I believed I had read all the fiction Paul Bowles ever published in these 18 years since his death. The discovery last week of the short story collection Midnight Mass, with the familiar Black Sparrow paperback binding – earthy tan with green and purple block print – was thus a very emotional experience.
Immediately I was flooded by memories and thoughts of the man I considered my favorite author from the time I discovered him in ’87, the summer I got my first tattoo, until his death at the end of the last century.
Instantly, too, in that powerful way that great literature connects us with the world we are in, I remembered myself experiencing his works: where I was, the effect it had upon me. The empowerment and awe I felt after finishing one of his short stories or novels: blown away.
Paul Bowles was a huge influence on me as a writer and thinker. He was one of the most powerful allies in my struggle with immigration to the United States and in philosophical discourse in Europe. That he wrote from the subconscious as described by his wife, Jane, was the most romantic and amazing concept to me when I was young and I longed to be able to do that – not to understand it, but to do it.
The utter irrationality of the Western project, the neoliberal insanity we have all endured so long, was exposed by Bowles and then swiftly and violently shattered by the reality of life among the desert people of North Africa. In other works, a slow and seemingly disconnected series of events between locals in a village would be described with such lucidity and simplicity that the differences in thinking between east and west were made suddenly crystalline in the end – hits you like a koan.
The collision of culture was total and instead of Coca-Cola and the Golden Arches mowing down the village, the puny, minuscule westerners melted away in the heat of the Saharan sun, driven mad.
Midnight Mass is the last collection of Bowles’ short stories published by Black Sparrow and features at its center the elegant, drifting, rootless novella Here To Learn, a gorgeous story about a girl from North Africa who just keeps moving buoyed by her beauty, her wit and her ability to learn quickly how to negotiate the West.
The collection starts with the titular story, Midnight Mass, one of Bowles’ incredible parties; the Nazarenes careening around in their expatriated stupor of drinking, carousing and complaining, the locals bursting with romance only to become suddenly something else – the change of face.
There are stories about the locals and their fantastic, sometimes circuitous logic and its culmination in a kind of basic justice. There are tales about the utter undoing of our perception of a shared understanding of this world.
At the Krungthep Plaza is an amazing story set as the U.S. President is due to pass through a certain North African village. The machinations behind the scenes and the conflicts between locals, expats and the security teams are expertly related, culminating in a wild effusion of emotions that I can only described as angst against the way things are now.
It’s all just so great. I miss Paul Bowles.
(sigh)
Paul Bowles, 18 years after he died, was the best writer I read this year.
I’d never read a single word of Jennifer Egan’s work until Manhattan Beach, released by Scribner this month, despite that Egan has published four previous novels and won the Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Award for A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), a novel that has been acclaimed in effusive terms for its inventiveness and originality in all quarters of the literary community.
Everything I read about Goon Squad makes it seem like my type of book. Weird, futuristic, made-up languages; character-POV-shifting chapters … I don’t know how I missed it. Trust me it’s on deck.
Though I’m late to the party, I think it might give me a different perspective on Manhattan Beach. I read it as a straightforward, third-person novel set in the mid-20th century.
Nearly all the early reviews of this novel mention how different it is from Jennifer Egan’s previous work and in specific, often quite vociferously, from Goon Squad. For an author who has been exploratory and inventive with form, Manhattan Beach is a contrast, a historical period piece.
But it turns out Egan worked on this novel considerably longer than any others. She told Alexandra Schwartz in a long form interview for the New Yorker last week she had been working on it for the last 15 years, struggling to put together a story “anybody is going to want to read.”
I recommend it.
Manhattan Beach is an extremely well-researched and fast-paced story set predominantly in Brooklyn near the end of World War II that transports the reader to New York City in the mid-1940’s and fills it with presence and character. Egan has crafted an intriguing family story with which to reveal the city and the times, with particular focus on life in and around the Brooklyn Naval Yards.
The protagonists Anna Kerrigan and her father Eddie, and their family, friends, colleagues and enemies carve out their lives cast in the meager circumstances of a wartime economy that we know from history is coming to a close. Manhattan Beach takes us on a richly detailed tour of the corruption and culture of Brooklyn, New York, the Mafia and the Navy in a very particular period in history: the handful of years before the end of the war, between Pearl Harbor and the fateful flight of the Enola Gay.
It’s an American story about a Brooklyn family and how their life is changed in a tumult. The war hangs at a distance and we see the city – and in particular the Navy Yard and its surroundings as most young, able-bodied Americans are being sent abroad to fight.
Anna is a tremendously likable character and her journey at the Navy Yard to become a diver is a fascinating and well-detailed arc that weaves through the mystery and intrigue of her father’s disappearance and the nefarious underworld of the gangster Dexter Styles.
Egan’s style is crisp, well-researched and yet poetic when necessary. Balanced in approach, one doesn’t get a nostalgic feeling for this period, but rather a view of it as if through a veil. The story unfolds, characters slowly discover things and we get to see something we haven’t been able to see.
The sea – riding upon it, staying alive in it, walking in divers gear and trying to see through it – plays a significant role in this work and yet it, like the war in the distance functions more as a powerful medium for the development of the characters.
By contrast, the plumbing of Egan’s characters – their thoughts and emotions buffeted about by war, crime and sea change – is lucid and clear. Egan is excellent at interior monologue and reflection by her characters. She gets at rooted feelings with wide-open eyes. This often results in gorgeous passages.
The story includes a brilliantly imagined voyage on a merchant marine vessel named the Elizabeth Seaman. The nod to Nellie Bly goes unmentioned, a subtlety at which Egan is graceful – letting history fall into place where it belongs.
Egan captures the longing and isolation of Eddie Kerrigan, in his stateroom 47 days at sea, suddenly gripped by the notion that he has forgotten the face of his beloved –
” – could hardly picture her anymore. Faraway things became theoretical, then imaginary, then hard to imagine. They ceased to exist.”
Then, almost immediately, a torrent of thoughts pour through him about the first time they met, about her children and their times together. Finally he concludes,
“It was all still there, everything he’d left behind. Its vanishing had been only a trick.”
The story here, of a child and father separated by fateful decisions who alternate between avoiding and seeking one another out, is woven expertly and filled with surprises that emerge, unfolding until events feel inevitable. That’s good storytelling. The characters have a weight and realness to them because they endure and grow. There are deaths and children and gangsters and action.
But the story takes place in a different America, a different New York and it’s glaring on occasion. Characters deliberate over ethically conservative matters with earnestness but it never escalates. How women are perceived, how abortions and unwanted children are handled; these matters are described but never raise up into full blown issues. Racial hierarchies are described with the vernacular of the day: “micks,” “wops” and “Negroes” but racism never emerges enough to be addressed as an issue. It’s just how things were is the feeling one gets.
Manhattan Beach faithfully portrays some Brooklynites, in particular Irish-American, Italian-American and Naval families during World War II and an era of transition from a more sexist, racist and somewhat naive past just up to the doorstep of a future we live in today.
I review without spoilers, so I’ll conclude by saying Manhattan Beach is a great book. New Yorkers will love it and Egan will be helped during awards season by that. But more, I enjoyed Jennifer Egan’s language – lovely turns of phrase – and her character’s introspections. She has managed to create a compelling tale from immense research.
How many have read all of Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Cixin Liu in the 11 years since The Three-Body Problem was first serialized in the Chinese magazine Science Fiction World?
How many have read it only in English?
Wie viele Leute haben Gesamtheit dieser Trilogie nur auf Deutsch gelesen? 有多少人用中文读完整本三部曲 ?
I ask because having just finished the trilogy in English as published by Tor in New York – The Three-Body Problem (2014), The Dark Forest (2015) and Death’s End (2016), translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen – I wonder if many people stuck with it all the way through. I’m eager to converse with those who have. In any language:
For full disclosure, I worked very briefly as a freelancer at TOR in 2001, but I have no relationship with them. I ordered each volume to my local branch of the public library, received hardbacks in an orderly fashion and read the three this May.
These were released in English in 2014, ’15 and ’16 but I binge-read it all as one novel. I get the feeling many people who finished the first book, didn’t read the second because it wasn’t released until a year later.
My reviews of Book One and Book Two were written as introductions – spoilers are at a minimum and I give readers suggestions to assist translation.
If you have not read any of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, I recommend you read those two reviews before continuing here.
Remembrance of Earth’s Past by Cixin Liu
I’m not a scientist. I’m not formally educated in computing or astrophysics or chemistry or astronomy or biology or nano-science or any of the disciplines Cixin Liu uses to sustain his startlingly creative projection of humanity hundreds of years and eventually hundreds of million of years into the future.
The consumption of this work is about the STEM level of people in China, India, Europe, and the United States of America – where STEM stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math. You have to have proper education in these disciplines to comprehend and indeed to enjoy this work.
I struggled to put together the science, but I was continually amazed by the thought Liu put into his fantastic inventions and conceits.
In Death’s End, humanity uses hibernation and near-light-speed travel to extend human consciousness millions of light-years across space and hundreds of millions of years into the future. This extends the philosophical reach of the first two volumes exponentially.
This trilogy is intellectually complex work that starts with the highest current levels of technology, imagines liberally and then sustains a creative and technical specificity that pushes wide the willing suspension of disbelief. The technical creativity got so immense I stopped doubting the science.
It was exhausting.
During Book One I started taking one Extra-Strength Tylenol™ roughly every 150 pages to deal with headaches. This continued until I finished the trilogy this morning.
It was educational.
I learned more hard science from a work of fiction than I have in decades. I ended up re-learning the basics of astronomy and physics, of chemistry and biology that I had let fall aside. Liu’s scientific and technological detail is great for re-firing dusty synapses concerning cosmology and for grasping a view of our universe with rich scientific ideas and creative philosophies.
It was exhilarating.
Liu’s seemingly inexhaustible imagination kept providing new ways of thinking about us as human beings or about various disciplines. He takes on huge issues of science and then drills down on the tech. He takes on philosophy with a handful of characters and large masses and manages to capture so many human qualities and conundra. He then pushes these as far as he can, exploring an immense range of human responses to conditions I’ve never – and perhaps nobody’s – ever considered.
From the standpoint of strategic and military thinking these books have a freshness that seems composed not from any one culture’s way of thinking about conflict – not Chanakya’s nor Sun-Tzu’s nor that of Von Clausewitz nor Machiavelli – but rather from gathering ways all humans have acted and reacted to this point, pulling it together, and then shoving forward en masse to address how we would struggle among ourselves to deal with his imagined future contexts: extra-terrestrial invasion, mundicide, global annihilation, solar annihilation, the annihilation of the universe itself.
This is a huge reach and there are problems with it.
I noticed often that I’d think of a strategy from human history that could be applied or a way we approach a problem that Liu doesn’t include in the discourse. It made me feel like he hadn’t really covered all the bases before launching into a new direction.
The result is a feeling that Liu is continually guiding us through the narrative by what his characters thought of and how they reacted not necessarily the totality of human possibility.
This bothered me, but then it made a deeper sense. History is composed of how people act and react in a moment and what flows from their decisions. This work does read like human history told from the very distant future.
Creatively that’s astonishing. Cixin Liu is bold and dares to imagine how we’d think and act and then tries honestly to faithfully represent us in his wild future.
It’s important to note I could rationalize the many different approaches that characters took in the works and decisions they made. Liu is exceptional at projecting a wide range of human flaws and brilliance into the way the characters move this thing along.
It lead me to realize how compartmentalized my own thinking of humanity is. My biases about the Chinese were revealed many times as I read Remembrance of Earth’s Past.
I want to be clear and honest about this as a means of discussing translation of the work. I’ve read that the German translation has been considered more faithful to the original. I wonder if that’s about differences between English and German and/or Chinese.
I’m eager to write more and to discuss with anyone who has read the complete trilogy. As usual I’ll update this post here over the next day or two, so look for a final version in a couple of days, but I must stop now.
Remembrance of Earth’s Past, the trilogy, by Cixin Liu
My mind has been expanded significantly by the first two books of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The scale and scope of the undertaking is truly on par with the greatest science fiction I’ve ever read. Hard science and theoretical ideas run deep, but remain very human and rational.
It’s a syncretic hyper-extension of the way we think and behave pushed into a highly orchestrated future that requires deep conceptualization to imagine.
Comparisons to Asimov are apt.
