Showing posts with label Commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Prince's "1999" and Carpe Diem Poetry



2016 appears bent on taking every androgynous, genre defying pop artist from us. As a longtime Bowie fan, I was pretty crushed when he passed away. Afterwards I must have listened to at least one Bowie album for about two months. I’ve long enjoyed Prince’s music, but I only really started to dive into his discography in the last three or four years, and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Prince was prolific. At nearly forty albums, Prince's discography is intimidating. The man had a whirlwind of energy packed into a tiny frame.. Prince has left any music fan more than enough material to spend a lifetime poring over, but I want to look at one of his most indelible hits to try to at least scratch the surface of his genius.

 The song “1999” is of course the title track to Prince’s 1982 album, and despite failing to initially place on the Billboard charts, it has since grown into one of the artist’s most iconic statements. It also showcases why Prince happens to be pop music’s master craftsman of carpe diem poetry.

It seems like in the public consciousness the phrase “carpe diem” has become associated with lofty virtues, like reading a book outside on a balmy spring day. I mean, take a look at this google image search of the word. It’s a disgusting collection of quills, exclamation marks, and cursive. This image of the phrase most likely comes out of the execrable Dead Poets Society, a film that manages to take complex literary works and boil them down into acceptable bourgeois aphorisms.

Naturally, carpe diem isn’t singular, and the notion of what it means to “seize the day” (or more accurately “pluck the day”) differs from person to person. But limiting the phrase to politely acceptable forms of time wasting smooths overs the possible complications and conundrums present in the concept. If we’re going to seize the day and forget about tomorrow, why show up for work? Why obey any social or moral codes? Why spend time parenting or working through your relationship with your spouse? Why not just dive headfirst into hedonism? And of course all of these questions have been explored by authors over the years.

One of the most famous carpe diem poems, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, is clearly interested less in lofty goals like spending time in nature and more interested in base desires. The poem opens up with the speaker addressing a woman: “Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime”. This is clearly a guy who wants to put on some Marvin Gaye and get busy. The speaker eventually goes on to suggest things they could do if they wanted to take their time, such as taking long walks and other romantic notions, but he clearly wants to skip that prelude to the main event. As the poem continues, the speaker’s strategy becomes downright vicious. Taking a cue from today’s pick up artist, he starts “negging” the poor woman by reminding her that her looks are fleeting.

 I’ve both enjoyed Marvell’s poem and recoiled at his douchey protagonist, but I do think it manages to examine the conflicting facets of the aphorism much better than pablum like Dead Poets. Prince smartly takes fear of impending death that underpins carpe diem and blows it up to apocalyptic size. In “1999” the millennium serves as an endpoint for all of civilization, and it’s interesting to draw connections between the song’s end of the world scenario and the eschatology of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the religion Prince would dramatically convert to later in life. Spirituality and sex are common bedfellows in Prince’s music, and the second couplet of the song has guitarist Dez Dickerson singing, “But when I woke up this mornin’ / I coulda sworn it was Judgment Day.” But unlike in other Prince songs, sex does not lead to spirituality; instead the impending afterlife leads him to bodily instincts.

 Speaking of Revelations, the surreal imagery of the New Testament’s final book are arguably echoed by the song’s many references to dreams. The song has one of my favorite first lines: “I was dreamin’ when I wrote this / Forgive me if it goes astray,” a phrase that’s repeated later with a slight difference. The line recalls the surreality of the end times, but it’s also a brilliant humblebrag. Prince asks for forgiveness because he wrote the song in his sleep. But he’s also so damn amazing that he can write a song like “1999” in his sleep.

 The spectre of apocalypse wasn’t only Prince’s response to the book of Revelations. There was also the real possibility of nuclear armageddon, a fear exacerbated by newly elected president Ronald Reagan’s more confrontational, some would say unhinged, worldview. A year earlier on Controversy Prince released the more explicitly political song “Ronnie Talk to Russia,” but here the politics are a little more subtle, or at least as subtle as they can be on a song about the world ending. In a Cold War context, the song’s hedonist urgings become a political statement. “1999” isn’t just about having fun before the world ends; it is about rejecting the notion of a “moral majority” that had overtaken the nation during Reagan’s ascent.

Prince also manages to make the icky gender politics of carpe diem poetry more egalitarian. Originally, Prince had planned for the song to be sung with three part harmonies, but he eventually split up the verses between himself, his guitarist Dez Dickerson, and backup singers Lisa Coleman and Jill Jones. By trading off vocals, the song has a looser party vibe. (Much of Prince’s music plays with the rigidity of 80s music production and the spontaneity of live performance, but that’s an essay for another day). By including female vocalists, the song makes it clear that pleasure seeking isn’t solely a male activity. In the delightfully over the top line, “I’ve got a lion in my pocket / And baby he’s ready to roar,” Prince is backed up by Jill Jones. In Laconian terms, the phallus is not solely possessed by males. Women have equal access.

 Prince didn’t just make a damn catchy funk song perfectly suited for the dance floor. He took a thousand year old tradition in carpe diem poetry and resurrected it for his own time and purposes. There’s a darkness in much of Prince’s music and “1999’s” no exception. The song begins with an voice artificially slowed and deepened claiming, “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I only want you to have some fun.” It’s not terribly comforting. The song bookends with a voice made to be higher pitched asking, “Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?” Prince could find the darkness in every party and start a party to keep away the darkness. The two are inextricably linked. And it’s this ability to complicate “simple” party songs that made him an enduring giant of music. When it comes down to it, we all need to be reminded now and then that “Life is just a party / And parties weren’t meant to last.”

