Eruditorum Press

Don’t look at the future. We drew something awful on it.

The Proverbs of Hell 15/39: Sakizuke

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SAKIZUKE: Variantly spelled “sakizuki” and “saki-zuke,” the latter on Janice Poon’s blog, where she describes it as “a sampling of small appetizers whose ingredients, garnishes, and dishware sets the tone for the season and invites the gods to partake of the meal.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, directly compares it to an amuse-bouche, I.e. the second episode of the first season.

The killer-of-the-two-weeks here is given an unusual sort of focus. On the one hand he’s the least sketched out killer the show has ever done – he’s literally only in the script as “Muralist,” and essentially everything we learn about him is projected onto him by other characters. On the other, Roland Umber’s awakening inside the mural is used as the cliffhanger, and the second episode luxuriates in this cold open, giving the sheer and visceral horror of the mural room to breathe. Fuller has said that his inspiration for this killer was equal parts Busby Berkeley and the film Jeepers Creepers, which is a pair of inspirations that boil down to “this is why you are the perfect showrunner for Hannibal.”

The wide shot of Roland, already making a probably fatal leap into the water, being dashed upon the rocks is a surprisingly black comic beat to end on after a very straight horror movie chase through a cornfield.

In an understandable move to avoid having all of Will’s scenes for the first six episodes take place in the same set, Fuller and company have crafted a second asylum location based on bright, stark whiteness instead of gloomy darkness, with the discrete white cages doing the work of making the space disturbing. It’s a triumph of design, managing to be a more impressive location than the iconic subterranean cell.

WILL GRAHAM: I’ve lost the plot. I’m the unreliable narrator of my own story. I’m trying to place myself somewhere in the frame of my mind and I have no bearings. No landmarks to tell me who I am.
ALANA BLOOM: You have an incomplete self. We are who we are in the now and we are the sum of our memories. There are pieces of you… you can’t see.

Will opens with a pair of lines that are starkly meta even for Hannibal. (Though who among us is anything other than the unreliable narrator of our own story?) The exchange is on the whole familiar – it’s restating stuff we’ve been dealing with explicitly (Hannibal doesn’t really deal with things in any other way) since “Rôti.” Of course, there’s a reason for this.

WILL GRAHAM: I’m… very confused.
ALANA BLOOM: Of course you are. Ideas and perceived experiences have the same effect on our minds as tossing a rock into a pond. It all ripples.
HANNIBAL: Let us help you, Will. Let me help you.
WILL GRAHAM: I need your help.

This exchange is followed by a scene of Will, still shaking with the emotion of this scene, being led back to his cell, where, once alone, the mask of overwrought emotion drops and it becomes clear that he was manipulating Alana and Hannibal through this entire exchange.…

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Here’s a Podcast Round-Up

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“The system James and I have been using to post Pex Lives stuff to the site whereby James tells me it’s up and I post about it has been falling through lately due to missed steps like James telling me or me doing anything about it.” – Phil Sandifer, 27th April, 2017.

Being James Murphy is a remarkably frustrating endeavour and one I can’t recommend. The only spot on the league table of frustrating tasks that beats being me is knowing me, I would guess. Yes, there’s lots of upsides but there’s also the beleaguered inability to ever capitalise on them. Let’s say that for some reason a writer you greatly respect long ago chose to offer you an amplifier. That’s great, you’ll definitely do something about that, you (I) think to my(your)self. But then you don’t, you useless bastard, you just get distracted and strum the same eight songs over and over on an acoustic guitar and go to work and sleep. Well, you’ll never beat the world’s finest procrastination artists, in their perfectly tidy houses, at their own game so you may as well make an effort at self improvement at self-promotion.

So. In an effort to actually exploit the kindness and worrying blindspot of my family here at Eruditorum Press, here’s an update of some of the Pex Lives – a left wing podcast that uses Dr. Who as an excuse to meet again every month – that have fallen out of the sky since that strange bashfulness about bothering Phil around my media and cultural criticism overtook me.

Download the Doctor Who and Silurians episode of Pex Lives right here: http://pexlives.libsyn.com/41-doctor-who-the-silurians-or-present-them-with-a-new-problem-and-they-start-shooting-at-it

Look at the length of that link. Lovely, isn’t it? That alone should keep you busy when you’re depriving your boss of your surplus labour. And then there’s the podcast itself, me and Kevin Burns bullshitting on classic gallic cinema and the Silurians’ first appearance.