Cixin Liu boldly describes human culture and philosophy facing impending first contact with an alien race that has advanced technology with a richness of supposition and detail that captures a wide range of human emotion and response. He does this with very few characters and an elaborate, all-encompassing style. The details are exceptionally well thought-out.
The setup incorporates the vast distances in space and a nuanced portrayal of human society dealing with an enemy about whom little is known and who will not arrive to attack for hundreds of years.
I am continually taken aback at the breadth of this work. Liu’s narrative is centuries long. It’s on the scale of James Blish (Cities in Flight) or, as has been noted, Frank Herbert (Dune).
While humans invent cryogenic hibernation and a space armada and other standard responses of sci-fi to deal with this situation, there are unique circumstances.
The sophons, a pan-dimensional use of protons that travel across space, arriving at Earth to unfold and manipulate our reality, was a mind-blowing central concept of The Three-Body Problem. In Book Two, Liu posits Wallfacers and their companion Wallbreakers as a complex reaction to this tactic of the Trisolarans.
Since the Trisolarans can see, read and influence human behavior, the only safe space to shield anything from them is within the human mind. The Wallfacers are created and tasked with never writing anything down, never explaining what they do or why they do it to anyone. They embark on their plans to resist the Trisolarans independent of social and military planners. Wallfacers become the central pre-occupation of The Dark Forest. It is conceptually impressive and flourishes into a great plot.
The Trisolarans do not make any significant appearance until the climactic battle at the end of this volume and are peripheral players throughout. This allows Liu to explore humanity through the behavior – and responses to the behavior – of the Wallfacers in a way that is totally original.
So now Liu has to describe humanity’s initial response – filled with variety: those who give up, those who would fight, those who would defect to the enemy – and to posit the extension of all these reactions 200 years into the future.
It’s galactic in scale and all just a little hard to swallow by the time you get to the division of this book between Earth of the late-20th/early 21st century and human culture of the year 2200. But to Liu’s credit The Dark Forest is more human and relationships are deeper, more sensitive and believable.
Cixin Liu grew significantly as a writer between the two works. He takes on the psychology of humanity faced with the cosmic situation he has created and works through abstract philosophical responses to create a range of believable, if summarized, cultural changes in us.
I liked The Dark Forest better than The Three-Body Problem because Liu goes further to extrapolate his visions of how humanity behaves in the face of the complex circumstance he has created. He includes and fills-out more intimate reactions and attempts to create a broad image of us and how we react – intelligently but oh, so human.
The Wallfacer Project is the primary mechanism for this. That the story advances 200 years in a leap of human culture is the second. Without giving too much away, allow me to say that many of the characters manage to hibernate and emerge hundreds of years later which results in a fascinating conceit:
Liu convincingly describes near-future humans who have survived post-Trisolaran contact. They’ve endured The Great Ravine – an epic depression of global scale that reduced human population by billions – and an era that forced most cities underground. Their tech is smart.
But this future human society is confronted daily by waking up hibernators, characters we know and appreciate from our time, awakened on schedule to proceed with the ultimate plan of Earth’s defense. It creates a truly original relationship between us and our future selves.
In some ways Liu’s future human relationships are a near-perfect emulation of contemporary generational relationships between the Digital Generation and anybody over 40. The clunky 21st-century hibernators call them “kids” though they’re a highly advanced civilization.
The Dark Forest is considerably more about philosophy, politics and social and military strategy than The Three-Body Problem, which was more computing and science. But it’s pretty heady stuff.
All of it is headed toward first contact and when the 2000-spacecraft-strong armada of Earth finally meets the first craft from Trisolaris, the story doesn’t disappoint. So many previous steps have led to this moment in our narrative, they unfold like the petals of a blooming flower as the action explodes. The battle is a brilliant sequence.
We come now to a principle failing of this work. The conclusion of volume two is meant to bring a suspension at last to first contact, but the solution that achieves this was, to me, a disappointment. When it finally happens, I wondered why it hadn’t come sooner to us to approach the problem this way.
I’m obviously trying to critique here without giving anything away, so I’ll conclude with a metaphor from another saga.
I used to love trolling fans of The Lord of the Rings by saying, “Put the ring in a box. Give it to the Eagles. Tell them to drop it in the fires of Mordor. End of story in 20 minutes.” After all, the Eagles easily defeat the winged Fellbeasts of the Nazgul in the great war of Middle Earth, they’d have no problem getting by them to rid the world of the ring.
Sometimes a simple plot hole can take away the power of a saga, so you have to avoid it to go on, and to enjoy the ride.
I hate to say it, but when the final philosophical and cosmological play is made in the battle between Earth and Trisolaris – elaborate and complex as it is – I saw it coming.
I really, really want to elaborate with anyone who has read these two.
I embarked on The Three-Body Problem because a colleague considered it a cultural touchstone that occupies the moment between China and the Western world. I traveled in Chinese-speaking countries for many years, and know a little of the Chinese having studied there, but this is the first Chinese novel – sci-fi or otherwise – I’ve ever read, so I was curious how it would be.
The Three-Body Problem is Book One of Remembrance of Earth’s Past, a trilogy being marketed as a global phenomenon: the first major sci-fi novel out of China by “China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.” It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006 and Three-Body Problem has been immensely popular among hundreds of millions of Chinese and a comparatively small, committed group of sci-fi readers internationally. It was originally published serially.
The English translation by Ken Liu (Tor, 2014) was nominated for a Nebula and Hugo Award for best novel – becoming the first translated novel to be nominated for a major SF award since Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in 1976. Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015.
Translations of Books Two and Three were released in 2015 and ’16 and the Three-Body Problem movie is expected later this year.
The novel takes the late-1960’s, early-70’s as a launching point for a fictional narrative that bounces forward 40 years to look back upon it as history. The context for beginning requires some understanding of the temperament of China, then. I took footnotes seriously and in real-time. I kept my cell-phone or computer handy and spent a few minutes googling and reading about historical events and figures as I went along to aid the translation. It helps.
The main characters are mostly scientists – theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, a nanomaterials guy – or military strategists. This is highly intellectual hard science and military thinking. You have to know a thing or two about the state of contemporary knowledge in many disciplines or be willing to learn as you go. I think this would have been more enjoyable in the serial form. I got regular headaches trying to read and follow all this in massive novel form.
Keeping Google handy helps a lot with both the Chinese history and the science. Complex scientific theories and ideas are referenced liberally throughout. It’s apparent Cixin Liu, an engineer by trade, has an expansive and comprehensive understanding of many disciplines. His knowledge of computing, theoretical physics, astronomy and chemistry has bloomed into the books of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. I got headaches, but I learned a lot.
The Setup
During the Cultural Revolution in China, a young woman, Ye Winjie, sees her father, a prominent scientist, killed before her eyes. Ye Winjie is profoundly affected by this and the brutal ignorance of the state and its ferverous minions. She grows up to be a scientist, herself, and is assigned to a remote radar telescope facility for a top secret project. She discovers scientists have revealed an alien culture in the vicinity of Earth’s next-nearest star, Alpha Centauri. A warning from the alien culture not to reveal Earth’s location for fear of invasion is unequivocal.
Ye Wenjie decides life under humanity is worse than worthless, headed for self-destruction, and, skillfully masking her intentions to gain the access necessary, she uses a massive radar dish and the power of the sun as an amplifier, to send a message across space, unilaterally inviting the aliens to come to Earth and take over. And so begins the saga between Earth and Trisolaris that will last hundreds of years.
Now two groups of people exist on Earth who know about the aliens, those who want to prevent them from coming and those who would aid them. We are are led in the narrative of those who would prevent them by a naive but inquisitive scientist and his gruff but lovable foil, an earthy cop who balances out the eggheads and help them push on.
Ye Winjie is a confined leader of those who would aid the aliens – called Trisolarans because they live on a planet with three suns. Yet she manages to connect with a disgruntled hippie who believes imperialist capitalists are carelessly destroying the world. He in turn inherits billions from his industrialist father, and together they create a small, committed force to help the aliens come to Earth to take over.
Meanwhile, the chapters concerning the Trisolarans are fast and heady. The unique structure of their system – a planet with three suns – results in rapid-fire changes described expertly in socio-philosophical and biological terms. It’s smart, interesting theoretical evolution.
The Three-Body Problem is a huge story with bold strokes, and lots of technical and philosophical ideas emerge from high concepts and hard science. A solid understanding of computing, physics, astrophysics, chemistry and theory is brilliantly at play here as the Trisolarans develop and indeed outdevelop us.
There are fascinating conceits:
the idea of dozens of physicists and scientists going mad because the physical universe itself flickers and communicates with them directly is terrifying, an idea that shakes the core of belief in what is real.
an alien culture less than five light years away has warped their specific consciousness through an elaborate and abstract intervention only they can observe with highly sensitive devices. It’s fantastic and explained through complex multi-dimensional chemistry.
having no machines, the Trisolarans construct a giant computer out of single individuals with flags – a massive human motherboard, with files of soldiers running as BUSes through it. It’s just so Chinese. But brilliant in the details of the construction.
While science makes this novel complex, by the time it all gets unraveled, including the complicated rationale of the humans who choose to collude with the aliens in their effort to take over the Earth, we are left with a basic story and simple characters executing a complex, tumbling plan toward Human and Trisolaran interaction. It’s a contact story that spans hundreds of years.
I was reminded of the devices of other sci-fi novels – the aliens use a video game to communicate with humans like in Ender’s Game, the rapid evolution of the Trisolarans reminded me of a story I read in the 80’s about life that forms on a pulsar.
The science and technology elevate this work more than the philosophy. There are clunky philosophical problems I associate as typically sci-fi that are exposed by the science, but it feels inhuman.
It’s sad and simplistic to accept a sane, highly educated person could give up on humanity unilaterally and gain access to the means to execute their betrayal. Isn’t it? It may sound sexist, but I couldn’t imagine a woman being the one to do it.
Once she commits the greatest universal act of betrayal in human history, Ye Winjie finds a community of supporters from cultures all over the world. Have we given up on ourselves so completely? It’s depressing.
This strikes me as a cultural question. Maybe it’s a collision of my mindset with contemporary Chinese or SF. The Chinese and the Trisolarans are foreigners to me here and Sci-Fi is my means of comprehending each, only abstrusely.
Conveniently, the Trisolarans live only four and a half light years away, so communications require just eight years between planets. Presumably in the next volume … we meet.
I finish what I start so I’ll review The Dark Forest, Volume Two of Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past, next.
A glacial is thousands of years of cold temperatures and glacial advancement. The last glacial ended 15,000 years ago, and we’re told the epoch we’re living in now, the Holocene, is an inter-glacial period.
But the unprecedented speed with which the ice has disappeared over the last 100 years gives us pause.
Humans as a species are having an effect on global temperature and the ice. It is undeniable now there’s at least a chance the change is irreversible. So, some ask the academy and society at large to admit the dawn of the Anthropocene, an era in which the glaciers may never return.
The Holocene was so named for the most powerful force of the epoch, the sun. The Anthropocene declares we, humans, anthros, have surpassed the sun in our ability to affect the planet. Some conservatives and capitalists who don’t want to take responsibility for what’s happening as anything different from anything that has happened in the past, say to call it the beginning of the Anthropocene is jumping to conclusions.
The story of three generations of a family are nothing to a glacier.
But historical records exist, and the stories your great-grandma told your grandma, your mom and you about the world are passed down. The oral tradition which has guided the entirety of human advancement for generations passes information down hundreds and thousands of years.
What if you could interview generations living in the Arctic Circle over the last several decades – this critical time – about what they’ve both seen first hand, and the stories they’ve been told for centuries?
There’ve been some humans who have gone northward a little ways and made some progress, but undeniably the greatest authority in the vast glaciated north are the polar bears who have roamed the ice and seas for thousands of years.
The last 100 years has brought them into contact with us humans, which is how it is possible, Yoko Tawada informs us prosaically in Memoirs of a Polar Bear, that we come to know them just a little bit.
It’s a gorgeous expansion of that little bit that makes this a magical novel.
This slim, beautiful biography of three generations of polar bears living not at the North Pole, but among us – in Russia, Germany and Canada between the 1960’s and today – uses an ethereal, intermingling of human and bear to tell it. In Tawada’s work, exceptionally sensitive humans and very particular bears can communicate profoundly and with feeling.
