2010 November | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Nov

we can roll ourselves over ’cause we’re uncomfortable

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Luther: Proof that the British may be more stylish than we, but they aren’t necessarily more sophisticated. Luther may feature talented actors with posh accents and some sharp writing, but it’s your standard cop-on-the-edge drama. Idris Elba (The Wire) plays John Luther, a DCI who doesn’t play by the rules but still gets results. He has a habit of getting into the minds of his suspects. This enables him to do brilliant work, but also makes him a bit of a nutcase, alienating him from his wife and, oh hell, do you even need me to finish this?

Each episode moves along at a swift pace. Plot twists come fast and furious. But the plots are all standard Law & Order fare. A murderer who thinks they’re smarter than the police; a traumatized veteran, back from the wars; a ritual Satanist; etc. The kinds of crimes that only exist in television fiction, in other words. Not the unending tide of knife crime which would cross the desk of a real London detective.

What keeps me watching?

I have a bias: I believe that good writing and captivating acting excuse almost anything. And the writing here is very clever. No point is dwelled on for too long before moving on to the next. The dialogue is harsh and direct. And there’s a large team of talented actors: not just Elba, but Ruth Wilson (of AMC’s “The Prisoner” remake), Saskia Reeves (of Sci-Fi’s “Dune” miniseries) and others you’ll likely recognize.

I’d call it a guilty pleasure but I have no guilt about it. For all my optimism I like watching stories about tormented geniuses. For all the time I spend fuming over police abuses, I like watching hard men who’ll bend the rules to put the bad guys away. I like believing that the world – both the good guys and the bad guys – are smarter than they are. And Luther is a little peek into that world, fictional though it might be.

Nov

nothing new, nothing new; y’all ain’t saying nothing new

Posted by Perich at 12:31 pm

I like living in the city, but I love visiting the suburbs. Whenever I visit the folks for the holidays, I love looking out my old bedroom window. It’s still a new development, so there’s an unbroken view to the treeline, and above that the cloudy horizons of Baltimore County. The fall really brings out the geography – the rolling hills, the converted farmland.

Coming back to Baltimore is always bittersweet for me. It reminds me of nothing but the adolescent longing I had to get away – to make real connections with people, to get to a better city. The feeling was so potent that it still strikes me, over ten years after I moved away. Even now that I have a life better than I could have dreamed in Boston, I get swamped by this overwhelming loneliness every time. I radiated it for so many years that it’s baked into the walls. It’s a miracle I survived.

(I didn’t have a difficult upbringing, for any strangers reading this. This is more a comment on the sort of child I was than the sort of adults my parents were. As recently as a few years ago, you could ask me point-blank “how are you feeling?” and I might not answer honestly. My home life was fine; I was weird)

This probably explains why I retreated so regularly into fantasy in my adolescence. Video games, roleplaying games, science fiction, classic films – anything that would take me somewhere. This wasn’t about sharing worlds with other people. It wasn’t until college that I started gaming regularly with friends (making some of the better friends I have). This was just about Getting Somewhere Else. I had an imagination before I had a car.

Now, of course, most of the games and books I owned as a teenager have migrated to Boston. Whether they were anchors or ladders, they’re no longer there.

Nov

the art of consent

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Politics is

(and I know I promised to stop talking about politics for two years; and I meant it at the time, really and seriously; but this was before the new TSA pat-down procedures hit the news; and a groundswell of heretofore silent civil libertarians suddenly discovered that Yes, The Federal Government Can Go Too Far In The Pursuit Of Extremists, which has only been news for two thousand years so I understand that some folks are late to the party; in any event, I think I’m allowed an exception anytime some indefensibly stupid federal policy makes headlines, and institutionalized sexual harassment definitely falls on that list)

often defined as “the art of the possible.” But that’s rather vague and doesn’t describe what actually goes on. In my eyes, “politics” is a series of unresolved debates on what exactly “consent” entails.

