*science fiction is fiction about science

Homework assignment – 20 “journals” for my science fiction class, needed to be about a page each, and I being myself waited until today to do any of them. Such, they are terrible and rushed and could have been written by a child. These are awful and I don’t stand by a single argument made in them, but they are writing and they’re getting posted on this site. The three not here are just old blog-posts I reworded and I’m not posting twice.  So yes, look at my terrible homework.

- – -

Journal 3

Escape from New York

John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is an outdated work, completely of it’s time. The idea of the world’s capital being reclaimed by crime is laughable in a post-Guiliani, post-9/11 world. The world at large would never allow that to happen, we love New York City too much. On the other hand, the idea of the U.S. sacrifing a city thats been consumed by economic collapse and crime is something completely believable in 2009. Detroit is empty at night these days, Katrina came incredibly close to eing sacrificed

the Wire has shown us exactly how economics can splay a city open. So an adjustment is to be made when watching the 1981 film, but all a viewer needs is to do is look past the surface detail.

No people wouldn’t dress like this, no to the cold war nuclear nihilism and blaxploitation trappings, no to the NYC setting but the core idea – that a major metropolitian area can and would be sacrificed and converted into a prison is still a viable premise.

The plot – that the president’s plane is hijacked and crashed in NYC, an ex-soldier about to be dropped into the prison is offered a pardon if he can get the president out before a big UN conference in 24 hours. The ex-soldier is Snake Plissken, and he runs around the city in the pulpiest way possible, we see that the streets are dominated by groups of feral cannibals or heavily armed gangs under the rule of brutal tyrant named the Duke.

As a work of science fiction, Escape from NY is a lot more interested in the conceptual precedent that it sets than exploring the idea. It’s a setting, and as much as Carpenter felt that the idea was a critique of the post-Watergate White House, he’s more interested in a ravaged metropolitian center as a place to set fights and chases than anything else.

Journal 4

Jan’s Atomic Heart

Jan’s Atomic Heart is a low-key sf story set in “Frankfurt, sometime in the far-ish future”, concerning a man who’s body is replaced with a prosthetic. Simon Roy gives us a slow, deliberate approach, full of slow reveals. It’s disorienting and shows us the character of Jan’s mindset. It’s the deflected nature of the way the story is told, we are not introduced to Jan as our lead character right off, we meet him through his friend as they get breakfast. Jan’s body has been completely replaced following a car accident (he was hit by a train) and he’s walking around in a robotic loaner for the week. Slowly we learn the facts of this world, that there is a seperatist movement on the moon which has used the same model of prosthetic bodies in bombing campaigns. Jan freaks out when he hears this and has his body examined for explosive – which his friend is unable to determine, so he goes to the insurance company and finds out it doesn’t exist. He and his friend call Interpol to have his body checked out, figuring that a) someone has screwed with his memory and b) he’s probably a bomb. Jan and his friend get into an examination room at Interpol and the friend starts killing Interpol agents. It turns out that Jan and Anders weren’t really close, he was just Jan’s handler and the two of them work for the Lunar Seperatists. And Jan, rather than freak out, he helps his friend and they detonate the bomb, destroying Interpol headquarters.

Which isn’t a groundbreaking work of staggering genius or anything, it’s not a revolutionary plot. Simon Roy understand the inherent disconnect in being seperated from your body but doesn’t dwell on it, it’s just another strange reality to living in the future. The real horror comes from Jan’s anxiety when he realizes that his memory isn’t reliable. In a situation where his body is not his own, the only really scary thing is finding out that the undefinable aspect of self – memory – is not under his control either. The particulars are incidental, but the quiet, horrifying way in which Jan figures out he’s just a pawn in a much larger game and gives in to it.

Journal 5

A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange is perhaps the finest piece of nihilism and ultraviolence ever comitted to screen. While Anthony Burgess’ novel may have had some internalized hope for the conscience of young people, Kubrick had no illusions towards goodness, though. He saw people in a very dark, cold light. The joyful skewering of standards in the films first third comes from an internal place – it takes someone who might truly despise humanity to make that chunk of film. It also takes that person to make that third as enjoyable as it is, and to then take aim at the audience and indict them for enjoying the previous 40 or so minutes of violence. Clockwork is about forcing a society gone rabid into normality through surgery, about the removal of moral choice from criminals.

Burgess’ argument was that without that choice, positive or negative actions are meaningless. Kubrick instead makes a portrait of a truly anarchic human being, saying that society creates people like Alex DeLarge, that he is a savage product of a savage world. He provokes the idea that people on either side of proper society are just masking savagery behind laws and rules. Order is an imposition in Kubrick’s world. The scientifictional idea of instigating a chemical reaction in the body whenever its exposed to sex or violence is just a quick shorthand for forced socialization on prisoners, on students and problem children. Burgess wanted to tell us that it was a moral imperitive on the individual, Kubrick wants us to know that we get the monsters we deserve.

Journal 7

Demolition Man

Demolition Man is a lot like Brave New World, only funny. Of the Sylvester Stallone 90s action movies, it is the funniest, which is probably why its the only one that’s worth watching on a regular basis. The argument of Huxley’s novel – that a perfect world would also be hell for anyone with emotions to live in. Emotions are the inherent flaw in utopia, and Huxley saw our way toward that world through Eugenics and socialization. The joke of Demolition Man is that the liberal California yuppie lifestyle would be cause enough to lead to his Brave New World.

