Eruditorum Press

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The Proverbs of Hell 16/39: Hassun

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HASSUN: A sushi course with small side dishes that sets a seasonal theme. Janice Poon discusses it in terms of balancing opposites, which could be made related to the weighing of guilt and innocence involved in a trial with relatively little critical legerdemain. 

A bewildering and suggestive opening image as Will is shown imagining his own execution from the perspective of the executioner. This is an entirely plausible thing for Will to do – indeed the idea that Will would actively try to empathize with his potential executioner is really interesting. But its substance is in practice merely “unsettling cold open,” the impact of the image left entirely for the viewer instead of the narrative. In one sense this is emblematic of the episode, which is very much the season’s “Œuf.” It’s actively identified by Fuller as the weak link, and sees the show attempting its spin on courtroom drama instead of police procedural, only to find that the move to the second half of Law and Order is a step further than the forced perspective brilliance of its iconography can sustain.

This smirk off the line where the prosecutor asserts that Will is the smartest person in the courtroom is interesting; its most superficial reading is standard issue “Hannibal gloating about how clever he is,” and yet given the depth of his investment in Will’s development it’s equally likely that this is a smile of genuine satisfaction that his friend is finally getting the critical reception he deserves.

JACK CRAWFORD: My instincts have not yet arrived at conviction.
KADE PRURNELL: Mine have. With the benefit of no prior involvement and no personal connections to the accused.
JACK CRAWFORD: Meaning, I can’t be impartial.
KADE PRURNELL: Of course you can be impartial. But right now, you’re not. You have to believe something. As long as there is reason and evidence to believe. You have reason. You have evidence.

It’s interesting that Prurnell’s case here frames belief as a moral obligation as opposed to a logical consequence. She is, after all, presumably not saying that all things there is both evidence for and some reason to believe are true. Rather, she is suggesting that an FBI agent has a duty to believe in these circumstances that Jack is being lax in. For all his faults, even Jack ain’t buying that bullshit.

JACK CRAWFORD: He can think like anybody. He has pure empathy and projection. He can imprint profiles on the blank slate of his mind for us to read.
MARION VEGA: Sounds like a supervillain.

Transparently untrue; a supervillain with such a thoroughly non-offensive power would be an extremely bizarre idea. A power like this is far more suited to a superhero, or, better yet, the troubled protagonist of some overly pompous post-House cop drama. Which is to say that perhaps genre-based narratology is not a great alley for Hannibal to wander down.

HANNIBAL: Tell me, Jack. Was your testimony meant to be a resignation?
JACK CRAWFORD: Something very appealing about walking away from all the noise.

…

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The One Thing I Can’t Seem to Shut Up About: A Commentary on Sol

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I cannot possibly review Seeming’s new album Sol. It’s fucking amazing. It’s astonishing to me that Madness and Extinction is an album it’s possible to double down on and outdo. But Alex did it, with a second album that’s frightening, ambitious, and unlike anything else that’s been done, ever, by anyone. I care about it like I care about Kill the Moon and Promethea. Go buy it. Honestly, buy it, listen to it a few times. You can stream and buy it here. All Bandcamp’s profits today are going to the Transgender Law Center, so it’s a great day to splash out some cash for it. Then come back here.

I’m one of the people Alex regularly sends demos to, and so Sol has been the single biggest soundtrack of my last three years. Alex is one of my closest friends, but I’m also an unabashed and unreserved fan of his stuff, and I tended to play each new demo to death and beyond before just as eagerly devouring the next, listening in rapt wonder as song after song mutated from idea (sometimes even an obviously good one) through to demos that sketched its potential and finally to finished mixes, each one of which evolved and developed further in a frenzy of final tweaks and flourishes. Most notably, Sol was the secret soundtrack to Neoreaction a Basilisk, with multiple passages in the book being directly influenced by songs on it. Which we’ll talk about,

Beyond that, Sol as it exists for me is a tangle of songs well beyond the thirteen that actually made the album. I can’t even fully map the album’s creative influence on me without talking about songs like “Yes Artemis” and “Angel in the Jungle,” which you can at least check out on the Faceless EP, and others like “Party Anthem 2000” and “You Rang” that might show up somewhere some day, but might just as easily be things that wither away having been heard by a couple dozen people at most, ever.

