Warren Ellis's Blog, page 53

Some Notes On THE NEWSROOM

 

The original title of Aaron Sorkin’s THE NEWSROOM was “You Canned STUDIO 60 Before I Got To Come, So Now I’m Humping This Shit Til Doomsday”

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) June 21, 2012

 

That was pretty unfair of me.  But I watched the pilot episode of Aaron Sorkin’s new show, THE NEWSROOM, the other day, and it really did strike me as STUDIO 60: Phase Two.

Some wags have suggested that I actually mean SPORTS NIGHT: Phase Four, but I don’t think that’s true. SPORTS NIGHT flirted with the ethics of reportage, but in a more personal way.  WEST WING was a paean to public service, but much more of a complete statement, despite Sorkin taking off at the end of the fourth season.

But STUDIO 60… using the backstage workings of a live comedy tv show to address both the trouble that American tv is in, and the trouble that American culture is in.  Sorkin got cut short on that show, and, quite clearly, never got to say everything he wanted to say.  And, perhaps, it wasn’t the best vehicle for delivering all the stuff that’s currently in his system.

And now, THE NEWSROOM: a vehicle for fully expressing everything he wanted to talk about in STUDIO 60, but in a more culturally “heavyweight” setting.  At least notionally.  And if you liked STUDIO 60, or wanted to see what more he had to say after that show’s cancellation, you’ll have a pretty good time with THE NEWSROOM.  It’s, obviously, a consummately craftsmanlike piece of television writing, and if you liked the casting and the gags on SPORTS NIGHT and STUDIO 60, you’ll probably like THE NEWSROOM just fine.

It opens, as STUDIO 60 did, with an elder man (in this instance, the protagonist, newsreader Will McAvoy) losing his shit in public in the mode of Peter Finch in NETWORK, the rant about how the culture is terrible being the engine of the show.  But there’s something a little different in this.  In talking about how ill-informed the American public is, McAvoy summons the memory of “great men” who told it like it was, Murrow and Cronkite.  Not great journalists.  Not even great newscasters.  Great Men.

That was the first of three things that really leapt out at me during this show.  The second was at the end, when I discovered that this show is actually set a couple of years ago, and what it’s positioned to do is illustrate how the American news media should have covered a string of real-life events.  It’s actually an alternate history.

(I’m reminded suddenly of a comment I made after I read the script, to the effect that the show was a televisual fantasy exploring the idea of whether or not Jeremy Paxman could get work in America.)

The third was all over the show, and is related to the first.  It doesn’t like women very much.  The female lead, Mackenzie, while described by someone else as having scars from covering Shiite protests and the like (but it’s Great Men who do the great work and Christiane Amanpour was certainly never on the ground for the siege of Sarajevo), is first described to us by two Great Men as both untrustworthy and some kind of fainting ninny whom they have to bring home from the world and fan until she revives.  The question that sets off McAvoy’s rant comes from a blonde student whom McAvoy also calls a “sorority girl” once or twice during the bit.

(I’m not counting as cruelty the fact that the gifted Alison Pill seems essentially cast as a stand-in for Janel Moloney – just the way her character is treated — but I thought it was a shame that we don’t really get to see the fire and bite she can produce.)

(I also don’t want to get into the frankly stupid interview Aaron Sorkin gave to Sarah Nicole Prickett, in which he is reported as addressing her with “Listen here, Internet girl…” This is too long already.  But read it.  It speaks quite directly to the tone of the show.)

But I wanted this to be a brief note, not a lecture or a drone strike, so let me just circle around to the first thing again.  That this is a show about A Great Man (or, if you like, as others have styled it, A Great White Man) allowing a team of women and less-than-classically-masculine men aid him in his crusade to Fix TV Journalism, Fix Reportage and Fix America.  In an alternate world, where, in the pilot episode, the work of many many journalists across the world is condensed into an hour’s placing of phone calls from the newsroom.  Sure, it’s fiction, there’s license, I get that, I do it all the time (TRANSMETROPOLITAN is nothing but a fantasia of journalism)… it’s just lousy coincidence that I’m currently reading a book about the BP oil spill that forms the news event of the pilot episode, a book which illustrates how much is still not commonly known about that event even today.  Hindsight lets Sorkin cheat (and I’m not going to spoil the big cheat for you, but you’ll know it when you see it and it’s a cynical “must invent shit to compress events for drama” cheat), and, unfortunately, that and the obvious triumphal applause at the end of the bit are going to give a lot of people clubs to beat him with.

