(Content Note: The following contains descriptions of racial injustice and violence, discussions of the author’s own personal history with racism, and some use of the N-word. It is also written by a white man from the American South, and is an attempt to dicuss these issues with a presumed-majority-white audience, and as such is in no way intended to displace black voices on these issues. If you’re looking for black authors on these topics, may I recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s “Dallas is a tragedy for all of us – and shouldn’t shut down calls for justice,” Bianka Bell’s “How Pseudo-Allies Enable the Killing of Black Bodies,” and Messiah Rhodes’s “Scary Negroes With Guns.”)

“I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car any more. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.

[…]

“…he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. […] He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running. When he does that, his left hand goes in a fist and goes to his side, his right one goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me. […] At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

— From Darren Wilson’s testimony on the shooting of Michael Brown.

No Way Out (1950) is a strange bird of a film by modern eyes: approximately equal parts despairing film noir, Tennessee-Williams-style social realist drama, and Hollywood harrangue about the evils of racism. Sidney Poitier (in his first-ever major motion picture role) is Luther Brooks, a young medical doctor working in a prison ward who pretty much sets the mold for the character Poitier would spend a career portraying: well-scrubbed, morally forthright men of impeccable ethical standards who abhor violence and serve not as the Magic Negro, but the Good Negro. If Luther Brooks or Vigil Tibbs had been murdered in the street by Darren Wilson, not even the Bill O’Reillys of the world would be able to find much cause for claiming the “no angel” defense.

Opposite Poitier is Richard Widmark’s Ray Biddle, a horrifying snake of a man who finds himself being healed by Brooks after he and his brother are shot fleeing from the scene of a robbery they have committed. When Biddle’s brother dies, he doesn’t buy Brooks’ diagnosis of a long-resident brain tumor but blames “the nigger doctor” for intentionally murdering a white man.…

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I think it’s symbolic or something. (The weird doors in the background, I mean.)

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly.

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister

Dragons of Meereen: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

The Mockingbird, Petyr Baelish

The Burning Heart, Melisandre

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Direwolf, Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

The Shield, Brienne of Tarth

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont

Winterfell, the Dreadfort, and Braavos are abandoned.

The episode is in eleven parts. The first runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. It is in sections. The first section is three minutes long; the first image is of an angry Jaime, his dialogue preceding his appearance. The second section is one minute long. The transition is by dialogue, from Jaime talking about who Cersei will choose as her champion to the Mountain

The second part runs five minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Gregor to Sandor Clegane.

The third runs three minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow.

The fourth part runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Jon and Sam sitting ruefully to Tyrion’s window.

The fifth part runs three minutes and is set in Meereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion in his cell to the great pyramid.

The sixth part runs four minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by image, from naked Daario to naked Melisandre.

The seventh part runs three minutes and is set in Meereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Melisandre and Selyse looking into the fire to Daario walking out of Daenerys’s room and getting dressed.

The eighth runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a wide shot of the Hound and Arya.

The ninth runs five minutes and is also set in the Riverlands. The transition is by dialogue, with Brienne and Podrick coming to speak of Arya.

The tenth runs five minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, with Podrick having just talked about Tyrion.

The last runs eight minutes and is set in the Eyrie. The transition is by family, from Tyrion to Sansa. The final image is of the Moon Door after Lysa Arryn has taken landing on a snake to new levels.

Analysis

Structurally speaking, the elegant style of play that had been the hallmark of the season pretty much gives out here. “Mockingbird” is a jagged mess of hard cuts and piece-shuffling concerned more with positioning plot lines to be able to handle the existence of a single-location ninth episode than with anything of its own. Thankfully the season’s overall shape from “First of His Name” on, in which episodes are anchored by a sequence of escalating set pieces, largely covers for this lack, making “Mockingbird” a more or less satisfying experience.…

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I was supposed to produce an essay today. I had a whole plan and everything, which would have involved writing the first of no-doubt many essays discussing the intersection of polyamorous perspective and large-scale political movements. Then two black men were murdered on camera in less than twenty-four hours and that post felt, shall we say, less than perfectly empathetic. I have a very different post, looking at racialized violence and systemic racism coming up for Sunday, but instead of doing something serious today I figured I’d do the weekly Oi! Spaceman podcast post. I promise, we don’t deal with any kind of serious or political issues on any of the Oi! Spaceman family. Honest.

Anyway, the big news is that Pex Lives’ own James Murphy came onto Searching For Fuchal to chat about the fifth episode of Series One, “Confidence and Paranoia.” James has been watching Red Dwarf about as long as he could talk, so this was a very fun (albeit relaxed) episode. Go check it out. 

