Media Consumption, Culling, Surrender and First World Problems to Ponder

NPR has this column up on their site, and even those of you who think NPR is communist hogwash trash will find this article is not about that sort of thing at all.  The article is entitled The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're Going To Miss Almost Everything.  Kind of lovely, that.  Written by a Linda Holmes.

Before reading any further, I kind of have to require that you read the article so I am not forced to repeat the words in the article too, too much.

I recall that in high school, a teacher discussed how Thomas Jefferson was a master of almost all the knowledge the world had to offer.  Languages.  Science.  Poetry.  History and Geography.  What have you, if a book offered it up, Jefferson bought the book and was able to recall and process the information.  "Of course," we were told, "there just wasn't that much to know back then."  Which, of course, I now realize is sort of a tall tale to explain how well-read Jefferson was, and to understand how he embraced lifelong learning as a passion (or, perhaps, his passion for knowledge is itself what drove him).

I didn't believe then that Jefferson truly knew "everything", and I often think back to that story as a sort of fantasy for bookworms, museum dwellers, hobbyists, etc...  (a) the mental capacity to absorb and comprehend whatever material is put in front of you and (b) such a limited amount of knowledge to even try to absorb that its possible to have learned all there is to learn in your culture, perhaps by the age of 50.

But that's a pretty damn high bar to qualify as "well read".

For the record, I don't consider myself well read.  My patience is short with books written prior to 1900.  Anything over 500 pages gives me a moment of pause.  The manner in which books are dealt with in K-12 education always felt unnatural and suspect.  It wasn't that I didn't or don't read.  I just think my AP English teacher broke me and my interest in reading a pre-assigned list of books one is supposed to read, and built in a lifelong aversion to approved literature.  This is not something I celebrate, by the way.  I'm kind of sad at all the things I will likely never read, because, seriously...  no.  I'm not going to read Tolstoy or likely ever James Joyce or any of a couple hundred books that bring joy to very smart people I like and admire.  I'm not in my 20's anymore, when I guess people read those books.  I bypassed college literature classes after comping out, and it didn't fit very well in my schedule then either for coursework or during my off hours where I could be found sitting in a movie theater or walking the aisles at the video store.

The article discusses mechanisms for dealing, either culling or surrendering.  And I think we all do a bit of both.

I recall being 18 and standing in Tower Records and having something akin to a panic attack as I realized "I will never hear 90% of the albums, and every time I buy one that's a thousand I didn't buy."  This was back when you had to buy music to hear it.  And so it goes.

I don't know very many people I would consider well read, even among people I know who read a lot of books.  I wish the article did more to talk about what the idea of being well-read even means in the 21st Century.  I don't know if I can buy the idea that Holmes states in her final sentences.

If "well-read" means "not missing anything," then nobody has a chance. If "well-read" means "making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully," then yes, we can all be well-read.

Who does this describe?  I don't know this person.  I've never seen him or her.  Even the idea that a person cranks through 100 books in a year is almost laughable.  You may read several, but in 2007, 1 in 4 said they hadn't read any books in the previous year.  But I'm not sure that's something to get hung up on, exactly.  Even if someone reads 50 books in a year, is that time better spent if the books are lousy than if that person were reading newspapers, journal articles, etc...?  Does reading all of War and Peace carry the same weight as a David Sedaris airplane book?  What constitutes thoughtful exploration?  Where's the rubric for that?

And...

Its the 21st Century.  We receive and process stories and information in packages that didn't exist 100 years ago.  If its fiction we're describing, does a book outweigh the value of a film at every turn (I'm the first to say it usually does)?  Longform television series?  And can't you have deep thoughts(tm) that come from these other media?  And if you don't, is it the media or the message?

We have limited time on this spinning space rock.  And we've all got our pet biases.  Of course I love comics.  And, firstly, 95% (or more) of the population will witness the walls of comics in my home, the crates of comics stored away and I cannot imagine anyone looking at me and judging me as well read.  I don't, but its not because I'm more likely to pick up Jimmy Olsen than finally @#$%ing finish Moby Dick.

