Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 9
January 30, 2024
VIRTUALLY REALITY
In the spirit of "Why Not?" which has both plagued and enlivened my life, I recently allowed myself to be persuaded to book an Instagram promotion for my most recent novel, Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus, as well as my other works. At the same time, I made sure I was running no other promotions of any kind anywhere else, nor even mentioning my books in formats or forums like this: I wanted absolutely flat sales so that any spike could be clearly attributed to the effect of the Instagram ads. This is an old tactic I use for my conventional book promotions and gives fairly accurate results. And what happened next, and what did not, is illustrative of the strange reality in which we live.
The promotion began around the first of January and is now winding down as the month itself comes to a close. In that intervening time, the separate posts about my writing garnered approximately 120,000 likes. Please note that I did not say 120,000 sales. I said "likes." And during that corresponding period I made exactly $8.26 in sales.
You read that right, folks: Eight dollars and twenty-six cents.
My math sucks, but unless I'm mistaken that means for every 14,000 people who clicked "like," I sold about a dollar's worth of books. To make even $82.00, I'd have had to get 1.2 million likes. To make my rent, which is $825, I'd have to get 10.2 million likes. In other words, the entire population of Greece would have to click "like" on Instagram.
But even this is assuming a great deal. Or, as we say in the criminal justice field: "assuming facts not in evidence." For I am deeply suspicious of whether most of these "likes" were clicked by human hands. In fact, I am morally certain the majority were liked by fake accounts or bots. My posts go up electronically, are "seen" by robots and then "liked" by robots, and then come down. The numbers, the analytics, are impressive, but since little of it is real, there is no corresponding result in the real world.
Many, many years ago, when chat rooms were very much in vogue, a writer on "Law & Order" called the internet "a place that's not even a place." He was quite right. But the reality is that this unreality now occupies at least -- at least! -- fifty percent of our very real, physical, tangible lives. Our brains have, through continuous use, become rewired to crave validation and attention from online audiences -- audiences which may not actually exist. I can't count the number of people I have seen, in the last 15 years, boast about how many "friends" they have on social media, as if all but a handful of them were actually friends! (At least the word "followers" more closely fits the cold, impersonal reality.) I have even, this very week, witnessed the grotesque sight of an Instgram influencer and YouTuber who struts around in bikinis and measures herself by the amount of lust she generates in anonymous men, moaning almost hyterically about how lonely she is...almost as if the stream of online validation and adulation had no actual substance, because even a million "subscribers" can't make you a candle-light dinner.
This bifurcated existence, in which we give equal import to things which aren't there and people we don't know, as we do to our actual friends, family, lovers, pets, jobs, hobbies, etc., is the salient feature of the 21st century to date. It has gotten so the seemingly harmless phrase "pics or it didn't happen" has taken on a chilling quality, because to a whole generation (or three) of people, this is factually true. Their sense of reality has been redefined, so that an unshared experience is no experience at all, but rather a kind of scientific-philosophical conundrum, like Schroedinger's cat. If you go to a concert, or to some scenic overlook, or a sports event or a nightclub or even a restaurant, it is now customary to document and record the event. Many people post almost professionally edited and mixed videos of their gym workouts. Warren Beatty famously jeered at Madonna that "she doesn't want to live off camera." The same insult could now be levied at the rest of us. And it is not mere narcissism that drives this impulse. It is an acknowledgement that we now live in two worlds -- one physical and one virtual. The problem, however, is not that this situation exists, but rather when both worlds are treated as if they have equal value, for the slope is slippery indeed. As someone who worked in the video game industry for nine years, and correspondingly met many from the vast community of cosplayers, Youtubers, Instragram influencers, etc., etc., I can say with assurance that there are many who have taken this a step further, and are more comfortable and more active in "the place that isn't a place" than in their actual, physical lives.
On the surface of things, this is understandable and was inevitable. Even in the 70s and 80s, there were millions who found safe harbor only in eccentric fantasy worlds -- Dungeons and Dragons addicts would be a literal example, but this could be extended to metalheads, punks, and other isolated communities of semi-or-full outcasts, be they tied together by role playing games, video games, music, drug-music culture, or what have you. I myself was one such kid: from the age of ten to about fifteen or sixteen, I lived primarily in my own head. Had I the resources of todays similarly aged kids back then, I'd have been no different than they are now: so there's no judgment here. I am simply pointing out that technology has allowed what the people of my generation (X) and those before us could only dream about: a way of making everyday reality optional. The internet has not been around long enough for us to say definitively what the consequeces of this will be, but anyone with eyes can see the downside goes lower than the upside rises. People are fatter than ever. They are unhealthier than ever. They are more anxious, more depressed, more nihilistic, more angry, and more suicidal than they have ever been, and a lot of this can be traced, circumstancially at least, to the pervasiveness of the internet. Life is hard: virtual reality is easy, and humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If you want to be an unstoppable badass killer covered in medals and stripes and held in awe by your peers, you can join the military and spend a couple of years working and sweating and bleeding your way through basic training, advanced training, airborne school, Ranger school, Special Forces school, and so on...or you can just get really, really good at Call of Duty, all without doing a single sit-up or even rising off of the couch. The distinction between the actual and the virtual has blurred to the degree that the very definition of reality no longer has a clear, sharp, obvious definition.
This is a problem for which no solution, short of an electromagnetic pulse which would destroy the internet entirely for the foreseeable future (and plunge the world into chaos as a result), presents itself. And indeed, short of such apocalyptic disaster, there may be no solution at all. Like atomic energy, this particular genie ain't going back into its bottle. This problem is, however, one which has come about in my lifetime, and watching it grow has been a fascinating process. I was certainly not among those who foresaw the troubles that are now with us, but I do remember being especially taken by a line of dialog from "I Robert, You Jane," an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which did, all the way back in 1997. It is a point of view which back then was considered laughable, but today has gained a great deal of currency indeed:
The only reality is virtual. If your'e not jacked in, you're not alive.
The promotion began around the first of January and is now winding down as the month itself comes to a close. In that intervening time, the separate posts about my writing garnered approximately 120,000 likes. Please note that I did not say 120,000 sales. I said "likes." And during that corresponding period I made exactly $8.26 in sales.
You read that right, folks: Eight dollars and twenty-six cents.
My math sucks, but unless I'm mistaken that means for every 14,000 people who clicked "like," I sold about a dollar's worth of books. To make even $82.00, I'd have had to get 1.2 million likes. To make my rent, which is $825, I'd have to get 10.2 million likes. In other words, the entire population of Greece would have to click "like" on Instagram.
But even this is assuming a great deal. Or, as we say in the criminal justice field: "assuming facts not in evidence." For I am deeply suspicious of whether most of these "likes" were clicked by human hands. In fact, I am morally certain the majority were liked by fake accounts or bots. My posts go up electronically, are "seen" by robots and then "liked" by robots, and then come down. The numbers, the analytics, are impressive, but since little of it is real, there is no corresponding result in the real world.
Many, many years ago, when chat rooms were very much in vogue, a writer on "Law & Order" called the internet "a place that's not even a place." He was quite right. But the reality is that this unreality now occupies at least -- at least! -- fifty percent of our very real, physical, tangible lives. Our brains have, through continuous use, become rewired to crave validation and attention from online audiences -- audiences which may not actually exist. I can't count the number of people I have seen, in the last 15 years, boast about how many "friends" they have on social media, as if all but a handful of them were actually friends! (At least the word "followers" more closely fits the cold, impersonal reality.) I have even, this very week, witnessed the grotesque sight of an Instgram influencer and YouTuber who struts around in bikinis and measures herself by the amount of lust she generates in anonymous men, moaning almost hyterically about how lonely she is...almost as if the stream of online validation and adulation had no actual substance, because even a million "subscribers" can't make you a candle-light dinner.
This bifurcated existence, in which we give equal import to things which aren't there and people we don't know, as we do to our actual friends, family, lovers, pets, jobs, hobbies, etc., is the salient feature of the 21st century to date. It has gotten so the seemingly harmless phrase "pics or it didn't happen" has taken on a chilling quality, because to a whole generation (or three) of people, this is factually true. Their sense of reality has been redefined, so that an unshared experience is no experience at all, but rather a kind of scientific-philosophical conundrum, like Schroedinger's cat. If you go to a concert, or to some scenic overlook, or a sports event or a nightclub or even a restaurant, it is now customary to document and record the event. Many people post almost professionally edited and mixed videos of their gym workouts. Warren Beatty famously jeered at Madonna that "she doesn't want to live off camera." The same insult could now be levied at the rest of us. And it is not mere narcissism that drives this impulse. It is an acknowledgement that we now live in two worlds -- one physical and one virtual. The problem, however, is not that this situation exists, but rather when both worlds are treated as if they have equal value, for the slope is slippery indeed. As someone who worked in the video game industry for nine years, and correspondingly met many from the vast community of cosplayers, Youtubers, Instragram influencers, etc., etc., I can say with assurance that there are many who have taken this a step further, and are more comfortable and more active in "the place that isn't a place" than in their actual, physical lives.
On the surface of things, this is understandable and was inevitable. Even in the 70s and 80s, there were millions who found safe harbor only in eccentric fantasy worlds -- Dungeons and Dragons addicts would be a literal example, but this could be extended to metalheads, punks, and other isolated communities of semi-or-full outcasts, be they tied together by role playing games, video games, music, drug-music culture, or what have you. I myself was one such kid: from the age of ten to about fifteen or sixteen, I lived primarily in my own head. Had I the resources of todays similarly aged kids back then, I'd have been no different than they are now: so there's no judgment here. I am simply pointing out that technology has allowed what the people of my generation (X) and those before us could only dream about: a way of making everyday reality optional. The internet has not been around long enough for us to say definitively what the consequeces of this will be, but anyone with eyes can see the downside goes lower than the upside rises. People are fatter than ever. They are unhealthier than ever. They are more anxious, more depressed, more nihilistic, more angry, and more suicidal than they have ever been, and a lot of this can be traced, circumstancially at least, to the pervasiveness of the internet. Life is hard: virtual reality is easy, and humans, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If you want to be an unstoppable badass killer covered in medals and stripes and held in awe by your peers, you can join the military and spend a couple of years working and sweating and bleeding your way through basic training, advanced training, airborne school, Ranger school, Special Forces school, and so on...or you can just get really, really good at Call of Duty, all without doing a single sit-up or even rising off of the couch. The distinction between the actual and the virtual has blurred to the degree that the very definition of reality no longer has a clear, sharp, obvious definition.
This is a problem for which no solution, short of an electromagnetic pulse which would destroy the internet entirely for the foreseeable future (and plunge the world into chaos as a result), presents itself. And indeed, short of such apocalyptic disaster, there may be no solution at all. Like atomic energy, this particular genie ain't going back into its bottle. This problem is, however, one which has come about in my lifetime, and watching it grow has been a fascinating process. I was certainly not among those who foresaw the troubles that are now with us, but I do remember being especially taken by a line of dialog from "I Robert, You Jane," an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which did, all the way back in 1997. It is a point of view which back then was considered laughable, but today has gained a great deal of currency indeed:
The only reality is virtual. If your'e not jacked in, you're not alive.
January 25, 2024
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART TWO OF THREE)
When "V" debuted in 1983, I was not quite eleven years old, and found myself sleepless with anticipation. The 80s were the Golden Age of TV movies and mini-series, of course, but the vast majority of these were historical melodramas like "The Thorn Birds," "Shogun," "The Winds of War," "North & South," "Masada," etc. A sci-fi mini-series about a "soft" alien invasion of contemporary Earth was a big deviation from the norm. In fact, it was unique. And since every kid my age had been raised on "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica," our thirst for fresh science-fiction adventures was pretty keen. "V" provided a lot of satisfaction for that thirst, but it ended on what might be called a cliffhanger, leaving me and my schoolmates keen for a resolution. "V: The Final Battle" certainly provided that. It's a slam-bang "finish" to one of the most interesting and innovative ideas ever put on television. But the emphasis is on the "slam bang" and not the "imaginative" or "innovative." In retrospect it is still enormously entertaining, but leaves the viewer -- this one anyway -- with a feeling that it might have been much more.
To position us in the right spot on Memory Lane, the place where "V: The Final Battle" resides -- 1984 -- it's necessary to walk backward a year, a perform a swift recap.
In the original "V," conceived and executed by writer-producer-director Kenneth Johnson, a huge alien fleet appears unexpectedly over the skies of Earth, disgorging aliens who look...just like us, and even use prosaic, comfortably familiar human names. The "Visitors," as they call themselves, pose as benefactors of humanity, offering their advanced technology in exchange for certain chemicals required for their dying homeworld. In reality, of course, the Visitors are humanoid lizards wearing prosthetic skins, whose real aim is to suck Earth dry of its natural resources and devour that of the population they aren't going to turn into slaves. Taking control of the media, government and military, exterminating the scientific community, and actively courting human collaborators, the Visitors soon established de facto control of the planet and go about their grisly scheme, only to be confronted with a home-grown resistance movement in Los Angeles led by handsy journalist Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and scrappy scientist Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant). At the end of "V," with the Visitors' secret exposed, the battle lines are clearly drawn: Visitors and their human collaborators versus the resistance and the "Fifth Column" -- sympathetic Visitors working with the humans to sabotage the evil aims of their fellow reptiles.
"V," as you will recall, was a heavy-handed but nevertheless brilliant analysis of how fascism comes to power -- not merely the methods it uses to destabilize and destroy democracy, but the nature of its appeal to the ordinary person on the street, the person who seemingly has nothing to gain by embracing it. The Visitors are not only dangerous because they have nefarious motives and employ violence to bring them about, but because they are so able at recruiting -- or rather seducing -- humans to do their dirty work for them. These collaborators run the range from cold-eyed opportunists to unstable weaklings thirsty for power, to merely the naive and credulous. Kenneth Johnson had a point to make, and he made it both grossly and subtly.
"V: The Final Battle" is cut from rather different cloth.
The second miniseries begins not long after the first left off. The Resistance, led by Mike and Juliet, is waging a brutal guerrilla war against the Visitor occupation, but floundering in the face of superior alien technology. Enter bloodthirsty mercenary Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), a resistance fighter from Chicago, who brings special weapons and a demand: join the larger, nationwide resistance movement or be wiped out. Tyler's appearance exacerbates existing tensions within the Los Angeles resistance, as well as despair over how they are ultimately going to drive the Visitors from Earth, but things aren't much better on the Visitor side of things: Supreme Commander John (Richard Herd) has to juggle the ambitions of his sadistic chief scientist Diana (Jane Badler), and their equally cruel security chief Steven (Andrew Prine), while dealing with the arrival of a new fleet commander, Pamela (Sarah Douglas), who arrives determined to exterminate the resistance and suck the planet dry. He must also contend with the Fifth Column, led by the brave dissident Martin (Frank Ashmore), which is feeding the resistance information and aid. Meanwhile, Robin Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), who was impregnated with the first human-alien hybrid baby in the last series, finds herself the potential key to ridding the Earth of the Visitors once and for all...but first she has to give birth, and only God knows what she's going to give birth to.
"The Final Battle" is densely packed with characters and even more densely packed with sub-plots, some carried over from the original series. As I just said, that series was essentially an allegory about how fascism infiltrates, seduces, and finally throttles a democratic society into submission: the second, far more violent and brutal, is about the price that must be paid to resist such tyranny, and not only the blood price, but the moral one. Families, including Donovan's, are broken apart by the war -- his mother is an arch collaborator. The resistance performs horrible acts fighting for freedom: experimenting medically on prisoners, setting up collaborators to be horribly murdered, using seduction and betrayal to obtain information, etc., etc, and these acts, in turn, set up fresh conflicts between the resistance members themselves. If there was one thing 80s TV was good at, it was the soap-opera dynamic of "constant conflict, constantly occurring." Everyone fights as much with each other as the enemy. This may be melodramatic, but it's also realistic, and compelling.
There are some commendable performances here. Andy Packer as the traitor David Bernstein is at once horrifyingly degenerate and truly pathetic as the sniveling, deluded misift who only the Visitors would accept and empower. Andrew Prine as Steven manages to look remarkably like a reptile wearing a human face -- he has a sort of cold, pitiless hunger in his stare at all times. Robert Englund is remarkably sweet as as Willie, and Frank Ashmore brings a grave dignity to the Stauffenberg-esque character of Martin. Though the cast is largely unchanged -- most everybody who survived series one is back for series two, with a few exceptions -- one of the great additions to "The Final Battle" is Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler. Tyler is a walking weapon, as cruel as the Visitors, and just as bloodthirsty, the sole difference being that he is human and they reptilian. If Donovan is the heroic "do-gooder" with a smoothly functioning moral compass, Ham epitomizes the ruthless resistance fighter who has zero scruples and would just as soon shoot a reluctant or collaborationist human as one of the lizards. The chemistry he has with Singer is terrific, and he elevates every scene he is in, even the bad ones.
There is also plenty of action, much more than in the first series, and much of it enjoyable. The Visitors, of course, don't shoot much better than Imperial stormtroopers or Cylons, and with the exception of the opening battle, the humans are far too successful in firefights and dogfights, but what the hell. If bad guys could shoot, Hollywood would be out of a job.
On the debit side, "The Final Battle" lacks some of the elegance of the first series, probably due to the lack of involvement by Kenny Johnson, the series creator, who had little or nothing to do with this sequel and lamented the less visceral, less philosophical script that was ultimately put on screen. The 80s were, tonally, as addicted to melodrama as they were teased hair and pancake rouge: some of the brain of Johnson's concept was crudely cut out in favor of Dynasty drama and shoot 'em up action. What's more, the rather tenuous suspension of disbelief the plot required to work at full pressure was pierced by logical holes at many points. The Visitors are so predatory and treacherous it's hard to believe they could get through a single day without killing each other all off, the "star child" plot is silly and scientifically nonsensical, and the alien baby sequences come off as utterly ludicrous due to rubbish make up effects. The "conversion" scenes with Julie are also intolerably long and in the end, tedious -- how long can we watch Faye Grant in a body stocking, acting as if she's having a heart attack? I was also disappointed that a plotline from the first film -- the Resistance trying to contact another race of aliens who are enemies with the Visitors -- is abandoned here. Finally, the solution the humans come up with to rid themselves of the reptiles, while workable as an idea, is executed in a laughable way -- laughable even to me as a twelve year old boy. Although this series is actually more fun than the first, being replete with shootouts, escapes and fist-fights, it is not actually better: in fact it is not as good. But the difference is probably not worth bothering with. Each miniseries has its own distinct flavor, bitter and sweet.
