Well, holy crap. Just saw Joker yesterday, and it was basically all I could hope for. Spoilers below the jump, and then I'll share some thoughts.
Sunday, 13 October 2019
Wednesday, 9 October 2019
Cautiously Optimistic about the New Picard Show
Well, I just had a gander at the second trailer for the upcoming Picard series, and I'll be honest, I've got some thoughts. And feels!
Have a look:
So, it's still kinda light on details. Plot, and so forth. In fact, like the previous trailer it looks a lot like Logan, except with Patrick Stewart playing the roles of both Logan and Professor X, all in one. Young woman with mysterious bad guys chasing her, hero who's gone into seclusion, etc and so forth.
But I also can't deny that the glimpse of Riker and Troi, more than anything, brought a chuckle and the teensiest lump to the throat. More so than Data or Seven of Nine, or the set from the classic fourth-season episode "Family".
I was thinking a little about my reaction to the trailer, and I guess it's the fact that, while my Star Trek will always be Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation feels like home, and coming back to it feels so, so right.
One of my friends, who was into Trek in high school alongside me, is fond of arguing in favor of Discovery by pointing out that the reaction to TNG was similar (die hard Trekkies saying it wasn't real Trek, "trash and not canon", etc). It's hard to conceive of that, though, as I'd argue that most Trek fans now probably grew up alongside TNG, moreso than fans who've gravitated toward any of the other shows, even the Original Series.
And while I think that TNG was good for a lot less time than us fans would like to recall, even when it failed it was thought-provoking, in ways that Trek really hasn't managed since. Even DS9, which I think had the most sophisticated storytelling of any of the shows, didn't always hit the heights of episodes like Measure of a Man or the Drumhead.
The Mission Log Podcast used to talk about "the Kirk speech" in TOS, where the captain usually delivered that episode's theme, though frequently in ways that haven't aged so well since the 1960s. Then, when they were reviewing TNG, they would talk about the Picard speech, which also delivered that week's theme, but I'd say those have aged a lot better, given that Picard always better exemplified the humanist spirit that Gene Roddenberry aimed to convey in the show.
And Picard was always just a more interesting character, especially once the writers gave him more to do than being cranky. Over the course of the show he was revealed to be a musician, archeologist, fighter, and lover - his card on the TNG card game back in the 90s even explicitly called him a Renaissance Man. Roddenberry always argued that humanity could be great if we could just put aside our hatreds, bigotries and obsession with money - and Picard is probably the best exemplar of that argument that the show ever gave us.
So that's why I'm so looking forward to this new show featuring Patrick Stewart. But then I think of all the things that worry me. For one thing, that similarity to Logan, which also implies to me that they're going to kill Picard off at the end of the show. Not that I blame Sir Patrick for wanting a clean break, but it'd be nice to see him ride off into the sunset, happy, rather than being put into situation after situation until it makes narrative sense to bump him off.
The other thing that worries me is that this is the same studio that brought us Discovery. As I mention in that rundown of season 2, I thought the showrunners fumbled the ball badly, after a first season that was rough but promising. Part of it is the changes they made to the formula: by focusing on the journey of Michael Burnham rather than making it an ensemble show, like the previous ones, CBS painted itself into the corner of following a character who's not actually that clever or interesting, and as a result failing to develop any of the characters unless they were needed in a given episode (RIP Airiam).
Picard looks like it'll be another serialized show, rather than episodic. For the story they look like they want to tell, that's fine, though my objection to it in Discovery is that they seem to have used that narrative structure only because that's what audiences expect, rather than what makes sense for Star Trek. That structure has also led to the show missing out on the humanistic and intellectual angle that TOS, TNG and the others had, to varying degrees, and replaced it with a more cinematic feel.
The cinematic feel can be good, in the form of higher production values and more action. But it can also be bad, in the form of action for the sake of action, and way more simplistic storytelling. And that trailer, where Picard is yelling about the Federation living up to its ideals, indicates to me that we're getting the simplistic storytelling that marred Discovery.
To put it another way: questioning whether the Federation was right was daring and fun when Deep Space 9 did it, but given that it's now the default mode of latter-day TNG movies and Discovery alike, it'd be nice to once again get stories that don't test whether Roddenberry's vision could work, but rather stretch out in it, take it for granted, and see what stories we can tell from within a Federation that isn't venal and corrupt.