Over on They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, we’re even less on any kind of overt poltical move, chatting about sleazy sex comedies. We covered The Cheerleaders and the ulta-obscure One Night Only this week and had a really nice time doing so. The Cheerleaders is kind of an accidental art film (with lots of female nudity and Skinemax-style sex scenes) and One Night Only includes an extended sequence involving The Scary Cave, a vaguely sexual act which really must be seen to be believed. If you’re interested in listening to two increasingly-drunken men chat about titty flicks, it’s probably not an entire waste of your time. …

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So, the Chilcot Report, end result of ‘The Iraq Inquiry’, is finally out.  I understand frantic, cosplaying fans were queuing up outside bookstores at midnight, desperate to get their hands on a copy.  People were getting seriously worried that Chilcot (or TRHSJCGCB, as fans call him, for ‘the Right Honourable Sir John Chilcot G.C.B.’) was getting too old, and would die before finishing it. 

Personally, I won’t bother.  The TV series overtook it years ago.  The most recent seasons have been especially good, what with all the stuff about the rise of ISIS.  The finale to the series just gone, with the bombing in Baghdad, was very shocking, if not entirely unpredictable.  I was less impressed with the comedy storyline about the attempted Blairite coup within the Labour Party, happening right the away across the other side of the map you see in the opening titles.  It was disappointing that the TV series gave so much space to the keystone palace revolutionaries within Labour, and so much less airtime to the storyline about ISIS terrorism against Muslims, but I guess they know their audience.

I don’t need to actually read the Chilcot Report to know what the main plot developments are, not least because reviewers have helpfully spoiled it at me since the publication. 

1. The war was “not a last resort”.
2. “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities … were presented with a certainty that was not justified”… in other words, Blair & Co. deliberately exaggerated the case for war.
3. Bush and Blair had no plan for what would happen after they made their momentous decision (gee, I sure am glad politicians don’t do stuff like that anymore). 
4. The Americans ignored advice and made blunder after blunder in their administration of occupied Iraq, blunders that led directly to the subsequent chaos.
5. Saddam wasn’t an imminent threat to other countries.  It would’ve taken him sanctions-free years (which were not a likelihood) to develop WMD.  Other countries were significantly more threatening.
6. British intelligence, while taking a slightly more nuanced view than Blair’s faith-based certainties, nevertheless worked from the pre-existing assumption that Saddam had WMD, and consequently produced “flawed” intel.
7. The British Army were sent in ill-equipped, in a rush, with little planning.
8. “If the UK had refused to join the US in the war it would not have led to a fundamental or lasting change in the UK’s relationship with the US.”  So all the talk of Britain needing to safeguard its international profile was unfounded.
9. The decision that the UK’s involvement was legal was “far from satisfactory”.

The report is actually quite strong, which (I admit) surprised me.  While I was not expecting (as it seems some were) the report to openly call Blair a war criminal and demand he be strung up from a lamppost in the Strand, I was expecting the report to be another in the line of whitewashes and semi-whitewashes which constitute the long history of UK establishment ‘reports’ and ‘investigations’ into that mess of things we now refer to by the handy catch-all word ‘Iraq’.…

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Hi all.  Busy working on edits for The Last War in Albion, Volume 1, which we’re planning to get out in August.  Also, the next installment of Lost Exegesis (Solitary) is taking quite a bit of research, but this is par for the course, as we’ll be venturing into the Quran, several philosophers, and a long-defunct TV show.  In the meantime, here’s the poem I read last Christmas for the Eruditorum Christmas Spectacular Podcast, but never got posted.  So here it is.  It’s about a man coming out of a ten-day medically induced coma after contracting spinal and cerebral meningitis, complicated by pneumonia, sepsis, and a mild heart attack.  It’s a poem about my dad.

The cough is a gong, laden with wet

Uncanny strong for one so feeble

Rattles his chest like windswept shutters

on an ivy-choked wall, a decrepit

          cottage late in autumn

The hands askew in twisted palsy

Dervish fingers fly and shudder

His trembling arm rises high

Palm spread wide

          to catch the sun

The face a mask for Hallow’s Eve

Furrowed brow, sallow pallor

Wax paper skin loosely wrapped

about his jaw, a frame of balsa

         cowled with grizzled snow

Sockets dark, lids red and swollen

Eyes set deep, the one half-open

Not quite rapt, cowers from fluorescent

light, like mine, a daughter lost

         upon a moonless grateful night

The mouth is a graveyard

Lips once puckered now surround

his jaundiced tombstones found

by a mangled tongue

        cracked like desert flats

Dad’s voice:  “Oh god, oh shit, oh man

Okay, okay, I got to— wow

Fuh—fuh—  oh Jesus fuck

Oh my god, oh god, oh no

        not again”

The seizure comes like lightning

Its iron fist grips every muscle, stiff

He stares in disbelief

Are these my legs? Are these my teeth?