Such was "V: The Final Battle." It was not Shakespeare, not even bad Shakespeare, but it had a lot to handle and it handled most everything, if not necessarily well, then at least decisively.
So where does that leave us now, as we stand at 1984 Memory Lane and peer through its ivy-covered windows into the dusty living room of TV history? Is "The Final Battle" worth remembering or celebrating? Does it withstand the test of time? And did it leave a legacy?
Having just rewatched the series, I can say that, despite all its hokum, its cumbersome plot armor, its logical contradictions and cheesy silliness, "The Final Battle" is largely a very satisfying watch even forty-odd years down the road. Stories of resistance against tyranny are almost always enjoyable despite their inevitable brutality -- and "TFB" is indeed quite brutal, sometimes even to the point of mild shock. Allegorical stories have a great strength to them, allowing us to make fanciful takes on real history, and "V" so clearly being the story of resistance to Nazism specifically and Fascism generally, it is nonetheless even more fun to see the allegory handled with laser rifles and green blood. From the standpoint of execution it may fail the time-test as all "old" television fails in the face of ever-advancing technology and changes in societal mores, but on the most critical point -- as a warning against fascism, and a reminder that democracy is fueled by the blood of ordinary people with moral and physical courage, not "influencers" or the punditry -- it is actually more relevant than ever. America, now, today as I write this with my cat staring at me, is in a surprisingly similar-looking boat to the fictive Los Angeles of 1984. Like the characters in the miniseries, we real flesh-and-blood Americans have a choice to make, between clunky, cumbersome, pain-in-the-ass democracy, or the sugar-coated poison pill that is fascism, that dark medicine that goes down so smoothly and leaves such a bitter aftertaste.
I close this second of the three chapters of this trip down Memory Lane by pointing out "The Final Battle" did indeed have a legacy: Following the huge rating success of this mini-series, a TV show was commissioned which continued the story and characters for another year...and we will soon be discussing this (mercifully?) forgotten chapter of television history: but but for today's purposes, this is the climax. And a fitting one. "The Final Battle" is not brain food as its predecessor was: it is greasy, overbuttered county fair popcorn, but damn tasty nonetheless. Entertaining as hell, it rides roughshod over its own flaws and delivers a brutal, satisfying, rather ridiculous finish to one of the more exciting moments in television history.
To position us in the right spot on Memory Lane, the place where "V: The Final Battle" resides -- 1984 -- it's necessary to walk backward a year, a perform a swift recap.
In the original "V," conceived and executed by writer-producer-director Kenneth Johnson, a huge alien fleet appears unexpectedly over the skies of Earth, disgorging aliens who look...just like us, and even use prosaic, comfortably familiar human names. The "Visitors," as they call themselves, pose as benefactors of humanity, offering their advanced technology in exchange for certain chemicals required for their dying homeworld. In reality, of course, the Visitors are humanoid lizards wearing prosthetic skins, whose real aim is to suck Earth dry of its natural resources and devour that of the population they aren't going to turn into slaves. Taking control of the media, government and military, exterminating the scientific community, and actively courting human collaborators, the Visitors soon established de facto control of the planet and go about their grisly scheme, only to be confronted with a home-grown resistance movement in Los Angeles led by handsy journalist Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and scrappy scientist Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant). At the end of "V," with the Visitors' secret exposed, the battle lines are clearly drawn: Visitors and their human collaborators versus the resistance and the "Fifth Column" -- sympathetic Visitors working with the humans to sabotage the evil aims of their fellow reptiles.
"V," as you will recall, was a heavy-handed but nevertheless brilliant analysis of how fascism comes to power -- not merely the methods it uses to destabilize and destroy democracy, but the nature of its appeal to the ordinary person on the street, the person who seemingly has nothing to gain by embracing it. The Visitors are not only dangerous because they have nefarious motives and employ violence to bring them about, but because they are so able at recruiting -- or rather seducing -- humans to do their dirty work for them. These collaborators run the range from cold-eyed opportunists to unstable weaklings thirsty for power, to merely the naive and credulous. Kenneth Johnson had a point to make, and he made it both grossly and subtly.
"V: The Final Battle" is cut from rather different cloth.
The second miniseries begins not long after the first left off. The Resistance, led by Mike and Juliet, is waging a brutal guerrilla war against the Visitor occupation, but floundering in the face of superior alien technology. Enter bloodthirsty mercenary Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), a resistance fighter from Chicago, who brings special weapons and a demand: join the larger, nationwide resistance movement or be wiped out. Tyler's appearance exacerbates existing tensions within the Los Angeles resistance, as well as despair over how they are ultimately going to drive the Visitors from Earth, but things aren't much better on the Visitor side of things: Supreme Commander John (Richard Herd) has to juggle the ambitions of his sadistic chief scientist Diana (Jane Badler), and their equally cruel security chief Steven (Andrew Prine), while dealing with the arrival of a new fleet commander, Pamela (Sarah Douglas), who arrives determined to exterminate the resistance and suck the planet dry. He must also contend with the Fifth Column, led by the brave dissident Martin (Frank Ashmore), which is feeding the resistance information and aid. Meanwhile, Robin Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), who was impregnated with the first human-alien hybrid baby in the last series, finds herself the potential key to ridding the Earth of the Visitors once and for all...but first she has to give birth, and only God knows what she's going to give birth to.
"The Final Battle" is densely packed with characters and even more densely packed with sub-plots, some carried over from the original series. As I just said, that series was essentially an allegory about how fascism infiltrates, seduces, and finally throttles a democratic society into submission: the second, far more violent and brutal, is about the price that must be paid to resist such tyranny, and not only the blood price, but the moral one. Families, including Donovan's, are broken apart by the war -- his mother is an arch collaborator. The resistance performs horrible acts fighting for freedom: experimenting medically on prisoners, setting up collaborators to be horribly murdered, using seduction and betrayal to obtain information, etc., etc, and these acts, in turn, set up fresh conflicts between the resistance members themselves. If there was one thing 80s TV was good at, it was the soap-opera dynamic of "constant conflict, constantly occurring." Everyone fights as much with each other as the enemy. This may be melodramatic, but it's also realistic, and compelling.
There are some commendable performances here. Andy Packer as the traitor David Bernstein is at once horrifyingly degenerate and truly pathetic as the sniveling, deluded misift who only the Visitors would accept and empower. Andrew Prine as Steven manages to look remarkably like a reptile wearing a human face -- he has a sort of cold, pitiless hunger in his stare at all times. Robert Englund is remarkably sweet as as Willie, and Frank Ashmore brings a grave dignity to the Stauffenberg-esque character of Martin. Though the cast is largely unchanged -- most everybody who survived series one is back for series two, with a few exceptions -- one of the great additions to "The Final Battle" is Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler. Tyler is a walking weapon, as cruel as the Visitors, and just as bloodthirsty, the sole difference being that he is human and they reptilian. If Donovan is the heroic "do-gooder" with a smoothly functioning moral compass, Ham epitomizes the ruthless resistance fighter who has zero scruples and would just as soon shoot a reluctant or collaborationist human as one of the lizards. The chemistry he has with Singer is terrific, and he elevates every scene he is in, even the bad ones.
There is also plenty of action, much more than in the first series, and much of it enjoyable. The Visitors, of course, don't shoot much better than Imperial stormtroopers or Cylons, and with the exception of the opening battle, the humans are far too successful in firefights and dogfights, but what the hell. If bad guys could shoot, Hollywood would be out of a job.
On the debit side, "The Final Battle" lacks some of the elegance of the first series, probably due to the lack of involvement by Kenny Johnson, the series creator, who had little or nothing to do with this sequel and lamented the less visceral, less philosophical script that was ultimately put on screen. The 80s were, tonally, as addicted to melodrama as they were teased hair and pancake rouge: some of the brain of Johnson's concept was crudely cut out in favor of Dynasty drama and shoot 'em up action. What's more, the rather tenuous suspension of disbelief the plot required to work at full pressure was pierced by logical holes at many points. The Visitors are so predatory and treacherous it's hard to believe they could get through a single day without killing each other all off, the "star child" plot is silly and scientifically nonsensical, and the alien baby sequences come off as utterly ludicrous due to rubbish make up effects. The "conversion" scenes with Julie are also intolerably long and in the end, tedious -- how long can we watch Faye Grant in a body stocking, acting as if she's having a heart attack? I was also disappointed that a plotline from the first film -- the Resistance trying to contact another race of aliens who are enemies with the Visitors -- is abandoned here. Finally, the solution the humans come up with to rid themselves of the reptiles, while workable as an idea, is executed in a laughable way -- laughable even to me as a twelve year old boy. Although this series is actually more fun than the first, being replete with shootouts, escapes and fist-fights, it is not actually better: in fact it is not as good. But the difference is probably not worth bothering with. Each miniseries has its own distinct flavor, bitter and sweet.
Such was "V: The Final Battle." It was not Shakespeare, not even bad Shakespeare, but it had a lot to handle and it handled most everything, if not necessarily well, then at least decisively.
So where does that leave us now, as we stand at 1984 Memory Lane and peer through its ivy-covered windows into the dusty living room of TV history? Is "The Final Battle" worth remembering or celebrating? Does it withstand the test of time? And did it leave a legacy?
Having just rewatched the series, I can say that, despite all its hokum, its cumbersome plot armor, its logical contradictions and cheesy silliness, "The Final Battle" is largely a very satisfying watch even forty-odd years down the road. Stories of resistance against tyranny are almost always enjoyable despite their inevitable brutality -- and "TFB" is indeed quite brutal, sometimes even to the point of mild shock. Allegorical stories have a great strength to them, allowing us to make fanciful takes on real history, and "V" so clearly being the story of resistance to Nazism specifically and Fascism generally, it is nonetheless even more fun to see the allegory handled with laser rifles and green blood. From the standpoint of execution it may fail the time-test as all "old" television fails in the face of ever-advancing technology and changes in societal mores, but on the most critical point -- as a warning against fascism, and a reminder that democracy is fueled by the blood of ordinary people with moral and physical courage, not "influencers" or the punditry -- it is actually more relevant than ever. America, now, today as I write this with my cat staring at me, is in a surprisingly similar-looking boat to the fictive Los Angeles of 1984. Like the characters in the miniseries, we real flesh-and-blood Americans have a choice to make, between clunky, cumbersome, pain-in-the-ass democracy, or the sugar-coated poison pill that is fascism, that dark medicine that goes down so smoothly and leaves such a bitter aftertaste.
I close this second of the three chapters of this trip down Memory Lane by pointing out "The Final Battle" did indeed have a legacy: Following the huge rating success of this mini-series, a TV show was commissioned which continued the story and characters for another year...and we will soon be discussing this (mercifully?) forgotten chapter of television history: but but for today's purposes, this is the climax. And a fitting one. "The Final Battle" is not brain food as its predecessor was: it is greasy, overbuttered county fair popcorn, but damn tasty nonetheless. Entertaining as hell, it rides roughshod over its own flaws and delivers a brutal, satisfying, rather ridiculous finish to one of the more exciting moments in television history.
January 20, 2024
I'LL SEE YOU(TUBE) SOON
Who gives a fuck what you think? -- Freddy Krueger
Folks, I'm going down the rabbit hole. As much as I've railed about the dangers, the stupidities, the ugliness of life online generally, and of social media specifically, I'm about to join that life...albeit at the entry level.
I'm starting a YouTube channel.
I've been considering a larger online presence for many years, perhaps as long as I've been actively publishing fiction, say since 2016. But because it goes against my grain -- and also, because I dislike new things and am somewhat lazy -- I was hesitant to actually take the step. My largest reservation however came from a natural, generational conservatism. The publishing world I wanted to enter my entire life was a static model, the same in the 90s as it had been in the 80s, 70s -- or 30s, for that matter. Minor changes in technology aside, it had actually existed more or less unchanged for centuries. When I was first submitting novels to agents in the mid-late 00s, many did not accept electronic submissions; some did not even have e-mail accounts. They wanted physical query letters and physical copies of sample chapters and manuscript. The Kinkos and Office Maxes in Los Angeles took a lot, and I mean a lot, of my money. Hell, on top of printing 300 page manuscripts on high-quality paper, I had to have the 'scripts shrink-wrapped before placing them in a box, strapping it shut, and mailing it via USPS or FedEx. It was a slow, expensive, cumbersome process, but it was the process I understood, and thanks to graduate school, it was the process I had formally trained in: much like the infantry officers of 1913 had trained to fight the wars of 1860, I had been rigorously and thoroughly indoctrinated to participate in a system which was manifestly obsolete.
The process by which I entered hybrid/micropress publishing in 2016 ran entirely contrary to this antiquated model. Everything was done electronically, and what's more, between Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook author page, personal website, press kit, etc., etc., my platform was also purely electronic. I cannot tell you much time getting all of that stuff up and running took, or how much frustration was involved, or how alien it was to my nature and training. Even now, when my Instagram promotions are routinely garnering 10,000 likes, when I am asked to guest on well-established podcasts fairly regularly (we'll talk more about this next week), I feel uncomfortable promoting them on my various platforms. The operative word in social media is, after all, social, and while I'm a good public speaker and can be gregarious when I wish, boasting does not come naturally to me, and what is social media but boasting? There is an implicit egotism in offering one's unsolicited opinion to the world, and it is with this idea that I am generally ill at ease.
I just got over it.
I am starting a YT channel late -- the platform is rather gray in the muzzle, and increasingly unpopular even with its own content creators, who lament demonitization, censorship and shadowbanning -- but late is the schedule upon which I generally operate. And the reason is very simple. In the eight years since I published CAGE LIFE I have won the following awards:
Best Indie Book Award -- three times
Book Excellence Award -- twice
Literary Titan Gold Medal -- twice
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award -- three times
Readers Favorite Gold Medal
Zealot Script Book of the Year
Eric Hoffer Awards Finalist
Readers Favorite Five Stars -- twice
Writers Digest Honorable Mention
Shelf Unbound Runner Up
IAN Awards Finalist
I think you'd agree this is a lot of hardware: yet I have done a grossly inadequate and slovenly job of building my brand, of letting people know I actually exist. And this in many ways is the first and only role of the self-published/independent/micropress writer: even his writing is second to marketing, to advertising...in short, to boasting, or at least drawing attention to himself. And let's face it. If you read this blog, you know I don't lack for things to say, for topics to talk about. I'm a writer, yes, and can talk about writing. By extension, I am also a reader and can talk about reading. But I'm also a ten year veteran of the criminal justice system, and a twelve year veteran of Hollywood (from make up effects to video games). I'm also an amateur historian with a massive, multi-lingual library. I'm also a kid who grew up in a highly political family with strong connections to everything from the White House to the intelligence community. I'm also a hiker, martial artist, periodic console gamer, and former "Chad," among other things. In short, I have a lot I can talk about, and the time has come for me to talk about it.
Don't misunderstand me. Given the sheer number of YT channels and the merciless way the algorithms direct viewer traffic, I don't foresee getting more than a hundred subscribers and, at most, a thousand views per video, and this only after a long difficult struggle in total obscurity, during which I will doubtlessly question why I'm even bothering to do these things at all. I harbor few delusions, too, as to the toxicity of the internet, and the way any firmly held opinion on anything can trigger frenzies of anger and hatred. But as the old saw goes, a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and if I may double down on my fortune cookie epigrams, when the student is ready the master will appear. I'm ready. It's just time, and in spite of the massive obstacles involved, I'm actually excited to climb them. I'm a lot of things, but dull isn't one of them. My strategy, such as it is, is to lead off with the entertainment industry/pop culture angle, and from there segue into deeper subjects more appealing to the sort of person who is probably reading this.
So, dear reader, in the next few months the channel will launch, like a tiny sailboat into a crowded sea. And I hope to see you on the voyage.
More to follow.
Folks, I'm going down the rabbit hole. As much as I've railed about the dangers, the stupidities, the ugliness of life online generally, and of social media specifically, I'm about to join that life...albeit at the entry level.
I'm starting a YouTube channel.
I've been considering a larger online presence for many years, perhaps as long as I've been actively publishing fiction, say since 2016. But because it goes against my grain -- and also, because I dislike new things and am somewhat lazy -- I was hesitant to actually take the step. My largest reservation however came from a natural, generational conservatism. The publishing world I wanted to enter my entire life was a static model, the same in the 90s as it had been in the 80s, 70s -- or 30s, for that matter. Minor changes in technology aside, it had actually existed more or less unchanged for centuries. When I was first submitting novels to agents in the mid-late 00s, many did not accept electronic submissions; some did not even have e-mail accounts. They wanted physical query letters and physical copies of sample chapters and manuscript. The Kinkos and Office Maxes in Los Angeles took a lot, and I mean a lot, of my money. Hell, on top of printing 300 page manuscripts on high-quality paper, I had to have the 'scripts shrink-wrapped before placing them in a box, strapping it shut, and mailing it via USPS or FedEx. It was a slow, expensive, cumbersome process, but it was the process I understood, and thanks to graduate school, it was the process I had formally trained in: much like the infantry officers of 1913 had trained to fight the wars of 1860, I had been rigorously and thoroughly indoctrinated to participate in a system which was manifestly obsolete.
The process by which I entered hybrid/micropress publishing in 2016 ran entirely contrary to this antiquated model. Everything was done electronically, and what's more, between Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook author page, personal website, press kit, etc., etc., my platform was also purely electronic. I cannot tell you much time getting all of that stuff up and running took, or how much frustration was involved, or how alien it was to my nature and training. Even now, when my Instagram promotions are routinely garnering 10,000 likes, when I am asked to guest on well-established podcasts fairly regularly (we'll talk more about this next week), I feel uncomfortable promoting them on my various platforms. The operative word in social media is, after all, social, and while I'm a good public speaker and can be gregarious when I wish, boasting does not come naturally to me, and what is social media but boasting? There is an implicit egotism in offering one's unsolicited opinion to the world, and it is with this idea that I am generally ill at ease.
I just got over it.
