How best to celebrate American civilization for Thanksgiving? I suppose one could reflect on both the glorious and tragic historical events that went into the creation of Americans as a people over the years. We could also examine the deep cultural roots from around the world that have threaded into the American tableau to create our society, and discuss the influences, both positive and negative, that we have had on the world and vice-versa. Then we could think about where we as a nation wish to go in the future, and how we can address the problems of mankind going forward...
Nah. Let's talk about pop culture. Specifically, those geek cults to which I personally belong - familiarity with which is how I and my fellow members will invariably judge your merit as a non-philistine.
These aren't just things I like, but things that have made a deep impression, whose material is ripe for reference, and whose reward is unbounded. That doesn't mean I'm necessarily involved in them all the time (though in some cases I am) - I have a pretty good memory, so I don't have to return to something to continually enjoy it - rather, these are things that proved fertile for the imagination, and routinely come to mind bringing (or invoked by) interesting insights. It's not a countdown, either, so I'm not saying one is cooler or more important than another - it's just a list:
- The Simpsons
No, I do not subscribe to the clichéd knee-jerk attitude that the series has jumped the shark. I have seen brilliant, hilarious episodes in every season. In fact, there is a top-notch episode from the current season on Hulu right now.
Granted, people have different standards for judging Simpsons episodes. Some folks prefer serious family storylines (Umm...it's a comedy, and a cartoon!) such as those from the earliest seasons, where there might be dramatic moments. People who feel that way are, I am sorry to say, insane. The part where Homer is going to die from eating a poisonous fish; or needs heart surgery and is terrified; or is about to commit suicide...suck. They were just thrown in there to please some English-major writer's sensibilities, not to actually provide entertainment.
I, on the other hand, subscribe to the Seinfeld modus of humor - non sequitur, absurdism, and moral egregiousness punctuated by unexpectedly pointed, oblique observations. Marge: "Homer, that's illegal!" Homer: "That's for the courts to decide." ; Sherry Bobbins' song: "If yoooooou....do a half-assed job, there'll be more time for plaaaaaaay!" ; Kent Brockman: "And I for one welcome our new insect overlords..." (Yes, that was the origin of the phrase). And so on, and so on. I won't try to pinpoint a "best episode" - with that many around, it's a fool's errand: One just ends up picking an early work of genius and feeling like later works of equal caliber weren't as good for occurring later.
Favorite characters:
Comic Book Guy
"Worst...episode...ever!"
---
Sideshow Bob
"(Loathing moan)"; "(Maniacal laugh)"
---
Wiseguy
"I got a movie for ya, fatty - A Fridge Too Far"
---
Mr. Burns
"Eeeeexcellent" ; "Smithers, who is that (insert diminutive)?"
Series nemesis: Family Guy
Family Guy badly attempts to imitate this art, and just ends up being totally random and meaningless. South Park lampooned Family Guy's lameness best when it portrayed the FG writers as using trained manatees to randomly select nouns and verbs for their scripts. "Remember the time I ____ with ______ in/at _______?" (cringe)
------------------------
- Mega Man (NES series)
The music and diversity of environments is what really seared itself into my mind playing these games as a kid, and evidently I'm not alone in that, judging by all the various instrumental and acoustic covers of the game soundtracks on Youtube. There were six "classic" Mega Man games, before Nintendo lost its way and tried to make it into a high-graphic series that destroyed the soul of the game.
Its premise was innovative for the time: You choose from a list of bosses to pursue and enter their unique domains, fighting subordinate enemies through those domains until you reach the bosses. If you beat them, you acquire their specialized weapons, and can use them in other domains. This would lead to rational uses in the earlier games - Ice Man's weapon wreaked havoc on Fire Man in the original MM, so you would naturally want to kill Ice Man first. Metal Man's weapon (a spinning blade) wreaked havoc on Wood Man, so you would kill him first in Mega Man 2.
