None of you understand. We’re not locked in here with you. We just lost our keys.
We are pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives, in which Kevin and James forget to watch The Mind Robber and talk about the smoldering wreck that is the 2016 election instead. That’s available here for your listening pleasure, or through most standard podcast apps. …
The Democrats’ vote collapsed. Many people who had previously voted Democrat, and many people who might’ve been expected to, didn’t go to the polls for Hillary Clinton. There is, undoubtedly, a degree to which sexism is involved here. I don’t want to minimise that. Hillary is the subject of a great deal of venomous misogynistic hatred. She comes in for loathing more than male politicians with equally grubby histories. She is often the redirected hate-object for people who have come to hate her husband and his legacy. The Clintons generally have become obsessive hate-objects for many Americans – particularly but by no means exclusively conservative Americans, despite being both extremely right-wing in real terms. The reasons are interesting but somewhat outside our scope here.
There is much to dislike about Hillary Clinton her purely on her own account. Some people might not like my taking the time to go into this at the moment, but I think it’s very important we don’t allow (entirely rational and reasonable) horror at Trump to make us forget the very real horror of the system and its apparatchiks under ‘normal’ conditions.
Clinton has – as those tapes made all too clear, as if it weren’t clear already – been perpetually a friend of plutocrats, of Wall Street, of big financial firms, of corporations generally. Those tapes were of speeches designed to reassure such people – people like me are silly and old-fashioned enough to call them ‘the ruling class’ – when, later, she made public speeches containing what would be, to their ears, dangerously left-wing rhetoric designed to woo the plebs. (Her fee for private speech is, by the way, about a quarter of a million dollars.)
She is authoritarian on ‘law and order’, and – like Bill – has employed racially-charged dogwhistles. She has been wobbly-to-retrograde on womens’ issues, including abortion. Always she has cloaked herself in inspirational soundbites about equality. In this election campaign she has made lots of noises about inspiring little girls, noises which have created rapture in the hearts of many white liberal feminists. Samantha Bee, for instance, fawned over Clinton revoltingly, taking her ball about inspiring little girls and running with it all the way to a friendly, jokey chat with Bill’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once said that the deaths of half a million Iraq kids from US-supported sanctions (half of them presumably girls) was “worth it”. Meanwhile, we were also supposed to be inspired by the activities of the partly Saudi-funded Clinton Foundation… which turned out to be a bad idea, even if we grant that charity is anything other than a way of managing the perpetuation of an evil system, usually run by the same people who benefit from it.
She has been a consistent enemy of welfare, helping articulate the right-wing arguments against it from within an ostensibly liberal discourse. When Bill was governor of Arkansas, she joined with him in victim-blaming the poor, welfare recipients, and then teachers. They extended the same logic to the Clinton presidency.…
Still not a spectacular insta-classic, but at least it’s an episode that stays away from most of the obvious things it could be as well. The double-threat structure means that there’s building momentum at all moments of the plot, which is good. Less good is the no-doubt budget-required decision to have two of the three plot strands consist of people standing in a room urgently discussing the plot. The biggest problem here is probably the strand consisting of Tanya and her parents, which ends up being in the kind of awkwardly stupid position of ineffectually relaying information between the two actual plots. But none of the plots are particularly high on urgency – it’s a significant problem that the flowers plot requires Dorothea to simply declare that they’re running out of time in order to garner momentum, and a pretty big one that Ram and April are essentially left with nothing to do but walk around for most of the episode.
So that’s what keeps it just shy of genius. On the other hand, however, there’s what the show always has, which is a dogged determination to be interesting. For instance, Ram and April’s relationship continues to be pitched well. It’s very eager to shout “WE ARE NOT FALLING INTO CONVENTIONAL TROPES OF TEEN ROMANCE,” which is probably irksome to some people, most probably teenagers, but the flipside of that is that it’s legitimately not falling into the conventional tropes of teen romance. Personally, I hope the season ends without them saying they love each other. That would be fantastic. (Also, though I missed a fair chunk of the details of the dialogue, the conversation about Ram’s Sikh heritage was a hoot.)
Even better are Charlie and Ms. Quill, who continue to go in unexpected directions. Has there ever, in the history of Doctor Who, been such a concentrated effort to take violent revolutionary politics as a serious moral position? I mean, it’s far from perfect, and the show would be wildly more interesting if Quill were presented as a hothead who considers violence a legitimate tactic as opposed to an ideological warrior for whom killing her enemies is her default setting. Indeed, and this is obviously a viewpoint influenced by political concerns that the episode couldn’t possibly respond to, I think equating violent resistance to slavery with the fetishization of violence is grotesque and irresponsible. But I still appreciate that this is a show willing to take the accusation of slavery completely seriously in the first place. And I want to be clear, I like Quill’s tendency to fly off the handle in the general case – her last scene with Dorothea is brilliant stuff. And I like that she’s being freed from her slavery now and that we get to see her unchained. I just wish that the surprisingly nuanced portrait of revolutionary violence was subtler yet.