And those aren’t the clubs that I think may well put THE NEWSROOM to death.  A death I take no pleasure in, because I loved THE WEST WING and I like living in a world where Aaron Sorkin is writing for television.  I think it would be really nice if, over the course of the run, Aaron Sorkin learned some things about how journalism happens and put them into the show.  I take no issue with the pilot episode’s lack of nuance, or the fact that it’s a polemic.

But, as a middle-aged white man, I take issue with the notion that it takes a Great White Man to fix the culture, and that shitting on every woman in the room to do it is just quirky, grumpy collateral damage.  I’m pretty sure that’s been tried, over here in the real world.  And here we are.

The British Humanist Association

If you click over here, you’ll see a list of the Association’s Distinguished Supporters, and quickly conclude that I have no business being in that company.

The BHA’s goals are fairly simple:

We want a world where everyone lives cooperatively on the basis of shared human values, respect for human rights, and concern for future generations.

We want non-religious people to be confident in living ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity.

We campaign for a secular state, challenge religious privilege, and promote equal treatment in law and policy of everyone regardless of religion or belief.

These are goals I’m proud to be associated with.  Going forward, this means I may doing a few personal appearances in connection with BHA events, and speaking in my role as a supporter every now and then.

I’m not going to make lots of sales pitches, but if the BHA interests you, they like it if I tell you that you can join.  I believe the perks include the legal rights to behead sorcerers and put false messiahs to the torch, but I may possibly have just made that up.  Also Richard Dawkins will send you a pair of his used underpants.

(I took that photo at Great Brampton House the other week.  The Millers appear fond of their lawn art.  Also I probably made up the bit about underpants too.)

BHA on Twitter: @BHAhumanists

What Is The Legal Status Of The Weather?

People often laughingly ask why the English are so preoccupied with the weather.  Elaine Stritch once famously said, “If you don’t like the weather in England, wait a minute.”  If you lived somewhere where it’s been raining for the last nine months or so, you’d have an interest in it.  Also, of course, once every five or six years, it rains for a whole year, and then things get difficult.

This question occurred to me on the way to Under Tomorrow’s Sky in Eindhoven.  Being English, and given the above, the sky is therefore of some interest to me. So much so that it was right at the top of my list.

Yes, my handwriting is terrible.  Also, I was writing that in the back of a car.  Shut up.

In the early Nineties, I had family in Cornwall, and would take the coach to visit them.  Two things to note about the coach ride to Cornwall.  One, there was always a cheer when the coach crossed the county border into Cornwall.  Two, it was a sarcastic cheer, because the rain always started when the coach crossed the county border into Cornwall.  My family lived in a large Cornish town. And I recall once arriving to some chaos, because the rain had been so steady, for so long, that it had finally invaded the telephone network, and killed every phone in a twenty mile radius.  And there were neighbours relying on their phones – this is before the days of the ubiquitous mobile phone, remember – for things like emergency medical services.

We’re not even talking about major Katrina-like events here.  We’re talking about your basic constant shitty weather killing people by subtracted urban support services.

The city can be seen as a machine for living in, and one of its mechanisms is this: if I live in the city, an ambulance is fifteen minutes away, but if I live in the country, it’s fifty minutes away.  Corrections to those numbers, like traffic density and stresses on the health provider, apply to both, but the simple fact is that the hospitals are in the big towns and cities, and the closer you are to the hospitals the better your chances are.

Until the weather drowns the comms system or the land you’re on starts to slip due to a year’s worth of saturation or your town just ends up underwater.

I paraphrased Bruce Sterling’s bit, while I was on my feet at the gig: the cities will be filled with old people who are afraid of the sky.

But I recalled something else.  Since the 1960s, Russia has been guaranteeing good weather for its Red Square parades and state holidays by controlling the weather.  Here in England, in fact, it’s long been held that the Russians have pushed their rain this way.  No-one ever called them on it, of course, because they were entirely capable of sending things larger and harder than rain through the air towards us instead.  Also, obviously, we’re paranoid about rain.