The best of them were 2, 3, and 4, the absolute best being either 2 or 3, depending on one's taste, although all were thoroughly enjoyable and challenging. The first, however, was an eency bit too challenging (the Japanese hadn't yet caught on that Americans have a lower tolerance for frustration in gaming). The fifth and sixth didn't make much of an impression on me - they were able and innovative additions, but not as memorable - so I won't bother showing themt, but the fourth had a few memorable soundtracks.
Best music in MM1:
Hauntingly beautiful (begins about 20 secs in):
---
Quite possibly the greatest videogame of all time, with the greatest game soundtrack of all time, Mega Man 2. Sure, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on N64 was also right up there, but it lacked the purity of vision - it was grander, but also more involved and therefore less hypnotic.
The famous intro:
Best music in MM2:
---
One of the greats:
Best music in MM3:
Intro and Stage Select:
Another hauntingly beautiful tune:
---
Best music from MM4:
A hauntingly beautiful ditty:
----------------------------
- Stanley Kubrick movies.
Kubrick is a god. He's dead, of course, but that which made him a god continues, ergo he remains a god. His mind apparently functioned visually, giving him preternatural instincts for how to set up hypnotic camera shots, pans, and capture colors and landscapes that none before or since have matched. The work that I celebrate most:
Dr. Strangelove (of course)
The apotheosis of deadpan hilarity.
---
2001: A Space Odyssey
Quiet, profound, unrelenting pwnage. This kind of technology will happen - we just got the date wrong.
---
A Clockwork Orange
Granted that it's dripping with disgusting '70s style, it's at least awesomely filmed and directed. Kubrick treats youth violence with the same naturalistic eye as he treated a wheel spinning in space in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and uses much of the same musical sensibility. The point is to show violence through the main character's eyes - the eyes of a psychotic punk who lives for chaos, and sees people as nothing so much as characters in his own little self-amused opera.
---
Barry Lyndon
Look at the sheer dimensionality of this shot:
Some of Kubrick's shots in this film were like oil paintings, and some as if you were standing right there in the 18th century. I wouldn't be surprised if Michael Mann had been inspired by him. Like most of his works, it had a quiet solidity to it, unlike the facile lack of substance in most historical pictures.
---
The Shining
The film adaptation of Stephen King's novel was vastly superior to the literary work, which I found lacking in credibility. That Kubrick was able to get such a performance out of a child actor is truly remarkable, since it's apparently difficult bordering on impossible to get children who aren't monumentally talented to act well. Yet somehow he found the right actor for the part, and was able to work with him. Even Shelley Duvall wasn't able to fuck up Kubrick's genius, although I still remain puzzled at his choosing her in the first place.
---
Eyes Wide Shut
Am I skipping Full Metal Jacket? Yes, I am. It was an entertaining and disturbing film, but I felt like Kubrick had chosen inferior base material and was phoning it in - even gods are occasionally off their game. Not so with Eyes Wide Shut. Not only do I still have no idea what the hell that movie is about (which is great), I enjoy every minute of watching it because it's so achingly brilliant and subtle. He films wild humping with the exact same eye as any other subject - every single environment is magical: A hospital, a city street, a bar lounge, a a naked prostitute slumping over wasted, etc. etc. And naked, minxy Nicole Kidman certainly doesn't hurt.
Trailer:
----------------------
- The Dune series, by Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert is a god. He's dead too, but like Kubrick, that doesn't stop him from being a god. Actually, I consider him an even higher and more powerful god than Kubrick - like Zeus to Kubrick's Apollo. His Dune series of novels comprises the greatest work of literature in human history, bar none, and is so rich and densely-layered with distant-horizon, barely-describable insights that I remain awed that a human being could have written such things.
It's a tragedy that his work was so badly marred on screen by David Lynch - it should have been Kubrick to make the attempt. Only Kubrick had the insight to translate into visuals what Herbert was communicating in written scenery, but I guess it was not to be.
And now apparently Peter Berg is directing a cinematic remake of Dune - that's right, Peter Berg, the director "Hancock." Sigh. I suppose when something is the greatest work of all time, you have to expect that attempted adaptations are going to fail spectacularly. Personally, I want Michael Mann to direct it - his visual sensibilities are very much in line with what I think would serve the material.
