Island, interviewing his out-of-doors man, who had been sent abroad in a car to look over conditions on the eastern end of the island.

‘How wet would you say the roads were?’ asked the tense voice.

‘They were wet,’ replied the reporter, who seemed to be in a sulk.

‘Would you say the spray from the puddles was dashing up around the mudguards?’ inquired the desperate radioman.

‘Yeah,’ replied the reporter.

It was one of those confused moments, emotionally, when the listener could not be quite sure what position radio was taking — for hurricanes or against them.

A few minutes later, I heard another baffling snatch of dialogue on the air, from another sector — I think it was Martha’s Vineyard.

‘Is it raining hard there?’ asked an eager voice.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Fine!’ exclaimed the first voice, well pleased at having got a correct response…..

Tuesday Three: Fictional New York Weatherpocalypses

2012-10-30T11:17:00.001-07:00

As Hurricane Sandy (known to some of you as FRANKENSTORM and to the more pedantic of you as THE METEOROLOGIST'S MONSTER) swaddles the Eastern seaboard with an extremely wet blanket, my thoughts turn to fictional New York weatherpocalypses past. These are their stories. DUN DUN.

1. The Day After Tomorrow

My greatest Frankenstorm pleasure (apart from a couple of extra "work-from-home" PJ days) derives from a lingering memory of a bunch of Oxbridge holier-than-thous snickering through a screening of The Day After Tomorrow at an environmental agency I once worked at.

"New York city shalt not be graced by a hurricanous monstrosity in any reality!" they exhaled, along with hearty fumes of red wine and superiority.

Now I'm not going to pretend that The Day After Tomorrow offers a portrait of anything approaching reality, but complaining about a lack of verisimilitude in a Roland Emmerich film is a bit like complaining that an orange tastes of citrus. What The Day After Tomorrow DOES give us, in order of priority, is a shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal (at a time when he still belonged to the indie kids), and amazing special effects shots of the New York Public Library drowned in a snow-pocalypse (Brangelina aint got NOTHIN' on weather-related portmanteaus...).

2. AI: Artificial Intelligence

Because it's never quite obvious that the weatherpocalypse has already happened long before the start of the movie, AI's controversial coda hits you in the face like a sickly sweet rhubarb pie. When I first saw the movie, I was the classic "love the movie, hate the ending" viewer, until I watched it a second time and suddenly got it.

Setting plays an important role here, implying that Kubrick's overall intent was something closer to Tree of Life than to his usual bleakness. It's the the crisis of human existence boiled down to its most fundamental battle: the creations of man vs. the creations of nature. And the beauty of AI is that it's impossible to figure out exactly who's winning between those dueling spawns, though humankind clearly lost. Poor David clings to the last vestige of what once defined humanity, until even that's lost.

3. Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes was a great obsession of mine as a kid (that includes all the offshoots, even the tv show, which inspired my first fanfiction, written as a lonely 10 year old in Jakarta, Indonesia). I haven't revisited the classic films since my tweens (I watched them so many times I can still see every scene in head), and as my mind developed, I came to realize that the films are microcosms of mankind's worst tendencies, especially the first film.

Planet of the Apes basically amounts to a wet dream for xenophobes, operating on the premise that as white men become the minority, the new colored overlords are barbaric murderers, concerned only with the downfall of the white men. (I'll take this opportunity to point out that the human women left in this particular white supremacist nightmare fantasy land LITERALLY HAVE NO VOICE).

But none of that dulls the impact of the incredible reveal at the end of the film, the only scene left from Rod Serling's original script for the movie. Taylor and Nova finally make it to the Forbidden Zone, only to find out that the "alien planet" he's landed on is, in fact, post-apocalyptic Earth. We don't know the exact circumstances that led to our Great Lady's semi-burial, but it's a decent guess that the climate had a fair bit of impact in the 700 years since Taylor and his fellow astronauts left Earth.

Conclusion

Weatherpocalypses fast and slow have long been a Hollywood obsession, so there are FAR more films that I haven't even touched upon. What are your favorites, whether New York or not?

Gap's Totally Not-Racist "Manifest Destiny" T-Shirt

2012-10-16T06:29:00.001-07:00

About a month ago, Gap released a special series of GQxGap crossover designs by Mark Mcnairy, who GQ dubbed one of America's "Best New Designers." While it's concerning that a man who writes white letters on t-shirts can be consider a "best new" anything, we're not here to talk about design. We're here to talk about manifest destiny.

The charitable view suggests that Mr. McNairy does not know what the term means. Let's let the originator, one John L. O'Sullivan in 1845, explain his phrase:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

So what did this mean? The Belle Jar explains what this means better than I could (I would just sing a tune of GENOCIDE! GENOCIDE!):

Manifest Destiny and the philosophy behind it are responsible for a whole bunch of really terrible things. It was used to justify the Mexican-American War, the War of 1812, and, most appallingly, the Indian Removal Act. Manifest Destiny was used to vindicate the myriad abuses suffered by people of colour at the hands of white North Americans. It’s the philosophy that lead to our continent-wide reservation system , not to mention the residential schools created for the Aboriginal peoples of Canada.

The effects of Manifest Destiny can still be felt, in the poverty and degradation suffered by American and Canadian people of colour, and in the deplorable conditions found on many reserves, both here and south of the border. The ideas behind manifest destiny still exist in our white western consciousness, as much as we might be loathe to admit it; they come up every time our (largely white) government asserts that it knows best when it comes to First Nations issues, or every time someone complains about how much freaking money has already been spent on Attawapiskat only to have their community still be in a state of crisis. Manifest Destiny is apparent every time someone chooses to be bigoted and wilfully ignorant about non-white immigrants, or tries to deny the far-reaching effects of racism; it’s apparent in the mindset of all the people who never take a moment to wonder why or how so many white people ended up owning so much fucking land.

Unfortunately, social media proves that he's very much aware of the phrase's significance. After one student created a Change.org petition against the shirt, Mcnairy replied with a tastefully crafted tweet (now deleted, of course):

Yes, survival of the melanin-deficient folks with the big sticks that go boom.

Gap (and McNairy) probably aren't trying to start a race war; they probably think that "ooh! this is a phrase that someone cool once said, maybe even the sort of hipster who wears black t-shirts with white lettering!" Or even more charitably, "let's reclaim the phrase for capitalism! We're promoting the destiny of lawbooks!"

But Gap is one of the guiltiest parties in subverting human rights by using sweatshops overseas. Even in markets with rigid anti-sweatshop laws, like South India, the conditions are appalling - open sewage streaming out into unpaved streets in remote factories, 12 hour days even when the monsoon floods the workroom floor.

This is manifest destiny today. That it's ok for the "not-we" to suffer so Americans can have cheap clothes.

The lingering effects of manifest destiny, well, they linger.

Mark McNairy has issued an official apology. Gap has removed the shirts from the website, but they're still available in stores. Make of that what you will.