And yet...
Much more than Discovery did, Picard is making me consider paying for CBS All Access, rather than waiting for my next trip abroad to watch it. Because even if it's bad, it'll feel like coming home.
Have a look:
So, it's still kinda light on details. Plot, and so forth. In fact, like the previous trailer it looks a lot like Logan, except with Patrick Stewart playing the roles of both Logan and Professor X, all in one. Young woman with mysterious bad guys chasing her, hero who's gone into seclusion, etc and so forth.
But I also can't deny that the glimpse of Riker and Troi, more than anything, brought a chuckle and the teensiest lump to the throat. More so than Data or Seven of Nine, or the set from the classic fourth-season episode "Family".
I was thinking a little about my reaction to the trailer, and I guess it's the fact that, while my Star Trek will always be Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation feels like home, and coming back to it feels so, so right.
One of my friends, who was into Trek in high school alongside me, is fond of arguing in favor of Discovery by pointing out that the reaction to TNG was similar (die hard Trekkies saying it wasn't real Trek, "trash and not canon", etc). It's hard to conceive of that, though, as I'd argue that most Trek fans now probably grew up alongside TNG, moreso than fans who've gravitated toward any of the other shows, even the Original Series.
And while I think that TNG was good for a lot less time than us fans would like to recall, even when it failed it was thought-provoking, in ways that Trek really hasn't managed since. Even DS9, which I think had the most sophisticated storytelling of any of the shows, didn't always hit the heights of episodes like Measure of a Man or the Drumhead.
The Mission Log Podcast used to talk about "the Kirk speech" in TOS, where the captain usually delivered that episode's theme, though frequently in ways that haven't aged so well since the 1960s. Then, when they were reviewing TNG, they would talk about the Picard speech, which also delivered that week's theme, but I'd say those have aged a lot better, given that Picard always better exemplified the humanist spirit that Gene Roddenberry aimed to convey in the show.
And Picard was always just a more interesting character, especially once the writers gave him more to do than being cranky. Over the course of the show he was revealed to be a musician, archeologist, fighter, and lover - his card on the TNG card game back in the 90s even explicitly called him a Renaissance Man. Roddenberry always argued that humanity could be great if we could just put aside our hatreds, bigotries and obsession with money - and Picard is probably the best exemplar of that argument that the show ever gave us.
So that's why I'm so looking forward to this new show featuring Patrick Stewart. But then I think of all the things that worry me. For one thing, that similarity to Logan, which also implies to me that they're going to kill Picard off at the end of the show. Not that I blame Sir Patrick for wanting a clean break, but it'd be nice to see him ride off into the sunset, happy, rather than being put into situation after situation until it makes narrative sense to bump him off.
The other thing that worries me is that this is the same studio that brought us Discovery. As I mention in that rundown of season 2, I thought the showrunners fumbled the ball badly, after a first season that was rough but promising. Part of it is the changes they made to the formula: by focusing on the journey of Michael Burnham rather than making it an ensemble show, like the previous ones, CBS painted itself into the corner of following a character who's not actually that clever or interesting, and as a result failing to develop any of the characters unless they were needed in a given episode (RIP Airiam).
Picard looks like it'll be another serialized show, rather than episodic. For the story they look like they want to tell, that's fine, though my objection to it in Discovery is that they seem to have used that narrative structure only because that's what audiences expect, rather than what makes sense for Star Trek. That structure has also led to the show missing out on the humanistic and intellectual angle that TOS, TNG and the others had, to varying degrees, and replaced it with a more cinematic feel.
The cinematic feel can be good, in the form of higher production values and more action. But it can also be bad, in the form of action for the sake of action, and way more simplistic storytelling. And that trailer, where Picard is yelling about the Federation living up to its ideals, indicates to me that we're getting the simplistic storytelling that marred Discovery.
To put it another way: questioning whether the Federation was right was daring and fun when Deep Space 9 did it, but given that it's now the default mode of latter-day TNG movies and Discovery alike, it'd be nice to once again get stories that don't test whether Roddenberry's vision could work, but rather stretch out in it, take it for granted, and see what stories we can tell from within a Federation that isn't venal and corrupt.
And yet...