But for the most part this is still another worthy but unspectacular example of the show’s default setting. It’s not leaning on any overly obvious plot structures, which is nice, but it’s not replacing them with interesting ideas either – just with a different sort of autopilot and wallpaper.…
I’m sorry I haven’t been producing more content lately, either in written or podcast form. I’ve got a new Consider the Ray Gun about 95% done, discussing Dune with James Murphy, and the next Searching For Fuchal has been recorded, although I haven’t even begun to edit yet. I’ve also got an upcoming Oi! Spaceman on The Space Museum, and it looks like 2017 is going to be the year I take a systematic look at Quentin Tarantino and other 90s-vintage indie filmmakers.
Jack, Kit, and I had been planning to do a US election podcast for the last couple of weeks, and suffice it to say this is not the episode I was hoping to produce. This was recorded late Friday night, and I think all three of us consider this to be a bit of a rough conversation about the issues discussed here, rather than a nuanced and final opinion on them. We chat about whether Trump’s presidency will be truly fascist (probably not), how opinion polling failed, the meaning of the safety pin, systemic issues with late-stage capitalism, and my experiences in dipping into the Fash the Nation podcast. It’s rough, both in content and form, it’s meandering, and it’s nearly four hours long. I think it’s pretty obvious that we’ll all be writing about and discussing these issues for at least the next four-to-eight years, assuming our ability to do those things lasts that long.
Here’s a direct download if that makes it easier. And if anyone has a good source for county-level election results going back several cycles (that are either free or very cheap) please let me know, as I’m working up a much more detailed look at the mechanics of the 2016 election. …
My response to the victory of blithering pea-brained plutocrat Donald J. Trump in the recent US Presidential election just kept getting longer and longer. So I’ll have to split it up into sections and post them separately. Here’s the first bit:
There was, of course, the initial opening flurry of Oh Shits and What the Fucks and You’ve Got To Be Fucking Kiddings. And quite right too. (Though Michael Moore predicted Trump’s victory, even if his analysis is deeply flawed.)
Then there were other equally predictable things. The orgy of masochistic doom-and-gloomery, for instance. (Again, not unjustified. It’s gonna be an awful 8 years, amongst other things.) We can forgive most of the hyperbolic and rhetorical That’s It, I’m Moving To Canadas, precisely because they were hyperbolic and rhetorical. The sentiment may, at bottom, be selfish and short-sighted, but it’s no more so than a cry of “If my parents find out about this I’m dead!” from a kid who’s been caught smoking weed by a teacher. (Conversely, the odious Katie Hopkins says she’ll now move to America… which puts me in a horrible dilemma.)
We also had the spectacle of some people realising that it was possible for someone who seems ridiculous to them, and who has consequently been ridiculed by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, etc, to not seem ridiculous to other people. Satire, they learned, doesn’t actually kill. You wouldn’t think grown-ups would need to learn such lessons, but apparently… You wonder how insulated some people can be. You wonder how they thought Donald Trump was coping in the world before now. You wonder how they think this world works. Do they genuinely still assume that it’s basically a meritocracy which prizes dignity and good behaviour over wealth? You wonder if they realise that Trump was already very powerful before being elected President, simply on the basis of his (inherited, grabbed, and swindled) wealth, and that his venality, vulgarity, stupidity, incoherence, and ridiculous appearance, never caused him any significant trouble in the exercise and enjoyment of that power.
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But then we move into uglier territory. We move into the inevitable blaming of people who voted for third-party candidates, even though this is self-evidently silly and, as it turns out, factually impossible. And even if third-party ‘protest’ voters had swung the election for Trump, I have a couple of questions for those now wagging fingers at them:
1) if we grant that protest voters helped Trump (which they, on the whole, simply didn’t), and if such phenomena are such a big concern of yours, then why don’t you make reform of the grotesquely unfair voting system a big priority of yours all the time, even when there isn’t an election happening? (If you do, good for you, but most of you don’t, do you?).
2) Why don’t you, instead of finger-wagging, actually take the time and trouble to listen to people who voted for third party candidates as a protest, to find out why they did it?…
The Tower, at its most optimistic (which is not very) offers the destruction of illusions. I don’t know about you, but I feel like burning some shit down.
