The perils of "politics": Baitz's "Other Desert Cities"

When you see a play about "politics" in a Boston or Cambridge theater, you're pretty sure what you're going to get: an image of Republicans (or, more generally, well-off white people, who can, to be fair, also be clueless liberals) as oppressive hypocrites. On that score, Jon Robin Baitz, in his play "Other Desert Cities", currently at the Music Box in Boston, does not disappoint.

The story of the play is pretty simple.  Lyman and Polly Wyeth are Hollywood Reagan Republicans, with extensive film credits, he for acting, she for writing, and now live in busy retirement in Palm Springs. Their unstable daughter Brooke comes to visit, to tell them that she has written a book about them and her older brother, Henry, who got involved in radical antiwar activities and committed suicide.

A play involving a writer already has a problem. Instead of having a need to examine the past that grows out the unwelcome compulsion of someone who has other things to do, Brooke is a professional witness and rememberer, and so digs things up because it is consistent with her job.  Brooke had a breakdown, and an early book that everyone insists was brilliant. She hasn't been able to write for a long time. Grabbing her family's tragedy is an easy out for her. A blocked writer will do anything to get words on the page.

But that's subtext, and if it's anything Baitz hates, it's subtext. Every underlying stress is laid out by the characters in articulate, verbose speeches. Everyone talks about what they are talking about. No one says one thing while meaning another, no one is after anything that is not right in front of them, no one slyly changes the subject while seeming to be candid.

Two other characters are Trip, the youngest brother, who produces a cheesy reality TV show and seems like he should be funnier than he is, and Polly's truth-telling alcoholic sister Silda, who gets some unearned laughs by condemning Republicans for being Republicans. Truth-telling alcoholics are almost as dangerous to plays as writers.

Polly and Silda used to write movies together, then had a falling out, a story that seems much more interesting than this one.

The first act was actually not bad, with some snappy patter. When he relaxes, Baitz can write. The second is endless, and involves the revelation of a secret so freaking stupid that you can't believe it.  The secret is so big and lumpish that in order to have missed it, Brooke's search for truth turns out to be so lame and pathetic it's lucky she can remember where her parents live.

What might have saved this absurd revelation is for each of the characters to reveal something else that makes the previous version false, but Baitz hates ambiguity as much as he hates subtext, so there is a true story, damn it, and he's going to tell it to you, no matter how dumb it is.

If you search for reviews of this play online, you will see a lot of raves. That makes no sense to me at all. Even if you liked the play (and my friend Marilyn did, and was a bit hurt that Sherri and I thought it was total dreck), I don't think you can make much of a claim for quality. But I've had this trouble before with earnest productions aimed at our waning demographic. We went to the SpeakEasy to avoid these things, but it seems they have followed us from the Huntington.

In the Playbill, it twice mentions that Baitz was fired from the show he created, Brothers and Sisters, because, he says, he wanted to do "...an entertaining meditation on class and position in America" and the producers wanted a night-time soap opera.

Maybe.

No one boos at plays anymore, and I didn't either. I just put my coat on and left in silence.  Like many other talented modern playwrights, Baitz needed to be challenged, edited, forced to rewrite and rewrite again. Instead he was overpraised, and the result is Other Desert Cities.

Lincoln: Spielbergo's redemption

I've long regarded Steven Spielberg as the Leni Riefenstahl of democratic capitalism: a brilliant film maker who, handicapped by an ideological predisposition, prefers manipulation to revelation.

This thought came to me most vividly in a scene in the mediocre Saving Private Ryan (a brilliant landing montage succeeded by an overproduced WWII B picture that takes itself so seriously it drowns before reaching the beach). A message is on the way to the Ryan mother to tell her her sons are dead. The camera pans across the inside of the mother's rural farmhouse, as gauzily lit as a 70s Penthouse spread, silver-framed photographs on the bureau, wide fields outside...then a gleaming sedan pulls drives across the field, as if Christina from Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World had finally gotten herself some wheels. It's more Saving Private Lauren ("But Ralph...is Ralph still alive? He was the only one of the boys who truly appreciated my style").

In that movie Spielberg was so unsure of himself that a letter Lincoln wrote to a mother who lost her sons during the Civil War gets read not once, but twice (though read the Wikipedia entry: the internet gives us our illusions, and then, if we pay attention, takes them away).

Dammit, Spielbergo, I want people to cry when I die

So Spielberg finally did the sensible thing and turned to Lincoln himself. My daughter Faith and I saw the movie on Monday. Aside from a few Spielbergian bits of overreach (I didn't need that first scene, with its recitals of the Gettysburg Address), it is amazing. Everyone's at the top of their game, no one more than Daniel Day-Lewis (who was always my choice to play Maturin in any Patrick O'Brian-based movie) as Lincoln. He gets the reedy, rural tone just right. Future actors, playing Lincoln, will find themselves playing Day-Lewis.