Much more than Discovery did, Picard is making me consider paying for CBS All Access, rather than waiting for my next trip abroad to watch it. Because even if it's bad, it'll feel like coming home.
Sunday, 29 September 2019
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
Just finished Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, and I'm filled with joy thinking about that novel.
I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, because my sister left a copy here when she went back to Europe, and because I needed to read a couple more books from top-flight authors for the year. It turns out I knew about the book, slightly, because Craig Mazin had read out an excerpt from it last year in the Scriptnotes podcast, and as a further bit of synchronicity, a local bookstore has a poster for one of Greer's previous books, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, up on the wall of their bathroom.
The premise is lovely - to avoid having to attend an ex-boyfriend's wedding, which also takes place on his fiftieth birthday, middling novelist Arthur Less starts accepting invitations from all kinds of half-baked literary events across the world. As he has indignity after indignity heaped upon him from New York to Mexico City to Turin, Berlin to Paris, Marrakech, India and Tokyo, he also remembers his own life as the companion to a much more celebrated poet, and comes to terms with his circle of friends aging - something that wasn't promised, given they came up and came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis.
Even more lovely is the language. In Berlin Less is enlisted to teach a brief course at a university, which he calls "Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein". The narrator describes Less having the students assemble words from favorite novels, translate a novel's opening from English to German and back until it's unrecognizable, and at the end says they may not have learned about literature, but have been given back the love of language that made them literature students in the first place.
This love of language shines through the whole book, from the description of Arthur Less's kissing ("like a man who knows only the present tense of a new language - only you, only now" [sic]) to the aforementioned passage read out on Scriptnotes, which deals with the difficulty of being the non-famous partner of a writer considered a genius.
But what makes it such a wonderful book is that the language, while erudite, flows effortlessly, making it a quick read, an enjoyable one and also an intelligent one. And a funny one - I don't know the rest of Greer's oeuvre, but here he draws on the likes of PG Wodehouse in using an impressive command of the language to make you laugh. Certain lines ("Let us never find out") made me laugh out loud, which other funny novels don't always manage.
One other thing that may make the book resonate for me is the theme on aging. Less spends the book ruminating on what it means to have gotten to fifty without the desired success in matters professional, financial or romantic, and when the date comes finds it an anti-climax. I'm not gay, a novelist (yet) or fifty (yet), but I did hit forty this year, and at the time found myself thinking back over the previous 20 years or so, trying to make sense of the tapestry of experiences I'd had up until then. It was hard to pinpoint any really major successes, but had to acknowledge a certain satisfaction with my travels, my years living abroad, and various other achievements.
Less has a similar trajectory, as he's faced with the prospect of being interviewed onstage by the ex-wife of his famous, genius lover, or of the possibility that he's killing the literati of Berlin with boredom, or even the dissolution of a friend's marriage that he'd previously thought rock-solid. He's looking back on all those experiences and trying to pull them into a coherent narrative of what his life has meant, a task made more urgent by the approach of the milestone that says you're old, and the need to adjust to the reality that there is actually life after fifty (or, in my case, forty).
But perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay the book is that it reminded me of how much I love writing, and got me back on track with my own work. There's something wonderful about reading a narrative by someone who knows the language as intimately as Andrew Sean Greer, and having it remind you how much you love the language too. I wish I could read it again for the first time.
I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, because my sister left a copy here when she went back to Europe, and because I needed to read a couple more books from top-flight authors for the year. It turns out I knew about the book, slightly, because Craig Mazin had read out an excerpt from it last year in the Scriptnotes podcast, and as a further bit of synchronicity, a local bookstore has a poster for one of Greer's previous books, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, up on the wall of their bathroom.
The premise is lovely - to avoid having to attend an ex-boyfriend's wedding, which also takes place on his fiftieth birthday, middling novelist Arthur Less starts accepting invitations from all kinds of half-baked literary events across the world. As he has indignity after indignity heaped upon him from New York to Mexico City to Turin, Berlin to Paris, Marrakech, India and Tokyo, he also remembers his own life as the companion to a much more celebrated poet, and comes to terms with his circle of friends aging - something that wasn't promised, given they came up and came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis.
Even more lovely is the language. In Berlin Less is enlisted to teach a brief course at a university, which he calls "Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein". The narrator describes Less having the students assemble words from favorite novels, translate a novel's opening from English to German and back until it's unrecognizable, and at the end says they may not have learned about literature, but have been given back the love of language that made them literature students in the first place.