Here and now, now come hear, our 40th episode: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons. http://pexlives.libsyn.com/40-spearhead-from-space-or-outside-your-cozy-little-world-other-things-could-exist

And, finally, in the land that time forgot, the ghetto that was February of 2017, way back when Ronald Reagan was still President and you could get a goddamn ride at the funfair and a sodie pop for a nickel and still get change, here’s our very ill, literally phoned in episode around the Tenth Planet. Now, that is a good serial of Dr. Who. http://pexlives.libsyn.com/39-the-tenth-planet-or-its-far-from-being-all-over

Somebody commented saying that one of the hosts let out a belch that was satisfying and happy sounding and it brought them some joy in these dark days and that you have to take any pleasure where you can get it, so, I suppose, keep an ear out for that wonder of an editing failure.

Alright!

Moving on, let me tell you about the rebirth of a podcast within the cheerful anarcho-collective of the Pex Lives feed. I love the manners and movements of old horror films. And the Amicus films, cheap, pretty, and often very well written, acted, and directed, are prime examples of the stuff that draws me right on in.…

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Wrong With Authority, Ep 5 – ‘Mississippi Burning’

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Wrong With Authority, the podcast where four white guys talk about movies based on real historical events, returns… and this time we’re talking about Mississippi Burning (1988), a travesty of the story of three civil rights workers – Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman – who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 by the Klan/cops/state government (all essentially the same thing at that point).

Download our episode >>HERE<<

Beware triggers.  We’re talking about vicious racism, hate-motivated violence and murder.  At one point in the episode, one of us reads out part of a historical document which contains the n-word.  We believe the context justifies its inclusion, but please be aware that it’s there.  Jack made the decision to not bleep it out, and takes responsibility.  Also, we mention rape a couple of times – because it was an integral part of both Jim Crow and slavery.

The film focuses not on the Civil Rights workers, or the struggle, or the African Americans oppressed by Jim Crow (American Apartheid), but rather on the subsequent FBI investigation.  It portrays the FBI as a heroic organisation bursting with concerned liberals, but also as solving the case via maverick vigilante violence.  Systemic racism is effaced.  In other words, according to Mississippi Burning, black people are invisible, or are passive and cowardly; Civil Rights workers are foolhardy victims; and the problem is neatly solved by a benevolent establishment going righteously outside the law to punish the bad guys – bad apples who are bad because they’re just inbred hicks.

With this episode, we’re all acutely and especially aware of the structural flaws inherent in our show… i.e. we’re all white guys.  This episode is, nonetheless, an attempt to grapple with the fact that WWA has, up til now, been heavily white-centric.  But we’re inevitably going to underperform here.  We in no way wish to talk over PoC who are talking about issues like this.  We’ll be happy to hear input and criticism.

[Jack here to add a personal note: I deliberately chose Mississippi Burning to address the overpowering whiteness of our subjects to date… which shows a fair bit of privilege and privilege-blindness on my part because a) Mississippi Burning isn’t about African Americans, as mentioned… in fact, it is a film that thieves an African American story from African Americans, and b) I unthinkingly chose a story about African Americans suffering, and which portrays them as passive victims.  I’ll try to do better in future.  I can only hope our critique of this film on these terms stands for something.]

*

Some Links To Things Menioned in the Episode:

The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen.

We Are Not Afraid by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray.

I Am Not Your Negro – new documentary about James Baldwin.

The 13th – documentary based on The New Jim Crow.

Do The Right Thing – Spike Lee’s classic.

The Butler

The Garrett video Jack mentions.

Here’s the article written by Chris Gerolmo, Mississippi Burning screewriter.…

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Commentary: Aquarium Park, Freedom of Movement, Shinto and Superplays

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At long last, after two weeks, the accompanying commentary for my Sonic Generations Aquarium Park superplay is finally up on my YouTube channel thanks to me spending the weekend in a place with a dramatically better Internet connection than where I live.

I talk about it in the video, but this was originally meant to be cut from outtakes of the recording session for the original superplay video, but in the end I recorded a whole new session just for this commentary. That wound up being good though, as I learned a few more tricks and techniques between the recording of that video and this one that I think makes the run I close out with here better than the one I uploaded before! Other topics of conversation include parkour, the discipline of training, movement and Japanese spiritual philosophy.

The video itself is kind of a hybrid experiment for me. I’ve been told working from more of a defined a script would do me well, so I wrote one this time. I vastly underestimated how far 3000 words would get me though, so the back 2/3 is completely off-the-cuff and extemporaneous, which should provide a nice contrast! I actually think I work better unscripted, but you can decide for yourself which style you like better!