I am starting a YT channel late -- the platform is rather gray in the muzzle, and increasingly unpopular even with its own content creators, who lament demonitization, censorship and shadowbanning -- but late is the schedule upon which I generally operate. And the reason is very simple. In the eight years since I published CAGE LIFE I have won the following awards:
Best Indie Book Award -- three times
Book Excellence Award -- twice
Literary Titan Gold Medal -- twice
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award -- three times
Readers Favorite Gold Medal
Zealot Script Book of the Year
Eric Hoffer Awards Finalist
Readers Favorite Five Stars -- twice
Writers Digest Honorable Mention
Shelf Unbound Runner Up
IAN Awards Finalist
I think you'd agree this is a lot of hardware: yet I have done a grossly inadequate and slovenly job of building my brand, of letting people know I actually exist. And this in many ways is the first and only role of the self-published/independent/micropress writer: even his writing is second to marketing, to advertising...in short, to boasting, or at least drawing attention to himself. And let's face it. If you read this blog, you know I don't lack for things to say, for topics to talk about. I'm a writer, yes, and can talk about writing. By extension, I am also a reader and can talk about reading. But I'm also a ten year veteran of the criminal justice system, and a twelve year veteran of Hollywood (from make up effects to video games). I'm also an amateur historian with a massive, multi-lingual library. I'm also a kid who grew up in a highly political family with strong connections to everything from the White House to the intelligence community. I'm also a hiker, martial artist, periodic console gamer, and former "Chad," among other things. In short, I have a lot I can talk about, and the time has come for me to talk about it.
Don't misunderstand me. Given the sheer number of YT channels and the merciless way the algorithms direct viewer traffic, I don't foresee getting more than a hundred subscribers and, at most, a thousand views per video, and this only after a long difficult struggle in total obscurity, during which I will doubtlessly question why I'm even bothering to do these things at all. I harbor few delusions, too, as to the toxicity of the internet, and the way any firmly held opinion on anything can trigger frenzies of anger and hatred. But as the old saw goes, a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and if I may double down on my fortune cookie epigrams, when the student is ready the master will appear. I'm ready. It's just time, and in spite of the massive obstacles involved, I'm actually excited to climb them. I'm a lot of things, but dull isn't one of them. My strategy, such as it is, is to lead off with the entertainment industry/pop culture angle, and from there segue into deeper subjects more appealing to the sort of person who is probably reading this.
So, dear reader, in the next few months the channel will launch, like a tiny sailboat into a crowded sea. And I hope to see you on the voyage.
More to follow.
January 17, 2024
READING: A LOVE AFFAIR
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home. ― Anna Quindlen
The other day I found myself sitting in a chair with a cat on my lap, reading. If this seems like underwhelming news, especially in a blog written on a platform called "Goodreads," consider the following: I have a been a voracious reader for most of my life, but when I moved from California to Pennsylvania in 2020, I had to do so without my books. For reasons I won't get into now, I had to leave my entire library in storage. As a result, neither my considerable pile of Go To books nor any of the To Be Read books (all bibliophiles know what I'm talking about here) were at hand. As a result, I began to watch more television and film than I was used to doing, and play more video games, too; the total number of books I read in '20 was the lowest in at least a decade. The subsequent year, when I had more books around me, I read only a few more. The same story obtained in 2022.
This was a source of considerable worry. Reading is, for me -- as for most of you I imagine -- not merely an activity, but a way of life; indeed, it is a large part of my identity. Yet for three years I read, on average, about one new book a month at the maximum. Whenever I had spare time and wasn't hiking, working out, drinking beer, etc., I was not reading, but in front of the tube or the computer. Granted, I was writing at a furious pace, but I always write at a furious pace: the one never detracts from the other. The truth is that I had quite gotten out of the habit of reading, something I thought impossible. Indeed, the very act of sitting down and reading became almost a chore to me -- I had to bear down, to force myself to sit still and to concentrate, and even then, I found myself unable to finish a good, well-written novel by one of my favorite authors: a first for me, and not a good one.
In 2023, however, I was able to hit my modest goals for reading, and take more pleasure in the act itself: the old habit of reading myself to sleep became, once more, a reflex. And the other day, on my lunch hour, I did something which in recent years was almost unthinkable: instead of loafing on the couch and watching an 80s TV show, I opened Unconditional Surrender, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, and spent that hour reading and listening to my cat purr. Evidently I have clawed my way back to a point where books are once again taking center stage in my life, to the point where they seem more appealing than the fabled lures of the television.
I mention all of this because if you'd asked me, before I moved, whether anything could truly replace books in my life, I'd have laughed in your face (politely, I hope, but still -- laughter). I took it for granted that this love, this need for reading which dated back to early childhood, would always be with me. I learned the hard way that we are, in the last analysis, what we do: not what we did. The past cuts very little in the way of ice, and reading is like any other skill: if you neglect it, it atrophies; and like any other atrophied muscle must be slowly and torturously brought back into firm condition.
We all have besetting sins: mine is entitlement. And entitlement, as a friend pointed out to me, is the enemy of gratiude. You cannot be grateful for something you feel you are entitled to, and the more entitlement you feel, the less gratitude -- a truly unhappy condition, for gratitude is close kin to appreciation, to pleasure, to joy. For many, many years I carried in my heart a depth of gratitude to my parents for bringing me up in a household of books. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with that. Took it for granted. Forgot my roots and who planted the seeds that gave birth to them, and that joy -- you know the one -- of sitting there beneath a lamp with a drink close to hand and a cat purring away on your lap and some music playing in the background? As Orwell once remarked through one of his characters, "It's bliss, pure bliss." I let it rust, and now I am in the process of cleaning it, polishing it, putting an edge on it. A process, slow and not always steady. But it is rewarding. A theologian once claimed that God has more love for the sheep which strays from the flock and returns than the one who remains the whole time. This always struck me as horribly unfair, but from an emotional standpoint I understand it. I have strayed, and now I have returned, and it feels good, but it is not a proud feeling. Rather, it's a feeling of acceptance, and gratitude at the acceptance. Because you may turn your back on books, but books never turn their back on you. Stray as far as you wish: the road remains.
The other day I found myself sitting in a chair with a cat on my lap, reading. If this seems like underwhelming news, especially in a blog written on a platform called "Goodreads," consider the following: I have a been a voracious reader for most of my life, but when I moved from California to Pennsylvania in 2020, I had to do so without my books. For reasons I won't get into now, I had to leave my entire library in storage. As a result, neither my considerable pile of Go To books nor any of the To Be Read books (all bibliophiles know what I'm talking about here) were at hand. As a result, I began to watch more television and film than I was used to doing, and play more video games, too; the total number of books I read in '20 was the lowest in at least a decade. The subsequent year, when I had more books around me, I read only a few more. The same story obtained in 2022.
This was a source of considerable worry. Reading is, for me -- as for most of you I imagine -- not merely an activity, but a way of life; indeed, it is a large part of my identity. Yet for three years I read, on average, about one new book a month at the maximum. Whenever I had spare time and wasn't hiking, working out, drinking beer, etc., I was not reading, but in front of the tube or the computer. Granted, I was writing at a furious pace, but I always write at a furious pace: the one never detracts from the other. The truth is that I had quite gotten out of the habit of reading, something I thought impossible. Indeed, the very act of sitting down and reading became almost a chore to me -- I had to bear down, to force myself to sit still and to concentrate, and even then, I found myself unable to finish a good, well-written novel by one of my favorite authors: a first for me, and not a good one.
In 2023, however, I was able to hit my modest goals for reading, and take more pleasure in the act itself: the old habit of reading myself to sleep became, once more, a reflex. And the other day, on my lunch hour, I did something which in recent years was almost unthinkable: instead of loafing on the couch and watching an 80s TV show, I opened Unconditional Surrender, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, and spent that hour reading and listening to my cat purr. Evidently I have clawed my way back to a point where books are once again taking center stage in my life, to the point where they seem more appealing than the fabled lures of the television.
I mention all of this because if you'd asked me, before I moved, whether anything could truly replace books in my life, I'd have laughed in your face (politely, I hope, but still -- laughter). I took it for granted that this love, this need for reading which dated back to early childhood, would always be with me. I learned the hard way that we are, in the last analysis, what we do: not what we did. The past cuts very little in the way of ice, and reading is like any other skill: if you neglect it, it atrophies; and like any other atrophied muscle must be slowly and torturously brought back into firm condition.
We all have besetting sins: mine is entitlement. And entitlement, as a friend pointed out to me, is the enemy of gratiude. You cannot be grateful for something you feel you are entitled to, and the more entitlement you feel, the less gratitude -- a truly unhappy condition, for gratitude is close kin to appreciation, to pleasure, to joy. For many, many years I carried in my heart a depth of gratitude to my parents for bringing me up in a household of books. Somewhere along the way I lost touch with that. Took it for granted. Forgot my roots and who planted the seeds that gave birth to them, and that joy -- you know the one -- of sitting there beneath a lamp with a drink close to hand and a cat purring away on your lap and some music playing in the background? As Orwell once remarked through one of his characters, "It's bliss, pure bliss." I let it rust, and now I am in the process of cleaning it, polishing it, putting an edge on it. A process, slow and not always steady. But it is rewarding. A theologian once claimed that God has more love for the sheep which strays from the flock and returns than the one who remains the whole time. This always struck me as horribly unfair, but from an emotional standpoint I understand it. I have strayed, and now I have returned, and it feels good, but it is not a proud feeling. Rather, it's a feeling of acceptance, and gratitude at the acceptance. Because you may turn your back on books, but books never turn their back on you. Stray as far as you wish: the road remains.
January 13, 2024
CAPTAIN KIRK, UNPERSON
I'll give this to Paramount Pictures: they're consistent. Going back as long as I can remember, Paramount has taken a snobbish, contemptuous attitude to fans of franchises the studio itself doesn't care for. Horror afficianados discovered this decades ago, when DVD releases of classic or cult-classic movies and television shows were either conducted on the cheap (with poor image quality, cropped format, no special features and wobbly sound), or simply never took place. The lucrative FRIDAY THE 13TH slasher series, which netted Paramount countless millions over the last 40 years, got especially shabby treatment. But recently an event transpired which was so jarring that even I, who expected nothing from P-mount to begin with, found myself appalled and dismayed.
They done deleted Captain Kirk.
Paramount recently released an advertisement for "Star Trek Day" which featured images of various cast members of various TREK shows which have come along since the inception of "TOS" (the original series) in the mid-1960s. Nowhere to be found among this imagery is the face of the most important character in the show's history, James Tiberius Kirk, originally portrayed by William Shatner in live action series, animated series, and numerous feature films stretching over decades before yielding (unwillingly) to Chris Pine, who was handed the role for Jar Jar Abrams regrettable franchise reboot. Shatner has been an outspoken critic of his erasure from the franchise, and equally outspoken about the fact this erasure has been going on for many years. But contrary to what his detractors may think, these complaints are not merely those of an actor whose signature role has been appropriated from him while he is still alive and in harness: they speak to a larger issue Shatner has -- which I share -- about why this erasure is actually taking place.
Audiences were first introduced to Captain James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, a United Federation of Planets starship whose "five year mission (was) to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before" in 1966. Kirk was inspired to a great degree by "Horatio Hornblower," a seafaring adventurer who appeared as the hero of a long series of adventure novels written by C.S. Forester, which were published between 1937 and 1967. Kirk, however, was a more simplified and perhaps idealized character than the troubled, complex Hornblower. Shatner's Kirk was courageous to a fault, superb in a crisis, bound almost to the point of torment by a sense of duty to his ship and his crew, and isolated by command. While he relied heavily on two subordinates (Spock and Dr. McCoy) for advice and moral support, all roads of ultimate responsibility lead to and ended with him. He wanted to do everything himself, could be ill-tempered and petty, and was clearly more comfortable with giving orders than with taking them from his own superiors. Although he detested killing and would go to enormous lengths to spare the lives of his enemies -- including, in the feature films, the life of the man who murdered his son -- he had a physical approach to problem-solving and was not the least bit shy about socking a perceived threat on the jaw. Unthreatening but persistent obstacles got the same treatment, as witnessed by this exchange in "Errand of Mercy:"
KIRK: ...where are those phasers?
AYELBORNE: I cannot tell you.
KIRK: You've told us a great deal about how you hate violence. Unless you tell me where those phasers are, you're going to have more violence than you know what to do with.
AYELBORNE: You mean you would actually use force?
KIRK: It's entirely up to you.
But it is Kirk's love of the ladies which was one of his most distinguishing characteristics. In the original series, he is relentless in his pursuit of women, so relentless that in the episode "Bread and Circuses" he beds a slave girl whose body is offered to him as a sort of last meal before his scheduled execution. (Most men in his position would be a little too preoccupied for casual sex, but not Kirk.) Nor is he above using them as means to achieve ends. In "By Any Other Name" and "Wink of an Eye" he romances women for the express purpose of producing jealous reactions in his enemies. And in "The Conscience of the King," he chastely seduces a 19 year old girl (he himself is about 33 at the time), using her to determine the identity of her father, whom he suspects is a war criminal. While Kirk is demonstratably capable of deeply romantic love, his propensity for putting ship and career over relationships (as well as, we can safely presume, some difficulty with the concept of monogamy) condemn him to never-ending isolation: every romantic partner from his past, and we meet quite a few, is very much -ex. Kirk's deepest love (he admits this more than once) is not for any woman: it is for his mistress, the starship Enterprise.
In short, Kirk is a paradigm of masculinity in its traditional and most understood form: he's brave, disciplined, proud, duty-bound, leads from the front, never shies from a fistfight, is a cocksman of the first water, and trusts his heart only to an inanimate object. Equally in short, he is everything Western culture has been trying to destroy for -- George Orwell would have argued this point -- the last 100 years.
Orwell's concept of the "unperson," deleted from history so thoroughly that it is as if they never existed, has haunted us since the publication of his masterwork, 1984: in fact it is an ancient concept, going back thousands of years to the Romans and Greeks and perhaps civilizations before them. In recent years, however, we have seen this concept applied to the field of entertainment rather than the political sphere, not merely through cancel culture, but via the subtler means of simply and quietly downplaying or making unavailable that "content" which runs against the grain of current thought. Nobody is actively trying to "cancel" Kirk: the character still exists within the STAR TREK universe. He is, however, a representation of everything Hollywood now despises: a rugged, self-reliant, charismatic, physically capable, sexually dominant male. Nowadays that label comes with consequences.
The war on masculinity is admittedly a right-ring talking point, which is why those who lean left gaslight themselves, and the rest of us roughly at the political center, by telling us there is no such thing. But one cannot entirely ignore the evidence of one's eyes in this regard, and both anecdotal experience and the facts, data and statistics demonstrate that masculinity in its traditional form is sharply on the downgrade, both in the number of males who fit the definition, and in the broader sense of masculinity being perceived by society as something valuable and virtuous, rather than "toxic" and threatening. And this is particularly painful and alarming to me for reasons both intensely personal and otherwise.
As a kid, growing up on STAR TREK reruns, I idealized Kirk to the point where I actually grew and maintained the up-and-over hair part and sharp sideburns that adorned him in the show. To me, Kirk was everything I was not, but aspired to be: a leader of men, a lover of women, a warrior with philosophical principles...in short, an adventurer. I cannot tell you the number of crises in my young life that I overcome at least in part because I relied on Kirk as an example of how to behave. And indeed, it seemed to me, looking at life in a broader and more historical perspective, that America had become as successful as it was in large part due to the fact that Kirk, in his own way, was a reflection of idealized American masculinity (I appreciate the irony here: Shatner is Canadian, and Hornblower was British, but on we go). The men who had defied King George III, who had stood up to each other at Gettysburg, who
had stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, were very much in the Kirkian vein. Like everyone living in this land, I owe them a debt, and while I never went farther down that road than registering for Selective Service (the draft) when I was 18 years old, I was prepared to pay it if called to do so. I think most of the men of my generation were as well, provided they felt the cause worthy of their life's blood and in tune with the principles of their conscience. This is, after all, still a democracy, and living in a democracy means nothing if one is not prepared to defy the government over a matter of sincere principle. But the fact remains that Kirk is an archetype of masculinity and nations that wish to survive in the long run must not only have such archetypes in their popular culture, they must be able to produce reasonable facisimilies of them in the general population. Nowadays, watching the Ukrainians defend their homeland against relentless assaults from a larger, more populous, and more powerful neighbor, I am grateful for their moral and physical courage, but I am also troubled, because I sincerely doubt my own country could produce a similar effort from its men if duty required it. I am not referring to those already in uniform, but to the vast body of men who are not, but may be needed. Questions of patriotism thrust completely aside, it boils down to whether a sufficient supply of real men -- of Kirks -- exists to take up arms in the crises to come. Too many of us have abrogated the responsibilty that comes with our balls, the obligation to be first in harm's way when the ship is sinking. The credo of the supposedly toxic man of yesteryear was, after all, "women and children first."
Generations ago, Orwell warned us in his essays about the practical consequences of discrediting physical courage in popular culture: he was a farseeing man, and he understood that societal mores are a weathervane which predicts the future weather of a nation. The question the erasure of Kirk brings to mind is: will there be enough Kirks left to withstand the storm which all of us know is coming?
They done deleted Captain Kirk.
Paramount recently released an advertisement for "Star Trek Day" which featured images of various cast members of various TREK shows which have come along since the inception of "TOS" (the original series) in the mid-1960s. Nowhere to be found among this imagery is the face of the most important character in the show's history, James Tiberius Kirk, originally portrayed by William Shatner in live action series, animated series, and numerous feature films stretching over decades before yielding (unwillingly) to Chris Pine, who was handed the role for Jar Jar Abrams regrettable franchise reboot. Shatner has been an outspoken critic of his erasure from the franchise, and equally outspoken about the fact this erasure has been going on for many years. But contrary to what his detractors may think, these complaints are not merely those of an actor whose signature role has been appropriated from him while he is still alive and in harness: they speak to a larger issue Shatner has -- which I share -- about why this erasure is actually taking place.
Audiences were first introduced to Captain James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, a United Federation of Planets starship whose "five year mission (was) to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life, and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before" in 1966. Kirk was inspired to a great degree by "Horatio Hornblower," a seafaring adventurer who appeared as the hero of a long series of adventure novels written by C.S. Forester, which were published between 1937 and 1967. Kirk, however, was a more simplified and perhaps idealized character than the troubled, complex Hornblower. Shatner's Kirk was courageous to a fault, superb in a crisis, bound almost to the point of torment by a sense of duty to his ship and his crew, and isolated by command. While he relied heavily on two subordinates (Spock and Dr. McCoy) for advice and moral support, all roads of ultimate responsibility lead to and ended with him. He wanted to do everything himself, could be ill-tempered and petty, and was clearly more comfortable with giving orders than with taking them from his own superiors. Although he detested killing and would go to enormous lengths to spare the lives of his enemies -- including, in the feature films, the life of the man who murdered his son -- he had a physical approach to problem-solving and was not the least bit shy about socking a perceived threat on the jaw. Unthreatening but persistent obstacles got the same treatment, as witnessed by this exchange in "Errand of Mercy:"
KIRK: ...where are those phasers?
