2011 April | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Apr

you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I thought I had another post lined up for Friday, but I guess I’m talking about President Obama’s birth certificate.

In its racial aspects, this is an ugly moment. As Baratunde Thurston put it, it’s not shocking to hear a rich white man asking a black man for his papers in America, except that this is April 2011. And there’s no question that this is about race. Not to suggest that the Opposition Party is furious at Obama because he’s black. They’re furious at him because he’s Ruling Party. If he were white, they’d go after every alleged mistress of his until they found one that stuck. Different tactics, same intensity. But, being a black man, it’s easy to accuse him of Otherness. No one ever thinks to accuse powerful white men of secretly being foreign citizens, even if they were born in Panama.^*

But if we consider this as a narrative about power, it becomes more complicated.

Barack Obama was born in the United States. He knew that; it wasn’t a surprise to him. Knowing that, he could watch the manufactured furor over his birthplace with detachment. He had the ability to put it to a stop the first time it came up. But he let it go for two and a half years (not counting his candidacy). Why? We can construct a story about his need to focus on the real issues, and the weirdness of America’s radical fringe, but Ockham prefers simple explanation. He did it because it helped him. He let the speculation go because it furthered his interests, and he stopped it once he thought it didn’t.

Barack Obama is a President who surfed to Washington on a wave of progressive sentiment and Ruling Party enthusiasm. He has since broken or ignored several of his campaign promises (especially the ones about transparency), prosecuted wars in five separate countries, tossed America’s working poor to the insurance companies like a gristly bone into a pack of dogs, granted protections both explicit and implicit to criminal financiers, lawbreaking telecom companies and torturers, and increased government spending even more than the last guy, who we all agree was pretty bad. Doing things like that, consistently and flagrantly and energetically, tends to disillusion the base. And when you’ve got a disillusioned base, there’s only two ways to get them back to your side: live up to the things they expect of you, or make the other side look terrifying.

“I can’t vote against the Ruling Party! You saw what happened when I voted for Nader in 2000! What if Trump gets elected?” Donald Trump will never receive a Presidential nomination. It’s not going to happen. The Opposition Party may do a bit of VP stunt casting come sweeps week, but for the foreseeable future, the face of the ticket will be a craggy white politician who polls well in the South. Trump neither owes nor is owed favors by anyone of note inside the Beltway. None of the kingmakers want him in the palace. Once you’ve been in a Pizza Hut commercial, the Oval Office is forever barred to you.

Donald Trump is too dumb to be a threat. But letting the birth certificate “debate” go on for two and a half years is a great way to keep the Ruling Party afraid of Trump and his ilk. And ending the debate by producing definitive documentation – documentation that’s existed for nearly fifty years – is a great way to earn a quick win for Team Blue. It leaves the Opposition Party with little choice but to either disavow their most excitable faction or to double down on a ridiculous claim. “Why did it take him so long to produce it?” the birthers whine. “Why is it only surfacing now?” Because you’re no longer useful to the President, guys. Go home.

* UPDATE: Ed over at Gin and Tacos gives a few examples of prior presidents and candidates who had disputable citizenship by birth, if you wanted to make a thing over it.

Apr

the economics of the death star

Posted by Perich at 5:19 pm

If you’re wondering why content has seemed so light this week, it’s because this is the only place you’ve been looking (like a sucker). Check this out:

* I tag teamed on a Think Tank with the rest of the Overthinking It crew on the economics of the Death Star blowing up a planet. This one seems to resonate, as it’s already been linked by The Economist. Whatever. It’s cool.

* If you want to see more of Overthinking It, you should check out Overthinking It Live at ImprovBoston’s Fifth Annual Geek Week. We’ve got two shows – one at 11:00 on Friday and one at 7:00 on Saturday. These shows include new material, music videos and a brand new live feature. I’ve been prepping for that all week as well.

* Plus I’ve been busy at work.