Saturday, March 19, 2016

The Last Command by Timothy Zahn

The Last Command by Timothy Zahn (4/5)


Here we come to the final installment of the “Thrawn Trilogy” as Zahn’s series of novels have come to be known. It’s a largely satisfactory ending aided by Zahn’s deft plotting and ear for the dialogue and cadence of Luke, Leia, and Han. In the previous installment, Dark Force Rising, Grand Admiral Thrawn had not only gained control over the “Katana Fleet,” a fleet of ships thought to have been lost or destroyed, but also started manufacturing cloned soldiers to man those ships, shifting the balance of power in the galaxy in the process.

Thrawn’s bolstered forces make the Empire a reinvigorated adversary, and Zahn smartly accomplishes this without using another superweapon as a crutch. While the New Republic deals with this new threat, Leia prepares the birth of her twins and Luke questions which side Mara Jade, former assassin for the Emperor turned smuggler, will ultimately join.

In the first part of the novel, Luke conscripts Talon Karrde into helping him track troop movements for the New Republic. Karrde, a smuggler with a heart of gold, stands as one of Zahn’s more indelible creations, and here he showcases Zahn’s ability to invest his plots with clever moves and countermoves. In fact, Karrde’s subplot might be my favorite element of the entire novel. He must form a shaky alliance between normally competitive smugglers in order to provide Luke and the New Republic with the intelligence they seek while also keep an eye on Thrawn’s attempts at seeding dissention within the group.

Zahn’s other and more popular contribution to the wider Star Wars Expanded Universe is of course Mara Jade, a Force sensitive former assassin for the Empire.  Throughout the trilogy, she seems hell bent on finally killing Luke who she blames for the death of the Emperor. In a risky move, Luke decides to trust her and bring her along on their mission to destroy Thrawn’s hidden cloning facilities. Because of Jade’s work with the Empire, she’s the only person with enough knowledge to lead Luke, Han, and the rest to where the clones are being produced en masse. They even defy the New Republic by sneaking Jade off of Coruscant where she has been detained because of her ties to the Emperor and newly discovered evidence that points to current collaboration with the Empire.

Jade has apparently become a fan favorite character, and she gives us another fully rounded female character other than Leia, something Star Wars needs more of. She’s an intriguing character because she seems to have lost her place in the world following the death of the Emperor. But it is a little silly how quickly Luke decides to trust her, especially considering the fact that she openly states multiple times that she plans on killing him. In fact, we’re just supposed to trust her because Zahn has decided that she’s going to be one of the good guys, which kind of sandpapers her edges in a way that makes her character less interesting.

When the New Republic detains her because they receive information from an Imperial agent that she’s still working for the Empire, Han steadfastly defends her innocence merely because the agent is likely untrustworthy. Sure, but if we’re going to think about the issue rationally, it would be idiotic for New Republic to allow a potential Imperial spy and former aid to the Emperor to freely move about their government headquarters. Zahn seems to ask us to trust Mara simply because he knows in the end she’s one of the good ones.

It’s interesting to see ways in which The Last Command contradicts canonical information from subsequent films. Bringing in the idea of clones, which at this point were nothing more than a quick allusion by Obi-Wan in A New Hope, smartly unweaves the seemingly definitive conclusion to the Empire at the Battle of Endor. But it’s suggested in the novel that the cloning process means the clones go insane after a couple of years, information completely missing from the prequels, likely because Lucas decided to just ignore this version of events. It’s a nice example of how the Star Wars EU never truly was canon. (There’s also no mention of Kamino as you might guess).

Eventually, Luke and Mara face off against insane Jedi clone C’baoth while the forces of Admiral Ackbar try to survive one of Thrawn’s traps. The novel ends with the remnants of the Empire more powerful and the New Republic a little weaker, a finale that guarantees the detente will continue. The expansive Star Wars EU wouldn’t have had the impact that it did without Zahn’s trilogy. He clearly understood Lucas’s creation, and when reading his novels, I often felt like I was visiting old friends.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but Star Wars had a decade-long absence from popular culture, and before the first book of Zahn’s trilogy, we last saw our heroes froloking to the sounds of that catchy “Yub Nub” song on the moon of Endor with a bunch cuddly teddy bears. Zahn’s trilogy started feeding fans information about where our characters ended up after the films ended, and he deserves credit for both demonstrating that there are still plenty of great stories to tell in the galaxy far, far away and that there was a pretty big appetite for this material. The Star Wars novels of 90s, Zahn’s as well as others, could often be found on the New York Times bestseller list. If it weren’t for the popularity of these books, I wonder if we would even have the prequel trilogy. (Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I’ll let you decide).

In fact, the Thrawn Trilogy had become so popular before Episode VII came out that plenty of people wanted Disney to straight up adapt Zahn’s novels. Ignoring the fact that the Thrawn Trilogy takes place five not twenty years after Return of the Jedi, I’m glad Disney didn’t go that route.

I obviously enjoyed the Thrawn Trilogy, but it also clearly has different goals than The Force Awakens. Zahn’s clearly trying to stretch out the battles fought in the original trilogy so that other authors can work within a world that looks much like it did in Episodes IV, V, and VI. I actually don’t think The Force Awakens goes far enough in differentiating itself from the original trilogy, something Lucas managed in the prequels. (One of the successes of the prequel films was the fact that Lucas created a world and conflicts that were different enough from his original creation while also still feeling like they’re a part of the Star Wars universe). But adapting the Thrawn Trilogy would have only compounded this problem. Zahn doesn’t even manage to differentiate the new villain from the Empire in any way.