As mentioned above, I was broken.  We all had assigned reading we hated.  Specifically, it was Tess of the D'Urbervilles that sort of pushed me over the edge into distrusting the idea of a prescribed set of books that may have been relevant 50, 75, 100 years prior, but sitting in a classroom in 1993, and seeing my instructor swoon in her personal infatuation with the book, but fail to convince me that the book wasn't some sort of masochistic victim porn.  "Why is this good?" I asked.  "Because people have loved it for generations" I was told.  "Its been assigned for generations," I said, "Of course you're always going to find somebody who likes everything.  I don't see how that makes it good.  Beverly Hills 90210 isn't 'good' and millions of people watch that."  "This isn't going to get you any closer to an 'A'" I was informed.  And so I shut up.

Of course genre fiction was trash.  And I loved it.  It brings me back to the question from over the weekend, of the possibly no-longer useful thinking employed in the NYT Game of Thrones review I mentioned.

But if I find something worth loving in Holmes' article, its the idea of surrender, which is something I occasionally espouse here, though I've never put a name on it.  I've just considered a zen* approach to dealing with the fact that there is too much to ever read, watch or listen to.  Just this week, I told some of your fellow Leaguers via email that I likely just wasn't going to read Ayn rand before I died.  It just wasn't on the bucket list.

You can actually see a version of the bucket list, by the way.  I keep it on a Google Site.  Its easier to manage if I keep a physical list of reminders, etc...  Would anything in that list lead you to believe I was "well read"?  Or was gaining understanding?  No.

Now, I am certain I cull.  I avoid romantic comedies, I won't read Harlequin Romance novels and I'll be honest... poetry is just beyond me.  I can't get my head around 95% of country music, and I generally avoid stagey, 3-camera sitcoms and sports talk television except during football season.

As per books...  you know, its hard to say.

But we all cull.  Its called personal taste or interest.  We all surrender.

I work in a building housing part of one of the finest libraries in the world.  The building I work in, a main campus library, is 6 stories and has a footprint about the size of just under a city block.  That building holds books on 4 of those floors, maps on one, and is one of about a dozen library buildings on campus.  And they really don't bother keeping much in the way of fiction in the library, I might add.

I have no idea what well read means.  Like everyone else, I wish I were smarter and had more information and insight at my fingertips.  But I am happy to be a part of curating and managing the wealth of human achievement as we move from dusty shelves to the digital beyond.

What choice is there but a happy surrender?

If there's been a central thesis to The Signal Watch and League of Melbotis before it, its been to try to rally a bit behind genre fiction in comics, books, movies, TV, et al., and try to make a case that this stuff has merit, that its part of the great possibilities.  It seemed like a small crack of insanity back in 2003, but in the short 8 years I've been doing this (and April marks the 8th anniversary), its been an amazing period of growth, co-option, adoption, transformation, diversity, etc... for the world of genre fiction.  If I've had any part in it, its just been to be a statistic of the number of blogs dedicated to these sorts of shenanigans, and these days, our numbers are legion.

So of course I'm biased.  But I also fully expect that a good number of readers have either culled the stuff I'm discussing right out of their options or they've done that surrender bit.  

But that's the way it is.  There's too much.  And I often feel badly, because you people are all right, and when you make suggestions as friends, its hard to just shrug and say "yeah, I'm probably never going to read that" and not make it sound like you're not a disrespectful jerk.  There's just a whole lot of stuff out there.

*certainly, I am misusing this word

Noir Watch: Human Desire

Ah, Ms. Gloria Grahame.

Human Desire is listed as 1954, directed by the great Fritz Lang, and is sort of a Double Indemnity meets Narrow Margin meets The Postman Always Rings Twice meets...   Still, I don't think its fair to say that Human Desire is a throwaway movie just because you can see the movie wearing its influences on its sleeve.

they say the same things about Jamie

The plot is a bit convoluted (aren't they all).  Grahame plays Vicki Buckley, the wife of a railyard junior manager who has lost his job.  He asks her to look up an old family employer of money and influence, and only after Vicki returns from securing the job does her husband, Carl, realize that Vicki and Owens may have had a past.  Things get murdery on the return train, and with incriminating evidence in his pocket Carl holds Vicki's fate in his hands.  However, Jeff Warren (played by Glenn Ford) works for the train company, has a run in with Vicki on the train, and slowly begins to piece things together even as he falls for Vicki.