Apr

it’s a dirty story of a dirty man and his clinging wife who doesn’t understand

Posted by Perich at 8:09 am

The Kill Zone is one of my favorite writing blogs. It’s a group blog, with each day of the week covered by an author in the thriller/mystery/horror genre. The authors are all big enough to have years of publishing experience, but not so big that they don’t have time to field questions in the comment threads.

Every once in a while, they offer “first page critiques.” Readers can submit the first 400 words of a manuscript to the site and get feedback from one of the writers. Since writing a killer opening is essential in making a book saleable for a new author, this is an amazing service. Slots fill up quickly and the feedback can be harsh.

So, if you wonder why I’m grinning like an idiot this week, now you know.

If you don’t give (or receive) a lot of writing criticism, you might wonder what I’m so psyched about. Most of Jordan’s response is critique, after all. Things I need to work on. How to structure the scene, where to start it, etc. And everyone prefers praise to prodding.

Part of growing as a writer, however, means knowing that what you write is imperfect. It’s acknowledging how much work a draft needs – a lot, a little, minor polishes – even if you don’t know where it needs work. There’s a big difference between a story that needs to focus on different elements in order to work and a story that just doesn’t work.

You can teach craft. But it’s much harder to teach the fundamentals. And what’s got me laughing behind my hand with surprise is reading the following:

Generally I like the voice of this woman character. She comes across as a no nonsense person who could sustain a reader’s interest with the uniqueness of her character’s attitude and her low key fashion sense. And her attachment to alcohol could prove to be interesting as baggage.

[...]

Even though this scene could be written better, it shows promise with a compelling character voice.

[this from James Scott Bell, another TKZ author] I like where this scene begins, late night phone call, as mentioned. That’s what I call a “disturbance” and is where all novels should begin–something out of the ordinary rippling the character’s ordinary world. “Your story begins when you light the match, not when you lay the wood.”

I can do this. Craft I can polish; structure I can rebuild. But I can tell a story that gets experienced authors in the genre wanting to read more.

All right, enough basking. Back to the keyboard.

Apr

death as surprise, death as interruption

Posted by Perich at 7:48 am

New post up on OTI, in which I rave aboutAMC’s The Killing:

The Killing is a police procedural for people who know police procedurals backward and forward. In the pilot, it plays to all the tropes we expect. Nubile victims being chased through the woods by flashlight-wielding killers. Tired cops who’ve seen it all before. Working class suspects. The Killing lays out every scene that we know should be coming. And then it screws with them. Not just once, but three times. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times (to quote Ian Fleming) is enemy action.

Why is Sud rattling our expectations like this?

Some spoilers for the pilot, but really, just watch the damned thing already.

Apr

winter is coming

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Game of Thrones: As good as anyone could have expected.

It betrays its TV roots by having most of the important plot developments narrated, rather than shown. We learn through exposition about Jon Arryn’s murder, about the bond between Ned Stark’s dead sister and King Robert, about the Targaryens’ need to raise an army to reclaim their throne. Such are the limits of shooting on a tight budget. It’s all skillfully done, but it suggests the limits of the “language” of television.

That said, the casting is phenomenal. Not just because the actors all look their parts – the offensively handsome Jaime, the cynical imp Tyrion, the jovial King Robert, the beautiful but proud Daenerys and her mad brother Viserys, and so forth. But because the actors all have amazing chemistry. Jaime and Tyrion have one scene together, yet it communicates perfectly how a handsome swordsman and a twisted dwarf could get along. We get a sense of Magister Illyrio’s unctuous scheming in just a few scenes. And even characters we haven’t properly been introduced to yet – the Hound, Theon Greyjoy – make their mark with one or two tossed-off lines.

I’m not thrilled with Sean Bean as Ned Stark. But Bean does grim well, and Ned Stark’s supposed to be honorable to a fault. Catelyn Stark hasn’t been given much to work with yet, but she’ll have more material in later episodes. And of course the best characters haven’t arrived yet – Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish, Lysa Arryn, and all the colorful minor characters that turn this story into a world.

So now there’s this, plus The Borgias, plus The Killing to watch. Time to quit my day job.