The movie shows the arm-twisting, party discipline, deal-making, and genuine principle that are all part of any great legislative enactment, even the 13th Amendment. It's not all noble speechmaking. It's funnest visit to the legislative sausage factory you're ever likely to have.

Vampires may be a metaphor for slavery, but slavery needs no metaphor to be a horror. Can one be a genuine American and not revere Lincoln? I try to be generous, but most of the time, I believe that to be impossible. Those who disdain Lincoln have something damaged deep in their souls. Lincoln would have deeply believed that they could be healed, and brought home. I am no Lincoln, and doubt it very much.

See it. I have forgiven Spielberg everything. Well, he could have muted John Williams and stopped zooming slowly in on people while they talked in case we missed the significance of what they were saying ("listen, you idiot, this is important"), but these characteristic flaws are a small price to pay for the existence of this movie.

Is Stephen Carter's The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Science Fiction?

What makes Stephen L. Carter’s The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln mainstream historical fiction rather than science-fictional alternate history? Maybe nothing—the book deserves a Nebula nomination, given that other alternate histories have been nominated. Maybe it’s just the marketing that put the book on another shelf.

Carter writes better than most science fiction writers, but that should not disqualify him.

Carter also eschews a lot of hand-to hand combat, complex break-ins into secret chambers under the unfinished Washington Monument, dead-eyed Western riflemen, Chinese mandarins with elaborate diction, Himalayan religious devotions, Texans ensuring the independence of their republic, submarines, silk balloons made out of ladies’ underwear, steam-powered pogo sticks, locomotive-repairing gamines with adorable smudges of grease on their high cheekbones, and Mark Twain.

OK, so he’s just faking it. The man clearly doesn’t know a thing about alternate history.

He does know how to write a good story, though, and I had a great time with it. His point of view character is Abigail Canner, a young black woman from a high-status black family in Washington who wants to become a lawyer, and gets swept up in the shenanigans surrounding the impeachment of an Abraham Lincoln who survived the assassination attempt at Ford’s Theater (“He had been shot on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, he rose.”)

There is much fun stuff about social life on either side of the color line (with “the many evil Mellison daughters” who taunt poor Abigail as particular standouts), legal researching, courting, politics, and corruption. A number of historical characters put in appearances, including James G. Blaine, our old “continental liar from the state of Maine” and William Tecumseh Sherman.

I can guess one thing about Stephen Carter, without ever having met him: he is not a scoundrel. Nor is he a scalawag, or a rogue. I doubt he is even a rascal.

And that’s too bad. Because to handle a man like Daniel Sickles, a major figure in the narrative, you had best have features of all of those, as well as those of a con man, a circus ringmaster, a military commander, a ward heeler, and a Don Juan. Sickles has claims on being more interesting even than my old favorite, Benjamin Butler, who also appears in the narrative, but only at a distance during the trial itself. Here Sickles is one of those characters writers can’t resist as describing as “colorful”, without really showing any signs of why anyone would think that. Instead of propositioning Abigail and then claiming she stole his wallet, he performs able service to the cause. Not that Sickles wasn’t able. He was just a lot of other things as well.

One of Sickles's achievements: killing his wife's lover (the son of Francis Scott Key) and getting away with it by a plea of temporary insanity--Edwin Stanton, future Secretary of War, was his lawyer

As was my old favorite, Benjamin Butler, who appears here only on the other side of the Senate floor, as a major prosecutor in the impeachment proceedings, as he was in the historical impeachment of Andrew Johnson that serves as its model. I wish Carter had brought him up close and personal, and not described him as tall and blond without noting that he was pudgy, squint-eyed, and balding.

Did I hear someone say "no Adonis"?

Actually, the ghost of Gore Vidal (a particular favorite of mine, though he became a major crank in his later years) hovers over this work. Carter ably handles the social maneuvers at parties, the closed-door negotiations, the gossip, and the naked lust for power that were all Vidalian fascinations. He even features Kate Sprague, Salmon P. Chase’s elegant daughter, who was a major character in Vidal’s superb, if much-debated, Lincoln.

And Lincoln was a major character in Vidal’s Lincoln. Carter treats him surprisingly gingerly, sticking mostly the comical stories Lincoln used to deflect opponents and conceal his goals. Carter admits to being worried about portraying this astonishing and perplexing man. But Lincoln is the focus of the story, not a major character.

But Carter does encumber his narrative with an overly complex alternate conspiracy in addition to the Congressional cabal that is seeking to impeach the President. As always, the requirements of the conspiracy plot eventually compete for vital character oxygen with the actual surface plot, Abigail’s relationship with her complicated family, the young lawyer who has an interest in her, and all the other characters who seek to help her, confuse her, or use her. Some key figures get shortchanged.

I think Carter should have trusted his characters and the clever situation he had created for them more. The maneuvers around the impeachment were quite enough to hold my interest. But even with that handicap, it was one of the most fun books I’ve read in quite a while. Highly recommended.