There also seems to be less at stake in the Thrawn Trilogy. I’m not necessarily talking about that dumb extra-large Death Star used in The Force Awakens. Lucas had established the main Star Wars cycle as an intergenerational tale, but Zahn’s novels basically serve as an addendum to the events of the original trilogy. The death of Han also raises the emotional stake in a way that Zahn’s novel doesn’t accomplish. (In his defense, it would be kind of a dick move to kill of Han Solo and make it impossible for any other Star Wars EU writers future use of the character.)

And while Thrawn’s a great villain, he never gets to be as menacing as he could be. He never interacts with the core protagonists, and in the end he’s killed by the Noghri, aliens who discovered that the Empire has been lying to them in order to gain their loyalty. It works within the context of the novel, but in a film it would come across as anti-climactic. (Hell, I was kind of hoping that Thrawn and his stooge, Pelleon, would make it out to fight another day.)

The less said about the clone of Luke that’s dropped into climax of the novel, the better.

Still, there are things Disney could learn from the Thrawn Trilogy. You don’t need another stupid, stupid superweapon to create a threat. That’s a crutch used by plenty of lesser authors who followed in Zahn’s wake. I would also love to see Mara Jade or a Mara Jade influenced character in the new trilogy. We need more female characters who are unaffiliated with either the villains or the heroes. Hopefully Disney will borrow from the Star Wars Expanded Universe while not forgetting to blaze their own path.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Reflection on the Star Wars Universe

Reflection on the Star Wars Universe

I’d like to make a quick programming note about my exploration of the Star Wars Expanded Universe and any further Star Wars related reviews in the near future. When I started investigating the Star Wars EU many months ago, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. Would the novels recreate the joy twelve-year-old me had of discovering a galaxy beyond the original three films? Or would they be embarrassingly bad like so much of the popular cultural detritus of the past? Turns out it was somewhere in between.

As much as I enjoyed revisiting the Star Wars EU, not all of it worked. At the very least, even those works that capture the character and feel of the original trilogy--such as the Thrawn Trilogy--were hampered by the fact that the Clone Wars saga had not been fleshed out, meaning any references to events prior to A New Hope never fully meshed with George Lucas’s overall plan as it unfolded from 1999 to 2005. But there were also some goofy ideas that felt like hastily written fan fiction (Dark Empire, I’m looking at you).

I’m planning on continuing my journey through the Star Wars EU. After all, I still have to finish off the Thrawn Trilogy. It will be interesting to see the Star Wars EU now that we have a very real “official” vision of how the saga should continue. I would also like to take a look at the new ancillary novels and comics that have the Disney stamp of approval. Of course, I won’t be able to immerse myself in all Star Wars all the time. I think it was Jesus (aka Young Anakin) who said, “Man cannot live by Star Wars alone.” But I might keep this up until the release of Episode VIII. Hell, I haven’t even watched those Ewok movies yet, which will likely require some time, whisky and gumption to get through.

Finally, I wonder how my time spent in the Star Wars EU affected my experience watching Episode VII. As I noted in my review, I liked Episode VII, but I was also ambivalent about how much of A New Hope the film borrowed. If anything, familiarity with the Star Wars EU eased expectations I had of Episode VII. Of course, the roman numerals in the title ask the audience to see this entry as even more important. They’re telling us that it’s a part of the cyclical myth of the Skywalker family, which has always been central to Lucas’s vision. But, at the same time, it’s also one of hundreds of stories told using tools fashioned by Lucas. I love having all of these stories, but they by necessity make the films a little less special. After all, if you increase the supply, then the value of the “product” diminishes.

For me, the original trilogy will always be the very heart of Star Wars. After that, the prequels and the Clone Wars cartoon constitute Lucas’s insane and uneven vision. Everything else, good and bad, will stand apart. And I’m okay with that. I love Lucas’s influences and the world he built, and I’m just happy to get some more stories told within that galaxy. For now, I’ll take it.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (3.5/5)

By 1991 the Star Wars series had been in a carbonite type deep freeze.  Return of the Jedi had come out eight years earlier, and in the interim Star Wars fans were tossed mere scraps, including two laughable made for television Ewok films.  If you wanted a decent Star Wars story between 1983 and 1991, then you pretty much had to start writing fan fiction.  Aside from the actual quality of Heir to the Empire, I think its reception, then and now, is clearly colored by the fact that when published in 1991 the novel served as a veritable oasis at a time when fans of Star Wars had been trudging through the desert.  That might seem like hyperbole, but not only has Heir to the Empire made it on just about everyone’s list of best stories from the Star Wars Extended Universe, but the entire trilogy was also voted onto the list of NPR’s 100 greatest sci-fi and fantasy novels.  (It beat out Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man!)  While I’m not sure Heir to the Empire qualifies as one of the greatest sci-fi/fantasy stories of all time, I can understand why people hold the book in such high regard.  Zahn has a real talent for creating new characters who fit within the Star Wars galaxy while also writing old favorites in ways that make them believable simulacrums of our celluloid heroes.

But the story begins not with Luke, Han, and Leia; it begins with Grand Admiral Thrawn, a red eyed, blue skinned Chiss who, after the demise of Emperor Palpatine five years earlier at Endor, has taken over the remaining imperial forces in the outer rim.  In a retcon to the films, the Empire is represented as racist (speciesist?), preferring to promote only humans into the ranks of the upper echelon.  On the one hand, considering that the work of Leni Riefenstahl and the Third Reich form the visual template for the Empire, this makes a certain amount of sense.  But considering the vast diversity of species within the Star Wars Universe, and considering the films never hinted at this policy, it seems somewhat counterproductive.  Still, the fact that Thrawn achieved the Empire’s highest command despite this policy of discrimination tells us a little about his skill as a leader and tactician.

