China Miéville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’ – A Review (and an Illustration)

October 4, 2014Art & Design, Book Reviews, My Artworkart, book review, China Miéville, dark fantasy, horror fiction, Illustrationindigoxix

I read The Scar several years before tackling Perdido Street Station, and although I enjoyed it immensely, I always felt I was missing something essential about the series by starting with the second volume. Not that it’s necessary to read the books in order, but clearly it helps. When I finally got around to the first volume in the trilogy, I realized almost immediately upon beginning it why I should’ve read them in order: because, no matter how far they get away from it geographically, the heart of these books has always been the port city of New Crobuzon, a kind of magically-poisoned Victorian London. In Perdido Street Station this great city is front and center, and it’s an unrivaled destination in the history of fantastic literary metropolises.

In New Crobuzon life is hell even before the monsters which serve as the central antagonists arrive there. Unlike with most fantasy series, magic (or thaumaturgy as it’s called here) is not something awe-inducing and esoteric but rather just another natural resource to be exploited by the greedy and powerful, and it’s uses (and misuses) lead to new complex and horrific social problems. Magic is often used hand-in-hand with the crude Industrial Age technology of New Crobuzon, creating weird physical/metaphysical amalgamations. For example, a part of the continent was once devastated by a kind of thaumaturgic atomic bomb, leaving the land mutated in unthinkable ways that leak into other planes of existence. And that’s just a minor background detail to this story, which deals with a plague of giant multidimensional moths accidentally set loose in the city that feed on the thoughts and dreams of sentient beings. Okay, plague is a bit of an exaggeration: there are only five of them, but that’s enough to bring the city to its knees. Trust me, these things are very bad news.

The central character of Perdido Street Station is Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, an aging, overweight scientist. Isaac is approached early on by a garuda, a birdlike humanoid whose wings have been severed from his back by his tribe as a punishment for the vague crime of ‘choice-theft’, which turns out to be much worse than it sounds, incidentally. Every character of consequence in the story is broken or misshaped somehow, or will be by story’s end, and this keys into one of the book’s major themes: metastasis, upheaval, that point at which someone or something is in a state of in-betweenness or incompleteness. All of the major species of Bas-Lag are viewed through this filter of transitionality, including humans (khepri–the beetle-headed species Isaac’s girlfriend Lin belongs to–see humans as half-khepri, half-ape). Then there are the Remades, people who have been magically augmented with animal or machine parts or the parts of other sentient species. The psychivorous slake-moths and the Weavers, the latter a race of gigantic, intelligent but insane spiders, reside in multiple levels of reality and are constantly moving in and out of them. And, of course, New Crobuzon is a city consistently caught up in crisis.

Isaac’s life’s work is even about channeling something called crisis energy, which places Perdido Street Station in the realm of metafiction similar to the way The NeverEnding Story does, though not quite as overtly. For crisis energy is really the power of impossibility, the life juice of fantasy fiction itself, and by figuring out a way to tap into it (as he eventually does), Isaac is consciously engaging in the task of reinvigorating the very genre to which he is relegated.

Meanwhile, an artificial intelligence has spontaneously manifested in a scrapyard in the city, a gangster who has become the ultimate Remade haunts New Crobuzon’s underworld, and the monstrous slake-moths terrorize the entire city’s dreams. None of these horrors would be half as effective, though, if not for New Crobuzon’s devious and incompetent government officials, reminding us that even in the realms of fantasy the corruption, apathy and cruelty of government is inescapable, and that’s what grounds Miéville’s work and keeps it from becoming too alien. Despite their exoticness, the characters still deal with real-world problems on top of the strange and magical ones that arise.

The book was originally released in 2000–a transitional year, I might add–and it was nothing short of groundbreaking. While the sheer number of ideas stuffed into the book threaten to push it into overkill territory, somehow Miéville manages to make all of it work as a sort of salmagundi of the fantastic. And like all great works of urban fantasy, Perdido Street Station takes the reader on a grand tour of its city, including the titular station itself, but the setting rarely becomes obtrusive. And when it does, the cleverness behind it renders all such breaches forgivable. In fact, even at those points when the book doesn’t manage to make suspension of disbelief effortless (and there are a few of them), the cognitive estrangement that arises can be treated as a guideline of what is possible within the fantasy genre. In that sense it should be regarded as required reading by anyone who wishes to write fantasy fiction, especially dark fantasy. But really anyone who is interested in the literature of the fantastic must read this novel. I promise you won’t regret it.

Grade: A+

And just for the hell of it, here’s my take on the slake-moths. This is actually my second version of the moths, as the first had some deviations from the way the creatures were described in the book. I liked this one better in the end. It’s a bird’s-eye view of the moth with the smoke-laden skies of the city provided as a vague backdrop. The wings of the moths are described as multidimensional and ever-changing, and the moths use them as a tool to mesmerize their victims. This was all rendered in Photoshop.