Fruit Looper

I took Simon, my 16-year-old son, to see Looper a bit ago.  He loved it.

Me, not so much.

Of course, you know that I don't generally care for science fiction movies, which I usually find dumb. I found this retread of The Terminator to be dumber than most.

One problem is one I've  had before: movies can make horrible protagonists seem appealing by casting attractive actors and making them the focus.  In this case, we have Joe who, despite living in a vast and busy world, can only get a job shooting helpless tied-up men in cornfields at the behest of mysterious future criminals. He has no interests aside from taking drugs and patronizing prostitutes. When his future self comes back, he does so to murder small children. Yep, one great guy.

But the movie is full of silly things (no real spoilers here, I hope):

• The victims from the future come back with payment in the form of big silver bars. Joe, seeking to get a stake so he can free himself, keeps the silver bars in a big vault under his floor, which everyone seems to know about. They must weigh half a ton. Why doesn't he convert them to cash, the way everyone else seems to?
• There is a big city, and corn fields with empty roads. No suburbs, no shopping malls, nothing. You can even see the city from the corn field.
• When Joe is being pursued, he runs straight home, presumably to shove the silver bars in his pockets.
• Future criminals have a time machine. In fact, they have sent one of their own back in time (Jeff Daniels, in a relaxed and witty performance). But otherwise they just dump bodies through it (the machine looks like a bathysphere from the 1930s), rather than going back to this past time to make fortunes.
• In 2044, people still hop on open freight cars to get free travel.
• Time paradoxes are incredibly fluid here. There is one creepy horror-movie scene of a future person being whittled down by actions against his younger self (shades of doing things to a person in order to destroy a voodoo doll in Theodore Sturgeon's story "A Way of Thinking"), but it wouldn't suffer much examination.

SF is too often an excuse for laxness, and this movie took full advantage.  Watch The Terminator instead, which got this kind of thing right.

Iron Sky

Last night I went to a showing of the Finnish Nazis-on-the-Moon SF extravaganza Iron Sky with some friends from my writing workshop:  Steve Popkes, Sarah Smith, and Heather Albano, along with Heather's husband Richard and couple of work friends of Steve's.

It was fairly entertaining, if you are generous, which I, out with my friends after a few beers, was inclined to be.  I grew up on Hogan's Heroes, so simultaneously obsessed and comical Nazis are part of my background. Nice special effects, a sexy serious Nazi in a tight skirt, a black astronaut turned white and blond through an albinism serum intended to heal his ethnic defect, and a Sarah Palinesque US President keep things interesting.

Don't look for narrative logic, however. Lots of irrelevance about the #2 Nazi wanting to take over from the #1 Nazi, and a wag-the-dog-like use of the Nazis by a President running for reelection (in 2014--since that's not particularly funny, I can only assume that's a genuine mistake made by people with a vocabulary with too many double vowels).

And its satire doesn't go very deep.  Once the black astronaut is turned Caucasian, aside from a predictable encounter with a black gang, it doesn't really go anywhere.  Europeans think pointing out that the US has complex racial relations is enough to qualify as satire. Saying "Hey, it's President Sarah Palin!" only gets you so far too. The actors are just OK, and use the camp positioning as an excuse for not working too hard.  This is particularly true of the Christopher Kirby, who plays the black astronaut.  Udo Kier does do a nice job as the world-weary Fuhrer Kortzfleisch.

So, it kind of wanted to be Dr. Strangelove in space, but fell far short of that.  Just laziness and coddling by the fan base, I suspect. SF fans like predictable jokes that reinforce their prejudices.  After 200+ years, Europeans are still appalled by and frightened of the United States, but they think the target is so big that they don't have to aim very accurately. Not true, you Euroweenies!  This whole thing could have been a lot better with a less self-indulgent approach to being funny.

So, lower your expectations, and you can have an OK time.  Watch for an entertaining speech from the North Korean representative to the UN.  A lot of beer helps.

"Beasts of the Southern Wild" as SF

Mary and I recently saw a great science fiction movie: Beasts of the Southern Wild. It was about a bunch of settlers in an alien world called the Bathtub. They create functional devices out of the remains of old technology and squeeze out a living however they can: they have learned to live in harmony with the world they have settled in, while others still try to maintain the no-longer-meaningful structures of the world they came from. They have a vivid and entertaining popular culture. As such stories often are, it is told from the point of view of a child, Hushpuppy, who has to deal with her ill, somewhat deranged father, a missing mother, and an oncoming disaster. She talks to the native fauna, a power not possessed by others. When the disaster strikes, she has a variety of adventures, and experiences loss.

OK, so it's not actually a science fiction movie. There are, however, many books set on alien worlds that don't make them as simultaneously strange and vivid as this movie does.