The premise of Demolition Man is cryogenics – that overcrowding in prisons would lead to cryogenically freezing all criminals and reprogramming their personalities during their frozen stay. This is used for comedic and dramatic purposes – Stallone emerges from being frozen knowing how to knit and sew, Wesley Snipes emerges knowing how to kill people and hack computers.

The film itself is really a generic actioner – Sylvester Stallone is a rogue cop, Wesley Snipes is a criminal psychopath who speaks only in catch phrases, Sandra Bullock is the ditzy love interest and the utopia is just a milieu to blow up chunks of while cracking jokes. The ideas of Huxley are presented as real, but also as laughable in light of the demands of the action film. Good looking vapid actors are given the best lines simply because in Huxley’s world everyone would be a happy, good-looking idiot. The world of Demolition Man sees Taco Bell as the only resturant left in the world, libraries named for former President Schwarzennager, and where the number one radio station plays nothing but commercial jingles from the 60s and 70s. Nowhere anyone would want to be.

Journal 8

Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is generally acknowledged as the first major “post-cyberpunk” work, and depending on what you care about science fiction those words might actually mean something to you. Whether or not it functions as a work of parody or satire depends completely on how familiar you are with cyberpunk fiction and it’s bastard children. When I first read the book, I wasn’t very, so the parts that were meant to be taken as jokes – the hypercompetent techie delivery guy, the suburbs run like countries with highly policed borders, a fully immersive virtual reality internet with modified physics to enable cartoony martial arts battles, the mafia run like a corporation with recruiters and everything – I read that stuff as serious.

The self-consciously cool elements of the book were never what grabbed me, though. What was interesting was the way the book saw ideas as something to be dealt with on a direct level. Instead of the way hackers have been portrayed as criminals and cowboys in most of these books, Stephenson decided that he would actually show computer hackers as poorly socialized, arrogant, opportunistic, greedy, poor at relationships, susceptible to the same impulses as everyone else. More interesting is how he talks about the only people being able to use the internet are people who are either rich or who use it for work, just like in real life.

Even more interesting is the way the book concerns itself with ideas like religion as a virus, memetically. The idea of judaism and christianity being propagating points for language is mirrored with the new religions of the book, liberally borrowing from Scientology, Babylonain mythology, and fundamentalist christianity all at once – ideas can be transmitted the same way that computers could transmit a virus, through the medium of language. But perhaps even more interesting than that is the way that Stephenson treats the relationship between the books two leads, Hiro and YT. Perhaps the only work of science fiction I’ve ever seen involving a fully platonic friendship between a man and a woman.

Journal 9

Soylent Green

Soylent Green is downright dour in comparison to Hestons other 70s science fiction opuses – Omega Man is gleeful in its zombie-killing christ allegories and Planet of the Apes is sure-footed in its hamfisted critique of racism. But Soylent Green never bats an eye, sure of the direction the world is heading. And it’s a terrible world, overpopulated beyond all reason. Human life, as the film shows us again and again, is worthless. Long before the big reveal that, yes, SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OUT OF PEOPLE, we are shown murder, instituted prostitution, brutal and violent crowd control, mercy killing, all funded by corporate interests. The world of Soylent Green shows us cops who are paid not to solve murders, a world where the natural no longer exists in any way beyond recorded images.

The big reveal of humans being made into food is downplayed, probably wisely but the film is more difficult for it. The catharsis never comes, just seas of people who don’t have any food and who don’t care anymore what they’re eating. Heston’s outrage is shown to fall upon deaf ears, and his one friend is shown as making the right decision, finally able to see the natural world for a few minutes in exchange for his life. The price of human life is meaningless, whether or not they’re being made into food, there are so many people that its not going to matter anymore.

Journal 10

THX-1138

George Lucas’ debut feature also borrows liberally from Brave New World, only it learns different lessons than did Demolition Man. No, Lucas instead makes a film that the trailers claimed to be “filmed on location in the 21st Century”, choosing to show not an outsiders perspective of Huxley’s utopia, but one of someone who was raised there. THX-1138 is the name of the protagonist, a factory worker who’s roommate begins tampering with his medication. Like Brave New World, everyone in this world is heavily sedated at all times and sex has been removed from society completely, replaced by mechanical masturbation. Religion has also been replaced with a strange combination of senseless consumerism and automated confessionals. Everything is heavily monitored, cameras are located in everyone’s homes and all public spaces and operators are constantly observing everyone. The difference between THX-1138 and almost all other science fiction is how the utopia it presents is actually a functional and positive one. While the ideas presented are in a way inhuman, Lucas understands that this world would view actions we understand as normal as abhorrent. There is an unspoken note in the film that this society exists because of an ecological disaster. Even in it’s most anti-emotional moments, the society never wants to hurt anyone. THX is tortured, but really his final punishment is to be assigned to a mental institution. Perhaps the genius of the film is that Lucas avoids explaining anything and plays the film as a documentary, using mostly real locations such as abandoned BART stations and real power plants. The world is one of industrial shopping malls and call centers, and it only makes sense that emotional responses would be retarded in a world like this. Escape becomes the priority for THX himself, as the other characters don’t actually understand what to do once they get out – THX simply wants out and he keeps running. The world outside, whether or not its survivable, is something different and he needs to see it or he’ll die.

Journal 11

Moon

Duncan Jones’ 2009 film Moon is a dodge – the plot sold to us in the trailers, that a man has spent so long by himself in a mining facility on the moon that he starts to go insane, isn’t actually the plot of the film. The first act of Moon plays toward that high concept, but Jones is just setting tone. When Sam Bell wakes up following his accident on the operating table, as an audience we can tell something has changed, we’re just not sure what. There’s some subterfuge going on between Sam’s bosses and the computer that runs the facility with Sam, but it doesn’t seem sinister. Then the other Sam shows up unconscious and hurt, and the film becomes a film about clones and memory. Which Sam is the “real Sam” becomes a prevalent question for the the characters, but Sam Rockwell plays the multiple role as if he were playing brothers – there’s resentment and guilt and unsureness in his performance.

