Probably my favorite cultural event of the year is the Christmas Revels, which I go see with one of my best friends from college every December. The performance of traditional music and pagent ends with this poem by Susan Cooper, which I adore. It’s called “The Shortest Day”:


And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.


Thanks for another year, folks. I’ll see you in 2011, and best wishes for a joyous start to it this weekend.

I’m not really a be-comprehensive-and-rate-popular-culture kind of blogger, but this is, in no particular order, culture I am glad to have experienced in 2010:

1. Gyptian, “Hold You”:

2. Get Him to the Greek

3. The father-daughter relationship in The Passage. Also, Kick-Ass.

4.  Brandon Routh in Scott Pilgrim

5. Jane Austen’s Fight Club

6. Mystery, Alaska, watched in Alaska

7. Nicole Scherzinger on Dancing With The Stars

8. Centurion

9. Rye Rye

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows


11. Seeing Spoon live

12. Finally watching 84 Charing Cross Road

13. Wolf Hall

14. The folks tweeting as Buffy characters

15. Toy Story 3


16. Homicide‘s sexual politics

17. Electro-metal covers of “Eleanor Rigby”

18. Doctor Who


19. Robyn, but duh

20. A Song of Ice and Fire, for which I owe you guys so much.

Part I is here. Part II is here. Standard rules apply below the jump: spoil up to, but not beyond, the section entitled “Phreaking.” And for next week, let’s read up to the section entitled “Conspiracy.”
One of the things that’s struck me most reading our most recent chunk of Cryptonomicon is the extent to which it is both about historical moments of innovation and change, and the extent to which it is itself a historical document. The sections that are about internet startups feel sort of  quaint and anachronistic, both in the technology Randy, Avi, and others are using, and in the way they understand startups and business models.


This is a bit of a diversion from the point I’m going to get around to eventually, but Lee wrote in comments in our first discussion that “the breathless way NS goes about describing Avi makes me wonder whether he doesn’t unself-consciously venerate these Silicon Valley VC types (making allowances for the fact that the bubble hadn’t yet burst).” I think is this not quite accurate, and the Epiphyte Business Plan is the best example of this:

Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document….After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz. appended resumes) w ill move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we ahve actually done anything.

My suspicion is that Stephenson admires Avi’s hucksterism, rather than him as a technologist, in the same way, as much as the Dentist is a parody, he is capable as hell. Stephenson likes survivors, especially when they’re a bit off-kilter, be they morphine-addicted smart-aleck Marines, semi-autistic cryptographers who have affairs with German spies because what the hell, dreamy coders who make throwaway deals for buried treasure. I feel like he could have written one hell of a Western.


But really what this section of the novel got for me, and why I think it works even if the technology Avi and Randy are using feels dated, is that it’s about moments when you change or die, the points at which we become different kinds of humans. Bobby Shaftoe feels the shift coming in the way he fights his war:

Shaftoe has killed Chinese bandits on the banks of the Yangtze by stabbing them in the chest with a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just by hitting him pretty hard in the head. On Guadalcanal he killed Nips by shooting at them with several different kinds of arms, by rolling rocks down on them, by constructing large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed up, by sneaking up on them in the jungle and cutting their throats, by firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him off a cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for a long time that this face-to face style of killing the bad guys is kind of old-fashioned, but it’s not like he’s spent a lot of time thinking about it. The demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy didx sort of get him thinking, and here he is now, inside one of the most famous killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves.

Of course, Bobby Shaftoe’s probably more likely to make the transition to a new age because he’s the kind of guy who will try out sushi and martial arts, just as Lawrence Waterhouse seems likely to make it because he’s able to see the world differently at the precise moment when there is a need for his kind of differentness, when elites start to desperately need non-conformists. There’s something remarkable about Yamomoto’s revelation as he’s about to die: the margin between the time you have to make these realizations is perilously thin, especially when the things that are changing about you aren’t just sort of fundamental communications things like the rise of the internet, but matters of more immediate life and death.


