Hurling logic out the window:

The good, the bad and the Davies

After watching the first half of the "Death of the Doctor" I wrote in a fit of giddy optimism that, "Strong on close interpersonal observation, not so good with dramatic logic, Russel T Davies' return to the Doctor Who universe is a qualified triumph."

If only it were so. Having now seen the follow-up, I need to re-write my lede and reconsider my larger thesis.

"Death of the Doctor" represents the best and the worst of Davies, but unfortunately, while the Good RTD is mostly ascendant in the first half of the diptych, the Bad RTD emerges all-too-typically triumphant in the second.

In Part One, we saw the perfectly-observed character moments, the witty asides that serve both to release dramatic tension and to ratchet it up a level, and the sort of cliff-hanger that can leave a grown man (well, this one) giggling with anticipation for the sequel.

Part One also provided the forced humour that breaks established character; the shameless emotional manipulation that often works but that leaves the sensitive viewer feeling cheap and dirty afterwards; the plot elements the experienced RTD-watcher fears will lead to nonsense when explained in Part Two and dangling plot-threads galore.

RTD needs a plot-oriented collaborator to slap down his Inner Fanboy. (Spoilers ahead; click at your own risk.)

ETA: Since I've been outed elsewhere, I won't wait for someone else to do it here. The below is a hoax, part satire, part attempt to get a real publisher to put an anthology like this one together. You know, an "essential" collection that just happens not to have any white male writers in the table of contents. I think it's instructive that it took me two or three hours to put together the TOC, mostly from books sitting on my shelf.

I like getting ARCs ... Some outfit called The BumblePuppy Press has just asked if I want an advance copy of their first SF anthology.0 Nice cover, and if the table of contents is anything to go by, it's going to be hard not to like it. Naturally, I said "yes, please."

Click here for the full table of contents.

Juno: Don't bother looking for Signs or Significance!

'Well, you know, I just — I was thinkin' that I'd just nip it in the bud. Before it gets worse. 'Cause they were talkin' in health class about how pregnancy can lead to ... an infant.'

Catching up on ...

Ellen Page in 2007 (image: Wikipedia).

It's not giving much away to say that Juno MacGuff does not nip her pregnancy, "in the bud" or otherwise. Instead, after a brief flirtation with abortion, the 16 year-old opts to carry the foetus to term and give the baby up for adoption. Significantly, Juno is not punished for her transgression (except insofar as the pregnancy itself meet be considered a punishment) persons seeking in the entrails of Juno any overt anti-abortion, pro-choice, pro- or anti-sex or other coded messages are in for a serious disappointment.

The movie's eponymous title gives the game away.

Juno is a story about (nearly) a year in the life of a teenage girl named "Juno". It is not an issue movie, or a cautionary tale, or a call to arms. The fact that Juno is about a pregnant 16 year-old girl does not mean it is "about" teenage pregnancy.

At its heart and despite its subject-matter, Juno is a romantic comedy. Where we might once have had Katherine Hepburn as a wise-cracking career-woman in a man's world, we now have Ellen Page as a wise-cracking teenager, who is every bit as independent as Hepburn ever was, if in a very different world.

(Spoilers ahead at Edifice Rex Online , but not many; this is a movie whose surprises are worth keeping.)

(And coming soon, reviews of work by Margaret Atwood, Catherynne M. Valente and Talekyn.

Damn you Katy!

I don't take, but sometimes I accept the challenge. Hence the rather hideous pic taken with Raven's phone only minutes ago.

We're I to formally tag, the post would be friends' only and the dare would be worded as follows:

Take a picture of you in your current state, no changing clothes or tidying up! NO PHOTOSHOP. Show your F-list the real you!

I should fess up: I fixed the colour a little on mine. But onwards.

Friday saw the online availability of my latest screed careful critical consideration of a Canadian cultural institution, in this case, the rather lamentable state of The Walrus magazine. You can read it at the newly re-designed True North Perspective or at my my own site.