Lang puts his stamp on the movie, incorporating trademark play with shadows and swashes of light, and in the tradition of the movies I'd mentioned above, it fits the bill for noir with any number of checkmarks including the disintegration of the everyman at the hands of sexual desire.  And, really, that's the hook of the entire story.

strangers on a train?

If I were to pick one thing that made the movie a bit of a standout, its that somewhat like Hayworth in Gilda, Grahame's Vicki is both victim and conniver, innocent and seductress.  Even when she's using less than scrupulous means to get something, its hard not to believe that she's at least partially honest.  And its that vacillation between right and wrong surrounding Vicki, Carl and Jeff, even with a murder in between them, that makes the story a bit different from, say, Double Indemnity.  Rather than simple corruption, its a sort of moral purgatory that seems to consume the characters.

Grahame gets an unusual amount of screentime in this one, and its a welcome difference.  On a simple read, I suppose its easy enough to see Vicki as the femme fatale, but her motivations from even before the film starts are mostly standard issue desires, and its circumstance and situations beyond her control that lead to the climax of the film.  The character simply isn't as likable as her role in her other co-starring film with Glenn Ford, The Big Heat, but she makes the most of a complex character.

Ford may have never committed fully to the pit he's supposed to be sinking into, and seems content to play the hero in a role that doesn't really demand it.  Curiously, in key scenes he does seem in tune with the material, so its an interesting noir schizm to see the lead merrily getting suckered into a bad corner without the "damn the torpedoes" look that comes with chasing a woman you know is going to wind up getting somebody killed.

Did I like the film?  Absolutely.  the story was tightly told, the characters believable, the setting and types of characters a bit fresh, and as I had Gloria Grahame on the brain, the timing was excellent.  I'd like to give it another whirl to see what I missed, and I'm sure some enterprising RTF scholar could write a whole paper on trains as symbolism of some sort as Lang frames them and uses them throughout the film.

I watched the film as part of a set Jamie got me for my birthday, Columbia Film Noir Classics 2.  The movie also comes with a short documentary.

In which I choose to judge a book by its cover

This may be the greatest cover to a book I've ever seen. Well, maybe not the greatest, but it speaks to me.

Picture of Young Joan Crawford kind of freakin' me out

I stumbled onto this last night, and now I can't quit looking at it. Young Joan Crawford looks like she really wants to stab someone.  I recommend you not look directly at the picture for too long.  Use one of those boxes you're supposed to make to look at the eclipse.  In this way, you are less likely to find yourself driven to madness.

As terrifying as I find Young Joan Crawford staring impassively into the camera, if she broke into a smile, I think I might pee myself a little.

No Post Monday

Last night we had a little to-do here at League HQ.  I had a blast, and I hope all of you Leaguers who made it had as good a time as I did.  If you didn't make it, I hope you can make some future shindig.

Heck, The Dug will be here in pretty short order, and that seems like reason enough to raise a glass or three (and possibly screen Birdemic while hangin' out with my family).

Anyway, rather than beat around the bush, this is about it for my post tonight.  I've got some other things on tap, and I'm a bit tired.  So here's something for you to ponder:

Signal Watch Reads: The Sixth Gun - Volume 1

We've talked a bit before about The Sixth Gun, a western/ fantasy/ horror book from Oni Press. Unfortunately for somebody in the equation, The Sixth Gun was one of the books I moved to my "will read in Trade format" during last year's re-think on how I was consuming my comics. For this post to feel more useful, I'd definitely hop back to that first post at the link above, and consider this a follow up.

Finally getting to Sixth Gun's first trade comes on the heels of me finally exploring a bit of Palmiotti and Gray's version of Jonah Hex, likely the best selling western comic in the US comics scene. Fortunately, just as movie westerns are really a big tent for all sorts of sub-genres, so, too, are comics westerns. Where we can get our Spaghetti Western on in the pages of Hex, Sixth Gun is telling aan adventure/horror tale of walking dead men, ancient evils and man's pivotal place in that scheme, circa 1870's America.

