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Build High for Happiness 6: A Field in England (2013)

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Wandering in open country is naturally depressing

A Field in England is a precise antipode to High-Rise, a fact acknowledged by Ben Wheatley, who has spoken about the way in which he is inclined to make one project a reaction against the previous one. But the thing about the alchemical union of opposites is that it works largely because of the similarities. Just as “up” and “down” presuppose movement in three-dimensional space and “left” and “right” presuppose neoliberal democracy, High-Rise and A Field in England presuppose a director doing sci-fi/fantasy inflected period pieces rooted in the psychogeographies of English spaces. In some understandings of conceptual space this is how the hypercubic prison works – through the systematic construction of axes bounded by opposites that, when multiplied sufficiently, create a territory that is at once infinite and contained.

This is in essence the problem that faces Whitehead, who winds his way through a recurrent series of at best gradual enlightenments in pursuit of no obvious goal or trajectory for escape. More to the point, his problem is heavily location-dependent, in both spatial and temporal senses. Spatially he is confined to the eponymous field, a setting we’ll unpick momentarily. Temporally, however, he is bound by the English Civil War. It has often been suggested that this event serves as the origin for the contemporary socio-political system, an argument that’s generally based on reading it as a transition between the established aristocracy of Charles I and the revolutionary fervor of the Puritans. This is an oversimplification in countless regards, not least that it misunderstands history as something with an origin as opposed to as a series of debts inherited and bloodily paid off from era to era. The English Civil War is certainly an instance of this, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that what emerged from it is somehow a sui generis origin as opposed to an if not inevitable at least entirely sensible consequence of what came before.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Whitehead straddles both sides of this transition, or perhaps more accurately, is stepping over the divide himself.  His status as an alchemist clearly situates him in the world that is receding. But the arc of his slow ascension is clearly towards a measure of individual liberty and away from the crass and domineering tyranny offered by O’Neil, which affiliates him more with the Puritans. Like us, he’s trapped on the inexorable slide down history’s birth canal – just from a substantively different angle. Or, if you prefer something in keeping with ascension, headed up the chimney, an identity gone up in smoke.

This leaves location: a field in England. Central to this is its raw genericness. There are a lot of fields in England, another consequence of the way in which the whole of the island is the product of human development and intervention. And there were a lot of them in the Civil War; Alan Moore is fond of claiming one near Northampton as the place where it was won, although that was merely the first of three, and dialogue about Pembroke places this one during the second, a few years later.…

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The Lying Detective Review

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Well, this was certainly better than The Six Thatchers, though a season of Sherlock (or indeed anything) in which the Moffat episode is not better than the Gatiss episode is difficult to imagine. In comparison with the three other straight Moffat scripts for Sherlock, which is to say to the three best episodes of the series this is… possibly not actually in fourth place overall for the show. Nah, I’ll go with definitely not – I’m comfortable putting The Sign of Three ahead of it.

Let’s start with Mary, since she’s certainly the biggest issue inherited from last week. First the good: we’re not done with Amanda Abbington yet! In fact, she’s credibly the best thing going for much of the episode, with her snarky side-comments routinely being the best gags in it. On the other hand, the narrative reasons for her death are by and large still inscrutable. The most obvious choice – that Moffat wanted to tell a story about grief and fatherhood – is clearly not where things are going, what with Rosamund not actually appearing in this episode. Nor does anything particularly follow from Mary’s death, or at least, nothing that couldn’t have been done anyway. Sure, the specific resolution of Sherlock getting into it with Culverton Smith to get John to save him is a product of Mary’s death, but save for that one emotional beat, this was a story that could have been done anywhere and at any point in Sherlock.