It amazes me how she creates this delicate balance between what we can understand and what we cannot and what the bears can and cannot grasp. The intersection of human and bear is deliberately an imperfect and haunting space, like any introduction between species at an equal level demands. It makes this book completely inhabitable.
Yoko Tawada was born on March 23, 1960, in Tokyo and studied Russian literature at Waseda. She moved to Germany when she was 22 years old in 1982 – seven years before the fall of the wall.
In her new country, she received a Masters in contemporary German Literature at Hamburg before completing a Doctorate in German literature at Zurich. She writes in German and Japanese and in 1987, she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition
And then the wall fell.
I have not read anything else by Tawada except this novel, which comes to me because New Directions published it and Susan Bernofsky translated it. But her wholeness of composition is staggering.
The three parts of this novel are incredibly different and yet weave together perfectly to tell not only the stories of the bears but of all of us as we have gone through what we have experienced these last 60 years.
The grandmother polar bear who begins the story has no name. She mothers Tosca, who not only has a name, but has the ability to engage and relate across continents. Tosca in turn births Knut, whom she rejects, so he is raised by us. It is an amazing idea.
The history of the Soviet Era is held in the grandmother, then the era of change – the end of the Cold War – in the telling of Tosca, and the sad withering of our culture into a global conglomeration bereft of deep and important memories of our past in Knut, a real-life polar bear, who captured the hearts of Europeans and Russians just ten years ago, in the Aughts, and whose history you should only google, read and learn about after you’ve read this novel.
The connection between us and the bears, that of our Class, mammalia, is here explored with compassion and interspecies love. I was completely enamored with Tawada’s use of what it means to be a mammal as a means of connecting us to another species as opposed to separating us from other mammalia. We don’t have kinship with bears, we have mammalian-ship with them. Genius.
But more than capturing what little exists of the understanding between us and the polar bears, Tawada has captured the predominant feeling of post-neoliberalism: the feeling of no place, of having no memory that will last, of how much history is disappearing into the sands, or melted seas, of time.
This is a visionary expression of a contemporary crisis that few have yet fully grasped: placelessness. The placelessness of those whose place is being taken away and the placelessness of those who have lost the ability to feel place – bears and humans respectively – is metaphoric for much human experience in the last 60 years: immigrants, refugees, citizenship, culture.
The bears as metaphors for a sensible understanding of what has actually been going on, remind me of the metaphors for what actually existed that reside in the works of oppressed Soviet writers. Amidst climate change deniers and global warming warriors, Tawada takes a sensitive approach to make us at least observe faithfully.
I’m a creative person who is the child of scientists. My father was one of the greatest sulfur chemists of the 20th century and my mother was a physics and pharmacology educator and researcher for decades.
Art and music and writing is my genetic code, while my environmental education and upbringing was always one of deep and proper science. The latter influenced me to be rational and theoretical and to question and wonder about our world, my life. The former, to be social and to feel the world, to dance and to get high. So perhaps I’m biased in my reading of Boyle’s particularly incisive view of the scientists who are the main characters of The Terranauts. But let me tell you, it’s great.
It takes a lot of sensitivity and prosaic power to get inside the hearts and minds of people locked up together in an intense project, a collaborative effort of scale, or a prison, and express that faithfully. You really have to go through experiences like that or understand how working together happens in a deep way to attempt something like this. You have to understand people, socially and personally. Boyle does.
In The Terranauts, T. C. Boyle has invented an immense human project, populated it with entirely believable characters and embarked on a plumbing of their emotional and physical landscape with such brilliant detail, I find myself taken aback at the effort and his skill pulling it off.
His description of the technology of the Terranauts’ sealed-glass home in the desert is so vivid in detail down to the workings of the structure itself and including the flora and fauna – in some instances even described with Latin nomenclature in such a way as to feel beautiful – that I had to remind myself this place does not exist.
The pleasure I got from the contemplation of plants, animals and weather ‘inside’ by his characters is distinctly due to Boyle’s sensitivity, rooted in research and built with great prose. His descriptions of the emotional aspects of the scientists’ relationships to their subjects as well as to their co-workers is equally nuanced but even bolder.
The comfort Boyle has developed in delving into human sexuality here reveals an honest portrayal of our superficiality more than our capacity for love. But it isn’t cold.
Science is calculating.
Yet, there is so much of that capacity for love displayed – in the love of a scientific subject, or for the idea of team, or for loyalty as a badge of love. Even the subtleties of friendship and the complicated feelings that tie people together are handled exceptionally here.
This is a faithful portrayal of the emotional landscape of men and women put together for two years separated from us all, and Boyle has created a believable continuum that speaks to everyone about how we act.
T.C. Boyle gets us. His characters over the years are always like people I know or meet along the way. Here he throws four men and four women together separated by only inches from a half dozen of their friends, colleagues and lovers for two years solely for the purpose of expressing intimacy. It’s an incredible conceit seen vividly through.
Employing the style of first-person chapters collected together to do the telling works because of Boyle’s talent for briskness of plot. Though I don’t generally love the format, here it lets Boyle expand inner monologue, the guts of people’s feelings in confession, post-facto, as scientists would … really as anyone would.
Confessing after the fact, telling the truth and letting it out feels so good. It’s a really cool way to unreveal the “True Story of the Terranauts!”
The arrangement of these chapters and points of view is beautiful construction. The first-person chapters are woven in a way of telling the tale that seems complete, unfettered, whole. And it happens progressively.
It doesn’t take long to feel a part of this ecosystem and, once you’re in, you’re equally concerned as the characters as to whether the goats are getting fed or whether there are any tilapia left. You’re equally worried about O2 levels.
The characters are genuine, believable and, confessing their relatable flaws, they’re likable. Those who seem initially like obnoxious foes or nemeses go through transitions and humanize while the flaws of protagonists are openly dissected and brought down to earth.
My emotions changed towards characters and so I felt a part of the immense human enterprise. Like I was on the team, in the dome or at Mission Control, not some dopey tourist staring through the glass on my way to the Grand Canyon. Brilliant.
In retrospect the archetypal quality of the characters is resonant. The details make Boyle’s ecosystem a deeply human environment of our typical longings, lusts, and desires met and unmet. The way we see each other in constrained circumstances relates clearly to how we behave in society and Boyle uses an incredible palette of language to achieve this. I could feel the soil of the Ecosphere between my toes. I wanted to hug Linda, hard.
And, I guess typically for me, I felt kinship with Vodge and Linda and Gretchen.
I thoroughly recommend The Terranauts to anyone with brains and a heart – or for that matter a penis or a vagina.
Way to go, T.C.
3.5/5 stars
A Word on T.C. Boyle’s Utter Coolness
T. Coraghessan Boyle is truly a social writer.
I don’t mean socially-conscious. Or Socialist. Or that he seeks to influence or corral a group of readers in some direct manner.
I mean he’s a social being … and an excellent writer.
His ‘socialness’ is apparent on Twitter where I have enjoyed daily images of his routines – the morning, the egg, the paper, the rat – and of his various voyages. But recently I became one of the many readers/followers to whom he has replied. I was reading his novel Talk Talk, (Viking, 2006), and tweeted some friends about it including his handle and what? what? @tcboyle dipped in to the thread to comment. Turns out he’s totally personable on Twitter and comfortable discussing his work in detail. (More on Boyle’s tweets in my review of Talk Talk).
So last week when I picked up his latest novel, I tweeted to tell him I was starting The Terranauts … and he responded! It was crazy. You can see the exchanges @mtksf. His openness and ease daily with his readers or the public or whatever twitter followers are, strikes me as pretty unusual for a novelist of his stature. I mean, he’s just so cool.
After 15 novels and dozens of short stories and collections, a bibliography of 25+ works, numerous national awards – the guy’s a prolific American man of letters – he still takes time out to hang with his twitter followers. Blows my mind. Though I shouldn’t be surprised. The one time I met him, pre-twitter in 2004, at KPFK in Los Angeles, he was totally present and easy-going, too.
He works at his discipline, teaches it, and is un-self-conscious enough to engage with his readers as a regular person. I can only conclude T.C. Boyle is as great a guy to hang out with as his novels are.
The originality of the structure of Lincoln in the Bardo immediately sets George Saunders’ debut novel apart. It’s composed of stacked lists of quotations attributed to the souls occupying Oak Hills cemetery in the Georgetown section of our nation’s capitol in 1862; to the President at the time, Abraham Lincoln, and to his son, Willie, recently deceased; and to the night watchman and manager of the cemetery, neighbors, historical figures and eyewitnesses to the events of the time.
I plunged into this work thinking these crazy quotes would continue for a few pages and then return to a normal third or first person narrative. Not only did they not, the form became its own sort of thing with hilarity and piety. The quotations interact, finish one another’s sentiments.
Saunders’ approach from his short stories in Pastoralia, where letters and notes and faxes between characters move plot and create conflicts, is here in fuller effect. This “debut novel” thus actually resides somewhere between the novella and the norm of long-form fiction. Almost as if Saunders still isn’t ready to write one of those “novel” things.
It was initially off-putting because pretty quickly quotes from real historical sources reside in equanimity with a tumbling invention of the thoughts of the dead.
The first time several quotations are used to describe the same person and there are wide disparities implying unreliable reportage, forcing the reader to flip back-and-forth to separate quotes from actual historical texts from made-up ones, it’s a hilarious reminder that we’re in a novel, and it doesn’t matter.
Fiction and Non-fiction swim together.
In the mid-90’s, in San Francisco, it was the fashion among serious young (read: unpublished) writers like me to read the postmodern fiction of structuralists like Harry Matthews, the only American member of the Oulipo, with great love. The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle bears consideration in advance of talking about Saunders as constructionist.
There is a confidence and ease I love about George Saunders. He really is in command of his craft. With this form, within a matter of a few chapters, you are in his world. If a person were to come over to you and look over your shoulder while you’re reading this novel, it would look to them like insane gibberish.
Saunders’ effort is totally original but like Matthews and the Oulipo before him, uses structure to train you into his narrative – isolating you from being able to “tell” this book.
It was immediately apparent an audio book of this work is basically impossible without dozens of actors and a unique method for attribution, audibly. It’s another thing, a book.
I wonder how the e-versions look/read?
Once aboard, the form establishes a rhythm and momentum that sends this richly imagined exploration of death, life and loss, forward with vigor.
The historical facts surrounding the 16th President and the death of his son at the White House and the Civil War that raged with the nation’s history in the balance are the nest in which Saunders crafts a re-imagining of purgatory. He does so to examine our sense of purpose and meaning – in life and after death.
But rather than a staid, dusty exploration of our historical understanding of the deaths of the time, Saunders populates his work with real people – everyday people who lived and died normal and un-extraordinary lives, filled with sins and loves and hates and pettiness. It is part of his charm in the short form that his characters are easily believable and admirable for their flawed, utterly human qualities. They are our guides to the mind of our beloved Lincoln, and nation.
Saunders’ exceptional understanding of people and compassion for their desires, dreams and regrets is again on display as this diverse collection of souls from many walks of life reveal themselves and the stories of their lives.
The population of the cemetery includes slaves but the book fails to really plunge into the national sin. I read a review that felt the opposite, that the recrimination and oppression of the slaves in the cemetery by the whites was clearcut and evocative, giving voice to the horror, but it was disappointing to me.
As I reflect on the role the slaves do play, it is once again as from a position of rectitude, to be able to look back at slavery and racism to contain it in the national narrative.
There are some serious and violent points of intersection between the black and white population of the cemetery and one particularly poignant one never ends, an eternal struggle. But I can’t help but feel this could have been developed. Slaves and masters in the same cemetery, with only the masters in marked graves, seems a rare territory and an opportunity to explore racism more deeply.
The conceit does fruit into a tangential reference into Lincoln’s conclusions on the matter, conclusions that led to years of bloody war over ending slavery. This book isn’t about that though, nor about the civil war.
It seems to be about how we, all of us, think of ourselves and our lives more than Lincoln or anyone else in 1862 does. It seems to be about how we think of our lives in advance of, and even after, death – whether it’s the death of someone we know or ourselves. In that, Lincoln in the Bardo succeeds with sensitivity and compassion.
Saunders understands un-requite, failure, desperation and the longing we all feel. He also knows how to craft this understanding into an incredibly direct narrative. It’s amazing.
Apparently he has said about his process that the narrative tells him how long it is to be, what it is to be. In this case it became something wondrous.