See, apparently, if a woman gets drunk at a bar while wearing a low-cut top, she has consented to have sex with a guy. Especially if she goes somewhere alone with him, and especially if she has a history of sleeping with guys in the past. Determining whether or not she consented is a legal – and therefore, a political – dilemma.

If a man goes to work for a large corporation, he consents that any idea developed on company time belongs to the company. Especially if he signed a piece of paper agreeing to that (among a dozen other things, like wages and sick time) and especially if every other company he might work for has the same policy. Determining whether or not he has redress if the company profits off his idea is a legal decision, and politics is the sphere of law.

If I drive a car, I consent to being pulled over by cops for any reason. If I subscribe to a magazine, I consent to the views of anyone that magazine has ever quoted. If I pay taxes, I consent to the bombing of Pakistan.

And, to make this little exercise relevant, if I board an airplane, I apparently consent to having my balls touched by a stranger.

You may agree with some of the above. But if you disagree with any of those assertions, find someone who agrees with them. They’ll invariably assert some version of the following: if you don’t like it, you don’t have to be there.

And it’s true. You don’t.

If I didn’t want my tax dollars to pay for the immolation of Pakistani wedding parties, I could always move to Costa Rica. If I didn’t want half-hour lunch breaks and forced overtime, I could always quit Wal-Mart. And if I didn’t want to be groped by a GS-12 federal LEO, I didn’t have to fly.

The mere fact that I’m present means I’ve consented. And once you consent to one item, you consent to every item that follows it.

Of course, not everyone agrees with that. Right now, there’s an outcry by American air travelers who’ve decided they don’t want to be treated like criminals every time they fly. They say they do not consent to being scanned and will opt out in large numbers to demonstrate it. Against this, the TSA cites opinion polls showing how many Americans support the scanners. So apparently consent is a tricky thing to figure out!

I always feel left out of these debates. I have this childish notion that “consent” means “I said yes to it.” Or, if we take qui tacet consentiret as our maxim – that “silence implies consent,” then consent means at the very least nothing I’ve given an explicit No to. I don’t think of consent as a subatomic particle. It’s not like a cat we have to herd into the bathtub. It should be pretty clear.

But apparently it isn’t. That’s why, every few years, there’s this big party where everyone goes into booths at their local public schools in order to determine what The American People have Consented To. If the People consented to most of the same things you consented to, congratulations! There’s a lot of cheering and sometimes crying. If the People didn’t consent to what you consented to, I’m sorry! Maybe next election! You gave a good try, though.

And apparently, at some point in the last twelve years, we consented to have our breasts squeezed. I’ll bet a lot of us would like that one back! But it’s too late now. We’ll have to wait for the next Consent Hunt in 2012.

I recognize that I’m being unrealistic, of course. An empire of three hundred million people couldn’t function if every decision required the consent of every citizen at every juncture. Nothing would ever get unanimous consent, and so nothing would ever be done. You’d have the Hobbesian state of nature – the law of the jungle! You’d have a wasteland where oligarchs amassed all wealth, where the strong murdered with impunity and where the weak were humiliated with bizarre rituals enforced at gunpoint.

Obviously, I prefer the status quo. I just don’t understand it. But I guess I’ve consented to it, since I’m still here.

Nov

stars with evil eyes stare from the sky

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

In The Heat of the Night: I knew going in that this was Sidney Poitier’s movie (and it is, and no dispute there). But I had no idea it would also be Rod Steiger’s movie, too.

Steiger turns in such a natural performance that you’d swear he was a Mississippi native. He approaches every crisis with a sullen fatigue born of humidity and small-town politics. Director Norman Jewison’s added touch of having Steiger chew on gum throughout is perfect: it tempts us to compare him to a farm animal.

By being relaxed and natural, Steiger contrasts brightly with Poitier. Poitier moves through every scene with the poise of a ballet dancer (or a fencer, more aptly), holding tight reserves of anger. He’s walking through Sparta, MS, like a kabuki performer because he knows his life is in very real danger. Compare this to Steiger, who’s in the seat of his power, and the choice to make him look lazy and tired becomes genius.

