Friday Review: Gravity

I'm certain about one thing went it comes to Gravity - director Alfonso Cuarón and his technical team earned every one of those Oscars they won last year.  The film is a technical marvel, seamless and incredibly real, particularly given that all but the last few minutes take place in space.

But beyond that - well, I'm conflicted.

Because, here's the thing - aside from the visuals, there isn't a whole lot else going on.  This is either a bold rejection of most storytelling conventions, in which case props to Cuarón, even if it doesn't quite work, or it's yet another example of a movie that's all about on-screen dazzle at the expense of things
like characters, plot, and the like.  Just because the visuals are used to bring to life something realistic and dramatic, instead of (for an example) giant robots that transform into easily sold commodities, doesn't give it a pass.

A regular flick, I suspect, would have given us some scenes on the shuttle before the big accident, or even on the ground during the run up to the mission, to get to know the characters.  As it is, only through some clumsy dialogue while they drift in space do we learn anything about them.  As a result, we can't really engage with them on an emotional level.  Yes, it would be tragic if they died while in space (as with the rest of the redshirts), but aside from that, why care?

But on the other hand, I respect that choice.  I have a short story where the main character escapes from many years of captivity.  One of the notes I got on it from my crit group wondered if he needed something more specific to "get back to" as motivation.  I didn't see it that way - he was a prisoner, for fuck's sake - but I can see the point.

I've often heard that short stories are better for adapting to movies than novels.  They have less material to start with, of course, so a director doesn't have to worry about cutting great swaths of material to tell the whole of the story.  Gravity feels like a short story, reminding me of something like "The Cold Equations," where it's less about the characters and more about the situation they struggle against.

Ultimately, it's hard to fault Gravity for not being the kind of movie I would make.  It's a visual showpiece, a true movie - something that would be nearly impossible to pull off in another medium.  In that way, it's a bit like 2001, which doesn't have the world's greatest script, either.  So that's good company to be in.

Gravity isn't much more than a trip, but it is one hell of  a ride.

The Details
------------------------
Gravity
Released 2013
Directed Alfonso Cuarón
Written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón
Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney

Friday Review: The Postman

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.

 - Mark Twain (maybe)

You can lead with all new lines

If you believe in what you say

And life can be just as you make it

Believe the lie and it will all come true

 - Umprhey's McGee (definitely)

Yeah, OK, so sometimes the lie is easier to tell than the truth.  But what happens when the lie is a noble one, one that (to borrow from The Simpsons) embiggens your fellow man?  And what happens if the lie gets out of control and takes on a life of its own?

That's the basic idea behind The Postman, by which I mean the lauded David Brin novel, not the critically savaged (hello Razzies!) Kevin Costner flick that sprang from it.  Gordon Krantz is not actually the titular postman - indeed, there are no such things in the post-apocalyptic world Brin lays out (in what is now our actual past). But he claims to be one, just to survive.  Then, shit happens.

Brin does an interesting thing in The Postman because instead of taking us through the apocalypse and the initial postlude of survival, he drops Gordon (and us) in 16 years after everything went to hell.  That's allowed the world to settle a bit, although it's settled into a world full of dangers, from mundane bandits to leftover pre-war survivalists with a philosophy that's very like Ayn Rand on steroids. It's while escaping from those kinds of bandits that Krantz comes upon an abandoned USPS truck, complete with dead driver inside.  He nicks the uniform purely for warmth and grabs a bag of mail for reading (and presumably other) material, no real intent to pull a scam on anybody.

The scam, such as it is, unfolds slowly and does require a bit of a stretch, that being that after nearly two decades of there being no such thing as the United States, much less the United States Postal Service, people are overwhelmed at the idea of getting mail service back.  Krantz's attempts to slip away from the first small town he comes to are complicated by people trying to pay him to take letters for them.  From there, Krantz builds an entire facade of being an official of the Restored United States and begins to forge some connections between the scattered Oregon settlements.

That's part one, in which Krantz falls into and embraces his scam.  Part two adds a nice twist.  He comes to the town of Corvallis (home of Oregon State University and a prime location for the post-apocalyptic Dies the Fire series), where society seems to be holding on pretty well and surging toward a brighter future.  It's precisely the kind of place Krantz has been looking for all these years, a place to settle down and help rebuild the world, but he's now trapped by his own lie.  He's unable to give up the postman game because of how much the lie has taken root behind him.  Thrown in another nice twist in the form of a still functional (maybe) super computer and this middle section of the book is a highlight.

The third part (perhaps not coincidentally, the part that wasn't originally published in stand alone form)doesn't fare so well.  There's an invading army of Randians threatening the struggling civilization, which Krantz decides to stay behind and fight, rather than flee.  Which is a shame, because when the big showdown comes - between genetically enhanced soldiers who have played no real part up to this point - he's watching from the sidelines.  Add in a weird bit of extremist feminism that seems more like parody than anything else and the book ends with a bit of a thud.

Naturally, this being Brin, it ends on an uplifting (ha!) sentiment.  He's big on science fiction as an inherently positive endeavor, showing how mankind will keep on keeping on in the future.  It's a hard fit for a post-apocalyptic tale, so it has to at least suggest that happy days are on the way to being here again.  Having said that, there's at least enough uncertainty in the world of The Postman to not make it feel like a cop out.

The Details
------------------------
The Postman
by David Brin
Published 1985
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award

Friday Review: The MaddAddam Trilogy

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that award winning director Darren Aronofsky has been tapped to adopt Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy for HBO.  Seems like a good choice.  After all, Aronofsky's last movie was about a petulant being who nearly wipes all life from the Earth because he gets pissed off. Basically, the MaddAddam trilogy is the same thing.

Which is not to say Aronofsky won't have his hands full.

Most literary trilogies - most sci-fi (and it is, dear reader, regardless of what Atwood would tell you) ones, certainly - tell linear stories.  The story starts in the first volume, continues in the second, and then is resolved in the third.  MaddAddam doesn't play the same game.  Yes, there is a continuous story being told, one of a post-apocalyptic world and the few people left to deal with it.  But the focus of each novel is on the past, not the present, as we learn just how this world came to be the way it is.  Which is good, because the flashbacks are, generally, much more interesting than what's going on in the "present."

Book one, Oryx and Crake, begins with Snowman (aka Jimmy), a post-apocalyptic hermit who lives nearby some very strange nouveau humans, to whom he is a kind of protector and prophet.  Through flashbacks, we learn that Snowman was friends with Crake (aka Glenn), an all around genius.  They were both in love with Oryx, who may or may not have been a girl they first discovered via only kiddy porn (See?  I told you the flashbacks were more interesting).  Crake's genius, as it happens, is tempered by his disdain for what humans have do to the planet, so he uses his skills to (a) engineer a virus that wipes most of humanity off the planet and (b) engineer the nouveau humans, called Crakers.

The second volume, The Year of the Flood, focuses on two women who survive the virus, Toby and Ren.  Their back stories intersect with each other via a environmentalist cult called God's Gardeners (they also intersect with Jimmy and Glenn, as it happens).  The Gardeners preach about the need to return to nature and of the coming "waterless flood," which will wipe humanity off the map (thus allowing the big bad from Aronofsky's movie off the hook after promising no more floods).  This book is interrupted, in numerous places, for sermons from the Gardener's founder, Adam One, and songs of worship.  For the audiobook, the songs are actually performed, which was neat at first, but quickly got old.  If we need hippified love-Gaia kind of tunes, couldn't they have called up Steve Hilliage?

The final volume, MaddAddam, picks up where the first two converge and goes forward from there, but also backwards.  This one focuses on Zeb and his brother, Adam (aka Adam One), and their role in the waterless flood.  This is all told, in flashback (naturally), to Toby, who then has the unenviable task of translating it for the Crakers, who continue to want to know how they came to be.