Bunn and Hurtt's comic shouldn't read as well as it does. By that I mean - there are a lot of comics on the stands that are mash-ups of two or more pop-culture concepts (seriously, you can't keep up), be it "Werewolf Zombie-Killer", "Chtulu High School", or "Spacefaring Vampire Superheroes" or whatever. And most of them are a kind of cute/ high concept idea with a neat cover and character designs, and then absolutely no ability to actually execute on a story.

Sixth Gun mixes concepts, and its hard to say its anything new, exactly, which is why it seems like this should fail.  But here at The Signal Watch, we say: it works.  The pacing, dialog, characters, etc...  may not be cut from new cloth, but Bunn and Hurtt seem to have that alchemy at their fingertips that can take those concepts and  breathe new life into them, pushing the story forward via well-conveyed character motivation and making the elements pulled from other sources fit like gears.

Bunn understands the spirit of the Southern culture he's depicting (I believe he's from Missouri, which puts him pretty neatly there below the Mason-Dixon line), and the misplaced honor and grandeur of the Old South which produces characters like our heroes and villains, and the expansion into the west as a sort of post-war purgatory where towns could burn to ashes and that was simply that.  And he knows what's actually scary about the concepts he's pulling into play.

Add in a set of a half-dozen guns-of-the-damned granting the carriers with supernatural properties, beasts from American mythology, and nightmare-inspired bar brawls, and Sixth Gun makes for a pretty darn good read.

As is now site policy, I'm going to wait to see how Volume 2 pans out before I give this book a "Signal Watch Official Seal of Recommended Reading".  I'd like to see where Bunn takes the protagonists, who showed signs of character, but seems to be on the slow boil model of character revelation.  Frankly, there's enough going on in the first volume with world setting, conflict establishment, etc...  that I didn't really feel like I was missing much until I began thinking about what we know about the rakish Drake Sinclair and Becky, the preacher's daughter who seems to have a bit of iron in her that precludes a standard-issue damsel in distress that a less creative writer might have put in her place. 

Hurtt's animation-friendly artistic style still works remarkably well for me, and I'll take it over any number of high-gloss, improbable anatomy wielding, no-understanding of action-framing artists out there working on high-profile books.  The terrain of the West, the mixing of western and wild mythology, etc...  blend very well under his pencil. 

Anyhow, we'll be back to talk Volume 2 when that edition arrives.

Baby, You're My Angel

New York Times steps on geek culture landmine, triggers wrath of Geek Girls

Not long ago I made mention of the welcome change I think the influx of Geek Girls has had on comics (and I guess sci-fi, but that's less an area where I mentally hang out). 

It seems The New York Times published a review of the upcoming HBO series Game of Thrones, a fantasy/ sword & shield epic based upon a series of novels by favored fantasy writer George RR Martin.  Truthfully, I'm not much of a fantasy-novel guy, and thanks to a decade of bad SyFy movies, I don't even remember if I have an opinion on fantasy movies that doesn't come with snarky detachment.

Anyway, it seems the reviewer in the New York Times has really tweaked the Geek Girl audience with the following:

While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half. 

Well, here we go.  Ginia Bellafonte, you know not what you hath wrought.

Frankly, I'm a little shocked this is what passes for a review in the NYT, not because its clear Bellafante has mistaken her own tastes in genre fiction for critical criteria, but because the review reads a bit more like an undergrad who hasn't really thought through her arguments against something they didn't like, but they've had a glass or two of wine and they can't quite articulate what they're thinking.  Again, I am not a fan of Martin's work, nor am I particularly enthused about Game of Thrones, but, srsly, NYT?

Nerdybird of Has Boobs, Reads Comics (a popular comics blog) has gathered up some of the reactions online.  Through the red anger-haze, I'm not sure all of the columns actually read what Bellafante was saying accurately, but that one troublesome paragraph is hard to miss, and hard to read incorrectly.

Unconsciously, Bellafante just called out the hordes of female sci-fi, fantasy and comics fans and suggested that they weren't, you know, "real girls".