I’d have known this if I did about five minutes of research on the movie beforehand. I chose to stay in the dark, though, so I could go into the movie fresh. And it paid off. In The Heat of the Night is more than just an important movie in the American canon – it’s also a really good murder mystery. It cranks the tension, it throws twists upon twists and it makes every character distinct. There are a hundred movies released every year which aren’t gripping dramas on the institutions of race and class butting head-on in the American South that can’t manage that kind of taut storytelling.

TL;DR: In The Heat of the Night is just as good as everyone says it is.

Nov

with a hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

As You Like It is, while still a popular Shakespeare play, still debated in merit. A lot of scholars see the plot as frivolous. What tension there is comes out of Rosalind’s insistence on playing a game with her suitor’s heart while in the forest of Arden. It’s rather like a sitcom, where one character has to carry the “Idiot Ball” to get the plot to go. And yet, As You Like It is still well loved (that’s one of the reasons I picked it, after all). Partly because it’s funny, partly because there are entertaining exchanges when the main characters have good chemistry, and partly because the theme – that love makes fools of everyone – still resonates.

The Longwood Players, just wrapping their fall performance of As You Like It, introduced some interesting conceits to the production. Some didn’t really work, like having the cast sit in the audience and take to the stage, donning their costumes anew, as they began each scene. The act of changing in and out of each costume created a lot of visual noise onstage that distracted from the scene. It looked especially ridiculous in some of the usurping Duchess’s shorter scenes – entering, just finishing tying on her bustle as she delivered her last line, then exiting.

However, the conceit of addressing the minor characters in the plot did work. They broke the fourth wall just long enough to drag the “usher” onstage, thrusting a script into his hands and casting him as Dennis, Charles the wrestler, Corin the old shepherd, Amiens of the exiled Duke’s retinue, and so on. This gag took a while to pay off and jeopardized a few scenes in the meantime, such as Touchstone’s “Instance, briefly; come, instance” scene with Corin. However, it paid off big by the end, so I can’t complain that much.

And the performances themselves were all fine. Rosalind (Joy Lamberton^*) and Celia (Anna Waldron) had the flawless chemistry they needed to make those roles work; both have excellent comic timing and good sincerity. Jaques (Anthony Mullin) played Shakespeare’s most verbose fool with just the right touch of pomposity, while Touchstone (James Aitchison) navigated several tricky speeches with perfect delivery. I’d never seen a performance of As You Like It which cast Phebe (Sierra Nicole Kagan) as a frumpy bully rather than a prissy bitch, but it worked hilariously well here. And Greg Nussen was wasted in the role of Silvius; he had the comic timing and charm to carry the lead role.

^*Apparently an understudy or a late change to the cast, as she’s not the actor pictured in the press release photo above. She pulled it off flawlessly, so the director got lucky.

Nov

like pun said, you ain’t even in mi clasa

Posted by Perich at 9:19 am

When NaNoWriMo started, I had this arch post in mind. I clearly had a lot to say about writing – having written four unpublished novels! – and needed to get it out there. While I wouldn’t deprecate anyone’s writing efforts, I’d make sure they knew that rushing through a novel in a month didn’t really count. My goal wouldn’t be to make people feel stupid. Just small.

And then my friend RJ announced that he’d be writing every day this month. So I said, “Well, can’t do that, now.”

Let me make clear: it’s not that I scrapped my post because I thought it would hurt a friend’s feelings. I write about things that I think will offend my friends all the time. Plus, RJ’s made of sterner stuff than that.

I scrapped my post because, if NaNoWriMo got RJ to start writing more, I was obviously wrong.

In addition to being a good friend – he got me my last job, which has now turned into something of a career – RJ is one of the smarter and funnier people I know. He’s full of clever turns of phrase. He lives an interesting life. He’s one of the very few people I believe should write more.