Indeed, for all that they rightly hyped Toby Jones’s portrayal of Culverton Smith, as a villain he is something of a step down at this point. The two most obvious comparisons, Magnussen and Moriarty, were both elevated by their actors, but were well-written and compelling ideas in their own right. Smith, on the other hand, would be a nothing without Toby Jones to leer and cackle his way through the episode. Sure, Sherlock vs. Jimmy Savile as serial killer is a decent hook, but the hook is all there is to Smith. There’s no potential for him to be elevated above baddie-of-the-week status, which isn’t really a status that a show that does three episodes every couple of years should be using. And more to the point, it’s basically one the show has rightly avoided since The Blind Banker. Much of what made Series Three so strong was that all three of its episodes were big, weighty events in their own right. This just… isn’t. And while the Jimmy Savile angle is clever, it’s also obvious, leaving nowhere for Moffat to get his teeth in and push it somewhere meaty.

As a result, this episode ends up being… fine. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but there’s nothing particularly right either. Its biggest idea is Sherlock’s addiction, which isn’t strictly speaking a topic that plays to Moffat’s strengths. He can’t really muster anything on it that he didn’t already do with His Last Vow, acknowledging the compelling and nebulous space between decision and compulsion.…

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Faeces on Trump 5

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Dedicated, with all awareness of the impudence and absurdity of doing so, but also with sincere love and respect, to the memory of John Berger.

 

In the new Preface he wrote in 2010 for a reprint of his 1975 book A Seventh Man, John Berger explained why, in some respects, the book was outmoded.  It is a book of words and photographs – by Jean Mohr – about migrants.  It was written, as Berger says, before a great many things happened which would profoundly alter the world’s political landscape.  One of these things is, as Berger puts it, “the establishment of the global economic order, known as neoliberalism – or, more accurately, economic fascism”.

Not even in the remote vicinity of fucking about, was Berger, despite his customary elegance.

But it’s true, in very essential ways.  Fascism is marked by one of the treasured tactics of the liberal or the reformist leftist.  It is a ‘mixed economy’.  One of the first things the Nazis did, when they were handed power by German bourgeois politicians, was to privatise lots of key manufacturing industries.  Much as did Thatcher as part of the neoliberal counter revolution in Britain.  This isn’t to equate Thatcher and Hitler, but to point out that neoliberalism is a version of a strategy also central to fascism.  And yet, as is better known (thanks to the semi-coherent screeching on this subject from the contingent of pub bores and internet bloviators I am thinking of christening ‘the folk Right’), the Nazis also employed a policy of state direction of industry, and were ‘statists’ in other broader senses.  But then, as many have pointed out, neoliberalism is not really anti-statist.  It expands the state in key ways, even as – fascism style – it integrates state power with corporate power.  The great early triad of neoliberalism was Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet.  Pinochet’s Chile, supported by Thatcher, and helped into being by the US, was run as a kind of lab experiment in what has become known as neoliberalism.  The opening of the state to corporate interests, and the subsequent transfer of what had been socialised wealth into private hands, with the brutality of all that being buttressed with direct state brutality, with the growth of state power in areas such as police repression and military spending.  Military spending, once again, a key aspect of fascism.

Of course, in Euro-American culture, we say it isn’t fascism if white people aren’t in the camps.  If white people aren’t being locked up for thoughtcrimes, aren’t being murdered by the state, then whatever it is, surely it isn’t fascism.  Without for a moment wishing to deny or downplay the immense suffering of the victims of the Nazi holocaust, and of mid-20th century German imperialism more generally, it’s true that we reserve a special and unique horror for that particular form of aggressive and racist imperialism because it was committed against mostly ‘white’ people in Europe.  

(Though we must always remember that the category of ‘whiteness’ is socially constructed, and is therefore permeable, malleable and manipulable.…

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Myriad Universes: The Deceivers Part 3: The Truth Elusive

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I don’t think any of the characters on the cover here actually appear in the issue. Certainly not that lady Romulan Commander: Davoros is male, I think.