Bookplates: Edward Penkov

September 25, 2014Art & Design, Humor & Satirebookplates / ex libris, dark art, dark fantasy, humor & satireindigoxix

I love bookplates and will be featuring a lot of them in upcoming posts. I am kicking off this series with work from Edward Penkov, a contemporary Bulgarian artist. His illustration tends toward the darkly humorous and surreal. Some of it even reminds me a bit of H. R. Giger.

A World of ART for Dreamers: Edward Penkov

When Monsters Are Born: ‘Carrie’, ‘Firestarter’ & ‘Silent Hill’

September 13, 2014Book Reviews, Film Reviewsbook review, film reviews, horror fiction, Silent Hill, sociology, Stephen Kingindigoxix

The birth of evil is always a tragedy, and the most heartbreaking tragedy of all is when the most innocent become the most monstrous. It’s tragic because we know, even when we don’t witness it firsthand, that the path that led there was one of horrendous pain. That is the case in three fantastic horror stories, two of which began as novels and one as a video game but have all since been made into films. I speak, of course, of the Stephen King works Carrie and Firestarter, and the original Silent Hill film, all of which feature young girls who have become corrupted by the physical and mental tortures and unthinkable betrayals that they are subjected to.

I have discussed before that I think Stephen King’s early work is his strongest both horror-wise and writing-wise. One reason I think this is so is that there’s a kind of desperation that undergirds those early novels, and this probably arose from being a still struggling author raising a young family. Once he became the most popular writer in the known universe, the desperation pretty much fizzled out. Nothing wrong with that–it’s probably the best trajectory the King of Horror could’ve taken, but it also means the nature of his work was bound to change. It certainly did, sometimes for the better (his imagination was able to fully blossom, and thus it ultimately gave fruit to what I consider to be his magnum opus, The Dark Tower series) and sometimes for the worse. In addition to losing touch with that desperation that made his early work so compelling, he exchanged the raw, elemental power that drove it for a more complex and convoluted spiritual world, the dark side of which is ruled by a being with nearly as much invented mythology as the devil himself, and the light side of which has an Eternal Champion to give both Moorcock’s creation and Jesus Christ a run for their money, and that ain’t a bad legacy for any writer. Not. At. All.

But with Carrie, King captured lightning in a bottle, and it’s easy to understand why it was this novel that broke him into the published author camp. Talk about desperation! It’s practically stitched into the very being of Carrie White, a weird, awkward, repressed adolescent girl who is an innocent in nearly every respect. Having only recently entered puberty (quite late), she is horrified to learn that her body naturally bleeds, and this ignorance leads to the infamous scene in the girl’s locker room where she is taunted and tormented by the other girls in her class. The interesting thing about Carrie is that it contains no otherworldly beings, no ghosts or haunted houses, no murderous psychopaths. None of the usual antagonists or tropes of your standard horror fiction are to be found here. Yes, there is a supernatural element in the form of Carrie’s powers, but they aren’t external to Carrie. And there are the kids and Carrie’s mother whose cruelty pushes her over the edge, but they are nothing out of the ordinary.

So, the horror of Carrie isn’t something alien which invades the girl’s tranquil and otherwise normal world. No, the real horror of the story is that we have been given a front row seat to the birth of evil in its most terrible incarnation. We are, in effect, watching the character we have come to empathize with the most transform before our very eyes into the monster. Carrie White has nothing but good intentions and the purest heart in the beginning, but by the end of the story, under the weight of the final degradation she is forced to endure, she has become a cyclone of violence and hatred who murders her classmates and finally her own mother, acts for which she can never be redeemed. And she isn’t. Instead, she dies from the stab wounds inflicted on her by her mother, or alternately, in the Brian Di Palma film, from a combination of the stab wound and suicide (by psychically destroying her house with her still inside of it). However, King does offer a note of hope in the novel in the form of another little girl whose mother sees her daughter’s abilities as a gift rather than a curse from God. Incidentally, there is no such hope offered in the Di Palma film, which fits the bleakness trend of late seventies cinema to a T.

But Stephen King wasn’t finished with this theme, for he would go on to pen Firestarter a few years later, a novel which in some ways takes the concept even farther than Carrie did. (Douglas Clegg, whose Goat Dance I reviewed recently, also owes a little something to Firestarter with his novel Dark of the Eye–more on that when I give it a proper review of its own.) The focal character, Charlie McGee, a little girl with pyrokinetic abilities, is even more of an innocent than Carrie White. Here, however, there are external malignant forces at work in the form of the Shop and especially the hit man John Rainbird. But these evils are not where Firestarter‘s ultimate horror lies. Once again, what is most horrific about the story isn’t the evil which already exists but the evil that emerges from Charlie herself, and again the path that led there is one of suffering. The ultimate irony of the story is one similar to that inherent in the relationship between Carrie and her mother: Margaret White sees in her daughter an abomination, and through her maltreatment of Carrie, contributes to making the girl into exactly that. Likewise, the secret government agency that fears Charlie is the very agency which eventually turns her into something to be feared.