The story of Moon is that of being replaced by an exact duplicate, of being fully replaceable. There’s also the fear of your body failing you, of the “other” being someone identical to yourself – lack of identity as well as loss. The performance is what sells Moon, but Jones has been a dilligent student. He has learned all the right lessons from 2001, Blade Runner, Solyaris, Outland, Silent Running, The Fly, and Alien – the film sets are all designed for functionality and the acting is given precedence over the tech.

Journal 12

Minority Report

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Philip K Dick short story Minority Report has very little to do with it’s subject matter beyond the basic premise of “precrime”. The dvd has a lot of ancillary material about how much research was done involving the burgeoning technologies we’d be using in the future – from interactive video processing to advertising to personal transport to drug use – Speilberg might have fallen into the trap of many science fiction creators – that of futurism. The urge to predict the details of the future rather than tell a good story, although his storytelling instincts are so strong that he gives us a fantastic suspsense film for almost the entire film’s runtime.

The post-9/11 fear of the patriot act and wiretapping is alive in Minority Report’s script, and while the paranoia alive in PKD’s original story doesn’t contradict it, it is a jerry-rigged contraption of a script – fear of encroaching facism and personal privacy retrofitted onto Dick’s drug-paranoid premise can’t maintain forever, mostly because Speilberg doesn’t have it in him to give us the downer ending the script sets us up for. No, the long expository soliloquoy John Anderton gives us at the end is perhaps too easy and too insulting. The rest of the movie hums along at an ever-increasing suspence pitch, a Hitchcockian chase film science fiction so rarely gives us, but Spielberg can’t stick the landing. Fun for the most part, though, especially for a film about loss of freedom.

Journal 13

Ministry of Space

Warren Ellis and Chris Weston’s alternate history of a British Space Program is an angry, intelligent work. The premise is essentially that before the United States performed Operation Paperclip, a real-life operation involving kidnapping nazi scientists and faking their transfer papers to the US in order to work on the space program, the English move in and kidnap them first. Not the largest of changes to history, but a significant one. Ellis surmises that English post-war imperialism would get humanity to the Moon earlier, and the colonization of both it and Mars in our lifetime. Essentially, by the time the United States and Russia would be amping up the Cold War, England would already have stolen the major game piece on the chessboard.

The flashback structure of the story gives us certain points of contention, we are given the facts in partial chunks. The “black budget” which funds the project turns out to be a stash of concentration camp gold – everything from watches to gold fillings – and the entire space program is tainted by the blood on its hands. The end result is a highly technological culture arising in the UK, showcasing that diffferences in the US and UK postwar mindsets might result in drastic differences in technological growth. But the true joke is on the reader, the big reveal isn’t that the whole endeavor was funded by nazi gold, but that a technologically advanced UK might not have gone through the same social changes it went through in the intervening years – the final shot showing a racially segregated space station is a good slap in the face to any optimism we might get from seeing man walk on Mars.

Journal 14

Sunshine

Danny Boyle’s pre-Slumdog Millionaire film Sunshine has been greatly derided, mostly because of it’s ridiculous third act problems. Of all the science fiction films released since 2001 and Alien were released, it is perhaps the most gorgeous – Danny Boyle is painting with light in a way few directors have ever been able to. In a visual medium, it’s a hard truth that story can fail, hard, as long as there is a stunning enough visual to make up for it.

The plot of Sunshine – that the sun would for some reason start to die and astronauts would be sent to detonate a series of bombs the size of Manhattan in the heart of the sun to re-ignite it owes much to Ray Bradbury, and likely has little to do with actual science. It’s a premise to show humanity at it’s most extreme, and a premise far different than many ticking clock scifi films.

Sunshine devolves into a thriller at the end, and that’s the flaw, but the film is obsessed with light, is about light. It is possibly a more poetic sf film than most – placing it alongside Alphaville and 2046 instead of Armageddon and The Core. Everything in the film is predicated on light – it is the cause of all the problems in the film, it is what kills the crew of the first ship, what drives them insane, and consumes most of the cast.

Journal 15

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of many PKD stories about the disconnect between reality and unreality. This particular instance is most famous for Eldritch’s line “God may promise eternal life but I can deliver it”, combining Dick’s dual obsessions of commerce and divinity – frequently in Dick’s novels we are exposed to a world where reality can be altered through drugs which is then processed on the scale of mass marketing.

In Three Stigmata, reality is altered for many people in the form of a Barbie-style doll and her dollhouse life known as Perky Pat. A user would get high and then project their personality onto the doll. Palmer Eldritch shows up and tries to put the company that makes Perky Pat out of business with his product, known as Chew-Z. Eldritch is a satanic figure, one of temptation in the novel and offers the lead character a world where he can hallucinate any reality he wants. He of course, is lying. Under the influence of this drug, Eldritch is all-powerful, but is defeated easily. The Stigmata of the title turns out to be lasting hallucinations of the users of Chew-Z that they or others have Eldritch’s features. Satirical in nature, the book ultimately mocks the space opera-save-the-universe aspects of the story are actually defeated by living a normal, boring life.