AYELBORNE: I cannot tell you.
KIRK: You've told us a great deal about how you hate violence. Unless you tell me where those phasers are, you're going to have more violence than you know what to do with.
AYELBORNE: You mean you would actually use force?
KIRK: It's entirely up to you.
But it is Kirk's love of the ladies which was one of his most distinguishing characteristics. In the original series, he is relentless in his pursuit of women, so relentless that in the episode "Bread and Circuses" he beds a slave girl whose body is offered to him as a sort of last meal before his scheduled execution. (Most men in his position would be a little too preoccupied for casual sex, but not Kirk.) Nor is he above using them as means to achieve ends. In "By Any Other Name" and "Wink of an Eye" he romances women for the express purpose of producing jealous reactions in his enemies. And in "The Conscience of the King," he chastely seduces a 19 year old girl (he himself is about 33 at the time), using her to determine the identity of her father, whom he suspects is a war criminal. While Kirk is demonstratably capable of deeply romantic love, his propensity for putting ship and career over relationships (as well as, we can safely presume, some difficulty with the concept of monogamy) condemn him to never-ending isolation: every romantic partner from his past, and we meet quite a few, is very much -ex. Kirk's deepest love (he admits this more than once) is not for any woman: it is for his mistress, the starship Enterprise.
In short, Kirk is a paradigm of masculinity in its traditional and most understood form: he's brave, disciplined, proud, duty-bound, leads from the front, never shies from a fistfight, is a cocksman of the first water, and trusts his heart only to an inanimate object. Equally in short, he is everything Western culture has been trying to destroy for -- George Orwell would have argued this point -- the last 100 years.
Orwell's concept of the "unperson," deleted from history so thoroughly that it is as if they never existed, has haunted us since the publication of his masterwork, 1984: in fact it is an ancient concept, going back thousands of years to the Romans and Greeks and perhaps civilizations before them. In recent years, however, we have seen this concept applied to the field of entertainment rather than the political sphere, not merely through cancel culture, but via the subtler means of simply and quietly downplaying or making unavailable that "content" which runs against the grain of current thought. Nobody is actively trying to "cancel" Kirk: the character still exists within the STAR TREK universe. He is, however, a representation of everything Hollywood now despises: a rugged, self-reliant, charismatic, physically capable, sexually dominant male. Nowadays that label comes with consequences.
The war on masculinity is admittedly a right-ring talking point, which is why those who lean left gaslight themselves, and the rest of us roughly at the political center, by telling us there is no such thing. But one cannot entirely ignore the evidence of one's eyes in this regard, and both anecdotal experience and the facts, data and statistics demonstrate that masculinity in its traditional form is sharply on the downgrade, both in the number of males who fit the definition, and in the broader sense of masculinity being perceived by society as something valuable and virtuous, rather than "toxic" and threatening. And this is particularly painful and alarming to me for reasons both intensely personal and otherwise.
As a kid, growing up on STAR TREK reruns, I idealized Kirk to the point where I actually grew and maintained the up-and-over hair part and sharp sideburns that adorned him in the show. To me, Kirk was everything I was not, but aspired to be: a leader of men, a lover of women, a warrior with philosophical principles...in short, an adventurer. I cannot tell you the number of crises in my young life that I overcome at least in part because I relied on Kirk as an example of how to behave. And indeed, it seemed to me, looking at life in a broader and more historical perspective, that America had become as successful as it was in large part due to the fact that Kirk, in his own way, was a reflection of idealized American masculinity (I appreciate the irony here: Shatner is Canadian, and Hornblower was British, but on we go). The men who had defied King George III, who had stood up to each other at Gettysburg, who
had stormed the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, were very much in the Kirkian vein. Like everyone living in this land, I owe them a debt, and while I never went farther down that road than registering for Selective Service (the draft) when I was 18 years old, I was prepared to pay it if called to do so. I think most of the men of my generation were as well, provided they felt the cause worthy of their life's blood and in tune with the principles of their conscience. This is, after all, still a democracy, and living in a democracy means nothing if one is not prepared to defy the government over a matter of sincere principle. But the fact remains that Kirk is an archetype of masculinity and nations that wish to survive in the long run must not only have such archetypes in their popular culture, they must be able to produce reasonable facisimilies of them in the general population. Nowadays, watching the Ukrainians defend their homeland against relentless assaults from a larger, more populous, and more powerful neighbor, I am grateful for their moral and physical courage, but I am also troubled, because I sincerely doubt my own country could produce a similar effort from its men if duty required it. I am not referring to those already in uniform, but to the vast body of men who are not, but may be needed. Questions of patriotism thrust completely aside, it boils down to whether a sufficient supply of real men -- of Kirks -- exists to take up arms in the crises to come. Too many of us have abrogated the responsibilty that comes with our balls, the obligation to be first in harm's way when the ship is sinking. The credo of the supposedly toxic man of yesteryear was, after all, "women and children first."
Generations ago, Orwell warned us in his essays about the practical consequences of discrediting physical courage in popular culture: he was a farseeing man, and he understood that societal mores are a weathervane which predicts the future weather of a nation. The question the erasure of Kirk brings to mind is: will there be enough Kirks left to withstand the storm which all of us know is coming?
January 10, 2024
DUMBING IT DOWN
Like Grandpa Simpson, I need little in the way of provocation to go on a tirade about something I find annoying, wicked, or just plain stupid. In this case I was set off by a single line of dialog in Denise Villeneuve's cinematic adaption of Frank Herbert's all-time sci-fi classic, DUNE. The most cerebral character in the entire sprawling cast, a man who is quite literally a human computer capable of staggering feats of mental computation, Thufir Hawat, gets on the radio and tells his fellows, "OK... we're good to go."
I am not sure what the writing team behind this adaptation was thinking when they made the decision to cram contemporary banalities in the mouths of what are essentially erudite Medieval characters...well, actually, I am sure what they were thinking, and that is what upsets me. If I may presume to read their minds, they were thinking what almost everyone else in Hollywood has been thinking for the last 25 years: DUMB IT DOWN.
You can say what you want about David Lynch's 1985 adaptation of DUNE, but you can't say the dialog was all that much out of tune with the way Herbert wrote it in his novel -- sometimes cerebral, sometimes mystical. But even when it was terrible, it was, so to speak, in-universe. When Gurney Halleck tells Paul Atriedes, "Guard yourself for true!" we understand that this is the way they talk in the DUNE world: we don't need Gurney to say "Put up your dukes, shit's about to pop off!" to understand his meaning. Whatever the ultimate result of Lynch's cinematic effort, he wasn't afraid of Frank Herbert's towering intellect, and he trusted us to "get it."
One could argue with considerable force that cinema has never been an intellectual stronghold, but this argument, while viable and packing plenty of ammunition, is far from invincible, because while vastly outnumbered, film, and yes, even television ("that bottomless pit of shit" as Stephen King once called it) also have long traditions of producing much which is thought-provocative. Arthouse cinema specializes in this, but the now-vanished mid-budget movie is where much of what was truly creat in cinema found its roots, and as late as 2007 were still producing winners. Meanwhile, the peak of witty, clever, intelligent stories making their way to the big and small screen was roughly around this same time, when entertainment made by such people as Dick Wolf, David Simon, David Chase, Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, Chris Haddock, Shawn Ryan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc., etc. either reached maximum popularity or its maximum level of cultural influence. It was more or less expected by this point that anything which wanted to be taken seriously within its field -- even comedy -- had to bring a higher standard of dialog, a larger and more obscure array of pop-cultural references, wittier banter, and so on to the table. The rigid, cliche-ridden, unchallenging formulas of the 80s and early-mid 90s had been smashed, and in their place were stories actually pitched at the adult level. Exposition was cut to the bone: audiences who didn't understand what they were seeing were challenged to figure out in in context. The presupposition of this crop of writer-producers was that audiences were smart, and would be able to keep up. And they were right.
It was, however, also around this very rough period that we saw the next generation of "creators" begin to helm their first major projects. In particular, in 2009, J.J. Abrams got hold of one of the most beloved -- and intelligent -- franchises in history, STAR TREK, and proceded to give it a frontal lobotomy. Gene Roddenberry's ground-shattering sci-fi show had tackled complex moral issues, and created characters who were just as smart, thoughtful and principled as they were daring: hence the show's enduring legacy. Abrams' reboot was an embarrassment, a noisy, empty-headed action film less memorable than the taste of the popcorn you ate when you watched it. I'll never forget the obscene rant of one guy on Tumblr, who howled "Abrams decided he would 'honor' the memory of Star Trek's most beloved Lady [Uhura] and turn her character into a dumb whore that Kirk fucked and promptly forgot about." However, as a more sober Michael Hare wrote in Film Experience at the time: "[Abrams' movie] is homogenized Star Trek, but that's less the fault of J.J. Abrams than it is merely a result of the current cinematic culture as a whole."
Hare was right: Abrams' unoriginal, one-dimensional and vacuous as his movies are, is merely a symptom of a generational problem: characters are only as smart as the people who create them. For the last 30 years or more, our culture has been engaged in a slow but systematic purge of everyone, in every field, who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, "modern" feminism, and the unrelated, but parellel "cult of youth" which assumes anyone 40 or older is evil or useless, we have managed to do away with the technical class which serviced us creatively, without actually training their replacements. The modern crop of writers and directors were promoted far too quickly and given entirely too much power: even the very talented ones lacked the seasoning of their seniors, men and women who had come up slowly through the ranks of writers' rooms, who had learned their craft through apprenticeship: the result is a collision of ignorance and arrogance, which produces from its impact only mediocrity, a mediocrity which shakes the bar loose of its old, lofty standard and drops it to a level where as visually sumptuous a film as the new DUNE can have characters say shit like, "OK, we're good to go."
The anti-intellectual element of so many modern movies and television shows, their faux-cleverness, their vulgarity, their deafening volume, their substitution of stale political bromides for plots, and archetypes for characters, are the result of people who are either stupid themselves, were picked for the wrong reasons (sex, gender, race or age rather than skill and passion) or who have been directed by higher-ups to knock thirty or forty IQ points off the script so as not to intimidate the sheep-like masses they believe audiences to be. But audiences are not anywhere near as sheep-like as cynics like to think. They do not need dialog or concept to be dumbed down. They may want it occasionally -- mindless entertainment definitely has its place -- but need it? From OPPENHEIMER to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and back again, we have ample evidence that what matters to audiences is that they be entertained, challenged, provoked, forced to think or at least to feel, and that assuming them stupid and witless is not only cynical and self-defeating, it's wrong from a purely practical standpoint. Put another way, it's bad business.
You will think by now -- and possibly be right -- that I am kicking a mole hill into a mountain. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's seeing the underlying, even unconscious motives in what seem like harmless artistic and cultural compromises. In the last 35 years we have already seen the human attention span artificially shortened, first by the increasing use of razzle-dazzle, frame-fucked, MTV-style editing in the 90s, and then later, through the popularity of mobile devices and their accompanying effect on the dopamine centers of the brain. The ability to concentrate, to think critically, to apply logic to situations is visibly dying before our eyes. The last thing we need are the most intellectual of our intellectual properties being turned into "content" because the directors entrusted to bring them to the screen aren't smart enough to understand them. Let the stupid stick to their own lane. The one we're in is narrow enough as it is.
I am not sure what the writing team behind this adaptation was thinking when they made the decision to cram contemporary banalities in the mouths of what are essentially erudite Medieval characters...well, actually, I am sure what they were thinking, and that is what upsets me. If I may presume to read their minds, they were thinking what almost everyone else in Hollywood has been thinking for the last 25 years: DUMB IT DOWN.
You can say what you want about David Lynch's 1985 adaptation of DUNE, but you can't say the dialog was all that much out of tune with the way Herbert wrote it in his novel -- sometimes cerebral, sometimes mystical. But even when it was terrible, it was, so to speak, in-universe. When Gurney Halleck tells Paul Atriedes, "Guard yourself for true!" we understand that this is the way they talk in the DUNE world: we don't need Gurney to say "Put up your dukes, shit's about to pop off!" to understand his meaning. Whatever the ultimate result of Lynch's cinematic effort, he wasn't afraid of Frank Herbert's towering intellect, and he trusted us to "get it."
One could argue with considerable force that cinema has never been an intellectual stronghold, but this argument, while viable and packing plenty of ammunition, is far from invincible, because while vastly outnumbered, film, and yes, even television ("that bottomless pit of shit" as Stephen King once called it) also have long traditions of producing much which is thought-provocative. Arthouse cinema specializes in this, but the now-vanished mid-budget movie is where much of what was truly creat in cinema found its roots, and as late as 2007 were still producing winners. Meanwhile, the peak of witty, clever, intelligent stories making their way to the big and small screen was roughly around this same time, when entertainment made by such people as Dick Wolf, David Simon, David Chase, Joss Whedon, Chris Carter, Chris Haddock, Shawn Ryan, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc., etc. either reached maximum popularity or its maximum level of cultural influence. It was more or less expected by this point that anything which wanted to be taken seriously within its field -- even comedy -- had to bring a higher standard of dialog, a larger and more obscure array of pop-cultural references, wittier banter, and so on to the table. The rigid, cliche-ridden, unchallenging formulas of the 80s and early-mid 90s had been smashed, and in their place were stories actually pitched at the adult level. Exposition was cut to the bone: audiences who didn't understand what they were seeing were challenged to figure out in in context. The presupposition of this crop of writer-producers was that audiences were smart, and would be able to keep up. And they were right.
It was, however, also around this very rough period that we saw the next generation of "creators" begin to helm their first major projects. In particular, in 2009, J.J. Abrams got hold of one of the most beloved -- and intelligent -- franchises in history, STAR TREK, and proceded to give it a frontal lobotomy. Gene Roddenberry's ground-shattering sci-fi show had tackled complex moral issues, and created characters who were just as smart, thoughtful and principled as they were daring: hence the show's enduring legacy. Abrams' reboot was an embarrassment, a noisy, empty-headed action film less memorable than the taste of the popcorn you ate when you watched it. I'll never forget the obscene rant of one guy on Tumblr, who howled "Abrams decided he would 'honor' the memory of Star Trek's most beloved Lady [Uhura] and turn her character into a dumb whore that Kirk fucked and promptly forgot about." However, as a more sober Michael Hare wrote in Film Experience at the time: "[Abrams' movie] is homogenized Star Trek, but that's less the fault of J.J. Abrams than it is merely a result of the current cinematic culture as a whole."
Hare was right: Abrams' unoriginal, one-dimensional and vacuous as his movies are, is merely a symptom of a generational problem: characters are only as smart as the people who create them. For the last 30 years or more, our culture has been engaged in a slow but systematic purge of everyone, in every field, who actually knew what the fuck he was doing. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, "modern" feminism, and the unrelated, but parellel "cult of youth" which assumes anyone 40 or older is evil or useless, we have managed to do away with the technical class which serviced us creatively, without actually training their replacements. The modern crop of writers and directors were promoted far too quickly and given entirely too much power: even the very talented ones lacked the seasoning of their seniors, men and women who had come up slowly through the ranks of writers' rooms, who had learned their craft through apprenticeship: the result is a collision of ignorance and arrogance, which produces from its impact only mediocrity, a mediocrity which shakes the bar loose of its old, lofty standard and drops it to a level where as visually sumptuous a film as the new DUNE can have characters say shit like, "OK, we're good to go."
The anti-intellectual element of so many modern movies and television shows, their faux-cleverness, their vulgarity, their deafening volume, their substitution of stale political bromides for plots, and archetypes for characters, are the result of people who are either stupid themselves, were picked for the wrong reasons (sex, gender, race or age rather than skill and passion) or who have been directed by higher-ups to knock thirty or forty IQ points off the script so as not to intimidate the sheep-like masses they believe audiences to be. But audiences are not anywhere near as sheep-like as cynics like to think. They do not need dialog or concept to be dumbed down. They may want it occasionally -- mindless entertainment definitely has its place -- but need it? From OPPENHEIMER to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and back again, we have ample evidence that what matters to audiences is that they be entertained, challenged, provoked, forced to think or at least to feel, and that assuming them stupid and witless is not only cynical and self-defeating, it's wrong from a purely practical standpoint. Put another way, it's bad business.
You will think by now -- and possibly be right -- that I am kicking a mole hill into a mountain. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's seeing the underlying, even unconscious motives in what seem like harmless artistic and cultural compromises. In the last 35 years we have already seen the human attention span artificially shortened, first by the increasing use of razzle-dazzle, frame-fucked, MTV-style editing in the 90s, and then later, through the popularity of mobile devices and their accompanying effect on the dopamine centers of the brain. The ability to concentrate, to think critically, to apply logic to situations is visibly dying before our eyes. The last thing we need are the most intellectual of our intellectual properties being turned into "content" because the directors entrusted to bring them to the screen aren't smart enough to understand them. Let the stupid stick to their own lane. The one we're in is narrow enough as it is.
January 5, 2024
GOODREADING, 2017 - 2023
I've been participating in the Goodreads Challenge for about seven years now, and I guess that comes to about 120 - 140 books all told: not an impressive total, and indeed, less than some true bibliophiles read in a single year. This got me thinking, however. How much do we really retain of the books we read? Does a person who puts away a book a week, or 100 a year, or even more, actually remember any of what they read? At my highest pace of book reading, I polished off around 26 full-length books in one year, and realized that a few of them had left no impression upon me at all. I barely remembered a word. Now, some of that may come down to bad writing, or inattention on my part, but it is curious, is it not, what we retain and what we forget?
Here are some of the books that really stand out in my memory over the last seven years, for good or for ill:
Charlton Heston: The Actor's Life 1956 - 1976 -- This is a remarkably readable and beautifully written diary-memoir maintained by Chuck Heston during the full flower and prime of his career. He discusses his personal and acting life in remarkably honest, clear-headed terms, discoursing on fatherhood, marriage, money, travel, politics (both SAG and American), the personalities of actors and directors he worked with, and the fickle nature of Hollywood. He's an arresting writer with a stinging wit and a powerful observational eye, whose strong, rather progressive moral sense is tinged with the rather forboding knowledge that he will become a deeply conservative man in old age -- a prophecy which came true. Should be mandatory reading for every actor and anyone interested in the acting life.