It is a difficult scene to get through when Charlie, dealing with the death of her father and learning of her betrayal at the hands of Rainbird and the Shop, turns her power up to ten and destroys everyone and everything in her path. But King again supplies a tincture of hope here, because Charlie is perhaps still young enough to recover from her murderous turn and live a normal life, and there may be redemption in exposing the Shop’s atrocities to the world, as Charlie ultimately does. But because Charlie has become cynical of the media, she only trusts one publication to get the story straight. She will never again be fully innocent; she has become corrupted by her experience, wizened to the ways of the world.

There are several contenders for the inheritor of King’s birth of evil motif, but perhaps none is as powerful–or as dark–as Silent Hill. I can’t speak much for the game because I have never played it, and I’m also aware that it differs significantly from the film. It is the film which most interests me anyway, because it more than any other fully embraces the concept of the good girl gone monstrous. Alessa Gillespie was once a normal little girl who was ostracized by other children for being born out of wedlock, became a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of the school janitor who targeted her because she was isolated and disliked, and then, as with Carrie and Charlie, suffered a final degradation which corrupted her, blackened her soul, and hers is by far the worst: she is burned alive and survives. In the process her soul divides into two parts, Dark Alessa and Sharon. Sharon is of course adopted by the movie’s heroine, Rose, but winds up back in the town, drawn in by Dark Alessa, who needs a worthy vessel in order to be able to enter the only place in Silent Hill that is forbidden to her in her dark form: a church sanctuary. It is Rose who winds up becoming the vessel, however, and when Alessa finally is able to show up in the sanctuary both in body and spirit, she too, as with King’s young girls, succumbs to a mass slaughter of those who tormented her in a scene that would give Clive Barker’s Cenobites pause, or maybe send them running in terror. And again, as with Carrie and Firestarter, it’s also a terribly sad scene because it makes explicit how much the girl was twisted and corrupted by her experiences. You shed tears watching the darkly beautiful scene unfold, for you know that, while you are horrified by the slaughter, you are also disturbingly satisfied by it on some level. These people got what they deserved, no?

You see, we as the reader/viewer, have followed the trajectories of these characters from young innocents to raging, hateful monsters (albeit somewhat obliquely in Alessa’s case), and we have grown with them. Charlie’s monstrosity may be temporary, and that’s some consolation. Carrie dies, so she no longer poses a threat to anyone. Ah, but Alessa . . . she becomes queen of her own little dark corner of hell. The good part of her, Sharon, exists but is still trapped in Silent Hill (along with Rose) by film’s end. And we are right there with them, left to contemplate how we have arrived at this point, how we have come to identity with the monster. Mourning the fact that we too, somewhere along the way, have lost our innocence. We too have loosed evil at some point in our lives, and once it’s out there in the world, wreaking havoc, there is no way to take it back. In fact, one of the functions of horror fiction is to remind us of that. So be good to your fellow man, folks, lest you give birth to monsters.

Elephantasies

September 5, 2014Art & Design, Uncategorizedart, elephantsindigoxix

It’s been awhile, so I figured I’d better check in. Sorry about that, but I have been preoccupied mostly with working on my novel. Anyway . . .

One of my favorite animals is the elephant. I missed World Elephant Day by nearly a month, but I had planned to feature some cool elephant art. It’s long past, sure, but why not post it anyway? So, here you go, some beautiful and psychedelic elephant art. [Note: those images which I couldn’t identify I have left unlabeled.]

Amelia Herbertson

Carrie Baum - Elephant — Carrie Baum – Elephant

Society 6: Carrie Baum

David R. Anderson - Inked Elephant — David R. Anderson – Inked Elephant

DeviantArt: DavesArtwork

Ellie Perla

H. Farrar - Baby Elephant — H. Farrar – Baby Elephant

Julia Watkins - Elephant Herd — Julia Watkins – Elephant Herd

Fine Art America: Samadhi Rajakarunanayake

Shepard Fairey - Obey Elephant (1) — Shepard Fairey – Obey Elephant (1)

Shepard Fairey - Obey Elephant (2) — Shepard Fairey – Obey Elephant (2)

Obey Giant

Waelad Akadan - Elephant's Dream — Waelad Akadan – Elephant’s Dream

Society 6: Waelad Akadan

Artist Unknown - Elephant Fantasy — Artist Unknown – Elephant Fantasy

Artist Unknown - War Age Elephant — Artist Unknown – War Age Elephant

I Came for the Sci-Fi; I Stayed for Robin Williams

August 21, 2014History, The Mediahistory, media, Robin Williamsindigoxix

Recently I got into a conversation on a friend’s Facebook thread about Robin Williams. I grew up in the 70s and early 80s, so my fondest memories of Williams are as the iconic Mork from the sitcom Mork & Mindy. I absolutely adored this show as a youngster. The thing is, I was drawn to the show because it was about an alien from outer space living with a human, and as you know from the approximately google amount of times I’ve mentioned it here, I was obsessed with science fiction as a boy. You can bet that if it had an alien, robot or weird creature in it, I was so there, especially since we only had two television channels where I lived, an ABC station (obviously) and the local PBS affiliate. When there aren’t a lot of choices for a raging sci-fi geekboy, you tend to take whatever you can get.