First, then: nobody is to blame for Trump’s election save for the people who voted for him. A failed resistance is not at fault for the actions it tried to prevent. Everyone in the circular firing squad is in the end wrong. The awful truth is that there is nothing you could have done to stop him. Let’s start, then, by jettisoning the illusion that said otherwise. The arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice. The moral universe has no arc. The moral universe does not even exist. History is a butcher without face or agency – a thing that simply happens to people. There is no individual level response to it. Your relationship to history is not one of subject to narrative, but of meat to predator.
Accordingly, there is no refuge to be found in any of the liberal platitudes offered as possible modes of resistance. There is no benefit to be found in giving him an open mind. There is no point in appealing to the checks and balances of the very system that has just given him material power. There is no value in hoping that history is going to suddenly develop a benevolent streak. “What do we do for the next four years?” is as stupid a question as “What do we do about Syria?” was. We don’t do anything. We cannot stop history. It is going to proceed with a grim inevitability, as deterministic and implacable as planetary motion.
The flip side of that is that history has no moral legitimacy beyond the mere fact of its existence. The material fact that when Donald Trump orders a drone strike there will be a drone strike is not “right” or “just.” It’s just true, in the same way that a bullet is true. There is no moral dimension to mere existence. That is not to embrace the idiot fantasy of “#notmypresident” or anything. Of course he’s the President. But this is only true as a material fact, and only material concerns follow from it.
Put another way, being President has not made Trump any more morally justifiable. Nor has it made him any more competent. Even for a right-wing authoritarian he’s a fucking moron driven by easily manipulable pathologies. The material consequences of this are by and large easy to figure out, at least in the broad strokes. Spoiler: it goes badly, and not just for his targets. Deaths in the millions are the best case scenario. The worst is billions. You can’t change that either.
But that does not mean that there is no resistance to be had. It’s merely to understand that resistance starts as an individual program. The fact that there is no intrinsic morality to Trump’s material power does not mean that we cannot ascribe morality. Indeed, allow me to do so with utter bluntness: Trump is fucking evil.…
No comics reviews this week. I just can’t. We’ll see about next week when we get there, but I was thinking of winding down the feature anyway, so peg your expectations accordingly. Instead, here’s this week’s Super Nintendo Project.
The future arrived in late September 1996, untethered to any major gift-giving occasion. My assumption in hindsight is that my mother, giddily triumphant after scoring one on the sly and apparently correct logic that Toy Works was still a place that would get a shipment but was not a place where they’d sell out in thirty seconds, couldn’t resist giving it to me immediately. It seems as though I must have known the Nintendo 64 was coming, just because it’s hard to imagine myself as a person who didn’t know things like that a new Nintendo console was coming out, but I honestly can’t even remember a trace of anticipation for the future. Perhaps that’s just where I was in late 1996. Certainly it was something of a low point for me, as adolescent depression’s teeth sunk in deepest and my academic performance began to degrade in the face of a simple and blunt inability to drag myself through page after page of rote busywork.
So it’s perhaps not a surprise that I was at the time unimpressed by the future. But oh boy was I. I beat Super Mario 64, but my desire to go back and collect further stars was essentially nonexistent. My objections were numerous and diffuse. I saw the “hunt for six stars in a level” schtick as little more than flagrant cover for the fact that there weren’t actually very many levels in the game, found the camera thoroughly unsatisfying, and hated holding the weird M-shaped controller by the middle and right prongs.
Most, though not all of this, was unfair, at least as a judgment of the future, in that it amounted to peculiarities of the early-version tech involved in Super Mario 64. Yes, the multiple stars per level were a workaround to deal with the fact that the cartridge could only hold so many of of the big 3D levels, but with subsequent games in the 3D star-hunt format this restriction loosened, and levels started getting the number of stars they could interestingly fit instead of six come hell or high water. The camera, likewise, gradually improved its basic AI, and the eventual switch away from the four-button C-Pad of the Nintendo 64 towards cameras controlled by a second analog stick took away most of the annoyance involved in Super Mario 64. Likewise the controller design, rooted in an understandable but still fundamentally erroneous guess that the D-Pad would remain the primary control mechanism for most games, was subsequently ditched, with future controllers, whether Nintendo’s or not, positioning the analog stick in more ergonomically pleasant locations.
(A side note on the multiple stars per level. On the one hand Super Mario 64 is focused on the search for a singular and defining object – a golden star around which entire worlds are organized.…
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Blasphemy, they would have said.
The story of handhelds is the secret story of the video game industry. Always overlooked in conversations about “bit eras” and “hardware cycles” and “console generations”, the handheld side of the medium has from the start been relegated to the kiddie table of the master narrative of history. This is in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that until quite recently handhelds were the best selling consoles on the market, and even today the “casual gamer” epithet is applied almost exclusively to those who are in possession of smartphones and tablets (that is, roughly 100% of the populace).
