Eruditorum Press

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Permanent Saturday: Really big at the box office

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With deepest apologies to Chris Stangl, Permanent Saturday is a semiregular critical exploration of Jim Davis’ comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson’s Farm.

Garfield and Friends was well known for its referential and self-aware style of comedy. Much of the humour from the second season onward was gleaned from poking fun at both pop culture and the capitalist industry that creates it thanks to its head writer Mark Evanier. Evanier is a veteran Hollywood jobbing scribe who was born, raised and still lives in Los Angeles, so he brings a very unique perspective to Garfield. For Evanier, celebrities and entertainers were his neighbours and fellow community members, and the business of making movies was the local industry. So when Garfield and Friends makes a joke about Hollywood agents or breaks the fourth wall and treats the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show as just another piece of primetime network television, this is not the series being especially perceptive and postmodern as much as it is Mark Evanier looking for inspiration in the people and things around him, and writing what he knows.

(Indeed, Mark Evanier’s secondary role as voice director is responsible for another thing Garfield and Friends is renowned for: Its frequent cameos from Hollywood luminaries of previous decades, mostly from stand-up comedy and the voice actor’s guild. Many of these performers had been functionally retired until Evanier had called them and asked them to guest star on Garfield.)

This puts Evanier and Garfield and Friends in staunch contrast to Jim Davis and the original strip upon which it is based. Far from being a Hollywood native who practically grew up in the business, Jim Davis was an Indiana farm boy who built Garfield and Paws, Inc. from the ground up as essentially a small business that wound up gaining international success. They are, by default, going to be operating from two wildly different positionalities and reference pools and have slightly different thematic interests (although it must be stressed that Davis and Evanier are incredibly close and have an extraordinary writing partnership: Evanier is, in fact, the only other person Davis trusts to write Garfield properly at a professional level).

So when Garfield the strip approaches looking at pop culture, it comes at it from a different angle then Garfield and Friends. The cartoon show takes the view of a deep, deep insider, cracking a *lot* of in-jokes that come squarely from Mark Evanier’s life experiences. In other words, those of an entertainment producer. The strip, by contrast, takes the view of the ordinary, everyday passive consumer of media entertainment, as we see in so many of the strips where Garfield is watching television and reacting to things he sees onscreen.

Which makes this strip, an overtly active diegetic parody of science fiction and broader genre fiction tropes, something of an oddity. Rather than snarking at a bad SF movie on TV, as he does from time to time, Garfield instead satirizes the genre himself within the basic workings of the strip itself.…

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Build High for Happiness 8: Jerusalem (2016)

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such rich centers of possibilities and meanings

There is of course no other way this could end, which is fitting given that one of the (many) things Jerusalem is about is predestination. Moore’s vision of the world is closely related to the one we’ve been exhaustively exploring throughout this series. He does not actually use the word hypercube (and indeed envisions the structure in even higher dimensions), but it’s nevertheless clearly what’s going on. And though it would be wrong to describe it as a prison (he’s ultimately too optimistic for that), the multidimensional superstructure in which he places us is nevertheless utterly inescapable. As Moore imagines it, reality is a fixed solid existing in at least four dimensions, in which all events are fixed, and human consciousnesses simply experience their lives on endless repeat, passing through their allotted portion of the structure over and over again, experiencing the same unchanging lives each time.

This poses several problems, of which the loss of free will is only one, and a fairly minor one at that. Some are acknowledged by Moore, either within Jerusalem itself or in interviews, most notably the apparent loss of any moral perspective. Moore, being a monstrously intelligent man, anticipates these, emphasizing the sacredness of consciousness and the way that it imposes morality and aesthetics upon the world, and for the most part this works. Certainly there’s a flat truth to it: whatever the overall cosmological structure of reality (or even just history) may be, we are in the end pinned to linearly experienced consciousness, and in a way that means that our perception of morality is all-encompassing. Moore unfolds this with moving humanity, suggesting that we are ourselves harsher moral judges than any external force could ever be, but the point stands as a simple, stark description of how the world works: in the end, we are alone with our experience of it and left to make of that what we will.