I’ll be curious to see how this emphasis on evolution plays out. Obviously, we know from history if not from the novel yet that being overly-evolved—in other words, in touch with and accepting of his homosexuality—doesn’t exactly play out for Alan Turing. And I think we’re also reaching the point in the novel when it’s going to be important for characters to be able to look back, without being captured by it. I assume that Randy’s mysterious correspondent is Enoch Root, something Randy can’t puzzle out yet because he can only see the new meaning of a root@ email address, rather than looking back (of course, Enoch Root isn’t really a fathomable phenomenon by any set of rules, old or new). I’ll be curious to see how Avi’s Judaism sorts itself out. And of course, given Stephenson’s focus on lineage, some understanding of these characters’ pasts is going to matter in comprehending their future. 

I sort of wonder if this is the movie Pegg and Frost should have been making, rather than Paul:

Mashing up stoner comedy and fantasy is a good idea, and even sort of traditional, isn’t it? The trailer did remind me that one of the impacts of being a) young and b) almost completely isolated from non-book pop culture in the 1980s was that I totally missed the cheesy, pre-advances-in-special-effects, live-action fantasy movies of the era. I did see Labyrinth in college, and though I get the humor in David Bowie’s terrifying codpiece, I’m not sure I truly appreciated it, and of course I’ve seen The Princess Bride. Is it worth digging into the tradition further? Any suggestions about where to start?

So, I’m torn over the news that Jason Segal intends to revitalize the romantic comedy by shooting to make a movie with the substance of Annie Hall. There are days I think romantic comedies really just need to be put out of their misery. And other days when I don’t think Woody Allen’s extraordinarily specific vision is enough to turn a genre around that continued on to disaster despite his best efforts.

I really have no idea what to make of Paul:

I have no idea, given how deeply they’ve become embedded into my understanding of clever-things-I-like, if I was as disoriented by the genre mashups that were Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Maybe the problem with this is that I can’t quite figure out what the clever juxtaposition is? Buddy comedy with alien movie, I suppose? I do like the insinuation that it’s far more disturbing when people you think you know do slightly strange things than when entirely alien beings proceed in their own entirely alien way, and that first contact might prove to be no big deal. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are clever enough to pull off worse comedies, I suppose. I just hope there’s something slightly more insane here than we’re seeing in the trailer, some spark of inspiration that doesn’t feel quite so derived from Men In Black.

I feel like I don’t mention the New York Review of Books enough on this blog. Next to the New Yorker, it may be the finest periodical in the country, and the attention that it gives to culture is even more sustained, but a lot of its archives are behind a paywall, and so during the period when my subscription lapsed, I wasn’t always up to date and linking. All of which is to say that Perry Link’s piece on China’s journey to this year’s Nobel Prize, in the form of a review of two contemporary Chinese books, is excellent, and you should read it while you still can. As much as the book is an explanation of those books, one a novel about the internet’s impact on Chinese dissent and ordinary Chinese citizens, and one a history of famine in the Cultural Revolution, it’s also an essay that I think powerfully explains China’s meaning on American movie screens.

It’s notable to me that for China’s rise in the world, we haven’t really figured out where China fits into our movies. The USSR no longer exists, but Russia is still a vague synonym for the enemy even though the Cold War is over. In action movies, skirmishes with China can be a pretext or a red herring, but they’re not the main event, mostly because we haven’t figured out what we’d want the main event to look like. A viable, independent Chinese democracy might be a compelling political and human rights goal, but it’s not easy to translate uprisings on the scale that would be necessary to create true change into a cinematic structure with a few main characters (Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon may be the only extant story I can think of that would lend itself to such translation, and would have a built-in American audience). I don’t think, despite worries about China’s rising military and economic power, that American audiences would get super-excited about movies that had the American military clashing with China.