This love of language shines through the whole book, from the description of Arthur Less's kissing ("like a man who knows only the present tense of a new language - only you, only now" [sic]) to the aforementioned passage read out on Scriptnotes, which deals with the difficulty of being the non-famous partner of a writer considered a genius.
But what makes it such a wonderful book is that the language, while erudite, flows effortlessly, making it a quick read, an enjoyable one and also an intelligent one. And a funny one - I don't know the rest of Greer's oeuvre, but here he draws on the likes of PG Wodehouse in using an impressive command of the language to make you laugh. Certain lines ("Let us never find out") made me laugh out loud, which other funny novels don't always manage.
One other thing that may make the book resonate for me is the theme on aging. Less spends the book ruminating on what it means to have gotten to fifty without the desired success in matters professional, financial or romantic, and when the date comes finds it an anti-climax. I'm not gay, a novelist (yet) or fifty (yet), but I did hit forty this year, and at the time found myself thinking back over the previous 20 years or so, trying to make sense of the tapestry of experiences I'd had up until then. It was hard to pinpoint any really major successes, but had to acknowledge a certain satisfaction with my travels, my years living abroad, and various other achievements.
Less has a similar trajectory, as he's faced with the prospect of being interviewed onstage by the ex-wife of his famous, genius lover, or of the possibility that he's killing the literati of Berlin with boredom, or even the dissolution of a friend's marriage that he'd previously thought rock-solid. He's looking back on all those experiences and trying to pull them into a coherent narrative of what his life has meant, a task made more urgent by the approach of the milestone that says you're old, and the need to adjust to the reality that there is actually life after fifty (or, in my case, forty).
But perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay the book is that it reminded me of how much I love writing, and got me back on track with my own work. There's something wonderful about reading a narrative by someone who knows the language as intimately as Andrew Sean Greer, and having it remind you how much you love the language too. I wish I could read it again for the first time.
Monday, 23 September 2019
When Chicago Was More Than the Second City
I've long wanted to visit more of America, and the last few years living in the US have given me the chance to see parts that I wouldn't get to when I was flying over from London. Some of it, like Portland or the more mountainy bits of California, have been for pleasure, but work trips have let me get acquainted with the likes of Las Vegas (where I went for CES for four years), Fort Worth and now Chicago.
My company is based in Bloomington, Illinois, and I got the word two weeks ago that they wanted me out there for a meeting. I weighed up my options and quickly decided that I wanted to add a couple of days in Chicago, which is about 140 miles away. I got a rental car, and the company was happy that it would cost them less to send me home on Sunday (i.e. yesterday) rather than the Thursday after the meeting ended, so I was set.
And things improved when my girlfriend agreed to fly out to meet me the day I drove up from Bloomington, marking our first long weekend away together (cue "Awwwws"). She managed to get on the same flight as me, and even booked herself into the seat beside mine, which made the whole trip even nicer.
As for the city itself: I planned on one major sight per day, and while we missed the Field Museum, Wrigley Field and Shedd Aquarium, we did get to tour the river on a cruise that focused specifically on the architecture, plus we hit the American Writers' Museum and the Art Institute, so I think it's fair to say we caught a bunch of things that are relevant to my interests. We even went to the viewing deck at Hancock Tower, overlooking Lake Michigan and downtown, where we spent a romantic evening watching the sun go down and the city lights come on.
My girlfriend laughed at me the first morning on the bus up to the Architecture Center, when I said I was already feeling good about the place, and could kind of see myself living there. I've since moderated that since a friend who lives there explained how brutal the winters have been, but even she agrees that it's a great city, if only they would put it somewhere more temperate.
Mostly I was just excited to be in a big city again, especially one with so much history. Between paintings, music and architecture, as well as politics and business, so much of what we associate with the idea of America comes from Chicago, more so than from New York or Los Angeles. I've heard more than one person (on and off TV) poke fun at the regard Chicagoans have for their city, and the self-regard on the gift shop shelves can be a little overblown, but it is nice to think of a third pole to the US, separate from the two giant cities on either coast.
More than that, being in Chicago reminds you of a time, not even that long ago, when the US considered a lot of cities important: Detroit, St. Louis and so forth. And of a time when New York was just this scruffy, dirty, dangerous city over on the East Coast, rather than the gilded playland that shows like Sex and the City are at pains to present.