Any trivial event (like NaNoWriMo) that gets RJ to write more is an obviously good thing. If some offhand comment of mine had discouraged RJ from writing – “eh, it’s only a blog post every day; it’s not really worth it” – that would have been terrible. I would have been taking joy out of the world. Thankfully I was lazy, and RJ started blogging before I could say something condescending.

And this got me wondering about what else my attitude might have got in the way of.

I know I don’t rule the lives of my (few) readers. But if I keep harping on something with the same dismissive tone, I have to imagine it’s dampening someone’s spirits. There’s a difference between talking someone out of doing something terrible (like going to grad school) and talking someone out of doing something that’s good but not great.

So while I might have a post about NaNoWriMo come the end of November, I’ll use a different tone. Not out of gentle consideration (I don’t have much in me). I don’t think everybody needs to write more. But I think that the people who do need to write more need to write more. And I don’t want to shut them up.

(In the meantime, read RJ’s stuff)

Nov

american zombies: the walking dead and urban flight

Posted by Perich at 10:45 am

New post on Overthinking It that looks at zombie movies in light of America’s mid-century flight to the suburbs.

Cities, as the centers of densest population, are likely to be the greatest concentration of zombies. They’ll clog the streets with their numbers. Every person they kill will only swell their ranks. In every good zombie movie of the modern era, the refrain is the same: get out of the city. Get to the countryside. That’s where you’ll be safe.

If you consider this for a few moments, though, it doesn’t make any more sense than our earlier theories on zombie transmission. Sure, cities will be full of zombies. They’ll be packed to the fences. What happens in any hunting ground that’s overpopulated with predators? The predators inevitably die off or move on. You can wait up in your concrete fortress for the hordes to dwindle to nothing, then take to the streets.

“But what about food? You can’t grow food in a city.” Maybe not, but this is true of any place in America. Unless you live on one of the country’s remarkably few family farms, you do not have the capability to grow a sustaining diet. You need to get your food the same place everyone else does – the store. And no one imports more food than cities. Your odds of successful scavenging are much higher in an urban center than in the sparse surroundings.

Also: I’ll have more to say on The Walking Dead once the current season comes to an end. But remember when I said I wanted shows to start being good from the pilot episode onward? The Walking Dead is what I meant, only I didn’t know I meant it yet. I had a future vision of post-apocalyptic awesomeness.

Nov

’cause it’s time is time in time with your time and its news

Posted by Perich at 9:08 am

I wondered for a while how Virgin Mobile could afford to charge $25/month for the same service – 3G Internet – that other providers demanded twice as much for. Then I called their customer service line. “Hyello!” said a cheery Slav. “Thes es Kady!” She walked me through the process of transferring my phone number from my old provider to my new one. Later that evening, I glanced over at my old Motorola V551, which now showed zero bars on its monitor. No Service, it said. Unregistered SIM. Good night, old friend.

I have followed you on many adventures, Professor Coldheart. But on this, the greatest adventure ... I go first!

I was skeptical of the universal Slav bloc accents among Virgin Mobile customer service. But either they’re very well trained or they have a very thorough script. They talked me through the activation process, helped me set up my billing cycle, and even troubleshot my Internet access. It helped that I had them on speakerphone using Google Voice the whole time. I spent half an hour on Monday sitting at my desk, talking into a USB mic using free VOiP while someone twelve time zones away helped me activate the Internet on my handheld device. It’s the future; deal with it.

Having full access to the Internet on my BlackBerry has reminded me of how little of the Internet I want to see. I have my personal web-based e-mail accounts synced to it, but the conversations on the BlackBerry don’t thread. So when my friends go on about Jeff Goldblum and Biz Markie on the Jimmy Fallon show – it’s a trip; check it out – I get all fifteen e-mails. Somehow this doesn’t bother me in GMail: it’s in one thread; I can take it or leave it. But it feels wasteful to store all of that on my tiny mobile device.

