Eruditorum Press

That is not dead which can eternally hit the snooze button

Closer to Glorifying Ecoterrorism than Neoliberalism: The Alex Reed Interview

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Alex Reed of the band Seeming (and various other projects you may have heard about) was kind enough to provide an interview. You can read my earlier review of Seeming’s deliciously good debut album Madness and Extinction here, stream the album here, and part with your hard-earned money for a copy here and at various other places where one would expect to buy music.

Hello Alex!
Hello Phil!
Much as it’s a largely debased and meaningless term, at first glance Madness and Extinction appears to be something of a concept album. So, why madness, why extinction, and why together?
Right.  I think both madness and extinction are viable alternatives to a world overrun by people convinced of their own rightness, and of their own right to control others, kill living creatures, and poison the sky.  As options go, I’d even say they’re preferable, really.
One aspect of the juxtaposition between madness and extinction is that the album has a sort of apocalyptic confessionalism: of the ten songs you wrote for it, by my count, nine of them feature the first person, including “Convincing,” in which you break an unspoken pop taboo and invoke yourself by name. What’s the appeal of such personal engagement with the apocalypse?
Music is a way of connecting with people, but I’m not going to pretend that what we have to say on this record is a message that lots of other people relate to or would want to.  Oftentimes the most rewarding art is the stuff that feels dangerous or risky, and so I made the choice with this album to give up on dance songs, on love songs, or on cheesy motivational ideas.  I like making dance music and love songs and I’ve written some very honest and hopeful stuff, but if that’s what you’re looking for as a listener, there’s a whole world of music out there tailor-made for you, and I can’t compete with it.  What I can do, though—and what I think we did with this record—is paint a picture that stares you back in the face with more than a hint of wildness and cold distance.  The risk on this record is its uninterest in relating.  It’s kind of a martian portrait.  And I think that’s what makes it exhilarating for me, and I think that people are starting to get it.
Speaking of “getting it,” I saw an exchange on Facebook where someone suggested there’s a symbolic “side flip” to the album between “Goodnight London” and “Come Back”—a feature that you more or less confirmed.  Can you talk a bit about the album’s sequencing and this two-sidedness? Is there a dramatic arc that you see to the album? Do some songs respond to one another directly?
Well, you talked about a “concept album,” and I can tell you that we never planned this to be a concept record as such.  But once we had the songs assembled, certain patterns fell into place in the sequencing.  “The Eyes of Extinction” always sounded like an opener, though finding a closer was harder. 
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“Peace through superior firepower”: The War to End All Wars

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Summary of shakedown trials for prototype codename “VOYAGER”…

In orbit around Shadir, a planet whose inhabitants are rumoured to be highly cultured and refined aesthetes, the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a passing spacecraft that’s apparently been through a massive battle, as little remains of it but debris. There’s also the larger issue that Xon and Uhura can’t pick up any lifesigns on either the ship or the planet. Kirk takes Xon and McCoy over to the ship where they meet Yra, a soldier who claims she and her ship are casualties in a planetary war that has overtaken Shadir. Before Kirk can pontificate on the tragedy of such a civilization falling to warfare, a massive blast strikes the Enterprise, rendering Decker unable to raise shields and crippling its critical systems. As the landing party returns to asses the damage, Kirk sends Yra to sickbay, where McCoy discovers that she’s actually an android.

Decker and Scotty tell Kirk the ship can’t survive another attack, but Yra claims another attack is forthcoming and asks to return to Shadir, where she might be able to help stop another projectile from being launched. Kirk agrees and takes her, Xon and McCoy down to Shadir to investigate. There, they learn that Shadir is organised around two basic premises: Upholding and preserving the sanctity of all life and the notion peace can be achieved through using armed conflict to resolve differences. The reason the ship’s sensors couldn’t pick up any lifesigns is because the Shadirians all live underground, but project their consciousnesses into android duplicates who fight a neverending war above ground and in space (an apparent “corruption” of the original purpose of Shadir). Furthermore, it turns out Yra was a double agent, and attempted to capture the Enterprise and her crew to attain a credit bonus from her superiors (so apparently war on Shadir isn’t just perpetual, it’s a form of capitalist labour as well).