I am left with so much after this novel. I find I cannot describe it very well. It’s like a magician’s deception. What you find within is worth much more than the conceit.
It is clear though, the magician knows his audience inside and out.
I have always been a romantic, despite the cruel human stupidity deteriorating this world.
I have seen and read and loved a lot and come to know the pain of it and of cynicism. I have come to appreciate Dorothy Parker and Bob Dylan. I have fought to resist the patina of the produced and to stare long in pursuit of a realistic understanding. Yet, I have always believed and fight still to believe in beauty, nature, goodness, harmony and love. I am not yet completely jaded. Hence I remain a romantic.
Even now, despite my age, I look upon a woman I find attractive from a distance and, knowing nothing about her, still think, “what if we are perfect for each other, in some way.” 50 years of living on this earth has dampened my spirits and broken my heart, but not ultimately my belief in the possibility of love.
But when people ask me what I want to write about, I’ve given the same response for decades: my interest is literary fiction about real relationships and people. I like the ability of a great writer to honestly capture what goes on between people in states of profound intimacy as effectively as the interior dialogue within them.
And the truth is, little of the best of this writing is romantic. The best is at turns cynical, petty, harsh and loving in ways that seem impossible to describe … until someone does.
I would give Kawabata as my first and greatest example. Then perhaps Kundera. You could add Hanif Kureishi to that list and now yet another K – Ismail Kadare.
Aksidenti, by Ismail Kadare was written in Tirana, Albania in 2008 and translated into English as The Accident in 2010. It is a haunting exploration of love, lust and desire wrapped into the puzzling investigation of a car crash.
From this seemingly simple conceit, Kadare weaves the pieced-together tale of two lovers, composed of the evidence and actualities that surrounded them. Untrustworthy depositions mingle with contradictory ones and the use of language amazes and delights as the story tumbles along, revealing unrequitedness, jealousy and the power game of love.
The first time I ever heard of Kadare was on a flight returning from Maine to New York City in August of 1999. I had taken a sailing trip up the coast of Maine for nine days with two close friends and I used the opportunity to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace the first time.
On the flight home, I had my tray table down and my journal out as I was making notes on the text. I pulled out the Tolstoy to copy some quotes from it and the man seated next to me noticed it. “Ah, Tolstoy!” he said, and as I turned to him he covered one of his eyes with one palm, stared at me through the other, and exclaimed, “Kutozov!”
It was an instantaneous connection over the scene in War and Peace in which the one-eyed general Kutozov is approached by a foot soldier who has come to ask for orders only to hear from the wizened general that it doesn’t matter what they do, that the orders, like the battle itself, are irrelevant.
The man seated next to me had a bushy mustache, thick black hair, and a slight Eastern European accent. He could have been Russian, but was more likely Czech or Hungarian or perhaps from one of the former Yugoslav Republics, which were then in the throes of separation and even dissolution.
The man put his hand down, looked at me and then asked, seriously, “Have you read Kadare?” When I shook my head no, he continued, “You must. He is the greatest living writer.” Which is how I began my exploration of this Albanian who has since won the inaugural International Man Booker Prize and is perennially a candidate for the Literature Nobel.
The Accident is first and foremost a puzzle of an investigation, but the story is about retroactively composing the last weeks of the lovers, Mr. Besfort Y. and Rovena, tossed from a taxi that “veered off the airport autobahn at kilometre marker 17.”
Kadare effortlessly moves between third and first person accounts in chapters that take off in different directions, leaving the reader to catch up. But once you do, he delivers a deep understanding of human emotions expressed directly. He is clever and precise in his method of setting you up to grasp what he is trying to say about us and the way we love or treat one another.
I had to flip back several times to remember things and put things together, but rather than being a nuisance or distracting, it became charming – as though I, too, were involved in this elaborate investigation and as if I might be the one who ultimately sees the truth.
Kadare doesn’t insult the reader. It is so great. He ‘hup-hups’ the reader to stay abreast, hiding important facts of the case in everyday accounts only to have them remembered later and tossed and turned all about. The puzzling elements are crisp and Borgesian, while the emotional landscape of this relationship and its satellites of love are raw, detailed and exceptionally written.
There is so much feeling in the human relationships, described nakedly and with stark eloquence, that I found myself thinking once again how much is lost to me by being in the United States. The relationships in our books are so narrow and empty of emotional range.
More and more it is because we are becoming flat and superficial. Americans on dates talk about tv shows, movies, stuff and money. We are fast becoming the kingdom of porn stars and prudes working in concert to confuse a society increasingly incapable of understanding true love or what meaning is.
Ismail Kadare’s love story or lust story or death story or whatever this is, is much more full than even real everyday loves in the United States, an incredible book.
I am glad Bob Dylan won the 2017 Nobel, but I must say, I am increasingly with the crowd favoring Kadare to win it soon.
My history with Salman Rushdie is unknown to him I’m sure, but beyond reading as much of his work as I can over the years, it also includes at least one performance piece in San Francisco in the 1990’s and at least one letter I actually sent him through his agent when I was working in New York and dated a woman who worked for his publisher in the early aughts. Pretty sure he never got it though.
After the fatwa was placed on his head, the performance piece was that -as a young writer living in SF and helping give birth to the non-profit resource Media Alliance – I had a button which read “I am Salman Rushdie” and wore it out and about while he was in hiding as an act of solidarity.
The button was particularly more effective on me than my peers – mostly white and black Americans – because I’m Indian and so perhaps could have appeared to be him to someone ignorant of his age.
And stupid enough to think he’d be wearing a button declaring himself who he was in public.
I have written about Rushdie before in the context of Haruki Murakami, and indeed I attributed Murakami with influencing Rushdie toward popularity in this. However, now I think more than by any peers, Rushdie has been influenced most by the United States and particularly his new chosen home of New York City.
It reminds me of John Lennon in that way, another Brit liberated and enthused by the teeming creative humanity of New York.
I think creative immigrants falling in love with the US can be compared and contrasted with others for whom it is the same, but never to me – for mine has been a continual, slow falling out of love with the place.
I wouldn’t speak for Rushdie with regard to his beliefs of course, but his facile use of language to allow characters to wrestle over the aspects of God or the legitimacy of the same exhibits an intellectual courage I, as an atheist, admire profoundly. And upon finishing this book it struck me:
If an atheist writes a fairy tale and it comes out seeming very much like the fantastic stories of all our religions, what does that mean?
I am reminded of Anatole France in this regard. By the end of Penguin Island is it really something else? I mean, is that us as humans staying in touch with our it? Two Years Eight Months Twenty-Eight Days has that quality in the form of its frame story – as if told from the distant future. (these guys also immediately brought to my mind the tall blue aliens of the far distant future in Spielberg’s, A.I., – my imagination is so dense with shit).
This book has all Rushdie’s expertise of craft – voluminous, tumbling wondrous language and ideas of fantasy worlds and people and non-people. It’s a tumult of musical and thunderous sentences, some of which run on for pages.
His mastery of the third person remains impressive because aspects seem omniscient – even Godly – while others are so human or somewhere in between, yet he never allows the authority of any hierarchy to intercede in the power of the narrative. The story demands to be itself despite all religions or deities or men or women who may exist within it. Even the ‘We’ in the frame story admonish themselves for editorializing.
But it is more pop now. And at times the veil between author and subject slips.
I am sure, after having lived there myself and knowing something of its temperament, being an international celebrity in New York comes with demands for new language. Rushdie’s now includes a clear love for the city and its cultural community. It is the basis for his exuberance.
In Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Days, Rushdie imports his beloved Thousand Nights and a Night to Manhattan and Queens and the Staten Island Ferry and proceeds to weave and reweave it into contemporary New York City and beyond.
Using simple abbreviations for countries abroad drawn in loose terms now – a secondhand where”A,P and I,” are Afghanistan, Pakistan and India or in which ancient sites of the Bible or Koran are described tangentially through the mechanism of the stories within stories that make up this telling, there’s still a clear association for Rushdie now with neoliberal, Obama-and DeBlasio-leaning New York as much as with Harry P., Das Racist and metropolitan culture.
And because his works are contemporary in skein if not in the whole of the yarn, fantastic stories and language emerge which create – perhaps utopically – a secular and liberated future beyond religion that is ultimately modeled after the best interpretation of New York City’s teeming admixture of humanities.
But something is missing – not teeth, there’s plenty of teeth in just one of his terrifying djinni to suffice – and the spin on Goya’s Saturn was epic. But I mean … there is a comfortableness in Rushdie here that makes this work, ultimately, light. A fairy tale. And reading it as such, I loved it. But felt it doesn’t turn the corner on cultural critique. It resides where you expect it might, entertaining and at times thrilling anyone who appreciates flights of fancy.
I followed the success of this book with interest, remembering that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction in 1950 and The Color Purple by Alice Walker did in 1983, both works I respected, but that since, African-American writers have been absent as victors. It is impossible not to think of the farce of the Oscars and other cultural awards when 34 years go between the appearance of anyone black on a list such as this.
Here is a historical fiction on the implementation of pre-Civil War slavery at the peak of the slavers repression of the slaves – the era when a few men of conscience were freeing slaves and encouraging states to outlaw the practice. Running away was working.
It is thus set at the time when repression was at its most savage; when slaving whites were afraid of uprisings and cracked back with an orgy of violence to send the message of their superiority.
Whitehead has a crisp tone and a direct manner, writing in the third yet exhibiting effortless shift of vantage, moving between the runaway slaves Cora and Caesar and the tumbling, ever-pressing posse of those who would catch and sell or kill them – led by the relentless Mr. Ridgeway – as well as a cast of characters that surround and support or seek to destroy the railroad.
In Whitehead’s telling the railroad is real and mechanical and underground, belching and speeding through darkness shielded from the stars and thus to who-knows-where with intense purpose or driven by the hand of a wild-eyed refugee pumping a pushcart through the narrowing and darkening hole to the point of exhaustion to escape her pursuers.
The book is brutal because the era is brutal and the telling is matter-of-fact about events that are a stain upon our national character – eugenics experiments alongside the horrifying comfort of those who laughed and skipped and played as they lynched, raped, burnt to a crisp and whipped to death. It is all here laid bare, written without sentimentality. I understand the book took Whitehead a decade and a half to write and the work is apparent as the narrative careens forward, northward, zigs toward unknown locales, zags to known others.
In some ways Whitehead’s craft in this book reminds me of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. I am not sure how I mean that except to say writing on matters that are so difficult to describe for their savagery requires a deft hand, an honest heart and a razor-sharp mind.
This is fine work – a worthy National Book Award winner – and I agree with those who believe all Americans should read it.
A deaf woman’s perspective written by a hearing man, this post is about discovering a T.C. Boyle novel from 2005 I hadn’t read called Talk, Talk, one of the most amazing feats of fiction I’ve read in some time.
I’m a big fan of Boyle but can’t keep up with his production, which is fast and furious. (I still haven’t read his current novel, The Terranauts).
In Talk, Talk, Boyle uses both language of the hearing and of those without to describe with startling precision the perspective of his main characters, a deaf woman and her hearing boyfriend. It is a complex landscape of communication that includes layers of perspective – people watching them sign to each other or the subtle differences in their own use or avoidance of sign or spoken language.
Boyle’s precision in describing the complicated dialogues taking place between the characters amazed me. He seamlessly enters the realm of the non-spoken we all share, e-mails and texts, where there is no distinction between the hearing and those who cannot. In fact, he empowers his characters with a beautiful countering of language for language.
The novel is essentially a road novel in which the driving force is an act of identity theft in which the perpetrator is a serially irresponsible and hateful user of others and the victim the aforementioned main characters.
From the police station encounter at the opening to the final showdown between the thief and his victim, the narrative isn’t that complex. It travels a good distance – from coast to coast – but it isn’t about the road. Somehow the landscape of the mindsets of the characters becomes more interesting than the plot. Their way of rationalizing and communicating is fascinating and sends this tale tumbling and careening down the road.
Subtle modes of communicating are revealed by Boyle’s process of how we talk to one another in extreme circumstances. When the final showdown between the thief and the woman finally occurs, after so much suspenseful haranguing and violent confrontation it ends with a pretty simple gesture – a shove.
I found out T.C. Boyle is on Twitter @tcboyle and is really active and generous about chatting about his work. He wrote to me when I complimented him about the novel, that the novel was about language itself.