Journal 16

Repo Man

Writer-director Alex Cox’s 1984 masterpiece Repo Man isn’t really much of a science fiction movie. It’s gained notoriety more from it’s position as a document of the punk scene of California than it’s acheivement as a work of sf. It’s major conceit of the inventor of the neutron bomb driving around a car with a full of alien corpses is pretty much the only science fiction element to it. The film itself essentially takes place in 1984, and only amplifies certain elements as points of satire – televangelist preachers, ufo cults, punk kids, lobotomozed area 51 scientists – it’s not so much a sf film as a straight satire of life in 1984.

The final result is a shocking synthesis of Terry Southern-style anarchy and documentary-style approach towards the way the world actually is. Alex Cox wrote the film about his actual experiences as a Repo Man, as well as all his research into the Neutron Bomb and it’s inventors. Cold War paranoia permeates the film, but it’s more sure of the way the world is than some possible doomsday. It’s about the long, nasty descent into the apocalypse of the now and how normal abnormality can be.

Journal 17

I Killed Adolf Hitler

Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler first gives us a world where anyone can hire a person, legally and openly, to kill someone for money. He shows us this in his own deadpan style, wherein everything is show in medium shot, everyone is some variation of funny animal and no one’s facial expressions ever change. The world is like the art, dry and detatched, vaguely sardonic. The plot of the story is the lead character (who is nameless) gets hired by a scientist to go back and kill Hitler, but the time machine takes 50 years to charge and only makes one trip forward and one trip back. The assassin travels back to kill Hitler, misses, and Hitler steals his time machine. He waits for 50 years and shoots Hitler when he steps out of the machine, but is too old to lift the body, goes and gets his girlfriend for help but the body’s gone. Turns out Hitler wasn’t dead and escapes after changing his appearance. The protagonist and the girlfriend run around looking for Hitler, staking out a writer who may or may not have met him while working on his biography. 50 years pass and the girlfriend hops in the charged time machine and tells the assassin to put one in his head, the story ends.

The style is the appeal of the book, of course, as is the argument hidden under the comedy – that the world turns out this way, full of callousness and lack of respect for human life, BECAUSE Hitler disappears and World War 2 doesn’t happen. It gives us pause, if only for a second that maybe that level of destruction was needed to keep humanity humble, but then again, really how well are we doing right now anyway? The real acheivement of a book called I Killed Adolf Hitler is that it’s so funny, it’s hard to read without laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, and yet it is never anything less than serious.

Journal 18

Pax Romana

Jonothan Hickman’s second major work is a work of both hard science and historical fiction – an alternate history if you will, like I Killed Adolf Hitler and Ministry of Space but far more specific and long-spanning in its view. The plot of Pax Romana is that the Vatican builds a time machine in wake of it’s ever-dwindling church and sends massive armored divisions to the time of Constantine, restructuring history.

The series is one of constant complications – once the soldiers land in the past they kill their Vatican representative and begin introducing modern scientific method and 4th Generational Warfare to the armies of Constantine, taking choppers and humvees into battle with men of 313 AD, creating a constant cycle of dynasties and revolutions so as to avoid the Dark Ages at all. The story is structured in flashback – the bedtime story told from the Gene-Pope to the Child-Emporer about the history of the world – is revealed at the end that one empire crosses the entire globe, other planets have been colonized and its’ still only 1421. Hickman is someone who believes that the only thing holding humanity back from the stars is the Dark Ages and the religious bases that created it – that with the right kind of thinking humanity has no limits. It’s an optimistic if savage view of people, and all complications are shown to be when ideals and ideas run up against human concepts like jealousy and family.

Journal 19

King City

Brandon Graham’s first longform work King City is probably what you’d call “soft” science fiction. A post-Moebius, post-Heavy Metal city populated entirely with science fictional creatures and situations. As sf, its really not interested in postulating a workable future or even railing against a modern situation Graham is worried about. Like most of the original Heavy Metal stories, though, he makes up for it in both stunning visuals and solid core story. The protagonist, Joe, is a theif with special training who hasn’t been in the city for years. He comes home to do a job, get a copy of a key. He goes to see his old friend Pete who is doing jobs for the mob to stay alive, his ex-girlfriend is dating an ex-soldier who spent time in the North Korean Zombie Wars and who’s body is now calcifying into chalk. The chalk is a drug, so he’s slowly turning into the thing thats consuming him. Pete’s latest job for the mafia is holding an alien girl who’s being sold as goods – whether she’ll end up in the sex trade or as food or an organ bank, we don’t know. Joe and his friends are on the periphery of a much larger story, one involving destiny and demons being resurrected to destroy the city, but Graham keeps the tone light and pushes almost all that material to the background. It’s the characters who dictate the story, and they are mostly smart enough to stay out of it.

Graham’s work is concerned with detail, and you can feel his love of drawing on every page. The small, informatonal arrows and captions giving us details to characters we’ll never meet, the lush backgrounds that only appear when he wants to give us some environmental texture, the comedic signage that pops up in almost every page. The science in this story is flat but the sf nature of the story is a deliveryt system for stories about old friends and tough decisons, about chasing after a girl when you should be trying to do a job, about knowing you’re on the edge of something so massive you don’t want to think about it, you go get breakfast with your old friend instead.

Journal 20

ALIEN

Alien is ultimately about fear of the human body. Or more accurately, fear of sex itself. While James Cameron’s sequel recast the Alien as a faceless, nameless enemy. An other that could stand in for the Vietcong or anything, really. The first Alien, Ridley Scott and his writers are much, much less concerned with “the other” as an enemy in a war and is a lot more interested in “the other” as a sexual being. The design of the Alien by HR Giger notwithstanding, the subtext of sex throughout the film is constant – Kane literally explodes from the inside in an act of birth, the journey into the alien ship resembles a vagina, Ash’s death scene ends with him bleeding white fluid. He even tries to kill Ripley with a rolled up pornographic magazine. Even the most minor detail of the film falls on gender issues. That the final scene Ripley, who has mostly been portrayed as asexual up until now, is show disrobing and objectified, it is only then she can kill the monster in the film’s slasher logic.