I mean, it isn’t good. The fact I can barely remember any of the major plot details is probably a bad sign, as is the fact I kept thinking of the Original Series episode “A Taste of Armageddon” all throughout. Both stories look at worlds where war has become a banal fact of everyday life and is considered necessary to uphold a tenuous peace, and both stories end with a massive explosive conflict that brings about the end of the existing social order. “The War to End All Wars” comes across as the more effective and acceptable of the two because it has Kirk state on numerous occasions that war is never the solution to anything, as opposed to having him go on a bizarre tirade about humans being natural-born murderers (but then again, it damn well better come across as more effective given how morally bankrupt this show has gotten in recent weeks).

This episode’s particular tweak is the concept of voluntary rather than obligatory warfare. While it was never especially clear to me whether or not the Shadirians were engaging in this elabourate ritual for recreational purposes, there is the sense this is something they do not just to resolve disputes, but for excitement (Kirk says something to the extent of “the mistake the Shadirians made was that they became numb and needed to seek out more and greater thrills”).…

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“Allamaraine, if you can see/Allamaraine, you’ll come with me”: To Attain the All

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Bloody hell.

“To Attain the All” has got to be the worst episode of Star Trek Phase II by *far*. “Cassandra” was bad. “The Child” was awful. “Savage Syndrome” was appalling, but that was by Margaret Armen, so that’s par for the course. And nobody really expected greatness from “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?”: A brief like that is angling for major problems from the outset. But this? Wow. There’s no excuse for this.

While investigating a system of planets strung together like a pearl necklace (so *that’s* where Star Trek: Year Four got the idea from. Seriously, how do you screw up a visual like that?), the Enterprise is suddenly transported to a realm outside normal spacetime where they are visited by a hyper-evolved energy being called The Prince who claims to represent an infinitely old culture who hold the secrets of the universe, and declares he’s going to test the crew to determine whether or not they’re worthy of attaining a form of enlightenment called “The All” (and it should be an indication for how bloody long this show has been going on that a brief like that feels hackneyed and boring). The Prince says he wants two representatives to face a series of challenges, to which Decker and Xon immediately volunteer for their own reasons (Xon thinks it’s logical, while Decker is starry-eyed at the prospect of learning and new discovery). Reluctantly, Kirk agrees, but at the same time begins to work with Uhura and Ilia to find a way to free the Enterprise.

After that bit, Decker and Xon go off to rainbow space land to play Legends of the Hidden Temple. They are faced with a series of puzzles and physical challenges they must overcome by using a combination of logic and intuition to progress to the next stage and reach The All while The Prince occasionally pops in to give them advice. You thought I was kidding. I wish I was. While this is going on, Kirk begins to notice that the remainder of his crew are starting to act disturbingly similar to each other: McCoy and Chapel are having a professional disagreement, but then start to see each other’s points, Sulu is starting to display character traits more associated with Chekov and vice versa, and Uhura and Ilia are starting to speak for each other. Eventually, this culminates in the entire crew, save Kirk and Decker, becoming subsumed by The All, which turns out to be a great big ancient hive mind that goes around assimilating other people, so naturally the two manly action heroes have to go and punch some sense into everyone and aggressively re-introduce them to good ol’ American Individuality.

Christ on a bike.

Where do I begin? The All is self-evidently enlightenment, obviously coded as a Buddhist version of it to boot…and the show thinks this is an evil, horrible thing. Idiotic and embarrassing children’s gameshow trappings aside, this is the fundamental problem with this episode. It dwarfs everything else and puts Star Trek into a dangerous position the likes of which it hasn’t ventured near for at least twelve years.…

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“…a swaggering, overbearing, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood”: Lord Bobby’s Obsession

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“Lord Bobby’s Obsession” is described as “Space Seed” meets “The Squire of Gothos”. This is the most accurate description in the history of things describing other things because that’s literally what it is.

It doesn’t even pretend to be something different. It is, beat-for-beat, the exact same story as “Space Seed” with the exact same scenes and the exact same plot twists except the supervillain is an alien fascinated with the British Empire, is acting alone this time and the submissive female humanities expert smitten with him stays on the Enterprise instead of departing with him at the end of the episode. This is my least favourite kind of story to write about, because it gives me essentially no material to work with. Even Margaret Armen gave me enough to complain about that I could find 1800 words to squeeze out of “Savage Syndrome”. You could practically take my “Space Seed” post, change the names around and write your own Vaka Rangi review of “Lord Bobby’s Obsession”.