Questionable retconing aside, Thrawn is a wonderful villain for our heroes.  Where Vader was quick to anger and would execute underlings at a steady clip, Thrawn is reserved, mindful.  When not occupying the bridge of his Star Destroyer, he’s often in his quarters studying hologram images of art created by different species from a myriad of different worlds.  Of course, he’s doing this in order to better understand the culture of these people so that he can get inside their heads and understand how to defeat them.  In the tradition of the erudite villain, like Hannibal Lecter, Thrawn can appreciate both tactics and aesthetics.  Part of Thrawn’s scheme to reassert the Empire as the central power in the galaxy involves recruiting Joruus C’baoth, an insane cloned Jedi master.  In order to convince C’baoth to aid him, Thrawn collects a bunch of small lizard-like creatures, the ysalamirir, which have the power to dampen a Jedi’s use of the force.  He also promises C’baoth that he will deliver Luke, Leia, and the twins Leia is currently pregnant with.

Of course, all these machinations are unknown to Luke Skywalker and the now married Leia and Han Solo.  They’re busy attempting to rebuild the New Republic, which also appears to be teetering on the brink thanks to political infighting and a lack of resources.  Han Solo is tasked with recruiting smugglers into legitimate shipping operations for the new government, but because it’s not clear how long the New Republic will last, many of these illegal operators are wary of taking any sides so long as the Empire is still a power player.  Zahn does a wonderful job of capturing the voice of not only the three main characters but also of secondary characters like Lando Calrissian and C3PO.  Even Admiral Akbar and Wedge Antilles make appearances.  But he’s especially great at capturing Han’s sardonic charms, something that’s not easy to mimic. 

The book is well plotted and has the easy momentum of a snowspeeder on Hoth.  As the protagonists attempt to unravel the mystery of who is attempting to kidnap Luke and Leia, Thrawn is drawing them and the fledgling Republic into further traps.  I don’t want to give away too much plot, but Thrawn’s plans come to a head on Mykyr, the planet where he collected the ysalimiri and home to the criminal operations of smuggler Talon Karrde.  Karrde is another great creation by Zahn.  As a smuggler with a code—he appears to have a sense of duty towards anyone he views as his guests—he fits nicely within the Star Wars galaxy.  Likewise, Karrde’s mysterious underling, Mara Jade, appears to hold a burning grudge against Luke Skywalker for reasons that even Karrde is unaware of. 

Perhaps the only drawback during this section of the novel is that because of the ysalimiri, Luke is without the powers of the Force.  I can only imagine the disappointment of fans who waited eight years since Return of the Jedi in order to read about Luke swashbuckling across worlds as a full fledged Jedi Knight, only to have the author take away those powers.  The ysalimiri are a somewhat dubious plot device to begin with (they’re strangely reminiscent of the controversial midichlorians from the prequel films), but using them as Luke’s kryptonite somewhat deflates the novel’s action and adventure. 

There are a few other aspects of the book that are creakily constructed.  Despite C’baoth being positioned early in the novel as integral to Thrawn’s schemes, he does very little throughout the course of the story.  Leia does not get much attention, and she’s essentially shuffled off to the Wookie planet of Kashyyyk where she’s forgotten for a long stretch (a chapter following Leia even ends on a cliffhanger that isn’t resolved until much later in the story).  There’s a little more retconning here and there that, as someone who’s protective of the original trilogy, I could have done without.  For instance, the novel suggests that Emperor Palpatine used the Force in order to increase the performance of his men during the battle of Endor.  (Was he also doing this while simultaneously attempting to turn Luke to the darkside?)  The prose is mostly serviceable, and while this makes for easy, fast-paced reading, it would have been interesting to see how an author might try to remake George Lucas’s visual palette into language.

Still, for those hungering for Star Wars adventures beyond the films, Heir to the Empire may very well be the perfect place to start.  Zahn does more than give us adventures with our favorite characters in a galaxy far, far away; he adds invaluable characters, places and concepts to this world.  Without a doubt, Heir to the Empire shows what creative minds can further conjure beyond the original trilogy. 

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I would like to touch upon one issue that I remember having with some of the Expanded Universe novels when I was a kid and that reading Heir to the Empire really reminded me of.  In the sticky concoction of influences that make up Star Wars, the novels always include far too much science fiction.  In an article about Heir to the Empire, Ryan Britt argues that the novel brought science fiction into Star Wars.  He argues that the ysalimiri demystify the Force and that even though the Clone Wars were mentioned in the original trilogy, making C’baoth a clone feels more like hard sci-fi.  I don’t agree with all of Britt’s examples, but he has a point, especially about the ysalimiri. 

Zahn’s non-Star Wars work is in the genre of science fiction, and it shows in the novel.  There’s a lot of technobabble that belongs more in a hard sci-fi world like Star Trek than in Star Wars.  Kevin J. Anderson, the other major author of the Star Wars EU novels, also writes primarily in the genre of science fiction.  The problem is that Star Wars is only partly a world of science fiction.  I remember as kid starting to realize that Star Wars and Star Trek had very little in common with one another beyond similar titles.  This made me happy since I never had to choose between these two distinct series. 