So there’s recap. About a page and a half of it, but that’s to be expected. What’s not to be expected, or at least Team Beardy didn’t expect it, is that Geordi and the crew knew all about their betrayal ahead of time, which allowed them to alter the frequency of their own phasers so they wouldn’t be affected when the alternate universe crew reversed the polarity or whatever. This allows our heroes to subdue their counterparts and curtail their little hijacking attempt. How did they know this? Quite simply, and naturally, we underestimated Deanna Troi. Being empathic, she could immediately sense when Team Beardy started to plot against the crew, and spied on them to learn the details of their plan. However, as Bearded Geordi points out, this still leaves them with the dilemma of what to do about the rogue sun threatening the Beta Argotha system in his universe, or indeed how to tell which universe everyone is in. We get some more recap about why this is a problem, before Haspan announces that he might have figured it out.

Back with the Enterprise half of the story, we seem to have gone back in time a bit as the Ferengi Marauder hasn’t warped out of the Neutral Zone yet. But then it does, and Captain Picard has a conversation with Worf about why they shouldn’t chase after it before he suddenly comes to a realisation. Cutting off his train of thought, he has Worf call up Commander Riker to tell him he and his away team can come back because the mystery has just been solved. While on Beta Argotha One, Haspan explains why he thinks Team Beardy is actually in the right, and that they are in their universe. After some mildly ageist ribbing from Smithers and Gillette, Haspan explains that he’s been idly making some scans of the local flora and fauna when the other team members were busy trying to kill each other, and discovered evidence of recapitulation.

And here’s where I start to cringe, to be honest. This is a good story arc, but this plot point right here is straight up bad science. Worse still, it reminds me of one of Star Trek’s most egregious nadirs, “The Child”. For those who mercifully blocked all evidence of that episode from your memory banks, the initial pitch for that trainwreck was based on recapitulation theory, the widely discredited notion that embryos go through all the “previous stages” of evolution during development. So, for example, a human embryo would go through reptile, amphibian, rodent, primate and early hominid before reaching its “final form”. This theory rests on a dangerously inaccurate teleological conception *and* shoddy observational skills both, and that’s not touching on the political ramifications of discourse surrounding reproductive biology.

To his credit, writer Michael Jan Friedman doesn’t *entirely* throw this.…

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Build High for Happiness 5: Crash (1973/1996)

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a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration

Within the biotemporal omnipresence of the hypercube escape must be understood as an exit wound. In practice, this would manifest itself as an area towards which the natural flows towards annihilation congregate – the eddies along the surface where narrative tracks converge, scar tissue forming anticipatorily around the site of injury. Counterintuitively, then, a weak point is going to appear as the thickest part of the skin.

Crash, then – first of Ballard’s three attempts at sci-fi without futurity, the book is a famously scandalous meditation on the eroticism of the car crash. Its film adaptation, in 1996, is suspended neatly at the halfway point between the twin towers of the Ballard and Wheatley/Jump High-Rises, and circles neatly around other touchstones. It’s directed by David Cronenberg, for instance, whose 1975 film Shivers saw him independently arriving at the concept of a modernist apartment complex descending into madness, albeit because of genetically engineered parasites who drive their hosts mad with lust as opposed to because of some inherent property of modernity. Its opening sequence – a slow tracking shot through an aircraft hanger, across the sleek bodies of airplanes, fragmented like a female body beneath the male gaze, until finally, in the middle distance, a woman undressing enters the frame and, as we move to close-up, exposes her nipple and lays it seductively upon the body of the aircraft, which she proceeds to relate to more closely and intimately than the lover who subsequently takes her from behind – draws a crucial link between the sexuality of cars and one of Le Corbusier’s other defining aesthetic obsessions, the airplane.

This connection is more subdued in the novel, but still present: Ballard’s wife (the main character is named after himself) is sleeping with a pilot and taking flying lessons, and Ballard has occasional descriptions like “even the giant aircraft taking off from the airport were systems of excitement and eroticism, punishment and desire waiting to be inflicted on my body.” The connection between cars and planes is hardly an unexpected one requiring reference to Le Corbusier, but the link is nevertheless generative. Le Corubusier’s aestheticization of mechanical functionality creates a tightly wound feedback loop that Ballard efficiently short-circuits. As Le Corbusier puts it, talking about cars, “through the relentless competition of the countless firms that build them, each has found itself under obligation to dominate the competition, and, on top of the standard for realized practical things, there has intervened a search for perfection and harmony outside of brute practical fact, a manifestation not only of perfection and harmony, but of beauty.” In other words, the mechanistic efficiency of cars naturally leads to the emergence of beauty, to which Ballard, quite sensibly, sets about trying to fuck.