With any trilogy, there's a sense of diminishing returns.  No sequel, no matter how skillfully done, can replicate the fun of being thrown into an entirely new world that you get from the first volume.  The MaddAddam trilogy suffers from this more than others, thanks to its format.  Each book essentially tells flashback versions of the same story, but from different points of view.  It's more effective than you might think, but by the time we dive into Zeb's story it's less a matter of learning new information than finding out how characters we've come to know from earlier volumes fit into the narrative.

The "old" world that Atwood fleshes out in the flashbacks is fascinating, chilling, and hits just a little too close to home.  Corporations have become supreme, not by buying into government (like they do now), but by setting up their own heavily armed fiefdoms.  Those who don't work for the corps are stuck in violence and poverty plagued "pleeblands."  The seas have risen (New York City is gone, replaced by a new version in Jersey) and various kinds of genetically grown critters - hybrids of, say, lions and lambs (it's a religious thing) - roam the earth.  I won't go so far as to say that Atwood sets up a world that's worth destroying, but that argument could be made.

The only thing in the new world that's half as interesting are the Crakers, the nouveau humans created by Crake as the replacements for our kind of humans.  Made with a heavy dose of genetic engineering, they're vegetarians (the graze), run around naked but can stand the warming sun, and mate only every so often in weird rituals that involve gang bangs and waving blue penises.  Unfortunately, the Crakers are also exceptionally annoying, because Crake did not bless them with a mind as advanced as our own.  The interactions between the surviving humans and the Crakers are sometimes amusing, but often are only annoying.

The dullness of the new world is most evident in the closing volume.  For one thing, Atwood lets Toby, a character who has survived on her own for months and was clearly a strong person, devolve into an older variant of a moody high schooler.  She spends entirely too much of our time worrying about whether Zeb's out fucking other women, based purely on speculation, and, generally, becomes a very passive personality.  I'll assume Atwood had a reason for doing this, maybe some comment on the way we fall into old communal habits even in the strangest of circumstances, but it was hard to take.

Similarly, there's very little threat to the characters in the new world.  Since this was a biological apocalypse there's lots of spare materials to use for survival.  Yes, life for these characters is harder than it was before, but I never had a sense that they were truly eking out a survival (nobody succumbs to a mundane injury/illness, for example).  One potential menace from the earlier books, creatures called "pigoons," loose their power to frighten.  Originally created to produce spare organs for humans, they're the most advanced sci-fi swine since the piggies of Speaker for the Dead.  But, as it turns out, the Crakers can talk to them and a deal can be struck to keep everybody safe.  Bleh.

That leaves as big bads for the humans, Crakers, and pigoons to face a pair of black-hat killers, refugees of a pre-flood punishment game called painball.  Painball is so ruthless and violent that anyone who survives it is turned into a heartless psychopath bent on rape and murder.  It makes them scary, but it doesn't make them interesting.  For one thing, it's never clear why Toby and the group see the painballers as such a threat - they have them outnumbered and outgunned, so why don't the painballers just go elsewhere?  For another thing, the group of survivors shows little rational thought when it comes to what should be done to the painballers, even worrying that their offspring might be murderous psychopaths (which makes no kind of fucking sense).  The final big confrontation is saved only by a nice switch in narration that gives the whole thing a distant, mythical gloss.

If that makes it sound like I'm down on the whole trilogy, it shouldn't.  Atwood's style and way with prose goes an awful long way to making the entire thing worth reading.  It's dark territory she's exploring, but there are bursts of humor and satire that stand out.  The only thing that really goes wrong is that the entire enterprise runs out of steam in the end.  That stings (see the US collapse against Portugal last Sunday), but it doesn't invalidate everything else.

But it does mean that Aronofsky has quite a bit of work ahead of him.

The Details
------------------------
All by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake
Published 2003

The Year of the Flood
Published 2009

MaddAddam
Published 2013

Friday Review: The City and the City

Think of a city. Now, think of another city, one nearby whose culture, economics, and general life are completely entwined with the first one. Your mind may go to someplace like Minnesota's "Twin Cities" or perhaps Cold War Berlin, but think a little harder. What if the two cities actually overlapped each other so they shared the same physical space.

That's the basic idea underlying The City and the City.

One day a dead woman's body is found in Besźel, a city state somewhere in southeast Europe. Besźel shares some of its physical location with another city state, Ul Qoma. In some areas the two cities overlap (are "crosshatched"), requiring the citizens of each to learn to "unsee" the evidence of the other. A street in Besźel may be the same as a street in Ul Qoma, but the drivers in each city navigate it differently. Movement from one city to the other is restricted to a single border checkpoint. Murder is one thing, but the most serious offense in either city is to breach - to cross over to the other without permission - a taboo enforced by a shadowy organization known, coincidentally (and somewhat confusingly), as Breach.

Needless to say, the death of the young woman - from neither Besźel or Ul Qoma - requires our hero, a Besźel detective named Borlú, to dive into the mysteries of the two cities and, ultimately, of Breach itself. In other words, he winds up questioning the very fabric of his reality. China Miéville does a great job getting inside Borlú's skull, showing both the ingrained importance he ascribes to avoiding breach and his growing suspicion that it's all a bit daft.

There is, potentially, another city involved in all this, a city between the cities called Orciny. The murder victim is fascinated with Orciny and, just maybe, finds evidence that it exists and that's what got her killed. Only we wind up learning that the reason she was killed was much more mundane - a corrupt politician in bed with outside business interests - and the whole Orciny thing was just a means to string her along.

Similarly, Miéville kind of does the same to the reader. His premise that is inherently fantastic - as in a fantasy literature sense - yet he takes it and deconstructs it. However amazing the co mingled lives of Besźel and Ul Qoma are, there is nothing supernatural about their relationship. The citizens in each city merely learn not to see citizens in the other. Our brains have a powerful ability to not see what we don't want to see, but once the illusion is over it's over for good. Hence why Borlú, who gets as close to truth as there is in these places, can never really go back. Even Breach itself, which begins as some kind of "other" presence (possibly alien) turns out to be a sort of NSA plus SHIELD organization on speed.

By the end of things, to be honest, I felt as jerked around by Miéville as the victim had been by her killers. The only difference is that I loved every minute of it.

The Details
------------------------
The City and the City
by China Miéville
Published 2009
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award, World Fantasy Award, & Hugo Award (shared with The Windup Girl)

Friday Review: ROSFest 2014

Last weekend I headed off to the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania for my fourth trek to the Rites of Spring Festival, aka ROSFest.  Held annually at the lovely Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, the fest was celebrating its tenth anniversary, having developed, arguably, into the premier progressive rock festival in the United States.  All and all, I didn't find this year's fest to be as good as years past, but it was still a great weekend filled with cool music.

Which, for a moment, I thought I was going to be able to hear in my hotel room.  The Gettysburg Hotel, built in 1797, sits across a small alley from the theater.  What I didn't realize until this year is that the hotel actually extends over the alley.  See for yourself:

That's the Majestic marquee jutting out from below my window.

But enough about that - how were the tunes?

First up on Friday was Clepsydra, from Switzerland, who would be the first of three bread-and-butter neo-prog bands for the weekend.  Active in the 1990s, they have only recently reformed and had done a few shows in Europe.  To judge by their Facebook posts during the run up to the fest, they were completely stoked to open ROSFest.  Their main distinction from the rest of the neo crowd this year was vocalist Aluisio Maggini, who is apparently from the Italian speaking part of Switzerland.  His voice and English delivery reminded me of Italian bands like PFM or Banco - not a bad thing!  Overall, Clepsydra were a good, solid way to start off the festival, particularly if you like late Fish-era Marillion.

The Friday headliner was Caravan, one of the great bands of the 1970s and an originator of the Canterbury school of prog.  Since I'd never seen any of the 70s giants live, I was pretty excited, but also a bit worried.  Were they still up to it, after all these years?  Holy hell, were they ever!  They absolutely ripped the roof off the place.  MVP for the band was Geoffrey Richardson, who, in addition to being the main audience conduit, played viola, guitar, flute, penny whistle, and spoons.  Electric spoons!  It is progressive rock, after all.  While I was a little disappointed they didn't do more tracks from a couple of my favorite albums, I appreciated them playing a lot of their new album.  A highlight of the weekend, to be certain.