As usual, you can get Sonic Generations on Steam, the Aquarium Park mod here and the “Blazy Mix” mod on ModDB. Don’t forget to grab SonicGMI and the Unleashed FX Pipeline shaders too.

Video clocks in at just under 1 hour, 12 minutes. I like these longer videos for commentaries and discussions, but I think I’m going to try and limit them to livestreams from now on because this was a *nightmare* to upload and my hard drive space is dwindling at an alarming rate. When next we meet on YouTube I may start work on what I hope to be the channel’s first marquee series: A game showcase featuring a full playthrough split up into different episodes. Stay tuned, I suppose.

Don’t forget to subscribe if you want to see these as soon as they come out and, not to press the issue too much, but I do have a Patreon to hep support this and other endeavours. Thanks as always for watching and supporting any way you can, and I’ll see you next time.

 …

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The Proverbs of Hell 14/39: Kaiseki

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KAISEKI: An umbrella term for multi-course meals in the Japanese style – roughly equivalent to what renaming “Apéritif” to “Haute Cuisine” would imply. The gesture towards the whole season makes sense for an episode that opens with a flash forward to the finale. (I should disclaim that my knowledge of Japanese cooking is wildly less than my knowledge of French cooking, and that I’m going to be much more reliant on Wikipedia for these than I was for the first 13 parts.)

The flashforward to the Jack/Hannibal fight scene from “Mizumono” is interesting. The flash forward in general was trendy in television around this time, mostly due to the influence of Breaking Bad, which used them habitually. But Breaking Bad’s default use of them was cryptic – they’d show short flashes of something that would hang over episodes or seasons as a mystery. This, on the other hand, is more of a promise at the expense of suspense. Hannibal pledges up front that Jack is going to figure out what Hannibal is up to, thus reassuring viewers before the season even starts that all of this business with Will being in prison will eventually be over. This has obvious narrative function – asking the audience to sit through six full episodes of Will in prison is a big ask even with the reassurance. But it’s striking how little else there is that actually relies on this flash forward, to the point where it begins to become easy to forget.

HANNIBAL: Kaiseki. A Japanese art form that honors the taste and aesthetic of what we eat.

The first time Hannibal has done a title drop. It’s a bit over-obvious, but a reasonable concession given that, unlike the first season, the episode titles are rarely cognates of identifiable English words. (The second season remains the only one where I routinely have to go look up which episode is which, and I’d be surprised if blogging it changes that.) Hannibal’s framing of Kaiseki in terms of uniting taste and aesthetic is, of course, utterly characteristic.

JACK CRAWFORD: I feel guilty eating it.

HANNIBAL: I never feel guilty eating anything.

JACK CRAWFORD: Can’t quite place the fish.

HANNIBAL: He was a flounder.

Hannibal’s really laying the “I’m going to tell you point blank that I’m a cannibalistic serial killer then chuckle silently as you miss it” on a bit thick today.

HANNIBAL: I last prepared this meal for my Aunt Murasaki under similarly unfortunate circumstances.

JACK CRAWFORD: What circumstances were those?

HANNIBAL: A loss. This is a loss. Will is a loss. We’re mourning a death.

The namechecking of Lady Murasaki is a rare acknowledgment of Hannibal Rising, very much the runt of the Thomas Harris litter, and the line characterizes Fuller’s approach to that book: acknowledge its canonicity while mostly ignoring the details. The loss in question is almost certainly Hannibal’s sister Mischa.

HANNIBAL: We can’t define Will only by his maddest edges.

JACK CRAWFORD: We can’t define Will at all.

…

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Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

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Regular blog post on Tuesday again this week, due to another round of shilling for friends. In my defense, I try to only befriend cool talented people.

Anyway, you may remember David Gerard, with whom I cut the first of the podcast series promotiong Neoreaction a Basilisk. He was my beta reader on the book, and a longtime Internet friend and coconspirator. Among the many things David does is help run RationalWiki, where he righteously and snarkily skewers all sorts of bullshit artists. And one of the more interesting things I’d seen him skewer was Bitcoin. So a while back I suggested to him that he should write a short book explaining why Bitcoin was not, in fact, the money of the future. I was imagining something 30k tops that just laid out the case for why Bitcoin is bullshit. Instead he wrote a full-length book that releases today: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.