Apr

this is your mission; pretend it’s television

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

NATO bombs Tripoli

NATO warplanes launched air strikes on the Libyan capital Tripoli on Thursday and state-run Al-Libiya TV channel [Yes, I know, not the most pristine source - Ed.] reported that there were casualties.

“Tripoli is now subjected to air strikes. There are civilian casualties,” a presenter said.

Reuters correspondents [is this better? - Ed.] reported hearing four blasts and saw plumes of smoke rising from the southeast of the city.

Let’s set aside for the moment the legalities of this war, the U.S.’s bipolar attitude toward Qaddafi over the last decade, the probable efficacy of a purely aerial campaign at ousting an entrenched dictator, the U.S.’s abysmal track record at picking sides in an African coup, the tremendous expense on an already debt-withered America, etc. All the trivial shit. Put that to the side for now.

I’m going to ask something purely tactical.

Let’s say I’m a resident of Al Jabal al Gharbi, one of the provinces between Misrata and Tripoli. I’m in my fifties. I’ve got a wife, three kids and a couple grandkids. I did some fairly undemanding maintenace work for Waha Oil Company, one of Libya’s nationalized oil producers – it paid well enough for me to retire. Like 90% of humanity, I’ve never been very political. Qaddafi gets on the TV and says some radical shit sometimes, and I hate having to pay off NOC officials just to get my reports approved, but it’s a living. So this is me: just a regular guy living between the site of a rebel uprising and the nation’s capital with no stake either way.

How do I avoid getting killed?

I have no desire to take up arms and join the rebellion. While it’d be nice to see Qaddafi go, I have my doubts that al-Hasidi is the kind of man I want to replace him. Plus, I’m over fifty. But I’m not going to put on a uniform and enlist in Qaddafi’s army, either (see the above).

If I’m driving to visit my sister in Tripoli, how do I avoid getting blown up by a NATO airstrike? If I hunker down in my house in Gharyan, how do I avoid rebels fighting the pro-Qaddafi forces in my neighborhood? If the rebels accuse me of loyalty to Qaddafi, how do I avoid being shot? If the loyalists accuse me of aiding the enemy, how do I avoid getting executed?

All I want to do is stay alive. How do I do that? And how do NATO airstrikes assist in that end?

Apr

so we’ll go no more a-roving

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

There’s an indifferent bar on Mass Ave in Cambridge called the Asgard. It’s an Irish pub. Don’t ask me what Asgard has to do with the Irish, although the Norse certainly had their way with Ireland a dozen centuries ago. Asgard differs from other Irish pubs in Boston in degree but not distinction. The dark, faux-ancient wood that makes up the bartop and tables is darker and fauxier; the buttressed ceilings are higher; the Guinness drafts are pricier. Otherwise, nothing separates Asgard from Kinsale, Joshua Tree, Tavern on the Square, Biddy Early’s, the Black Rose, Crossroads, O’Brien’s, An Tua Nua, Clery’s, the Green Dragon, Lir, J.J. Foley’s, Matt Murphy’s, the Druid, the Field, River Gods, Phoenix Landing, Tommy Doyle’s, Grafton Street, Union Street or the Emerald Isle. They have trivia on Tuesdays, live music on some Fridays and, until about two weeks ago, Boston’s best karaoke on Wednesdays.

I should know. I was there.

To have a good karaoke night, you need alcohol, forgiving friends and karaoke (in that order). Very few people like to sing with rockstar presence unless there’s a drink nearby. There’s no point to belting out your favorite 80s hits, New Jack Swing or showtunes unless you have an audience. And you need a song catalog, a monitor to prompt you, and some decent speakers. Those first two are easily attained. It’s the third one that’s the hurdle: finding a catalog that covers pop hits and buried classics, in a bar that has a good sound system and is the kind of place you wouldn’t mind drinking.

In March 2007 I was still in Neutrino, an ImprovBoston house troupe that did improvised video vignettes, filmed and edited together live. Dave had recruited me. One evening, Dave told us about this karaoke night he and John S. had stumbled onto at the Asgard. Since the Asgard was right around the corner from our rehearsal space, and Rachel V. and I needed a drink anyway, we followed. The bar was nearly empty. Baseball season hadn’t really started yet, it was Wednesday and it wasn’t dark yet.

