Eruditorum Press

The bodies on the gears of the culture industry

City of the Dead 8: The Psychopath

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Eruditorum Press is thrilled to announce the return of Holy Boson and the City of the Dead podcast to our… whatever you call airwaves for a podcast. Anyway, this is the famed “lost film” of the Amicus set, with a story that I know Holly related to me once, but that I’ve completely forgotten the details of. I’m sure she explains it in the podcast. Anyway, with a script by legendary horror writer Robert Bloch, one assumes this is potentially a hidden gem. Or possibly a legendary trainwreck. Find out right here.…

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A Witness To Its Own Myopia

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One of the most fascinating figures in William Blake’s mythology is Ahania, the Emanation of Urizen. Like all of the Emanations, she provides the feminine aspect of a concept, in this case reason and the intellect. Where Urizen is a tyrannical figure of single vision and Newtons sleep, deriving absolute and universal law from precise and mathematical measurements and using it to ensnare the world in the net of religion, Ahania represents pleasure and curiosity – the carnal urge to discover and understand. Her separation from Urizen is what dooms him to his fall; her eventual reunion with him his redemption and a fundamental part of Eternal salvation.

Jonathan Blow’s second game, the would-be masterpiece The Witness, attempts to be an extended hymn to Ahania. Its purpose, as Blow stresses in interview after interview, is to explore the experience of learning and discovery. His mechanism for this – indeed the defining mechanism of the game – is a maze puzzle. The basic form is simple: trace a line from a starting node (a big circle) along a path to an ending node (a small rounded nub at the end of a line). The variations are numerous, with the game ultimately having several hundred iterations of this puzzle type of varying difficulties, arranged on panels across a sizeable island to explore.

There is genuine elegance to how this unfolds. Observe the progress of the opening area. You begin at the dark end of a tunnel, an illuminated door ahead and above you. You walk up to it, and find the literal simplest form of the game’s puzzle, and the game gives you one of its handful of actual instructions as it suggests pushing X to attempt the puzzle.

You trace the line, the door opens, and you get a second door.

Which opens into this courtyard.

And when you go to investigate that panel up ahead, it’s a souped up version of the first two doors (shown here at the moment of solution).

Solving it causes the wire coming out of it to ostentatiously illuminate, and you can trace it to a couple other panels of growing complexity, and finally to gate with this panel to the right of it.

A bit of poking at it reveals that you can’t complete the maze through the black bars (what a surprise), but if you trace the other wires you can find panels that will lift the bars, allowing you to complete that maze and open the gate.

Obviously the game gets harder. Indeed, it will in the very next area, which we’ll look at in a moment. But it’s worth explicitly highlighting the step-by-step education given here. Indeed, of particular note is the second puzzle – the little L-shaped path that comes between “trace a line” and “here’s a maze with dead ends.” The truth is that essentially no player actually requires both it and the initial straight line puzzle as preparation for the mazes. As an education in how the game works – which is obviously what this is, being an initial area of a game and all – it’s going ostentatiously slowly.…

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“Unloved”: Attached

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Could it ever have worked?

That’s a question failed romances and failed engineering projects seem to get asked all the time. There’s an allure to the counterfactual, the idea that had just a few things happened a bit differently, than all our lives would have ended up immeasurably better as a result. When confronted with a failure, or a perceived failure, it’s perhaps only natural that we would pick through the rubble and self-reflect after the fact. Sometimes we say things like “it was doomed from the start”. Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20.

In reality, no endeavour is ever “doomed from the start”. At the outset, each project has just as much potential for success, or for failure, as any other. Technology must always start as a fiction, and every fiction is equally real. What governs the success or failure of a technology is whether its constituent human and nonhuman actors can work together to keep it alive throughout the process of reification. It requires a sustained loyalty and commitment from all given players, and this is what we mean when we talk of love. Because that kind of unyielding resolve only comes about through a kind of love, because we can only ever be that committed to things we love very deeply. Actors need to adapt and evolve as time goes on, and they have to care enough about their project to have the willingness to adapt alongside it. From an engineering perspective, the moment where something is post-facto declared a success or failure only comes about when the actors resonate together in such a way that the project becomes what can be considered a material, tangible reality.