Instead he went off and wrote a beautifully thorough overview of Bitcoin that not only establishes the sheer number of scam artists and crooks surrounding Bitcoin and the larger notion of blockchains, but also establishes how utterly and hilariously stupid almost everything around it is. David provides one of the most layman-friendly explanations of what Bitcoin is, then explains in cogent detail why this involves breathtaking and fundamental design flaws such as consuming as much electricity to maintain as the entirety of Ireland. He’s got jaw-dropping accounts of people like Ross Ulbricht (aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of the Silk Road website) and Craig Wright (who almost certainly did not invent Bitcoin). And a host of other amazing tales.

It’s a great book for anyone who’s interested in learning more about Bitcoin and the hype around it; one that takes the desire behind it seriously without buying into it, and that illustrates in ways both moving and hilarious just how big the gap between futurist dreams and the messy, material present can be. I highly recommend checking it out. Currently it’s on Amazon in Kindle edition, but there’s a print edition coming imminently, and it should be up on Smashwords today.

See you Tuesday.

(Oh, and keep an eye on the Seeming Twitter account: they’ve got another track from Sol dropping today.)…

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This Post Has No Title

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Someone – I think it was Nick Mamatas – recently made a sarcastic Facebook or Twitter post, expressing mock-surprise that a “multi-million dollar Hollywood movie isn’t the Communist Manifesto” (or words to that effect).  The thing being mocked there is the way in which it seems that some on the Left will criticise an expensive (and, the studios hope, profitable) product of the mass-market corporate capitalist culture industries for not being something it was obviously never going to be, and never could be. 

As it turned out – for a host of complex and contingent historical reasons – cinema and television became almost-overwhelmingly comforting and placating instantiations of the spectacle.  Every now and again a big movie will come along, like Mad Max Fury Road or (I’d argue) Prometheus, which contains aspects of radical critique within its aesthetic and/or thematics.  But firstly, this happens rarely, and only when a host of other factors constellate.  Based on the cited examples, I’d be tempted to suggest that franchises and auteurs have something to do with it, which is interesting, as is the way those two things are clearly related in the mentioned cases.  In any event, both films are akin to aberrations which can slip out occasionally, not despite but because of the existence of an overarching and hegemonic mainstream with tightly policed ideological rules and regulations.  To be crude about it: they can happen only because they are, by definition, exceptions to the rule.  And then, of course, we have to ponder what effect they actually have.  I am – as far as I’m aware – the only person who detected a metaphor in Prometheus about the fascist impulse immanent within all imperialist Westernism, about fascism as a syncresis, concatenation, and meta-expression of Western culture’s id), so I’m unsurprised to learn that it hasn’t led many people to fundamentally question Western civilisation’s foundation on the principles of racist empire.  Basically, to notice it (or to construct it through your relation with the text) you have to already feel it – which gives us a clear idea of its capacity for agitation.  Mad Max Fury Road possibly had more effect, in that it may have helped give some expression to a burgeoning new feminist consciousness in some Western women and men. 

I strongly suspect that media has very little ability to directly influence particular opinions or attitudes.  That isn’t how it works.  Media, over time, as part of a hegemonic ideological system, reflects, reinforces, and normalises certain assumptions and impressions.  When it comes to ideological production via media, individual representations probably mean less than the trends of representations over swathes of media, over long periods.  This is why one decent bit of representation is not going to achieve very much, except as part of changing trends.  These trends can be positive, but that’s the exception.  And the positive effect is minor, especially if we confine ourselves to thinking about the direct effects of one representation.

Of course, it’s easy for me to kvetch about the uselessness of representations.…

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Permanent Saturday: Oracle Bone

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“There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit-love.”
-Morihei Ueshiba
Simple pleasures for simple minds, so the saying goes. Many a joke over the years has been made at the expense of Odie’s celebrated idiocy, surely to the delight of Garfield‘s Cat Person target demographic everywhere. And truth be known Odie is not a particularly complex being: Not so much irrational or prerational as nonrational, Odie is guided by mere existence. He doesn’t stop to let his superego overanlyse his actions largely because it’s not entirely clear he has a superego. Certainly Odie will never be in any danger of being paralyzed by an overactive mind. Within Garfield‘s Funny Animal satire of modernity, Odie offers the biggest challenge by being the biggest diegetic commentary on the strip’s fundamental artifice: Odie is the one animal character who acts in accordance with stereotypical Western ideas about animal minds-Pure, unthinking, instinctual being.
 