Although in terms of science fiction content it wasn’t exactly on par with a Star Trek or a Battlestar Galactica, it had enough of a sci-fi hook to bring me in. Even back then Mork & Mindy seemed to me less an out-an-out sci-fi show than a vehicle for allowing Robin Williams to vent his particular brand of hyperactive, oblique craziness. But Williams was a world unto himself on the show, and the entire Mork & Mindy universe revolved around him and his ability to sell the character. It was wildly successful, to say the least, and it’s hard to imagine a M&M series being half as entertaining without him.

After M&M Williams went on to fairly successful film acting career, including many roles for which he was nominated for some award or other, and a few that he won awards for. What the films proved was that Robin was a versatile and dynamic performer, a man of many faces and identities. But with all those masks, not a lot of people ever got to see his true face. The sad clown is a bit of a cliche perhaps, but there is more than a grain of truth in it for Mr. Williams. He battled chronic depression, alcohol and drug addiction to varying degrees throughout his life; I too have struggled with depression, and to a lesser extent drug problems. It almost comes with the territory of being a creative person anyway, but when you have all the health issues I have and you’re too poor to afford treatment, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion.

But one thing I have never had to contend with was being in the never-ending spotlight and having to keep up appearances for the sake of your fans. One of the reasons I chose to obscure my identity and write under a pseudonym, in fact, was because I am not interested in being personally famous. A renowned writer? Sure, give me every bit of that (but only if I’m worthy of it). But I also dig my privacy. I’m not a life-of-the-party kind of person–never have been and never want to be. I have seen what that can do to perfectly good writers, artists and performers who aren’t cut out for it, and often it’s not pretty. Williams is the quintessential example du jour, but there are so so soooo many examples.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a few thoughts about one of the greatest entertainers the planet was ever blessed with, an amazing one-of-a-kind soul who will never be replaced.

Na-Nu Na-Nu, sir, wherever you are.

Douglas Clegg’s ‘Goat Dance’ – A Review

August 11, 2014Book Reviews, Psychology, Sexualitybook review, Douglas Clegg, psychology, sexualityindigoxix

A few years ago I did something that remains one of the low points of my life: I went to Virginia. If you’re interested I’ll share the whole wretched event with you sometime, but suffice it to say, what should’ve been a relatively simple fourteen hour car trip turned into a thirty hour dead-of-winter hellride. The thing is, I was a nervous wreck for three days leading up my trip and literally got almost no sleep during that time. And there was a storm when we got there, and not one but two semi-trucks flipped across the middle of the interstate. And we got lost in the mountains. And, and . . .

Now, I have nothing against the state of Virginia itself; I’m sure it’s lovely (when not in the grip of a snow storm, that is) but I plan never to return if I can help it. Ever. But long before that trip I read a little novel called Goat Dance set in Virginia at wintertime by a then-new author on the horror fiction scene. It probably planted the seeds of my dread of Virginia, for which the road trip only cemented it.

Oddly enough, I first read this book during another road trip, albeit a far less eventful one. I was a teenager at the time. I had already cut my horror teeth on a handful of novels by McCammon, Koontz and King, and I had just discovered Clive Barker. Our vacation was ending and I wanted something to occupy my time during the twelve-hour ride back home. I found Goat Dance in the book section of Wal-Mart, or maybe it was at a drugstore. I don’t really remember where I picked it up. It’s not important. But the cover had caught my attention. It had one of those cutout covers that were so in vogue in the ’90s, and the cutout revealed a goat-headed man with a pentagram carved into his forehead (which, by the way, is not in the book, and a good thing too), and I loved, loved, LOVED monsters, so I figured I’d give it a try.

[Note: As you can see, I didn’t use the original cover for my review–there are a variety of reprint covers and I chose the one I liked best.]

Anyway, expecting a so-so novel that would nevertheless keep me entertained for the duration of the trip, I bought it. And then I read it, and . . . holy shit. I finished the book right before we got home. It had completely sucked me into its dark world. When I say dark world, I’m fully aware this is a cliche often used to describe horror novels, but in this case the term is completely accurate. This was Clegg’s debut novel, and he had knocked it right out of the park. I haven’t read his entire oeuvre yet, but in terms of what I’ve read this book comes in second for me only to Neverland, or even ties with it, depending on my frame of mind. Now this is what horror was capable of, and possibly more than any other book I’d read up to that point save McCammon’s Swan Song, it made me want to write in this genre. And yet Clegg himself considers this one of his mediocre contributions. Go figure.