Uprising Everyone's favorite human cyclone of controversy, David Irving, wrote a truly noteworthy account of Hungary's failed, tragic uprising against communism in 1956, which has never come close to being equaled by any English-speaking historian. (Michner's THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU is a cartoon by comparison.) Irving's unrivaled ability to dig out firsthand source material was outweighed only by his ability to make people angry, and he details -- uncomfortably, but even Christopher Hitchens agreed, accurately -- how the Nazi massacre of Jews in the early 40s led to, or accelerated, the popularity of communism among European Jewry, which in turn led to communism in Hungary being perceived as a Jewish concern by its victims, and the revolution of '56 therefore a kind of pogrom. Whatever your take on Irving or his thesis, however, this is a compulsively readable book, meticulously researched, and I failed to detect any actual anti-semitism in it, just uncomfortable facts which stemmed from an even larger tragedy: the Holocaust which preceded it. Given the Israel - Palestine war, itself a result of preceding tragedies, it has a curious timeliness.
Across the River and Into the Trees I have read most of Hemingway's novels and short stories, and this novel, which Charles Whiting once referred to as "a bitter, irrational, cynical book" is...well, a genuine failure. It is so strikingly off key and clumsy that it stands out in my memory as a kind of testament to the fact that even the greatest literay figures are capable of totally tanking it. The story of a dying American colonel just after WW2, embarked in a foolish romance with a much younger woman, it opens strongly, but quickly disintegrates into a sloppy hodge-podge of terrible dialog, childish one-dimensional characters, and Hemingway cliches. (One of the dangers of being famous for your literary style is that you can easily become its prisoner. Hemingway began his career satirizing writers he considered trash, and at this point sounded like someone satirizing him.) Even in the muck of the plot, however, there are flashes of genius, and of fearlessness. It's a bad book, but it's not really a forgettable one.
Beau Geste. Percival Wren may or may not have served in the French Foreign Legion: nobody really knows; but his novel on the subject is certainly a cornerstone of Legion lore. Though overwritten to a numbing degree, it is also beautifully, even gorgeously, prose-written: the story of English brothers who join the Legion to save their honor after being blamed for a jewel theft, it is a double mystery, woven into a grand adventure story set in French Sahara. Though Wren's characters tend toward national stereotype -- the Americans in particular -- it's a lovely novel that examines both English country life in all of its rigid Edwardian morality and silliness (people doing outrageous things for the sake of family honor), and the curious combination of romance and savagery that the Legion (and colonialism) represented.
Not Bad For A Human Lance Henriksen is one of the most prolific actors of the last 50 - 60 years. I doubt most people know his name, but few would fail to recognize his weather-worn face or deep, gravelly voice. In this incredibly enjoyable autobiography, he takes us through his remarkable and inspiring life, in which a tragic boyhood, a vagabond gypsy period, and a failed stint in the Navy ended up producing a first-rate actor whose gentleness, thoughtfulness and positivity inspire everyone around him. He's worked with everybody and done everything, from huge franchise flicks to TV series to "alimony movies" he'd rather forget. Yet Henriksen puts on no airs; he bears no grudges; his basic philosophy is that the world has enough shitheads in it as it is, there was no need for him to join their ranks. I met the man once, and he is no phony. He lives it. Great book. Great guy.
An Accidental Cowboy If you grew up in the 80s, you know Jameson Parker from either SIMON & SIMON or John Carpenter's rather cerebral horror movie PRINCE OF DARKNESS. In this mesmerizing little book, Parker examines how he, a well-educated, well-traveled, successful actor with rather happy go lucky nature, ended up improbably abandoning Hollywood to become a California ranch hand. Shot twice by a lunatic over a trifling dispute, Parker struggled with chronic depression, suicidal ideation and severe social anxiety, and found in cowboy life a therapy that saved his life. A beautiful examination of modern American Western life, dying traditions, the effects of PTSD, as well as a personal memoir, it is beautifully written and constructed almost like a suspense story or mystery novel. I was so moved by this book I e-mailed Parker to congratulate him, and he kindly responded with his thanks.
Foundation I finally got 'round to reading Isaac Asimov's original FOUNDATION trilogy, and I confess that I now get just how deeply he influenced almost every science-fiction writer who came after him, either directly or indirectly. While Asimov certainly has his limitations as a novelist, and his characters tend toward the paper cutout type, the story he tells is awesome in both scope, ambition and imagination. The story of the downfall of a vast galactic empire, its heroes are not swashbuckling rebels but fugitive scientists who believe they can predict the future and ultimately save it. Cerebral but fast-paced, combining intrigue and strategy with anthropology and sociology, it hits its strongest stride in the second volume, but is largely enjoyable and remarkably imaginative the whole way through.
Asylum - Carly Rheilan is a somewhat reclusive English novelist whose long career in social work produced this quietly masterful mystery-suspense story about African refugees living in prison-like conditions in London, and the people who try to help them...or exploit them. Not at all a story I thought I'd like or be interested in, it slowly weaves a tale about human trafficking, the after-effects of tragedy, the plight of refugees, the difficulty of cultural interchange, and the ways man-made systems (criminal and legitmate) can crush the human spirit, which is deeply moving and occasionally even funny. Its protagonists are flawed and relatable, and its villain, Christmas, is probably the most terrifying depiction of a pure sociopath I have ever encountered in a novel.
King of the Gypsies Bartley Gorman V was a bare knuckle boxer known in the traveling community as The King of the Gypsies, going more or less undefeated over 60 brutal, no-quarter, illegal matches over many years. This book is his riveting autobiography, the story of a proud, thoughtful man, an English gypsy who took up the gypsy bareknuckle tradition of his forebearers (Tyson Fury, current heavyweight champion, is a relation) and unapologetically embraced the violence, pain, jealousy, intrigue, money, glory and woe that followed his assumption of the crown. Fascinating, funny, and tragic, part biography, part bareknuckle boxing history, and part exploration o Traveler culture, it is the story of the ultimate outsider -- a gypsy -- who dove headfirst into the ultimate outside profession: barekuckle boxing.
My Wicked, Wicked Ways Errol Flynn was and is a synonym for degeneracy: the phrase "in like Flynn" is a specific reference to his prowess with the ladies. But buried beneath all the screwing, drinking, philandering, adultery, perversion and selfishness was a man with a surprisingly incisive mind, a surprisingly skillful pen, and an eyebrow popping backstory, who came to understand, and to regret, that he wasted his life and his talent making increasingly derivitive swashbuckler movies and cultivating a reputation he was addicted to, but despised. Flynn's autobiography is lengthy, and full of cons, hustles, seductions, crude pranks, alimony payments, and bad behavior, almost to the point of tedium and occasionally to the point of disgust; but it's also the story of a man humbled by life, who discovers looks, money, fame and women cannot fill the void in his life. Before his premature death, he had become a novelist, documentary film-maker, pilot and yachtsman, and was plainly trying to escape the self-built prison in which he lived.
Tales of the Jazz Age F. Scott Fitzgerald is rightfully referred to as the spirit of his era, and this collection of stories proves it. Running the range from the fantastic to the comic, the pathetic to the tragic, it showcases both his talents, his range of interests, and his proclivity for both portraying the silliness and the vulgarity of his time and his awareness that it was silly and vulgar. "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a work of genune imaginative genius and drips with sarcastic joy about the evils of greed and materialism, but the sadness of "The Lee of Happiness" is difficult to shake, and the ending of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is haunting.
Crosses in the Wind This is the only book I've ever read about how an army at war cares for its dead. Written by William Shomon, who commanded a Graves Registration company during WW2, it is a terse, well-written, diary-like account of his service in France and Germany in WW2, from D-Day to the end of the war and after. Fascinating, moving, and respectful, it describes in detail the enormous lengths the U.S. Army went to locate, identify, and bury its dead soldiers. He describes the rituals by which bodies were recovered, washed, examined, fingerprinted -- and if necessary, X-rayed -- before burial. He describes the way the cemetaries were built, right in the middle of the war. And he describes life in the field, which included being bombed by the German air force, shelled, and so on. This is a genuinely important book, and speaks volumes about the fundamental humanity that underlay a vicious war.
The Bridge on the River KwaiMost people have seen the pic movie. Not as many have read Pierre Boullet's novel from whence the movie was drawn. And they should, because it's one helluva book. Although set in WW2, it is really a novel about pride, duty, and ego, specifically as it manifests in a battle of wills beteen a sadistic but desperate Japanese POW commandant charged with building a bridge with slave labor, and a snobbish, pathologically inflexible British colonel who is theoretically his prisoner, but in other ways both his master, his nemesis, and his willing minion. Boullet is a fine writer, but he's also a smart one, smart enough to get out of his own way and let the reader draw the morals from this complex moral tale, in which a man is so blinded by honor he willingly commits treason.
The Poetry of William B. Smith Arguably the scariest-looking actor in the history of Hollywood, the dark-eyed, muscle-bound, coarse-voiced Smith looked like he killed and ate babies for breakfast and enjoyed every second of it, and that was usually the sort of characters he played. Monsters. Brutes. Baddies. My God, he was the only man manly enough to play Conan the Barbarian's father. In real life he was more interesting than any fictional character: hall of fame bodybuilder, expert martial artist, stuntman, linguist, UCLA professor, NSA intelligence operative...and poet. This rather prosaically titled book lays bare the soul of a man who was almost incredibly thoughtful, ingenious and complex: patriotic, antiracist, fascinated by life and its ironies, imaginative in the extreme, unnerved by the impositions age were making on his body, plagued by fears, all of it comes out in these poems. While he's not uber-talented technically, he makes up for this with passion and sincerity. It's less a book of poems than a tour through his mind, and what a tour it is. They don't make 'em like Smith anymore.
I could go on, but I think this is a good sampling of some of the most memorable books I've read in the past six or seven years. I deliberately left out most of the history books, because I read so many of them in comparison with everything else that they deserve their own blog; I also left out Joseph Heller's Now and Then, one of the three most boring books I've ever read, because while the memory of the boredom is real, writing even a brief review would cause me to pass out over the keyboard. All I can say about that bowl of sawdust is that it's a warning never to write a memoir if you admit you lack any sense of sentimentality about your past. Anyway, and in closing, I'd like to add that it is impossible for me to think about some of these books without remembering where and how I read them: Heston's diaries, for example, very definitely belong to my back yard in Burbank -- the gate by the orange tree. Flynn's autobiography, in contrast, was the first book I read when I first moved back to York, and I had to lie on a beanbag in my living room to read it because at the time I had no furniture. I opened this ramble by asking if people really retained what they read, and I close it by asking if they, too, remember books not merely in terms of the books themselves, but the slice of life they collect from us when we read them?
Here are some of the books that really stand out in my memory over the last seven years, for good or for ill:
Charlton Heston: The Actor's Life 1956 - 1976 -- This is a remarkably readable and beautifully written diary-memoir maintained by Chuck Heston during the full flower and prime of his career. He discusses his personal and acting life in remarkably honest, clear-headed terms, discoursing on fatherhood, marriage, money, travel, politics (both SAG and American), the personalities of actors and directors he worked with, and the fickle nature of Hollywood. He's an arresting writer with a stinging wit and a powerful observational eye, whose strong, rather progressive moral sense is tinged with the rather forboding knowledge that he will become a deeply conservative man in old age -- a prophecy which came true. Should be mandatory reading for every actor and anyone interested in the acting life.
Uprising Everyone's favorite human cyclone of controversy, David Irving, wrote a truly noteworthy account of Hungary's failed, tragic uprising against communism in 1956, which has never come close to being equaled by any English-speaking historian. (Michner's THE BRIDGE AT ANDAU is a cartoon by comparison.) Irving's unrivaled ability to dig out firsthand source material was outweighed only by his ability to make people angry, and he details -- uncomfortably, but even Christopher Hitchens agreed, accurately -- how the Nazi massacre of Jews in the early 40s led to, or accelerated, the popularity of communism among European Jewry, which in turn led to communism in Hungary being perceived as a Jewish concern by its victims, and the revolution of '56 therefore a kind of pogrom. Whatever your take on Irving or his thesis, however, this is a compulsively readable book, meticulously researched, and I failed to detect any actual anti-semitism in it, just uncomfortable facts which stemmed from an even larger tragedy: the Holocaust which preceded it. Given the Israel - Palestine war, itself a result of preceding tragedies, it has a curious timeliness.
Across the River and Into the Trees I have read most of Hemingway's novels and short stories, and this novel, which Charles Whiting once referred to as "a bitter, irrational, cynical book" is...well, a genuine failure. It is so strikingly off key and clumsy that it stands out in my memory as a kind of testament to the fact that even the greatest literay figures are capable of totally tanking it. The story of a dying American colonel just after WW2, embarked in a foolish romance with a much younger woman, it opens strongly, but quickly disintegrates into a sloppy hodge-podge of terrible dialog, childish one-dimensional characters, and Hemingway cliches. (One of the dangers of being famous for your literary style is that you can easily become its prisoner. Hemingway began his career satirizing writers he considered trash, and at this point sounded like someone satirizing him.) Even in the muck of the plot, however, there are flashes of genius, and of fearlessness. It's a bad book, but it's not really a forgettable one.
Beau Geste. Percival Wren may or may not have served in the French Foreign Legion: nobody really knows; but his novel on the subject is certainly a cornerstone of Legion lore. Though overwritten to a numbing degree, it is also beautifully, even gorgeously, prose-written: the story of English brothers who join the Legion to save their honor after being blamed for a jewel theft, it is a double mystery, woven into a grand adventure story set in French Sahara. Though Wren's characters tend toward national stereotype -- the Americans in particular -- it's a lovely novel that examines both English country life in all of its rigid Edwardian morality and silliness (people doing outrageous things for the sake of family honor), and the curious combination of romance and savagery that the Legion (and colonialism) represented.
Not Bad For A Human Lance Henriksen is one of the most prolific actors of the last 50 - 60 years. I doubt most people know his name, but few would fail to recognize his weather-worn face or deep, gravelly voice. In this incredibly enjoyable autobiography, he takes us through his remarkable and inspiring life, in which a tragic boyhood, a vagabond gypsy period, and a failed stint in the Navy ended up producing a first-rate actor whose gentleness, thoughtfulness and positivity inspire everyone around him. He's worked with everybody and done everything, from huge franchise flicks to TV series to "alimony movies" he'd rather forget. Yet Henriksen puts on no airs; he bears no grudges; his basic philosophy is that the world has enough shitheads in it as it is, there was no need for him to join their ranks. I met the man once, and he is no phony. He lives it. Great book. Great guy.
An Accidental Cowboy If you grew up in the 80s, you know Jameson Parker from either SIMON & SIMON or John Carpenter's rather cerebral horror movie PRINCE OF DARKNESS. In this mesmerizing little book, Parker examines how he, a well-educated, well-traveled, successful actor with rather happy go lucky nature, ended up improbably abandoning Hollywood to become a California ranch hand. Shot twice by a lunatic over a trifling dispute, Parker struggled with chronic depression, suicidal ideation and severe social anxiety, and found in cowboy life a therapy that saved his life. A beautiful examination of modern American Western life, dying traditions, the effects of PTSD, as well as a personal memoir, it is beautifully written and constructed almost like a suspense story or mystery novel. I was so moved by this book I e-mailed Parker to congratulate him, and he kindly responded with his thanks.
Foundation I finally got 'round to reading Isaac Asimov's original FOUNDATION trilogy, and I confess that I now get just how deeply he influenced almost every science-fiction writer who came after him, either directly or indirectly. While Asimov certainly has his limitations as a novelist, and his characters tend toward the paper cutout type, the story he tells is awesome in both scope, ambition and imagination. The story of the downfall of a vast galactic empire, its heroes are not swashbuckling rebels but fugitive scientists who believe they can predict the future and ultimately save it. Cerebral but fast-paced, combining intrigue and strategy with anthropology and sociology, it hits its strongest stride in the second volume, but is largely enjoyable and remarkably imaginative the whole way through.
Asylum - Carly Rheilan is a somewhat reclusive English novelist whose long career in social work produced this quietly masterful mystery-suspense story about African refugees living in prison-like conditions in London, and the people who try to help them...or exploit them. Not at all a story I thought I'd like or be interested in, it slowly weaves a tale about human trafficking, the after-effects of tragedy, the plight of refugees, the difficulty of cultural interchange, and the ways man-made systems (criminal and legitmate) can crush the human spirit, which is deeply moving and occasionally even funny. Its protagonists are flawed and relatable, and its villain, Christmas, is probably the most terrifying depiction of a pure sociopath I have ever encountered in a novel.
King of the Gypsies Bartley Gorman V was a bare knuckle boxer known in the traveling community as The King of the Gypsies, going more or less undefeated over 60 brutal, no-quarter, illegal matches over many years. This book is his riveting autobiography, the story of a proud, thoughtful man, an English gypsy who took up the gypsy bareknuckle tradition of his forebearers (Tyson Fury, current heavyweight champion, is a relation) and unapologetically embraced the violence, pain, jealousy, intrigue, money, glory and woe that followed his assumption of the crown. Fascinating, funny, and tragic, part biography, part bareknuckle boxing history, and part exploration o Traveler culture, it is the story of the ultimate outsider -- a gypsy -- who dove headfirst into the ultimate outside profession: barekuckle boxing.
My Wicked, Wicked Ways Errol Flynn was and is a synonym for degeneracy: the phrase "in like Flynn" is a specific reference to his prowess with the ladies. But buried beneath all the screwing, drinking, philandering, adultery, perversion and selfishness was a man with a surprisingly incisive mind, a surprisingly skillful pen, and an eyebrow popping backstory, who came to understand, and to regret, that he wasted his life and his talent making increasingly derivitive swashbuckler movies and cultivating a reputation he was addicted to, but despised. Flynn's autobiography is lengthy, and full of cons, hustles, seductions, crude pranks, alimony payments, and bad behavior, almost to the point of tedium and occasionally to the point of disgust; but it's also the story of a man humbled by life, who discovers looks, money, fame and women cannot fill the void in his life. Before his premature death, he had become a novelist, documentary film-maker, pilot and yachtsman, and was plainly trying to escape the self-built prison in which he lived.