That I liked it as much as I did is testament to the humane skill of the writer/director Ben Zeitlin, and his fellow writer Lucy Alibar (the movie is actually based on a play Alibar wrote). I tend to dislike movies about "free spirited" outsiders who are misunderstood and abused by the existing power structure. But this one manages to evade any overt oppressed/oppressor agenda. The inhabitants of the Bathtub are not particularly functional, though they get by. And the power structure is desperately trying to keep them from dying, both collectively, when their community floods, and individually, since Hushpuppy's father is ill, and refusing to be treated. It's just that they come from a completely different world, and there is almost no communication between them.

Hushpuppy (who has a wonderful voice) compares the clean, well-lit refugee shelter they end up in as "a fish tank without water", which coveres both its smooth surfaces and the fact that she and her people are flopping around in it, unable to breathe.

And the movie does have big, mysteriously boar-like horned "aurochs" from the "Iced Age" that Hushpuppy learned about from her cool local schoolteacher. Aurochs, extinct giant cattle that appear in cave paintings,  have a weird role in European hunting psychology (Hermann Goering wanted to backbreed them from domestic cattle with "primitive" features and stock a hunting preserve carved out of the Bialowieza Forest with them), but those don't seem to have much with the semi-porcine inhabitants of Hushpuppy's imagination.

Anyway, one of the best SF movies I've seen in a long time. Well worth your while.

On buying books at full price

Like anyone else, I get seduced by getting books at a discount off cover price, whether at Amazon, or with coupons, or at special sales. It's nice to save money.

There are two problems with this. One, how much money am I saving?  Given that I sometimes like to go out and get a drink at a local bar like the Saloon or Casablanca, which runs over $10. And sometimes I have more than one. It's not that saving money on books is thus irrelevant, or that I drink way more than I read (really!), but it seems proportionally less important.

And when books are on sale, I am often tempted to buy them. I mean, I buy books I otherwise wouldn't, because the price is lower. Yes, I know that's dumb. I do it anyway.

So I have books I sell to used bookstores, and books I leave on my shelves for some future date when I read them. Hello, three volumes of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. That vicious little court intriguer sounds just up my alley, from what I've read, but I can't say when I will finish them.

So, a couple of days ago, when I read a David Frum review of a new book by one of my favorite history writers, Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword, I went out and bought it at my local bookstore, Porter Square Books. At full price. Who's going to tell me where my consumer surplus lies? Tonight I'll drink at home.

And I'll report on the book when I'm done. So far, it's great fun.

A situation is not a story: Martha Marcy May Marlene

People who join abusive cults voluntarily are likely to have preexisting problems. This is makes it harder to disentangle the origins of their symptoms once they leave.

MMMM is a movie about a situation. A young woman (named Martha, renamed Marcy May in the cult she joins, and answering the phone as Marlene, as all the women in the cult do) escapes after two years and moves in with her older sister and her sister's husband. Martha is skittish, weird, paranoid, and somewhat dopey-seeming. As we see flashbacks to her time in the cult, we see how she was manipulated, abused, and finally ended up participating in some of the cult's violence.

It is all well done, I thought.  But aside from anatomizing the situation, the movie didn't really go anywhere, and I have a genre desire for imposing plots on inchoate reality. Martha's sister and brother-in-law are on vacation in an isolated lake house, and both are dull and flat of affect. No one ever talks about anything interesting. The cult members are likewise deadpan.

So the movie seems really long.  The flashbacks do have a kind of progress to them, but the post-escape scenes do not. The movie does add some ominous touches, as a way of adding suspense, and those are the only trace of narrative energy. Scenes are slow-moving and dull. Maybe the actress who plays Martha, Elizabeth Olsen, acts, maybe she doesn't. I found it hard to be sure.

So: good raw material if you have a project that might include a character who was already damaged and was further damaged by a cult, and who plays a role in an actual plot, but not recommended if you just want to see a movie.

Post-surgery entertainment: Frailty

I like movies but watch too few of them. Somehow I can't sit still for long enough, or have something else to do. I have to make resolutions to watch them. It's really quite silly.

But after my eye surgery, I was confined to bed, and still am forbidden much movement, so have watched more movies than usual, and even a whole season of Deadwood, in a truly decadent binge.

As I've mentioned before, one thing I really like is movies that are pretty good but not great, that let me rewrite them as they are going on, and serve as inspirations for new plots. Last week I watched a movie that was perfect for that: Frailty, which is about religious revelation and murder in an East Texas town. I liked it, but thought it was only half good, in that it carefully built up a situation that it then blew. Most crucially, it dumped a key character, one with genuine strength of soul that we had every reason to respect, in the toilet, in an ill-advised attempt at a creepy twist ending. And the ending was genuinely creepy. I just thought it was the wrong one.

On a rainy night, a young man, Fenton Meiks (played by Matthew McConaughey) shows up at FBI headquarters to tell FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (the impressive Powers Boothe--also in Deadwood, as it happens) that he knows who a notorious serial killer, the Hand of God, is. And he knows this because of what happened to him in his childhood.