I love that Herbert invented the Bene Gesserit - a credible look at the potential of feminine power. He didn't just paste male Amazonian fantasies on to female characters - while I enjoy that kind of thing as much as the next guy, it's a profound treat to see something along those lines that's internally consistent and natural. The Bene Gesserit make sense as actual women in the context of the story.
And then there are the quotes. My god, the quotes are something from a higher plane of reality. Listen to this stuff:
"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct."
"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
"Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain."
"There is no escape — we pay for the violence of our ancestors."
"My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be."
"You cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what I can detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are prepared to do. And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was a fifth-generation descendant of Stilgar the Naib and did not even know it."
"In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use it's proper name: Temporary."
The Dune novels are chock-full of this kind of thing, and it just makes more and more sense with each reading. Too bad Herbert's son had to go and take a dump on his legacy by writing shitty prequels and sequels with a mediocre hack SF writer.
I do, however, agree with the Sci-Fi channel miniseries adaptations. The adaptation of Dune, while silly in some respects (i.e., ridiculous costumes, awkward accents, and some poor casting decisions), was nonetheless acceptable and true to the spirit of the novel. The adaptation of Children of Dune, however, was truly beautiful - especially the Brian Tyler score, which was promptly bought and abused by movie studios again and again in trailers for terrible adventure films.
---------------------------------
- Firefly
Silence in outer space! On a TV show, no less! Thank you, Jeebus! And, of course, great dialog and characters, as one would expect of Joss Whedon - not quite a god, but at least a demigod. What's even better about Firefly is that it's very hopeful, humanistic, and life-affirming - it's not cynical at all, despite the somewhat bleak social environment in which it takes place. And it's also hilarious.
If you haven't watched it, you need to do so immediately: Several episodes are freely available on Hulu, so you have no excuse not to watch them unless you intend to rent, buy, or steal the entire series and watch them all in order.
Great intro song:
Best episode: Jaynestown
The entire cast and character interaction is brilliant, but aside from the main character, Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), you'll most want to watch Firefly for two characters: Kaylee Frye (Jewel Staite) and Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin). Kaylee is a sweet, innocent, girly girl...spaceship mechanic. Jayne is a thieving, corrupt scumbag, tough guy, crude SOB, and all-around barbarian who's tolerated by his comrades because they generally (though not entirely) can count on him in a fight.
------------------------------
- Star Trek
My greatest familiarity is with Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), but I have a firm grounding in all the series (with one caveat* - see below) and deeply appreciate Gene Roddenberry's hopeful vision of the future. While the series after TNG had strayed from that vision, humanism and hope were still strong influences in most cases.
I tend to think that TNG was the apotheosis of the pure Star Trek universe (and the film Star Trek: Generations the pinnacle of that achievement), but of course The Original Series (TOS) set the stage despite being occasionally undermined by low budget and undeveloped technical capabilities at the time. The intractable fan debate between Kirk's comic book bravado and Picard's Shakespearean gravitas is a bottomless source of entertainment for both sides of the argument, though time is naturally shifting opinion in Picard's direction.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) had to adapt its narrative structure to a fixed location, so it was more about people and social forces moving through that location than a starship going out to meet them. I think it made solid contributions to the Trek universe on several fronts, particularly the devastating long-term consequences of military occupation on both the oppressors (the Cardassians) and the oppressed (the Bajorans). DS9 was more serialized than episodic, and could therefore offer more nuanced pictures on this and other issues than TNG was usually able to do outside of season finale specials.
Then there was Star Trek: Voyager (VOY), which I feel had the most crystallized and well-developed writing of any of the series. It didn't have humanist grandeur or wistfulness like TNG, nor closely observant social examination like DS9, but it managed to combine the travelogue of TOS with a simple, character-driven sincerity that made many of its episodes remarkably stirring and underrated. If any Trekkies/ers out there haven't seen it, or think it not worth the time, I urge you to reconsider.