Within the novel, of course, this is a cheat, albeit a fairly well-earned one. The narrative perspective shifts among two dozen or so characters in the course of the telling, but they are all in the end Moore’s perspective upon Moore’s world, a fact all but explicitly acknowledged by Moore’s blatant avatar within the work, an artist working on an installation about the working class Northampton neighborhood she lives in that consists of thirty-five works corresponding precisely to the novel’s thirty-five chapters. And the larger cosmology of the novel tacitly acknowledges this cheat: in fact there is an afterlife that one can retire to when one is tired of repeating one’s life, consisting of existence in the higher realm of Mansoul in which the four-dimensional solid of reality can be observed from above, and where the immortal souls appear to have free will and the ability to die. And there are several points where it’s noted that there’s a level above Mansoul on which the pattern repeats, occupied by a singular architect that Moore has been perfectly willing to suggest is him all along, typically via a long and deadpan interview routine in which he discusses the idea of simulationism before noting that the designer would probably incarnate himself in the simulation, and that most portrayals of God are of an older man with a long beard before trailing off pointedly.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 21st, 2017)

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Two quick orders of business.

1) As part of the release of Articles of Secession (which, if you missed that yesterday, do check out), we made a 50-copy print run of the zine with the extended text of the piece. Forty-nine of these were distributed around Ithaca. The fiftieth is now on eBay, with proceeds going to charity. For the purposes of people who aren’t in Ithaca, this is basically a print edition of one, so go get yourself some bragging rights and some disenfranchised Ithacans some groceries.

2) Jack has opened a Patreon of his own. If you like Jack’s work here, and of course you do because Jack is fucking awesome, you should go support it. 

How’s everyone holding up?…

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The Comprehensive History of Injustice

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A guest post by Seth Aaron Hershman.

…the entire world might be poisoned. This, however, seemed unlikely, as the world, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is a book series, and currently a Netflix show, about three orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, who are chased from place to place by a man named Count Olaf who manipulates (and if necessary knocks off) anyone who might try to take them in so that he can have them–and their inheritance/trust fund–for himself.

Count Olaf is a rich man looking to get richer, who relies on transparent lies and cheap theatrics to get his way, casually uses and discards people, has a roughly third-grade literacy and vocabulary level, and works in entertainment.

It’d be easy to go that route, wouldn’t it?

The issue of timeliness is a difficult one for A Series of Unfortunate Events, a franchise which actively avoids setting itself in a specific era in a way that should be familiar to fans of, say, Archer or Batman: The Animated Series. Because the series goes out of its way not to take place in any particular time, it’s difficult to pin whether the obvious allegory is an act of authorial intent or merely a fortunate coincidence. (One could argue that the fact that these books were written a decade ago makes it a forgone conclusion, but it’s not like our president was anonymous in at the turn of the century.)

In fact, it’s difficult to pin anything. Which is perhaps part of the point–anchored to no time, the series is able to make a broader point about how all times and all eras are susceptible to the transparent lies and cheap theatrics of rich men looking to get richer.

The rich men themselves are not really the point of the series–after all, most of the series’ characters are comfortably well off, and our leads are victimized specifically because Olaf wants at their sizable inheritance. In fact money itself seems to be a little besides the point. The bigger problem is self-absorption, and the inherent flaws in systems built out of self-interest.

The reason Olaf’s schemes always succeed until the last moment is that self-possession is a character flaw on the part of all who take the Baudelaire orphans in. Their uncle Monty knows well enough to suspect “Stephano” but gets hung up on the idea that his new assistant is after his scientific discoveries rather than his newly aquired children. Their aunt Josephine is ruled by her intense phobias and too obsessed with her tragic past to suspect someone who’s obviously manufactured a similar one for the sake of sympathy. And Mr. Poe, the man in charge of the Baudelaire estate, is constantly talking about how important it is that he get back to his other business matters before he has the chance to do even the most basic checking-up on whatever circumstances he’s dumped the children in this time.…

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The Nintendo Switch Presentation: The Beginning and the End

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Edit August 207: Well, several months after the official launch of the Switch and I’ve been proven wrong on pretty much all counts here. I may even get a Switch myself by year’s end. However, in my defense, I will say my opinions in this essay do accurately reflect the climate of MISinformation that was being spread about the Switch in those early months. Somewhat unsurprisingly, fake and misleading news isn’t limited to politics and video game journalism is a theatre of the larger cutural struggles we’re all going through these days.
 
I was right about oen thing though. I’m sure never doing any game journalism again.
 
Here’s the thing about cycles. The wheel turns, but that does not imply that history will repeat wholecloth. Time, of course, does not exist. History doubly so: History is a patriarchal fiction. There are endings and new beginnings as the seasons change. Recognisable archetypes reiterate and reincarnate, but each spin of the wheel is an event of its own. Impermanence is all part of the cycle.
 