Now, as a movie viewer, you know that, in any kind of movie worth watching, the FBI agent is not just a neutral listener to a confession. He is receiving this confessional because he, in some twisted way, is related to the things being confessed.

And so it is. I won't tell you what the connection is, except that it turns out to be lame and pointless and totally contrived. That revelation comes pretty late in the movie, though, so most of it can be enjoyed before it gets to that point.

As Doyle and Meiks drive out to check out where the bodies are buried (oddly enough, though the Hand of God is billed as a serial killer, only the first of his bodies have been found, an oddity that gets explained later), Meiks tells the story of his childhood. He starts with some idyllic childhood scenes of him and his younger brother Adam, an idyll shattered one morning when their widowed Dad comes into their bedroom and tells them that he has been visited by an angel. This angel has told him that the world is inhabited by a number of demons, looking exactly like normal human beings, that it is his mission to eliminate. And his sons need to help him.

The steady progress of this mission is the main motive spring of the film. Dad finds the instruments of his vengeance (gloves, a pipe, an ax). And he starts kidnapping people, murdering them, and burying them in a rose garden near his house. Young Adam is down with this. Fenton, a bit older, resists, and is savagely punished for his resistance. Things get worse and worse.

Is it crazy to do something crazy if an angel with a flaming sword appears on the underside of the oil pan of a sedan you are repairing and tells you to do it? Well...yes, of course it is. Even Moses asked for some indication of God's bona fides before doing his bidding, but Dad is a sad and lonely widower with two sons that are probably more trouble to raise than it seems, and is happy to have a mission.

I write novels, not screenplays. Novels can handle a lot of narrative complexity. Movies can't.  You can only do so much in 100 minutes. So the movie had no way to tie Agent Doyle to the past story, detail the actual actions of the Hand of God killer, and show the two boys in later life.  But the movie at least toys with an obvious notion for a science fiction writer: what if the demons are real? What if Dad has a real mission, no matter how deranged he seems?

When I was a kid I loved a show called The Invaders. It was about an architect who sees an alien spacecraft one night, and spends the rest of the series trying to persuade people that there are aliens invading the Earth. No one ever believes him. The aliens are always out to get him, and he often has to kill them. When they die they vaporize.

Already rewriting things in my head at age 10 or so, I waited, every week, for him to screw up and kill someone who doesn't vaporize, but just lies there and bleeds on the pavement. How can he possibly maintain a 1000 batting average? What does he do when he realizes he has killed a human being, not an evil alien? What new secrets get revealed by that, and what does he do? Needless to say, it never happened, but I thought something of the same thing watching Dad kidnap people and haul them home to be eliminated. Even if some of them are demons, is he always right?

Plus, the point of killing them off is unexplained. There is no hint of a coming apocalypse, a final struggle, whatever. It's just a form of extreme police enforcement, religious vigilantism. But that Dad is unreflective is totally fine. Bill Paxton, who also directed, does a great job with the role, holy vengeance as everyman. He's a good and loyal employee at the garage where he works, and he's a good and loyal instrument of the Lord.

But Fenton's childhood resisting the demands of his holy serial killer Dad...connected to a more interesting Now story, one where the consequences of that time really come home to roost, and some unexpected truths are revealed...some potential there.

Secular skeptic that I am, I'm probably not the right person to write it. Because I see refusal to play ball as a valid response to an insane request, even from a supernatural being. It's like the ending of one of the best debate-the-meaning-with-your-friends movies ever made, Michael Tolkin's 1991 The Rapture: if God insists on generating an evil world and then following it up with an Apocalypse that is simultaneously arbitrary, cruel, and cheesy, isn't the only existentially valid response to refuse to go along?

Many people would argue that it isn't. Ours is not to reason about the mission God gives us, or to criticize His special effects.

But it's been two decades since The Rapture and one since Frailty, so it's about time for another meditation on what one of us moderns would do if some being stepped out of Scripture, grabbed us by the shoulder, and gave us a mission.

Moderating and getting value out of a convention panel

A lot of smart people go on panels at a science fiction convention. Put a bunch of them on a panel, however, and you often end up with mess.

The same is true of work. Some places have a lot of smart people at them. But these people can ineffectually waste a lot of time if they are not managed properly.

Enter the middle manager (my role for some years). Underappreciated and definitely unsung, but the essential feature of bringing problems and minds together in an organized way.

In the same way, a convention panel needs a moderator. That too is an underappreciated and unsung position. I take it seriously, when I have it. Some people do. Others are pointy haired bosses who ask you ridiculous and unanswerable questions, or, on the other side, lose control and let gabby people sitting in the front row of the audience hold forth endlessly. Poorly managed panels are the devil's playground.

One important thing is not just keeping the panel on topic, allowing flexibility when an interesting and potentially fruitful side topic pops up, but making people interesting, by not allowing them to fall into default positions. It may surprise you to learn that your favorite writer is a bit of blowhard. It is the moderator's job to prevent you from reaching this realization.