Paul, the karaoke DJ, had an effortless grin and the towniest accent that the North Shore has yet produced. He had scattered thick books across several tables. You didn’t need to fill out a slip to request a song; nothing so 20th century. He had every song in his catalog on a hard drive. Requests were kept in order by some descendant of the WinAmp player. I paged through the back, found one of my favorites, and whispered it in Paul’s ear.

“Primal Scream?” he asked. “That’s not one of those death metal bands, is it?”

Over the next four years, Wednesday night at the Asgard went from a ghost town to a dense pit of humanity. Dave, Rachel and I recruited the rest of ImprovBoston to come by after shows or rehearsals and sing their weary hearts out. I expanded my catalog from inoffensive pop to rock, classic hip-hop power ballads and the most depressing sorts of folk. People made friends with me, bought me drinks and challenged me to freestyle rap battles (all true). Wednesday night karaoke followed me through three apartments, three jobs, four haircuts and a variety of hook-ups both awesome and ill-advised.

But the heart must pause to breathe: two weeks ago, karaoke at the Asgard was suddenly canceled. I wasn’t there; I didn’t see it; all my details are hearsay. I hadn’t gone as often in the last year. Karaoke was no longer a weekly ritual to convince myself that I was a well-liked rockstar. I had discovered that I was well-liked, even for my faults, and that was enough. But there were still plenty of people who wanted their fix every week – for that or other reasons – who now lacked an outlet. And there were people I almost never saw but for Wednesdays.

“Leaving people is a sadness,” Frank Herbert wrote. “A place is just a place.” Paul B still does karaoke gigs throughout the Boston metro area, and may be coming back to Cambridge soon. I can still find most of my friends in the bar of the ImprovBoston lobby. But on hearing that karaoke had been canceled, I realized that I had no reason to ever set foot in the Asgard again. It was the black box in which the biggest party of the week happened. Now the sets were struck and the actors were moving on. I could leave the Asgard without so much as a second glance.

But recollection is a tactile thing. We remember sensations first, ideas second. We invest our memories in the taste of beer, the swirl of dim lights and the sound of our own voices through beat-up amps. It’s easy to forget that there’s nothing special about the Asgard in itself, and that they pour a better Guinness elsewhere.

Apr

wonder why the right words never come

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Could someone spoil the ending of these two movies for me?

Appaloosa: I have no idea why this movie was made. I got maybe half an hour into it before ejecting the DVD and resealing the Netflix envelope. The movie makes no effort to invest the audience in its characters. There’s an evil land rancher (Jeremy Irons), but aside from shooting a U.S. Marshall he doesn’t seem that evil. There are the good guys who ride into town to stop him (Ed Harris; Viggo Mortensen), but they don’t seem particularly good. And before you say, “Well, maybe the point is that the line between good guys and bad guys was grayer than we think in the Wild West,” that movie has been made already. It was called Young Guns 2 and it was fantastic.

Ed Harris directed the movie, which explains the tremendous amount of Ed Harris jawing away that we see in the first thirty minutes. He’s also not good at framing shots, or hired a cinematographer who wasn’t. I know it’s easy to make fun of Renee Zellweger for looking pinched, and that’s unfair; she can be quite cute at times. But the first time we see her – the shot that’s supposed to convince us that Ed Harris’s character has been swept away by her beauty – she’s disembarking from a train with the light at her back and the wind in her face. Perhaps it was a train full of wasps where all they served were lemons and we’d know that if we read the novel on which this was based, but it’s the worst that Mrs. Z. has ever looked. I say this not to make fun of her appearance but to make fun of Harris as a director: that was the best shot you had, Ed? Seriously?

You never get a sense of what’s at stake. It’s not too much to ask that our heroes be either heroic or (if anti-heroic) interesting. Clint Eastwood wasn’t a good guy in most of his Westerns, but he at least had attitude. Viggo Mortensen sounds like he read the opening voice-over for Appaloosa with his head in his hands. I haven’t turned off a movie early since Bad Boys 2 and that was years ago.