        Doesn’t see the flowers         

Everything chimes

Heart monitor, blood pressure,

the bed, the phone, his central line;

        no more the stoic ventilator.

 …

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Ugh. It’s the Gatiss episode.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of Kings Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen

Roses of Kings Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Ships of Braavos: Davos Seaworthy

Burning Hearts of Braavos: Stannis Baratheon

Kraken of the Dreadfort: Theon Greyjoy

Flayed Men of the Dreadfort: Ramsay Snow

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

With the Bear of Mereen, Jorah Mormont

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins, the Wall is unmanned.

The episode is in four parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in Bravos. The opening shot is of Stannis’s ship sailing across the Narrow Sea.

The second runs eight minutes and is set at the Dreadfort. The transition is by the concept of ships, from Davos hiring Sallador Sahn to Asha sailing towards the Dreadfort.

The third runs six minutes and is set in Mereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Ramsey’s smiling face to a goat herder.

The fourth runs twenty-five minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, with Daenerys coming up in conversation at the council meeting. The final shot is Tyrion smiling at having landed on a ladder and demanded trial by combat.

Analysis

Like “The Lion and the Rose,” there are several courses of vegetables followed by dessert. The vegetables are much the same – two lengthy sections dealing with Stannis and the Dreadfort. Indeed, so is the dessert – a big King’s Landing set piece, although not quite so big as “The Lion and The Rose” due to significant attrition in the number of available characters. But this is in every regard the more intensive version of the exercise. “The Lion and the Rose” built inexorably to its denouement, inserting two earlier King’s Landing scenes to build to the wedding. “The Laws of Gods and Men,” on the other hand, drops its two slogs consecutively at the start, then offers a palate cleanser in Meereen before plowing into its King’s Landing piece as one single bloc.

This is, of course, slightly unfair to both the Stannis and Ramsay scenes, as they do have several legitimate points of interest. Stannis’s scene, for instance, is the occasion for introducing a new location to the opening credits, which gives it an odd emphasis, even if the weight of Braavos as a location is not entirely clear. (Although it’s notable that Tywin and Arya both talked about it last episode, further emphasizing it as a big deal.) But this is mostly an intellectual curiosity – Stannis is on his way back out of Braavos after eight minutes, and while the location sticks around in the credits for the rest of the season (whereas the Eyrie, curiously, never gets used), nothing of its importance is actually conveyed by the episode, its introduction serving the same purpose as Liam Cunningham’s charisma, namely desperately trying to spice up a dull scene.

The Dreadfort scene is more straightforward in its efforts to make itself engaging, in that it has people hitting each other with swords.…

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(Title given to this post with apologies to Jane and Lee, who to my knowledge are not in a relationship as would be implied by the inherent parallelism.)

This week over on Oi! Spaceman, Shana and I were joined by the wonderful Jane Campbell and chatted about The Time Monster in an episode called “Esoterica, Power, and Dick Jokes,” and in which all three of that triptych make an appearance. Jane has already shared that with the Eruditorum Press audience in the link above (and had a brief digression about hooting owls in the process), so I’m assuming most of you have already seen it, but if not you the link above will send you right there.

Title and header image are actually from this week’s They Must Be Destroyed on Sight, in which Lee and I kick off this year’s sex comedy series with a look at the 1969 counterculture/open relationship classic Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. (Link goes to the podcast episode page.) Lee is monogamous (while, if you hadn’t heard already, I am polyamorous), so there was an interesting back and forth on the different character interactions and the overall meaning of the film as a whole. Some of the material I cover in this podcast is liable to make it into a future essay, so if you want an advance look at some of my thoughts on the way the sixties counterculture fed into the cultural malaise of the seventies, go give it a listen.…

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First of all, I just want to direct you all to Shana’s post from Friday, because it’s an absolute stunner. Really, everybody’s on form lately, and it’s leaving me itching to finish off Brief Treatise, because I feel like the weak link on my own site. Although the truth is that something fairly fast and easy like Brief Treatise is still useful while I finish up Last War in Albion Volume 1 revisions (which I got the last big part of done this week), typeset Neoreaction a Basilisk, and finally get some work done on the next actual chapter of Last War in Albion. So I’m busy, just not with stuff that goes on the blog weekly.

Still, I’ve been thinking about what I want to do after Brief Treatise and the Super Nintendo Project wrap. I’ve got a Jack-style series in mind called Build High for Happiness, and an ongoing thing called The Proverbs of Hell, both of which should be fun. And perhaps one-offs on things like Mr. Robot season two, which I’m terribly excited for. And probably reviews of The Obelisk Gate and Death’s End when those come out. Those will presumably come before Super Nintendo Project wraps, of course.

Meanwhile, for discussion this week… what do you want that science fiction isn’t providing for you right now? …

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