Certain schools of Taoism and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism would probably find a lot of commonality with Odie. As the embodiment of pure “I Exist”, his character lends itself well to being read as a metaphor for the simple bliss of calm, unexamined presentness. We are all seeking happiness and peace and, such sages would tell us, we deprive ourselves of them both when we focus too much on our thoughts and our conscious mind. True enlightenment, they would argue, exists simply within the concept of existing itself: Being aware of consciousness and being at peace with that. Other disciplines encourage the pursuit of enlightenment through trance and meditative states of keeping one’s mind similarly clear and empty. It is tempting then to leave the analysis here-After all, what’s the point of clouding our being with thoughts when true bliss and enlightenment can only be found within the absence of such things?
 
Garfield, however, has always been about presentness, so the argument that Odie and Odie alone is the gatekeeper to that knowledge does not hold. This is the setup to today’s joke, in which Garfield exclaims that “Odie has discovered the secret to happiness!”. The great tragedy of modernity is perhaps not a lack of presentness, but a lack of respect for presentness and its virtues, and this is what the constantly thinking cat satirizes. Happiness is something we all claim to be searching for (the United States even cites “the pursuit of happiness” as a central ideal upon which its nation was founded), yet so few of us are engaged in practice that actually allows us to manifest within a state of genuine bliss. And if anyone has found such a secret in the world of Garfield, it would certainly appear to be the dog: Odie is very rarely depressed or upset-His grin, while vacant, is indeed one of happiness. For a strip depicting a universe of unceasing boredom and banality, Odie’s unwavering contentment with himself and his lot in life provides a tempting role model many may wish to emulate.
…

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A Consistently Inaccurately Named Trilogy Part III: Looper

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Looper is a flawed film in ways that neither Brick nor The Brothers Bloom were. This is not to say that it’s a bad film; it’s not at all. But after two films that were notable in part for their impressively taut discipline the fundamental sloppiness of Looper stands out. There’s not a lot that follows from this – everybody who’s made more than one film has a worst film, after all, and most directors have one that’s far worse than this. There’s still a number of things it does well, and well in ways that confirm where Johnson’s talents lie. There’s just also whacking big problems, most of which have a reasonably obvious source.

The biggest and most fundamental problem is that the join between two halves of a script completed at very different times. The first hour – basically everything up through the diner scene – was written in 2008 during the shooting of The Brothers Bloom. The second half, starting with Sara’s introduction, came in 2009. And it shows. The first half is a well constructed film about a man in gripping contact with his older self. The second half, on the other hand, is a well constructed film about a creepy psychic kid. Both are good, but on a very basic level they’re not the same film, and the second half feels as though Johnson realized he didn’t have quite enough ideas to get over the finish line and so arbitrarily decided to raid Akira.

That Johnson should have this problem is admittedly a bit strange. Cid (the psychic kid) is little more than a MacGuffin – the thing over which the two iterations of Joe, the main character, must fight. It doesn’t seem like it should have been that difficult to find one that extended out of the existing time travel concept instead of adding a whole second set of big sci-fi ideas. Instead, the premise around Old Joe seems to abruptly shift as he’s suddenly revealed to have been planning a campaign against futuristic crime boss “the Rainmaker” since before he was sent back in time, a plot point that doesn’t really fit with how his being sent back in time is initially shown. More frustrating is the fact that Sara, the female lead, who ends up being the viewpoint character for the final scene, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. It’s not that any of this is easy to fix per se, but it’s at least pretty straightforward what you need to do.

But it’s still a problem that only really means that the film never quite manages to hit a point where everything clicks and it starts really getting impressive. Instead, Looper simmers along on the brink of greatness without ever crossing the line. But in many regards it’s less productive to look at what holds it back than what almost gets it there. First and foremost is the most elegant premise of Johnson’s career to date. The basic jist of Looper is that there are hiit men who kill people sent back in time from the future.…

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New Podcast Theme Song: Stranger

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Those who listened to our Doctor Who podcast series will have noticed that I had new theme music this year. Some also noticed that I never actually said what it was. My stock answer was that it was a secret transmission from the future.

The future is here. 

Seeming’s new album, Sol, is out on August 4th. You can pre-order it here. It’s absolutely incredible, and like nothing else you’ve ever heard. I’ll be talking more about it and how it’s the secret soundtrack to Neoreaction a Basilisk closer to when it’s out, but for now let’s all just enthusiastically watch that video again and again.

(Oh, and if you don’t know Sammus, the guest vocalist on “Stranger,” she’s absolutely phenomenal as well and you should check her music out. Her new one, Pieces in Space, is brilliant, but her older more nerdcore stuff is solid as well.)…

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