Tequila Sunrise: Now this one was better. This is the first movie I have any clear memory of seeing a trailer for on TV. Kurt Russell plays a vice cop in L.A. County; Mel Gibson plays the mid-tier drug dealer he’s known since high school. They’re torn between their love/hate relationship with each other and by their attraction to restauranteur Michelle Pfeiffer. Robert Towne (The Last Detail, Chinatown) wrote and directed.

It’s not perfect. The melodrama’s excellent: people get soaked to the skin and make out while a saxophone solo throbs in the background. Characters stare into the distance, lit by the sun through window slats, a cigarette ashing, unacknowledged, in a limp hand. And the performances are all compelling. Russell is the cool one, with the Pat Riley haircut and the cocky retorts. Gibson is the passionate one, two inches away from crazy (as he always has been). And Pfeiffer’s got the attitude, as well as the mix of contempt and fascination at the way the two male leads play off each other.

So why didn’t I finish it? Because I was late for a date, and I was watching it on Netflix Instant Streaming, which requires Microsoft Silverlight, the worst means of displaying media since RealPlayer. I tried to resume watching it twenty-four hours later, only for Netflix to tell me that I had hit an issue common to people who try to use Silverlight on a Mac. The best solution (said Netflix) would probably be to uninstall and reinstall it. An issue common enough for the largest retailer of online streaming movies to know about it and have a Troubleshooting page ready, but apparently not common enough for Microsoft to fix it. I cannot express my hatred for Silverlight enough. I would rather uncover the story of Tequila Sunrise on Sumerian clay tablets, wiping away the dust of centuries with the finest of brushes to find that one scene where Gibson and Pfeiffer fuck in a hot tub, then reinstall this piece of shit.

Neither IMDb nor Wikipedia have a full synopsis, so could someone tell me how it ends? Along with Appaloosa? Because I can no longer be bothered to ingest movies in their conventional format, I guess.

Apr

book of days

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I’d tell you to see Bad Habit Productions’ staging of Book of Days, but I saw it on its last weekend. Like an idiot. Because I could have seen it when it opened and then told all of you to see it.

The tricky part about being a critic is having to remind people that you’re a critic, which I do by using lots of critical, polysyllabic language. I talk about the pros and cons of a given piece of art, compare it to other works in the same genre, and try to close with something clever. It’s a lot of effort for something small and local, and it’s a ridiculous amount of effort for something I’m doing without pay. But it enhances my ability to appreciate art, particularly theater, which I think needs a lot of work.

And then something like Book of Days comes along and fucks that shit to hell.

I watched the entire play, all two hours and something minutes of it, with my mouth hanging open. The language is crisply real with the appropriate hint of Neil Simon timing to make it funny, or poignant, as needed. The show introduces us to a dozen characters in the first ten minutes and makes them all distinct and human. And the story directs all this effort, this soaring cathedral of tragedy and comedy and struggling human endeavor, over a nothing of a town in Missouri! Set in the modern day, on the doorstep of the 21st century; not in the period where it’s okay to be a nothing town. Add to all that a compelling plot – a will-they or won’t-they, a whodunnit, a play-within-a-play – and it’s an astonishing triumph.

But none of this works without good actors. There are several lines – especially when the town’s wealthiest man reminisces about his son’s basketball victories, or when the protagonist’s husband waxes enthusiastic about good cheese – that could be butchered by a mediocre actor. Or even by a good actor who tried too hard. Thankfully everything moves and flows in a way that keeps the audience engaged. Everyone’s good, but three players in particular deserve praise: Chuck Schwager’s Walt, the owner of the factory that keeps the town going, who’s both respected and hated at the same time, full of folksy wisdom but blind to the realities in front of him; Casey Preston as James, a rising political star in both the State assembly and the local church, who delivers his good ol’ boy attitude with the perfect pitch of knowing arrogance; and Anna Waldron as Ruth, who keeps heart as her world falls apart around her, drawing strength from mythology in order to cleave to what’s true.