Because we can’t separate the regime and the people on-screen, because we haven’t figured out what we want the future to look like, we turn to the past. The fact that Christian Bale will be staring in a movie about the Nanjing massacre made by a significant Chinese director seems like an obvious detente. An English-speaking actor fronts a movie controlled by someone with semi-nationalist sensibilities (the same director did the opening ceremony of the Beijing games) in a movie that shows the Chinese as victims of dishonorable incursion, but suggests that Americans have a role to play in standing up for decency and the Chinese people. It’ll be curious to see who it resonates with.

I often think that the careers of folks who started out as Daily Show correspondents is illustration of why supporting actors are so important. Take Cedar Rapids, in which Ed Helms is clearly the supporting actor in his own movie:

Without that slight blank, cheerfulness, though, the other characters wouldn’t have the catalyst they need to turn in what looks like a reasonably amusing series of performances. On the opposite end of things, John Oliver is just a genius of disruptiveness as Professor Ian Duncan on Community:

His character doesn’t fully gel with the dynamic of the cast, and his persistent loopiness might be too much if it was on the show all the time (I think Community‘s achieved a nice balance, after basically ignoring the character for most of last season). But it’s excellent leavening, a reminder that the characters have turned a lot of weird things into a fairly consistent level of normal, but that the world around them is stranger still. It’s beautifully proportioned.

I know everyone wants to be a star, for both one-off pecuniary and consistent-level-of-employment reasons. But artistically, there’s a lot to be said about providing either the canvas or the splash of color that makes the work pop.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for slightly dilapidated amusement parks and mini-golf courses, but the trailer for Hanna looks rather visually gorgeous, doesn’t it?

And that’s before we actually get to the substance of the movie, Saoirse Ronan’s ethereal teenaged (and perhaps genetically engineered) assassin. I loved the father-daughter dynamic in Kick-Ass, though I think it remains to be seen if this movie has the same unforced, loving naturalism to the relationship despite the enormously warped circumstances.

I do find this micro-trend of fathers-training-pint-sized-killers interesting, though. I wonder if it would be harder for the movies to portray fathers schooling their sons in extreme violence, conjuring up images of everything from John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo’s deadly campaign around the Beltway in Washington to families of violent white extremists. When a man hands his son a gun and tells him to kill, he’s recreating ancient tragedies and evils. But when a father hands his daughter a weapon, he gives her power, he himself defies gender expectations: in the semantics of our culture, they become admirable rebels, elevated by their deviance, rather than stunted cowards shrunken by their violence. It says a lot about the pace of our journey towards gender equality that giving a woman any kind of power is supposed to be liberating, no matter what she does with it.

On what makes a movie so bad it’s good, and why Showgirls is just bad.

Thanks to a tweet from Shani, I devoured this two-part series on dancehall music and homophobia in Jamaica over the weekend. I won’t say anything else about it specifically because I really, really hope that people go read it. But to me, this is what’s important and interesting about cultural criticism. I may bungle my way into arguments over movie trailers, or gush over Robyn, but really, for me, the primary question is what what we like says about who we are. What we spend our time and money on for fun is incredibly important, even, and maybe even especially, if we’re spending time on things that are frivolous. And sometimes popular forms contain deadly serious content. If I could do this full-time, this is the kind of story I’d want to write.

I really need to remember that when I go home to my parents’ house for holidays or various and sundry other visits, I don’t need to bring extra books with me. It’s not just that they have a marvelous collection, but I find myself revisiting childhood books I haven’t looked at in years. This time out, I teared up happily re-reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, an inferior successor to Little Women, especially in its moralism, but still a rather satisfying fable none the less.

What made this reading though was one of the gifts my parents gave me: Eden’s Outcasts, John Matteson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 joint biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson. I’ve always known that Little Women and its successors are directly inspired and shaped by Alcott’s life—that fact is directly alluded to in the book, when the immortal protagonist Jo March writes her novel-within-a-novel. But I don’t think I knew the extent to which the specifics are simply biography in disguise. In Little Men, Jo tells a naughty girl enrolled in her school that:

“I had a new pair of shoes once, and wanted to show them; so, though I was told not to leave the garden, I ran away and was wandering about all day. It was in the city, and why I wasn’t killed I don’t know. Such a time as I had. I frolicked in the park with dogs, sailed boats in the Back Bay with strange boys, dined with a little Irish beggar-girl on salt fish and potatoes, and was found at last fast asleep on a door-step with my arms round a great dog. It was late in the evening, and I was a dirty as a little pig, and the new shoes were worn out I had travelled so far.”