So this isn’t a review. Instead it’s a commentary that is utterly rooted in my own idiosyncratic perspective. A “now the whole story can be told” documentation of the last few years of my life by way of one of the most titanic creative achievements I’ve ever seen, little yet had front row seats to. And, along the road, my own external sense of how the songs developed.

Doomsayer

I’ve mentioned more than once that I “accidentally” wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk. This is a funny line that did its marketing purpose, but beneath the joke there’s a kind of grim-faced reality. Accidentally writing a book is more accurately described as compulsion and obsession. Whatever I may have wanted to be doing with my evenings, what happened instead was that I opened my laptop and continued to extend the strange and twisting block of text that insisted, again and again, that I come back to it. I too know what it’s like when only one thing is real.…

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Bloodmoon Episode 1: BloodRayne Part 1

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Today’s video over at my channel is the first in a new series featuring full playthroughs of a number of different video games, all centred around the same set of themes and motifs. These will probably be split up into 15-30 minute episodes of pure gameplay footage. First up, the original BloodRayne from 2002, which was available on the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, XBOX and PC. I’m playing the PC version, modded for controller support and widescreen HD resolutions. Now I know this perhaps doesn’t seem like the kind of game I typically like to talk about and some of you might have questions about that, but all I can say right now is to please trust me-I’m going somewhere with this 🙂

Edited text from the video description:

Bloodmoon is a series that looks at the evolution and apotheosis of specific themes and archetypes throughout various video games via the medium of full playthroughs with open discussion prompts.
 
Questions and observations:
 
Why does the intro cinematic seem to be, at first, trying to mislead us into thinking Rayne is a villainous monster when it would have been immediately obvious to anyone buying this game that she was the protagonist?
 
Rayne’s look and general persona are derived from that of a classical dominatrix. What BDSM themes, if any, can you find in the game going forward and what ramifications does this have for how we should read it?
 
According to the game’s official backstory, during this opening tutorial sequence Rayne is technically only still a teenager. Do you think this influences how Laura Bailey chooses to play her?
 
In Romanian folklore, where such legends are almost exclusively derived, the traditional name for creatures like Rayne is not “vampire”, but “strigoi” (thought to be derived from the Greek “strix”, which referred to a nocturnal bird of ill omen). Only male strigoi would have been comparable to what we think of as vampires: Rayne, being female, would specifically be a “strigoaică”, which simply connotes a witch or sorceress. Of course, an important part of the game’s story is that Rayne is only *half* vampire, or “dhampir”, a reference to Balkan folklore which emphasized male vampires’ patriarchal lust to dominate women.
 
Much modern American art and folklore is inspired by places such as the Louisiana Bayou and Mississippi Delta region and is about coming to terms with its place in the nation’s collective consciousness. The birthplace of the blues, the only true musical style invented by the United States and home to the deepest of the deep South, and all that goes along with that, many would argue this region is the “real” heartland of the United States.
 
In Neopaganism and Wicca, the Moon, especially when full, is associated with the power of the Sacred Feminine. However, myopic and appropriative beliefs stemming from the ubiquity of these schools have misled people into thinking the Sun is “always” masculine and the Moon is *always* feminine, even though Solar Goddesses have been prominent in many cultures throughout history.
…

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Eruditorum Presscast: Alex Reed (Sol Interview)

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The new Seeming album, Sol, is out Friday. So I sat down with Alex Reed to talk about it and play clips from a bunch of songs, including three that are getting their world premieres. It’s a fantastic conversation in proper Eruditorum Press fashion, which is to say that it jumps freely from the Situationists to the X-Files in order to talk about things with no obvious relationship to either one of those. We also talk about important things like “what is a self-banishment ritual” and “so Alex, you recorded a gothic funk album, tell me about that.” Seriously, this is a great conversation. You can listen to it here.

Sol, meanwhile, is out on Friday and available for pre-order here. I’ll be back on Friday (where I’ll be replacing Jack this week) for more talk about it. It’s amazing – literally every song on it is brilliant. I cannot wait for you all to be able to hear it and to finally talk about the ways it’s been influencing me for three years now. …

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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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