That said, like “Tomorrow and the Stars” before it, this doesn’t mean “Lord Bobby’s Obsession” doesn’t manage to improve on its source material such that this is the superior version of the story. It definitely does, and this alone makes it noteworthy and deserving of at least a little attention. Once again, the Star Trek Phase II version manages to distill out the essence of the story by removing all of its more problematic ethical hangups. In this case, most of the welcome changes come from the title character himself: Robert Standish, Third Earl of Lancashire. Modeling him after Trelane instead of Khan is actually something of a genius move, and the result is we get someone whose latent charm and charisma belies the fact he’s really a petulant, childish, self-centred wannabe with a seriously inflated sense of self worth and importance. And because Lord Bobby isn’t a godlike being, he’s just a regular guy with access to some advanced technology, this neatly avoids the problems we read into Trelane’s character back in “The Squire of Gothos”. And in doing so, “Lord Bobby’s Obsession” manages to deftly invert that episode’s structure, demonstrating that, despite everything, Star Trek really has come a long way.

What I mean by this is that the basic issue I found with “Gothos” was that Trelane is set up as a kind of dark parodic mirror of William Shatner’s interpretation of Jim Kirk, namely, a drag action hero fixated on honour, duty, valour, the chain of command and warmaking. The intended point being, as I saw it, that in spite of Shatner’s noble attempt to skewer the inherent silliness of all that by taking Kirk in a different direction then how he was originally written, by the mere fact of playing Kirk and playing the hero of this show, he was in some sense at least partially complicit in the original Star Trek‘s unsavoury predilections. The problem came about in the climactic reveal, where it turned out Trelane was literally a child, the spoiled offspring of a couple of standard-issue hyper-advanced energy beings, thus removing any claim Trelane had to offering any sort of serious critique.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 5th, 2014)

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Hello all. A lovely, if busy week, spent mostly writing Last War in Albion. The next chapter’s at 6,000 words and shaping up on the whole well. Still lots to fill in – it looks set to be a long one – but I like where I am on it for the amount of time I have to write it in.

The next Eruditorum book has fallen into a slight limbo – the copyeditor I gave it to has been busy and is behind. I need to do some shifting around and probably give her Davison/Baker to work on instead and give Baker part 2 to someone else, but I’ve not gotten my act together to send those e-mails. Hopefully this week and I can get everything back on track, but realistically, it’s looking like late summer as a best case scenario for Baker 2, and probably more early autumn. I’ll try to have Davison/Baker sooner after that, however. Very sorry for that.

I recently found myself looking up Season Eight spoilers for an utterly idiosyncratic reason that I am absolutely confident nobody has ever looked up spoilers for before. But that got me thinking about the general question of spoilers and people’s views on them.

So, to what extent do you seek out spoilers, avoid spoilers, let yourself be spoiled, or go to great lengths to not be spoiled? Do you think spoilers actually diminish your enjoyment of a text? Are they a big deal at all? Should productions put effort into keeping a tight lid on things, or should people who like spoilers be allowed to enjoy them in peace?…

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“These pages present a case of literary parasitism.” Devil’s Due

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The First Part of the Tragedy

Out in unexplored space, the Enterprise comes upon a class M planet heretofore unknown to the Federation. Taking a landing party down, Kirk learns the planet is called Naterra, and is invited by the locals to meet their beloved ruler, an elderly and highly agitated man by the name of Zxolar the Blessed. However, he is met by evasion and confrontation, as Zxolar keeps going on about the end of the world and someone named Komether and continually insisting the “contract is not yet up”. After he realises Kirk and his party have no idea what he’s talking about, Zxolar explains that Naterra is about to be destroyed and begs Kirk to help, but Kirk recites the Prime Directive at him. Soon though, Zxolar collapses and an energy form appears in the room, causing McCoy to disappear. After Kirk and Xon beam up to the Enterprise with Zxolar and call for search parties to locate McCoy, the energy form reappears in sickbay and attacks Chapel.

Eventually, it is revealed that the energy being is the aforementioned Komether, who was summoned one night many years ago by Zxolar and his five philosopher colleagues, who prayed for help to avert Naterra’s destruction due to its unchecked pollution. Komether agreed to save Naterra and grant it a thousand years of prosperity on top of that, but also promised to return after that time had elapsed to destroy the planet himself and subjugate it to his will. Zxolar and the other philosophers had hoped the millennium would give the Naterrans enough time to develop space travel and escape their planet before Komether returned, but that never happened. Realising Komether is a potential threat to the Federation and needing to locate McCoy, Kirk decides to find the contract (an actual document Komether and the philosophers signed) and challenge Komether’s legal right in a trial, with the fate of not just Naterra, but the Enterprise in the balance.