We in video game journalism appropriate some of this truth when we use terms like “hardware cycles” to describe the passing of the console generational torch (“generation” and “torch”, of course, both being metaphors taken from patriarchal master narratives). Video game consoles do not so much go out of date as they get supplanted. A history of invasions and conquests, or a season for everything?
 
Were I to do this normally, I would go through my notes and recap the Nintendo Switch Reveal Event Presentation beat-for-beat. But on this occasion, normality doesn’t seem appropriate. Nintendo did indeed flip a Switch with this event, but I doubt highly it’s the Switch they wanted to flip. Over the course of about an hour, my entire world was turned on its head, and I’ve been in shock trying to cope ever since (of course, I should be used to this by now-Shock, trauma and loss is apparently what my life is now as it’s been this way for three straight years). Within the span of not even 24 hours, my entire perspective changed entirely. I walked into the reveal super excited for the next new Nintendo console, and I left it seriously considering walking away from everything, starting with video games.
 
The console itself, it should be stressed, looks marvelous. As a piece of gaming hardware, it’s just about second to none. Much time and emphasis was spent during the presentation demonstrating the Switch’s impressive tech specs and functionality, such as its detachable JoyCon controllers, both of which boast highly sophisticated motion sensors and haptic feedback. The two controllers have independent left-right motion control, near field communication read/write capability (or at least the right one has that), and something Nintendo have obnoxiously decided to call “HD Rumble”. Basically, it’s a haptic feedback system that can emulate highly detailed acoustics, like (for example, as was demonstrated) ice cubes being dropped into a glass, and then the glass filling with water.
…

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Build High for Happiness 7: The Witch (2015)

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wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public

Many roads lead here, but we are unmistakably off the map. Like High-Rise, Robert Eggers’s film is firmly rooted in both place and location: the edge of a New England forest during the Puritan era. This in turn situates it a mere step away from A Field in England. Other distant reflections will flicker through the trees as we progress. Make no mistake, however, Whatever this belongs to, it is not our comfortable hypercube, with its cool brutality. This is somewhere else. Somewhere the land is cursed. Where the crops wither, the hunts fail, and the beasts turn against their masters. Where the sky is as stark as the muddy, useless soil. And that’s outside of the forest. Within its canopies there are even more horrors to be had.

At the heart of this malaise is the eponymous witch, a fact that led to an easily dismissed but frustratingly widespread reading of the film as somehow concerned with validating Puritan anxieties. It is tempting to dismiss this by asking whether this logic applies to all horror movies, or to point out that for all the film commits completely to the presence of an actual witch straight out of New England folklore it also repeatedly undermines Puritan ideology at large. But the more important angle to take on this is simply that this fundamentally mistakes the film for being about the family at large, as opposed to what is clearly demonstrated by the opening shot, in which William being exiled from the plantation is depicted not in terms of his philosophical and religious defiance, but in terms of how it is experienced by Thomasin, his eldest daughter. This may be a story in which a bunch of Puritans confront their biggest cultural nightmare, but what the story’s about is female sexuality and agency.

In this regard its ending, in which Thomasin becomes a witch, levitating into the sky at a Sabbat cackling with ecstatic joy, is a surprisingly vivid match for High-Rise, which similarly resolves into a murderously utopian vision of matriarchy. This is derived from Ballard’s novel, but Jump expanded on it considerably in scripting the film as part of a larger and welcome revision away from Ballard’s fairly banal overuse of rape, making the ultimate dominion of the building by its female residents into a point in its own right instead of a glib culmination of Wilder and Laing’s psychosexual architecture. But it is here, fully liberated from the tower’s phallic shadow, that the idea finds its fully developed form.

Central to the film is the way in which Thomasin is trapped and essentially powerless. This is a subtle thing in a horror movie, in that everybody is trapped and essentially powerless. What’s only gradually made clear over the course of the film, however, is that unlike all the other characters, it’s not the witch and her blight that imprisons Thomasin: it’s all the other characters. Her mother is vindictive and suspicious, her father is a mediocrity willing to lie and let her take the blame, her younger brother is more powerful than her in terms of the family dynamic but still looks to her for physical comfort and, increasingly, with lust, and the twins don’t obey her (and are worshipping Satan in the form of a goat).…

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The Final Problem Review

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I know, I said this wouldn’t be up for Monday. But then my weekend plans got spoiled by a stomach bug and I ended up home and watching Sherlock anyway. So it’s entirely possible that I’ve got a sour mood to match my stomach. Nevertheless, what a complete and utter disappointment this season of Sherlock has been.