But be warned, it's a couple of thousand words; enter at your own risk (but it also includes a picture of Pierre Trudeau, so how can you resist? Read "The Dumbing of the Beast"!

His didactic materials

When story-tellers fail:
On Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials

I'll never forget the shocked silence that greeted my ingenuous kindergarten announcement that, "I don't believe in God".

My class-mates, and even my otherwise perfect teacher, Miss Matthews, simply didn't know how to process such a shocking proposition. In Quebec in 1970, a five year-old atheist was nearly as strange and terrible a creature as one with green skin, fangs and a devil's tail. (I exaggerate, but not that much.)

Philip Pullman seems to have shocked much of the Christian world in the same way that I did my kindergarten class. His Dark Materials, a fantasy (or science fiction; see sidebar below) series whose plot revolves around an attempt to kill "god" is obviously at least in part a direct reply to children's books (or "young adult novels") probably best exemplified by the likes of C.S. Lewis' soporific apologia for Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia.

In any case, the series has been taken as anti-Christian and a quick Google search will quickly find all sorts of horrified and angry reactions to it.

So I, as a both a life-long atheist and a long-time reader of F and SF, am (but for the fact I'm neither a father nor a teenager) am pretty close to Pullman's ideal reader. I approached the first volume with a lot of curiosity and no small amount of hope that I would enjoy it quite a lot.

Read the full review at Edifice Rex Online.

Writing the forest, not the trees

Yeesh, and aaarrggghhh, and O! come on! were but a few of the noises I made as the clock ground (ever-so-slowly) down on the penultime entry to Steven Moffat's first first series as boss-man of Doctor Who.

And yes, I was checking that clock quite a lot during the program. ( Only if you give a damn what I think about this particular children's/family television program ought you click to see below this cut. )

'Art' of Onanism:
Pop Life mocks the National Gallery of Canada

"It's not pandering. We have certainly not lowered our standards or principles in order to have line-ups at the door." — National Gallery of director Marc Mayer, quoted in the National Post.

Well. Thank God that's settled! But the denial does beg the question, "Just what kind of standards did the National Gallery have before Thursday's opening of the "blockbuster" travelling show, "Pop Life"?

Lonesome Cowboy, by Takashi Murakami: theft as art, in the worst tradition of Warhol (Wikipedia.)

Jeff Koons tells it like it is in the November 1988 edition of ArtForum. (Image: Sex Sells.

It's not just that we expect our politicians and priests to lie to us, and our journalists to transmit those lies with straight faces; it is also that we have somehow come to habitually lie to ourselves, unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge that which is spelled out before us, unless some Authority does so first.

So concerned are we with our status in the eyes of those we accept as authorities or experts, we will happily gorge on shit and, chins dripping with the muck, we will grin excitedly as the last chunk slips past our teeth and beg for yet another serving.

* * *

The opening of the National Gallery of Canada's summer blockbuster, Pop Life on June 10 (on until September 19), was crowded with hipsters and art-students and those members of the bourgeoisie who feel it imperative to put in an appearance at such events.

The crowd milled about with all the electric excitement of a herd of cattle on anti-depressants.

The men and women gazed with bovine approval at a second-rate sculpture of a naked man's huge and hugely erect penis, eternally spurting semen into the air; at pages torn from third-rate 1970s-era pornographic magazines; and at poorly-lit, still photos of an "artist" having sex with a man who has paid her $20,000 for the privilege.

Not to mention at a "dead horse", symbolizing ... well, I forget just what it symbolized; there was a little card with several explanatory paragraphs typed onto it, but the words seemed to have very little to do with what we were looking at.

But most of the audience seemed to nod knowingly at one another, and they exchanged stock phrases such as "transgressing boundaries" and "challenging patriarchy" and (to quote from the exhibit's PDF accompaniment, Sex Sells) "...tread[ing] too closely within or against the lines of common decency", as if imparting to one another the wisdom of the ages.

Read more ...

A dance of slicey death
(with apologies to Eddie Campbell)

Hit-Girl takes a licking.

Chloe cuts with a knife.