Fundamentally, “Devil’s Due” is really just Faust in a science fiction setting, which is simultaneously terribly interesting and not interesting at all. It’s trite because Faust is a stock story archetype, so adapting it for Star Trek amounts to nothing more then going through the literary motions and doing something just because it’s easy or you feel obligated to do it. In her first, and what remains one of her most landmark, works, Avital Ronell describes Goethe, who wrote arguably the most famous and influential version of Faust, as an intangible, monolithic force that defines, frequently unconsciously, everything considered “good” and “admirable” in German culture. Though this is best summed up in the fact that Goethe’s best friend believed he embodied a kind of “classical” (meaning Greek) “totality”, Ronell also describes how Goethe was massively influential on essentially every German-speaking writer and thinker.

Sigmund Freud saw Goethe as the “father” of psychoanalysis in every sense of the word (which means Freud also often feared Goethe’s disapproval). Walter Benjamin would frequently have dreams about Goethe, night terrors, in fact, as he would wake from them sobbing.…

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“Most women choose to be weak, because it makes their lives easier.”: Are Unheard Memories Sweet?

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Well, the first thing I have to say is that this episode isn’t as bad as I was led to believe it was going to be given the description, and especially considering the source material. But it’s also pretty tough to call “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” an especially good idea in the first place: When the best thing that can be mustered to say is that “It’s not as irreparably catastrophic as it could have been”, that’s not exactly praise either.

The imminent problem is that “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” was apparently based on the novel The Revolt of Man, which was an 1882 dystopian story about a society ruled by dominant, aggressive women who crush and subjugate the passive and weak men. Naturally, this results in the end of all scientific and technological progress, because that’s “men’s work” and women are incapable of properly handling it. So, the men stage a massive planetwide revolution to restore the “proper order” of things, in the first time I have ever cheered *against* an oppressed minority rising up and overthrowing their oppressors. There is no possible way adapting this book into a Star Trek story could ever conceivably be seen as anything remotely resembling a good idea, even to a creative team *this* tone deaf. And yet, here it is. That Worley Thorne somehow manages to avoid the somewhat unthinkable feat of unseating Margaret Armen as the single most hatefully reactionary writer in the entirety of Star Trek is nothing short of a small miracle, yet that doesn’t make “Are Unheard Memories Sweet?” something to get terribly excited about either.

Star Trek Phase II‘s “twist” on this story is that the alien planet is not ruled by women, but is in fact made up entirely of hermaphrodites who have both male and female hormones. The society they build is basically a stock-reiteration of the Talosians from “The Cage”, honing their powers of illusion and their “mental abilities” in lieu of developing more and better material technoscience. Apparently though, their bodies can’t manufacture the male hormones naturally, and either both or specifically the male ones are needed to control their illusory powers, so, in a scene reminiscent of “The Lorelei Signal” (which isn’t a good sign), they’ve been luring starships to their planet so they could supplant their chemical deficiency by harvesting from their crews. There’s also something about the illusions causing people to regress in age and be hypnotized and something else about the Enterprise being in a deteriorating orbit and needing dilithium crystals that the previous ship left behind and that the aliens are hiding for some reason or another, but I literally did not care enough to go back and check.

The sad thing is this is once again a really great episode for the new characters: There’s more anxiety over Xon’s youth and inexperience, Chekov is in full swing in his new role as security chief/tactical officer and even Janice Rand is back, for the first time since “In Thy Image”, and gets to join the away team early on.…

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Jerusalem, Candle in the Wind, and Princess Diana: A Reply to Popular

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So, this entire thing is a response to Tom Ewing’s fabulous post on his blog Popular on “Candle in the Wind ‘97,” which really is great, and probably worth having a look at. What follows is a rather lengthy reply that focuses on one specific aspect of his essay and runs with it for rather a lot of words. Enough words, in fact, that I thought it worth porting over here.

Specifically, I want to talk about the invocation of Blake’s “Jerusalem,” and use it to make a point that is only incidentally related to Elton John and Princess Diana, and really an excuse to highlight something that I’ve been meaning to find an excuse to talk about for years, which is that picking anything by William Blake as your de facto national anthem is the most amazingly and wonderfully fucked up thing ever.

For those playing along at home, in addition to writing the words to the hymn popularly known as “Jerusalem,” or, more accurately, to writing the poem that Hubert Parry set to music in 1916 and to writing that poem that misspelled “tiger” that you had to read in Intro to Poetry, William Blake was an outsider artist, printmaker, revolutionary, and poet who regularly had visions of angels that inspired his lengthy prophetic works in which he detailed his own personal mythology of gods and wondrous beasts battling for control of the very soul of the world.

