Category: Culture

It seems worthy of note that Rick Veitch did a fill-in issue of JLA this month. It’s a one issue story, so you could even pick it up and read it if you don’t read JLA. Although it’d be kind of pointless if you’re not a comics fan, but we can’t have everything. Veitch is one of those guys who slips back and forth between alternative comics and mainstream superheros; I guess you’d say he’s an alternative comics writer and artist who happens to like the superhero genre a lot. Kind of a psychedelic orientation. I really liked his JLA.

The following has some spoilers.

The weekend’s movies were Far From Heaven and Catch Me If You Can. Definitely a retro weekend, not even counting the incredibly hip Soma FM Secret Agent streaming radio station I’ve had tuned in since Thursday. I feel like a martini, and you’re just the sort of woman to drink me…

Ah, sorry. The mood took me for a moment. More a Catch Me If You Can mood, I think; that’s the lighter of the two films. It has that jazzy sixties bliss to it, up to and including invoking James Bond with a short Goldfinger clip. That makes the contrast between the two all the more interesting, though, since they’re both about transgressions against the natural order.

Frank Abagnale Jr. breaks free of social restrictions and demonstrates exactly how much we rely on social convention to fend off the intruder. In Far From Heaven, the Whitakers both transgress, with varying degrees of success. But in Catch Me If You Can, the final dynamic is very different. We’re encouraged to cheer for the young con man — and in the end we’re reassured that it was OK to cheer, because he got caught and his pursuer was his very best friend. His real father (played by Christopher Walken, in a really brilliant turn) taught him that it was OK to lie, and wound up a sad sorry corpse. His surrogate father, the FBI agent, brought him back to the straight and narrow and in the end everyone’s happy.

Far From Heaven doesn’t offer the easy out. Cathy Whitaker’s life is ruined by the combination of her transgression and that of her husband, Frank. Oddly, Frank’s life doesn’t seem to be so bad, which got me thinking about the exact relationship between her love for a black gardener and his love for another man.

Homosexuality is so far outside the comprehension of the time that the couple can barely even talk about what’s going on. Their first scene together after she catches him kissing a man is particularly well filmed; it’s an atonal song of confusion and barely spoken thoughts and stammers. Lovely stuff. As a result, Frank’s infidelities are ignored by the world around him. Cathy’s potential infidelities are not.

Did Cathy step outside her life only because she had no other reaction to Frank’s actions? I think so, to a degree. Raymond (her gardener) is a symbol, and she’s willing to reject him when it’s the necessary thing to do. She doesn’t go back to him until Frank rejects her, at which point she needs another anchor in her life. Then again, when faced with the fact that going with Raymond will only hurt his daughter, she steps back. The safest analysis is that she really does love him, and that Far From Heaven follows the line of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas all the way through, but I wonder.

Anyhow, meanderings through theory aside, I recommend both of ‘em. Far From Heaven is by far the better movie, but Catch Me If You Can is a fun little romp if you don’t get hung up on obsessing about the end. It’s hardly Spielberg’s fault that the real Frank Abagnale turned to the side of the law, after all. They’re both excellent evocations of times past, lovingly and skillfully filmed. Good weekend for movies.

Mister Sterling isn’t bad. I was kind of expecting something more draggy, and it is a touch preachy at times, but as TV dramas go it’s not bad. I like the cast, I like the characters, and I was OK with the setup. I can say that last mostly because of the nice little twist in the middle of the first episode, which I personally took as a metatextual zing at everyone who thought the show would be The West Wing II.

The back and forth between Senator Sterling and his new chief of staff regarding his beliefs lived up to the promise of the twist. Keep up the ambiguity and it’ll be a decent drama; lose track of the differences between the new Senator and the party with which he votes and it’ll wind up sucking. I’ll be interested to see how long the writers are willing to portray someone in the Senator’s unusual political position as laudable.

Cory Doctorow has another story, “Liberation spectrum,” up on Salon. It’s most definitely Transhumanist: deeply rooted in today’s technological culture, set in a fairly near future, and so on. It doesn’t have the body modification elements I’d been thinking were a key component of the subgenre, although I think there’s one or two offhand references to the concept.

I like this story more than “Jury Service” or “0wnz0red,” possibly because the conflict between the techie founder and the need for business oversight is something that crops up all the time in my day to day work. The characterization rocks too. Lee-Daniel’s got personality, and he’s real, not just a carrier for the thoughts on technology. Same goes for the other characters. I’m really impressed with how much Doctorow was able to say about Mac in so little room.

After failing to get to the theater in time to see Catch Me If You Can, my brother and I settled on Narc. It was really good; Joe Carnahan, the director, wanted to make a 70s cop movie and he succeeded.

The plot’s complex enough to be interesting and not entirely obvious, but not so unwieldy that it gets in the way of either the psychological tension or the action. I was a little worried that it would veer into a moralistic frenzy, always a danger in a movie that has so much to do with drugs, but nope. The acting’s excellent. Ray Liotta put on thirty pounds to play his role and it worked perfectly.