Tales of the Jazz Age F. Scott Fitzgerald is rightfully referred to as the spirit of his era, and this collection of stories proves it. Running the range from the fantastic to the comic, the pathetic to the tragic, it showcases both his talents, his range of interests, and his proclivity for both portraying the silliness and the vulgarity of his time and his awareness that it was silly and vulgar. "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a work of genune imaginative genius and drips with sarcastic joy about the evils of greed and materialism, but the sadness of "The Lee of Happiness" is difficult to shake, and the ending of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is haunting.
Crosses in the Wind This is the only book I've ever read about how an army at war cares for its dead. Written by William Shomon, who commanded a Graves Registration company during WW2, it is a terse, well-written, diary-like account of his service in France and Germany in WW2, from D-Day to the end of the war and after. Fascinating, moving, and respectful, it describes in detail the enormous lengths the U.S. Army went to locate, identify, and bury its dead soldiers. He describes the rituals by which bodies were recovered, washed, examined, fingerprinted -- and if necessary, X-rayed -- before burial. He describes the way the cemetaries were built, right in the middle of the war. And he describes life in the field, which included being bombed by the German air force, shelled, and so on. This is a genuinely important book, and speaks volumes about the fundamental humanity that underlay a vicious war.
The Bridge on the River KwaiMost people have seen the pic movie. Not as many have read Pierre Boullet's novel from whence the movie was drawn. And they should, because it's one helluva book. Although set in WW2, it is really a novel about pride, duty, and ego, specifically as it manifests in a battle of wills beteen a sadistic but desperate Japanese POW commandant charged with building a bridge with slave labor, and a snobbish, pathologically inflexible British colonel who is theoretically his prisoner, but in other ways both his master, his nemesis, and his willing minion. Boullet is a fine writer, but he's also a smart one, smart enough to get out of his own way and let the reader draw the morals from this complex moral tale, in which a man is so blinded by honor he willingly commits treason.
The Poetry of William B. Smith Arguably the scariest-looking actor in the history of Hollywood, the dark-eyed, muscle-bound, coarse-voiced Smith looked like he killed and ate babies for breakfast and enjoyed every second of it, and that was usually the sort of characters he played. Monsters. Brutes. Baddies. My God, he was the only man manly enough to play Conan the Barbarian's father. In real life he was more interesting than any fictional character: hall of fame bodybuilder, expert martial artist, stuntman, linguist, UCLA professor, NSA intelligence operative...and poet. This rather prosaically titled book lays bare the soul of a man who was almost incredibly thoughtful, ingenious and complex: patriotic, antiracist, fascinated by life and its ironies, imaginative in the extreme, unnerved by the impositions age were making on his body, plagued by fears, all of it comes out in these poems. While he's not uber-talented technically, he makes up for this with passion and sincerity. It's less a book of poems than a tour through his mind, and what a tour it is. They don't make 'em like Smith anymore.
I could go on, but I think this is a good sampling of some of the most memorable books I've read in the past six or seven years. I deliberately left out most of the history books, because I read so many of them in comparison with everything else that they deserve their own blog; I also left out Joseph Heller's Now and Then, one of the three most boring books I've ever read, because while the memory of the boredom is real, writing even a brief review would cause me to pass out over the keyboard. All I can say about that bowl of sawdust is that it's a warning never to write a memoir if you admit you lack any sense of sentimentality about your past. Anyway, and in closing, I'd like to add that it is impossible for me to think about some of these books without remembering where and how I read them: Heston's diaries, for example, very definitely belong to my back yard in Burbank -- the gate by the orange tree. Flynn's autobiography, in contrast, was the first book I read when I first moved back to York, and I had to lie on a beanbag in my living room to read it because at the time I had no furniture. I opened this ramble by asking if people really retained what they read, and I close it by asking if they, too, remember books not merely in terms of the books themselves, but the slice of life they collect from us when we read them?
December 29, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART ONE OF THREE)
"Memory lane" is a phrase designed to evoke nostalgia. It presupposes a past which is enjoyable to revisit. This is not necessarily wrong, but it is rather limited in vision. We should picture this particular Memory Lane not as a pleasant, attractive-looking suburban street with sprinklers chuffing, power-mowers droning, and kids being pulled along in red wagons by their dads, but rather as a long walk through Middle Earth. You remember Middle Earth? It's got the Shire and hobbitons, but it's also got Mordor. In other words, if you walk far enough, you'd encounter both the loveliness of nature, quaint and charming villages, and well, a marshy, rocky wasteland inhabited by monsters, riddled with sinister-looking architecture, and whose dominant geographical feature is a volcano that belches poisonous smoke. In other words, there's a lot to reccommend here, and there's a lot which we'd be better off avoiding. But if you're going to explore, you've got to actually explore, and that means spending time with smelly, brutish orcs as well as cuddly, pipe-smoking Hobbits.
It's the same way with our television and movie memories. When I poke around in the past, I can't just stick to what worked. Sometimes I have to examine what did not. And sometimes, as in the case that follows, I have to do both. And when I talk about "V," it's necessary for me to clarify what the hell I'm actually talking about. In this case it is not one but three things:
"V" - the two part miniseries (1983)
"V: The Final Battle" - the three part miniseries which followed (1984)
"V: The Series" - the weekly television show which ran from 1984 - 1985
"V" is such a colossal subject to tackle, such a long journey to make, that I must break it up into three separate stages. During those legs of our trip, we will encounter a lot which is good, a lot which is depressingly relevant to today's political situation worldwide, and a great deal which is just trash. The whole of the expedition, however, is necessary, as you will soon discover.
Our fist steps take us to the original miniseries. I was around ten or eleven years old when "V" debuted, and as with a few other cultural phenomena of the time, you really had to be there to appreciate just how big an impact "V" had on television. The 1980s were both the peak and the beginning of the end of the golden age of big-budget TV movies: by the end of the decade, cable TV began to cut deeply into their ratings, and they began to disappear from the cultural map. In 1983, however, they still occupied dizzying heights, and "V" had all the halmarks: a big budget, a huge cast, lavish costumes, the best special effects possible, and a simple yet ambitious story.
"V" is the story of an alien but human-appearing race, dubbed The Visitors, who suddenly appear in the skies over Earth in dozens of enormous spacecraft. The Visitors proclaim friendship and promise to cure Earth of its ills with their superior technology, asking in exchange only some raw materials they require to restore their dying homeworld. A few humans are suspicious, but the Visitors seem sincere, deliver on some of their early promises, and quickly co-opt various journalists, politicians, police officials, and industrialists to their cause. At the same time, however, they begin to orchestrate, through their human puppets, a campaign against the scientific community on earth: some scientists simply disappear, others are forced out of their jobs, all of them are subject to harassment and intimidation. The Visitors also try to secure the loyalty of human youth by empowering the more weaker and more pliable sorts, who are rapidly corrupted by this power and become their willing tools. Soon they have become the de facto government of Earth, all the while proclaiming their friendship. An intrepid journlist eventually discovers the Visitors' human appearance is a sham: beneath realistic skin suits they are carniverous reptilian monsters, and have come to Earth to suck its natural resources dry, enslave some of the population, and, well, eat the rest. This journalist also discovers a few of the Visitors detest what their race is doing and work against the unseen "Leader" as a Fifth Column, an underground resistance movement. Eventually, a human resistance movement arises too, led by a refugee scientist and composed of people from all races and walks of life as well as a renegade Visitor, and begins the seemingly hopeless task of trying to overthrow the Visitors and their human collaborators and save the Earth.
"V" had a positively massive cast, too large for me to break down here. The principal heroes were Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), a two-fisted news cameraman who suspects the Visitors from the beginning, Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), a scientist who becomes the leader of a human resistance movement, and Willie (Robert Englund), a kindly Visitor who befriends the humans. The principal villains were John (Richard Herd), the Visitor's Supreme Commander, Diana (Jane Badler), a sadistic, scheming Visitor scientist meant to reflect Joseph Mengele and other Nazi war criminals; and Stephen (Andrew Prine), the suave, pitiless Visitor security chief. (There were however several characters meant to serve as archetypes which we will examine later.)
This was the original "V" in a nutshell. It comes off as more or less typical science fiction of the 1950s type, with its flying saucers and malevolent aliens, and it is also a rather impressive examination of the moral and psychological difficulties presented by joining a resistance movement, but there is an enormous distinction which helps elevate the series from mere entertainment into something which is -- sadly -- more relevant in 2024 than it was in 1983. "V" was an unsubtle but at the same time, surprisingly nuanced, allegory about fascism. Specifically, it explored how fascism subverts and destroys democracy, but it also examines, quite fearlessly, the appeal of fascism to the broad masses. Let us tackle this last point in order.
In "V," the Visitors arrive with an impressive display of power -- fifty gigantic motherships, each of which is the size of a major city and presumably holds a corresponding number of "people." Having dazzled Earth with their arrival, they proceed to make a series of promises which seem too good to be true, because they are; nevertheless, most people fall for them. And those who receive the Visitors warmly are in fact rewarded, while those who express suspicion or opposition either disappear without explanation, are "converted" through a form of mind-control torture, or are subject to every form of harassment, forcing them into an underground existence. An entire class of people who could see through the Vistors' facade, scientists, are essentially dehumanized through a propaganda campaign carried out by a co-opted media, and presented as traitors to their own planet: those who do not go into hiding are ultimately killed. The unveiled reference to the Jews of Germany during Hitler's reign is too grossly obvious to mention, but the parallel way it is explored -- more on this in a moment -- is very effective. "V" warns us that fascism is a bait and switch, a fatal game of three card Monte, in which a malevolant magician first hypnotizes us, then picks our pockets, and then, if necessary, beats us into complete submission or simply kills us to get his way. Because by the time many humans have woken up to the threat of the alien magicians, it is too late: the military has been disbanded, police agencies have been co-opted, many brainwashed young people have become willing informers for the aliens, and Visitor troops are everywhere. Those who toe the line live priviliged lives and retain some power, while everyone else is simply used as slave labor or herded onto shuttles for one-way trips to a mothership. A great deal of the Visitors' plan rests upon the idea that corrupted humans will do a certain amount of the dirty work themselves, and they are not wrong in this belief. Three characters in particular epitomize "the collaborators" -- Daniel Bernstein (David Packer), Christine Walsh (Neva Patterson) and Eleanor Dupres (Jenny Sullivan).
Daniel who hails from a Jewish family whose patriarch is a Holocaust survivor, is presented as weak, immature, irresponsible and socially awkward teenager who is seduced by the Visitors to serve as a "youth leader," and is rapidly corrupted almost to the point of insanity by the power he possesses; power he uses to bully and humiliate others. Daniel has brief flashes of conscience after essentially destroying his own family, but always leans toward evil in the end: every time his Visitor mentor sees him weakening, he simply offers him more power, and Daniel always accepts.
Christine is an ambitious reporter who eventually becomes the Visitors' spokesperson on Earth -- in essence, she trades her journalistic integrity for influence, shilling shamelessly for the Visitors even when her ex-boyfriend, a member of the resistance, tries to reveal to her their true nature. Christine sells out completely for a time; she differs from Daniel, however, in that it is more naivete than ambition that corrupt her, and perhaps because of this, in the end she sacrifices her life to help expose the Visitors for what they are.
Eleanor is Mike Donovan's icily ambitious mother, the wife of a wealthy industrialist who sees the Visitors as a means to expand her own fortune and personal power. Beguiled by Stephen, the Visitor overlord who is eventually responsible for some of the worst atrocities the Visitors commit against humanity, she never has a single qualm about climbing into bed with them, and is willing to sacrifice both her marriage and her son's life to further increase her position.
By giving us these characters, "V" allows us to see the appeal of fascism is universal, and different people can arrive at that dark destination by very different routes. The character of Daniel, ably portrayed by Packer as both disgusting and pitiful, is to me is a hallmark of series creator Kenneth Johnson's genius. Making the principal sell-out Jewish, and not merely Jewish but the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who sees all too clearly what is happening, lifts the story from a mere allegory of Nazism to a much larger examination of why fascism (whatever it calls itself) can appeal to anyone, of any ethnicity or race. Daniel is not inherently evil. He's just an unhappy, lazy, weak-minded teenager with well-meaning but ineffectual parents and an unrequited crush on his neighbor's daughter, who rightly feels unseen and powerless; in other words, he's a typical discontented, slightly spoiled suburban high school kid. The Visitors offer him power, the first he has ever known in his life, and he immediately becomes drunk with it, and though he becomes a true monster, he is never beyond our understanding.
"V" also gives us two Visitor characters, the afformentioned Willie, and Martin (Frank Ashmore) who embody the idea that conscience is and always has been the enemy of fascism. The hapless Willie is ultimately too kind-hearted to serve in the Visitor army, falls in love with a human girl, and joins the human resistance. The tougher, more capable Martin, a Visitor security officer, is actually a leader of an antifascist resistance movement within the Visitor race, and joins hands with his human counterparts in hopes of liberating his own people from the tyrannny of their unseen "Leader." At one point, Martin gives Donovan a brief lecture on how lucky humans are to live among such abundance as Earth provides: he is referring to natural resources, but the message is plain -- enjoy your freedom, kid, because it may be gone tomorrow. In a show which was often incredibly heavy-handed, and could have portrayed all the Visitors as cartoonish monsters, it was refreshing to see this sort of nuance.
It is true that "V" suffered from all the stigmata of most 80s television shows. The weight of the allegory can be crushing at times. There are logic problems and plot holes that were obvious to me even as a ten year old boy. The Visitors, considering their advanced technology, are startlingly incompetent whenever the script requires them to be. The co-hero, Mike Donovan, though portrayed engagingly by Marc Singer, is a Mary Sue of the first caliber, and becomes more of one as the "V" universe progresses (in contrast, Grant's Juliet Parrish undergoes much more realistic struggles of conscience and confidence as she unwillingly evolves into a guerilla leader). In the end however, none of this really matters, because the essence of "V" is timeless. It is a warning, not about the danger of first contact with aliens, but about what we, human beings, are capable of doing to each other. It is a lesson about the fragility of democracy and decency, the tragic necessity of remaining permanently on guard against those who arrive with brass bands and flags a-flyin', offering us easy solutions to complex problems if only we'll part with a little...just a little...of our decency and personal freedom. In today's age, when certain American politicians are more or less openly employing the tactics of the Visitors to the adoring applause of their followers, it is a lesson we could stand to learn once more.
It's the same way with our television and movie memories. When I poke around in the past, I can't just stick to what worked. Sometimes I have to examine what did not. And sometimes, as in the case that follows, I have to do both. And when I talk about "V," it's necessary for me to clarify what the hell I'm actually talking about. In this case it is not one but three things:
"V" - the two part miniseries (1983)
"V: The Final Battle" - the three part miniseries which followed (1984)
"V: The Series" - the weekly television show which ran from 1984 - 1985
"V" is such a colossal subject to tackle, such a long journey to make, that I must break it up into three separate stages. During those legs of our trip, we will encounter a lot which is good, a lot which is depressingly relevant to today's political situation worldwide, and a great deal which is just trash. The whole of the expedition, however, is necessary, as you will soon discover.
Our fist steps take us to the original miniseries. I was around ten or eleven years old when "V" debuted, and as with a few other cultural phenomena of the time, you really had to be there to appreciate just how big an impact "V" had on television. The 1980s were both the peak and the beginning of the end of the golden age of big-budget TV movies: by the end of the decade, cable TV began to cut deeply into their ratings, and they began to disappear from the cultural map. In 1983, however, they still occupied dizzying heights, and "V" had all the halmarks: a big budget, a huge cast, lavish costumes, the best special effects possible, and a simple yet ambitious story.
"V" is the story of an alien but human-appearing race, dubbed The Visitors, who suddenly appear in the skies over Earth in dozens of enormous spacecraft. The Visitors proclaim friendship and promise to cure Earth of its ills with their superior technology, asking in exchange only some raw materials they require to restore their dying homeworld. A few humans are suspicious, but the Visitors seem sincere, deliver on some of their early promises, and quickly co-opt various journalists, politicians, police officials, and industrialists to their cause. At the same time, however, they begin to orchestrate, through their human puppets, a campaign against the scientific community on earth: some scientists simply disappear, others are forced out of their jobs, all of them are subject to harassment and intimidation. The Visitors also try to secure the loyalty of human youth by empowering the more weaker and more pliable sorts, who are rapidly corrupted by this power and become their willing tools. Soon they have become the de facto government of Earth, all the while proclaiming their friendship. An intrepid journlist eventually discovers the Visitors' human appearance is a sham: beneath realistic skin suits they are carniverous reptilian monsters, and have come to Earth to suck its natural resources dry, enslave some of the population, and, well, eat the rest. This journalist also discovers a few of the Visitors detest what their race is doing and work against the unseen "Leader" as a Fifth Column, an underground resistance movement. Eventually, a human resistance movement arises too, led by a refugee scientist and composed of people from all races and walks of life as well as a renegade Visitor, and begins the seemingly hopeless task of trying to overthrow the Visitors and their human collaborators and save the Earth.
"V" had a positively massive cast, too large for me to break down here. The principal heroes were Mike Donovan (Marc Singer), a two-fisted news cameraman who suspects the Visitors from the beginning, Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant), a scientist who becomes the leader of a human resistance movement, and Willie (Robert Englund), a kindly Visitor who befriends the humans. The principal villains were John (Richard Herd), the Visitor's Supreme Commander, Diana (Jane Badler), a sadistic, scheming Visitor scientist meant to reflect Joseph Mengele and other Nazi war criminals; and Stephen (Andrew Prine), the suave, pitiless Visitor security chief. (There were however several characters meant to serve as archetypes which we will examine later.)
This was the original "V" in a nutshell. It comes off as more or less typical science fiction of the 1950s type, with its flying saucers and malevolent aliens, and it is also a rather impressive examination of the moral and psychological difficulties presented by joining a resistance movement, but there is an enormous distinction which helps elevate the series from mere entertainment into something which is -- sadly -- more relevant in 2024 than it was in 1983. "V" was an unsubtle but at the same time, surprisingly nuanced, allegory about fascism. Specifically, it explored how fascism subverts and destroys democracy, but it also examines, quite fearlessly, the appeal of fascism to the broad masses. Let us tackle this last point in order.