Ridley Scott, while making a film that is essentially gothic horror in space- a pick-em-off slasher film in post-Star Wars clothing. Scott apparently fell in love with the directness of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre while he was working on Alien and it shows. The way in which that film attacks family is the same way Alien attacks sex – literally by ignoring it on the surface as the subtext bubbles knowingly underneath. There isn’t a scene in Alien where sex isn’t a factor, whether it’s an argument between two co-workers about whether or not to open the airlock or the final sexualized confrontation between Ripley and the creature, as it screams and falls out of the wall like a techno-organic infant. Alien is about the human body and out inability to understand it, about sex and our inability to sublimate it.

ADVANCED COMMON SENSE EPISODE 6

Tucker Stone and Marty Brown make that funny.

The one major thing you have to remember tonight is that the man next to you is your brother and you damn well better treat each other that way cuz if you don’t then we blow the whole thing.

So here’s the deal – I get backed up on schoolwork, so I try to write ahead, doesn’t work, so the blog suffers. I get sick. I fall behind on schoolwork, comics writing, article writing, all of it. I get better, I finally catch up on everything except the blogging, school work starts to stack up but I’m keeping pace and then I get sick again. Please excuse any delays caused by my insanely shitty luck.

Stuff coming.

Anyway I’m writing 2 projects right now, ones the new thing the others a resurrected I Love You Venus No.17.

(the Lady Gaga made me remember Giacobbe, which meant I remembered Dirt)

qotd

“One school of thought says that directors shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own films. But the truth is they should be. And they should be really brutal. Really brutal.”

- Cormac McCarthy

Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

You guys remember in the late 90s/ early 00s when Cunningham and Sigismundi took huge sums of cash to direct videos for Christina Aguilera and Madonna? I always hoped that the end product would be something as rabid fucking nutzoid as this.

Seriously, did you catch the James Cameron shot of the coffins?

oh yeah

Looper is, with any luck, going to be the next film

by the people who made “Brick” and “The Brothers Bloom”

We have a finished script, and not much else.

 

QOTD

Whatever world Tangerine Dream traveled from on their way to the Hollywood Hills via dronetown, a metal world wired for sound and breathing thought and pleasure, then Kylie once visited this planet under the name Barbarella. Wires were inserted into her body, circuits slotted into her mind, and years later she emerged, video-driving towards a city on the other side of imagination, as a finished mix of dream machine and celebrity. Somewhere in some universe down some wormhole on the edge of some supernova, Tangerine Dream were a time-traveling science fiction boy band, and Kylie, as a coltish, bare-cheeked Barbarella, guested on their biggest hit, a song that went on for centuries and who’s lyrics simply consisted of the sounds “la la la la la la la la” . Here she is on another adventure – it looks to me as if she, with a song and a smile, is being magnetised onto videotape, digitised and projected electronically miles into space, angled off the face of a satellite, back down to a central relay system, amplified, synthesized, redigitised, sent to peripheral relay posts, forked out to local signal sites, re-magnitised, and sent on her way along primitive copper wiring into homes around the world.

- Paul Morley, Words and Music (aka my favorite book all-time)

Apollo 100 – (Hall of the) Mountain King

Soundtrack to alien invasions. Like, cover of The Genocides-style.

Emma Peel Sessions 21 – V.

Well it’s Guy Fawkes day, so I guess we’ll talk about V for Vendetta. How about this one?

V is the story of a supervillain who does what he does for arguably the right reasons. He murders, destroys, tortures, drives insane, manipulates – he commits so many evil acts that calling him a hero is interesting. Alan Moore himself has described it as “a terrorist superhero story”, but for any similarities to Batman and the Shadow are superficial at best. No, V’s every action and aspect are objectively what supervillains do. He has an origin story built on medical experimentation and dehumanization, a lingering kind of insanity throughout his dialog, let alone his actual not-fun insanity throbbing underneath. He has a Winchester Mystery House kind of  lair, with interlocking rooms and doors that lead nowhere. He has racks and racks of disguises, a dead (non-romantic) love he’s dedicated his life to. He grows roses, he stockpiles plastic explosives. He subjects people to torture in order to force them to think like he does, to recreate versions of himself.  He kidnaps a young girl, has her help him commit murder, she leaves him, he kidnaps her again, destroys her personality through concentration camp-style tactics bringing her to the brink of death, and then on the event of his death he asks her to literally become him.

V is a bad person, who does what he does because it’s right. He wants to make the world a better place, and the only way he can do that is by burning a society down to its knees, just to prove a point. The brilliance of V for Vendetta is that not once do you ever think V is wrong. Not once. He is completely in the right, killing his way across his past so as to clear a path to bringing down an entire fascist government. He is either enacting a Hitchcockian revenge plot and then escalating to a society, or misdirecting the cops. Still – because of the way he moves, the way he talks from the first scene on – V is doing what he does because he knows it needs to be done. Moore and Lloyd are truly interested in portraying the terrorist, the villain, as a moral force.

That, of course, does not mean that he’s not evil.