The weekend split kind of oddly for me this year.  I knew something about nearly all the Saturday bands, but almost nothing about Sunday's.  Would familiarity or surprise work better?

The closest thing to a surprise on Saturday was the opening band, Elephants of Scotland (despite the name, they're from Vermont).  They released their second album earlier this year and I had listened to some YouTube clips, so I had some idea of what to expect.  They didn't disappoint, playing a sometimes heavy, Rush-like kind of symphonic prog.  Good tunes and great playing all around (lots of juicy keyboard bits, always a good thing).  Their downfall, in my opinion, were the vocals.  Lead vocals were shared by the three guys not playing drums, but none of them really have lead vocalist chops.  Their harmonies sounded really good, but I think the band would benefit from a dedicated front man.  Based on some other reviews I've read, I'm not alone in thinking that.  Nonetheless, good stuff and a great kick off to the day.

Thank You Scientist hails from New Jersey and was pulling off a kind of festival double - they emerged onto the scene last year thanks to a spot at ProgDay.  That's why I had their album well in advance of the festival.  I'm glad I did, because it prepped me for their very frenetic, high energy style.  It's a lot of fun, but it's a little wearying over the course of 90 minutes.  The band stands out thanks to some unusual instrumentation - drums, guitar, bass, violin, trumpet, and tenor sax, plus a bearded lead vocalist who prowled around the stage.  They were the closest thing to "weird" at ROSFest this year and the audience embraced them, bringing them back for an honest-to-goodness encore (a riffy version of "I Am the Walrus").  Did I mention that Fantastic Planet played behind them the whole time?  Trippy, man.

Sound of Contact is a project built around drummer/vocalist Simon Collins.  You may know of his father, Phil, of Genesis fame.  Sound of Contact was actually supposed to play ProgDay last year, but their proposed tour fell through.  Now they're out on the road touring their album, Dimensionaut, which they performed in full, front to back, at ROSFest.  I'll be honest, the album hasn't really done anything for me and the live performance didn't do anything, either.  Collins is a decent enough drummer and singer, but the music is too often mush, ballady AOR kind of stuff.  If the album had Phil's name on it, I think the prog community would have panned it, but, for some reason, it's been embraced by lots of folks (including the two women in the front row giving Collins the rock star treatment).  To each his or her own, I guess.

Sweden's Beardfish is another band that broke into the prog consciousness after appearing at ProgDay (albeit several years before Thank You Scientist).  I know that, after reading about that performance, I immediately went out and grabbed The Sane Day, their then-current album.  I also bought their next three albums sound unheard.  Then . . . something happened.  For whatever reason, the furious love I had for this band waned.  Would a headlining set at ROSFest rekindle the fire?  Sort of.  The band, led by the multi-talented Rikard Sjöblom, put on a great show, are great players, and work through some really interesting music.  Nonetheless, I found myself more interested in the old stuff I knew than the new stuff.  It's not much different, but maybe that's the issue?  I can hardly complain, however, as they trotted out "Sleeping In Traffic" in all its 35-minute glory.  A good set and good way to end the day.

So, this being Sunday, I knew next to nothing about these bands coming into the day.  I was hoping one of them might turn out to be a real revelation, along the lines of Sanguine Hum from 2012, but it didn't really turn out that way.

Fright Pig is . . . well, I'm not exactly sure what Fright Pig is, to be honest.  I'm not sure it's a "band," in the traditional sense.  Assembled in Gettysburg for its first ever live performance (a tough assignment, given the Church of Prog time slot), the band itself was composed of two keyboard players from New York (one of whom was the main writer/guru) and a bunch of other players with ties to the Berkley School in Boston, but from all over the globe - Canada, Serbia, Belgium, Mexico, and the United States.  Given the ad hoc quality of the group, their performance (also playing their one album stem to stern) was impressive.  Sadly, I didn't like it all that much.  The music is very riffy and very flashy.  The audience conduit keyboard player (not the same as the guru) praised the Serbian guitar player as playing "as many notes as ants on a Tennessee anthill."  That's not really my thing.  It also didn't help that the group didn't have enough original material to fill their set and ended with lots of not-particularly-proggy covers.  So, a disappointment, but I'll not for the record that I seem to be definitely in the minority on this one.

Red Sand, from Canada (Quebec, if I'm not mistaken), was the second of the neo trio for the fest.  They certainly looked the part.  Bass player arrived with pedals (the only one of the weekend, I think) and a doubleneck, while the vocalist engaged in some patented Gabriel/Fish-inspired theatrics.  It all worked well enough, but of the neo bands for this year I thought they were the weakest.  The longer tracks didn't hang together very well.

I was prepared not to light Subsignal (from Germany).  I had convinced myself that they were a prog metal band and that's not really my thing.  So I was pleasantly surprised by how they actually sounded.  To me, they are a good, heavy, melodic rock band with a keyboard player.  Not overly proggy, but pretty damned good at what they do.  I also thought vocalist Arno Menses won the award for best crowd interactions ("you win a refrigerator!") and had a great voice to boot.  In fact, I'm disappointed that the Subsignal album I picked up afterward (their latest, Paraiso) isn't nearly as good as they were live.  Oh, well.

Collage emerged from Poland in the 1990s, along with previous ROSFest headliners Quidam, as part of the prog revival of that decade.  Unlike Quidam, they split up in 1996.  Guitarist Mirek Gil was at ROSFest last year with his current band, Believe, and the fest organizer asked him about Collage ever reforming.  In spite of initial misgivings, the reunion happened and Collage (with Believe's lead vocalist filling in) came back together specifically for the purpose of being the coda on this year's edition of ROSFest.  It was well worth the effort.  Gil is a fantastic guitarist and the Collage material suits him perfectly.  They were, by far, the best of the neo bunch and an excellent cap on the festival.

Overall, this year's ROSFest had a pair of great headline performances and a bunch of others that ran from really good to just all right.  That's a pretty good batting average, even if I didn't walk out of the theater having been awakened to an exciting new musical obsession.

Hey, there's always next year!

Friday Review: The Half-Made World

We often talk of making the world over in our own image, but at the end of the day, the world is what it is.  Any transformation is mostly metaphorical and, on a cosmic scale, brief.  But what if the world itself was still in the process of being made?  And what if human expansion is what finally tamed it?  That's the background for The Half-Made World, an entertaining mix of steampunk, alternate history (sort of), and "weird" tales.

The eastern portion of The Half-Made World looks a bit like Europe or the eastern United States in the Victorian age.  Out west, over the mountains, is a country in the process of being settled, sort of equivalent to the American west of the same time period.But further west, beyond that, things get wild.  Part and parcel of that is a native population that is more in tune with the unmade world than the more "civilized" parts of it.

Our journey into this world comes with the aid of Liv, a practitioner of the budding field of psychology who, leaves her life in the east to work at a hospital on the edge of the settled west; Creedmore, the agent of one powerful faction who kidnaps her and one of her charges; and Lowry, commander of another power faction trying to track all down.

The factions are a pair of ruthless forces that are more ideology than physical things.  The Gun favors chaos and destruction, wrought through its agents who are controlled (to a greater or lesser extent) by demons that live in their firearms.  The Line, on the other hand, preaches mechanical progress (it's main instrument are engines, which appear to be sentient trains) and converts everything in its past to a world that sounds slightly like a predecessor to Terry Gilliam's Brazil (that the Line's commander is named Lowry is surely not a coincidence).

The Half-Made World has two things really going for it.  The first is the world in builds (so to speak), particularly the way it turns an age old order/chaos conflict into the running battle of the Line and the Gun.  There isn't much time spent on why each faction does what it does or where they come from - I kind of like the ambiguity.  Instead, the book focuses on how out west everyone's lives are controlled by their relationship to one of those two factions (ally, foe, or wary neutral).