But this is not necessarily a healthy approach to take when examining romantic relationships between human (or perhaps humanoid) actors. There’s no bigger or better sign of an aimless, self-absorbed and self-indulgent man who’s completely lost his way in life (and let’s be honest, this is almost always a man) then the guy who randomly calls up his ex to ask if things could ever have worked out between them and if they ever had a chance at “really going the distance”. In real life, romantic relationships typically end for a good reason, usually that the people involved have either grown apart from each other (which happens way more than people are willing to admit) or they’ve slowly realised that they probably weren’t a great match for each other to begin with.

So the question has to be asked. Could it ever have worked out for Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher? And the answer, quite simply, as far as I’m concerned, is no. Firstly, I still maintain there’s too much of an age difference between Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden, and thus their characters-Ten years is simply far too large a gap. That puts them, quite literally, in two different generations. And as much as Captain Picard may symbolically be linked to his younger crew instead of other people his age or older, there’s still an unpleasant cultural precedent involved in pairings like this I feel Star Trek: The Next Generation should not be perpetuating.…

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Shabcast 16 – Do White Saviours Dream of Electric Sheeple?

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I’m planning to make up for the lack of any Shabcasts in February by providing loads in March, and here‘s the first. 

This time I’m joined by the amazing Mayor Kevin Burns – my favourite US politician, and one half of the Pex Lives team – to talk about the Matrix movies.  For some reason.

I wanted to hear him indulge his hate, you see.  I went in intending to sortakindamaybe half-play the role of ‘good cop’ (at least with regards the first film) but that didn’t last long.

Please enjoy our show, in which we analyse (i.e. pillory) the three films, review the old ‘do movies cause violence?’ debate, complain about the Hollywood CGI singularity, ponder the unfortunate obsessions and attitudes of the late 90s-early 2000s, and look back with sadness and shame on our wasted youths.

Download here. 

Next time I’ll be joined by the wonderful Shana of the Oi! Spaceman podcast, to talk about some good films, the 80s Jim Henson fantasy masterpieces The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

 …

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Comics Reviews (March 2, 2016)

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And so begins the last month of the long and terrible WicDiv hiatus.

The Discipline #1

I wanted to like this. I mean, that’s implicit in the fact that I picked up the first issue. Peter Milligan is famously hit and miss, but when he’s on he’s good enough that I have second thoughts about not making him a main character in Last War in Albion. And then there are things like this. 2016 is the right time for a weird fiction erotic thriller comic with a female lead. It’s an on-point, interesting idea for a book. The problem is that Milligan’s lead, while short of a cliche, is visibly taped together from stock characters and stereotypes, seeming to wander around buffeted more by the needs o the plot than by any sort of coherent internal psyche. Right book, wrong writer. Oh well.

Batgirl #49

An artist’s jam of an issue that holds together better than those usually do. There’s a sense in which this feels like it’s building to an end, which would be a pity, as this really is a solid take on the character. All of which said, I’m just not managing to invest in the Fugue as a villain, and this somewhat by-numbers “psychic rescue” issue doesn’t really change that. 

Darth Vader #17

This book’s monumental commitment to the slow burn continues, although at least there’s some actual heat being generated at this point. Gillen is managing to foreground Vader’s interiority without actually going inside it, which is compelling; this is the first time in possibly all the Star Wars I’ve ever consumed where I’ve felt like the angry and impulsive character of the prequel trilogy and the majestic villain of the main trilogy were actually the same person, which is quite a feat. I’m sure once the heat on this arc gets intense enough it’ll move up nicely in the weekly rankings. For now, a solid effort. 