While Star Wars has some elements of science fiction, mostly culled from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the old Flash Gordon serials, the space setting is used simultaneously as a means of escapism and a mythical projection outward.  In other words, this unreal setting serves as a means for us to forget our surroundings and delve into another world for a few hours and a new version of mythology’s tendency to project us backwards and outwards.  Myths never take place at the time they are being told.  They always take place in the past in order to provide gravitas and to create a sense of continuity between the mundane now and the transcendent world of myths.  Using space as a setting for mythic storytelling has always been one of the genius aspect of George Lucas’s creation.


Star Wars is a collage of so many diverse influences, from David Lean’s epics to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, that it would be shame to overemphasize its sci-fi roots.  In fact, I would argue that Star Wars has more in common with fantasy than science fiction.  That’s not to say that science fiction authors shouldn’t work on Star Wars properties.  But I do hope that after this latest reboot of the Star Wars EU, Lucasfilm will decide to bring in a broader set of creative minds to work on the Star Wars novels and comic books.  It’s a big galaxy; let’s not make it smaller.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Forty Years Later




How to Build a Universe thatDoesn’t Fall Apart Forty Years Later; Or, My Trip through the Star Wars Expanded Universe

 With the recent announcement of a third trilogy in the Star Wars saga, fans of George Lucas’s brainchild have, naturally, found themselves cycling through a complicated series of emotions, but mostly those of fear, anger, and other states of being that could lead one to the dark side.  I too have felt some trepidation about three more film entries into the world of warrior space monks, light swords, and intergalactic war.  Some of these concerns have already been plastered across the internet, so I won’t rehash them here.  (I will say that one of the things that bothers me about Abrams is that he seems like such an obvious studio choice that you could almost hear a studio exec telling his friend over a cell phone at brunch, “You know that guy who redid those other star movies?  Well, why don’t we just get him on board our star movies?”) 

After this initial rush of dread, I started to think about the possibilities inherent in the world of Star Wars.  George Lucas crafted a unique and inspiring box of toys that have allowed plenty of creative minds to conjure some imaginative continuations of his world.  Like plenty of geeky children growing up in the 90s, I became interested in the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) that was having something of a renaissance in the lead up to the new prequels.  I’ve decided that for my blog, I should revisit some of the ancillary works derived from the Star Wars Universe but not directly from George Lucas himself.

Here, I should probably provide you with a brief overview of my take on the prequels.  The short version is that the first two are incompetently made while the third one is mostly an enjoyable film that only falls flat towards the end because it’s tasked with doing the heavy lifting that the first two films failed to accomplish.  But others have gone over what’s wrong with the prequels (at length).  What’s rarely mentioned, however, is that the prequels are filled with great concepts that are poorly executed.  I quite like the idea that we follow Anakin from his days as an innocent child to his turn to the dark side, even if the lines poor Jake Lloyd had to deliver would have been impossible for even the most accomplished actor.  I love stories about romantic relationships stifled by monastic orders, like the famous the letters between Abelard and Heloise or the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  But there is absolutely no chemistry between Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman.  Still, when the characters kept their traps shut, the audience was often treated to impeccable displays of action choreography, special effects and spectacle.  For whatever reason, directors half George Lucas’s age are mostly incapable of staging action nearly as well as him, and this holds true even for the much maligned prequels.

But there is one crucial aspect of the original trilogy that holds true for the prequels as well: they are both immaculate examples of world building.  In recent years, when I watch any one of the six main Star Wars films, I’m reminded of Michael Chabon’s brilliant essay, “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes.”  Reflecting on some fictions’ ability to invite others to join in the process of creation, Chabon writes:

Readers of Tolkien often recall the strange narrative impulse engendered by those marginal regions named and labeled on the books’ endpaper maps, yet never visited or even referred to by the characters in The Lord of the Rings.  All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure.  Through a combination of trompe l’oeil allusions, of imaginative persistence of vision, it creates a sense of an infinite horizon of play, an endless game board; it spawns, without trying, a thousand sequels, diagrams, and Web sites. (54)

Well, there are obviously no maps in the Star Wars films on par with the now iconic one that opens up each book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Lucas’s galaxy still engenders flights of imaginative fancy through the alternating elements of that which is cloaked and that which is elaborated. 

First, the elaborate detail of the Star Wars films is awe inducing, which has only become truer as special effects have developed over the decades.  But let us just take the Mos Eisley Cantina scene as an example.  That scene is striking for a variety of reasons, not the least among them is the fact that we are introduced to a dozen or so species built out of the imagination of an extremely talented makeup and special effects crew.  You can imagine how overwhelming that scene must have been to audiences in 1977, especially considering they were probably used to the elongated ear and funny eyebrow aliens on shows like Star Trek.  This brings me to the fact that the origin and background of these creatures are completely cloaked, allowing the viewer’s imagination to conjure a million unique backstories.  Lucas provides us with the raw materials as well as the open space necessary to build a world in our own fecund imaginations.  The incredible detail with which Lucas painted his galaxy has lead many people to wonder what other stories are out there, what other tales there are to tell, while the mystery of what’s hidden gives us space to craft these narratives in our own head. 

I still remember the first inkling I had that in Star Wars, unlike some other imaginary worlds, there is an entire universe of stories that appear to be happening even as we are following the three main characters.  It was when I realized that the fighter pilot, Wedge Antilles, appears in all three films, first helping destroy the Death Star, then fighting AT-ATs on Hoth, and, finally, destroying the second Death Star.  As a kid it blew my mind that a single actor would reprise his role for what amounted to maybe five minutes of screen time over the course of three films.  I became quickly enamored with Wedge because he seemed to be at the center of all these major, galaxy changing events, but he was just an everyman.  He wasn’t royalty, he didn’t win the heart of the princess, and he wasn’t secretly the chosen hero.  He was just a damn good pilot fighting for a cause he believed in.  Realizing that Wedge appeared in all three films made me understand that this galaxy extended far beyond a handful of characters.  Wedge was another means for Lucas to develop a sense of simultaneity in his world. 

