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.”

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.

________________________________________________________________________________

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.

Experimenter

Experimenter (4.5/5)

As Experimenter reminds us, the Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience and authority is found in nearly every first year psychology textbook, but the influence of Milgram’s work has spread much further than just the freshman college course. It’s the kind of experiment that has taken hold of popular imagination in such a way that high school teachers across discipline drop it as a little bit of knowledge. There’s something about Milgram’s experiment that makes for a great story. It’s a narrative all its own that confirms our worst fears. It also happens to be the focus of Michael Almereyda’s biopic, Experimenter.

Just a refresher: in Milgram’s obedience experiment, an unsuspecting subject is asked to play the role of a teacher while a second individual, who is an actor aware of the ruse, plays the student. A man pretending to be a doctor, garbed in a lab coat, explains the rules of the experiment to the subject, and during the experiment, the “doctor” sits behind the subject and directs his or her actions. The subject/teacher is instructed to ask the student a series of questions--the student would essentially have to memorize and repeat the second word in a series of word pairs--and when the student chooses incorrectly, the subject must shock him with an increasing amount of voltage. Throughout the experiment, the student/actor feigns pain from his place in a separate room. Despite reservations, the vast majority of subjects administered the highest voltage.

Experimenter is a surprisingly strong entry into that most maligned of genres: the biopic. The biopic has a reputation for being weepy Oscar bait at its absolute worst (see: the perfectly mediocre The Theory of Everything and the truly egregious The Imitation Game, exemplar of everything wrong with the genre). Biopics shouldn’t be this awful. There are some fascinating people who have interesting lives and exist in interesting times. If I were to diagnose the problem with the biopic, it is that they skew too heavily towards telling us one man or woman’s story without regard to the larger context. Why do these people matter? What do they say about the times in which they lived? Not only do most biopics take these questions for granted, they also try to stuff a person’s entire life into two hours, which is usually a fool’s errand.

Along with End of the Tour and Love & Mercy, Experimenter slips the curse of the biopic by paying attention to questions that extend far beyond the life of a single man. Almereyda uses Milgram’s life as a jumping off point to explore questions of power, authority, human plasticity, and authenticity. At times, the film feels more like a visual essay than a traditional film. Although screenwriting rules usually forbid voice-over and breaking the fourth wall may seem garish, Almereyda stuffs his film with both. Milgram himself becomes our Greek chorus, explaining his experiments, which are not limited to the one that made him famous, and leading us through his life.

Because his voice accompanies us throughout the film, Peter Sarsgaard must do plenty of heavy lifting as Milgram. The role of Stanely Milgram provides a wonderful opportunity for an actor, and Sarsgaard takes full advantage of being front and center, addressing the audience for much of the film’s running time. Sarsgaard plays Milgram as hunched and observational. He rarely interacts with any of the subjects of his experiment, and his ability to speak to the camera gives him a sort of God-like authority. And yet, he’s also unassuming. He may have a massive ego, but it has been honed by the rigors of scientific discourse.

Sarsgaard also subtly plays Milgram’s identity by ever so slightly incorporating a Jewish-American accent when he’s alone with family and friends but hiding it when he’s in a professional setting. As he mentions throughout the film, Milgram is the Yiddish word for pomegranate, one of the six fruits of the Hebrew Bible. Milgram’s work was influenced the events of the Holocaust and Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, an event that would lead the philosophy Hannah Arendt to coin the term, “the banality of evil.” From Eichmann’s point of view, he wasn’t a mastermind behind one of humanity’s greatest sins; he was merely doing his job as a small time member of a much larger machine. Evil, then, doesn’t come in the form of Satan; it comes in the form of a bureaucrat doing what he has been told and not taking responsibility. It’s just doing what the nice guy in the lab coat tells me to.

Milgram’s obedience experiment has imbedded itself into the popular consciousness because it purports to say something about human nature, and this is certainly true. But it also says something about how our environment molds our behavior and sense of ethics. The film emphasizes the importance of environmental factors by employing obviously projected backgrounds. Although the sciences purport to harden the world around us--to discover facts--the film’s playful form suggest that Milgram’s work does the opposite. He becomes a postmodern scientist, suggesting with his work that we do not exist except as constructs of the world that shapes us. There’s no I there.

Eventually, the film makes its way down the rabbit hole of inauthenticity. In 1976, CBS produced a fictionalized account of Milgram’s obedience experiment, starring none other than William Shatner (Kellen Lutz) as a fictionalized version of Milgram. This leads to scene in which Milgram as played by Sarsgaard converses with Shatner as played by Kellen Lutz dressed as Milgram on the set of a cheesy 70s film.