In "V," the Visitors arrive with an impressive display of power -- fifty gigantic motherships, each of which is the size of a major city and presumably holds a corresponding number of "people." Having dazzled Earth with their arrival, they proceed to make a series of promises which seem too good to be true, because they are; nevertheless, most people fall for them. And those who receive the Visitors warmly are in fact rewarded, while those who express suspicion or opposition either disappear without explanation, are "converted" through a form of mind-control torture, or are subject to every form of harassment, forcing them into an underground existence. An entire class of people who could see through the Vistors' facade, scientists, are essentially dehumanized through a propaganda campaign carried out by a co-opted media, and presented as traitors to their own planet: those who do not go into hiding are ultimately killed. The unveiled reference to the Jews of Germany during Hitler's reign is too grossly obvious to mention, but the parallel way it is explored -- more on this in a moment -- is very effective. "V" warns us that fascism is a bait and switch, a fatal game of three card Monte, in which a malevolant magician first hypnotizes us, then picks our pockets, and then, if necessary, beats us into complete submission or simply kills us to get his way. Because by the time many humans have woken up to the threat of the alien magicians, it is too late: the military has been disbanded, police agencies have been co-opted, many brainwashed young people have become willing informers for the aliens, and Visitor troops are everywhere. Those who toe the line live priviliged lives and retain some power, while everyone else is simply used as slave labor or herded onto shuttles for one-way trips to a mothership. A great deal of the Visitors' plan rests upon the idea that corrupted humans will do a certain amount of the dirty work themselves, and they are not wrong in this belief. Three characters in particular epitomize "the collaborators" -- Daniel Bernstein (David Packer), Christine Walsh (Neva Patterson) and Eleanor Dupres (Jenny Sullivan).
Daniel who hails from a Jewish family whose patriarch is a Holocaust survivor, is presented as weak, immature, irresponsible and socially awkward teenager who is seduced by the Visitors to serve as a "youth leader," and is rapidly corrupted almost to the point of insanity by the power he possesses; power he uses to bully and humiliate others. Daniel has brief flashes of conscience after essentially destroying his own family, but always leans toward evil in the end: every time his Visitor mentor sees him weakening, he simply offers him more power, and Daniel always accepts.
Christine is an ambitious reporter who eventually becomes the Visitors' spokesperson on Earth -- in essence, she trades her journalistic integrity for influence, shilling shamelessly for the Visitors even when her ex-boyfriend, a member of the resistance, tries to reveal to her their true nature. Christine sells out completely for a time; she differs from Daniel, however, in that it is more naivete than ambition that corrupt her, and perhaps because of this, in the end she sacrifices her life to help expose the Visitors for what they are.
Eleanor is Mike Donovan's icily ambitious mother, the wife of a wealthy industrialist who sees the Visitors as a means to expand her own fortune and personal power. Beguiled by Stephen, the Visitor overlord who is eventually responsible for some of the worst atrocities the Visitors commit against humanity, she never has a single qualm about climbing into bed with them, and is willing to sacrifice both her marriage and her son's life to further increase her position.
By giving us these characters, "V" allows us to see the appeal of fascism is universal, and different people can arrive at that dark destination by very different routes. The character of Daniel, ably portrayed by Packer as both disgusting and pitiful, is to me is a hallmark of series creator Kenneth Johnson's genius. Making the principal sell-out Jewish, and not merely Jewish but the grandson of a Holocaust survivor who sees all too clearly what is happening, lifts the story from a mere allegory of Nazism to a much larger examination of why fascism (whatever it calls itself) can appeal to anyone, of any ethnicity or race. Daniel is not inherently evil. He's just an unhappy, lazy, weak-minded teenager with well-meaning but ineffectual parents and an unrequited crush on his neighbor's daughter, who rightly feels unseen and powerless; in other words, he's a typical discontented, slightly spoiled suburban high school kid. The Visitors offer him power, the first he has ever known in his life, and he immediately becomes drunk with it, and though he becomes a true monster, he is never beyond our understanding.
"V" also gives us two Visitor characters, the afformentioned Willie, and Martin (Frank Ashmore) who embody the idea that conscience is and always has been the enemy of fascism. The hapless Willie is ultimately too kind-hearted to serve in the Visitor army, falls in love with a human girl, and joins the human resistance. The tougher, more capable Martin, a Visitor security officer, is actually a leader of an antifascist resistance movement within the Visitor race, and joins hands with his human counterparts in hopes of liberating his own people from the tyrannny of their unseen "Leader." At one point, Martin gives Donovan a brief lecture on how lucky humans are to live among such abundance as Earth provides: he is referring to natural resources, but the message is plain -- enjoy your freedom, kid, because it may be gone tomorrow. In a show which was often incredibly heavy-handed, and could have portrayed all the Visitors as cartoonish monsters, it was refreshing to see this sort of nuance.
It is true that "V" suffered from all the stigmata of most 80s television shows. The weight of the allegory can be crushing at times. There are logic problems and plot holes that were obvious to me even as a ten year old boy. The Visitors, considering their advanced technology, are startlingly incompetent whenever the script requires them to be. The co-hero, Mike Donovan, though portrayed engagingly by Marc Singer, is a Mary Sue of the first caliber, and becomes more of one as the "V" universe progresses (in contrast, Grant's Juliet Parrish undergoes much more realistic struggles of conscience and confidence as she unwillingly evolves into a guerilla leader). In the end however, none of this really matters, because the essence of "V" is timeless. It is a warning, not about the danger of first contact with aliens, but about what we, human beings, are capable of doing to each other. It is a lesson about the fragility of democracy and decency, the tragic necessity of remaining permanently on guard against those who arrive with brass bands and flags a-flyin', offering us easy solutions to complex problems if only we'll part with a little...just a little...of our decency and personal freedom. In today's age, when certain American politicians are more or less openly employing the tactics of the Visitors to the adoring applause of their followers, it is a lesson we could stand to learn once more.
December 27, 2023
SECOND THOUGHTS ON FYRE FESTIVAL
It is now six years since the disastrous Fyre Festival came and went, and except for some entertaining YouTube documentaries and a few press pieces on the release of its organizer from prison, it is largely forgotten -- one more viral sensation consigned to the dustbin of internet history. It seems to me, however, that the whole sordid saga of Fyre -- how it came to be, how it failed, and the aftermath -- has something important to tell us about the state of the modern world.
For those who have indeed forgotten, or never cared to begin with, the Fyre Festival was a musical festival held in 2017 on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas, to promote the Fyre app, which was created to book musical talent. Fyre was the brainchild of an unknown "entrepreneur" named Billy McFarlane and fading rapper Ja Rule. After a brilliant internet marketing campaign, which featured famous models running through the surf and yachts swirling through crystal blue waters, approximately five thousand people showed up to enjoy "an immersive music festival ... two transformative weekends ... on the boundaries of the impossible." For hefty price-tags, concertgoers were to enjoy a slew of the world's hottest entertainment acts and gourmet food while staying in villas or luxurious tents on the beach. It was to be a party for the ages, but more than that, an opportunity for those with the means to be there to flaunt their presence to the world. Fyre was, as we used to say in the 80s "the place to be" for wealthy hipsters and social media influencers.
Though few people knew it, McFarlane had no idea what he was doing, and though many people knew it, they apparently ignored the fact that Ja Rule has never known what he is doing. They were the two of them, however, very good at bluster. McFarlane was a college dropout with no real business experience who bluffed investors into forking over enough money to secure celebrity endorsements and craft a slick marketing campaign. Rule was a clueless rapper on the far margins of relevancy hoping to revitalize his brand. Together they were able to generate a great deal of interest and publicity for the two-week event, but it was all smoke and remained smoke until it finally dissipated. Not only did they have no actual plan to bring the concert about, they had neither the money nor the time to execute one even had it actually existed. A concert on the scale they envisioned would have employed an army of hundreds if not several thousand workers, food service people, security, drivers, medical staff, etc., etc., and required massive quantities of construction materials as well as supplies of fresh drinking water, food, sanitation facilities, reliable elecricity and so on. Those (belatedly) consulting said they'd need an additional year (on top of the one they'd already had) and another $46 million in funds to make it happen. None of this existed by the time the concert began, and as a result most of the acts signed to perform canceled at the last moment: none ever performed.
At this point I defer to Wikipedia for what actually happened:
Initial arrivals were taken to an "impromptu beach party" at a beachside restaurant, where they were plied with alcohol and kept waiting for around six hours while frantic preparations at the festival site continued. McFarland had hired hundreds of local Bahamian workers to help build the site. Meanwhile, organizers had to renegotiate the guarantees they offered to the people who would be playing at the festival as costs spiraled out of control. Later arrivals were taken directly to the grounds by school bus where the true state of the festival's site became apparent: their accommodations were little more than scattered disaster relief tents with dirt floors, some with mattresses that were soaking wet as a result of the morning rain. The gourmet food accommodations were nothing more than inadequate and poor quality food (including cheese sandwiches served in foam containers).
Festival-goers were dropped off at the production bungalow where McFarland and his team were based so they could be registered, but after hours of waiting in vain, people rushed to claim their own tents. Although there were only about 500 people, there were not enough tents and beds for the guests, so they wound up stealing from others. Attendees were unable to leave the festival for the nearby Sandals resorts as it was peak season, with almost every hotel on Great Exuma already fully booked for the annual Exuma Regatta. Around nightfall, a group of local musicians took to the stage and played for a few hours, the only act to perform at the event. In the early morning, it was announced that the festival would be postponed and that the attendees would be returned to Miami as soon as possible.
Reports from the festival mentioned various other problems, such as the mishandling or theft of guests' baggage, no lighting to help people find their way around, an unfinished gravel lot, a lack of medical personnel or event staff, no cell phone or internet service, insufficient portable toilets, no running water and heavy-handed security. These problems were exacerbated as the festival had been promoted as a cashless event, leaving many attendees without money for taxi fare or other expenses.
Many attendees were reportedly stranded, as flights to and from the island were cancelled after the Bahamian government issued an order that barred any planes from landing at the airport. The first flight back to Miami boarded at 1:30 a.m. on April 28, but was delayed for hours due to issues with the flight's manifest. It was cancelled after sunrise, and passengers were locked in the Exuma Airport terminal with no access to food, water[26] or air conditioning; a passenger recalled that at least one person passed out from the heat and had to be hospitalized.
The failure went viral, with many ticket-holders livestreaming their discomfiture for millions to see, and "Fyre Festival" became a synonym for disaster. Some critics humorously likened what happened to LORD OF THE FLIES or THE HUNGER GAMES. A slew of lawsuits were filed, and Billy McFarlane eventually went to prison for fraud.
A surface examination of this debacle is always good for a few laughs. There is nothing quite like the collapse of a gigantic scam, be it Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme Madoff LLC; and there is nothing so satisfying as watching rich, entitled, over-privileged hipster/jet-setter/influencer types eat a little of the shit the common folk are forced to digest every day. A deeper examination, however, tells us a great deal about the effects that social media and the internet have had on human psychology, and the further, harmful effects those raised on this psychology can inflict on others.
Obviously there will always be people like Billy McFarlane: glib, shallow, irresponsible corner-cutters who will do anything for money except work for it are as old as civilization. He is nothing new, and he may not even consciously have intended to commit fraud when he hatched this scheme. In fact, I think it more likely that he believed he could pull it off, and, liars being most skillful at lying to themselves, believed to the very end that he could shuck and jive his way through the disaster that actually unfolded before him. The key phrase in "con man" is "confidence," after all, a word which has more than one meaning. No, what is interesting here is the very nature of the Fyre Festival. Three salient points come to view if we stop chuckling long enough to look for them:
1. It was built entirely around image;
2. It appealed to vanity, narcissism and a certain type of greed.
3. It hurt people who actually matter.
I think you would agree that most events -- sporting, musical, comedic, what have you -- are attended for the purposes of entertainment, which is to say enjoyment. One goes because one wants to go and expects to take pleasure in the experience as a thing in itself. When I saw Micky Ward fight Arturo Gatti at the Mohegan Sun, when I watched John Cleese tell jokes at the Strand, when I showed up to listen to John Williams conduct his orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, I did these things because I was hoping for the satisfaction of a particular, personal desire. I would have gone had I been the only one in the audience and no cameras permitted. Like you and your own public private passions, I am driven by love, active interest, or at least curiosity, in the subject matter. When I saw Mazzy Star in Ventura some years ago, the band forbade the use of cameras at the show, and shone no lights except for candles on the stage: they wanted the audience to enjoy the music, not mere spectacle.
The Fyre Festival, however, represents an advancement on an idea which used to exist only a small scale and for a particular group of people: those who considered it of vital importance "to see and be seen," i.e. people in the entertainment industry or the bored rich, the society-charity folk who value their press clippings as much as their money. The internet has made the idea of experiencing something strictly for its own merits and for one's own pleasure to be eccentric, even contemptible. Now, people collect experiences not for their own sake but to boast about it on social media and thus project a "curated life," the Instagram-sham existence in which frauds like Dan Blizerian sit in rented Ferraris in front of rented mansions with bevvies of bikini models who are being paid for their time, in the hopes that dupes on the internet will believe what they are seeing is an actual lifestyle. And the boasting is not of the ordinary kind, i.e. to make oneself look good, but one consciously intended to make others feel actively jealous. It is not an appeal to entertainment or enjoyment, but to vanity and narcissism and arrogance and even cruelty: it is a projection of raw capitalist fantasy, the idea that not merely a luxurious and hedonistic lifestyle is the apotheosis of human existence, but that it is a measure of worth -- human worth.
The Fyre Festival did more than dupe cretins of this type out of a few thousand dollars and some unearned dignity. Its impact was felt the most severely on those could afford it the least. To save money and to try and salvage what he could from the disaster, McFarland hired a very large number of local workers to make last-minute preparations at the site of the festival. None of these people were ever paid for their work. Innocent Bahamanians were harmed and in a few cases even financially wiped out, when their generous donations of food (to hungry festival-goers) went unremunerated: and this was the least-reported aspect of the entire squalid episode. Those (like myself, admittedly, at the time) who were deriving enormous pleasure from seeing modern-day Marie Antoinettes told there was no cake, paid little attention to the real economic hardship and pain this brought ordinary working people. My dismissiveness of this pain was probably part psychological: the story becomes less funny the more you think about the actual effects, so a superficial view is safest. But this is not a full answer. The truth is that ordinary working people are, under the internet rubric, not as important as people with money: actually less than human, lumpen, faceless drones, "non player characters" who ultimately don't matter. The temporary discomfiture of a few hundred trust-fund jockeys and well-heeled party girls is of far more interest to most than the actual suffering and ruination of an equal number of working stiffs.
One could argue forcefully that this too is as old as civilization, and one would be right; the difference is that this mentality used to be reserved to a very small proportion of the population, something at the five percent mark or less, and that these people kept as much to themselves as possible. The internet has figuratively dissolved the iron gates and stone walls that separated the nobleman, the robber-baron or tycoon, from the rest of us: it seems to exist primarily, in some spaces anyway, for throwing material success through those barriers and into our faces. "I live on a yacht. I own eight Lambos. I go to Vegas and drop a mil at the tables and laugh all the way to my private jet." Again, the point is not merely to boast, but to taunt. To lack empathy and sympAthy is one thing, but to incline toward this shallow form of sadism is quite another, and the internet has not merely legitimized it, it has fetishized it, twisted it into a species of virtue.
This at any rate is what I think about when I remember the Fyre Festival. It was a frank appeal to vanity, exclusivity, snobbery and that peculiar form of greed, the greed for attention and envy. It failed and ended in disaster, but its lessons went largely and perhaps totally unlearned. It had no substance, it was never anything but smoke, as indeed all the emotions it appealed to were smoke, but as any decent firefighter will tell you, it's always the smoke that kills you.
For those who have indeed forgotten, or never cared to begin with, the Fyre Festival was a musical festival held in 2017 on the island of Great Exuma in the Bahamas, to promote the Fyre app, which was created to book musical talent. Fyre was the brainchild of an unknown "entrepreneur" named Billy McFarlane and fading rapper Ja Rule. After a brilliant internet marketing campaign, which featured famous models running through the surf and yachts swirling through crystal blue waters, approximately five thousand people showed up to enjoy "an immersive music festival ... two transformative weekends ... on the boundaries of the impossible." For hefty price-tags, concertgoers were to enjoy a slew of the world's hottest entertainment acts and gourmet food while staying in villas or luxurious tents on the beach. It was to be a party for the ages, but more than that, an opportunity for those with the means to be there to flaunt their presence to the world. Fyre was, as we used to say in the 80s "the place to be" for wealthy hipsters and social media influencers.
Though few people knew it, McFarlane had no idea what he was doing, and though many people knew it, they apparently ignored the fact that Ja Rule has never known what he is doing. They were the two of them, however, very good at bluster. McFarlane was a college dropout with no real business experience who bluffed investors into forking over enough money to secure celebrity endorsements and craft a slick marketing campaign. Rule was a clueless rapper on the far margins of relevancy hoping to revitalize his brand. Together they were able to generate a great deal of interest and publicity for the two-week event, but it was all smoke and remained smoke until it finally dissipated. Not only did they have no actual plan to bring the concert about, they had neither the money nor the time to execute one even had it actually existed. A concert on the scale they envisioned would have employed an army of hundreds if not several thousand workers, food service people, security, drivers, medical staff, etc., etc., and required massive quantities of construction materials as well as supplies of fresh drinking water, food, sanitation facilities, reliable elecricity and so on. Those (belatedly) consulting said they'd need an additional year (on top of the one they'd already had) and another $46 million in funds to make it happen. None of this existed by the time the concert began, and as a result most of the acts signed to perform canceled at the last moment: none ever performed.
At this point I defer to Wikipedia for what actually happened:
Initial arrivals were taken to an "impromptu beach party" at a beachside restaurant, where they were plied with alcohol and kept waiting for around six hours while frantic preparations at the festival site continued. McFarland had hired hundreds of local Bahamian workers to help build the site. Meanwhile, organizers had to renegotiate the guarantees they offered to the people who would be playing at the festival as costs spiraled out of control. Later arrivals were taken directly to the grounds by school bus where the true state of the festival's site became apparent: their accommodations were little more than scattered disaster relief tents with dirt floors, some with mattresses that were soaking wet as a result of the morning rain. The gourmet food accommodations were nothing more than inadequate and poor quality food (including cheese sandwiches served in foam containers).