The crux of the problem is one that plenty of franchises have fallen afoul of, which is thinking that you can introduce a character like Eurus and have her matter to the audience purely on the mythic weight of who she is instead of having to develop her. But it doesn’t work. She’s a distressingly one-note character whose characterization consists entirely of Mycroft asserting things about her. More to the point, her supposed powers are all bizarrely undersold: we’re told that she can effectively enslave someone by talking to them, but nothing about her comes off as particularly persuasive or charismatic. Mostly she sits around talking like a Markov bot fed on mediocre nihilist philosophy. And this is a real problem – the episode depends on her being the unholy fusion of Sherlock and Hannibal, but instead she’s just a generic megalomaniac. Which makes the resolution of her just needing a hug painfully unearned.

Making this worse is the way in which the episode is haunted by Moriarty. It’s not that it would have been better to actually bring him back, but having him popping up on video screens for dramatic effect and to have been the secret co-architect of all of this only serves to highlight how much weaker Eurus is as a villain. I’m not sure even Magnussen could have been effective with Andrew Scott popping up all over his episode, but Eurus doesn’t stand a chance, and the overall effect is to constantly remind the audience of a time when the show hadn’t used up its best ideas yet.

It’s not that there aren’t good bits. The relatively bottle-episode nature of it such that the majority of it is just Sherlock, John, and Mycroft is good, and all of them get some lovely character moments throughout. Mycroft, in particular, shines, getting a wealth of small emotional moments of the sort that he hadn’t really had before in the series. But John’s incredibly well-used as well, even if I don’t entirely buy him backing down from shooting the warden. And of course Molly’s scene was incredible.

But none of that masks the fact that this is just The Great Game done over with the melodrama pushed past the breaking point. The reveals just don’t work. The big one – that Redbeard was actually a person that we’ve never met before and aren’t particularly invested in – is a complete flop. We’ve already seen five people get murdered this episode. Finding out some kid from Sherlock’s past got killed instead of his dog doesn’t carry any particular weight. If anything, it was easier to be upset when it was a dog, which at least felt like a fairly fleshed out dog.…

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Faeces on Trump 6

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This is the final part of ‘Faeces on Trump’… which now seems a peculiarly poor title for this series… all the worse for being so nearly right.  Still, I daresay I shall have more to say about Trump and related issues in the years to come (if I’m spared).  But this first line of thought draws to a close.  This post is, as a result, a kind of ‘summing up’.  (God, I sound pompous, don’t I?)  Further thoughts, or lines of thought, will have to stand alone from now on – and so I’ll be able to retitle for more relevance when I arrogantly shit them all over the internet, as if my opinion matters.  But anyway, this is the last squirt of diarrhea from the bellyache that Trump’s victory gave me.  Further dyspepsia will doubtless cause more and different effluvia to rain down upon you, because clearly I can’t help myself.  (And you’re not even paying me!)  Watch this space, you poor doomed motherfuckers.

 

Fuck it, let’s not bother with any more piss jokes.  Let’s have some Lenin.  We might as well, in a world in which making a Ghostbusters film with a female main cast is enough to get you called a Marxist:

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor… [D]eceit, violence, corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy, and oppression of the poor is hidden beneath the civilized, polished, and perfumed exterior of modern bourgeois democracy.

– Lenin, from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (as quoted by Cliff in Volume 2 of his biography of Lenin)

Paul Foot put that quote up over his office door at the Daily Mirror – where he worked before Robert Maxwell was allowed to take it over so he could bust the unions – just, in his words, “so there could be no doubt about where I stood”.

Even so, Foot wrote an entire book – and a very good one, which I recommend – about how great the The Vote was, and how many people had to struggle so hard and for so long to get it.  Arguably, Foot under-stresses the extent to which the vote has not just been betrayed (by Labour) or undermined, but also repurposed as part of a system of consent to continued capitalist rule.  You have to remember that huge numbers of working people thought of universal suffrage (however they defined it) as a means to fundamentally change society in favour of working people, including redistributing wealth and property.  This ultimately didn’t happen, obviously… or rather, it did, but the wealth and property were redistributed upwards.  This is neoliberalism, and a vital part of how it works is the repurposing of popular democracy, more than just its subversion.  You could even say that neoliberalism is the great expression of that repurposing.  Neoliberalism, as a global system, is a direct – and, at the lower and earliest levels, consciously connived – counter-revolutionary response to the post-war social democratic era, which was itself an extemporisation on the part of the capitalist system, a survival strategy to appease a global rejection of the inequalities of the pre-war system.…

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