That’s whats worth rereading V for Vendetta for the millionth time again. Because instead of a morality play in which we learn that fascism is wrong, we are given a story with no easy answers. V for Vendetta’s core is Evey’s experience in the prison, and the framed story of Valerie. There’s no disputing what that means. But in the story around it, we learn that ideology almost always hurts someone when its put into practice. That putting ideas over people is always damaging, and no matter what lengths are gone to and how right you are, you’ve ultimately compromised any ideals you had in the first place.

The end of V for Vendetta is Evey taking on the face of evil in order to do the right thing, because there’s no other way to complete V’s plot. It’s a malicious force asserting itself on a character we know to be innocent to commit its last wish on the earth. It is a possession, the demon of anarchy taking another host. It forces us as readers to see the horror in the moment, as well as the beauty.

The shitty fucking movie left that part out.

The Great Tyrant by Paul Maybury

via his site, which also has maybe the only Alien comic you need to read other than Woodring and Plunkett’s Labyrinth.

qotd

On Simpsons first-draft king John Swartzwelder, from John Orvted’s Unauthorized Oral History of the Simpsons:

We would have story meetings with him outside. And I remember distinctly one time being a young comedy writer, and Swartzwelder just happened to be sitting there, smoking a cigarette on the lawn. And I though, Man, I’m just gonna ask John Swartzwelder a random question and see what he says in return. And I said “John, what would you do if you had all the money that you could spend?” And without a moment’s hesitation he said “I would buy a battleship and the Empire State Building. With the Empire State Building, I would just let it run down and get decrepit. Because people would say, ‘You can’t do that! That’s the Empire State Building!’ I would say ‘No, I can! I own the Empire State Building!’ The battleship,” he said, “I just think it would change people’s conversations with me if they knew that I had a battleship.”

- Brent Forrester

“Also, the day of OJ’s Bronco chase, John didn’t show up for work. He told us that he had been walking around Encino with a baseball bat – looking for him.”

- Jennifer Crittenden

Unreal Estate by Matt Zoller Seitz

Found, of course at the House Next Door. If you love anything about movies, this will fuck your head up, even if its just a little. Finally, someone has topped Jamie Thraves on re-utilizing the Vertigo soundtrack. See also Zombie 101.

QOTD

So you’re there, and you’re trying to be creative, but over these long stretches of time. There were periods of time where you felt like, Gee, I think I lost my mind a bit during certain stretches.

I used to walk around the Fox lot, and once I found two pieces of a broken pool cue in an alley. There were two pieces that screwed together, with a brass fitting, and then unscrewed. Jeff Martin and I developed a whole game around unscrewing it, flipping both pieces in opposite hands, and screwing it back together, and seeing how many times you could do that in one minute.  And then we developed all these complicated rules involving how far your wrists had to be apart, and we really took it seriously.

It got to the point where Jeff had the record for forty-five flips in one minute, but then there was the time I broke it and got to forty-six; we were elated. And other people in the room would watch sometimes. I remember times where Jeff and I were doing it, and there was a circle of people around us watching and it got very intense.

If you’re trapped on a deserted island, you can build an entire religion around a seashell. It was that feeling. That’s an illustration of how we were driven to the edge of something, I don’t know what.

- Conan O’Brien, from John Orvted’s Unauthorized Oral History of the Simpsons.

World Cinema by the Coen Brothers

Excerpt from the anthology film Chacun De Cinema starring Josh Brolin and Grant Heslov

Kid Koala – Basin Street Blues

Joanna Newsom by Annabel Mehran

Life of the World to Come

I am like 90% sure only David Allison will laugh at this, but I had to do it.

QOTD

Motherfucker took me out of the ghetto. That’s my dude, man. He’s been like a dad to me. I remember when I was on Saturday Night Live my first year and I wasn’t getting much. I was down; I was ready to quit. It was three o’clock in the morning, man, I’ll never forget. Makes me want to cry sometimes when I think about it. I love that man. I love that man. [long pause; starts to cry] I’m sorry, man. Excuse me. [another long pause] Son of a bitch … motherfucker’s good. I remember one time Lorne took me to his office, and he said, “Tracy, you are here not because you’re black. You’re here because you’re fucking funny, man.” [bursts into tears again; wipes face with shirt] Changed my whole perspective … They say every Jewish man is supposed to love one black motherfucker in this life. I’m glad Lorne Michaels chose me.

- Tracy Morgan

You need to listen to this interview with him at NPR too, it is seriously the most amazing thing ever.

Velvet Undergound Poster Art

A collection of Velvet Underground posters, some from Warhol’s Factory. (thanks for the link Beaucoupkevin)

I use “montessori school” as a slur. Kind of proud of that.

A narco-fueled angry rant of a Mad Men writeup in TV of the Week at the Factual along with Matthew J Brady’s great Venture Brothers piece (also Fringe) and Tucker Stone, Our Man in X on House.  Actually I haven’t linked but I’ve done most of the season, click back if you feel like it, its the only consistent writing I’ve been doing the past couple weeks. Last weeks is really crappy though, it was written when I was all jacked up. I don’t know if the Mad Men pieces are as good as the Boosh ones, as I’ve only really gotten an angle in the past few weeks. The Boosh pieces were about how Adult Swim was botching the US release of a possible comedy classic (and how much the show was about rape). The Mad Men pieces are just kind of angry and unfocused and I don’t know if they’re funny, but pretty much every week I talk about Betty and Don and how much I hate the rest of the cardboard cutout cast. Then again, maybe Mike Sizemore’s right and the show is about the only people in the entire decade who weren’t armed to the teeth so why the fuck should we care? Joan Holloway isn’t even on the show any more to stare at.