Festival-goers were dropped off at the production bungalow where McFarland and his team were based so they could be registered, but after hours of waiting in vain, people rushed to claim their own tents. Although there were only about 500 people, there were not enough tents and beds for the guests, so they wound up stealing from others. Attendees were unable to leave the festival for the nearby Sandals resorts as it was peak season, with almost every hotel on Great Exuma already fully booked for the annual Exuma Regatta. Around nightfall, a group of local musicians took to the stage and played for a few hours, the only act to perform at the event. In the early morning, it was announced that the festival would be postponed and that the attendees would be returned to Miami as soon as possible.
Reports from the festival mentioned various other problems, such as the mishandling or theft of guests' baggage, no lighting to help people find their way around, an unfinished gravel lot, a lack of medical personnel or event staff, no cell phone or internet service, insufficient portable toilets, no running water and heavy-handed security. These problems were exacerbated as the festival had been promoted as a cashless event, leaving many attendees without money for taxi fare or other expenses.
Many attendees were reportedly stranded, as flights to and from the island were cancelled after the Bahamian government issued an order that barred any planes from landing at the airport. The first flight back to Miami boarded at 1:30 a.m. on April 28, but was delayed for hours due to issues with the flight's manifest. It was cancelled after sunrise, and passengers were locked in the Exuma Airport terminal with no access to food, water[26] or air conditioning; a passenger recalled that at least one person passed out from the heat and had to be hospitalized.
The failure went viral, with many ticket-holders livestreaming their discomfiture for millions to see, and "Fyre Festival" became a synonym for disaster. Some critics humorously likened what happened to LORD OF THE FLIES or THE HUNGER GAMES. A slew of lawsuits were filed, and Billy McFarlane eventually went to prison for fraud.
A surface examination of this debacle is always good for a few laughs. There is nothing quite like the collapse of a gigantic scam, be it Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme Madoff LLC; and there is nothing so satisfying as watching rich, entitled, over-privileged hipster/jet-setter/influencer types eat a little of the shit the common folk are forced to digest every day. A deeper examination, however, tells us a great deal about the effects that social media and the internet have had on human psychology, and the further, harmful effects those raised on this psychology can inflict on others.
Obviously there will always be people like Billy McFarlane: glib, shallow, irresponsible corner-cutters who will do anything for money except work for it are as old as civilization. He is nothing new, and he may not even consciously have intended to commit fraud when he hatched this scheme. In fact, I think it more likely that he believed he could pull it off, and, liars being most skillful at lying to themselves, believed to the very end that he could shuck and jive his way through the disaster that actually unfolded before him. The key phrase in "con man" is "confidence," after all, a word which has more than one meaning. No, what is interesting here is the very nature of the Fyre Festival. Three salient points come to view if we stop chuckling long enough to look for them:
1. It was built entirely around image;
2. It appealed to vanity, narcissism and a certain type of greed.
3. It hurt people who actually matter.
I think you would agree that most events -- sporting, musical, comedic, what have you -- are attended for the purposes of entertainment, which is to say enjoyment. One goes because one wants to go and expects to take pleasure in the experience as a thing in itself. When I saw Micky Ward fight Arturo Gatti at the Mohegan Sun, when I watched John Cleese tell jokes at the Strand, when I showed up to listen to John Williams conduct his orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, I did these things because I was hoping for the satisfaction of a particular, personal desire. I would have gone had I been the only one in the audience and no cameras permitted. Like you and your own public private passions, I am driven by love, active interest, or at least curiosity, in the subject matter. When I saw Mazzy Star in Ventura some years ago, the band forbade the use of cameras at the show, and shone no lights except for candles on the stage: they wanted the audience to enjoy the music, not mere spectacle.
The Fyre Festival, however, represents an advancement on an idea which used to exist only a small scale and for a particular group of people: those who considered it of vital importance "to see and be seen," i.e. people in the entertainment industry or the bored rich, the society-charity folk who value their press clippings as much as their money. The internet has made the idea of experiencing something strictly for its own merits and for one's own pleasure to be eccentric, even contemptible. Now, people collect experiences not for their own sake but to boast about it on social media and thus project a "curated life," the Instagram-sham existence in which frauds like Dan Blizerian sit in rented Ferraris in front of rented mansions with bevvies of bikini models who are being paid for their time, in the hopes that dupes on the internet will believe what they are seeing is an actual lifestyle. And the boasting is not of the ordinary kind, i.e. to make oneself look good, but one consciously intended to make others feel actively jealous. It is not an appeal to entertainment or enjoyment, but to vanity and narcissism and arrogance and even cruelty: it is a projection of raw capitalist fantasy, the idea that not merely a luxurious and hedonistic lifestyle is the apotheosis of human existence, but that it is a measure of worth -- human worth.
The Fyre Festival did more than dupe cretins of this type out of a few thousand dollars and some unearned dignity. Its impact was felt the most severely on those could afford it the least. To save money and to try and salvage what he could from the disaster, McFarland hired a very large number of local workers to make last-minute preparations at the site of the festival. None of these people were ever paid for their work. Innocent Bahamanians were harmed and in a few cases even financially wiped out, when their generous donations of food (to hungry festival-goers) went unremunerated: and this was the least-reported aspect of the entire squalid episode. Those (like myself, admittedly, at the time) who were deriving enormous pleasure from seeing modern-day Marie Antoinettes told there was no cake, paid little attention to the real economic hardship and pain this brought ordinary working people. My dismissiveness of this pain was probably part psychological: the story becomes less funny the more you think about the actual effects, so a superficial view is safest. But this is not a full answer. The truth is that ordinary working people are, under the internet rubric, not as important as people with money: actually less than human, lumpen, faceless drones, "non player characters" who ultimately don't matter. The temporary discomfiture of a few hundred trust-fund jockeys and well-heeled party girls is of far more interest to most than the actual suffering and ruination of an equal number of working stiffs.
One could argue forcefully that this too is as old as civilization, and one would be right; the difference is that this mentality used to be reserved to a very small proportion of the population, something at the five percent mark or less, and that these people kept as much to themselves as possible. The internet has figuratively dissolved the iron gates and stone walls that separated the nobleman, the robber-baron or tycoon, from the rest of us: it seems to exist primarily, in some spaces anyway, for throwing material success through those barriers and into our faces. "I live on a yacht. I own eight Lambos. I go to Vegas and drop a mil at the tables and laugh all the way to my private jet." Again, the point is not merely to boast, but to taunt. To lack empathy and sympAthy is one thing, but to incline toward this shallow form of sadism is quite another, and the internet has not merely legitimized it, it has fetishized it, twisted it into a species of virtue.
This at any rate is what I think about when I remember the Fyre Festival. It was a frank appeal to vanity, exclusivity, snobbery and that peculiar form of greed, the greed for attention and envy. It failed and ended in disaster, but its lessons went largely and perhaps totally unlearned. It had no substance, it was never anything but smoke, as indeed all the emotions it appealed to were smoke, but as any decent firefighter will tell you, it's always the smoke that kills you.
December 22, 2023
AS I PLEASE XXI: CHRISTMAS EDITION
Christmas, as Hans Gruber once remarked during a heist at Nakatomi Plaza, is the time for miracles. It's also a time for taking stock of the gifts life has given you, and that you have given yourself. So here we go:
* This year I managed to make travel once more part of my life. Aside from a few familiar places, I went to Dallas, Montreal, Quebec City and Miami, and in each place had experiences I will remember for the rest of my life, albeit in very different contexts. As much as I hate the act of traveling, I do very much enjoy being where I'm at, and in 2024 I plan on exploring as much unfamiliar territory as time and budget allow.
* I have now lost somewhere between fifteen and sixteen pounds since June. There is still a lot of work to do in this department -- I'd like to lose another 5 - 10 lbs, and then begin packing the muscle back on -- but everyone has to start somewhere and even a massive journey can be undertaken if one breaks it down into manageable stages.
* I'm something of a whore for literary awards, finding them compensation of a sort for all the frustrations and indignities a writer must endure, one of which is poverty, but this year was a rough one in that regard until SINNER'S CROSS took the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal in Historical Fiction. I had a good time in Miami and hope to return there next year for a new medal for a different book -- once a whore, always a whore.
* In Miami I met Burke Allen, who invited me to appear on the "Burke Allen's Big Time Talker Podcast," which streams on every platform imaginable. I recorded the show with him a few weeks ago and found him a superb host: the pace was fast, his questions were extremely incisive, and forced me to dig deep in what I laughably refer to as my mind for answers. The podcast should be live in a week or two.
* In Miami, aside from being able to attend the Festival of Books, I was also able to reconnect with an old teacher of mine, Scott Johnson, whose novel THROUGH THE WITCHES' STONE, took Bronze in the fantasy category. Scott's a great guy who regaled me with tales of visiting Hemingways' home in Key West, which is now upon my list of places I need to see.
* Because time waits for no man and I'm already a half-century old, I have set up an ambitious schedule of self-promotion in the coming year. You may have the chance to see my face -- or avoid it -- on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram before long, doing interviews, telling stories, and reviewing books, movies and television shows. I also plan on releasing audiobook versions of my novels, novellas and short stories. I have a few narrators in mind aside from yours truly, who (ahem) considers himself a rather talented vocal artist. The point is simply that you've got to get busy living before you get busy dying.
* On the writing front, I finished -- after 6 1/2 years -- SOMETHING EVIL, my epic horror novel. The draft is a fucking mess, and I foresee at least a year's worth of revisions and redrafts before it's even close to being ready for a formal, professional edit, much less any type of publication; but the relief I experienced when I typed "the end" (I had to do it, just to make sure the wretched thing was really dead!) was monumental.
* EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (my fifth novel) is now available for pre-order on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle download. I slated it to drop on New Year's Eve, in large part because I realized I have released nothing new in 2023, and that doesn't sit well with me. EXILES was a big accomplishment for me in many ways: I tried a new genre, wrote the book quickly, and enjoyed the process enormously. CHRONICLES is something new for me: the stories are set in an alternate reality and follow, at various distances and through various eyes, the rise, fall, and possible resurrection of Magnus Antonius Magnus, a man whose unrestrained ambition wrecks the world several times over. A study of the effects of power on men, technology on people, and ambition on history, while taking equal interest in the accidents and absurdities that take equal part in unfolding events, it evokes vaguely DUNE-like vibes in its presupposition that fiction can be used to explore not only human nature but the systems human beings create to govern themselves and their world. That at any rate was the working ideal.
* I also began, and am in the process of finishing, the third CAGE LIFE novel, DARK TRADE, which whose first draft will be complete before New Year's Eve. This is the first time I've returned to the world of "crime noir" since 2016, and reuniting with my troubled protagonist, Mickey, and the various femme fatales, thugs and cops who populate his world was a bit like going on a date with a beautiful but dangerous woman: exciting, but highly unpredictable. CAGE LIFE was my first completed novel, my first published work, the first fiction I ever wrote that won an award -- the list of "firsts" is endless, and so I have quite a soft spot for the series. At the same time, I find writing it a thoroughly professional experience, because I am not attempting to be profound or "literary," merely entertaining, albeit in a somewhat more thoughtful way than most fiction of this type aspires to be.
* This year I also read twelve books, watched 44 movies I'd never seen before, and lost myself in a few newish, and a lot of classic, television shows. I was particularly delighted to view the first few seasons of the classic LAW & ORDER, which was truly excellent and groundbreaking television before it eventually hardened into sensationalistic formula. Even more pleasurable, in a guiltier way, was KOJAK, which features some of the very best pulp dialog ever written, silkily performed by Telly Savalas. Only a three-testicle apex male like Savalas could get away with shit like this: (takes fellow cop's coffee): "I owe you a dime, sweetheart." (takes sip, grimaces, gives coffee back) "On second thought, we're even."
There is, of course, more to tell. There were silly goals I set just for the sake of knocking them off -- doing 3,500 push ups in a month, for example -- and a few extreme long shots I took trying to get my name in front of people that matter in the entertainment world, which may or may not pay off. I found more job satisfaction in what I do professionally -- advocate for victims of crime -- this year than I ever have before, albeit at some cost to my mental and spiritual health: Everyone has a threshold of how much tragedy and vicarious trauma they can stand, and the time will come when I realize I have reached mine; but that time is not yet, and years of apathy and selfishness, debauchery and entitlement have got to be paid for with years of hard, sefless work. One thing I've come to understand (belatedly, the way I come to understand everything) is that as William Shatner says, you must say "yes" to life. You must realize that you can do enormous number of things and be successful at many or even most of them. You must break out of the restrictive identities others place on you and that you place upon yourself, and realize that anything that can be done by one person can be done by another -- only vicious egotism keeps us from believing otherwise. So I will wind this ramble up by saying what another Watson is now famous for saying: the best Christmas gift you can give, the miracle you can make, is to be the best version of yourself and give that person to the world.
Merry Christmas.
* This year I managed to make travel once more part of my life. Aside from a few familiar places, I went to Dallas, Montreal, Quebec City and Miami, and in each place had experiences I will remember for the rest of my life, albeit in very different contexts. As much as I hate the act of traveling, I do very much enjoy being where I'm at, and in 2024 I plan on exploring as much unfamiliar territory as time and budget allow.
* I have now lost somewhere between fifteen and sixteen pounds since June. There is still a lot of work to do in this department -- I'd like to lose another 5 - 10 lbs, and then begin packing the muscle back on -- but everyone has to start somewhere and even a massive journey can be undertaken if one breaks it down into manageable stages.
* I'm something of a whore for literary awards, finding them compensation of a sort for all the frustrations and indignities a writer must endure, one of which is poverty, but this year was a rough one in that regard until SINNER'S CROSS took the Readers' Favorite Gold Medal in Historical Fiction. I had a good time in Miami and hope to return there next year for a new medal for a different book -- once a whore, always a whore.
* In Miami I met Burke Allen, who invited me to appear on the "Burke Allen's Big Time Talker Podcast," which streams on every platform imaginable. I recorded the show with him a few weeks ago and found him a superb host: the pace was fast, his questions were extremely incisive, and forced me to dig deep in what I laughably refer to as my mind for answers. The podcast should be live in a week or two.
* In Miami, aside from being able to attend the Festival of Books, I was also able to reconnect with an old teacher of mine, Scott Johnson, whose novel THROUGH THE WITCHES' STONE, took Bronze in the fantasy category. Scott's a great guy who regaled me with tales of visiting Hemingways' home in Key West, which is now upon my list of places I need to see.
* Because time waits for no man and I'm already a half-century old, I have set up an ambitious schedule of self-promotion in the coming year. You may have the chance to see my face -- or avoid it -- on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram before long, doing interviews, telling stories, and reviewing books, movies and television shows. I also plan on releasing audiobook versions of my novels, novellas and short stories. I have a few narrators in mind aside from yours truly, who (ahem) considers himself a rather talented vocal artist. The point is simply that you've got to get busy living before you get busy dying.
* On the writing front, I finished -- after 6 1/2 years -- SOMETHING EVIL, my epic horror novel. The draft is a fucking mess, and I foresee at least a year's worth of revisions and redrafts before it's even close to being ready for a formal, professional edit, much less any type of publication; but the relief I experienced when I typed "the end" (I had to do it, just to make sure the wretched thing was really dead!) was monumental.
* EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (my fifth novel) is now available for pre-order on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle download. I slated it to drop on New Year's Eve, in large part because I realized I have released nothing new in 2023, and that doesn't sit well with me. EXILES was a big accomplishment for me in many ways: I tried a new genre, wrote the book quickly, and enjoyed the process enormously. CHRONICLES is something new for me: the stories are set in an alternate reality and follow, at various distances and through various eyes, the rise, fall, and possible resurrection of Magnus Antonius Magnus, a man whose unrestrained ambition wrecks the world several times over. A study of the effects of power on men, technology on people, and ambition on history, while taking equal interest in the accidents and absurdities that take equal part in unfolding events, it evokes vaguely DUNE-like vibes in its presupposition that fiction can be used to explore not only human nature but the systems human beings create to govern themselves and their world. That at any rate was the working ideal.
* I also began, and am in the process of finishing, the third CAGE LIFE novel, DARK TRADE, which whose first draft will be complete before New Year's Eve. This is the first time I've returned to the world of "crime noir" since 2016, and reuniting with my troubled protagonist, Mickey, and the various femme fatales, thugs and cops who populate his world was a bit like going on a date with a beautiful but dangerous woman: exciting, but highly unpredictable. CAGE LIFE was my first completed novel, my first published work, the first fiction I ever wrote that won an award -- the list of "firsts" is endless, and so I have quite a soft spot for the series. At the same time, I find writing it a thoroughly professional experience, because I am not attempting to be profound or "literary," merely entertaining, albeit in a somewhat more thoughtful way than most fiction of this type aspires to be.
* This year I also read twelve books, watched 44 movies I'd never seen before, and lost myself in a few newish, and a lot of classic, television shows. I was particularly delighted to view the first few seasons of the classic LAW & ORDER, which was truly excellent and groundbreaking television before it eventually hardened into sensationalistic formula. Even more pleasurable, in a guiltier way, was KOJAK, which features some of the very best pulp dialog ever written, silkily performed by Telly Savalas. Only a three-testicle apex male like Savalas could get away with shit like this: (takes fellow cop's coffee): "I owe you a dime, sweetheart." (takes sip, grimaces, gives coffee back) "On second thought, we're even."
There is, of course, more to tell. There were silly goals I set just for the sake of knocking them off -- doing 3,500 push ups in a month, for example -- and a few extreme long shots I took trying to get my name in front of people that matter in the entertainment world, which may or may not pay off. I found more job satisfaction in what I do professionally -- advocate for victims of crime -- this year than I ever have before, albeit at some cost to my mental and spiritual health: Everyone has a threshold of how much tragedy and vicarious trauma they can stand, and the time will come when I realize I have reached mine; but that time is not yet, and years of apathy and selfishness, debauchery and entitlement have got to be paid for with years of hard, sefless work. One thing I've come to understand (belatedly, the way I come to understand everything) is that as William Shatner says, you must say "yes" to life. You must realize that you can do enormous number of things and be successful at many or even most of them. You must break out of the restrictive identities others place on you and that you place upon yourself, and realize that anything that can be done by one person can be done by another -- only vicious egotism keeps us from believing otherwise. So I will wind this ramble up by saying what another Watson is now famous for saying: the best Christmas gift you can give, the miracle you can make, is to be the best version of yourself and give that person to the world.
Merry Christmas.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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