In his reading of “Candle in the Wind ‘97,” Ewing makes the interesting note that the passing reference to “England’s greenest hills” in the lyrics in turn invokes “Jerusalem,” specifically its opening couplet “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green.” Ewing reads this as a moment in which the vaguely messianic imagery surrounding the late Princess Diana almost coheres, gesturing towards “what England might have if we finally got rid of the Royal Family” due to the hymn-version of the poem’s status as an alternative national anthem to “God Save the Queen,” noting the spikiness of invoking this in the context of Diana’s fraught relationship with the Royal Family proper. Ewing labels this reading as “tenuous,” which is perhaps, fair, except the tenuousness fits perfectly into what “Jerusalem” actually is.

“Jerusalem” is in practice part of the preface to Blake’s second-longest completed prophecy Milton A Poem. Indeed, it is arguable whether this is even true – as with many of Blake’s works, Milton a Poem is a complex textual phenomenon. Four of the engraved and illuminated manuscripts that Blake himself prepared survive. Three of these, known as copies A, B, and C, were printed in 1811, while a fourth copy, D, was printed in 1818. Despite being printed along with Copies A and B, Blake tinkered with Copy C over the years, and it more closely resembles Copy D. As a result, five plates appear only in Copies C and D, and a sixth plate is unique to Copy D. A seventh plate, however, appears only in Copies A and B.…

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“I live my life like I’ve been raised by wolves”: Savage Syndrome

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It’s Margaret Armen again. That’s really all you need to know.

It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect Margaret Armen-penned Star Trek Phase II to be: Almost comically terrible, offensive and unworkable drivel that largely misses the entire point of the show. So structurally unsound as to actually become some kind of cosmic anti-structure and loaded up with the most unforgivably ghastly racism and misogyny you can think of, “Savage Syndrome” is without question the worst episode of the show to date. No contest. It’s also probably her very worst submission overall, which wow, we’re really hitting record lows here.

There’s no point in any kind of summary, but basically, the Enterprise gets hit with a space mine that “reverts” the crew to a “primitive”, “animalistic” mindset, all save for an away team comprised of Decker, Ilia and McCoy, conveniently the three crewmembers who could most easily resolve the plot at the end of the episode, who were conveniently off exploring a derelict spaceship and conveniently decided to use a shuttlecraft so they wouldn’t have to be beamed back aboard (no, the script does not explain why they just happened to decide to use a shuttlecraft on the precise mission where it was absolutely vital that they do so). And of course, Armen’s conception of “animal instinct” is the absolute worst it could possibly be, firstly totally misunderstanding how gender roles manifest in real life animals by embracing the patriarchal assumption that female animals are always submissive breeding stock for alpha males and the appallingly racist notion that evolution is linear and that indigenous cultures are closer to animals and thus more “primitive” and “savage”. I can’t even muster up the energy to get righteously angry at this shit anymore. It just sucks. That this evil, reactionary, talentless hack is still getting paid writing gigs in fucking 1978 is beyond belief. Fuck this.

(Ironically, in spite of all of this, “Savage Syndrome” is, somewhat horrifyingly, Decker and Ilia’s best outing yet. Both get really sizeable and important parts and carry the majority of the episode’s narrative weight, given that everyone else save McCoy is incapacitated. Ilia in particular is quite good: She does manage to get kidnapped a couple times, but she frees herself, and she uses her “Deltan powers of sensuality” to manipulate the male crewmembers because of course she does, but she runs all over the ship rerouting power and just generally fixing things and, scary as it is, this is her best episode to date.)

As it would be terrible for my patience, temper, mood and general mental well-being to do so, what I’d rather do instead of meticulously going through this episode’s litany of flaws is to talk about the story’s underlying assumption. This would be, in an attempt to strip away as much of the hideous racism as is possible, the idea that simplifying one’s life is tantamount to being retrograde, going against the idea of progress. The affected crewmembers, for example, do not know how to use the modern technology of the Enterprise and resort to fashioning basic implements out of metal rods and bars.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 29, 2014)

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Hello faithful readers. I’m off traveling on a family engagement and forgot to queue one of these before I left, so am quickly banging this out on an iPad. So I’ll be brief this week.

The engagement involves an unusually large amount of me cooking, and that venison post really did go over surprisingly well, and so let’s go with that. Two questions. What’s the best meal you’ve ever had, and are there any foods or food topics you’d really like to see me get around to covering some week, since apparently food posts are weirdly popular.

Have a good weekend, all.…

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