What is the international legality of that?  I mean, if you could exert serious control over weather. Is there a legal framework for saving your cities from destructive weather by pushing that weather somewhere else?  What’s the right of response if you find yourself suddenly deluged by the rainfall that nature had originally aimed at a city that couldn’t take it?  Saving Wales by chucking eight feet of water at Ireland?

What is the legal status of the weather?

Something Rachel Armstrong said at Under Tomorrow’s Sky: Nature wants to smash us.  Until we get out the bleach.  Which I love, but I don’t know whether it’s possible to uncreate weather, what the long-term results of that would be, and if the short-term results simply involve that weather happening to someone else.  Which brings up the big questions should a protocol be evolved to deal with the actual Katrina-level events, which would constitute batting an event with the payload of a small nuclear device over someone else’s fence, with some uncertainty as to whether or not it’s been defused.

Or, worse: knowing it hasn’t been defused.

I have a lot of questions.  They feel like questions that may need answering by a lot of people in the near future.

 

I’m on Twitter as @warrenellis. Rachel Armstrong is at @livingarchitect.  Bruce has a private account at @bruces.

Our Hopeless Future And Other Comedy

First off, this happened last Friday evening.

A CRACKED WISDOM TOOTH with a raging infection that resisted antibiotics so handily that it had to be removed on an emergency basis.  The dentist injected about a pint of drugs (including adrenaline) into my face and then said, “Nurse, give me the Cow Horns.”  At which point I decided it would be best to close my eyes.  Thirty minutes of hard manual labour later, the result is pictured.

And yes, I was getting on a plane the next day.  Which I did.

Also, yes, one of the bits does look a bit like a finger.

I have a lot of catching up to do, so I’m resorting to the daybook format for the rest of the week.

BEN HAMMERSLEY, presenting his new book, 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then: How to Face the Digital Future without Fear.  The moustache is, in fact, embossed.  Much like Ben’s own.  We were on a panel together at the literary/philosophy festival How The Light Gets In a couple of weeks ago, along with the journalist/analyst Edie Lush and the radio journalist Paul Moss.  Ben and I had some fun messing with each other, but he always won the sympathy vote because of his dogs, which slept in his arms the whole time.  People thought this was cute, and did not realise they were merely biding their time until the perfect kill-strike opportunity presented itself.

(a crop of an original photo by Adam Greenfield)

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN was a really, really interesting weekend for me.  I got to meet all kinds of brilliant people I’d never normally have access to.  And there’s some cognitive dissonance in sitting talking to Michael Nyman about Chingford.  I probably spent the most time talking to Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association (their sister org, the Rationalist Association, publishes The New Humanist, which I never get to read any more because Lili stole my copy so often that I eventually put the subscription in her name when she was 14 or so, making her possibly their youngest reader).

Also, this is the back garden of the place the festival put me up in:

That is in fact a giant iron, yes.

I was billeted at Great Brampton House, a fantastic and maybe a leeetle eccentric place run by some fantastic and maybe a leeetle eccentric people who were just incredibly welcoming to a tired old hack who really had no idea what he was walking into.   (Caitlin Moran was in the car that dropped me off there, and she expressed a curiosity as to whether I would be seen alive again.)  Have a little look inside:

You have no idea how grateful I am to Nancy at the festival, and to the wonderful Millers and their staff, and their drinks cabinet.  The drinks cabinet is where I met Andrew, plying Hilary Rose with martinis.  If it hadn’t been for him drawing everyone into conversation, I probably would have stayed at the table you can see above, hanging on to the whisper of wifi so I could finish writing a tv project outline.  Instead, I got to spend an evening talking with Hilary and Steven Rose.  Which is not an opportunity you get every day, and one that may never come again, just getting to drink and talk with and listen to two eminent and engaged scientists in their seventies.

Despite the horrendous weather, both the above-mentioned panel (about whether the internet was changing the way we think) and my one-on-one panel with the festival organiser, Vassili Christodoulou, was remarkably well attended, the latter fixture’s attendance being something commented on by another staffer.  Even though the rain almost washed me off the board:

OUR HOPELESS FUTURE AND OTHER COMEDY.