I also wonder if the way the Line and the Gun are meant to be a metaphor for American anti-terrorism activities in the 21st century.  The Gun are the ultimate terrorists, causing damage and death for the heck of it.  The deeds are committed by scattered agents that number, perhaps, in the dozens, as opposed to a kind of formal militarized force.  The Line, on the other hand, is precisely that kind of militarized force, deploying a formidable array of clever weaponry that obliterates basically everything in its path.

Early on, as the Line is in pursuit of Creedmore before he arrives at the hospital, he winds up in a small town, Kloan.  When his identity is revealed a firefight ensues that leaves most of the town's prominent citizens dead and much of the town on fire.  In spite of all that, Creedmore escapes.  What's left behind is a town now under control of the line, one that was truly destroyed so it could be saved.  If that echo of our anti-terrorism policies abroad wasn't intended commentary, it's a hell of a coincidence.

The other thing The Half-Made World really has going for it is Creedmore.  He's the only of the three main characters who really stands out in your mind.T he Line commander is just a cog in a wheel, easily replaceable, which doesn't make for great characterization.  And Liv, while fully realized in her own right, just doesn't have a lot to do.  Creedmore, on the other hand, has a fascinating past - he fell into a life of crime only after trying just about every do-gooder organization in this world (abolitionists, advocates for the native "hill folk," religious groups, etc.).  But he's a good criminal, which is what attracted him to the Gun in the end.  But now, a long way down a life extended by the Gun's magic, Creedmore is having second thoughts about his master, with whom he has nearly constant running discussions.  I appreciate that the book presents all this as an ongoing matter and dodges the easy cliche of a "bad" man who turns "good."  Creedmore is much more interesting than that.

Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of chasing that doesn't add up to a whole lot.  The unmade part of the world isn't as interesting as the Line/Gun lands.  This shift about and are generally "weird," but not all that dangerous.  As someone else pointed out elsewhere, there's still air to breathe and food to eat.  Still, the chase comes to an end, so that means something, right?  Not really.  The great secret that all parties have been chasing is never explained, although it's hinted at.  More importantly, the main characters don't seem to have arrived at any sort of end point in their stories. The book ends like it's the first of a series, but although there is a second book set in this world it isn't a direct sequel.  So the lack of a hard ending is a big disappointment.

Not big enough to avoid recommending the book, however.  The world is inventive and it's worth spending time with Creedmore as the action spills out over the west.  That it might have been better doesn't stop it from being very very good.

The Details
------------------------
The Half-Made World
By Felix Gilman
Published 2010

Friday Review: Dying of the Light

If you only know George R.R. Martin thanks to Game of Thrones (and the Song of Ice and Fire books upon which it's based), you should know two things.

First, he is not your bitch.

Second, he wrote stuff before A Song of Ice and Fire, some of which was really pretty good.  When your debut novel is nominated for a Hugo award, you're no slouch.

Which is not to say there aren't some parts of Dying of the Light that sound a bit familiar all these years on.  It's set on Worlorn, a rogue planet that's spent about 60 years in a place where it was habitable.  As a result, it hosted a festival that became a kind of World's Fair on steroids for the neighboring planets, but, as the novel starts, the festival has ended and the world is growing slowly colder and colder.  That's right - winter is coming!  There's also a typical Martin focus on detail (what everybody's wearing, eating, etc.) that, at some point, goes from interesting background detail about the world into overkill.  Oh, and did I mention that one faction that comes to the fore in the second half of the book has a wolf's head as a sigil?  Only they ain't Starks.

Our hero (of sorts), Dirk, comes to Worlorn at the urging of an old lover, who may or may not need his help.  As a result, he's dropped into some first rate culture shock when he finds out that said lover, Gwen, is now married (after a fashion) to a guy, Jaan,  who is also in a long term relationship with another man (his "teyn"), Garse.  It's complicated, but Martin does a good job of fleshing out the culture of High Kavallar (where Jaan and Garse come from) and its honor-based economy.

The other thing Dirk finds himself in, of course, is the middle of a planet that's dying.  The most effective part of the book for me was the first third or so, during which Gwen shows Dirk around the planet, taking him to several of the different cites set up by the various cultures that participated in the festival.  Those include a still fully active (and sparsely inhabited) city run by computers and the haunting Crying Lamia, an entire city designed as a musical instrument played by the winds.  The music it makes is so melancholy that it drives people to suicide.  Kind of like Magma (kidding!).

This exploration also gives Martin a chance to dig into the rich relationship between Dirk and Gwen.  To say Dirk holds a torch for Gwen is putting it mildly, although it's not clear that she has any real affection for him.  She takes him to task for holding onto a memory of another version of her that he basically made up (and gave a different name - names are big in Dying of the Light), but isn't certain whether she's in a better position in these days than those.

I thought the second half of the book was less interesting, mainly because it turns into a standard (if well done) series of chases, double crosses, and reveals of middling effectiveness.  And as the running occurs there's an inordinate amount of Kavallar dick swinging that, along with everybody going by their full several-words-long name, gets old fast.  Martin wraps everything up by not really wrapping up anything, with an ending that is either cleverly open ended or downright maddening (you'll have to judge for itself).

It's worth keeping in mind that Dying of the Light, for all its charms, is a creature of its time.  As this review notes, Gwen is "more than a McGuffin but not much more."  She's the only woman in the novel and, although she's not merely a damsel in need of rescue, the book mostly revolves around how the men in her life scheme over her.

The Details
------------------------
Dying of the Light
By George R.R. Martin
Published 1977

Friday Review: Broadway the Hard Way

In 1988 Frank Zappa embarked on what would be his last tour.  He put together a big band, complete with a five-piece horn section and drilled it on dozens of songs, both reworked old favorites and new material.  Zappa mainstays like Ike Willis and Ed Mann were joined by newly minted stunt guitarist Mike Keneally.  Musically, the result was one of the best periods of Zappa's career, with argument being split as to whether this band or the mid-70s Roxy & Elsewhere band came out on top.

Sadly, the band fell apart, rather spectacularly, following stops in the eastern United States and Europe.  As a result, the 1998 band has an almost mystical quality to it, both because people wonder just what caused it to implode and the because it was, for many folks, the best band they never heard in their lives.

Thankfully, Zappa saw fit to record every stop on the tour (save one, due to technical difficulties) and, for a band with an aborted lifespan, it's ridiculously well documented.  During Zappa's lifetime he released three albums of material, with additional tracks showing up on some You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore collections.  Even more tracks have been released since Zappa's death.

The first of the three albums to be released was Broadway the Hard Way (also the name of the tour itself).  Originally an LP of almost all new material, it was expanded for its CD release with several reworked older tracks.  The new stuff is almost all political or socially satirical in nature  and will put off some folks.  However, the political stuff is bipartisan (Jesse Jackson gets smacked in "Rhymin' Man," along with the GOP in tracks like "When The Lie's So Big?" and "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk") and some of the other stuff is good fun ("Elvis Has Just Left the Building," for instance).  There's also an appearance from "Mr. Sting" to perform "Murder By Numbers" and a ripping "Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel."  Still, it's the least essential of the three because it's so bogged down in the era.

The two-disc The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life featured more older material, although in radically different forms given the arsenal Zappa had at his disposal.  Good examples would be the run of One Size Fits All tunes on disc one.  It also features the highest quotient of Jimmy Swaggart related songs (he was a regular rhetorical punching bag throughout the tour), including "Swaggart Versions" of "More Trouble Every Day" and "Lonesome Cowboy Burt."  Finally, this release includes some bizarre cover versions, some recorded during sound checks, topped off by a version of "Stairway to Heaven" in which Zappa the guitar god lets the famous Jimmy Page solo be taken by  . . . the horn section.