This, I am sure, will horrify her.  She's a NYT reviewer and no doubt prides herself on her feminist ideals.  But, instead, she decided to go snob high schooler, casting generalizations over both the entirety of the human species, and dismissed anyone who basically doesn't share the taste of she and her pals.  Kind of weird, that, in a NYT review.

In some ways, its a bitter reminder that despite the mainstream embracing of aspects of geek culture into popular, prime time worthy entertainment, most folks just shrug at sci-fi or fantasy and will consume it if it comes across their plate (sort of like, "I don't really love mushrooms on my pizza, but if that's what's left on the buffet, that's what I'm eatin'"), while others are still a little miffed that not only do people seem to just consume what's put in front of them, but can you believe this Star Wars Klingon crap?  Gawd.  It's clearly no Brothers and Sisters. 

The interesting bit is that while guy geeks of my generation and older took it for granted that somehow devoting oneself to watching professional sports and wearing the colors of a pro-sports franchise is seen as totally normal adult behavior, routinely watching Star Trek should mean you're justly denied the affections of a woman and deserve ridicule for reading this type of book versus that type of book.*   This, of course, made no damn sense to me as a kid, and it makes less sense to me now.   

Fortunately, the Geek Girl movement is anything but quiet within the geek-o-sphere, and this seems like an interesting salvo to move beyond even just the geek-o-sphere and not taking any of that crap, thank you.

Bellafante seems a bit puzzled that "oh, hey, sex" occurs in fantasy fiction and reacts with a sort of prudish disbelief. 

What's fascinating and telling is that, from her comments, Bellafante no doubt considers herself up on what constitutes mature and appropriately lurid television and movies, indicating there's a rubric that constitutes "adult depictions of sex" in modern fiction or polite society that she's pretty sure she can approve or disapprove.  And, of course, that quote above?  It actually starts off with the following sentence:

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.

Wow.  Just...  There's so many things wrong in that sentence and contradictory (oh, so now we're condemning perverted women for making the wrong kind of sex happen on TV...) that its just flat out amazing this thing saw print.  

On the plus side, you just rallied a whole lot of women who maybe weren't going to watch the show just to stick it to the NYT.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Ms. Bellafante's weekend goes. 


*that isn't to say all books are just as good, but the cheerful ridicule of genre by someone ignorant of what they are reading and perhaps why its a useful read within the genre is probably one of the most damn irritating things I can think of.

I really don't know how I CAN'T go see the new "Apes" movie

My Apes obsession crescendoed in the days prior to any blogging or social media. Circa 1998 - 2001, I was all about Planet of the Apes and its sequels. Somewhere, I still have a Charlton Heston action figure and 12" dolls of Cornelius and Dr. Zaius.  Now that I think on it, once, when Jamie was in the hospital, I left her there to go catch a screening of POTA at the original location of the Alamo (with her permission).

My favorite of the series, of course, was the original, which Tim Burton remade into a mess of a surprisingly boring film about 10 years ago. My second favorite was always Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, in which you learn about the early days of the ape revolt, which had been hinted at in the previous films.  Its a sort of cautionary tale/ leninist fantasy of the beleagured apes rising up and striking back at their tormentors (us a-hole humans) who have basically been treating apes as slave labor in the context of the film.

@#$% is about to get real, yo

The trailer above is quite different from Conquest, so its a new story that seems to give a faux-scientific plausible explanation for how the ape revolt could have ever happened. In some ways, its a bit like introducing midichlorians, but after the goofy mutants of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, I'm not sure the franchise maintained the same credibility with even the fans that Star Wars carried for so long.

Everyone who comes to Planet of the Apes has a different perspective,  because (a) its not a series built on a cheery proposition and (b) my own wife just gets creeped out by the make-up, so she won't watch the films even when I can prove that Kim Hunter as Zira is just awesome (she appears in the first 3 Apes films).

see!  even Cheston loves Zira.  Maybe too much.

As a kid, I remember watching the Apes movies when WGN or our local UHF station would have "Ape Week" (5 Apes movies in 5 nights.  It was as good as "Godzilla Week".  Man, UHF ruled.), but unlike Tron or Star Wars I do remember having to work pretty hard to grok the Apes movies.  In a lot of ways, the social commentary and criticism of the movies that I thought pretty clever in 1998 just wasn't apparent to me as a kid.  But, you know, apes.  You had to watch.