Eric Canete’s White Queen

There’s a really amazing Eyes Wide Shut-style Hellfire Club comic in my head drawn by Canete now.

QOTD

“DO YOU WANT PAUL VERHOEVEN TO FINISH THIS MOTHERFUCKER?”

- James Cameron

Frightened Rabbit – The Greys

ALL CAPS 13

Nine Inch Nails/Gary Numan – Metal

David Bowie – Scary Monsters-era interview

THROW A PIE FOR GOD’S SAKE

Because I’m not going to be around for the weekend and this week consisted mostly of me running around like an extra in The Magnificent Three, here is some content I normally wouldn’t put up. Yay! No, this is a short fiction thing. Explanation – I have started doing these weekly prose sketches for a weekly writing challenge started by the very nice and smart people I do bar trivia with. Each week, someone decides on a single element that has to be included in the story, and it has to be a maximum of one page. It’s excercise, and I try to write them in one-shot in-the-moment style rather than thinking about it ahead of time. They’re theater and prose people and I tend to go for visuals, so three weeks in I’m still getting my legs. This one is not as terrible as the previous ones, though, and the two characters in it are probably going to end up in one of the two books I’m writing right now. The theme for this week is masks.

- – -

That Keeps Her Peace, Most Every Day.

The mask covered her eyes and nose – black fabric of some kind, slightly too rough for what it was. It looked amazing. Her brown hair was tied up, she was wearing a pair of black trouser, a white buttoned down shirt, a black dress jacket, and a gray cape. She smiled. “There’s something particularly decadent about all this, I feel like we should be doing cocaine and denying someone a bank loan”.  She turned to the woman at her left, a synthetic blonde with pale skin and sad, wide eyes. The blonde was wearing long opera gloves and a minidress, long legs ending in six-inch black pumps with a yellow heel. Her hair straight back out of her face. She stared out off of the bridge, out onto the water — the two of them leaned against the cobblestone railing. The blonde leaned forward on one elbow, “It’s not decadent, not to enjoy yourself”. Fireworks went off in the distance, cascading bangs arpeggiated – strange time for fireworks at sunset, but it was gorgeous. More explosions, now from behind them. She took the mask off and let it drop off into the water. The sirens were blaring now too, klaxxons thrumming off in the distance. Perfectly timed. She leaned over, her head on the blonde’s shoulders. The blonde’s expression didn’t change – a kind of impenetrable blankness. She exhaled and closed her eyes a halfsecond “So what’s the plan for tonight?”. The blonde blinked and stared into the sunset, neon orange with constellations of color cutting it in two. “How about we go back to the hotel — I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. Tapas?”. She looked up at the blonde, staring at her eyepatch for a minute. “You’ve never looked better.” “Neither have you”. The sirens get louder. A fleet of ambulances scream by, and both girls can’t help but laugh uncontrollably.

Spacemen 3 – Take MeTo The Other Side

Art of Storytelling release party.

The very cool guys at The Art of Storytelling are having a magazine release party at 8pm Max Fish this Friday. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it out, but if you’re in NYC this weekend, you should definitely check it out. I haven’t posted anything up about it yet, but I’m going to have my first published article in their first issue along with interviews w/ Derek Riggs and Andrew WK. I’m really excited to see it because this would totally be a magazine I would read even if I didn’t inexplicably find my name in it.

Emma Peel Sessions 20 – Made the choice to go away

Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero

PART THREE

Trent Reznor is probably my favorite performer and musician, period. I realize that might be a strange choice to some people, and if you told me I’d said that five years ago, I’d be surprised. Beck crapped out, the Beatles are too universal, David Bowie clearly had a point where he gave up even though I love him, I came to Scott Walker too late, DJ Shadow and the Pixies couldn’t make it past the third album, My Bloody Valentine too hard to pin down, the Wu couldn’t be trusted for quality, neither could Sonic Youth, and Radiohead… well five years ago it would have been Radiohead. Hell, I’d even be up for argument – Radiohead are amazing. If there’s a Beatles of the past 20 years, it’s certainly Radiohead, from the way they process their influences to the way they work to the crazy division of labor in that band. They are smarter than everyone else, they make music that grabs everyone in their head and their soul at the same time. They experiment with format, and have spearheaded massive changes in the way we as a society listen to music. But… Radiohead weren’t the band that kicked me in the face and changed the way I listened to music. One day I was listening to Korn and Limp Bizkit shit on the radio and the next I was blaring “Heresy” and dying my hair black and taping Chris Cunningham videos off the tv. I’m not saying it was healthy, but goddamn if it wasn’t a step in the right direction. I don’t even remember how I got into Nine Inch Nails, to be honest. But that change was so palpable. Without, NIN I don’t buy Odelay, I don’t watch Eraserhead. I come out as a fundamentally different person. But this was late, I was going through this crap older than I should have been – I didn’t really get into music at the right time and when I did it was right in time to get caught up in a whole heap of bullshit. If I hadn’t heard the few bands I heard at this time, I probably wouldn’t have been a music person for much longer. I was a reader, I was kind of starting to be film nerd – but not music. Really, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it. NIN was THAT BAND for me and then Radiohead were the second and then I was a music person.