The new Star Trek film I don't rate at all - it's not a real addition to the Trek universe. It's "The Fast and The Furious" set in space, with the nouns ripped off from Star Trek. Perhaps later additions will gravitate toward some kind of substance, now that the studio trusts that people are willing to keep seeing Star Trek, and may be less forceful in demanding committee-driven pablum from their writers. Or maybe not. If not, I'm fine with the series as it stands.
*I do not consider Enterprise canon, so I don't mention characters from it. The writers of that show gave up that right the moment they decided (or their studio bosses decided for them) to suddenly change the direction of the show after 9/11 into a quest for vengeance and rationalizations of torture. Roddenberry would have shit himself if he saw what they did to his universe. Sad, really - so much otherwise good material, poisoned by contemporary politics.
I should note I've never read, and have no intention to read, any of the franchise novelizations: Star Trek is a TV and film series to me, and I have never felt a desire to wade into the web of contradictions and flimsy rationalizations usually needed to turn a TV science fiction show into a book.
Favorite characters:
TOS:
TNG:
DS9:
VOY:
------------
- Tolkien
I've read most of Tokien's work in his Lord of The Rings universe, and can safely say he personally invented what we understand today as the genre of High Fantasy. The material he drew from - cultural mythologies of dragons and demonic hordes, medieval heroes, knights in shining armor, etc. - existed in poetry, oral tradition, and a wide diversity of marginal fiction, but it was he who gelled the substance of those stories into what we think of as fantasy: A universe governed by the titanic clash of pure good vs. pure evil, manifested by magical powers guiding or hindering the adventures of mere mortals (usually from feudal or agrarian cultures) on a grave quest against dark powers.
Although Tolkien's most famous work, is, of course, The Lord of The Rings, I think his best is The Silmarillion - the "Bible" of the Tolkien mythology. His creation story is more interesting by far than that of the Old Testament, and I would say much more beautiful as well. His god, Eru Illuvatar, is not some sadistic Punisher modeled on a Sumerian despot, but rather told as a mysterious and creative force that is both bound up in all things and only interacting directly with them on the rarest of occasions. Tolkien's angels, the Valar, have fascinating, distinct personalities and areas of interest.
But the most fascinating character in all his writings would have to be his devil, Melkor - He Who Arises in Might, later renamed "Morgoth" (enemy of the world) by another brilliant character, Fëanor. Melkor, like Lucifer, is the greatest and most powerful of the Valar, but while his comrades concern themselves with air, water, rock, or living things, he concerns himself with the seething energies of darkness. His future corruption is set in motion by an act of jealousy, as told in the Ainulindalë (Music of The Ainur) - the very first part of The Silmarillion.
Sauron, whom most people think is Tolkien's devil, was in fact merely a servant of Melkor who continued his master's legacy when the latter was overthrown and cast out into The Void to stew in his own hatred. He (Sauron) sincerely worships Melkor, but is a distillation of his master's evil that is considered by Tolkien scholars to have been even more potent in the affairs of sentient creatures. Melkor was basically a force of nature - a raw energy of malice and destruction unleashed - whereas Sauron is more common, although he was a lesser Valar (a Maiar) himself.
I also highly recommend The Lays of Beleriand - a collection of poetic verse telling some of the stories laid out in The Silmarillion in greater detail. Particularly, it tells of Turin Turambar, and Beren and Luthien - two of the great stories of the Tolkien universe - among some other, shorter verses.
-------------------------------
And that's pretty much all I have space for in this diary, but allow me to mention in passing the other geek cults to which I belong:
- Isaac Asimov
- Naruto (subtitled, NOT dubbed)
- Smashing Pumpkins
- Buffy
- Spaghetti Westerns
- Quentin Tarantino
- Kevin Smith
- Martin Scorsese's "Gimme Shelter" trilogy (The movies where he plays that song at some point - Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed)
---------------------------------
This diary, however extensive, has not been a chore at all. I have thoroughly enjoyed talking about my geek obsessions. I hope your holiday has gone as well as mine, and that you've enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it (assuming anyone has read it, which is merely a bonus to my fun in composing it).