By carefully crafting these blank spaces, Lucas has invited plenty of artists to collaborate in creating this universe, which they did in droves starting in the early 90s.  At the time, I read a number of EU novels and comic books, and I’ve played plenty of Star Wars video games in my day.  (I especially liked Michael A. Stackpole’s Star Wars: X-Wing series, which, naturally, followed the exploits of Wedge).  But it’s been many years, and I cannot be certain that the works I enjoyed were any good and the ones I hated were actually bad.  Besides, the Star Wars EU was quite the cottage industry back in the day, and there are plenty of well regarded or infamous works that I’ve never touched.  Now that Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars universe, have effectively put a lid on the EU, it seems like now is as good a time as any to see what I missed out on during my early days reading Star Wars novels and comic books before this portion of the Star Wars Universe is reimagined by Disney.  (Fans appear to be upset about the fact that Disney has stated unequivocally that the EU isnon-canon, but since they never really were canonical, I don’t fully understand what the big deal is).  My plan is to drop some reviews here and there over the course of the next year as we lead up to the release date of Episode VII.  I just hope I don’t become completely consumed by 90s nostalgia in the process.  Wish me luck.

Monday, September 10, 2012

On Pitchfork and Lists



 Several weeks ago Pitchfork.com, often described as the hipster Bible of music websites, put up an application that allowed you to arrange, in order of quality, the best albums of the last fifteen years, which also happens to be how long Pitchfork has been in business.  What often bothers people about Pitchfork (myself included) is the definitive way in which they present their tastes. The website does not include a comment section, presumably because it could serve as a platform to launch an attack against the aesthetic arguments of Pitchfork’s reviewers.  The lack of a comment section ensures that there will be no oppositional discourse to Pitchfork’s tastemaking.  In a world of web 2.0 where interactivity has increasingly become essential, this decision by Pitchfork appears more and more to be a deliberate strategy.  Their obsession with lists also reinforces the idea that they are engaged in a canonical enterprise with the end goal being the construction of what constitutes a “proper” understanding of popular music.  Their opinions are less arguments than they are divine truths inscribed onto a tablet and brought down from the mountain top.

So the “People’s List,” as Pitchfork called their project, at first appeared like a nice way to admit that they had placed a tyrannical emphasis on their own judgment.  It was time to give back to their readers, to let them make the tough decisions.  I personally enjoyed passing along best of lists with people I know like we were trading baseball cards.  However, problems crept up once again when Pitchfork aggregated their reader’s picks.  The end result ended up looking like something that Pitchfork, rather than its readers, would have put out.  But in hindsight this isn’t terribly surprising.  People read Pitchfork because they are interested in indie-rock music, and in return Pitchfork helps shaped the aesthetic taste of its audience.  The end result was, in a word, bland.

This caused Pitchfork critics to go into a fury.  Over at Slate they accused Pitchfork readers of being racists and claimed that the entire list was a “scandal” (I’m not making this up, folks).  Gawker’s response was, unsurprisingly, heavy on the snark.  For me, however, all of this discussion of lists reminded me of the wonderful Walter Benjamin essay, “Unpacking MyLibrary.”  In this essay, Benjamin analyzes the process of book collecting.  He notes that it is much more and much less about reading the books in one’s collection.  In one sense, Benjamin argues, book collecting is a sort of obsessive compulsive disorder, or, as he writes, “For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as an order?” (60). What’s more, collecting is just as much about the corporeal aspect of the books as it is about their actual content.  Physically assembling the books in one place, regardless of whether or not you have read all of them, seems to be the main goal of the book collecting obsessive. 

In this sense, collecting books is more about the collector than the books themselves.  The same can be said about the creation of best of lists.  In some sense, they’re less than the sum of their parts.  A list that attempts to collect the best films of the last twenty years, for example, tells us an awful lot about the person who created that list, but usually tells us very little about the films themselves.  This is just Benjamin’s obsessive compiler of rare book artifacts transmogrified into the digital age.  The internet is overrun with enumeration.  If you want someone to read a web article, then start typing out numbers, and, if you aren’t pressed for time, throw some paragraphs in there as well.  I mean, the website Cracked is based around the idea of creating listings that in no reasonable sense could be organized from worst to best. 

But this doesn’t mean that lists are necessarily pointless.  Like I said, they tell us an awful lot about the compiler.  I enjoyed reading the various lists of favorite albums that floated around the web over the last few weeks.  They taught me a lot about the person who put these lists together.  And every once in a while they pointed out some new classics that I felt compelled to track down.  But once these lists were compiled into Pitchfork’s uber-list, they lost their individuality. They started to tell us more about the kind of music Pitchfork grants 9.2s and 9.6s to than about their readers.  These days we collect in order to create a mosaic of ourselves.  If you’re curious as to what albums I came up with, then you can see them here.  Putting it together, I think I learned a little about the last fifteen years of my life.

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Wrap Up to Nolan's Batman Trilogy



Over the course of his Batman trilogy, Nolan has produced three distinct films with a shared aesthetic.  Although each film takes place within the same canonical Batman universe, they take increasingly different positions on the political issues of the day.  Since Momento, his first full length film, Nolan has always been interested in pop-philosophy, and this did not change when he was given a much bigger budget to work with.  For this he gets a lot of credit.  But what has been disturbing over the course of the three films is their gradual drift into conservative ideology.