The final release, also two discs, was Make a Jazz Noise Here, which is the most "serious" and "heavy" of these albums.  It's also the most essential.  It covers a lot of the more extended instrumental tracks, often laden with improvisation and Synclavier madness from various parties.  It's here where the band shines the most, as on the suite of old Mothers tunes stripped (for the most part) of vocals.  Check the uniform attacks from the horns and percussionist Ed Mann on "The Orange County Lumber Truck" and marvel.  Having said that, some of the pieces on disc one wander a bit.  However, disc two is probably my favorite hunk of Zappa ever released (except, maybe, depending on the day of the week and the barometric pressure, Roxy & Elsewhere).  All the songs are strong and they have enough structure to them to let you know where you are.  When things end with Zappa introducing the band at the end of "Strictly Genteel," it sounds like a perfect cap on the whole affair.

Speaking of the whole affair, what the fuck happened to this band, anyway?  The short answer is that a rift quickly developed between bass player Scott Thunes, also the "Clonemeister" (the guy responsible for rehearing in Zappa'a absence) for this tour and most of the rest of the band, particularly drummer Chad Wackerman and the horn section.  The long answer (although, honestly, there isn't much more to it) is laid out in Andrew Greenaway's recent book, Zappa the Hard Way.  Using extensive interviews (new and old) with most of those involved, Greenaway provides an interesting insight into the tour, the personalities involved, and how the whole thing fell apart.  It's not the most integrated work - Greenaway is prone to introducing a person and quoting whole paragraphs of the interview - but it's chock full of interesting anecdotes, not all of them focused on what went wrong (my personal favorite was the story of the night Mats & Morgan got to meet and play with Zappa).

One thing Greenaway gets right - because I agree with him! - is that Zappa was a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to these live albums.  In the liner notes to each, Zappa proudly explains that the music contained therein was all performed live and with no overdubs.  While that was true, it elides the fact that most of the tracks are stitched together from multiple performances, thus presenting performances that never really existed in the wild.  I've got no problem with that - it's a stunning technical achievement in some instances (over 20 in "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk") - but don't get all holier than thou about it.

At the time the 1988 tour fell apart, nobody knew it was Zappa's last.  He made statement (both after and before) about being done with the rock band thing, but it's hard to say if he could have kept off the stage had he lived past 1993.  As a last hurrah, it's a shame it had to implode the way it did.  But it did leave behind an awful lot of excellent music for posterity.

The Details:
--------------------------
Broadway the Hard Way, by Frank Zappa
Released 1998

Tracks:
1. Elvis Has Just Left the Building (2:24)
2. Planet Of The Baritone Women (2:48)
3. Any Kind Of Pain (5:42)
4. Dickie's Such An Asshole (5:45)
5. When The Lie's So Big (3:38)
6. Rhymin' Man (3:50)
7. Promiscuous (2:02)
8. The Untouchables (2:26)
9. Why Don't You Like Me? (2:57)
10. Bacon Fat (1:29)
11. Stolen Moments (2:57)
12. Murder By Numbers (5:37)
13. Jezebel Boy (2:27)
14. Outside Now (7:49)
15. Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel (6:40)
16. What Kind Of Girl? (3:17)
17. Jesus Thinks You're A Jerk (9:15)

The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, by Frank Zappa
Released 1991

Tracks:
Disc one
1. Heavy Duty Judy (6:04)
2. Ring Of Fire (2:00)
3. Cosmik Debris (4:32)
4. Find Her Finer (2:42)
5. Who Needs The Peace Corps? (2:40)
6. I Left My Heart In San Francisco (0:36)
7. Zomby Woof (5:41)
8. Bolero (5:19)
9. Zoot Allures (7:07)
10. Mr. Green Genes (3:40)
11. Florentine Pogen (7:11)
12. Andy (5:51)
13. Inca Roads (8:19)
14. Sofa # 1 (2:49)

Disc two
1. Purple Haze (2:27)
2. Sunshine Of Your Love (2:30)
3. Let's Move To Cleveland (5:51)
4. When Irish Eyes Are Smiling (0:46)
5. "God Father Part II" Theme (0:30)
6. A Few Moments With Brother A.West (4:00)
7. The Torture Never Stops (Part One) (5:19)
8. Theme From "Bonanza" (0:28)
9. Lonesome Cowboy Burt (Swaggart version) (4:54)
10. The Torture Never Stops (Part Two) (10:47)
11. More Trouble Everyday (Swaggart Version) (5:28)
12. Penguin In Bondage (Swaggart Version) (5:05)
13. The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue (9:18)
14. Stairway To Heaven (9:19)

Make A Jazz Noise Here, by Frank Zappa
Released 1991

Tracks:
Disc one
1. Stinkfoot (7:40)
2. When Yuppies Go To Hell (14:36)
3. Fire and Chains (3:57)
4. Let's Make The Water Turn Black (1:36)
5. Harry, You're A Beast (0:47)
6. The Orange County Lumber Truck (0:42)
7. Oh No (4:43)
8. Theme From Lumpy Gravy (1:12)
9. Eat That Question (1:55)
10. Black Napkins (6:56)
11. Big Swifty (11:13)
12. King Kong (13:11)
13. Stars Won't Work (3:33)

Disc two
1. The Black Page (New Age Version) (6:45)
2. T'Mershi Duween (1:42)
3. Dupree's Paradise (8:35)
4. City Of Tiny Lights (8:01)
5. Royal March From L'Histoire Du Soldat (1:00)
6. Theme From The Bartok Piano Concerto #3 (3:43)
7. Sinister Footwear 2nd Mov. (6:19)
8. Stevie's Spanking (4:26)
9. Alien Orifice (4:15)
10. Cruisin' For Burgers (8:28)
11. Advance Romance (7:43)
12. Strictly Genteel (5:37)

Players for all:
Frank Zappa (lead guitar, synth, vocal)
Ike Willis (rhythm guitar, synth, vocals)
Mike Keneally (rhythm guitar, synth, vocals)
Bobby Martin (keyboards, vocal)
Ed Mann (vibes, marimba, electronic percussion)
Walt Fowler (trumpet, flugel horn, synth)
Bruce Fowler (trombone)
Paul Carman (alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, baritone saxophone)
Albert Wing (tenor saxophone)
Kurt McGettrick (baritone saxophone, contrabass clarinet)
Scott Thunes (electric bass, MiniMoog)
Chad Wackerman (drums, electronic percussion)

Zappa the Hard Way, by Andrew Greenaway
Published 2011

Friday Review: Bright-Sided

My favorite current comic strip is Pearls Before Swine.  Part of why it appeals to me is that I see the two main characters, Pig and Rat, as the dueling sides of my own personality (see also, Van der Graff Generator's "Man-Erg").  Pig is sunny, trusting, gullible, and generally simple minded.  Rat is a cynic, a curmudgeon, and thinks the best character for a childrens' book series is a frequently drunk, homicidal donkey.  You get the picture.  I mention that because, while reading/listening to Bright-Sided, I kept wondering about how Pig and Rat would react to a "positive thinking" sales pitch.  Undoubtedly, Pig would gleefully embrace the power of positive thinking.  Rat, by contrast, would beat it into a coma with a tennis racket.

Barbara Ehrenreich would probably help Rat by holding positive thinking down.  In Bright-Sided she catalogs how the idea that good thoughts can manifest good outcomes in the world around us has infiltrated just about every facet of modern American life.  She begins with the world of breast cancer, with which she was diagnosed in 2000.  She was appalled by the amount of ink spilt not only on the idea that one must have a positive attitude toward treatment in order to survive, but that in many quarters suffers are encouraged to see breast cancer as a "gift" that actually changes their lives for the better.  Ehrenreich traces such counter-factual positive thinking through modern business, religion, academics, and financial sectors.  It is, she argues, largely responsible for the financial meltdown of 2007.

Ehrenreich also goes back in time a bit to figure out where this aversion to reality came from.  Oddly enough, she traces it back to another aversion from reality - religion.  Specifically, Ehrenreich argues that what we think of today as the "positive thinking" movement began as a reaction to the particularly harsh, judgmental 19th Century form of American Calvinism.  In a world shaped by a view that your salvation (or, more likely, lack thereof) was preordained, a contrary voice saying you had more power to shape your own destiny than you ever knew was compelling.  The result was the New Thought movement, out of which sprang things like Christian Science and the Unity movement.