Boyle writes so much of such high quality, it seems almost effortless and I asked him how he manages to be so productive and yet active on Twitter and giving talks and being social, something I find very difficult and he replied pointedly that writing is the thing he does, every day. He is active at the process.
It was a great reminder from a guy who when asked what suggestions he had for a young writer just starting out once replied, ‘come from a wealthy family.’
In San Francisco, in the Mission District, between 1993 and ’95, I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood. He was then only recently translated into English and popular in San Francisco.
Those early novels were unpredictable, well crafted and defied genre. Murakami’s talking cats, imploding houses, slight shifts in perception of reality – and his cool characters’ natural acceptance of deep, scalar trips through levels of that reality – became a genre of their own.
His characters and prose paralleled in literature the malaise, disaffection, vapidity and bored waiting game of the end of the 20th century and then transcended it with fantastic departures from the world. The ride was like manga without the images or a purely textual Miyazaki Hayao animation epic just for single, young adults.
I first read A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami’s third novel, written in 1982, in San Francisco when I was 25. It remains my favorite. I remember feeling incredibly small in the face of the universe as his characters were pushed around.
I have a reverent fascination with Japan and a profound respect for her people. In my lifetime Japan was the most Americanized among all Asian countries, so growing up in the US, I was allowed slightly greater exposure to her writers.
Among Japanese novelists, I’d read Kawabata since I was a teenager, and in university covered Mishima and Akutagawa. I hadn’t yet read the post-war existentialists, when I picked up Murakami. Banana Yamamoto’s Kitchen was the hot new wave hitting California from the land of the rising sun.
Murakami was immediately different: pop synthesis of West and East through a contemporary urban Japanese socio-cultural lens.
Haruki Murakami began writing novels at the age of 29, in 1978, and has told Bomb Magazine, “Before that, I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all.”
Wiki states he had a sudden epiphany during a baseball game:
In 1978, Murakami was in Jingu Stadium watching a game between the Yakult Swallows and the Hiroshima Carp when Dave Hilton, an American, came to bat.
… in the instant that Hilton hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night. Murakami worked on Hear the Wind Sing for several months in very brief stretches after working days at the bar. He completed the novel and sent it to the only literary contest that would accept a work of that length, winning first prize.
Now I’m 45 and Murakami’s 65, so we both remember 1984, the year in which his newest novel, 1Q84, is partially set. We have also both lived through an era that has seen the realization of some of the socio-cultural horrors described in George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, which 1Q84 uses as a sort of launching point.
My loudest use of Orwell’s work was on the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks, in 2002, as a performance element of the art installation US=THEM, in Los Angeles, I read Orwell’s 1984 aloud in its entirety in a book store gallery, beginning at 5:35am (the time the first plane struck WTC2) and ending just as the sun set on the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. I printed slap tags that read 2002=1984 and stuck them everyplace.
I was excited to hear Murakami was using Orwell as a point of reference, and assumed the work would have socio-political overtones. I hoped 1Q84 would be more openly political and less personally intimate than the love stories he’d been writing. I consider Orwell to have been ahead of his time, so I was biased by the title’s obvious reference.
The particularly Asian coolness and practicality of Murakami’s characters in every day life is inspiring. But from the first, I felt his work was limited by the use of first-person narrative, usually with a narrator who seemed very much like himself: a middle-aged Japanese man living in Tokyo and underwhelmed by normal existence.
Murakami’s male narrators, all roughly his age, made the work light-weight. His contemporaries in late-20th century fiction writing in and translated into English: Garcia-Marquez, Eco, Kundera, Bowles, Ondaatje, Atwood, Boyle, Kureishi, DeLillo, Roth, Rushdie, Oates, Bolaño didn’t succumb to this basic approach.
As a writer, I’d come to the conclusion that my fiction suffered from my inability to write effectively in third person. I was biased by instructors and Modernism away from the trend toward first-person narratives written for the Me Generation. Murakami had no such bias, and neither, it turns out, did the publishing industry.
Murakami was young when he began and was thrust into the international limelight very quickly because of the accessibility of his work and his remarkable imagination. He was rewarded for making it easy to read. He was rewarded immense audiences for his references to Western pop, to “classical music” and to the boozy freedom of post-modern urbanity.
Haruki Murakami’s narrators’ exceptional breaks from the normative were what thrilled – these crazy trips into the unreal experienced coolly by his characters.
As a straight, booze-drinking, single, urbanite in my twenties (pre-metrosexuals) Murakami’s meals, drinks and one-night stands were a blast, in some cases a relief from the moralizing of political correctness.
I have sometimes felt targeted by novelists. Some just succeed in getting it. I wouldn’t discover Pepe Carvalho until a decade later, but Spanish readers will appreciate the comparison to Montalban. We used to joke about a drinking game in which you take a drink every time a Murakami character does. It gets harder to finish the book.
I only begrudgingly got into Murakami’s use of Western cultural tropes as described within an East Asian urban society, which Murakami was “first-to” in terms of crossover, and which he uses abundantly like a signature.
As an Indian living in the U.S. and Asia, who studied Ronald Takaki then, this was unappealing, I hated what post-post-modernism was becoming. But by the late ’90’s crosshatching Asia and the West had flooded the field. Murakami and Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino and Miyazaki Hayao made it cool. Sensible. At last, Asians outside London and New York were exhibiting what Hanif Kureishi knew, was called insouciant for writing.
It was inevitable at the dawn of the Internet and the globalizing 21st century. Haruki Murakami, the runner, from the longest US-occupied part of Asia, Japan; the novice writing in Japanese, first-person about being single, urban and sexually liberated was the first high-reaching Asian to just go ahead and run with it. Straight into the 21st Century.
I’m generalizing, but proposing Murakami was the best-seller who embodied the literary trend toward first-person narrative form and made it cool for Asian writing to love the West. Rushdie’s Ground Beneath Her Feet, must’ve been influenced in some small part by what Murakami was carving out.
Initially turned off by the brazen professing involved in it, I began to embrace Murakami’s careful choices of European orchestral music and western movies, TV shows and pop songs appropriated to both metaphorize, translate and drive narrative on multiple tiers. But creatively it always struck me as an easy way to force structure.
I was least impressed by Norwegian Wood. It struck me as a soap opera written for a specific audience of romantics. So after finishing it, I passed on a few of Murakami’s books and embarked on other, pretty heavy, post-war Japanese novels: Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human; Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes; and Saiichi Maruya’s contemporary classic, A Mature Woman.
I returned to Murakami in 2005 with the publication of Kafka on the Shore, which was my summer read while living on a Japanese shore, in Kamakura.
Again impressed by the proficiency with language, I liked the poetics and the magical, even spiritual, feel, but I remained disappointed by what struck me as basically a first-person, relationship story. Murakami was still pushing western tropes through to the title page and writing less political, getting more pop.
That’s my experience with Murakami’s work. I am not qualified to review 1Q84 as anything other than a reader of novels for 30 years. I do not pretend to understand him as a man, nor have I read much about him or his method, barring what’s been published in the New Yorker here and there.
In some small part this will also be a discussion of the state of the publishing industry in 2012 which has carefully produced ‘Murakami, the technically proficient, edgy yet non-threatening Asian romantic fantasist’ into an internationally best-selling novelist.
Though I’ve lived in Japan, I cannot read Japanese and so have experienced all the Japanese novelists only in translation to English.
1Q84 – translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel – was published by Knopf as a massive, 944-page, case-bound Borzoi, with a vellum slip cover designed by Chip Kidd that lightly masks close-ups of two Japanese faces, a female on the front and a male on the back, on October 25th of last year (2011) and sold for $30.
I found one in great condition for $18 earlier this summer at one of the used book stores I help stay in existence. I finished it last week.
The paperback and e-versions have been available for some time now and I began to wonder whether this form of publication is ever really being read, cover-to-cover. The thing is a doorstop, a bookcase brace, a coffee table weight, but reading it’s awkward, heavy and very hard to conceal.
Lugging this anvil around the past few weeks, I was stopped and asked about it many times in the street. One guy stopped pedaling his bike, going up a hill to stop me and ask, “Is that the new Murakami?’ Is it good?” Waiters, bartenders and waitresses at all my local coffeeshops, bars and restaurants asked and showed anticipatory excitement about this big, pretty thing.
I was sure the novel was being read … but figured the vast majority of that reading was happening in multiple parts as separate books in paperback, or in a digital format. I’ve never wanted an e-reader more than in these past few weeks lugging around 1Q84, with its slippery vellum cover.
Which brings us to the design by Chip Kidd and to why it was sitting pretty, marked down 30% at the used bookstore within eight months of publication.
“But Knopf, which published the title late last month, has not only turned the book into a bestseller, it’s also managed to reverse another trend: it has made the book more popular in print than in digital.
“According to numbers released by the publisher, the novel, which was at #2 on the Times bestseller list on November 13, has sold 75,000 copies in hardcover, and 25,000 in digital. Those impressive print sales are thanks, in large part, to an extravagant package that Knopf put together that has made the book the kind of object–beautiful and collectible–that readers want. And, more than likely, non-readers also want.”
The design is horrible.
The lettering of the title is put on two lines so that the 1Q is above the 84, rather than written like a year: 1Q84. The result is that everyone who knows nothing about the book thinks its title is I.Q. 84 – which is hilarious and sad.
The vellum cover and the bold, sans-serif font make it worse. It’s so done-already. The design completely fails to help make Murakami’s connection between 1984 and 1Q84. (oddly, so does Murakami within, so perhaps it’s a case of too-good design)
The faces on the cover aren’t the author but face-models, and the vellum Kidd asked for that’s received so much praise, serves to mask their Japanese-ness, while retaining the sexy – fashion! haute couture!
The endsheets and chapter title pages continue the idiocy of separating the numbers of the title out, making it more disassociated than ever from Orwell. These pages are all black and white photographic backdrops of twilight and of the moon, which plays a significant role in the book, but though highly-stylized, they’re cheaply produced and the graphic elements aren’t even like the descriptions by the author within, which are specific about the appearance of the moon. Design sensibility invades literature again.
ugh. It’s whorish and stupid and has received nothing but praise and exaltation for Knopf and Chip Kidd for 8 months.
“the kind of object–beautiful and collectible–that readers want. And, more than likely, non-readers also want.”
sigh.
In the late-’90’s when I was working as a low-wage proofreader, fact-checker, jacket-designer and researcher in the New York publishing industry while trying to get published myself, at nights and on the weekends I also worked to help found a non-profit artists book organization in Brooklyn.
It was bizarre: by day, I’d be using new digital tools to make mass-produced work flashier, more-designed, more image-oriented, less text-heavy, while at night and on the weekends I helped produce fine art books with traditional materials in limited edition.
The turn of the millennium in New York City brought the consolidation of publishing and birthed the end of the book as we know it. What happened with 1Q84 last year was that it was sold as a sculptural object to great success. They made it into something you could market at Xmas whether anyone read it or not.
But appreciating the work within is made more difficult by the immense distraction of these new marketing methods, which crowd the work with the gushing sycophancy of non-readers buying sculpture.
END PART ONE
and now,
a poll:
PART TWO: 1Q84, Murakami Tries Third Person
1Q84 is Murakami’s first novel in third person. It succeeds in reaching for high ground, but weaknesses are revealed by the more difficult form. Some of these may be solely a result of translation issues, but whatever made it happen, at points it’s unbearable.
1Q84 is overwritten. It could easily be two-thirds the length. There may be perhaps no single person or department to blame for this.
It could be issues of translation. Having two different translators may have contributed to the repetition of ideas as each attempted to infuse their read. Throughout the work slipshod word choices are not just used but repeated awkwardly.
I hated the choice of the word “jacket” rather than “sleeve” for record covers. It isn’t wrong but it just sounds clunky in repetition – and the term is repeated within a paragraph without replacement when “sleeve” or “cover” would work so much better. The translation seemed rushed and simple. I presume this added pages.
It could have been a bad editor at Knopf, unwilling or unable to realize that when you publish three books in the same series from another language into one book sometimes there will be an absurd number of repetitions of basic points because when the work was originally published, these points were repeated to bring in new readers at each stage of publication.
I haven’t read any other reviews of this book, but I gather from the PW clip that this was the NYT’s problem.
It could be the fault of Knopf, itself, which seems to have rushed to shove the book out the door fast for Xmas season of last year, using cheap, flashy design to create a book to be sold as a sculptural object. They didn’t care what was in it as much as what was on it, what it looked and felt like. It could easily have been rushed for sales and cheated of the requisite time and effort required for editing and translation.