It's easy to read Batman Begins as a rebuke of America's foreign policy during the "War on Terror," what with its questions about justice and vengeance and where the line between them lies.  But all of these questions are brought up naturally and are carried along by characterization.  They fit right at home in a Batman movie.  And the fact that Batman is fighting against terrorists (albeit comic book terrorists) draws an obvious parallel between the events in the film and America's foreign policy. 

A lot of these same questions came up in The Dark Knight, which is arguably a better film (I kind of wish I had bumped it up half a star in my rating) even if it doesn't handle the larger issues as well.  The part of the movie that people on the left criticized the most was Batman's cell phone hacking.  In the climax Batman hacks into all of Gotham's cell phones so he can use them as some sort of sonar devices in order to track down the Joker.  Plenty have noted the similarity between Batman's phone hacking and the actual phone hacking done by the government.  But while Batman's decision to essentially take over all the cell phones in Gotham is obviously a violation of privacy, it is arguably nowhere near as invasive as the NSA's search through the e-mailand phone conversations of American citizens.  Do we really want the government listening to the conversations between friends, family, and lovers?  First of all, the issue is simplified.  Of course, the audience wants Batman to broach the law because the Joker is about to blow up two boats.  Nolan has basically constructed a ticking time bomb situation, which also happens to be a situationthat has never occurred in real life.  (Besides, if you only have a matter of minutes, wouldn't the mad bomber just be able to hang for that short period of time?  The hypothetical sort of defeats itself.)  This is radically different from having the government creep into our personal communication network over the course of years.  And the movie's proposed solution, that we just blow up the capabilities when we're done with them, just doesn't cut it in a democracy where not only do you set a precedent, but that precedent can be later used by someone you wouldn't trust.  (This is why we must be just as critical of Obama when he skirts the law as we would have been with Bush). 

Still, The Dark Knight comes up with some interesting questions, including whether we would be ready to disproportionately punish criminals if it means that we can save our own necks.  Unfortunately, Nolan loses all of his ability to pose interesting questions in the third installment, The Dark Knight Rises.  Where the first two films offered interesting queries about the world we lived in, for the third film I had to actively ignore some of meager attempts at social commentary in the third film in order to enjoy it.  Ultimately, I liked the film thanks to its ambition and the care it takes with its characters.  Still, Nolan's attempt to deal with questions of social justice and class wouldn't cut it in a freshman philosophy course, and they certainly don't work on screen.  As I mentioned in my review, the entire set up is unclear to begin with.  (Is it the underclass who are trashing Gotham or just the prisoners, or are they being treated as one and the same?)  Perhaps the most laughable line in the entire film comes from Selina Kyle's friend.  When the two of them are surveying the damage done to a ransacked mansion, Selina remarks that this was someone's house once, to which her acquantance says, "Now it's everybody's house."  Don't you see, people?  If we ask the wealthy to pay a marginally higher tax rate, then it will be total bedlam!  Granted, I'm not sure if this is exactly what Nolan is saying, but I don't think he has a clue as to what he is saying either.

The end of the film winds up pitting those in power, the police force and the wealthy aristocrat Bruce Wayne, against the prisoner population of Gotham.  The status quo must be set right.  This is an inherently anti-populist view of the world.  It is only those few elites who, in the old world, could exert control over the many that must regain control and set things to the way that they used to be.  Batman as an archetype can be used as a political symbol for the left or the right.  He does not inherently signify a particular ideology, so I don't think positioning him as a neoconservative is automatically wrong.  But I do wish that Nolan would acknowledge some of these issues, which he at least attempted in the second film. 
 
I’m reminded of Frank Miller’s work on The Dark Knight Returns, which asked us to question whether or not we should condone the actions of a vigilante.  Throughout the book, Miller uses news style interviews of Gotham’s citizens to show how different people project their own fears and prejudices on Batman’s actions.  Some decry his actions while others praise him.  And then, in the midst of these opinions, one man on the street gives the following viewpoint: “Batman? Yeah, I think he’s a-okay.  He’s kicking just the right butts – butts the cops ain’t kicking, that’s for sure.  Hope he goes after the homos next” (45).  The line is brilliant because the reader can feel himself agreeing with the man until the brutally bigoted last sentence.  Here, Miller asks us to question populism in a more complex way than Nolan.  At what point should we shield the minority from, as the philosopher De Toqueville called it, the “tyranny of the majority”?  But Miller teases out these issues in a couple of sentences when Nolan couldn’t do so over the course of nearly three hours.  It is not that the issues that Nolan brings up shouldn’t be discussed.  It is that these issues should be discussed with nuance, vigor, and intelligence.

On the internet people like to bandy about the word pretentious, but it is often used incorrectly.  When people call a work of art pretentious, what they really mean is that the film is too difficult or esoteric for them.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines “pretentious” as “Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed” (OED).  So a pretentious work of art is something that thinks it has more to add to the conversation than it actually does.  The Dark Knight Rises is often pretentious in the truest sense of the word: it is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is.  But, I would still rather watch something with a pretense to greatness than a film that doesn’t even try.  I might not love The Dark Knight Rises as much as I wanted to, but I do respect its ambitions. 