The film even questions Milgram’s ability to navigate ethical concerns in science. There is no way that the obedience experiment would make its way past an institutional review board today (“informed consent” is a hell of a thing), but Milgram seems disconcertedly dismissive of the kind of emotional harm he may have caused others. Tellingly, it’s the women in the film who mostly call him out on his lack of concern, which suggests that Milgram may have had a gendered ethical blind spot. In the end, the film asks us to think about ethics in a postmodern world. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Vonnegut, which I’ll leave you with: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

David Bowie - Blackstar

David Bowie - Blackstar (5/5)

On The Next Day, David Bowie self-consciously looked back through his legacy. The repurposed “Heroes” cover art and the songs about youth (both of unnamed protagonists as in “I’d Rather Be High” and Bowie’s own as in “Where Are We Now?”) signaled Bowie’s intent on sifting through memories and taking stock of a life fully lived. On Blackstar, his follow up album, Bowie seems more interested in breaking from the past and once again making a massive leap into the unknown.

Always the consummate collaborator, Bowie this time not only brought in his long time producer Tony Visconti but also enlisted the work of the Donny McCaslin Quartet, a group that melds jazz and electronica. Because he has devoured so many genres over the decades, jazz isn’t necessarily new to Bowie. “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” from Aladdin Sane and “Bring Me the Disco King” from Reality immediately spring to mind. While Blackstar demonstrates Bowie’s most sustained engagement with jazz, it should come as no surprise that Bowie tackles the genre from his own askance perspective and fully fleshes it out with his ever shifting personality.

In addition to jazz, 90s trip-hop and ambient electronica are equally important to Blackstar’s sound. The eponymous album opener is a nearly ten minute opus populated with mythic, future-fantasy lyrics that sound as if they were assembled from William S. Burrough’s famous “cut up” technique that Bowie has been known to use. Set to a stuttering drum beat, Bowie sings of the “villa of Ormen” in the cadence of a Gregorian chant. The archaic lyrics showcase Bowie’s interest in medieval European culture and narratives, but here they brush up against electronic arrangements resulting in something that both sounds like it always was and will never be. If past and present are two similarly charged magnets, then “Blackstar” stands at its very center. A little over the halfway mark, “Blackstar” takes a turn towards the theatrical, from a Broadwayesque crescendo into a slinking 1930s cabaret number. As if that weren’t enough, Middle Eastern sounding woodwinds and strings eventually creep into the proceedings. Within ten minutes, “Blackstar” seems to be reaching towards everything at once, but still maintains a cohesive identity all its own, much like Bowie himself.

As expansive and experimental as “Blackstar” sounds, it’s still more inviting than the more streamlined “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” Both songs employ polyrhythm and syncopation to unsettle the listener. While the Donny McCaslin Quartet attack their instruments, Bowie layers his patented croon over the carefully controlled chaos. Donny McCaslin and company deserve a good deal of credit for their aggressive playing, giving the songs real bite, but both tracks were originally demoed by Bowie himself prior to anyone else’s involvement, and they showcase his real ability to really investigate disparate genres and then make them his own.

Letting his quintessential Britishness poke through, Bowie borrows the title of “‘Tis a Pity” from a seventeenth-century English play about an incestruous tryst between brother and sister, certainly an allusion and subject matter you aren’t going to find from any other rocker. Likewise, the lyrics of “Girl Loves Me” are partly in the style of Nadsat, the fictional dialect developed by British author Anthony Burgess in his dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. As if these disparate influences weren’t enough, “Sue” and “Lazarus” in particular play up the album’s noir feel, which is also echoed in the album title and artwork. At only forty minutes in length, Blackstar contains multitudes. The album name is actually supposed to be styled as ★, and so much of the work sounds like an artist trying to slip the constraints of language and rigid rationality.

The album’s last two tracks, “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” are a little friendlier than those that precede them. Both are midtempo pop songs driven by indelible melodies. After the dark collage of music that constitutes most of the album, the final two tracks offer a little sliver of light and some emotional release. This tension has always been within Bowie’s music. From the beginning, the light has always kept darkness at bay, if just barely. And here Bowie is in his late sixties and reinventing himself once again. In “Dollar Days,” he sings, “I’m dying to / Push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again,” a mantra for both this album and Bowie’s life. I picked up Blackstar on the day it came out, and after listening to the album repeatedly, I thought to myself, “I can’t wait to see what Bowie is going to do next.”

But, of course, we’ll never know. As everyone knows by now, David Bowie died of cancer two days after the album was released. In retrospect, it’s clear that the album was written while Bowie was contemplating his own fragile mortality, and death and dying are found throughout the album, something I vaguely recognized when listening, but I mostly chose to ignore because the idea just seemed unfathomable at the time. Producer Tony Visconti called Blackstar Bowie’s final parting gift, an idea present in the lyrics and title of the final song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” The album speaks to Bowie’s generosity of spirit--that, in the end, he poured out nearly everything he had for his art and his fans. And who but Bowie could craft a final work of art that brilliantly looks towards the future, exploring new sounds and ideas all the way to the end.