The cold detachment that characterizes Laing is obviously a big part of this, but what Crash foregrounds that High-Rise does not is the eroticization of this clinicism, as evidenced by his description of a fantasy of “the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbreake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered forever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.”…

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The Six Thatchers Review

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Not sure these will always be on Sundays – they might migrate to Tuesdays, which this week will be Build High for Happiness 5. Anyway, Sherlock‘s back as the Year of Moffat continues, albeit, you know, with Gatiss. Speaking of whom, and in a rare concession to spoilerphobes, let’s start by saying has written what’s almost certainly the best script of his career here, a position admittedly previously held by The Empty Hearse and The Hounds of Baskerville. It’s not labyrinthine; Gatiss has never done that, and that, as opposed to his usual problem of stultifying unoriginality, has generally been his weakness on Sherlock. But it moves in unexpected ways. The substitution of Mary for the expected Moriarty plot is in many regards just the same trolling as “eh, we’re not going to tell you how he actually survived,” but the last twenty minutes felt extraordinarily inventive, moving in genuinely unexpected directions. The revelation of John’s near-affair is unlike anything Gatiss has ever done, small and human and actually like a writer who exists in a post-Russell T Davies world. The end, particularly with the injunction to save John, is unmistakably also the season-plotting influence of Moffat, but the small, moment to moment decisions of how it’s structured are chosen with a care and weight that’s as much of a leap forward for Gatiss’s writing as Scandal in Belgravia was for Moffat’s. On the back of this, I’m actually curious what he’ll do for what you’ve got to figure could well be his last ever Doctor Who script this year.

More broadly, it’s an interesting place to put the season. Past seasons have had fairly self-contained first episodes that end in some vague tease of future weight – twice Moriarty, once Magnussen. But it’s never felt as though there was too much to clear up in the next three hours. This time, with the fractured Sherlock/John relationship, the strange musings about death, Sherrinford, Moriarty, and a trailer that’s focused on a character with no obvious relationship to any of this, it feels like a show that’s going for something it’s never done before, trying to push itself into a new shape. It’s a good feeling at the start of 2017; what it seems like we want from the return of Sherlock. More of this thrilling, exciting sense of possibility please.

And, of course, less of this “we fridged Mary” crap. This is, simply put, a fucking awful decision. Maybe – maybe – there’s some way to justify it that we’ll see over the next two weeks. I certainly wouldn’t put it past Steven Moffat to turn a decision this awful around. But the fact remains that Mary Watson was one of the best things Sherlock had going for it. The Abominable Bride rightly celebrated the female characters that the show’s modernized approach let it have. Now they’ve taken the best one out in a cheap and arbitrary way that offers nothing save for an opportunity for Martin Freeman to get to show off his dramatic range.…

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New Year’s Eve Waffling

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I realized I didn’t mention the end-date for the Boxing Day sale on ebooks. That’s January 2nd, so you’ve got two more days if you’re interested in picking up any of our books for cheap.

I posted something to this effect on Twitter a few weeks ago, but didn’t get that many responses, so figured I’d make it a New Year’s Eve waffling topic, as I’m genuinely interested in how people respond to it. My suggestion was answering these two questions in lieu of New Year’s resolutions. Certainly I think they’re important questions to have answers to right now.

1) What would your government have to do to lose its legitimacy in your eyes? (Define roughly as “you would consider its overthrow outside the normal democratic procceses to be a good thing.”)

2) At what point does violence become an acceptable tactic for resistance? (Please note that unless you are an outright pacifist the answer “never” is cowardice.)