I like moderating, and like to think I'm good at it. At least, I take it seriously. But at Boskone, I failed my audience by inadequately controlling my panel. The topic was Global Warming, but with an interesting and idea-generating twist: it wasn't about what to do about it, it was to assume it was going to happen and then discuss what people should do to survive and prosper. Or, as I put it, "global warming for fun and profit". Tell me, panel, where I should put my resources. What decisions should I make, what portfolio should I hold, what things should I look out for?

Fun, right? The panel didn't think so. They pretty much defaulted to discussing giant space shields and other such things. Now, just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that topic. It just is the one people always talk about. We'd been given the opportunity to approach things from another direction.

I learned a few things about panel and audience management, so it wasn't a total loss. But I still want to know how to Profit from the Coming Disaster. I'll bet you do too.

Trying to watch TV: Fringe

When I was young, I watched a lot of TV. Every night after dinner, my younger sister and I would retire to the den to watch a black and white TV pretty much until it was time to go to bed.  For a good while after that I had a TV in my room. I watched it after school while I played with my Cape Canaveral set.  I kept watching a lot of TV until partway through college.  Then I stopped.  I didn't have a TV for a while, and kind of lost the habit.

TV shows really are much better now. If you don't believe me, watch an episode of Gilligan's Island or F Troop, staples of my youth.  And they now have way more sex in them, which would have been a big plus for me as an adolescent.

All my fellow writers watch a lot more TV than I do. I feel left out, particularly as I've never much liked SF TV shows.  I've discussed this before.

But I'm willing to keep trying. Since I'm writing a book that involves alternate universes, several people have recommended Fringe.  But there are three gigantic seasons of the thing. I didn't feel like digging through all of it.

Fortunately, a writer and editor named Jennifer Heddle came to the rescue, with a guide to what episodes to watch in the first seasons. I can't emphasize how much this kind of thing helps. I can be up to speed quickly, and not waste a lot of time on filler material. If you actually enjoy watching TV, as an activity, filler material is fine, even necessary. I'm just trying to get a basic knowledge, so I can fake it. I'm using leverage, and Ms. Heddle is providing the capital.  Thank you!

Did you ever think you would need Cliff's Notes for television shows?

So far, Fringe is OK. It has the problem I find inherent to SF TV shows (and most written SF, truth be told): it's always about what it's about. The characters know what the story is, and they do what they need to in order to move it along. Employees of evil megacorporations spend their time kidnapping people and plotting world domination rather than clockwatching and attending project update meetings. Everyone feels obliged to follow the dictates of a typewritten manifesto from decades ago. And Olivia, the main character, God love her, has the sense of humor of a cement mixer. Of course, she is slowly discovering that she was the victim of unauthorized experiments on her in childhood, which could ruin anyone's day.

And why does the ravishing Astrid get to do nothing but turn things on and examine bodies? I'm worried she'll start sending out her resume, looking for a sidekick job where she actually gets to say mordant and amusing things and occasionally kick someone's butt. Is that too much to ask?

Nice ending episode, with some cute mysteries set up.  If I'd had to watch the entire season to get there, I would have felt underrewarded, but as it is, I'm looking forward to zipping through Season 2!

God of Carnage: play without subtext

Last night I went to the Huntington Theater to see Yasmin Reza's God of Carnage (which is currently also a movie, Carnage). It was better than most Huntington productions, though given my experience with them, that's setting the bar pretty low.

The play was translated from the original French by Christopher Hampton. He must also have had to translate a lot of cultural referents from the 14th Arrondissement (or wherever) to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The housing supply owner Mike Novak reads a bit too generically working class--self-satisfied upper middle class people tend to be easier to port from one cultural operating system to another, while strivers still have culturally specific rough edges.

You probably know the story. One 11-year-old boy hit another one with a stick, breaking a couple of teeth. The two pairs of parents come together to reasonably discuss the situation, only to fall apart into almost hostility, drunkenness, and self-pity.

It's pretty fun, and has the advantage of being really short. But it says nothing other than what is there. There is essentially no subtext. No character is anything other than what he or she says there on stage. There is no sense of anything deeper, any history, any unarticulated feelings. At one point they flirt with wondering what the real story of the boys' relationship might be, a potentially deeper issue, but quickly drop it in favor of squabbling over cell phones, tulips, and Darfur.

Movies can get away with that kind of thing, because they have so many other ways of distracting you from lack of underlying content. Plays can't. If those real people in front of you don't bleed out past the edges of the stage and the hour or two they are there, they become just people saying lines.

I won't see the movie, so feel free to tell me what that's like.

We live in Newt Gingrich's alternate universe

There are certain figures that genre writers like to use as defining specific eras.  If you go to early-to-mid eighteenth century America, no matter where you go, you run into Benjamin Franklin. Straining at the limits of biography, Neal Stephenson bootlegs an extremely young Ben Franklin into Quicksliver, and Jim Morrow puts an only slightly older one into The Last Witchfinder. Similarly, Mark Twain puffs a cigar and comments mordantly in almost any version of the Gilded Age you can imagine, Theodore Roosevelt yells "Bully!" in alternate worlds with steam-powered land dreadnoughts and Confederate empires, and Winston Churchill nobly faces down invading German armies even in worlds where history varied widely from our own. No amount of historical change can seem to get rid of these guys.