One irony of the positive thinking movement is that, although it began as a reaction to a particular strain of Christianity, it was eventually adopted by a wholly different one - the "prosperity gospel" megachurches.  Ehrenreich delves into that as well - particularly focusing on the church of Joel Osteen - and we see the self-affirmation and "imagine it and you can have it" morphed into "pray hard enough and God will provide it."  Same shit, different container, as they say.

To be honest, I've never given positive thinking, or its more recent commercial versions like The Secret much thought.  It's woo, of course, but largely harmless woo, right?  Ehrenreich convinced me otherwise.  Aside from the basic truth that someone who thinks they can mould reality to their will is going to be seriously disappointed eventually (perhaps in disastrous ways - see the financial meltdown), Ehrenreich also went into how the push to think positively helps obscure injustice in the world.  This particularly came through in her discussion of positive thinking as it invaded business practices during the 1980s, particularly when it comes to downsizing.  Why be angry at a political or economic system that just made you unemployed after years of work for a company when, if you think it hard enough, you can see it as an exciting new opportunity to change your life?  Likewise, why should the cancer patient rail against the inequality of living in the only civilized country on Earth without national healthcare when you can discover personal growth through the arduous (and expensive) process of mere survival?  In the end, all gurus sound like Pangloss, preaching about how this is the best of all possible worlds.

Having said that, there's a sense that Ehrenreich is only going after low hanging fruit.  It's easy to point and laugh at people who think they'll get a new Mercedes just by thinking hard enough about it.  The folks that peddle that nonsense are cranks of the first order.  Wealthy cranks, but cranks nonetheless.  But Ehrenreich doesn't really investigate where positive yet still realistic thinking might be helpful in certain circumstances.  To use a personal example, I wouldn't keep writing and working on fiction to try and get it published if I didn't have a little bit of "I know I can do this" running round in my head (confession time - I occasionally daydream about what my Wikipedia entry will eventually say).  That being said, I don't sit back and think I'll get published and be a successful author just by visualizing it.  I know there's a lot of work still to be done and lots of things I need to learn.  But if I didn't have some positive outlook on the whole process, why would I stick with it?

Which is to say, Ehrenreich's book isn't going to sway a lot of people away from the power of positive thinking.  She's largely preaching to the skeptical choir.  Nor does she really make any attempt to understand the allure of positive thinking to those who support the industry by buying books and DVDs and attending seminars devoted to it.  Sure, the stuff about the Osteens had its place, but what about those in the congregation who come back Sunday after Sunday?  It's too easy (and condescending) to dismiss them all as idiots and be done with it.

What Bright-Sided has going for it is that it's a fun read and, in many spots, an interesting one.  However, it falls short of really proving how positive thinking undermined America.

The Details
------------------------
Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermining America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Published 2010

Friday Review Year In Review

2013 wasn't the most productive year here at Feeding the Silence, but if there was one thing I returned to time and again, even in fairly fallow periods, it was the Friday Review.  Partly, I'm sure, that's because if I have something to say about a movie, album, or book this is the best place to do it.  It's also due to the fact that, based on page views at least (meager though they be), this feature is fairly popular.  So, here's what you might have missed in the past 12 months:

Music:

• Dare
• Harbor Lights
• The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)
• ROSFest 2013
• Selling England By the Pound
• Yessongs/Tales From Topographic Oceans
• The Weight of the World

Books:

• Dies the Fire
• Earth Abides
• The End of Eternity
• State of Jones
• Under the Dome

Movies:

• Compliance
• The Exorcist
• Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie
• 9012Live
• Zero Dark Thirty

More to come in 2014!

Friday Review: The Weight of the World

In spite of what Foreigner says, it never really feels like the first time.  There's just something about the spark of discovery that can't be replicated.  That's true of music as much as it is of, well, other things.

When Sanguine Hum took the stage at ROSFest 2012 I hadn't heard note one from them.  They only had one album out and I was perfectly willing to wait and see what they were all about in a live setting.  That worked out well, as they completely blew me away.  I went out and got a hold everything related to the band I could, from their album Diving Bell to a pair of EPs by a prior incarnation of the band called Antique Seeking Nuns.  I even tracked down an electronic side project called Nunbient. I was musically smitten.

Then, this year, along came The Weight of the World.  A new album!  Oh, joy!  Oh, rapture!  Oh . . . hey, wait a minute.  This isn't quite the same, is it?  No, this time I've got some idea what to expect going in.  The result, as it happened, was that the new album landed in my mind with a kind of depressing thunk.  It wasn't bad, certainly, but wasn't brain rattlingly brilliant.

That was months ago.

Now, I'm pretty convinced that The Weight of the World is, in fact, brain rattlingly brilliant.  It takes the style of Diving Bell, refines it even further and adds some neat extras (some imported from Nunbient, to my pleasant surprise).

Take "From the Ground Up," which opens the album with just a synthy beat and vocals, unlike anything from Diving Bell.  Things get more "organic" once the whole band joins in (Matt Barber favors a lot of Rhodes piano, which is far from a bad thing) and the long, lilting vocal lines sit atop winding guitar and synth lines.  Similar touches of electronica infuse "Cognoscenti" and the exponential spiraling of "Day of Release," as well.  A couple other tracks, including the instrumental "In Code," conjure a Zappa-esque feel with some finely crafted tuned percussion work.  All this leads to the epic title track, which wraps up everything in neat, if sprawling, package.

In the end, it's hard to pin down just what it is about Sanguine Hum that hits my musical sweet spot.  Their music is dense, layered, and complex but doesn't come off as "complicated" just for the sake of it.  In other words, the band doesn't scream "progressive rock," it's just as proggy as it wants to be.  On the other hand, it's generally melodic and tuneful, but with a dark edge to it that doesn't exactly leave you walking down the street whistling. Antinque Seeking Nuns had a Canterbury-ish sense of humor that's lacking, or at least tempered by serious melancholy, in Sanguine Hum.  Maybe that's it - that combination, leavened with a heavy dose of genuine Englishness, curdles into something I just can't resist.  It doesn't sound like anything else out there, that's for certain.

Regardless, The Weight of the World lives up to its ambitions and is, if not the very best album of the year, certainly one of them. So, no, it's not like the first time.  It's even better.

Details
-------------------
The Weight of the World, by Sanguine Hum
Released 2013

Tracks:
1. From The Ground Up (5:35)
2. System For Solution (8:02)
3. In Code (4:35)
4. Cognoscenti (3:57)
5. Day Of Release (5:51)
6. Phosphor (3:04)
7. The Weight Of The World, Parts 1 to 3 (14:51)

Players:
Matt Baber (keyboards, drum programming)
Joff Winks (guitar, vocals)
Brad Waissman (bass)
Andrew Booker (drums)

Friday Review: Earth Abides

If Isherwood Williams is the future of the human race, perhaps best just to let it go and call it an eon.

I sometimes have a problem coming to things too late.  By the time I saw The Godfather and its sequel, the culture was so saturated in mob stories - from Casino and Goodfellas to The Sopranos (did I mention I came to it late?) - that it didn't seem fresh or all that interesting.  That's not a knock on its quality, just that it didn't really do it for me.

I get the same vibe from Earth Abides.  It is one of the first, if not the very first, examples of the post-apocalyptic "last man on Earth" subgenre of science fiction.  Published in 1949, it's won its share of acollades, including inaugural International Fantasy Award.  Heck, the version I read/listened to was even introduced by Connie Willis, no slouch herself.

So why doesn't Earth Abides do anything for me?  No, scratch that - why did it encouraged in me a positive loathing, at least at times?  Certainly part of it has to do with the genre itself having been played out ad nauseum over the ensuing decades.  The vistas of empty cities, decaying landmarks, overgrown lawns, and the like are all fairly common now.  Same for the struggle to survive in a world where the conveniences of modern life are gone.

That's certainly part of it, but a large part of my negative opinion of Earth Abides is that it is deeply entwined with its lead character, a hero who really is anything but.