Happy New Year, everybody. This isn’t going to be easy, but we’re all in it together.…

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Spirit Tracks: The Elder Scrolls Chapter I

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Just in time to see out the year, it’s the debut of Yet Another Eruditorum Press Podcast! A show I have tentatively decided to entitle Spirit Tracks, because reasons. I’m really excited to be able to share this new series with all of you: It’s a project I’ve been working on for a great deal of time and it’s gone through a number of different conceptual phases and incarnations. In its current form, I expect to be mainly doing commentary tracks on assorted bits of visual media, but I also hope to build a stable of regular guests and topics as the show evolves. I’ve already got a great series of co-hosts lined up for the first block of episodes, and I can’t wait to introduce you to each of them.

Tonight, for our first regular broadcast, I’m joined by friend of the blog, and my own personal friend, Ben Knaak, to talk about something that has been almost indescribably important and formative to both of our lives: The Elder Scrolls series. Because this is such a broad (and rather inaccessible) topic and Ben and I can (and have, as you are welcome to see) talk about it for hours on end, this particular episode is going to be Part 1 of at least two shows, looking at The Elder Scrolls from two different angles. In this part we take a more straightforward games journalism/video game historian approach to the series: We examine each major series entry to date in chronological order, talking about what made them historically important, what these games meant for us personally and what they contributed to the unfolding lore that makes The Elder Scrolls so utterly unique among large-scale video game franchises. Next time, we’ll go into more detail about precisely what that lore is, what ramifications it has for the act of reading narrative fiction and perhaps, expose a little of the lineage-magicka that is The Elder Scrolls’ biggest open secret.

Check out the episode here, over at the Pex Lives Libsyn site. The show clocks in at just over three and a half hours, average length for a standard radio talk show, but there are plenty of places to pause, take a break and come back to should you feel the need to do so. Also, do please note we had some issues first recording and then editing the myriad of audio files we generated: In particular, I ran into a series of rather gnarly audio sync problems. I did my best to get everything flowing together properly and, while it’s not perfect, I remain quite proud of my first official podcast editing job. Thanks in advance for listening, and hope you enjoy!

A few liner notes to keep in mind as you go through the show-Just some things I neglected to mention during the recording, or slightly misquoted to the point it made me feel like a bit of an idiot when I went back and edited it…

 

  • It was Ken Rolston, lead designer on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, who stated that he started The Elder Scrolls I: Arena “at least 20 times”, and only managed to get out of the first dungeon *once*.
…

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Faeces on Trump 4

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So, farewell 2016.  But don’t worry.  Plenty of nasty shit is going to happen next year too. 

Plenty of nasty shit went on this year, and has especially been going on since Trump was elected.  Next year won’t be better.  It’ll be worse.  The question isn’t whether it’ll be worse (it will), the question is how will it be worse? 

As many predicted, the most immediate danger is probably going to be the emboldening effect of Trump’s election upon the vast army of resentful bigots who – like bullies in every schoolyard – suddenly feel a lot braver in the shadow of the really big bully. 

Moreover, despite apparently immediately falling prey to incompetence, lack of preparedness, and a tendency to prioritize the settling of scores with Republican enemies, the Trump team has managed to make some appointments, and moot more… and they range from the routinely scary to the frankly terrifying.  One of the worst so-far, almost everyone seems to agree, is Steven Bannon, former head of crazed, ultra-reactionary internet rag Breitbart, online hub for white supremacists, anti-semites, misogynists, conspiracy theorists, and most fervid and febrile flavours of the ‘alt-right’.  Bannon himself is every bit the distasteful specimen you’d expect from such a background.  He’s another of the ‘fascists without a uniform’ who seem to be proliferating in Trump’s bloated shadow.  As an indication of what Trump plans to do with his presidency, it’s pretty unmistakeable.  He plans to surround himself with a cloud of extreme reactionary dogma, and at least sound PR notes centred on denying and denigrating progress, attacking womens’ rights, stoking white ressentiment and paranoia, feeding Islamophobia, smearing Black Lives Matter and any such movement, and relentlessly attacking anything that looks like ‘the Left’ to the kinds of people who think the new Ghostbusters film is a Marxist plot (it wasn’t, by the way… or at least, if it was, they forgot to tell me.)