Turns out, Louisa May Alcott had the identical adventure. She ran away from home and was found by the town crier sleeping on a doorstep curled up with a friendly dog that had decided to turn protector. It’s like the moment I had reading Homicide, when I found out that the opening scene in The Wire actually happened.

It’s incidents like this that make me question the imaginative power of fiction. There’s no question that fiction lets us tell stories that might be too painful, or personal, to relate simply as the truth with names attached, and that fiction allows authors to create the follow-up to a perfect anecdote. If we don’t go anywhere beyond “Got to. This America, man,” in The Wire or the little girl found on a doorstep in Little Men, we miss the point. But I don’t know that fiction set in our world and playing by the rules of it can be more extraordinary, or perfectly illustrative, than the gorgeous randomness of true life.

Welcome back! I hope that those of you who celebrated Christmas had a wonderful holiday, and those of you who didn’t, got a good rest, or had other good things happen, depending on your pleasure. Let’s read up to, but not past, the section entitled “Phreaking,” by Thursday. For the rest of the week, I’ll be posting once or twice a day.

Nah, no grumpy Christmas for me. The blog will be off tomorrow while I bake a Merck’s Cake, smell deep drafts of pine, and give an array of pop-culturtastic presents to the people I love the most. But I’ll leave you with my new favorite Christmas song, courtesy the lovely and talented Amanda Mattos:

May all your Christmases bring such happy surprises. I’ll see you all on a reduced schedule next week, and we’ll continue with Cryptonomicon then.

I find Love, Actually about as effective as emotional crack, but if I had to pick my favorite holiday movie of recent years, I’d probably actually name the unfairly overlooked The Family Stone:

The movie’s somewhat forgotten as part of Sarah Jessica Parker’s efforts to find a role other than Carrie Bradshaw to carry her into the future. And there’s an extent to which it’s a goofy, fish-out-of-water movie. But it’s also a surprisingly raw movie about the complicated emotions we all have about the holidays and our families, a movie that insists that mastectomy scars can be beautiful, and that isn’t afraid of the ugliness and sadness inside of all of its characters. As a bonus, it features quite a fine performance from Rachel McAdams playing somewhat awful, and I think it’s good for her. Anyway, highly recommended if you need to sneak away from your own family a bit, or if you could all use a good laugh and welling-up together.

I think we can all agree that a show about a group of gay sci-fi fans is a fairly niche product, even in an era where The Big Bang Theory is a significant hit. I also think, even given its niche nature, that it’s a reasonably good idea for a television show. Identity, these days, comes not just from race and church and sex and nation. We define ourselves based on our politics, our interests, our places of education, our groups of friends, our sports teams.

What’s interesting is less any individual thing we choose to define us, and how the disparate pieces of our identities come together and clash. It’s fascinating that we live in a world where it may be more socially acceptable to be gay than to be a very serious and committed fan of science fiction, that fantasy sports can be the basis for an entire social network. Exploring affinities and how they affect our lives, friendships, marriages, and families is important work for understanding the power of our popular culture, and for understanding ourselves.

Ta-Nehisi has an interesting point about the visual failures of big-screen comic book adaptations. I think the challenge, generally, is that things that don’t have to meet the test of plausibility in the form of illustration do have to look plausible when real people are acting them out. You can’t get away with the anatomical distortions illustrators get away with whether they’re drawing top-heavy superheroines or the Hulk, unless you want to end up with the terrible versions of the Hulk we’ve seen on-screen, and it’s hard to pull off aliens, feats of derring-do, and general strangeness that works on the page in real-life either.