I am sure Newt Gingrich sees himself as a similar linking figure, looming darkly in a variety of divergent histories. Often he is scorned and disregarded, which doesn't make him any the less penetrating and right. But now, in our universe.... The muffin and the moment have met.

Gingrich writes and reads science fiction. I am sure that he consciously thinks this. This is the right universe, he thinks, for his improbable ascent. This is the line of history that is the true one. There are lesser lines where he goes down to defeat. They are low-probability lines, inhabited by shadows.

I don't think he'd ever blurt this out, in debate or on the stump. He has learned some control over the years. It would make him seem...crazy. But look into his eyes. He doesn't really believe that you exist. You're just a shadow appearing in a single universe. But he is a reality in all of them. Believe it.

Newt Gingrich: a science fiction writer's idea of a politician

What, you need an actual post to go along with the title?

I guess, now that we are in the future, we need one of those technocratic visionary leaders the future was always going to ruled by.

Science fiction writers don't create futures you want to live in. They create futures that are fun to read about. This one is turning out to be neither.

The violent detective as a type

I do like reading detective novels and police procedurals.  A couple of recent ones are interesting because of what they have in common: main characters, professional policemen both, who brutally assault someone when they are not personally under threat. And they are not portrayed as anomic thugs, but as sympathetic protagonists.

Snow Angels is set in Finland, but is written by an American, James Thompson. So it's a bit of a Nordic thriller with training wheels. Kari Vaara, Thompson's Finnish cop, explains things to us, or to his American wife, like an expression about the passing of time that's based on the fact that you have to let a reindeer urinate every so often to avoid kidney problems, that are revealing and interesting. The book overall, however, is both unpleasant and incomprehensible.  It has a high level of sexual violence and degradation, and murderers pop up out of nowhere. One main suspect kills himself without, as far as I know, ever having been on stage at all. Vaara never, at any point, figures anything out. He sucks as a detective, and deserves to suffer the consequences of this, since he deliberately misleads others in order to stay on the case. Occasionally, he calls someone, who quickly provides the necessary answer--not that these answers get Vaara too far. Writing a real detective story is hard--believe me, I've tried it. Thompson doesn't have the knack yet.

But, the violent detective part. At one point Vaara beats and threatens to kill a suspect, his ex-wife's current husband, because the man insults Vaara's American wife. Real smooth police work there, Vaara. I suspect that this type of behavior is frowned on, even in Finland.  I'd say Snow Angels is mildly interesting (I did finish it), and decently written, but there are a huge number of better Nordic detective stories out there.

In the rural Wyoming Cold Dish, by Craig Johnson, the sheriff, Walt Longmire, beats someone up because of something bad he did, and breaks his nose. The victim is not a suspect or even anyone involved in the investigation, and this would, in the real world, endanger or even end Longmire's career.  I'm not quite done with Cold Dish, and so can't say what consequences this has in the book. And Cold Dish has significant virtues which I will discuss in another post.

In both cases, these are not even remotely fair fights. In one case the victim is a suspect in custody, in the other he's just walking down the street. Both detectives are portrayed as sympathetic (Longmire more so than Vaara). These acts make them look like volatile morons. What gives?

I'm starting to suspect this is just a cliche, a sign that the detective, despite some sensitvity, is not to be messed with. It's like alcoholism, a liking for jazz, a history of divorce, a troubled relationship with an adolescent child--a signifier of late-stage hardboiled fiction, which tries to be sensitive, then gets nervous about it. I may have to just live with it.

I prefer my detectives opaque and focused on the job. I'm not much interested in their inner conflicts. So unprofessional behavior based on their deep inner flaws just irritates me. If they actually suffered the consequences of their actions, I might get more interested.

Do you really want a bike that reads your mind?

OK, this is a little too much intrusion of science fiction into daily life:  a bike that allegedly shifts in response to your brainwaves (HT: The Infrastructurist).

Now I know why so few people bike: it's just too hard to decide when to jump up or down a cog. Although I'm not sure a mind-reading bike really solves that particular problem, since you still have to decide to shift, though it says it can also remember previous shifts by location, and then shift again at the same place, say downshifting before you hit a hill. No indication if it takes a wind reading before doing so.

This is kind of fun, if creepy, but it's really a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is the intellectual demands of shifting, it should measure muscular effort and cadence, and shift to maintain constant pace and effort. Your mind shouldn't really have much to do with it.

Or it could measure sweat (maintaining an effort that keeps you from getting to the office soaked in sweat) or passerby perception (if someone attractive is watching you, you'd like to be showing some real speed and form). There are lots of possibilities.