The central protagonist of the story is Malcolm “Cup” Coffey, the survivor of one terrible winter at a prep school in Pontefract, Virginia which ultimately ended in two equally traumatic events for him: the death of another boy, and unrequited love for a girl named Lily, both of which Cup is still obsessed with years later. So when Cup, now living in Washington, DC, receives a strange phone message from Lily on his answering machine one winter’s day, he decides to return to Pontefract to look Lily up and discovers a town caught in the grip of a nightmare that has only just begun and is slowly building up to something, of which Cup is unwittingly a big part.

I hadn’t read the novel for about fifteen years (ironically, about the same amount of time that passes between the prep school events and Cup’s return to Pontefract), but I recently realized what a debt I owe to Clegg, and this novel in particular, for the structure and certain elements of the content for my novel-in-progress, AL+ER. Like Goat Dance, my novel uses fictional supplemental items tangential to the story to reinforce its verisimilitude, has a small town where the horror builds slowly and is rooted in a past tragic event in the town’s history, and features a little girl who has certain abilities and who is something like a compliment to the protagonist. Of course, my book is significantly different in a variety of ways too. For one thing, the young girl plays a much bigger role in my story. For another, neither the protagonist nor the girl are from the town (Milton’s Eye, Mississippi) where the bulk of the horror occurs and are not directly connected to it in any way. Also, my book is meant to be the first in a series that will feature the protagonist and the girl as a team, and there is more of a science fiction feel to it than Clegg’s novel has. But for me to suggest that Goat Dance wasn’t extremely influential on AL+ER would be a bald-faced lie. And there you have it. So I decided to reread it, to see if it had held up to time and my own maturity (such as it is) and to determine exactly to what degree I am borrowing from it.

Without going too much into the plot, I will divulge that Goat Dance is my favorite kind of horror novel: the kind where the horror builds slowly, and where, by the time the main characters realize it’s there, they’re already thoroughly caught up in its web and cannot escape it, only deal with it. Peter Straub did it beautifully with Floating Dragon. Bentley Little did it spectacularly with The Resort. And Douglas Clegg does it equally amazingly in Goat Dance.

Another thing I love about the novel is that Clegg leaves a lot about the book’s antagonist–a force or being that goes by a variety of names, including Goatman (hence the garish and inaccurate figure on the book’s original cover)–to the imagination. Where did this Eater of Souls come from? We know how it got where it is, but we never really learn what it is or how long it’s been there. The monster’s true self is never really shown. We see the various masks it wears and the people it manipulates, but we never look upon its own visage, and maybe we couldn’t even if we wanted to, which gives the book a nicely handled Lovecraftian quality.

But has it held up over time? Damn straight, it has. In fact, I think I appreciated it even more this time around (my third reading of the book, incidentally) because one character in particular, a teacher at Pontefract Prep, reminded me so much of one of my own college professors. And I realized certain aspects went over my head the first and second time I had read it. When I was a younger reader, I often found my first reading of an amazing book to be more impressionistic than detail-oriented, which was perfectly fine by me. In those days I might not have been able to completely express what it was about a book that appealed to me, but that was only a sign of its quality, because I wasn’t distracted by the little stuff that didn’t matter. I didn’t just read those books; I lived them. And if a book could so thoroughly pull me into its world that I forgot myself, then it was a resounding success. Moreover, if a book like Goat Dance could make me want to take up residence in that world, no matter how dark and disturbing it was, then that was just sheer genius. Perhaps the only other writer I have ever encountered that could do this to me with such dark material was Elizabeth Hand, especially with the novels Winterlong and Black Light. How did that happen?

Turns out the key ingredient was a heady spice made up of the beauty of the writing itself, the detail in the world-building and that slow-burn sort of build-up. By contrast, Clive Barker’s writing is every bit as smart and gorgeous, but I have only occasionally felt truly horrified by his work, merely awed by it. I think the key difference there is that Barker, as brilliant as he is, has a tendency to dazzle you with the sheer weirdness of his worlds and characters, which makes his work more dark fantasy than straight-up horror to me. Moreover, he tends to throw you right into the bizarreness rather than let it simmer and build, and that choice often has a peculiar flattening effect on the horror elements of his work. This is not a criticism of the overall quality of Barker’s work, mind you. I still love every minute of it. It’s just that for me, with the exception of some of his early stuff, the horror aspects of his fiction tend to take a backseat to the dazzling spectacle of the fantasy, which is obviously where his heart is anyway. Not a problem for me–I love that too, just for somewhat different reasons.