The original novel of Planet of the Apes is actually quite a bit different from the 1960's version of the movie, and vastly different from the Mark Wahlberg-starring version, although there's a bit of the "suprise ending" in all three.   Its worth noting that Rod Serling, Mr. Twilight Zone himself was part of the brains behind the movie of Planet of the Apes (1968), which makes total sense if you've seen the movie. 

Anyhow, I'm up for an Apes movie.  This looks properly ridiculous.

Dames to Watch Out For: Gloria Grahame

Its my birthday as I begin this post, so I'm going to indulge myself and return to that old standby of "Dames In the Media the League Once Dug", which at this URL, we call "Dames to Watch Out For".

In this edition: Ms. Gloria Grahame

You may think you don't know Gloria Grahame, but if you owned a TV in the 1980's and 90's in the month of December, it means you saw It's a Wonderful Life.  Grahame played Violet Bick, the woman who seems a lot more interesting than Donna Reed who George gives some money to so that she can leave town and start a new life (its also shown she had eyes for George Bailey, and he had no idea.  We think George may have missed the boat on that one.)

see, you know this person

She also appeared in Oklahoma! as Ado Annie, a sort of naive, man-crazy problem-child.  Grahame was in her 30's by the time the movie was released, but was playing someone around 17 or 18, I'd guess.  Go figure.

If you've seen Oklahoma!, she's the crazy one who is often seen in a terrible hat.

the hat alone should warn the farmers and the cow mans that she's 10 kinds of crazy

But that's not the Grahame we're here to talk about.  Today, we want to discuss the Noir-centric Gloria Grahame.

Grahame gives Ford a couple of things to think about

In doing my research I stumbled across a great post about Grahame at Bright Lights Film Journal, and I'd recommend it as a good read.

I haven't seen all that many films with Grahame, but its hard to ignore her in either Crossfire or The Big Heat.

It seems Grahame actually received accolades for her work in Crossfire, and its not hard to see why.  Its a heartbreaking role as a taxi dancer, caught up in the murder of a Jewish US Soldier.  Ginny's role isn't the focus, although pivotal, and Grahame breathes a lot of life into the character, worn out and tired, and rightfully certain she's barely counted as a person any more.

I'll discuss Crossfire at another point.  I've seen it twice, and while somewhat dated in its approach, its still a great, tight film and uses the genre to share messages that were on the mind of America in the wake of World War II.

Also like a loaded gun?  A loaded gun.

Grahame would receive an Academy Award nomination, but it wouldn't lead to her becoming part of the Hollywood Pantheon of stars best remembered from the eras she crossed, from Hayworth to Monroe, or their later peers.

I have discussed The Big Heat, which I'll reiterate here is just a terrific movie.

this fills so many check boxes for me on a great noir scene, my brain is kind of exploding

For me, the standout role for Grahame is likely in The Big Heat, which is the source of the image above.  This is a movie about tough/ righteous police, corrupt cops and their spouses, sociopathic henchmen, ruthless mobsters, etc...  and Grahame manages to go toe-to-toe with all of them.  Including Lee Marvin.  Lee.  Marvin.

Grahame's character (a bit like descriptions I've read of Grahame herself) is a particularly bright woman who also likes to have a pretty darn good time.  She may intellectually know she's hanging out with hoodlums, but it seems to be working out pretty well for her.  The character takes a drastic turn, and Grahame handles the metamorphosis terribly well for what could have been an awkwardly melodramatic performance in lesser hands.  It may not be a femme fatale role, but its also an interesting female role from the era (as many are once you head into the world of noir).

publicity still from "The Big Heat"

Unfortunately, as with her peers such as Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, Grahame's personal life seemed fit for its own big screen treatment if it hadn't featured a lot of material that likely wouldn't have met production codes back in the day.

Grahame had her fair share of romantic entanglements and married four times (including to Nicholas Ray and, later, Ray's son, so....  yeah, there's a story there), and died at the age of only 57.

For my birthday I received a film noir box set from Jamie featuring Human Desire from 1954.  Its one of the movies up next in my queue, so expect to see more Grahame in the near future.