Digital code: FCM5RNYY1KB4

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Adventures Year Two #6

Snagged on a whim because “River Song and Abslom Daak” was too tempting a combo to reject. Not entirely sure why John Hurt is on the cover, but other than that this was a charmingly overstuffed banquet of continuity culminating in a reveal I saw coming a few pages off and thought “no, they can’t possibly actually be going to do something this gloriously wanky.” They did. I punched the air. Might well go back to this; certainly will be getting Part Two. Still a pity about the art. 

Invincible Iron Man #7

Bendis’s typical style of decompression pays off nicely in an issue that’s mostly a funny and character-heavy dialogue between Tony and Mary Jane. Deodato’s art ends up providing a strange and perverse contrast, as he’s stuck trying to make preposterously talky pages fit his style. The results are the best pages I’ve seen him do in recent memory. The book loses focus on the back half as the need to do plot takes over, but this is still probably the best issue of this eternally frustrating book to date.…

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“The one I love”: Rules of Acquisition

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Along with “The Homecoming” /“The Circle”/“The Siege”, “Rules of Acquisition” is probably the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story that became genuinely iconic to me.

As I’ve mentioned before, though I was familiar with the show before this run of episodes, my familiarity basically consisted of dissociated images-The water bath clone scene from “A Man Alone”. Some promotional art of a runabout. The offhand conversation in the shadows under a staircase somewhere. That elusive scene of Dax on the parallel bars that I’m half convinced I completely imagined. Vivid as it was, my memory of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in its first season was fragmented, consisting only of brief flashes of lucidity. This is very much a consequence of the way I watched the show at that point: I could only ever catch the odd glimpse of it while flipping through the channels, because my local affiliates stupidly ran Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine opposite one another, and I wasn’t going to chance missing my favourite show to take a gamble on its younger sibling.

(This was not an uncommon happenstance, by the way: I am by no means the only one who made that decision when faced with similar circumstances, and that’s a major contributing factor to the failure of every post-Next Generation Star Trek series.)

So while my experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation was similar, I was always better researched on that show and it didn’t take me long to connect my sensory memories with actual plots and episode titles: I had enough reference guides, VHS tape rentals were not unheard of and eventually the reruns became commonplace enough I gained a working knowledge of that show rather quickly. But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine I pretty much literally never got to watch again for another ten years: Between the initial run of the first and second seasons and the DVD release in 2003, I had no material critical experience with actually physically watching the series whatsoever. As a result, there were only a handful of episodes of this show I was ever intimately familiar with at the time. And by no coincidence, these were the ones “novelized” in the issues of Starlog’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine that I owned, specifically issues five and seven.

The magazine itself is getting its own chapter in this book because it absolutely defined my exposure to and formative impressions of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s world so I have to keep myself from going into too much detail about it here. The reason it’s relevant to tonight’s episode is that “Rules of Acquisition” was the first episode covered in issue seven, which happened to feature our very own Jadzia Dax as its cover girl. This kind of sets the stage, because while I know “Rules of Acquisition” is kind of a sequel to last year’s “The Nagus”, as far as I’m concerned this one is all about Jadzia Dax: This is the story where the Jadzia Dax I know and love finally emerges fully formed and in bloom.…

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Lost Exegesis (The Moth) — Part 2

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You can find Part 1 of the essay here. Usually, the essay is spoiler-free until we get to the “Looking Glass” portion after an intertextual intermission. In this case our selected cultural artifacts are all much more interesting in how they function prophetically, so here’s your advance notice of spoilers from here on out.

Intermission

Saint Jack

SAWYER: Ah, damn. Didn’t I tell you? Word from the valley is Saint Jack got himself buried in a cave-in.

Let’s start with Saint Jack, a movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich based on the novel by Paul Theroux. Now, Paul Theroux, we should point out, isn’t just a novelist, he’s also justly known as a great travel writer, thanks to his travels to Africa, Singapore, and Japan. He’s earned the enmity of several governments, largely for bringing to light certain aspects of their countries which they’d preferred to keep covered up.