  Old books can be indecent books
  Though recent books are bolder,
  For filth (I'm glad to say)
  Is in the mind of the beholder.
  When correctly viewed,
  Everything is lewd.
  I could tell you things about Peter Pan —
  And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!
       — Tom Lehrer, "Smut"

 

There is a possibly apocryphal story that at a certain point in his career, Picasso (or maybe it was Dali) grew so cynical about his own fame that he took to selling blank canvasses alongside his paintings. The story resonates, because I remember seeing a Picasso at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Admittedly I was a callow youth and might have missed some brilliant subtlety in that enormous canvas, but what it looked like to me was nothing more nor less than a joke at the expense of whoever would be willing to pay money for such a sloppy monstrosity. It looked to me like Picasso had slapped the canvas with a house-painting brush until it was mostly filled by artless black lines and white spaces.

As I said, it might be that I missed some deeper layer of meaning but I suspect not. I've seen that Picasso damned well could paint when he was of a mind to, and I didn't see any evidence that that painting was one of those times.

That canvas is why I am so ready to believe the story about the blank canvasses. The fine art world is such a confidence racket (see Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word if you haven't noticed it for yourself) why wouldn't a succesful and cynical artist test it to see just how gullible it could be?

I've seen a couple of movies recently which brought to mind the above anecdote, as well as the fable of the emporer's new clothes.

One is an art-house film, directed by one of Canada's regulars at Cannes, at director whose movies win prizes but sell few tickets. The other is a crass and violent film that made Roger Ebert "sad" and which has also appalled all sorts of people who haven't seen it.

One film boasts leaden dialogue, the other reparté that, if not quite Shakespearean, still sparkles by comparison; one boasts an utterly forgettable score of sacharine strings that bear no apparent connection to what is occuring on-screen, the other a soundtract carefully chosen not just to accompany but to augment each scene; one film opens with a narrative voice-over which is almost immediately forgotten, the other begins with the voice-over and — succesfully — maintains it.

One is (or pretends to be) a study of sexual obsession and a portrait of a family threatened by the estrangement of man and wife and by a sexually powerful interloper (which also gives the director the chance to get his actresses naked and to make out with each other though — since this is Art — neither of them appears to have any fun doing so.

The other is an unabashed fantasy of violence and vengeance, a portrait of a nerdy teenage boy who dons a costume to fight crime (and who mostly gets brutally beaten for his troubles) and of an 11 year-old girl who lives out her father's fantasies and really does succeed in slicing, stabbing, gutting, shooting and otherwise slaughtering a veritable legion of bad-guys, all while cursing up a blue storm (yes, folks, even the dreaded C-word).

No prizes for guessing which film I think is worth your time.

Warning: Come-on: Swearing and gratuitous nudity behind the fake cut to my website.

Edit @ 2306 hours Eastern time: Turns out I fell victim to either Google or my browser personalizing my results. Thanks to (or should that read "thanks"?) Livejournal's mijopo for pointing out my nakedness. Ah well, my unexpected fame was fun while it lasted.

Non-plussed (but frankly rather pleased)

Doing the narcissistic statistical analysis of recent hits at Edifice Rex Online led me to follow a link to a Google search of the phrase doctor who flesh and stone (no quotation marks).

Apparently, my thoughts on the venerable program are more popular than those of a major British newspaper.

More than a little to my amazement, my review of the episode showed up on the number two spot at google.com, while The Guardian's came in at number three. (Google.ca had me at the same position, but The Guardian was in 10th spot.

Seems a little difficult to believe that my humble organ's pensés on Doctor Who are out-polling those of one of Britain's major newspapers, but Google wouldn't lie to me, would it?

I really think it's about time publishers started sending me ARCs.

Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.

I feel like I'm 14 again, thrilled that The Empire Strikes Back is every bit as much fun as I remembered Star Wars to have been.

With Steven Moffat's fourth at-bat in his run as show-runner for Doctor Who, I can finally say that my inner child is happy.

Comment here, or there; or don't comment at all. I'm flyin' baby! I'm flyin'.