I kind of thought of it as a gateway band after a while, to be honest.  The Fragile came out in Sept. 99 and Kid A came out in Oct. 00 – in that time I went from being a nu-metal kid to being a music snob. I discovered all this great stuff – from the obvious stuff like the Pixies and Bjork to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emporer to Massive Attack and Primal Scream to Atari Teenage Riot to the Smashing Pumpkins to Mos Def to Aphex Twin to PJ Harvey to the Sex Pistols to Public Enemy. No, Radiohead were a real band and Trent Reznor was a guy who made some records I liked when I was 14. When With Teeth came out six years later I was off that, listening to Gorillaz and Broken Social Scene. I remember a friend of mine (who’s name I don’t remember so… yeah, probably not that good a friend but this was pre-back injury and therefore is hazy) telling me they heard the title track and hated it, going “with-uh teeth-uh”, and me deciding that I should probably skip it and trying and steal some more Ultravisitor-era Squarepusher white labels off the internet.

I was an angry, fucked-up, overweight kid who had just been kicked out of a catholic school and wasn’t dealing with it well, had no friends,  and the facile anger of the stuff I was listening to really wasn’t doing the job. The difference between the angry twelve year old gritted teeth and tears of Korn’s “Kill You” and an album that’s first song has the lyric “TEAR A HOLE EXQUISITE RED FUCK THE REST AND STAB IT DEAD” screeched with religious conviction is night and day. I may have wrote it off as angst at some point, the way most people do – but it’s not just angst. If you lay out all the records that I screamed along with in high school none of them hold up the same way. Rage Against the Machine? Nirvana? Tool? Metallica? It’s all shit for teenagers. There’s no depth to it, musically or emotionally and once you understand that there’s more to music than guitar solos, there has to be something. Even if it’s frivolous crap, there’s got to be something there. But a few year on I had moved on. From a lot of stuff, I had a lot of health issues and had just started writing comics – like when I got into the band, it was a transitional time and I wasn’t really up for NIN anymore. It didn’t help that the intervening years saw Reznor bitching about the way Kid A was sold against The Fragile, the perception of With Teeth as a “safe” album (which is debateable but “Hand That Feeds” didn’t help that image), the shitty song on the Tomb Raider soundtrack,  Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” which kind of invalidated the original for a while, Reznor getting clean – which sounded like a bad idea for a dude who made the kind of music he did. I didn’t buy or steal With Teeth, the most I heard of it was the stuff sampled on 24 Hours. There were a few things – I’d heard that the band was kind of stunning live now, but they already were, and then I heard about the radio sessions he was doing with Tv on the Radio and Peter Murphy. That’s probably where my interests were piqued – there’s a real ease to those sessions. It’s a maturity in a way that’s not Sting-maturity. Reznor wasn’t recording an americana album or hiring Brian Eno or Rick Rubin to fix him, he wasn’t recording in a villa in Spain, going classical or jazz, choosing a cause, allowing his side members to write songs, doing a covers album, becoming a live-only band – none of that. Here he was, touring with legitimately interesting bands (Tvotr, Ladytron) that weren’t obvious. And with the choices of songs he was making, he was understanding (and maybe positioning) himself in a tradition of stuf like The Idiot and Unknown Pleasures. He was recognizing that 15 years into his career if you don’t define these things yourself – maybe the biggest problem with NIN in the 90s is he defined his peers as Helmet, Soundgarden, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson. Reznor is still a valid, current artist and literally no one he was compared with in 89-99 are either around or still worth a damn. He’s the only one who’s not a joke or a casualty. Maybe it’s because he was too singular a person and musician or maybe it’s because he toured with David Bowie and learned a few things.

When Year Zero was released as a free stream on NIN’s site I gave it a chance and was kind of floored. I didn’t know about the ARG or that it was Reznor’s first real “concept album”, or that it was science fiction. I listened because it was free and a few people had mentioned it as being a step up from the previous. Every song shifts perspective, every song ends in a mess of shuddering noise. Reznor’s voice has grown far more expressive in the intervening years, and any and all structure is manipulated to do the exact opposite of what you expected. Its not just smart, it’s smart on every level – be it personal, political, musical, noise, pop, etc. Year Zero was the kind of album I needed to hear at the right time to hear it, just like Deltron was. It’s a musician I loved and understood using a genre I loved and understood to push himself forward. Year Zero is Deltron 3030’s nasty mirror image – where Automator’s production is evocative, Reznor’s is assaultive. Where 3030 is the rap equivalent of Neuromancer, Year Zero instead models itself on Akira – it is a world in collapse seen from every possible angle as it adds up to a picture of a society as a whole. 3030 is single-perspective vignettes and Year Zero is short stories from the pov of mouhtpieces, suicide bombers, religious leaders, the military, the debased. Deltron’s message is at it’s core about how you behave in comparison to the world around you, Year Zero is a warning of the the way the world is headed and the inability of the individual to change it. Where Deltron is reference laden,Year Zero is naturalistic. It is about losing yourself in the din of noise from all sides, and the extremism that results. It’s as important a work of science fiction this decade as Children of Men and Pattern Recognition, saying so much about the culture that produced it while succeeding on personal and artistic levels at the same time. Year Zero kicked my ass, and the next few posts here are going to be about it, and I might go a little overboard in the process. Consider yourself… warned.

Roc Raida RIP

The way I always looked at it there weren’t many great scratch djs, but probably the best was always a battle between Kid Koala and Roc Raida. And really, I don’t think Kid Koala could ever do something like this:

NIN – Ghosts 19 (Lights in the Sky tour)

NIN – Ghosts 31 (Lights in the Sky tour)

*bing* “Freedom is slavery!”

Jared draws Mr. Freedom. Click over for full size.

Raekwon – Criminology

qotd

I’m late on this but David Allison, dropping science

Readers, I have to confess — I’ve often wanted to visit the set of The Prisoner! Which is odd, given the nature of that series, but then again this blurring of dreamlike promise and real horror is part of the substance of It Felt Like a Kiss.