TNC mentions the Lord of the Rings movies as an epic adaptation that does work, but I don’t think the book-to-film leap there is quite analogous to the comics. Most of the things that people in those books do is within our realm of understanding and possibility. Fighting is essentially hand-to-hand or with familiar weapons. The animals and other races of humanoids in the books are variations on physical forms we’re familiar with. There is some magic, but most of it’s translatable, or on a smaller scale. Sure, sending water in the form of horses to drown some guys on horses is magic, but it’s magic that amps up a potentially natural phenomenon. Ghosts come out of a mountain to fight human men, but they still look basically like humans fighting other humans. And when we read things in a book, we translate them with our minds.

When the possibility of what humanity can accomplish, and the nature of what humanity is changes, that’s where it gets hard to translate the action with human actors. And when we’re given a picture of what things are that is beyond what we conceptualize people doing, and then are asked to believe it again when it’s just people doing it, it’s hard to make the leap. Movies were always going to have trouble making what we were willing to accept as real on the page look real on the screen.

Charlie Jane Anders’ exploration of the turning point in the eighties when science fiction movies took the leap and became franchises, rather than one-offs, is a wise look at the commercial developments that shaped the entertainment landscape we live in now. But as much as inevitable sequels to sci-fi movies generally trouble us these days, the move towards franchising also represents a truer understanding of the possibilities of science fiction.

Star Wars couldn’t have ended with A New Hope because the story wasn’t over: the Emperor was still in power, and the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion hadn’t reached a crisis point. From a more traditional sense, it wasn’t clear yet whether the narrative was a comedy or a tragedy, if it was going to end in what seemed like any of several possible romances, or in definitive defeat. But Star Wars didn’t have to end, and Star Trek didn’t either, because there were still possibilities left in their universes to explore.

The defining characteristic of science fiction isn’t any one character, any one conflict, any one plot. It’s that the story is set somewhere else, where the rules of that universe are not the same as our own in ways that are governed by advancements, or different possibilities, in science. Given that, it’s equally valid to do a one-off story or a meandering, generation-spanning narrative. Good people working within the genre should know what they’re doing, and what its—and their—limitations are. If your motivations for continuing a story are driven by profit rather than the needs of the particular story, you’ll make bad stories. If you make a lot of money off a story that demands three movies, or a movie and a novel series, or a series of cartoons and a lot of comics, there’s nothing wrong with doing good for your wallet and the world of story.

So, my post about The Tree of Life yesterday was cranky, and worse, inarticulate. I ended up sounding silly, and Simon, justifiably, slapped back at me for it. As an apology and explanation, I wanted to lay out a couple of things to do a better job of explaining both my preexisting assumptions and prejudices and what I find obnoxious about this particular trailer.


1. I tend to think of mass-market movies and film as discrete things: all I mean is that I think there’s a difference that’s conveyed by context. Film’s a medium, and it includes things that I would gladly be hypnotized by in a museum, whether it’s looping images of Sarah Palin speaking intercut with Alaskan native dancers or anything by Matthew Barney. If I’m hitting up a multiplex, I tend to expect something a bit more conventionally plotted.


2. That is not to say that I think artistic, experimental, plot-averse, etc. film should go sit in the corner, or anything. I’m all for a world where we see much more diverse things in mainstream movie theaters. But…


3. I think studios and directors have an obligation to sell audiences on those more unusual projects. And I think that pitch has to sell the project on the merits. Most of what I found so objectionable about the trailer for The Tree of Life is that it essentially seemed to tell viewers: “It’s Brad Pitt! And Sean Penn! And it’s deep! And we have arty images!” If Malick’s actually doing something “radical,” if this movie stretches back to prehistoric Earth (all things that have been reported out of it), then that campaign is both a cheat to audiences and an insult to their intelligence. Give us at least a sense of what we’re going to see, and make a strong pitch for why we should want to see that. If that hideously pretentious voiceover in the trailer isn’t part of the movie, it’s very silly marketing. If it is in the movie, I reserve the right to consider it bad, pretentious writing.