Said hero, referred to as Ish for most of the book, is at an isloated cabin in the woods near San Francisco when some kind pandemic hits that wipes most of humanity off the Earth.  How he escapes that fate isn't really explained (it may have something to do with an infection from a rattlesnake bite he was fending off), but that's not important.  What is important is that when Ish comes down from the mountains to rejoin society, society's pretty much gone.

Early on Ish cites his background as a geographer and his termperment as giving him the perfect tools to observe how the planet will reclaim itself without mankind around to mess things up.  While this leads to some interesting digressions into the survival (or not) of particular environments or critters, it also, unfortunately, highlights the fact that Ish (and the author) are much more interested in watching than doing.  In fact, my main problem with the book is that we're trapped in Ish's head most of the time, even when he describes events that could serve as narrative jumping off points for some real drama.

A perfect exmaple - the book is divided into three main parts and covers over fourty years.  However, most of those years are blazed through in a pair of chapters in which Ish simply ticks of things that happend, including births and deaths that impact the makeup of the little tribe that just might be the future of the human race.  In addition to giving short shrift to those kinds of events, this allows Ish (and the author, by extension) to ignore lots of potential conflicts that could arise among a few dozen people trying to make a go of it after the world goes to shit.  There's very little dialog and even less tension, since everything is filtered through the lens of Ish's perception

Which is a major problem, because Ish is, sad to say, pretty much an asshole (I haven't disliked a main character this much since I read The Magicians).  His stand offishness doesn't come off as a chacater trait that will make it difficult to integrate with the new world, a barrier to overcome (which might have been interesting).  Instead, it's part of a smug superiority complex about himself compared to the rest of what's left of humanity.  Most of the first half of the book is taken up by an epic transcontinental journey during which Ish meets some other survivors, none of whom measure up to his standards for companionship.  Once he returns to the San Francisco area and settles down things get no better.  He repeatedly puts down the others in his little group as being stupid, not interested in intellectual matters, and generally inferior to him.  None of them are up to the task of rebuilding civilization, which Ish thinks is important, but not important enough to ever do anything about.  All of this wouldn't be so bad if we had something other than Ish's word to go by, but since we rarely see anybody else in action it's hard not to think he's just an elitest prick.

It doesn't help that Ish is very much a creature of his time.  The women of his little group (again, by his description only) are good for little more than house keeping, baby making, and a generic sense of "strength" in the face of even more generic adversity.  The one exception is Evie, a grown woman with some kind of mental deficiency or developmental disability.  For the most part she's simply an other, always kept apart from the tribe's subgroups when Ish feels the need to give us a census.  He even muses about killing her simply to be done with her and the problems she presents.

Evie's only part to play in the story is when an outsider, Charlie, comes to town with two of the younger men who have made another (aborted) transcontinental journey.  He's immediately "trouble" and starts to move in on Evie, probably giving her the only real attention she's recieved in years.  Ish is concerned and it's easy to see why - it looks like Charlie intends to take sexual advantage of a woman who's not metnally competent.  Good for Ish.  Only, it turns out, Ish's real concern is not for Evie's individual rights or bodily integrity, but that the resulting offspring would be idiots and, thus, drag the tribe down.  When Ish and a few others decide to off Charlie, it's less out of a sense of protecting an innocent than from some misguided low-tech eugenic concern.

It also doesn't help matters that Ish constantly changes the way he feels about the world lost and the world as it might be when he's gone.  On the one hand, he belittles some of his companions for holding onto memories of things from the old world that won't return for a long time, if ever.  On the other, he extols the virtue of books and the need to consume the knowledge in them, even if he never finds anyone worthy of his pursuit of that knowledge.  He wants someone to rebuild civilization, but it's never clear why as he didn't seem to have much fondness for it.

Which, oddly, counts for the greatest strength of Earth Abides.  For all its faults, the story itself is not the stereotypical one of surivovors picking up the pieces of a shattered world and trying to rebuild it.  Instead, Ish and his fellows just live, for years and years (all to easily, if we're honest), without undertaking great quests or schemes for rebuilding.  That's not the direction most works in the genre it helped spawn take, so kudos for that.

I recognize the prime place Earth Abides has in the genre's history.  And I recognize that, read at an earlier time with a more open mind, perhaps it would have a great impact on a reader (as it has to many others).  But on the verge of 2014, I have to admit that I just don't get it.  Earth may abide, but I don't think I'd be able to abide Ish for very long.

The Details
------------------------
Earth Abides
By George R. Stewart
Published 1949
Winner, International Fantasy Award (1951)

Friday Review: Compliance

Some movies are labeled “inspired by a true story” to avoid lawsuits and distance the film from the real life inspiration. Others are labeled that way because, if they didn’t, you’d think “there’s no way this kind of shit could really happen.” (Still others do it just to fake you out).

Compliance needs the label because what happens on screen shouldn’t ever happen in real life, but it did.

Between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s there were a string of incidents – more than 70 in all – in which a man would call some retail establishment, claim to be a cop, and convince a manager to “investigate” an underling for some alleged offense. The orders included a strip search, confinement while waiting for the “police” to arrive, and a constant search for purloined funds (for a lengthy article about the scam see here).

Compliance dramatizes the basic outline of one of most heinous incidents – one that progressed so far that it included forced oral sex and cavity searches. Along the way, it asks an awful lot of questions about why people do things others tell them, based on nothing more than what the courts call, in another context, “apparent authority.”

Compliance tells the story of Becky, a 19-year old front-counter employee at a nondescript chicken-based fast food joint. Her manager, Sandra, has lots of things on her mind - $1500 in spoiled food, a “fiancé” who won’t pop the question, and a parcel full of unenthused teens for a workforce – when a man calling himself “Officer Daniels” calls. He accuses Becky of stealing from a customer within the last hour. He also claims that he has the customer with him, that there’s video surveillance of the whole thing, and he’s got Sandra’s boss on the other line. Won’t she help him with this investigation?

Of course she says yes, even though she’s seen nothing to suggest Becky is a thief. The caller uses that initial agreement to drive Sandra (and, eventually, her would-be fiancé) into being his agent on the scene, doing all sorts of degrading things to Becky in the name of “clearing things up” and keeping Becky from being taken to jail.

One of the interesting dynamics in the film is how there are multiple levels of “compliance” happening. First, and most obviously, there’s Sandra who acquiesces to the authority of an alleged cop and, to a lesser extent, her boss. Second, there’s the dynamic between Sandra who has to both bring some of her employees into the action or, at the very least, fend off their questions about what’s going on. In the end, they defer to their boss. Finally, and more esoterically, there’s the entire idea that regular ideas about how the world works should come to a grinding halt in order to secure evidence of criminal wrongdoing. It hangs over the people involved here just as much as it did to folks in Boston when parts of the city were locked down following the Boston Marathon bombing.

Particularly fascinating to my defense lawyer brain was how Sandra used the certainty of Becky’s guilt to keep her own underlings in line. The incident as described by the “cop” doesn’t really make any sense – as several other employees point out. It would have caused a huge scene and the allegedly wronged party would’ve sought out Sandra to complain (indeed, we see another customer complain about a poorly made sandwich – it’s a tough crowd!). Nevertheless, whatever doubt Sandra has about Becky’s guilt is suppressed on behalf of a clear narrative – there’s been a crime, I’m in charge, don’t fuck with me.

In the end, a little bit of skepticism on Sandra’s part would have gone a long way toward averting the whole situation. A simple call to her superior or to the police to confirm the investigation (we learn in a postscript that the police station is only a few blocks away) would have put an end to the farce from the beginning. But that requires the ability to disbelieve, which is hard for some people to do, particularly when it comes to people presented as authority figures. Compliance shows how far some people will go without pushing back against that kind of authority.


The Details
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Compliance
Released 2012
Directed & written by Craig Zobel
Starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, et. al.

Friday Review: The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)

I’ve had a strange relationship with Steven Wilson. Or with his music, anyway.