---

I first became interested in Bowie when I was about eighteen and I bought Ziggy Stardust. Before then, I had heard his radio hits, but I had never really delved fully into his work. Listening to the album at the time felt like a world opening up to me. It was catchy, theatrical, campy, and mercurial in the way only Bowie could manage. Back then, gas was cheap, and I drove around in my shitty, bluish-green Ford Escort nearly non-stop, and for some time Ziggy Stardust became my soundtrack to the woods of rural Ohio.

From then on, I was hooked. The first paper I wrote in college that I was somewhat proud of was written for my freshman composition class, and it focused on the questions of gender and sexuality in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was only through Bowie that I came to more fully comprehend--rather than merely “know”--the fluid nature of gender and sexuality.

Before listening to Bowie, my understanding of these concepts were rather rigid and staid. I was brought up in an evangelical household, and while I had abandoned much of the regressive politics of that culture by the time I was a senior in high school, I had yet to fully come to terms with homophobic thought and language. I was still quasi-religious at the time, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around why homosexuality was supposed to be a sin. I reasoned that if it was a sin, then it must have been on the level of lying or some other kind of act that wouldn’t imperil your soul. But I also used the occasional unthinking homophobic slur. While I was moving in the right direction, I still had too much of a regressive attitude towards gender and sexuality. Bowie’s music allowed me to become more open and accepting.

In other words, Bowie’s music did what great art is supposed to: it transformed the way I saw the world. I realized that many of the harmful and bigoted ideas I had about others were incommensurate with the person I wanted to be, and they needed to be discarded. I can honestly say that listening to David Bowie gave me empathy and understanding. His music has since weaved itself into my life. Whenever I’m on a long plane ride, I always listen to the entire Berlin trilogy, and I even incorporated music from the “Heroes” album into my wedding ceremony.

Bowie’s musical contribution is vast. In his discography there are universes within universes that I suspect I’ll be exploring from here until my dying day. His output in the 70s is unparalleled, but he continued to surprise. There’s a lot more to Bowie than the way he played with gender and sexuality. Questions of identity were central. The truism about Bowie was that he was a chameleon, but every new personae still felt like it was somehow still him. He always is and never was David Jones, David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and Aladdin Sane. He’s like a postmodern Bodhisattva.

In fact, I had a hard time reconciling the Earthling era David Bowie that populated the airwaves when I was growing up with the 60s folkie he started off as. Over time, Bowie’s unceasing transformations started to become one of his constants, a concept he played with by purposefully reemploying the iconic “Heroes” cover for The Next Day. His contributions also spanned far more than his music. He was an incredible stylist and a great actor. Who other than David Bowie could have pulled of the outrageous fashion of Jareth the Goblin King in The Labyrinth? But he could also go for subtlety as in The Prestige and The Man Who Fell to Earth or play with his iconography like he did in an episode of Extras.

In some ways, there’s a Bowie for everyone. But I think that for fans, all Bowies are necessary. After buying Blackstar, I found myself scouring the internet for stories about Bowie, and I spent hours perusing Consequence of Sound’s ordering of every Bowie album from worst to best where they staunchly defend his much maligned work in the eighties. I disagree with plenty of their reviews (soon I’m certain that Reality is going to get a reassessment), but the fact that the critical attitude of Bowie’s oeuvre can shift so dramatically demonstrates that when it comes to Bowie nothing’s unnecessary. However uneven, each album has always been a new facet of a restless artist. He’s left us a body of work that will take a lifetime to explore, and for that I will always be grateful.

Much has been made recently about the “Lazarus” music video, which takes as its subject a bedridden David Bowie and includes the lyrics, “Look up here, I’m in Heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.” Death is present throughout Blackstar, but like an idiot I mostly ignored these obvious hints. A world without David Bowie seemed inconceivable, especially since he was still making vital and important music. There was more work to be done. It’s amazing to me that even as he passed away, Bowie had the utmost control over his image. It’s equally amazing that he had such generosity to give us one final parting gift. Few other than Bowie could transform their death into a work of art.

I’m sure the death and resurrection story of Lazarus appealed to Bowie’s playful instincts. And he’s not wrong. He will rise again, if not in flesh, then in culture. Like Wintermute in Neuromancer, Bowie has achieved something like non-corporeal sentience. His iconography will live on, and other artists will take Bowie the saint and remake him for their own purposes. Artists have been creating their own David Bowies for some time now, from Hedwig and the Angry Inch to Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine to The Venture Brothers to a Neil Gaiman short story. Bowie is an artist, a revolutionary, and an idea unbound by time, space, life, and death.