4. Additionally, I, very personally, don’t think any director is so visionary that they automatically deserve my time. The movies are a business, and if you’re going to work through the studio system, and get $25 million to make a movie, then I don’t think you’re exempt from explaining what you’re doing and can just expect audiences to just follow along (I’m speaking generally here, not necessarily about Malick). That said…


5. I’ll probably, in perpetuity, watch anything Tony Gilroy makes, without explanation. And the reason for that is this. When I go to a mainstream theater to see a movie, I ultimately worship at the altar of the writing. I understand this is a specific preference, and it is not necessarily correct, and certainly not necessarily the most sophisticated way to watch movies. But I think it’s worthwhile to be honest about it. 


What I really want to see is brilliant plotting and dialogue, and I’m interested in how that gets played out in front of me. Gilroy’s so compelling to me because he can stage something like the opening fight scene in Duplicity, which is a gorgeous piece of physical comedy, and sort of formally stunning in its severe color palate and battle lines of corporate suits, but that also serves the plot and the writing directly, making you wonder why these men are fighting, and alerting you that what follows is going to be both dead serious and very silly. 


I love him because he can work with actors in such a way that a line like “I am Shiva, the god of death,” can sound like perfectly natural speech out of the mouths of both an insane man and a perfectly sane one in Michael Clayton, that he imbues a child’s explanation of a fantasy series with an incredible richness that gives a dignity to it, makes us feel the pull of that fantasy for the person reading it. His language shows us the semi-permeable barriers between madness and sanity and the divine, and he does it in movies about corporations.


I feel the same way about Preston Sturges. The physical comedy in the dining room scene in The Lady Eve is funny, but it’s the verbal translation of the action that makes it brilliant. Something like this sequence:

See those nice store teeth all beaming at you. Oh, she recognizes you! She’s up, she’s down, she can’t make up her mind. She’s up again. She recognizes you! She’s coming over to speak to you. The suspense is killing me. “Why, for heaven’s sake, aren’t you Fuzzy Oathammer I went to manual training school with in Louisville? Oh you’re not? Well, you certainly look exactly like him, it’s certainly a remarkable resemblance… But if you’re not going to ask me to sit down, I suppose you’re not going to ask me to sit down… I’m very sorry, I certainly hope I haven’t caused you any embarrassment, you so and so.”

Is Veronica Geng decades before Veronica Geng, and it’s incredible. Even Buster Keaton, who never gets to talk in his best movies, it’s the writing that matters, the jokes on the title cards, the plotting that creates a mirror image of all the gags.


Anyway, I’m way off-topic here. All I meant to say is that when it comes to the movies, rather than film as a whole, the rigor of the plotting and dialogue are the bones to me, and the execution and visual expression of those plots and themes are what matter most. If you want me to love something else, I’m open to it. But I want to be persuaded, rather than pandered to.

Given that Mark Wahlberg’s career has really, truly taken off, moving both into comedy with The Other Guys and back into Oscar territory with The Fighter, I sort of doubt he and the rest of the gang will ever get back together to make The Brazilian Job. A sequel to The Italian Job was never strictly necessary, from a narrative or any other standpoint, but in that moment when Ocean’s Eleven squeezed so much fun out of a light caper movie with a sophisticated cast, it would have been diverting. And more importantly, it might have given Jason Statham the opportunity, nay, required him, to be something other than grimly determined:

I still need to see The Bank Job at some point (is Statham only allowed to express emotion in movies with “job” in the title?), but even thought what he’s been given to do is somewhat limited, the man has a body he can put to other uses than mayhem, and an ironical, winning smile. It’s dull watching him stride away from explosions and fight people all the time—he’s beyond aplomb and into boredom:

Maybe he can teach Ben Foster how to walk away from gas station conflagrations with his mouth set and his sunglasses firmly in place, and then go on to other things? And no, voicing Tybalt in the animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet doesn’t count.