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

A Groundwork of Metaphysics of Internet Piracy


 Arguments about internet piracy have, like piracy itself, ravaged the internet at least since Napster’s wonderful explosion in popularity followed by its just as glorious collapse.  But recently an article written by college student and NPR intern EmilyWhite has reignited this always contentious debate.  On NPR’s All Songs Considered blog, Emily White details her music buying experience, or, more precisely, a nearly total lack of it.  Through the process of friends who uploaded songs onto various devices, Kazaa, and ripping albums from her university’s radio station, Emily estimates that she has only bought perhaps fifteen albums in her lifetime, but owns around 11,000 songs.  Wisely, Emily feels somewhat guilty about this.  She notes that many of the flippant, poorly thought out solutions to the problem of easy access to free music, like “sell more t-shirts,” are completely inadequate.  But she also doesn’t really offer any solutions of her own beyond a vague call for a more convenient way to access music.  (Is clicking a mouse really all that inconvenient?)

Emily’s article garnered a slew of rebuttals, the most popular being the response of Dave Lowery, singer for the bands Cracker and Camper Von Beethoven and current professor of music business.  Where Emily’s solutions were somewhat vague, Lowery’s response was far more interested in clear details, and while I certainly don’t agree with everything he writes, I’m fairly certain it does a nice job of voicing the larger frustrations felt among the musician community.  The debate expanded from there with people taking both sides.  In the ensuing discourse there were two go to assumptions that really got under my skin: 1) generation gap politics and 2) coddling the young.  These might seem contradictory at first, but upon further examination they fit nicely next to one another. 

A quick glance at any comment board that dealt with Emily’s post will garner a slew of arguments about generational norms.  The act of stealing tens of thousands of songs, the argument goes, can be chalked up to those worthless millennials who are selfish and want everything handed to them, never mind that a generation ago the means to illegally download this number of songs just didn’t exist.  David Lowery’s post, at times, falls back on this generational finger pointing, and it’s one of his weakest arguments.  Travis Morrison, of Dismemberment Plan fame,responded to the assumption that millennials must some how be more morally bankrupt than past generations by noting that he as well as many of his friends stole music all the time back in the day.  Of course, he doesn’t really deal with the fact that it used to require a good amount of effort to steal back in the day where it has become nearly labor free today. 

Regardless, some of this generational resentment comes down to a vague anxiety plenty of baby boomers have that their place in the world of popular culture is quickly being replaced.  Couple this with the fact that the decline of the middle class tracks with the political rise of the baby boomers, and you have an entire generation worried about their own legacy and willing to lash out at their youngers.  Recent years have done damage to the narrative the boomers have constructed of themselves: principled actors who protested against the Vietnam War out of moral convictions and helped form a more open society.  Of course, this narrative is hurt by the fact that Nixon actually won the youth vote in his election runs, suggesting that plenty of the baby boomers were less concerned with American imperialism than they were with the fact that now they were being asked to sacrifice in order to support our overseas adventures.  In other words, no one cared about the war when the poor were dying, but as soon as the middle class were asked to join, then the youth culture of the late 60s started to pay attention.

This generational resentment finds its way into plenty of arguments, and my guess is that we will be seeing it for some time.  The other obnoxious trend I’ve noticed surrounding the Emily White article is a protective, sometimes condescending, tone people take when defending 21-year-old Emily.  There are a number of posts that accuse Lowery of “yelling at a 21 year old,” as if she isn’t old enough to handle a rebuttal to her public statement.  In one particular defense of Emily’s original post, written confusingly enough by another person named Emily White, the author begins by telling the first Emily that she “wrote a great blog post!”  (yes, with an exclamation mark).  I know that if you’re 21, then you’re just barely old enough to drink.  But you’re also old enough to handle some criticism.  You’re considered an adult at 18, and we do no service to young adults if we don’t call out their dumb ideas as dumb ideas.  When Emily writes that what she really wants is some vague notion of convenience, it’s perfectly acceptable to tell her, “You know, Emily, that’s kind of stupid.”

What is perhaps most frustrating aspect of the internet piracy argument is the fact that people are constantly speaking past one another.  There are those who are concerned with making sure that musicians can make a decent living so that they can make more great music.  On the other end, there are those “free culture” extremists who rightly note that technology has shifted the old business models, pointing out the benefits of this new technology, but plug their ears when people start talking about reasonable compensation for artists.  There are two related but separate issues at stake in this conversation.  First, the macro issue of business models and corralling the buying behavior of large groups of people.  Second, the micro issue of individual moral choice.  We might agree that downloading music without compensating the artist is a bad ethical choice, but that doesn’t mean that the problem will dissipate any time soon.  This means we must come up with a new business plan to better address this problem and make sure that artists receive enough compensation to continue to produce great art.

But at the same time (and this should really go without saying), just because a large number of people are stealing music does not make it ethical for you as an individual to also engage in this same behavior.  This part of the argument reminds me of Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” from his treatise, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.  In this text, Kant attempts to provide the basis for an understanding of morals that are universal, separate from any particular time and place.  In order to deal with this problem (and I’ll skip all of the intricate abstraction that he develops), Kant comes up with the idea of the “categorical imperative,” which he defines, in its simplest terms, as the maxim that “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (70).  So in order to adjudge whether or not illegally downloading music is an ethical choice, we should ask ourselves what would happen if everyone were to make the same decision.  Obviously, if no one paid for music, then the entire industry would pretty much fall apart, and we would have a lot less great art in the world.  In fact, those who pirate music have benefited greatly from those of us who have purchased our music over the years (or mostly purchased our music, as the case may be). 

We need to have both a discussion about the micro and macro aspect of internet piracy.  Each of us should determine what sort of ethical choices we need to make.  But at the same time, it is unrealistic to believe that people will automatically just stop pirating, especially cash strapped college students who love music.  And as we have this conversation, let’s not confuse the overarching issue of business models with individual ethical choice.