By the way, I just recently learned that Clegg is gay. Not that I’m shocked; many of the best horror and dark fantasy authors tend to have non-heteronormative sexualities. I think a lot of that stems from the fact that Westerners are so weirdly puritanical and guilt-ridden about sex to begin with, and when you add on top of that the fact that when you’re a preadolescent and your sexuality is just developing, if your sexual feelings happen to be taboo too, you begin to see the innate horror of existence in your formative years. The fact that you are in a sense a slave to whatever weird or unusual quirks/hitches nature has decided to throw into the pot of your genetic materials and/or the profoundly influential early years of your existence, I think we non-heteronormatives really get a sense early in life that the layer between normalcy and strangeness can be paper-thin in spots. It’s just one step up from there to understanding that the layer between civilization and chaos can be, and often is, equally threadbare.

And that dread realization is generally the driving force behind horror fiction. It’s a way for some of us to make sense of the burbling randomness and insanity of life. Further, the need some of us have to create horror, to synthesize it, at least in part taps into another primal fear: the unfairness of being born into a time and place when you are thought a freak for whatever you find beautiful. In Goat Dance, Cup is dealing with his own sexual neuroses, and it manifests in a deeply symbolic way in the resolution, as he finds himself at one point trapped in a foul pit–the sickly throbbing heart of the Eater of Souls’ domain and influence–with a naked child, the very epitome of innocence and vulnerability, and the desire (to his horror) to . . . eat her.

Ziiiinnnnng! Bull’s-eye, Mr. Clegg. Bull’s-eye.

Grade: A+

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology: Film Review

July 22, 2014Film Reviews, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Sexuality, Sociologyfilm, philosophy, politics, psychology, religion, sexuality, sociologyindigoxix

Recently I’ve found myself searching through Netflix for the unusual, the oddball, the just plain bizarre. When I happened upon a documentary called The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the title hooked me immediately and I knew I had to watch it. I have since watched it twice, finding some of the ideas presented in it useful to varying degrees.

Apparently a sequel to another doc, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which I haven’t seen, the film is basically a Marxist and Freudian examination of the concept of ideology as presented in and through an assortment of films both well-known and obscure. Truthfully, I don’t really get the “pervert’s” part of the title–it seems to be little more than a red herring to draw attention to the film, and I can imagine it works like a charm. Directed by Brit Sophie Fiennes and narrated by the thoroughly engaging (if sometimes difficult to follow) Slovenian Marxist psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, the film is a fascinating documentary that, if nothing else, offers us a unique perspective on a motley collection of films we know and love such as They Live, Jaws and Titanic.

But I have to admire Žižek–a knotty foreigner with a thick beard, a pronounced Slovene accent and a stilted manner of speaking, he boldly challenges us thoroughly capitalist Americans to step outside our comfort zones and look at movies through utterly oblique eyes, and he somehow pulls it off spectacularly.

He begins by claiming that when we feel we have escaped the influence of ideology, it is then that we are most susceptible to it. Indeed, we actively resist being removed from it because it is extremely uncomfortable to disengage from our ingrained social identities. Or, as he succinctly puts it, “freedom hurts.” It’s hard to argue with that, especially in a nation where the political divide continues to widen every year and where outlandish conspiracies once relegated to the political fringe have moved nearly into the mainstream. Žižek aims his criticisms squarely at consumerist culture, of which we Americans are by far the biggest offenders. Not that he has nothing positive to say about us. For example, he makes no bones about the fact that he admires Starbucks’ model of compassionate capitalism, identifying it as the perfect form of capitalism in the age of cynicism.

With nary a misstep, Žižek tackles the symbolism of the shark in Jaws, the true message of the Catholic church in The Sound of Music, Travis Bickle’s sexual repression in Taxi Driver, and the concept of the Big Other as represented in propaganda films like post-WWII Russian narrative film The Fall of Berlin and the Nazi documentary The Eternal Jew, among other things, all from the Marxist point-of-view. Whether you identify in any sense with Marxism or not, Žižek presents Marxist philosophy in terms that are easy to grasp, or at least much easier to grasp than the works of Karl Marx himself. I can vouch for that–I have tried to delve into Marx’s writing several times, with various degrees of success. I can understand the basic premise of Marxism, but it’s all pretty confusing beyond that. In fact, the Marxist idea I find most engaging (but no less complex) has nothing much to do with economics per se: dialectical materialism. But more about that later.

Anyway, if you’re at all interested in Freudianism, Marxism, semiotics, film history, film criticism, and so on, this shouldn’t be missed. And now, to find a copy of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema in my little Southern town. Yeah, good luck to me, huh?

Grade: A

Updates: 7-20-14

July 20, 2014Site Journal & Updatesindigoxix

Okay, so I finally got around to creating an Indigo Xix account for Facebook. You can friend me or follow me by going here or by searching for Indigo Xix in the search window at the top of FB.