Despite (or because) of this, it still seems unthinkable that David Bowie has died. Even as he aged, he seemed ethereal as if he had already slipped this plane of existence long ago. Rest in peace, David Bowie, and thank you.

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.

Star Wars: Episode VII--The Force Awakens

Star Wars: Episode VII--The Force Awakens (4/5)

For many Star Wars fans, they have been waiting thirty-two years for The Force Awakens, both because the film continues the story of Han, Leia, and Luke and because they don’t consider the prequels a worthy follow up to the original trilogy. Disney, the new corporate stewards of Star Wars, seem to be acutely aware of fan reaction, and they have crafted Episode VIII with these disgruntled fans in mind. In order to do so, they brought in J.J. Abrams who has garnered a reputation as a fixer when it comes to franchises run astray. He directed an installment of Mission Impossible after Tom Cruise’s star had fallen, and then he helmed the rebooted Star Trek as well as its unsuccessful sequel. From his first announcement as director, I was disappointed to see J.J. Abrams in charge, largely because it seemed like such an unimaginative choice. Without a doubt, The Force Awakens is the best outcome we can expect from someone like J.J. Abrams (which I know is both something of a compliment and an insult).

I’ll try to make this review relatively spoiler free, but if you want to go in without knowing anything beyond what you may have gleaned from the trailers, then you might want to skip the review until you’ve actually seen the film.

In a knowing nod to the audience, the new generation of characters are themselves immersed in the tales of Star Wars. They’ve heard of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, the Millennium Falcon, and the Rebellion, but to them these stories are little more than myths. You can read this as cynical audience manipulation if you like, but the four new characters--ace pilot Poe Dameron, reformed Stormtrooper Finn, orphaned scavenger Fey, and Darth Vader wannabe Kylo Ren--all earn their place in the Star Wars galaxy. They’re genuinely interesting characters who have their own conflicts and arcs over the course of the film, and the actors turn in great performances, something that has long been missing from Star Wars.

But those of us who first fell in love with the original trilogy probably aren’t coming to The Force Awakens primarily for the new characters. We’re showing up for our old favorites whether we want to admit it or not. I was skeptical of the plan to bring back the big three from the original trilogy. Why reuse characters whose stories have already been told, I reasoned. But when Harrison Ford finally arrives decked out as Han Solo, I’ll admit to becoming a little giddy. Not only was it exciting for Han to show up but for Ford to show up as well, since he has seemed completely absent for his last several performances. I’m not sure what Abrams did--perhaps slip some whisky into Ford’s morning coffee?--but Ford is by turns funny, charming, and gruff. And when he finally rendezvous with Carrie Fisher as General Leia, I may have become a little verklempt.

Most moviegoers will get a vague wiff of deja vu for most of the proceedings, and that’s because the film cribs heavily from the original trilogy. In fact, The Force Awakens largely plays out like a mix and match A New Hope. There’s a desert planet, a character with a greater destiny, an older mentor, and a giant superweapon (we’ll get to that soon). In fact, The Force Awakens feels like a reboot in multiple ways. First, the film isn’t too far off from being a remake of A New Hope. Second, the film’s goal appears to be resetting the series after the poorly received prequels. From the recycled plot to the smaller focus to the use of practical effects, The Force Awakens aims to go back to basics. Still, it's clear the film was made with genuine affection and reverence (but perhaps too much of the latter).

How much enjoyment you can ring out of the film’s retread of old favorites depends on what you expect from a Star Wars movie. Personally, I went back and forth on the issue. The one retread that genuinely bothered me was the return of yet another Death Star superweapon. Learning that they were bringing back a version of the Death Star gave me terrible flashbacks to all of those awful superweapons from the 1990s Star Wars novels. At one point Han Solo voices my feelings, saying that this new planet sized weapon is just like the Death Star, to which another character swats away such concerns, basically saying, “Naw, dude. This isn’t anything like the Death Star. It’s, like, much, much bigger.” (I’m kind of paraphrasing here). But unlike in A New Hope, where the Death Star plans drive the plot forward, the new superweapon seems mostly incidental.

I’ll admit to both enjoying The Force Awakens and feeling somewhat ambivalent. For all their faults, the prequels strove for something new. George Lucas didn’t have to answer to anyone, and he gave us something that was weird, unique, and, yes, sometimes terrible. What he didn’t do is repeat himself. Disney won’t let that happen again, you can be sure. And according to fan reaction, the public has largely welcomed our new corporate overlords. Perhaps it’s a fool’s errand to hope for something unique and exciting from big budgeted entertainment. At the same time, that’s exactly what George Lucas gave us with A New Hope, a postmodern bricolage of cowboys, samurai, myth, WWII, and experimental cinema. It’s unlikely we’ll ever see something like that in the Star Wars universe, but we will get a string of some pretty good movies. I guess for now that’s good enough.