I, Jedi by Michael A Stackpole

I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole (2/5)

It’s not clear whether the title of Michael A. Stackpole’s Star Wars novel, I, Jedi, is an allusion to Isaac Asimov’s short story collection, I, Robot, or Robert Grave’s work of historical fiction, I, Claudius. What’s more, I’m not sure which allusion would be more pretentious on the part of Stackpole, since the novel doesn’t come close to the quality of either work.

As a preteen devouring Star Wars novels, I always liked Stackpole’s X-Wing books the best. I vaguely remember his novels as great page turners that made something new out of the Star Wars Universe. I liked that only George Lucas’s perpetual survivor, Wedge Antilles, made his way from screen to page as a major character in Stackpole’s novels. After reading I, Jedi, I’ve come to think that perhaps twelve year old me may not have had great tastes in books. Either that or I, Jedi is a massive step down from Stackpole’s X-Wing series.

I, Jedi follows Corran Horn, a Rogue Squadron pilot who also served as the de facto protagonist of the X-Wing series. Here Stackpole writes in the first person as Horn, which was the first time a character not from the films was given a first person point of view. In the earlier novels, we learned that Horn is Force sensitive, but at the start of I, Jedi he has undergone no formal training. After returning from a mission with Rogue Squadron, he learns that his wife Mirax has been captured by pirates while on an undercover mission. Instead of rushing out to save her, Horn decides that he must first join Luke Skywalker’s newly founded Jedi Academy to cultivate his nascent Force powers.

The novel is split into two halves. During the first half, Horn trains with Luke and other Force sensitives at the new Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, the planet where the Rebellion launched its attack on the Death Star in A New Hope. This inaugural class, however, is tormented by the risen spirit of Exar Kun, an evil Sith Lord whose ghost has apparently been waiting thousands of years for the right time to pounce. (This subplot made me wonder why we haven’t gotten a full on Star Wars ghost story yet. Get on it, people!)

As I read this portion of the novel, something seemed off. It was as if sections of the narrative had been carved out of the novel, like we were only getting part of the story. One of the Jedi trainees, Kyp Durron, is seduced to the darkside by Kun and steals a superweapon called the Sun Crusher or some such nonsense. But none if this is all that well developed. Even the final confrontation with the big bad, Kun, occurs off stage.

A little dip into the internet makes it clear that these events are covered in The Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson. This section of the novel appears to require some familiarity with The Jedi Academy Trilogy in order to have any real impact on the reader. If anything, I, Jedi, is exhibit A for why Disney was right in wiping out the Expanded Universe. When a reader must be intimately familiar with the larger expanded web of Star Wars novels in order for the story to be satisfying, the author just hasn’t done his or her job. Sure, the idea of covering the same territory as another novel from a unique perspective has potential, but the execution is way off.

The second half of I, Jedi is more engaging. Horn goes undercover with the space pirates who have taken his wife and must infiltrate their ranks. It’s a well worn narrative, but it’s fun to see it applied to the world of Star Wars. The first half of the novel does deflate some of the story’s urgency. Why doesn’t Horn run out to rescue his wife the moment he finds that she’s missing? And it doesn’t seem like his time at the academy was all that well spent. Horn ultimately finds his Jedi training unsatisfying and gives Luke a kind of douchey speech about how he’s had tougher training before and he doesn’t really need the weak sauce that Luke is serving. It’s largely self-aggrandizing and makes Luke, who should be the galaxy’s preeminent expert in the Force, look like a fool.

In general, I found Horn to be an unlikeable character. There’s one aspect of the character that conspicuously pops up again and again: his goatee. The man is always thinking about his goatee. He’s stroking his goatee or dying his goatee or finding some way to insert his goatee into the story. The man is obsessed with his own facial hair. This does lead to one of my favorite lines in the book: “I laced my fingers together and pressed the index fingers against my moustache” (306). I don’t think I have ever read of a more seductive dance between digits and facial hair.

The obsession Stackpole has with Horn’s goatee seemed a bit odd. Sure, it might just date the novel to the 90s when this sort of outlandish facial hair was marginally more acceptable. But I had a feeling that Horn’s goatee signified something deeper. I googled Michael Stackpole and found his picture, and sure enough, there it was: a stupid-looking goatee clutching the author’s mouth and chin.