“I feel bad about telling other people that they were ‘good’ in their shows,” I said after the play, “because I don’t have the right words for this.” It’s a fantastic effort with a fantastic piece of material. And it’s new to me, too. This new avenue has been opened up to me in Lanford Wilson’s work – a man who apparently wrote plays for four decades, which if they were half as good as this are better than most theater, and died two weeks ago. And not just a good play, but a good play done perfectly, with so much attention devoted to pacing and staging and timing and the details that bring characters to life. And it’s about a real town, filled with real people, in a real part of the world, even if it’s about the bookkeeper of a Missouri cheese factory playing Joan of Arc.

You can’t see the show now. But you can see whatever else BHP does, because they consistently pick good plays, cast good actors and then demand good performances out of them.

Apr

written by an Italian poet in the thirteenth century

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Caught the two-hour premiere of The Borgias, Showtime’s entry into the “Blood, Tits and Scowling” genre that’s all the rage on premium cable. Considering the hard sell that HBO’s putting on Game of Thrones, The Borgias caught me almost completely off guard. Where’s the NYC food truck painted like a sacristy? Whither the “Indulgence” gifts on Facebook? Anyway.

The Borgias: Aside from the usual weaknesses of a pilot episode, an excellent introduction to Vatican politics. Jeremy Irons is suitably restrained, for once, as Rodrigo Borgia, vice chancellor of the College of Cardinals on the eve of being elected Pope Alexander VI. He’s attended by his son, Cesare Borgia (Francois Arnaud), who’s also a priest but ironically seems more ruthless. Cesare seems to hold the role played by Michael Pitt in Boardwalk Empire: the loyal, cold-blooded son, willing to do what the father isn’t. He’s aided in this cause by a conveniently recruited assassin, Micheletto (Sean Harris), and his brother in the papal armies, Juan.

Pope Alexander VI starts the pilot by telling his mistress, Vanossa (Joanne Whalley – remember her? she’s still great), that he can’t be seen with her in public. He ends the episode in a cozy affair with Giulia Farnese (sultry-eyed newcomer Lotte Verbeek), much to the family’s chagrin. But Giulia’s not a lovestruck innocent: she quickly begins consolidating her power by befriending the Pope’s daughter, Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger). Lucrezia and Cesare’s relationship is already uncomfortably close for brother and sister; we’ll see if the Pope’s threats to marry her off put a strain on it.

The pilot suffers from the need to cram a great many plots in a mere two hours. Confrontations and reconciliations that probably took months in real history take seconds on screen. More than once, we see something akin to the following:

Pope Alexander VI: … and I’m making my mailman the Archbishop of Barcelona.
Cardinal Orsini: SIMONY! I denounce you!
Pope: Sounds like someone doesn’t want the awesome papal offices I’m selling.
Orsini: What? Me? Nonsense.
Pope: Good.
Orsini: Speaking of, why don’t you come to a party I’m throwing tomorrow?
Pope: I don’t know; you were just threatening me. Are you sure I won’t be poisoned?
Orsini: Oh, come on. “Poison-free in ’93″, that’s my motto.
Pope: Well, I’m between mistresses at the moment, so I’m free.
Orsini: Excellent! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to swing by the pharmacy to pick up some, er, flavorless blood thinners. Back in a trice!

And so on.

This baldness aside, the series benefits from good cinematography and great performances. When we first see Alexander VI greet the citizens of Rome on the Vatican balcony, blessing the crowd with a dignified wave of his hand, the parallel to the recent coronation of Benedict XVI is striking. Every scene in the Church drips with rich robes, the luster of gold, and the dim lights that would evoke backroom politics in a later century. The Cardinals all look old and corrupt, barely capable of putting up a front for each others’ lies. The younger generation, embodied in the Borgia family, appear young and vibrant. Cesare is most frequently filmed in motion, his clerical robes swirling around his heels as he stalks down one corridor or another.

I still have high hopes for Game of Thrones, but it’s got a strong competitor to live up to.