I also deleted a couple of articles dealing with gun control. Not because I have changed my opinion about the issue, but because I no longer want the hassle of dealing with irate gun people, and because I do feel they were harsher than I originally intended them to be.

That’s all for now. Have a good one, people.

Some Thoughts on the Scientific Method and the Anti-Science Mentality in the United States

July 9, 2014Morality & Ethics, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Sociologymorality & ethics, philosophy, psychology, religion, sociologyindigoxix

There’s a succinct and spot-on piece penned by Editor-in-Chief Analee Newitz over at io9 entitled If You Love Science, This Will Make You Lose Your Sh*t. The article examines a piece written by Jason Mitchell, a Harvard-based professor of psychology, who addressed a growing criticism of the social sciences surrounding the fact that many of its researchers have published studies throughout the last decade or so with results that were not reproducible. Mitchell, therefore, challenged the very notion that reproducibility is important to the sciences, which is no less than a brazen refutation of the concept of science itself. Newitz (rightly) ripped Mitchell a new one for this nonsense.

In order to understand what’s going on here, we need to examine the scientific method, what it is and what it’s for. In a nutshell, the scientific method is a process through which scientists can test their hypotheses, which is just a fancy word for hunches, albeit ones that are usually well thought through. The origins of the scientific method as such can be traced back to the Renaissance, but the concept behind it goes back at least as far as Aristotle, so it has a long and distinguished history. In fact, it is one of the few human inventions that have lasted, being tweaked, refined and improved upon over the centuries rather than completely scrapped for a different approach. But the latter is precisely what Mitchell is proposing scientists do.

Mitchell’s belief that reproducibility isn’t important to science is a dangerous precedent for someone in his position to set. Reproducibility, which is the ability of both the original experimenter and others in the scientific community to duplicate the results of an experiment, is vital for determining scientific truths. Otherwise, a study could be fabricated whole-cloth and passed off as accurate without anyone being the wiser. Think about the implications of that. Would you trust your children’s lives or your own to a new medication that had only been demonstrated to be safe and effective in a single study that couldn’t be duplicated? And yet, this is the level of standards we have been getting in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics) as a matter of course in the last few years, which is the reason for the criticisms that have been leveled against many of the studies in these fields. Even without gross fabrications these fields have traditionally had less rigorous standards to abide by than the hard sciences, but it seems that some, including Mitchell, believe there should be even fewer standards for testing claims, or perhaps none at all.

All of the fields listed above have been problematic, but the one that most concerns me is psychology because it is the one that most directly impacts the lives of many people. Thus, for someone of Mitchell’s standing to dismiss the importance of reproducibility in studies that come out of his field is downright chilling. For starters, consider that psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are often called as expert witnesses in criminal court proceedings, sometimes in literal life-or-death cases. Now, if you were on trial for a murder you didn’t commit, would you want your fate put into the hands of someone who placed little or no importance on the most accurate and widely respected forms of fact-finding among scientists? I wouldn’t.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just the so-called soft sciences that have been impacted by this kind of lazy thinking. It has even infiltrated the hard sciences, most notably in the areas of evolutionary theory and biology, the big bang theory and climatology. What you should notice immediately if you are at all politically aware is that the importance placed on empirical fact-gathering for these issues tends to break down along political and religious lines, with liberals tending to support the validity of traditional scientific thought and conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, tending to favor a faster and looser approach to the empirical evidence, despite what they may claim. Anyone who takes science seriously can discover this for themselves by putting their studies and claims to the test. But, of course, if the test itself is viewed and treated as valueless by them, then they can make the results say whatever they like, which is mighty convenient for those who hold to beliefs not supported by the hard evidence. Like climate change deniers.

The fact that the vast majority of scientists working in the field of climatology (not to mention tangential fields like geology and oceanography) agree that our planet is indeed undergoing significant climate change and that we humans are to a large extent responsible for it should be enough to silence the deniers. The problem is that it has become a deeply politicized issue. Without politicians jumping into the fray, this probably would not be a controversial issue at all. But it is, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why: many wealthy politicians, particularly those who are fiscally conservative, have a direct financial stake in businesses that are strongly contributing to global warming. The Guardian points out that a mere ninety companies worldwide are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s problematic emissions, with most of the bigger ones being oil and coal companies. Guess who are some of the major investors and employees of these companies? Wealthy conservative politicians.

These are primarily Republicans, but there are also some conservative Southern and Western Democrats in the mix. And it isn’t just politicians who are directly tied to Big Oil and Big Coal who are the problem; those companies also use their money to gain political advantages through Congress. If you’re interested, there’s a website that lays out the connections between energy companies and major political players: Dirty Energy Money. It is definitely worth a look.