That said, I think the movie is much more celebrated than the book, so that’s what we’ll be attending to. It was shot in several months entirely on location in Singapore, under the pretense of being a standard rom-com (“Jack of Hearts”) as opposed to an adaptation of Saint Jack. After it was released, the movie was banned in Singapore for decades. So it’s got that, at least, in common with the book.

(What is it about “covering” things up? Come to think of it, Jack covers for Charlie at the end of The Moth, lying that Charlie has the flu to make his withdrawal more socially acceptable.)

The film is possibly some of the best work by Bogdanovich and lead actor Ben Gazzara, who plays the titular Jack Flowers. Jack Flowers is an American expat living in Singapore in the 70s. He makes his living by running a brothel, which also supports his drinking. Jack makes it work because he does not judge the people in his life. It’s not like he’s in a position to without being a hypocrite, but then we see all kinds of hypocrites in Jack’s line of work. He doesn’t use force or intimidation or privilege to navigate the world – no, he looks at everyone as deserving of his attention and respect and warmth, and even when he’s proven wrong he does little more than walk away. So Jack is a “saint” in this rather spiritual respect, in how he manages his relationships, not in terms of his “sins.” He’s a saint, but he’s no saint.

The movie meanders for quite a while, basically a series of vignettes featuring Jack interacting with his clients, workers, and other people, but it’s got a couple of pivotal moments. The first is when the local mob takes down Jack’s place of business, wrecking his establishment and dispersing his people, while marking his arms with tattoos comprised of various epithets and obscenities. This is actually about the halfway point of the movie. Jack goes to another tattooist to put down more tattoos that effectively integrate the Asian hieroglyphs into pictures of flowers.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.06: The Climb

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Go Up, Up The Magical Ice Wall Ahead

State of Play

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

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, the Hand of the King Tywin Lannister

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

The Burning Heart, Melisandre

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

The Direwolf, Bran Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Stag, Gendry

Stags of King’s Landing: King Joffrey Baratheon

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins, Yunkai is empty.

The episode is divided into parts. The first runs three minutes and is set north of the Wall. The opening image is of the fire Sam is ineptly building.

The second runs three minutes and is set in the North. The transition is by hard cut, from a zoomed out shot of Sam and Gilly around their fire to Meera skinning a rabbit.

The third runs four minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Joren talking about his vision of Jon Snow to Jon.

The fourth runs eight minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

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

The sixth runs six minutes and is set at the Dreadfort, though this is not disclosed. The transition is by hard cut, from the climbing party to Ramsey blowing a horn.

The seventh runs four minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by dialogue, from Theon trying to guess which of Robb’s bannermen Ramsey is to Robb.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Catelyn to Brienne talking about her.

The ninth runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jaime to Tywin Lannister.

The tenth runs three minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from a broken pen to climbing.

The eleventh runs nine minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Sansa Stark. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sansa to Littlefinger and Varys talking about her fate.

The twelfth part runs three minutes and is set on the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger talking about chaos as a ladder one climbs to Jon reaching the top of the Wall. The final image is of Ygritte completing a Full Web with Jon Snow after seeing the Seven Kingdoms for the first time in her life.

Analysis

Let’s start with the official short description of the episode, if only because we’ve never done that.…

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“…which opens to that primeval cosmic night”: Dark Page

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Memory Alpha is *really* letting me down in terms of screenshots.

The first thing that struck me upon rewatching “Dark Page” was the Cairn. In prehistoric times, a “cairn” was an artificial stone pile structure used as a trail marker or burial mound, or in ceremonial astronomical rites. Some cairns, especially in German, Dutch and Inuit territories, were considered totemic figures: They were known as “imitation people” or “stone men”, and considered effigies and representation of human forms.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Cairn are a telepathic species who communicate purely on the level of images. It’s an elegant and holistic form of communication that engenders a sense of cosmic oneness, and the show understands the real ramifications of this. The Cairn find verbal communication awkward and limiting, and the show makes no attempt to refute this assertion because it’s true. Language is built around artifice, an inaccurate facade constructed to represent and stand in for the ineffable whose only hope for success is to convey a general idea for a concept through simile, metaphor and mimicry. The true nature of reality is that great cosmic interconnectedness of all things, and the only way we can truly perceive and understand this is at a heightened state of conscious awareness: The realm of images, emotions and memory.