The directing — I said before that it was a 70s cop movie, but actually it’s not. It’s more as if Hollywood had been refining and developing the 70s cop movie ever since. Carnahan has a big bag of cinematographic tricks, and uses them with skill. There’s one exceedingly eloquent split screen moment that I won’t spoil, but it took my breath away. Confident and daring work.

Recommendation: see it before it vanishes from theaters.

I’ve watched this trailer around five times now. Last night, this morning. Watching it again right now. And I believe. Yes, I do. I have no qualms about saying this:

In 2003, Uma Thurman will Kill Bill.

I cannot believe that they’re giving Alfonso Cuaron the reins to the Harry Potter movie franchise. I honest to god officially can’t believe it. Not that I think it’s a bad thing, but I have to wonder: how many of his movies has J. K. Rowling seen?

The thing is, I watched Great Expectations over the weekend, and it just blew me away. Cuaron had the chutzpah to turn Dickens into a sensual, almost erotic reverie. It’s a movie about passion, and passion lost, and passion recovered. It’s a movie about how much people mean to one another: Finn to Estella, Estella to her mad aunt Ms. Dinsmoor, Finn to his brother-in-law Joe, and so on.

It’s thematically a match for Y tu mama tambien, which generated buzz based on the forthright sexuality of the story and earned that buzz based on its quality. However, that movie, too, was about human relations. It’s just that Cuaron knows full well that sex is often an important component of such matters.

What surprised me in Great Expectations, though, is that Cuaron is willing to acknowledge the tension that can exist between the young. There’s a scene where Finn and Estella kiss at a fountain, at a very young age. It’s daring in today’s society. It’s not in any way repellent or voyeuristic; it’s just the first note in the emotions that grow between them.

So… I guess I should go rent A Little Princess and see how he handles kids there. I love his movies. It’s just not clear to me that he’s going to be a good match for Harry Potter — or, I should say, the third Harry Potter movie. I have no doubts that Rowling is going to tackle romance in the later novels, but man, it’s not exactly a strong component of Prisoner of Azkaban. What’s a lush, romantic director like Cuaron to make of Hogwarts?

Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow collaborated on a short story entitled “Jury Service,” which has been serialized on SciFi.com. The whole story is up now. Fun reading for geeks. Not entirely deep, though; I’d kind of have to classify it as what eluki bes shahar calls phatic text.

I.e., it’s very comforting fiction. To a certain class of extropian geek, reading this is like drinking a glass of warm milk. The story is in service of the extrapolation: Huw is secondary to the cool transhuman technology. I am, alas, not compelled by Huw — I’m compelled by what happened to him.

This is not a bad thing per se. Science fiction (as does most genre literature) has always had an element of the phatic to it; it’s part of the outsider culture that revels in the knowledge of difference. There’s a body of knowledge to science fiction reading, in that fans can be expected to know what a hyperdrive does (or what cyberspace is) without a lot of explanation. Elements of that shared body of knowledge serve as phatic signifiers, letting the reader know that he or she is in a familiar place.

Some books also progress beyond that, adding new elements to the vocabulary. Larry Niven invented the flash crowd. Daniel Keyes gave us the concept of enhanced intelligence. H. G. Wells gave us the Moon. There’s an importance balance; the comfort of existing elements provides a base on which to build the new. Phatic text is a necessity, in fact.

The interesting thing about “Jury Service” is that it’s extropian phatic text. It’s not at all clear to me that the extropian concepts inherent in the story are really part of the common memes of science fiction just yet; I think Doctorow and Stross are changing that with this and other similar stories. See also, of course, the father of extropian SF Neal Stephenson. I suppose, come to think of it, that Vernor Vinge is the grandfather. Bruce Sterling is the dirty old uncle, and any metaphor which resorts to a dirty old uncle should probably be put out of its misery around now.

Is this just cyberpunk? No. It differs from cyberpunk in that cyberpunk was not a product of technologically savvy authors. The stuff I’m talking about is informed by the cyber, and has not a whole lot of punk in it. The story of how Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter is legend, and it says a lot about the differences between the cyberpunk ethos and the extropian ethos.

Sterling reinvented himself as a tech-savvy writer pretty early on, mind you, but I’d argue that this really was a reinvention. Note that the top ten nonfiction book list in Cheap Truth #4 is more interested in social sciences than in geek cred.

So, yeah; phatic text, but perhaps not phatic in the usual ways. I’ll have to think more on this.

Edit: Cheap Truth,. not Cheap Trick.

This weekend, on the Brunch Report:

I had a lovely breakfast today; fried eggs with bacon and some nice monterey jack melted on top, between two toasted English muffins. Instead of the traditional cholesterol-laden mayonnaise, there was some tasty artichoke salsa to glue it all together — spicy, but not too spicy, with a hint of roasted garlic.

Where’d I get it? I made it myself. I am bachelor king! My coffee is good, too.