These possibilities notwithstanding, the responsibility for quality of the work lies with the author and Murakami’s attempt at third person results in common problems for anyone embarking on the daunting task of writing a proper novel: you must get inside the characters to let them live, but you mustn’t show you are inside the characters for them to live.
One sophomoric method used to achieve this for several decades is italics to represent the thoughts and inner monologues of a character. If it absolutely has to be done, then this is the accepted practice. Oh, I’m getting pedantic!I hope they’ll understand what I mean, that you should be able to write your characters into what you’re trying to convey and not have to rely on italicized font to tell the reader something important, oh, maybe I’m just nitpicking. M.T., you’re such an oppressive rationalist.
But just like the flashback has become nauseatingly common to drive narrative in movies since Pulp Fiction, usage of italicized thoughts has become standard in novels in third-person in this, the era of the first-person narrrative. It’s a failure on the writer’s part, or at least a CYA move. If you have to do it as a writer, you make it count.
Not so in IQ84.
Murakami’s discomfort with form leads to an unending parade of italicized thoughts. No character goes mentally uninvaded. Like the first-person narrative before, Murakami is shaking off rules again in this attempt at third-person narrative. This could be considered bold, I suppose, but not by me.
What was bold was the whole new dimension added when Murakami decided to have these characters thinking in italics about quotes. These sections are actually italicized and bolded. I don’t mean once or twice at climactic moments, but throughout the entire novel; nearly every character.
Murakami has characters read a number of different texts aloud to each other. This is in and of itself bizarre because references to existing texts, like Chekov could have been made “off-the-page” rather than being read aloud between two characters.
The point of using the Chekov could have been made in action, or through literary tactics, leaving the text itself as a support floating in literary space. In some cases these non-fiction texts are literally the full repetition of historical data as bedtime stories, simply so they can be referred to in future chapters – clunky. It’s also demeaning to readers.
In the case of notes read aloud between and within the minds of characters, Murakami doesn’t even let the note exist as the exchange. The note is quoted by a character within his or her own thoughts! Murakami and the translators use bold text within the italicized thoughts to display the character working out the meaning in their own thoughts. It’s either genius beyond me or annoying filler because you can’t convey what you mean.
The repetitions continue, almost as though when ‘occupying’ one character or another, Murakami has forgotten that another character has made a point … and so he repeats that point. At first, I thought this was because the book, like works of Murakami’s in the past, was going to get fantastically multi-layered and these would echo. But that never happens. It’s just repetitive.
1Q84 is also a little predictable, despite it’s imaginative elements. I saw the intersection of the lead characters Tengo and Aomame coming long before it was clear they were intertwined. I wondered if Tengo was authoring Aomame into existence, so I could see clearly through to Murakami himself.
I lay all of this at the feet of the shift to the third-person narrative. It’s hard to do. That is why I think Murakami is at mid-career despite having written so many novels and achieving such success. Murakami strikes me as a hard-working perfectionist who will likely tackle third-person narrative form again rather than shy away from it after a first-rate attempt. I look forward to his progress, and as usual, will be among the millions reading his flights of fancy.
I enjoy Murakami’s precise, technical prose, like describing a meal or a piece of music. I admire what Murakami does well: creating translucent, shimmering waves of realities that both define and filter how his characters perceive of reality.
I enjoy his detailed descriptions of events of the past – like war and post-war conditions, laden with contemporary attitudes about those events. Certain simplicities like descriptions of the natural world, Murakami just nails – his cicadas take me to Japan in summer:
Haruki Murakami continues to display a brilliant imagination and wild ideas. He weaves his plot streams together beautifully. Though some of the unpredictability has gone as a result of our familiarity with his tactics, Murakami has invaded our consciousness with his genre.
Unfortunately 1Q84 as it stands is too long, in parts very repetitious, somewhat clunky, and as a result, boring. I give it a 3 out of 5.
In Conclusion: The NY Publishing Industry’s Horrible Now
As I write these words from my home in California, the Nobel Committee prepares to announce its highly political and socially-influenced choices and the New York publishing industry is preparing to launch any number of new 1Q84s to push forward their bottom lines in this year’s Xmas season – some new sculptural objects whose contents are mostly recycled scraps and cardboard, rather than goose down and gold. Orwellian indeed.
For people living in California and Asia and with concerns about the works from these places, these two events in Scandinavia and on the East Coast of the US have little bearing. They have proven themselves wholly out of touch. While here and in Japan we fight to author a new world.
We must bring ourselves up out of what post-post-modernism and its failed capitalist globalism has wrought.
Read, read, read. Think, think, think. Enough with the gushing sycophancy – the world is headed down a dark road by our ignorance and selfishness.
As readers, we must demand better product; better editors, translators and deciders of what gets put into our hands.
Seek out authors from independent publishers, read blogs, comment.
**8,500+ hits (as of Apr ’14) from around the world to this post, which was written when it first opened in theaters. Please do answer poll. Thanks**
The writer William Gibson recently tweeted (@GreatDismal) that he’s also noticed strong and divided opinions about Director Ridley Scott’s new science fiction spectacular, Prometheus, in theaters now.
Gibson tweeted on June 14th: “Split on Prometheus (which I haven’t seen) is vast and deep, with smart friends on both sides. In that situation, there’s often something going on with the dichotomy.”
Similar critique surrounded Scott’s Alien three dozen years ago and Bladerunner received the same treatment when it came out in 1982; the producers felt disrespected. On the DVD of the Director’s cut, with commentary, one of them snarls that Gandhi won the award for Best Costume Design over Bladerunner that year.
What if Ridley Scott’s worst crime is he’s a visionary unable to express ideally within the constraints of Hollywood’s demands and thus left us with a mess to interpret? Over the years in sci-fi we’ve considered far less quality product with far more attention.
Here’s excerpts of interviews with screenwriter Damon Lindelof and some actors from the film (not Ridley Scott, who is pretty closed-mouthed), that reveal a lot of this movie was edited out for the time constraints of Hollywood’s ‘Summer Blockbuster Marketing Mentality’.
This certainly has contributed to the confusion. Lindelof goes so far as to say that in Hollywood they just don’t want a movie to last more than two hours. The run-time is 2:03.
Frustrated fans have a right to be upset if this is true. A story takes time to tell. Marketers and groovy executives must be kept out of the calculation when it comes to run-time.
We’ll see if future extended versions and Director’s cuts of Prometheus flesh out the film. I propose we have to work harder to imagine the story wholly, but that it’s worth it.
To describe the story in Prometheus, Alien and Aliens taken together, I’ll use both my own writing and plot synopses written by others. [Prometheus from IMDB by WellardRockard; Alien by Colin Tinto].
Please respond to this poll of your thoughts on the film:
The “Other” Comments
Nine poll respondents used “other” to comment:
“both awesome and full of shortcomings,”
“Intense, positive for sure, but lacks full disclosure. Leave em wanting more?!”
“amazing brilliant movie.”
“Expecting more than a thinly disguised Alien remake.”
“Lot of plot holes and overall inconsistencies”
“Great. and visual!”
“I fell Asleep Watching it “
“flawed.”
“lacking information”
Explaining Prometheus
Ridley Scott is an avant-garde of the first two decades of multi-episode, scalar, sci-fi sagas.
I say Ridley Scott is avant-garde in the context of a continuum of sci-fi film-making that begins with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then, only after nearly a decade of Planet of the Apes (1968) sequels, moves on to Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and finally Bladerunner, The Thing and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg’s hand was what made the genre more popular until Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) come along and blow it up.
In Alien, his breakout, Ridley Scott established a unique and very specific blueprint: a slow build with the first half of the film to establish grand settings and an ensemble of characters within an immense context and then a hell ride for the second half of the film to its fantastic, terrorizing conclusion.
Perhaps Scott’s failing, if it can be called that, is avant-garde-ism coupled with a density of information that startles and cows some contemporary viewers, preventing appreciation of the work the first time through.
A second major problem seems to be an issue of control over editing. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof was meant to bring human dimension to Scott’s immense vision, but it sounds like much of the tempo and dialogue required to do this ended up on the cutting room floor.
It requires imagination to appreciate imagining of this scale and one has to have two things to enjoy the movie: a willingness to wholly go on the ride, and active interpretation of subtle motivations described in a limited fashion by the cut.
I’m definitely eager for the Director’s Cut, which I hope will be a vastly improved film.
(editorial note: the death of Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony, within weeks of the release of Prometheus, must have interrupted any post-release work)
The Grand Plot Begins on Earth Before the Dawn of Man
Human life on Earth began millennia ago because a being – perhaps twice human-size, capable of interstellar travel and to whom we refer hereafter as an Engineer – drank something toxic and died while visiting Earth, collapsing into a waterfall.
I gather this from the title sequence of Prometheus. This Engineer’s DNA co-mingled with the primordial soup to jump start evolution and ultimately to create us: smaller, weaker, less advanced versions of the Engineers. It is unclear whether this is a purposeful act, but the pain the Engineer endures in disintegrating implies not.
An oblong shape is seen above him in the sky – a ship? It appears to be getting smaller, leaving? I wondered whether he was being left here to commit suicide?
2089 A.D., Humans Discover the Engineers
A series of ancient cave paintings are found all over Earth, each depicting one of these oversized human figures (the Engineers) pointing upward to a constellation pattern. In the year 2089, archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discover this star map among ruins and archaeological sites of several otherwise unconnected ancient cultures.
Shaw and Holloway divine a location in space to associate with the star pattern. The two interpret this as an invitation from humanity’s forerunners – an interpretation which may or may not be one of many misreadings in the grand narrative.
Throughout his career, Ridley Scott has succeeded in imbuing contemporary human hubris onto our future behavior, making viewers unsure whether the actions and opinions of any of his characters, save Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien films, are sound.
The events of the film Prometheus take place between 2089 and 2094. Shaw and Holloway are hired to lead an expedition to the theorized location depicted in the cave drawings,a moon that orbits the immense ringed-planet LV-223. They achieve interstellar travel via cryogenic suspension with the crew of the ship USS Prometheus.
2093, the Prometheus plot
Peter Weyland, the elderly founder and CEO of the Weyland Corporation, funds the creation of the scientific deep space research vessel USS Prometheus to follow the cave painting maps to a distant moon orbiting the planet LV-223, many light years from Earth.
The ship’s crew travels in stasis at light speed while the android David stays awake, pilots the craft, studies ancient languages in order to translate for possible interactions with humanity’s makers, and monitors the passengers in cryo-sleep on their voyage, going so far as to read their dreams.
Note: One flaw is that if LV-223 is, as stated, many light years away and the Prometheus arrives in just over two years, the craft must have traveled faster than the speed of light to cross the distance in space between Earth and LV-223. This remains unexplained and mere cryo-stasis is not sufficient to explain it. It can only be a maximum of two light years away. (wormholes?)
The android David, the scientist Shaw and the CEO Weyland are direct parallels as characters to the androids Ash and Bishop; to Ripley; and to the Company in the Alien films. These tropes are significant on multiple levels because Scott makes use of the image we have of these characters. He constructs them to be knocked about so we can see a range of human experience – and in so doing, he acknowledges, subtly, sci-fi blockbusters of the past.
In David, one senses not only Ash and Bishop, but also the cold, insouciant, horrifying spirit of HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; in Shaw, the naive wonderment of Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway in Contact meets Ripley’s stubborn righteousness; and in Weyland, we’ve the aging hubris of Jurassic Park‘s Jon Hammond, played so deliciously by Richard Attenborough, and the billionaire boys’ club attitude, ever-forward pushing like Contact‘s S.R. Hadden, as played by Jon Hurt. There’s a movie sci-fi continuum.
Here, Weyland is portrayed by Guy Pierce as a cold, calculating, demanding CEO, the inventor (of David) and aging corporate raider obsessed with extending his own life above all other concerns.
In Prometheus, there’s continuity of feeling with Alien and Aliens, and nuanced shades of many science fiction films and characters of the recent past, but there remains a doomed feeling throughout that much of our human spirit is weak and flawed. Maybe that’s why people don’t like it.
The principle criticism I hear from fans so far, who like the work in general, is that the characters are not developed. Very few of the characters are given much depth, and it’s painfully obvious that the “Hollywood Summer Blockbuster” cut is brutal. One has to imagine a lot, and much if it isn’t good. That’s not easy and folks don’t like doing it.