By the way, lest you think these politicians are just constantly lying to our faces, well, there is certainly some of that going on, but it isn’t the whole picture. You see, often what happens is that these fallacies begin first as lies, but eventually the liars tell their lies so often that they begin to believe their own lies. So how does that happen, exactly? Do you remember those pesky things called cognitive biases that I’ve talked about before? One of the biggies here is confirmation bias. This is the tendency for people to gravitate toward information that already supports what they believe. Thus, these politicians and heads of energy corporations have fabricated their own science with which to counter the real science. Likewise, the deeply religious have fabricated their own science to counter the mainstream scientific findings that disturb them. So, you see? They no longer have to lie–they have their own bona fide science they can believe in, allowing them the comfort of avoiding the unpleasant evidence that shows their beliefs to be misguided. This is what we call pseudoscience (literally: ‘false science’), and the more people they can convince to swallow it, the easier it is for them to maintain their Grand Delusion. Unfortunately, their success rates are frighteningly high because a great many people are too morally and/or emotionally weak to face Truth-with-a-capital-T.

And if it’s that easy to convince people to dismiss the overwhelming evidence presented by the hard sciences, imagine how easy it is to sway people when it comes to the murkier realms explored by the social sciences. It’s true: hard policies with regard to mental health issues and other social issues are often a reflection of the current societal biases that are masquerading as science. This is why in the past, when homosexuality held a much greater stigma attached to it than it does now, the studies of the day often tended to reflect the stereotypes of that era–because psychological studies which are not held to the same rigorous standards as the hard sciences are far too easy to manipulate to reflect whatever the investigators want it to reflect. So please remember that fact when you consider studies coming out today that deal with issues which are in some sense politically, socially or ethically controversial.

Simon Clark’s ‘Darker’ – A Review

June 22, 2014Book Reviewsbook review, horror fiction, Simon Clarkindigoxix

This was the first book I’ve read by modern British horror phenom Simon Clark, and it was not a bad introduction to his writing, but I’m willing to wager this isn’t his strongest novel. Clark’s writing style here is lean and his chapters are extremely short, both of which are a good fit for what is essentially a chase story. The concept behind it is not exactly original–it bears more than a passing resemblance to Dean Koontz’s The Door to December.

The book centers on a young couple, Richard and Christine Young, who, along with their four-year-old daughter Amy and Christine’s bumbling smart-ass brother Joey (go ahead and try not to picture Ricky Gervais as this character, seriously), get sucked into the orbit of a desperate man named Michael, who is on the run from some giant invisible force he calls the Beast. Meanwhile, Michael is also being pursued by a teenage girl, Rosemary Snow, who intends to do him bodily harm after he left her to die at the, er, “hands” of the Beast, though mostly she’s upset that her run-in with the monster has left her facially disfigured. Hmm, sounds like the motivation of every Batman villain ever. Anyway, things are not what they seem with Michael, who isn’t telling the Youngs everything he knows about the Beast, and who quickly starts cultivating a particularly creepy relationship with little Amy. Does he have ulterior motives? Signs point to ‘yes’ pretty much from the get-go, and the reader can see what’s coming from miles–excuse me, kilometers (this is a British novel)–away.

As far as actual horror elements go, the novel is aggravatingly slight on them. There are a few scenes of the Beast smashing people and objects to a pulp, but they play out more like a bloody Tarantino film than a horror novel. In fact, the story is much more action-suspense than it is horror. The fate of one of the main characters at the very end of the novel was pretty disturbing, but one almost gets the impression Clark wrote the entire novel just so he’d have an excuse to write that scene. Almost. Still, the plot is straightforward and flies by–as it should–and most of the characters seem genuine and well-rounded, particularly Michael (I kept picturing Rhys Ifans doing a slight variation on his Mycroft Holmes character from the CBS series Elementary) and Rosemary. Little Amy was realistic enough as far as child characters go, even if she serves basically as little more than the story’s MacGuffin through most of it. Clark is hardly the first genre writer to fall into that trap with children though, and he’s certainly far from the worst offender I’ve encountered.

There were some questionable narrative choices in the book. About halfway in, for example, Clark invents a reason to get Richard and the sixteen-year-old Rosemary naked and lip-locked in a scene that feels more like a middle aged man’s fantasy come to life than an organic and necessary plot element. Luckily he doesn’t carry it too far. Instead he leaves it as an unresolved loose end, which I suppose was moderately better than having his hero, a married father of two, cheat on his wife with a teenage girl while in the midst of rescuing his family from an evil bastard. Then there’s Joey, who is more of a foil to Richard than a character with real motivations. The guy seems incapable of making good choices even when he tries. Which he usually doesn’t. And you just know as soon as he’s introduced that he’s destined to screw shit up somewhere along the way. Which he does.

In short, nothing groundbreaking here, but all in all a decent read that has piqued my interest in Clark. I’ll be giving another of his novels a try at some point. Anyone have any recommendations?

Grade: B-