It is perhaps not altogether difficult to see why: Accessibility was always going to be a sticking point for a culture fundamentally built around the exclusivity of privilege necessary to have the latest up-to-date technology at any given time, and handhelds are built to be accessible, using older, established kit in inventive new form factors to keep costs down and ergonomics up. And there’s nothing gamers fear and despise more than low cost and ergonomic, for to them such things comprise the mark of the weak-willed and the infidel. So shunned was the Game Boy and its house for receiving allegedly pared-down ports of superior home console titles, and mocked were those who dared besmirch themselves by owning one. Why would you waste money on inferiority when you can get the same game but better for the NES and Super Nintendo for almost the same price, the gamers derided? Never mind that not everyone can afford a home console, or has room for one, or needs or wants one, and never mind that not everyone wants to spend their entire life slack-jawed and complacent in front of the reassuring glow of the TV screen.
And never mind that Nintendo has always built their name in the video game industry on the back of hardware like the Game Boy. Nintendo’s first real breakout in games aside from its early arcade cabinets was the Game & Watch, a series of simple handheld LCD games that doubled as watches and could fit in one’s pocket, marketed towards the average person on the go. In those days, and still to this day to an extent, Tokyo was a city of foot traffic, and something as simple and elegant as the Game & Watch was a surefire success. And if it wasn’t for the Game & Watch, we wouldn’t have the NES controller, and by extension every home console controller ever made. Or at least, it would have looked dramatically different: It was the unique cross-shaped input on the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong that inspired the now-ubiquitous control pad. And it was that same Donkey Kong Game & Watch which also featured a unique dual-screen clamshell layout (also seen, curiously enough, on the Game & Watch version of the original Zelda no Densetsu alongside the same control pad), that gave rise to another influential Nintendo handheld.
And so, it was to fall to The Legend of Zelda, biblical canon of the gamers, to legitimize the Game Boy in the eyes of anointed.…
Judging the first part of a two-parter is always a pain in the neck. (Remember when I thought Under the Lake had promise?) And there are other factors complicating this, like the nagging worry that Class isn’t ever going to transcend the fact that you can snarkily describe it as “The Sarah Jane Adventures with fucking.” Certainly we’re in familiar territory here, both in general and for Class, which is to say that we’re running through a fairly standard set of genre paces with a couple of unique spins. In this case, the basic mode is the mid-season finale, with the most obvious model being the “Surprise/Innocence” two-parter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Class is at least consistently good at throwing itself into whatever it’s doing with zeal, and so four episodes in its reliance on old standards has consistently been outshone by the flare with which they’re being done. All the same, my fondest and most adamant hope for the second part of this, or at least for something in the back half of the season, is that we get an episode that’s actually doing something new instead of adding a bit of spice to a cliche.
All of which said, once again the cliche is very tasty. Ness continues to be very good at striking a balance between the show’s instincts towards taking place in a TV school and its instincts towards emotional realism. The scene among Ram, April, and her mother is probably the highlight in this regard, with Ram being perfectly pitched both as a genuinely decent guy (“I didn’t want her to think bad of you.”) and as a mildly rebellious “bad” kid (“I had some condoms.”) It’s a smart balance, and more to the point one that’s ultimately derived from Doctor Who’s own longstanding balance of melodrama and actual drama. (And, of course, from Buffy.) And there are other bits of genuine intelligence around this. The “April feeds back into Corakinus” beat is entirely expected. Corakinus asking to cuddle after sex, on the other hand, is absolutely inspired. (Less successful – Tanya’s “I think they had sex” seeming to exist entirely to set up the moronic “Ram and the Shadow Kin?” joke.)
This last parenthetical also brings us to the things the episode is doing that at least offer real potential for going in a boldly original direction. The most interesting thing the show has going for it remains the Charlie/Ms. Quill relationship, which is clearly being pushed gradually to the forefront. It’s frustrating that this is often some of the clumsiest writing, with Tanya and Matteusz getting to flail uselessly against Charlie’s conviction of his moral rectitude, both on the slavery issue and on the owning weapons of mass destruction issue. This sets up the odd phenomenon of a plot that’s simultaneously the show’s best hope of turning in something that really makes you sit up and take notice and that’s flopping around on the table unsatisfyingly.
In a similar and more successful vein is the new head teacher, Dorothea, who tragically isn’t played by Sophie Aldred or Jackie Lane, but who is otherwise charming.…
Sorry about missing Thursday, but here it is (better late than never).
This time, I’m joined by Kit Power to chat about two Stephen King novels, The Dead Zone and The Running Man, and their respective film adaptations.
Kit and I think these stories have some application to issues of the day. See what you think.…