That said, the relationship between Shaw and Holloway is the most explored. It’s revealed that she has faith in Christ and that he is an atheist. In making their discovery Holloway chides Shaw about her faith. She claims to be unfazed, a believer. This is what Weyland saw in her.
Holloway, her atheist colleague and lover is, for his part, unbothered, he loves her and would do anything to pursue her interests. Holloway’s faithless willingness to do anything leads to his doom.
In 2093, the ship arrives in the orbit around LV-223. This is not the same planet first seen in Alien (1979) and in Aliens (1986) as confirmed by Ridley Scott in an interview on Friday June 1st on BBC radio 5 live.
Alien is set on LV-426, or Acheron, while Prometheus is set on a moon of LV-223.
After being awakened from hibernation, the crew are informed of their mission to find the ancient aliens, the “Engineers”. They also view a holographic message from Weyland himself, which tells them that he, Weyland, has since died, but that he has funded the mission under the direction of the scientists.
The Weyland hologram introduces Shaw and Holloway to the others, and the two explain what they have discovered and their intention to respond to what they perceive of as an invitation from humanity’s creators.
The other scientists are agog at the scale of the mission and the geologist Fifield and biologist Milburn express real skepticism. Mission director Meredith Vickers orders all present to avoid any direct contact if the Engineers or any other aliens are found.
The Prometheus lands near an alien structure and a team including Shaw, Holloway, and David explores it, while Vickers and Captain Janek remain aboard the ship and monitor their progress.
Flying drone scanners are employed to zoom through the immense curved structure beaming red, analytical light across the interior surface and allowing 3d mapping to be simulated as a visual model back on Prometheus and the data to be shared among the scientists simultaneously – rad.
The explorers find breathable air within the alien structure, discover hundreds of vase-like artifacts and a monolithic statue of a humanoid head. Other bodies are later found, and the Engineers are presumed to be extinct.
Using his polyglothic array of ancient languages, David sorts out how to use the controls for projectors within the structure and makes visible 3-Dimensional video replays of the final moments of the Engineers.
The replays show the oversized human beings, the Engineers, running through the structure, and yield valuable archaeological perspective of the events that led to the death of one of them, who tripped and was decapitated by a fast closing doorway. When David rapidly interprets the commands etched in a wall beside where this occurred, and opens the door, they find the actual large humanoid head of the Engineer behind it.
A rapidly approaching storm forces the crew to return to the Prometheus. Shaw insists they take the Engineer’s head back to the ship with them and they barely make it back alive. A biologist and geologist, Milburn and Fifield are stranded in the structure after becoming lost trying to find the way out.
David, the android, meanwhile, returns to Prometheus with one of the vases, while back in the structure, apparently induced by the presence of the away team, dozens of the remaining vases begin leaking black, gooey liquid. Small worm-like creatures are seen writhing in the goo – there’s life here. Upon entry the vases were dry and clean. Something about the entry of these people here has begun what is occurring with the vases, which the scientists told David to avoid.
David secretly bringing the vase back is the first of three covert acts that make us question his motivations.
In the ship, Shaw and medic Ford analyze the Engineer’s head, bringing it to life with electrostatic shock. They find some kind of disease, illness or growth on the surface of the head, which comes to life and endures a lifelike pain and exacerbation of the skin growth, eventually rupturing, causing the head to explode. “Mortal, after all,” remarks the android David.
Taking a sample of the tissue, Shaw discovers that the DNA of the Engineer is identical to that of the human race, confirming our relationship to these predecessors.
Note: this DNA match makes no sense whatsoever – if it is an exact match then, they would be, essentially us, and since they are in fact different from us in size, it seems likely there would be some difference in genetic structure.
Meanwhile, revealing an unnamed covert purpose, David investigates the vase he has secretly brought aboard and discovers a vial containing a black liquid.
David removes a drop of the black, organic goo within and puts it on his finger. There’s a beautiful ECU of David’s finger – instead of prints he has the Weyland logo subtly carved into his fingertip.
Earlier in the film, during stasis, we see David standing over the cryochambers and realize that he is able to see into the dreams of the sleeping passengers. Now, we see him again standing over a passenger. It is unclear who is within the chamber, but someone on the mission has not yet been awakened. David is communicating with the person in stasis.
Vickers confronts David about this, asking, “What did he say?” To which David initially responds “He” wouldn’t want David to tell her, but pressed by Vickers physically, responds the message from “him” was “Try harder.”
While it’s unclear to whom they’re referring, the fact that it’s Weyland, Vickers employer, who created David, is inescapable. Vickers intimacy implies a deeper connection between her and to whomever David is communicating.
David’s android reasoning is revealed further by this conversation; caught by his Master’s need for secrecy, he cannot lie to Vickers and yet cannot tell her the whole truth. This is the first of David’s conundra that result in unusual behavior.
Two Possible Directives Explaining David’s Behavior
Weyland is directing David to act from within the cryochamber via both some kind of direct communication and David’s ability to read the dreams of the sleeping passengers.
There are two basic directives:
1. to find a living Engineer; take Weyland to the Engineer, and convey Weyland’s wishes for immortality.
2. David is also being told to explore the organic goo and the parasitic creatures found aboard the Engineer’s ship – for the purposes of Weyland’s corporate goals.
These two directives are being interpreted by a first-generation, one-of-a-kind synthetic human, who:
a. is instructed by its maker to both function covertly and serve the mission of the Prometheus.
b. is a prototype and predecessor by 29 years of the android Ash, who was also programmed to act covertly in Alien aboard the Nostromo (which the Company calls a malfunction), and by 81 years of the softer, safer version of synthetic person, Bishop in Aliens.
c. has spent two years interpreting the dreams and thoughts of Weyland, Shaw and the entire crew bound to meet their maker, all while studying human culture and ancient human culture.
Long before the Prometheus arrives at LV-223, questions of identity abound for David.
Upon opening the vase and taking a drop of the liquid for his own analysis, David realizes that to follow through on the second directive he must infect a passenger.
David’s scene with Holloway in the billiard room is an excellent example of an android reasoning out how to proceed with the problem of his orders being covert. He asks Holloway a series of leading questions meant to bring Holloway to implicit approval of David’s plan to infect him.
The dialogue ends with David saying,”Then it’s time for a drink” – only then does David infect Holloway by briefly tapping the tiny black drop of the gooey substance on his finger into a glass of champagne he has poured.
Android reasoning – David gets Holloway’s tacit approval for experimenting upon him. It is subtle but clearly by design and only after a series of statements and questions that David allows himself to deposit the drop in Holloway’s glass.
Holloway downs it,”Here’s mud in yer eye, pal.” It’s such a Deckard line – most of my friends think it cheesy, I love it.
David predates Ash by 29 years and Bishop by 81 years. He is also a unique, a one-off – the first, a prototype. There is little compassion in him, little emotion. His quirk of having a fascination for one single human movie – Lawrence of Arabia – is hyper-constructed and yet gives him so little sweetness. The android is calculating and emotionless in 2093.
Shaw and the infected Holloway have sex. It is revealed that Shaw is sterile. Holloway follows her blindly and experiments wildly alongside. He loves Shaw and takes her as she is, a believer, a Christian, unable to bear children. He truly loves her and would be led by her to the end of the universe, to this Godforsaken place.
Holloway later looks in a mirror and sees his eyes are changing – mud in his eye – first evidence that he has been poisoned with the black goo by David. He still does not know how he came to be infected.
Meanwhile, trapped back inside the structure by the storm, Fifield and Milburn meet and are attacked by snake-like creatures which invade their suits, their skin and their minds. The slithery tentacle-like snakes have a bulbous head of folded skin that unfolds to reveal a triangular head with gaping mouth and teeth.
Note: just as in Alien, the first appearance of the ‘monster’ isn’t until one hour and one minute into the film. Scott’s blueprint is intact.
The snakes penetrate first the suit and then the skin of Milburn, who is killed, and perhaps made a host for an embryo – the snake goes into his mouth. A corrosive fluid (yellow acid blood) from one of the creatures melts Fifield’s helmet, exposing him to the dark liquid leaking from the vases. The “acid for blood” immediately recalls to mind the facehugger in Alien.
The crew returns to the Engineer’s structure after the storm passes to find Milburn’s corpse and no sign of Fifield.
David, meanwhile, separates from the others and discovers an immense cargo hold filled with the goo-filled vases. Though he is connected digitally to the Prometheus and specifically to Vickers, David intentionally severs this connection, revealing for the second time a covert intent.
In another room David discovers a living Engineer in stasis and video replays that allow him to see a holographic star map of the universe. The map highlights Earth.
Then David discovers the bridge of what is obviously a spacecraft. We’ve seen this huge, C-shaped ship with a giant chair in it already. It’s the one occupied by the skeletal remains of an oversized humanoid pilot with its rib cage pushed out in Alien and Aliens.
David learns how to operate the craft from the videos of the extinct Engineers, and how to liberate the living Engineer from cryostasis. He does all of this alone, cut off from the Prometheus, adding to the aforementioned covert mystique.
This is a trillion-dollar, private, corporate expedition and there are unseen hands at play – the undead Peter Weyland is acting through the robot David. We come to realize that Weyland is in cryogenic stasis and that David has been communicating with him throughout. The agent behind David’s covert activity becomes more clear.
David can thus be seen as part of a progression in robot design over 81 years – from David to Ash in 29 years of development and from Ash to Bishop in 57 more years. But he is also the first, a unique, like HAL. Weyland’s crowning achievement in synthetic people, like HAL, is subject to philosophizing, wonderment, and devious, purposeful action in the pursuit of its directives.
Holloway’s infection rapidly ravages his body, and he is rushed back to the ship. Shaw doesn’t understand why he is sick and no one else is. As he visibly deteriorates, Vickers, holding a flamethrower and standing at the ramp to the Prometheus refuses to let Holloway aboard. Holloway is in immense pain and finally he steps forward demanding she kill him. Vickers immolates him at his request.
Shaw is shattered, and stunned because she does not know how her lover was exposed singularly. She doesn’t know David gave him the black goo in his champagne. She doesn’t understand what is happening. Her naivety takes its major slam in the face. This, of course, is very reminiscent of Ripley’s experience in the Alien films and it’s horrifying and emotional.
To make matters much worse, a medical scan reveals that Shaw, despite being sterile, is in an advanced state of pregnancy impregnated with an alien creature that in 10 hours has grown to the size of a basketball and is still growing, all as a result of having sex with Holloway who has been poisoned by David with the black goo. David – removed, eerie, in the revelatory moment says, “Well, Doctor Shaw, it’s hardly a traditional fetus,” then – HAL-like, Ash-like – attempts to subdue her.
One feels obvious parallels here: Weyland has instructed David to return Shaw to Earth in stasis as a container for the creature which he considers a biological weapon. It’s exactly what the Company, Ash and Burke hope to do with Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo and Ripley and Newt, in 30 and again 87 years in the future from these events.
But Shaw, like Ripley, escapes and uses an automated surgery pod to cut a cephalopod-like creature from her abdomen. It’s a female parallel to crewman Kane’s stomach-rip in Alien in some weird way.
The scene is epic: The robotic, automated surgery chamber, a gurney in a tube, uses spray-on anaesthetic, robotic hands and metal clamps to fold back Elizabeth’s belly skin. A small robotic crane enters her exposed gut and brings out the placenta-covered, squid-like creature which then emerges, alive, spraying pre-birth from within its amniotic sac all over her. The machine closes Shaw with a staple gun, while the tentacled squid-thing flops angrily above her, held tenuously by the robotic crane arm.
Note: The idea that a machine capable of conducting such COMPLEX, delicate operations on human beings would somehow not be designed for males and females is ridiculous.
Shaw escapes crawling out from under it and, stumbling around like a little girl who has had everything horrible revealed to her, discovers Peter Weyland alive, sitting calmly on a bed, being waited upon by his doting robot.
Shaw realizes Weyland has been alive the whole time in stasis aboard the ship. She finds him and the cold, bemused David – who considers her resilient for surviving the implantation of an alien within her – preparing to meet the Engineer.
David is an excellent predecessor to the androids Ash and Bishop of Alien and Aliens, colder, more calculated, less concerned about human beings than either. He dotes on his creator, who made him singularly and treats him like a son.