On the drive back to O'Hare yesterday I kept thinking about Sufjan Stevens's Illinois album, which at its best talks about the human stories dotted around the entire state, referencing cultural signifiers like Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln and even Superman and John Wayne Gacy. It's not the best album, because it was his attempt to keep up with his (quickly abandoned) idea of doing an album for all 50 states, but in its best moments I do recognize what I've seen of the city.
I guess I'm affected by the city because it hearkens back to times when America was still confident and good at making things, and when you could make it big in pretty much any big city. This is a feeling I also get when I read Bill Bryson's books about America, for instance his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which talks about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Now Iowa is kind of the butt of jokes, but here on the coasts we forget at our peril that people do live there - maybe if we hadn't bypassed the middle of America by flying over it and shifting our manufacturing out of cities like Detroit, we wouldn't be in the mess we're currently in.
I think the city's tallest tower is a good example. When it was the Sears Tower, and the world's tallest office building, it represented a strain of American business that employed a good chunk of the workforce. Now it's the Willis Tower, and Sears-Roebuck has pretty much torn itself apart through dire mismanagement. But the tower itself is still the daily destination for around 12,000 workers every day - representing how just because a place is no longer the center of the business world people still live and work there.
Illinois is obviously not as down-at-heel as cities like Ohio and Michigan (or at least parts thereof), which were more reliant on heavy industry. It's been helped along by its more service-oriented economy, I suppose, and its continuing cultural capital comes from being the first stepping stone for a lot of Saturday Night Live comedians... as well as housing works like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.
In any case, I'd like to go back and see more of it - potentially arriving on Amtrak, the way people used to get there before flying was commonplace, and you had to stop there on trips between the coasts. My friend who lives there talked about how it's a city of neighborhoods, and I think it'd be fun to find out more about those places, too.
And maybe spend another romantic evening with my honey up at the top of the city? That sounds pretty good, too.
My company is based in Bloomington, Illinois, and I got the word two weeks ago that they wanted me out there for a meeting. I weighed up my options and quickly decided that I wanted to add a couple of days in Chicago, which is about 140 miles away. I got a rental car, and the company was happy that it would cost them less to send me home on Sunday (i.e. yesterday) rather than the Thursday after the meeting ended, so I was set.
And things improved when my girlfriend agreed to fly out to meet me the day I drove up from Bloomington, marking our first long weekend away together (cue "Awwwws"). She managed to get on the same flight as me, and even booked herself into the seat beside mine, which made the whole trip even nicer.
As for the city itself: I planned on one major sight per day, and while we missed the Field Museum, Wrigley Field and Shedd Aquarium, we did get to tour the river on a cruise that focused specifically on the architecture, plus we hit the American Writers' Museum and the Art Institute, so I think it's fair to say we caught a bunch of things that are relevant to my interests. We even went to the viewing deck at Hancock Tower, overlooking Lake Michigan and downtown, where we spent a romantic evening watching the sun go down and the city lights come on.
 |
| Top of the World, Ma |
Mostly I was just excited to be in a big city again, especially one with so much history. Between paintings, music and architecture, as well as politics and business, so much of what we associate with the idea of America comes from Chicago, more so than from New York or Los Angeles. I've heard more than one person (on and off TV) poke fun at the regard Chicagoans have for their city, and the self-regard on the gift shop shelves can be a little overblown, but it is nice to think of a third pole to the US, separate from the two giant cities on either coast.
More than that, being in Chicago reminds you of a time, not even that long ago, when the US considered a lot of cities important: Detroit, St. Louis and so forth. And of a time when New York was just this scruffy, dirty, dangerous city over on the East Coast, rather than the gilded playland that shows like Sex and the City are at pains to present.
 |
| View from the start of the river tour |
I guess I'm affected by the city because it hearkens back to times when America was still confident and good at making things, and when you could make it big in pretty much any big city. This is a feeling I also get when I read Bill Bryson's books about America, for instance his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which talks about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Now Iowa is kind of the butt of jokes, but here on the coasts we forget at our peril that people do live there - maybe if we hadn't bypassed the middle of America by flying over it and shifting our manufacturing out of cities like Detroit, we wouldn't be in the mess we're currently in.
 |
| The Seer's Tower and modernist architecture in front |
Illinois is obviously not as down-at-heel as cities like Ohio and Michigan (or at least parts thereof), which were more reliant on heavy industry. It's been helped along by its more service-oriented economy, I suppose, and its continuing cultural capital comes from being the first stepping stone for a lot of Saturday Night Live comedians... as well as housing works like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.