Or you can get a fixie, like I have, and just follow its cruel dictates.

Returns to abstraction: science fiction and the real future

In the first chapter his fascinating, to-me-almost-incomprehensible account of infinity, Everything and More, David Foster Wallace talks about levels of abstraction. In order to learn math, you have to move up through levels of abstraction, from physical objects, to numbers, to unknowns, to functions and so forth. If you are unable to manipulate the abstractions, you are unable to go on with math. And, often, even if you do well at math (as I did), you don't really understand it.

The big bucks in our economy come to those who have moved vast numbers of levels up the ladder of abstraction. The person who sells apples makes little, never mind the person who picks them. The person who creates financial instruments that hedge commodity price fluctuations makes a great deal more.

Science fiction is about the future. In the future, anyone who matters will deal with matters so many levels above concrete physical reality that there will be no clear relationship between the two. But that's not that interesting to read about, save in a tight story that is really, in some sense, about that process of abstraction, and what it means, both for the world and for the human soul. But how often can you do that?

Which is why you still see characters repairing physical things, like space drives or time machines, rather than trying desperately to fix a system of busted collateralized debt obligations. Or, even worse, arguing about how to define the problem to be fixed.

This is an interesting problem for fiction, because the people doing the abstracting are still shaved primates, with status hierarchies, anxieties, and flawed bodies that will inevitably stop working. It's that boundary between profit-and-knowledge-creating abstraction and human need that is a fertile ground for our fiction.

The "committed" auteur: Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor

I'm toying with a horror novel set in an abandoned insane asylum. Nothing unusual here, certainly, but I think it might be fun.

Part of the backstory is someone who had himself voluntarily committed to investigate something of what was going on at the asylum while it was functioning, events that play a role in the present.

In the spirit of research, I rented Samuel Fuller's movie Shock Corridor (1963), about a reporter who commits himself to a mental hospital to find out who committed a murder there.

What a terrible movie! Fuller wrote, produced, and directed. Whatever the merits of his direction (hint: minimal), the writing, at least, is wretched: overblown, repetitive, and rambling. It really plays as if he just wrote it once, a few days before filming, and then never read it again, and just handed out the shooting scripts to the bemused and long-suffering actors.

The story is about a man, Johnny Barrett, who goes into an asylum and there becomes mad. Fine. But the first ten minutes or so involve his girlfriend, stripper named Cathy, with the austere face and demeanor of a nun in a particularly restrictive order, who tells him that this is dangerous, and that if he goes in there, he will lose his mind. Then we see her sing and do a woodenly choreographed striptease. The rest of her scenes involve her telling Johnny's editor that Johnny will lose his mind, or telling Johnny on visiting day that he will lose his mind...her scenes take up about a third of the movie, have no connection to anything, and never pay off in any way. Except that he actually does lose his mind. She was right!

About a third of the way into the movie, we finally figure out that Johnny is there to investigate the stabbing of a man named Sloane. Who Sloane was, why he was killed, what the consequences were, who might have wanted to kill him...to Fuller these are tedious irrelevancies.  What he really wants to do is let a few actors rant about modern societal issues, have a moment of clarity where they remember something about the stabbing of Sloane, and then have big breakdown.  This is definitely one of the times where the term "cult" actually means "lame".

In addition to wasting time with Cathy, Fuller sticks in some color sections from failed movie projects, trying to amortize their cost by labeling them as memories or dream sequences. At one point, a character actually remarks how odd it is that his memories are in color, presumably because he knows he's actually B&W. The silliest of these is where a black character remembers being a Brazilian Indian, presumably because those were the darkest-skinned people Fuller had footage of.

As usual, I thought about many different ways this story could go. Obviously figuring out the stabbing would be just the start--why the stabbing happened is the interesting thing. Cathy only makes sense if she has her own game to play, either encouraging madness on the part of her fiance, or facing a threat while Johnny is incarcerated, or finding clues at the strip joint that connect up with Johnny's investigation--clues Johnny rejects. What seems to be irrelevant "thematic" rambling by the various madmen would actually conceal useful information, information Johnny doesn't see because he is obsessed with only one question, that about the stabbing.

So it was useful for me to see, because it gave me a lot of ideas, as failed movies often do. You might want to see it as a sociological document, or as a desperately ridiculous failure, or as an example of what a total farce auteur theory turned out to be. Just don't see it because you think it will be fun to watch.

The thoughtful gaze in book covers

My recent reading has included Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman and P.D. James's The Skull Beneath the Skin (mentioned a few days ago).  I noticed that the book covers had a similar thematic structure:

A woman with an side and upward thoughtful or abstracted gaze, accompanied by some symbolic background, the James from 1987 (though the design is probably from 1983), the Kirstein from 2003. Would anyone use this style for a male character? I think it conveys thoughtfulness, but a bit of distance. This woman is interested in figuring something out and is probably not that easy to get to know.

Just an interesting coincidence, of no real significance.