There’s a distinct Mary Sue quality to Horn, which is only aggravated by the novel’s first person point of view. For those who don’t know, a Mary Sue is a term for a character who is amazing at just about everything and is often the surrogate for the author. The most obvious example is Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Despite feigning difficulties here and there, in this novel Horn is just the best. He defeats Luke Skywalker in a duel and then lectures the Jedi Master on what he’s not doing right at his academy. Later, he’s so irresistible that the female leader of the space pirates tries to seduce him. But, you know Horn. He’s a standup guy, and, besides, he’s married. Also, he has killer facial hair.  

After spending over five hundred pages with this guy, I couldn’t wait to get away. The novel also made me think that Disney made the right choice. When it comes to the Expanded Universe, maybe they were right after all to burn it to the ground and let something else grow in its place.

Post Pop Depression by Iggy Pop

Post Pop Depression by Iggy Pop (4/5)

2016’s string of unexpected celebrity deaths has forced myself as well as much of America to think about our mortality, normally something most in this country studiously avoid. But because death is the only inevitability shared by all of humanity regardless of nationality, race, religion, and class, it’s a topic ripe for artists. From Cicero’s dictum that “to study philosophy is...to prepare one’s self to die” to Western art’s obsession with the pieta to Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, the topic of death seems to cut straight through time and circumstance. With this in mind, Iggy Pop’s latest, and perhaps last, album spends much of its nine songs staring into the unknowable while fighting his own obsolescence.

Pop’s career has always been interesting, even if it has been uneven. Sure, his work with the Stooges and David Bowie catapulted him into the pantheon of rock and roll gods, but his later work has been less certain. His recent (partly) French language cover album was an intriguing turn, but the less said about the Stooges reunion, the better. Pop’s always benefited from strong collaborators who can properly channel his creative impulses, which Pop himself seems to be aware of since he drafted Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme as his writing partner for his latest. The result on Post Pop Depression are nine dark and nimble songs that rank with some of Pop’s best.

Post Pop Depression doesn’t sound like a tired play for relevance like Pop’s unfortunately early aughts alliance with Sum 41. Instead, it’s a serious work unbound by musical trends. As someone staring down his seventies, the end is clearly on Pop’s mind. As a xylophone traipse over a rumbling bass on “American Valhalla,” he sings, “I’ve shot my gun / I’ve used my knife / It hasn’t been an easy life / I’m hoping for American Valhalla.” The conflation of sex and violence are a longtime career obsession, perhaps a version of Freud’s death drive. And of course Pop’s aggressive, violent live performances always seem like the work of a man aching for self destruction. Sex itself has long been associated with death, either as a means to avoid thinking about the big sleep or a means of seeking the end--la petite mort. At the very end of “American Valhalla,” Pop intones, “I’ve nothing but my name,” as the music drops out completely. This moment eerily foreshadows a time when Pop will have left us with his ghostly legacy.

There’s a larger reason why Pop is unleashing his inner dirty old man on an album that purposefully looks towards oblivion. Sex also reminds us that we are bags of meat--the soft machine as William S. Burroughs once wrote. “Gardenia” seems to borrow its themes from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a nineteenth century lyric poem that appears to recall the night of Arnold’s honeymoon. But where Arnold’s narrator reflects on the ebb and flow of the water along the English shore of the channel to his new bride, Pop finds himself in a cheap hotel with a woman wearing a “Cheap purple baby doll dress.” The transformation of the muse and location speaks to Pop’s instinct to marry classic poetry with the skeezier landscapes of industrial Detroit.

At the close of the album’s final song, “Paraguay,” Pop begins to rant about technology, information, and those damn kids. He has transformed into full on “get off my lawn” mode. This diatribe questions whether technology has really helped us all that much. We can carry around a computer in our pocket, but in our lifetime we’ve seen a gradual disintegration of the middle class and ballooning wealth inequality. And as Pop points out, the same technology that we carry around with us can also be used to invade our privacy.  And yet the rant doubles as a representation of Pop’s fear of obsolescence. Where does he fit within this new world and will anyone remember him when he’s gone? I don’t think Iggy Pop has anything to worry about, especially if he can still produce an album this strong. He claims that Post Pop Depression will be the end of his recording career, but I hope that’s not the case. Judging by the album, it sounds like there’s still plenty of gas left in the tank.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.