In any case, I'd like to go back and see more of it - potentially arriving on Amtrak, the way people used to get there before flying was commonplace, and you had to stop there on trips between the coasts. My friend who lives there talked about how it's a city of neighborhoods, and I think it'd be fun to find out more about those places, too.
And maybe spend another romantic evening with my honey up at the top of the city? That sounds pretty good, too.
Thursday, 29 August 2019
RIP the UK
The title might be a little dramatic, but this week's news that the supposed Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided to send Parliament home for five weeks in a bid to stop them from stopping his no-deal Brexit agenda is also quite dramatic. It's also probably overkill, since Parliament had trouble agreeing on anything before he took power.
Because I read the Guardian, it's hard to escape the impression that things are going to hell in a hand basket, and that we'll be back to death by stoning by dinner-time (I never get tired of that Blackadder quote, in part because it remains so apposite with each new development in the Brexit saga). But in fairness, if I read the Times, the Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) or the Sun or the Daily Mail, I'd be just as het up but in the other direction: worried that my Brexit and taking-back of control could be stolen out from under my nose at any time by shifty foreigners and disloyal leftists.
Which is part of the problem: in normal circumstances it's a good thing that the papers in Britain have a viewpoint, but here it just means that people are unable to find any common ground, because they're being whipped into a frenzy by their respective sides.
My problem with the whole business is that I actually guess the UK's going to be okay. Not great, not as well off as it would be if they'd just voted in Ed Milliband in 2015, or more likely, had returned a majority or coalition for Gordon Brown's Labour in 2010. But the UK's economy is probably big and robust enough that it could do okay on its own - potentially even with a no-deal, though because it's so unprecedented it's impossible to tell.
But what's frustrating is the eternal deadlock that's been unleashed by 2016's Brexit vote. Labour and the Tories respectively are in disarray because being pro-Leave or pro-Remain doesn't cut neatly across party lines - Theresa May had a fifth column in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg's cronies in the European Research Group blocking everything she proposed, just because it suited them to do so, while Jeremy Corbyn's personal distaste for the EU is balanced by the strong Remain contingent in his party and counter-balanced by the knowledge that a great number of Labour strongholds voted heavily to leave.
And while it's comforting (and probably accurate) to point to the massive irregularities in the vote caused by dodgy funding and social media interference, the fact remains that the country voted and people have picked their sides. I won't claim I could foresee the result, but conversations I had as early as 2004 made me wary that a vote to leave would always be possible - for as long as I've lived in the UK there's been a steady drumbeat of negativity about the EU (in no small part because of Boris Johnson's agitating in his newspaper columns).
Add to that the fact that even then the north, or really anyplace that wasn't London, was being left behind. For all the vibrancy of Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh, the place to really do most anything is London, whether you want to get into politics, finance or the media - or simply find a job, given that so many former industrial communities in the North and Midlands still haven't recovered from the double blow of their massive inefficiencies and the Thatcher years.
I don't like to subscribe to notions that it's grim up north, especially because the farthest north I've ever been in England is Nottingham (I'm hedging a bit, because I have been to Edinburgh), but I knew enough people from those areas to know that coming down to London was their best bet to getting started in their early twenties.
The problem with Brexit generally, and my suspicion that Britain will be okay (though as stated, not great), is that it'll do nothing to address those structural issues. Power will still be concentrated in the southeast, and with it all the funding and attention; housing will remain impossible to find, at least at decent prices and at a sufficient level of quality that you'd like to see your children live there. And given that Brexit was revealed as a massive racist attempt to stop immigration, it's ironic that the folks driving up property prices in London - rich Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners, among others - won't be affected by the end of EU freedom of movement.
Moreover, Scotland's going to make more noises about seceding from the UK, hoping in part to get back into the EU, while Northern Ireland could turn back into a powder keg - or at least a giant headache for Westminster, since it had already gotten so fractious that it wasn't being ruled from Belfast anymore.