It makes perfect sense that this would be something Star Trek: The Next Generation would instinctively know, at least at a subconscious level. Art exists in the liminal space between language and the eternal, and is meant to serve as the modern shamanic pathway from one to the other. Thematically, Star Trek: The Next Generation was always destined to reach this point eventually because the realisation is ultimately little more than empathy writ universal: The macro- and microcosm both of the divine cosmology. But Star Trek: The Next Generation has also always been an artistic evocation whose true self lies within aesthetics-The utopian dream lives in the image of the navigator and is evoked through the picture of a brilliant blue voyaging starship adrift in deep space. It’s not the show and never has been the show: It’s the idea of the show and what the show inspires within us through the ideals it signifies. 

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I relate to the Cairn. I relate to the hopeless struggle of trying to express yourself with words you don’t have, visions you don’t know how to communicate and images whose depths you may or may not even fully understand. That is, ultimately, what the story of this phase of Vaka Rangi is: You can never truly know what Star Trek: The Next Generation means to me and I can never truly explain it. And some days I don’t even feel like trying. Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t even fully understand itself, and it’s through the Cairn it’s finally openly admitting this to us. The show is a performative simulacrum of its true self and its true potential and always has been.…

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A Post On A Topic Selected By My Patreon Backers

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I found myself weirdly fascinated in hindsight by the early reviews of Blackstar that praised it while professing a certain bafflement at the meaning of it all, such as a Guardian review of the title video suggesting that it might “just [be] 10 minutes of standard-issue pop promo surrealism.” And then, not long after, Bowie’s death emphatically answered most interpretive questions about the album. It is not merely that the early critics were wrong – the early claim that “Blackstar” itself was about ISIS, for instance, is flagrantly wrong, but not nearly as perversely funny. Rather it is that this particular claim is an almost precise opposite of the truth. Critics claimed the album was a lot of cryptic and meaningless pomposity. In reality, there was a master interpretive key that unlocked almost the entire thing – a simple fact on the level of “it’s about X” that made sense of the entire project.

German sentence structure allows relative freedom of word order; the result are sentences that build towards a climactic revelation as to their meaning, clauses and words carefully piled up in anticipation of an ending that will at last illuminate their purpose. Even in English, writing naturally points towards endings. There’s no such thing as a nonlinear narrative. It always points forward. As Roger Ebert puts it, “Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die.”

Implicit is the existence of a high concept; a grand idea. Everyone is supposed to have a magnum opus. With it, a theme; a clear message to communicate; a subject. But we do not simply communicate the message. We cannot. Instead we half-communicate it, sketching it, alluding to it, gesturing towards it. It is less meaning than direction. We say part of what we mean, and let it stand in for the whole. All writing is foreshadowing.

And nothing is more foreshadowed than death. Strange figures follow us and watch, judging us, recording our deeds and misdeeds, drafting an eventual critical judgment. Dread signs and ominous portents abound. We know, instinctively, constantly, that something is going wrong; some horror is slowly unfolding. It must be, for the alternative – to be directionless – would surely be worse. As Thomas Ligotti puts it, “being somebody is rough, but being nobody is out of the question.”

Ligotti, of course, is an apropos writer to discuss, and not just because he’s ruthlessly trendy. His stories work upon an associative logic, more lyrical than narrative. Things are not said, but alluded to. Niggling illnesses and lost time. In particular, recurrent images of puppets. The faces that look at us are animated by other things. Things we cannot see or know. We recoil in horror.

“Dream logic” is the cliche descriptor of this sort of this. It’s not wrong as such; the unstable identities and shifting locations of dreams to resemble what we’re talking about.…

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