My first exposure to his stuff was Porcupine Tree’s The Sky Moves Sideways, which left me completely unimpressed. It wasn’t until I heard Porcupine Tree in their later, more streamlined Stupid Dream phase (via a webcast of their set at NEARFest) that something clicked. I’ve been a fan since, although I’ve not dug back into the older stuff (Sky . . . still doesn’t really do it for me).

Given that Porcupine Tree is essentially Wilson’s baby, it made sense to check out his other stuff. I really like most of what I’ve heard of No-Man (his collaboration with vocalist Tim Bowness) and would really like to get my hands on his droney ambient project Bass Communion (they’re maddeningly hard to come by). So when Wilson went “solo,” such as it was, I came along for the ride.

His first album, Insurgentes, mined a lot of his influences that were tangential to progressive rock, if they had any relation at all. As such, it’s not overtly “proggy,” but has a pan-genre inclusiveness to it that makes it really interesting. I like it more than most people, however. Grace for Drowning, his second effort, wore the influences of his work remixing the King Crimson catalog and went down a much more prog-through-the-lens-of-jazz path. In spite of an amazing list of collaborators, Grace . . . has never done much for me.

Which brings us to The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories). To tour Grace . . . Wilson put together a killer band that included Marco Minnemann, Theo Travis, and Nick Beggs. From that tour he took those guys right back into the studio for The Raven . . .., hoping to capture some of the energy of the live shows.

The result is pretty impressive, even though it doesn’t get me as excited as it does many prog fans. The Raven sounds even more like an homage to 70s symphonic prog, right down to the extensive use of the original King Crimson Mellotron (it pays to be friends with Bob Fripp). It’s used to particularly good effect near the end of “Luminol,” which in other places fires off riffs that remind me of “21st Century Schizoid Man” (or, more recently, another Wilson collaborator – Steve Hackett’s “Mechanical Bride”). The highlight for me is “Holy Drinker,” with some fantastic organ and synth bits. The title track is also a beautiful, mournful cap to the whole experience.

I’ve lived with Grace for Drowning since it came out, waiting for it to grow on me and rip my head off. It’s never happened. But in the few weeks I’ve had to digest The Raven . . ., I’ve found myself warming to it noticeably. Not an immediate “wow,” but definitely an impressive, layered grower. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Details
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The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories), by Steven Wilson
Released 2012

Tracks:
1. Luminol (12:10)
2. Drive Home (7:37)
3. The Holy Drinker (10:13)
4. The Pin Drop (5:03)
5. The Watchmaker (11:43)
6. The Raven That Refused To Sing (7:57)

Players:
Guthrie Govan (lead guitar)
Nick Beggs (bass, Stick, backing vocals)
Marco Minnemann (drums, percussion)
Adam Holzman (Rhodes, Hammond, piano, Minimoog)
Theo Travis (saxophone, flute, clarinet)
Steven Wilson (vocals, guitars, bass keyboards, Mellotron)

Friday Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s begin with the thought that no representation of a historical event can really accurately capture that event. Even first-hand news accounts based on interviews from people who just witnessed the event often get things wrong, either the minor details or broader strokes. Which is only to say that any movie, even a documentary, isn’t able to present “the truth,” but rather only one variant of it, a variant that’s molded for reasons of art and, sometimes, politics or propaganda.

When Zero Dark Thirty came out last year I wrote about the controversy swirling around of whether it justified torture as the means by which the United States learned the location of Osama bin Laden, ultimately leading to him being killed by Navy SEALs. On the one hand, it was an apologia for torture that shows an efficacy that isn’t borne out by the historical record. On the other, it’s a movie that, perhaps, is taking aim at broader themes. As I concluded:

Which is just to say, you really need to see the movie before you decide its morally horrific. Is there some reason to think that critics, who have actually seen it, just check their moral compasses at the door? Or is the film perhaps more nuanced and subtle than Bruni, et. al., are giving it credit for? Who knows? I suppose we common folk will need to wait until January to find out.

In the end, it’s best to judge for yourself.

So now that I’ve finally seen Zero Dark Thirty, I suppose it’s time to do some judging. Putting to one side Kathryn Biggelow’s ill-advised remark that the film is “journalistic,” I think most of the furor about the film was ill founded.

First and foremost, does the movie come out and say torture was effective in getting crucial info on bin Laden and thus allowing us to track him down? Sort of yes, sort of no. The real problem is that, for dramatic/streamlining purposes, the dozens of people questioned and, in some cases, tortured for information during the search are pretty much reduced to one guy, Ammar. We see him brutalized in multiple ways, during which he either provides no information or incorrect information (in one scene he feebly recites every day of the week as potential answers to try and avoid being crammed into a tight wooden box). Later, after an attack in Saudi Arabia, he’s treated to lunch and a little kindness (in addition to false information about the attack) and only then does he provide some relevant information.

Is Ammar’s story one of torture working in the end? After all, during their little lunch the chief interrogator tells Ammar that he can hurt him again, if he doesn’t cooperate. The threat of more brutality hangs over the conversation like a circling bird of prey. Or, alternately, is Ammar’s story one that shows how torture doesn’t work, since he only gives up important information after the torture stops? Honestly, it’s both.

If Ammar was a real person, a single identifiable individual, I’d say it shows that torture had been effective. The brutality he experienced is a bell that cannot be unrung. After all, the whole reason the bad cop/good cop dance works isn’t because the suspect wants to please the good cop, it’s because he wants to avoid further pissing off the bad cop. Once tortured, any further questioning while the threat (explicit or otherwise) remains is tainted, at least within the short time frame presented in the film.

But Ammar isn’t a real person. He’s a character in a fictionalized account of a real event, one that serves as a stand in for numerous detainees, if not damned near all of them. Dramatically, the distinction between what produces no information (torture) and what produces valuable information (kindness, or at least humane treatment) is stark and dramatically effective.

So, is it a movie that argues for the triumph of torture or not? Did Dick Cheney really love it? Ultimately, I think it works as a sort of Rorschach test for the viewer. There’s enough there for viewers looking for a pro-torture message in the film to find it, such as later repeated references to new limits on torture making the hunt for bin Laden more difficult. But there’s also enough there to read it as a statement on the ultimate futility of torture as a useful information gathering tool. There is never, to be fair, a full-throated moral objection to torture, however. It’s a purely utilitarian argument.

Personally, I see the film as a meta commentary on the United States reaction to 9/11 and our behavior during the War on Terror. In addition to being a stand-in for the person (or persons) who led the hunt for bin Laden, the main character Maya strikes me as a stand-in for the American people as well. She is spurred to action by 9/11, is uncomfortable with some of what that means, but ultimately she’s not willing to completely repudiate it. Her laser-like focus on bin Laden is contrasted with the world moving on around her, raising questions about the need to expend resources on the hunt. And, finally, when all is said and done, what has Maya really accomplished? She heads home, alone, in the back of an empty C-130 transport plane, to an uncertain future. The air of melancholy at the end of the film seems to me to be a giant question mark – like someone’s asking “was all of this worth it?”

Having said all that, is the movie any good? It’s not bad, but there isn’t much greatness in it. Most of the film is a slow, slogging procedural that’s only of interest because of the inciting crime and the target of the manhunt. There’s no real character development, things just move from point A to point B, efficiently and competently, but not very compellingly. The exception to the rule is the depiction of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Rather than pump it up artificially to be the kind of loud, bright, fast action sequence we’re used to on the big screen, Bigelow lets it play out in real time. It’s a slow, methodical execution of a meticulously assembled plan. It’s all the more chilling for the cold efficiency of the SEALs in doing their thing.

Good art, at some level, is about confronting the audience with something they don’t want to see or think about. On that level, Zero Dark Thirty succeeds in spades. Whatever your ultimate takeaway from the film, it’ll make you think about what’s in it, think about it, and make you reconsider your own thoughts. That’s not a bad result, all things considered.

The Details
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Zero Dark Thirty
Released 2012
Written by Mark Boal
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, et. al.