But I think the best summation of the issue is my friend's comment that the instant rage directed at the idea of revisiting the vote is ridiculous. As he points out, if the arch-Brexiteers have their way, we'll never be able to vote on it again. It's like if we were to stop having elections in the US after we voted in Donald Trump, because we can't go back on that ever (though watch this space - in the unlikely event that he loses the 2020 election, who's to say he leaves the White House...?).
Still - there's probably enough there for the UK to muddle along once it crashes out of the EU without any trade deals. There probably won't be riots or fighting in the streets, and the march of business will set things back on course at some point. But it'll be a smaller, crappier and less pleasant place, losing many of the things that made it a nice place to live or visit. And that's the tragedy of this whole farce.
Because I read the Guardian, it's hard to escape the impression that things are going to hell in a hand basket, and that we'll be back to death by stoning by dinner-time (I never get tired of that Blackadder quote, in part because it remains so apposite with each new development in the Brexit saga). But in fairness, if I read the Times, the Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) or
Which is part of the problem: in normal circumstances it's a good thing that the papers in Britain have a viewpoint, but here it just means that people are unable to find any common ground, because they're being whipped into a frenzy by their respective sides.
My problem with the whole business is that I actually guess the UK's going to be okay. Not great, not as well off as it would be if they'd just voted in Ed Milliband in 2015, or more likely, had returned a majority or coalition for Gordon Brown's Labour in 2010. But the UK's economy is probably big and robust enough that it could do okay on its own - potentially even with a no-deal, though because it's so unprecedented it's impossible to tell.
But what's frustrating is the eternal deadlock that's been unleashed by 2016's Brexit vote. Labour and the Tories respectively are in disarray because being pro-Leave or pro-Remain doesn't cut neatly across party lines - Theresa May had a fifth column in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg's cronies in the European Research Group blocking everything she proposed, just because it suited them to do so, while Jeremy Corbyn's personal distaste for the EU is balanced by the strong Remain contingent in his party and counter-balanced by the knowledge that a great number of Labour strongholds voted heavily to leave.
And while it's comforting (and probably accurate) to point to the massive irregularities in the vote caused by dodgy funding and social media interference, the fact remains that the country voted and people have picked their sides. I won't claim I could foresee the result, but conversations I had as early as 2004 made me wary that a vote to leave would always be possible - for as long as I've lived in the UK there's been a steady drumbeat of negativity about the EU (in no small part because of Boris Johnson's agitating in his newspaper columns).
Add to that the fact that even then the north, or really anyplace that wasn't London, was being left behind. For all the vibrancy of Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh, the place to really do most anything is London, whether you want to get into politics, finance or the media - or simply find a job, given that so many former industrial communities in the North and Midlands still haven't recovered from the double blow of their massive inefficiencies and the Thatcher years.
I don't like to subscribe to notions that it's grim up north, especially because the farthest north I've ever been in England is Nottingham (I'm hedging a bit, because I have been to Edinburgh), but I knew enough people from those areas to know that coming down to London was their best bet to getting started in their early twenties.
The problem with Brexit generally, and my suspicion that Britain will be okay (though as stated, not great), is that it'll do nothing to address those structural issues. Power will still be concentrated in the southeast, and with it all the funding and attention; housing will remain impossible to find, at least at decent prices and at a sufficient level of quality that you'd like to see your children live there. And given that Brexit was revealed as a massive racist attempt to stop immigration, it's ironic that the folks driving up property prices in London - rich Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners, among others - won't be affected by the end of EU freedom of movement.
Moreover, Scotland's going to make more noises about seceding from the UK, hoping in part to get back into the EU, while Northern Ireland could turn back into a powder keg - or at least a giant headache for Westminster, since it had already gotten so fractious that it wasn't being ruled from Belfast anymore.
But I think the best summation of the issue is my friend's comment that the instant rage directed at the idea of revisiting the vote is ridiculous. As he points out, if the arch-Brexiteers have their way, we'll never be able to vote on it again. It's like if we were to stop having elections in the US after we voted in Donald Trump, because we can't go back on that ever (though watch this space - in the unlikely event that he loses the 2020 election, who's to say he leaves the White House...?).