The next few days, I’ll be migrating contacts from my old phone to my new one. If you text me and I don’t recognize you, I beg forgiveness. Also, apologies ladies, but I updated my girlfriend’s number first. So texting hey dear, want to hang out tonight? in the hopes of tricking me will get you nothing more than a spot on the waitlist.^*

___________________
^* Note to self: delete references to “waitlist” before posting.

Nov

give the devil his due

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Henry IV, Part 1: A bold production, full of emotion, volume, color and action by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project. This isn’t always to the show’s benefit, mind you. A lot of the actors commit the sin of starting a scene at ’8′ and building to ’10′, instead of starting at ’2′ and building there. The result is a buffet of volume that fails to engage, rather than a slow coaxing in. But the volume serves well in the boisterous tavern scenes, the passionate confrontations and of course the battle that caps off the play.

Robert Walsh, despite some issues with enunciation and an obvious fat suit, was an engaging Falstaff. He had the best comic timing of any member of the cast, and delivered his soliloquy on honor with remarkable strength. Allyn Burrows, despite being old enough to be a brother to the actor playing his father, was an excellent Hotspur: full of rage and impulse, but also capable of some genuine tender moments with his wife Kate. Joel Colodner was a better Henry than the Henry I saw in London. But it took me a while to warm to Bill Barclay as the young Prince Hal. As the gadfly prince in the first few acts, he’s too insolent and distant from the madcap comedy. He sneers rather than laughs. He does much better as the haughty prince spurred by his father to war and glory.

Some excellent choices in lighting and staging (despite one technical hiccup at the Act 3 Scene 2 midpoint). A set of lights beneath the stage, whose beams crept through the slats, were used sparingly and to good effect in the gloomier scenes. A balcony above the proscenium gave kings an opportunity to parlay with besiegers, or pilgrims to march on the high road while thieves plotted on the low road. There was a choral poem, composed by some uncredited member of the crew, that added nothing to the production. Other than that I have no complaints. It’s an excellent retelling of one of Shakespeare’s better histories; I recommend it.

Nov

every day I write the book

Posted by Perich at 7:32 am

I’ve used this metaphor a couple times in the past few weeks, so I must like it. Maybe it’s a nugget of hidden wisdom. Try it out:

The first draft of a novel is when you dump all the Legos on the table. The second (and successive) drafts are when you start building the house.

If you’re like me, you got into writing because you love to read. You like stories. You like discovering a world through well-written fiction. Because of that, when you start writing a novel you expect that what comes out of your fingers should look like what you hold in your hands when you read. You’re writing a novel, so the thing that you’re typing should look like a novel.

This won’t work.

The thing that you hold in your hands when you read (i.e., a novel) is the result of several years of work by many different people. Not just the author on the cover jacket, but her writing group or whoever gives her feedback. The people she turned to for research. Her agent, who tailored the manuscript to make it saleable. Her editor, who fixed the manuscript further to make it readable. That’s between half a dozen and twenty people. Look at the Acknowledgments page of your favorite contemporary read and do a headcount.

Your first draft will be a mess. You have to accept that. In fact, you’ll know you’re growing as a writer when you recognize the mess as you’re writing it. Many times I finish my two thousand words for the night and say to myself well, that was shit. On rare occasions, I say it to myself as I’m writing. As the words appear on screen. I type shitty words and I keep going. I know that, of those two thousand words, two hundred will survive to the final product.

But that’s fine. That is in fact ideal.

Your first draft is when you dump all the Legos on the table. And that’s not easy. You have a big bucket of Legos. You have to scoop them all into a pile, get the last few out of the bottom of the bucket, and make sure none of them landed on the rug. That’s a process.

But you can’t build a house by taking Legos out of a bucket one at a time. You can’t throw the Legos on the table and expect them to fall into structure. Your first step has to be a mess.

I’ve found that giving myself permission to make this mess improves my attitude. I don’t know if it improves the final product; I haven’t sold anything yet. But my manuscripts keep getting better. And none of the writers I’ve read would say that the first draft is supposed to be perfect.