Bookmarks for 2012-06-18

Exclusive Print ( Death Tarot ) on Vimeo
Exclusive Print ( Death Tarot ) Upcoming exclusive Kickstarter print by Ben Templesmith and menton3 for 44FLOOD. The Kickstarter Campaign will start on June 25 2012, please keep your eyes out. video and all contents are © 2012 44FLOOD LLC Ben Templesmith
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Who I Am And Where To Find Me (June 2012)

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write books and comics and articles and other things. 

I live in south-east England.  My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due January 2013 from Mulholland Books.  The film RED 2, sequel to RED, based on the graphic novel I wrote, is due autumn 2013.  A film version of my GRAVEL graphic novels is in active development at Legendary Pictures.  I have author pages at Amazon and Amazon UK. 

My most recent original comics work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

I’m writing a new novel and developing things in film and tv, but am keeping an eye out for interesting things to do on the side. If you want to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills – her email’s linked in the righthand menu bar, too. I’m currently looking to write more articles and the like, to help keep me sane during the writing of this novel.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move and make noises, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.  I’ve previously been a columnist for WIRED UK and Reuters.  You can contact me directly about everything else, including interview requests, at my public email address: warrenellis@gmail.com (gets checked daily.)

I have a weeklyish newsletter, MACHINE VISION, which you can sign up for at this link.

@warrenellis on Twitter. I have an Official Facebook Page. Username warrenellis on Instagram (for as long as it lasts!) and This Is My Jam. I keep a notebook at Tumblr. I occasionally podcast.

I can next be seen in public in London on June 26th, where I’m introducing Greg Palast on the occasion of his new book launch.  Details here.

Back From Eindhoven

The silver FIELD NOTES book gets reserved for the serious business. The whisky was provided, with great kindness, by the estimable Bruce Sterling.

Just got back from Eindhoven a few hours ago, where I was on the public think tank for the science/art brainstorming that will inform the forthcoming UNDER TOMORROW’S SKY exhibition at MU Gallery there, on the subject of the city of the future.  Tomorrow I will try and unpack at least some of what happened there.  But I want to say that Bruce, the cracklingly intelligent biologist Rachel Armstrong, and the erudite and insightful Simon Ings were absolutely brilliant.  As was, as ever, my friend Paul Duffield.  And the digital painter, Ed, whose last name I now forget (for reasons I’ll get into tomorrow, I’m sure), was a revelation – even his unintended marks sparked stories.

Right now, I just want to thank Liam Young, Angelique and MU Gallery for arranging all this and hosting us, and to all the people who showed up and/or listened in on the Ustream.  It was a really entertaining, fascinating way to spend a weekend, and wonderful ideas were conjured, despite the massive drag factor introduced into the mix by my inclusion.

And now, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in about nine days, so…

Related articles

DEEP MAP PILOTS 2: by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis (warrenellis.com)
DEEP MAP PILOTS 1: by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis (warrenellis.com)
Body Area Networking (warrenellis.com)

DEEP MAP PILOTS 2: by Eliza Gauger & Warren Ellis

REHANI saw space before she saw the sea. When she finally stood at the edge of an ocean, at night, all she could really see was something black and chilly and sparkling, with the sketched suggestion of islands out in its deeps. Rehani was disappointed. She flies for Big Island, a great floating city that surfs the cloud-tops of Venus at two hundred miles an hour. It’s wider than the Central African Republic, and moves across a misty vastness you could lose every ocean on Earth in. And it spins in something that is blacker and colder and more sparkling than anything, anything she’s ever seen. It’s never disappointed her. It’s the only sea she needs.

[larger image] [original size image]

DEEP MAP PILOTS: A Series Of Five Pictures From Words
MARENKA – REHANI – CAMEO – JINJING – ASCENCION

[process: I wrote five flash fictions for Eliza Gauger to produce a piece of accompanying art for each. The idea was to produce five little portraits of women in space, in art and words.]

Art © Eliza Gauger 2012. Words © Warren Ellis 2012

Bookmarks for 2012-06-13

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@ozmills: @kierongillen You look like you were trying to emulate @warrenellis – A noble goal! http://twitter.com/ozmills/status/212...
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Leda’s Dance by Miss Aniela

Wanting to be more experimental and choose from the wider world of paintings to blend into photographs, I combined a painting I sourced through the Internet, The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselyn (17th cent), together with a very flexible nude model I shot in the Sussex countryside…

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Miss Aniela via Flickr -