Still - there's probably enough there for the UK to muddle along once it crashes out of the EU without any trade deals. There probably won't be riots or fighting in the streets, and the march of business will set things back on course at some point. But it'll be a smaller, crappier and less pleasant place, losing many of the things that made it a nice place to live or visit. And that's the tragedy of this whole farce.
Sunday, 18 August 2019
Big Cold War Love
Every once in a while you step back and notice a pattern in what you're watching, reading, listening, or whatever. I've recently noticed how many movies and TV shows I'm watching that are about the last few years of the Cold War.
The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.
It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.
It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.
On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.
What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.
I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).
Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.
In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.
I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.
Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.
Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.
It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.
It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.
On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.
What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.
I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).
Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.
In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.
I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.
Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.
Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Monday, 12 August 2019
Now That's What I Call All of British Music
My research through the twisting and turning corridors of British music continues. As promised when I wrote about listening to all of the Kinks' albums a few months ago, I went on to listen to the Rolling Stones' discography, then The Who, and on and on. I've explored how the blues and R&B fascination of the 60s turned into the hard rock of the 70s, and from there into the stadium rock of the 80s, a trajectory that encompassed all three bands, and might have included the Beatles, if they'd lasted that long.
I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.
My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?
The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.
The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.
The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).
There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.
Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.
It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.
There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.
Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...
I had a brief delve into folk, with the Small Faces (though not the Faces) and Fairport Convention, though there again I wasn't sure I wanted to continue through their discography which (impressively) continues to the present day. I might still be on Fairport Convention if I'd done that.
My other big takeaway so far from this whole business is that prog rock is not for me. I gave the albums of Jethro Tull a game stab, but didn't start very promisingly with This Was or Stand Up, and I gave up completely when I got to A Passion Play. Aqualung may be considered a high-water mark but with that in mind, why subject myself to the likes of 1999's J-Tull Dot Com?
The one exception to my "no-prog" rule is Pink Floyd, but I think they really only got good when they left behind the worst excesses of the genre with Dark Side of the Moon. And even they had a difficult decade in the 80s, when David Gilmour and Roger Waters decided they'd had enough of each other.
The Bee Gees are another band that I fail to see the charms of, now that I've listened to their whole oeuvre. They weren't very remarkable before they took up the whole disco thing, nor were they very remarkable after, when they opted for the same over-produced sounds that many a British rock band's career foundered on. Come to think of it, the disco years weren't particularly exciting either.
The most interesting thing about them, I'd say, is the late Robin Gibb's uncanny resemblance to former Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart. The proof that we're in the darkest timeline is that a Google search for "Rory Stewart Robin Gibb" fails to throw up pictures of the two side by side for comparison (I'd do it myself, but I'm not that bothered, frankly, and I don't have loads of time for such bollocks tonight).
There are positives, of course. I really liked going through Elton John's back catalog. I loved his 70s albums when I was in middle school and high school, and revisiting them had the same effect as re-reading my old comics - being reminded of stuff I hadn't thought about in twenty years and revisiting what I liked about it then. Of course, he had a pretty difficult 80s too, a fact that comes to mind especially when I watch the video for Nikita and realize that Ethan Phillips based the character and look of Neelix in Star Trek: Voyager on Elton's get-up for that video, right down to the unfortunate mullet.
Slightly more seriously, it's interesting to see the similar trajectories, where these artists find out how the things that worked in the first decade of their career don't necessarily work in the second, only to find that a back-to-basics approach allows them to carve out a respectable third decade. It worked for the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Elton John - the tragedy is that the Kinks broke up just as people started to recognize how good they'd been.
It's worth noting that there's a point to the whole enterprise, beyond muso credit. In a lot of cases, I knew about these less-heralded bits of favorite artists' careers, but only glancingly. It's been nice filling in the gaps in my knowledge, for instance by listening to Genesis and figuring out where both Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins came from.
There's loads more to go, of course. The 60s were easy because if you listen to The Beatles, the Kinks, The Who and the Rolling Stones, you've basically hit the high points (though I did go further and also listen to the Small Faces and the Zombies), but the 70s are when rock splintered into a number of sub-genres... and that's even before you get to punk.
Ironically I'm already a lot more conversant with the best bands of the 80s and 90s, but I'm sure both decades will throw up some interesting stuff. I'm also hoping that the 2000s will hold up as well, and that I'll be able to find some decent bands from the 2010s, though I may have to draw the line at Bastille...
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