However, to once again be pedantic and lay myself open to misunderstanding, I find it implausible that Bannon and Trump will be instituting a Nazi-style round-up of anyone to the Left of them into camps, or a new political police force to arrest people for questioning the regime.

What does worry me is the idea that, on the look-out for such things, people – and I include myself in that, because god knows I’m prone to missing important shit going on under my nose – miss the incremental ramping-up of what we might call ‘normal extremism’ to the point where ‘fascism’ becomes entirely obsolete, because the system simply no longer needs it.  That is what I see starting here: the beginning of a final burst of speed for normal extremism as it sees the victory line in the distance.  The contours of fascism return as normal extremism speeds up.  People notice the increase in speed and ferocity, but fascism as we have known it fails to appear.  But before anyone notices, every function fascism has historically played in the service of capitalism – the burying of the left, the smothering of resistance, the disempowering of the working class, the slavish servicing of the needs of big capital, the reinforcement of the hierarchies of race and gender that capitalism finds so conducive to stability, the ruthless imperialism in the service of domestic capital, etc – can be achieved without fascism.…

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Myriad Universes: The Deceivers Part 2

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Vaka Rangi Volume 1 is currently 33% off on Smashwords as part of the Eruditorum Press Holiday eBook sale with the coupon RT654, now through January 2, 2017. If you’ve got an eBook reader, are a fan of Vaka Rangi’s take on Star Trek and haven’t yet checked out the first volume of the revised version of this project, now might be a good time to do that!

 

The Geordis introduce themselves and exposit to one another. Our Geordi begins by recapping the events of last issue (or at least the parts of it pertaining to his and Deanna’s subplot), while Bearded Geordi claims his team was on an urgent mission to intercept a rogue star that had entered the Beta Argotha system on a collision course with its host sun. In their universe (because of course they’re from an alternate universe: Why on Earth would you ever suspect otherwise?), Beta Argotha has six planets instead of the five in our version of it, and the sixth is an inhabited world with no spaceflight capabilities and no way to divert the rogue star. On top of that, Bearded Geordi’s Enterprise had only *discovered* the Beta Argotha system a few days prior to the events of the story, thus giving them next to no time to react.

There is some technobabble explanations for why Bearded Geordi and his crew couldn’t have delivered the necessary payloads via remote control, or contacted their Enterprise for help after they crash-landed, and Bearded Geordi angsts that by the time his ship figures out what happens it will be too late. Unless, he says, our Geordi lets him use our Runabout (which wasn’t as badly damaged as the alternate Yutcan) to try and finish the job. In fact, he doesn’t say, or even ask: He demands our crew turn over the Yutcan, arguing that the mission must be completed no matter what. Geordi, however, flatly refuses.

Back on the Enterprise (that is, *our* Enterprise), Captain Picard has brought up Gul Erak’s charges with Tavorok. The fugitive Romulan naturally (and flippantly) denies them, says he has no idea what the Cardassians are talking about when they say he “committed a heinous crime against them”, and reasserts his claim that what the Cardassians want is access to the dilithium-eating virus he had been working on while in the employ of the Romulan Star Empire. Tavorok is thus certain that the Cardassians are lying, though Captain Picard remains guarded. At that moment, Commander Riker calls him: Another ship has just turned up-A Romulan Warbird. The Enterprise hails the Romulans and, after exchanging the usual pleasantries about the dangers of trespassing in the Neutral Zone, the Romulans request the Enterprise extradite a known criminal currently in their jurisdiction: Namely, Tavorok.

The Romulan Commander says Tavorok is a murderer, though denies Gul Erak’s claim that he has committed some atrocity against the Cardassian people. According to the Romulans, Tavorok was indeed a scientist “at the forefront of a number of scientific breakthroughs”, though he dismisses the fugitive’s story that his work had anything to do with creating an artificial dilithium virus to be used as a superweapon to cripple Federation starships.…

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