Weyland and David explain to Shaw that Weyland intends to ask the Engineer to help him avoid his impending death. The subtle devotion that David has for Weyland, the blind following, reveals much about his actions in the film thus far.
Outside the Prometheus, a mutated Fifield attacks the hangar bay and kills several crew members before being killed himself. Janek sees what is happening and theorizes that this moon is actually a facility where the Engineers designed weapons. He proposes it was a military base until they lost control of their biological weapon: the vases and the black fluid they contain.
Vickers attempts to stop Weyland from going through with his plan. She tells him he will be killed. Weyland is stoic even as, in departing, Vickers calls him father and the connections are all made clear. Weyland’s invented a son in David and abandoned his connection to his daughter. Vickers grew up hating the old man – something David takes to be normal in all humanity – “Doesn’t everybody hate their parents?” he asks Shaw.
Weyland, David, Shaw and Ford return to the structure to awaken the Engineer David discovered in cryogenic stasis. It becomes clear that the Engineer is occupying a space ship (the same design as the crashed alien space ship seen on LV-426 in Alien and Aliens). It’s a spaceship with a cargo hold filled with toxic chemical and biological weapons that can destroy whole worlds with parasitic aliens.
David shows Weyland, Shaw and Ford the bridge and cryo-chambers of the Engineer. He then wakes the Engineer from cryogenic sleep. This is the moment Weyland and Shaw have been waiting for: to meet our maker. But now, after all that has happened, each has very different requests.
The immense Engineer slowly comes to its wits from hypersleep and attempts to understand the small human beings before it. Shaw, realizing Janek is right, screams in English “Ask him what’s in his Cargo Hold?” Why is he taking it to Earth?” and then at the Engineer: “Why do you want to kill us? What have we done?”
Before the Engineer can respond, the selfish and decrepit Weyland has Shaw silenced to put forth his android, his son – the perfect specimen of human likeness, capable of speaking in multiple languages, indeed having translated those of the Engineer to learn the controls of the craft and its devices – to explain his purpose.
The Engineer responds by decapitating David and killing Weyland and Ford. Shaw escapes the alien ship as it is activated for launch by the Engineer. Weyland dies, pathetic, broken. Vickers, observing from aboard the Prometheus, and hearing the flatline confirming the death of her father Weyland, orders Janek to return to Earth.
The still-active David lies disembodied on the floor of the Engineer’s craft, but maintains contact with Shaw and now begins to tell what he knows. The craft begins to initiate take-off and Shaw is hurled from within the ship and crawls and runs across crevasses created by the launching of the immense craft.
It’s a scene that mimics the headless Ash being brought back to tell the crew of the Nostromo what is actually happening to them in Alien. David’s severed body and still-conversant head are similar to the final state of the android Bishop of Aliens as well, who ends divided yet able to cling to the floor of the Sulaco and grab Newt to save her from being thrown out the airlock. It’s as if the fate of all Scott’s androids is a milky decapitation.
David reveals to Shaw that the Engineer is starting up the ship and is intending to release the vases of black goo on Earth. She hears David and tries to warn Vickers and Janek that the ship is headed to Earth with the intention of killing off humanity.
Vickers, aboard the Prometheus, orders Janek to return to Earth, but this is the Captain’s shining moment. Janek, in a brief exchange with Shaw, assesses the threat to humanity if they allow the Engineer’s ship to leave. He defies Vickers and tells her to abandon ship if she doesn’t want to die. While Vickers flees in an escape pod, Janek and his crew, straight-forward, no-nonsense and generally non-involved in the mission throughout, save humanity by crashing the Prometheus into the Engineer’s ship as it attempts to take off.
The disabled ship of the Engineer crashes onto the planet, falling onto Vickers, crushing her. The ship continues to tumble and nearly crushes Shaw, but she escapes.
Shaw goes to the escape pod to get oxygen and retrieve supplies and finds her alien offspring has grown to gigantic size. The Engineer survives the crash, enters the escape pod and attacks Shaw, who releases the tentacled creature. It subdues the Engineer by thrusting a tentacle down its throat. When the Engineer falls with the immense tentacled creature atop him, the creature looks very much like the “facehuggers” in the Alien films.
David, still functioning and decapitated, lying on the floor of the bridge of the downed spacecraft, communicates with Elizabeth Shaw who lies, crying on the moon’s rocky desolate surface. David says he would like her help, that if she can collect him and carry him, he could help here to leave this place because there are other crafts like this one on the moon.
Shaw recovers David’s remains from the alien ship, and asks if he can operate the craft. He responds that he can fly them back to Earth.
Shaw asks if he can fly them to the place of origin of the Engineers and he says that he can. Together they activate another Engineer ship. Shaw and the remains of android David then take off to travel to the Engineers’ homeworld in an attempt to understand why they created humanity and why they attempted to destroy it.
In the final shot, back in the Prometheus escape pod, the immense tentacled facehugger has died (just like the facehuggers do after implanting the embryos in Alien) and the Engineer’s body begins to convulse. From within his chest emerges an alien (very similar but not the same as seen in later movies) The creature bursts out of the dying Engineer’s chest and we see the mouth within a mouth and familiar head structure and body shape of the “chestburster” xenomorphs in Alien.
2122, the Alien plot – 29 Years After Events of Prometheus
The events of Alien (1979) take place June 3rd to 6th in the year 2122 A.D.
USCSS Nostromo encounters what is assumed to be a distress signal emanating from the planetoid designated LV-426, in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert investigate a derelict spacecraft that contains the fossilised remains of an unknown alien species, and thousands of Xenomorph eggs. One of the xenomorph spore (‘facehugger’) attaches itself to Kane’s face and plants an embryo in his throat, which then hatches, killing the host. The hatchling (‘chestburster’) grows to over 7 feet tall and kills Dallas and Engineer’s Mate Brett.
Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that Weyland-Yutani want the Alien specimen and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable. It is revealed Science Officer Ash is in fact a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android, who has been protecting the Alien.
Chief Engineer Parker renders Ash inoperative when Ash attacks Ripley. Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien whilst evacuating the Nostromo. Ripley rigs the ship to self-destruct and escapes on the shuttlecraft Narcissus with the ship’s cat Mr Jones. The Alien also escapes on the shuttle, but Ripley manages to blow it out of the airlock, effectively killing it.
Plot Summary of Alien (1979)
(scenes in red are only in the Special Edition)
Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Warrant Officer Ripley, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, Chief Engineer Parker, and Engineering Technician Brett. When the story opens, the Nostromo is heading back to Earth.
A computer the crew calls “Mother” monitors the ship’s operations. Mother intercepts a strange signal from a nearby planetoid and wakens the crew. The crew believe at first that they’ve arrived at Earth, however, they quickly determine that they’re charged with investigating the strange signal, which is assumed to an SOS. Before they prepare the “tug” craft to land on the planet, crew members Brett and Parker argue that they’re not a rescue team and that they should be compensated for the extra work. Ash tells them that there is a portion of their working contract that states the crew must investigate any occurrences such as this one.
The tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the planet (with the ore and mining facilities left in orbit); the landing is rough, causing repairable damage that will take some time to fix. Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal, walking through the planetoid’s inhabitable atmosphere. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin, losing contact with the Nostromo upon entering the massive ship. Inside they find the remains of an enormous alien creature in the pilot chair, now fossilized. There is a hole in its ribcage, indicating that something burst out from inside its chest. Meanwhile, Ripley’s analysis of the unidentified transmission reveals that it is not an SOS, but a warning. Ripley wants to go after the search party but Ash talks her out of it.
Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot’s chair, discovering thousands of leathery objects that resemble large eggs. He also discovers a strange mist covering the eggs that reacts when broken. Moving in to investigate further, Kane illuminates one of the eggs from behind with a flashlight & discovers movement inside; a strange, spider-like organism is the resident. The egg opens, and as Kane moves into for a better look, the strange life form inside leaps out, dissolves the visor of Kane’s spacesuit, and attaches itself to his face.
Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley, who is the commanding officer in the absence of Dallas and Kane, refuses to let them back on board, citing quarantine protocol. However, Ash disregards Ripley’s decision and lets them in.
In the infirmary Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane’s face, but they discover they cannot because it will tear Kane’s skin off. Kane is examined with sophisticated equipment which shows that the creature has inserted a tube into his throat and is feeding Kane oxygen despite his comatose state. Dallas makes the decision to remove the creature from Kane’s face, no matter the consequences.
When Ash tries to cut off one of its legs, a yellowish fluid pours out and begins to eat through the floor. Dallas is concerned that the acidic fluid will breach the hull, but it stops it’s corrosive effects. Dallas says the substance resembles molecular acid, and Brett comments the creature must be using it for blood. ‘Wonderful defense mechanism – you don’t dare kill it’, Parker growls. Kane is left in his coma and is tended to by Ash.
Ripley later confronts Ash about his defiance of her orders and allowing the alien organism onto their ship, which put all of their lives at risk. She distrusts him, as well as his seeming inability to give them any useful information about the creature. The damage to the tug is repaired by Brett and Parker, and the crew takes off and docks with the refinery & cargo in orbit. The Nostromo then resumes its course for Earth.
Eventually, the creature detaches from Kane’s face on its own and the crew find it dead. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed, and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal, Kane begins to choke and convulse. While he lies on the table & the crew try to aid him, a new alien creature bursts from his chest. Parker moves in to kill it with a knife, and is stopped by Ash. The creature then scurries away, leaving the crew stunned and horrified.
After a short funeral for Kane, the crew members split up into two teams to capture the small creature. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew’s cat, Jones.
Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett to catch Jones. As he searches for Jones, Brett finds a mysterious object that appears to be skin on the floor. He continues on, eventually catching up to Jones in a huge room. As he tries to coax Jones out, the cat hisses as a huge shape drops down behind the engineer. It is the alien, now fully grown and enormous, and it attacks him, dragging him, bloodied and screaming, into an air shaft. In the 2003 re-release of the film, Ripley and Parker hear him and arrive in time to catch a glimpse of the monster as Brett disappears.
The crew debate their next move. Ripley again questions Ash and his inability to give them helpful information. They all agree that the alien is using the air shafts to move around, so Dallas enters the network of air shafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien’s signal, but the signal vanishes, leaving Dallas unsure of the creature’s location. He finds the alien’s slime on the tunnel floor. Dallas is disoriented in the cramped space and starts to panic when the signal returns, indicating it is heading directly for him. In his attempt to escape, he runs right into the creature. The remaining crew members find only his flamethrower left behind.
Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that “the company” (unnamed in this film, but identified in the sequels as “Weyland-Yutani”) had recognized the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien creatures brought back for study, considering the crew expendable. This information is related in just four screen shots of text from Mother – an excellent scene.
Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Company’s “Special Order”, but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can kill her. Parker dislodges Ash’s head with a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash is an android. With Ash disabled, Ripley and the others reconnect his disembodied head to see if he can give them any advice on how to deal with the creature. Ash tells them they have no chance against it, as it is “the perfect organism”.
Ripley decides to follow Lambert’s earlier suggestion; set the Nostromo to self-destruct & escape in the shuttle, leaving the Alien to die on the Nostromo. As they leave the room, Parker turns the flamethrower on Ash’s corpse to ensure he will not be re-activated and come after them. While Ripley preps the shuttle for launch, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle’s life-support system.
On the ship’s open intercom system, Ripley hears the cat and realizes Jones has been left behind. Alone, she goes out into the hallways of the Nostromo to find him. Expecting the alien at every turn, Ripley finally locates the cat and puts him into his traveling container. She then hears the sounds of the alien attacking Parker and Lambert in another part of the ship, and Parker shouting orders to Lambert to get out of the way. The alien corners Lambert against a wall, but Parker is unable to get a clear shot at it with the flamethrower without killing Lambert. Finally he charges at the creature, but it spins on him and kills him with its bizarre inner jaws. It then turns back to Lambert and Ripley hears the sounds of it killing her as she rushes to try and save her friends. Ripley finds the bodies of Parker & Lambert in the storage room they had been working in, and then races back towards the bridge.
In another restored scene, Ripley finds Dallas in a storage chamber. He has been cocooned by the alien in an unidentifiable substance (the creature’s secretions) and very weakly begs Ripley to kill him. Ripley also sees Brett, already dead, whom appears to be transforming into another of the species’ eggs. Ripley burns them both with the flamethrower and rushes out of the chamber.
Ripley realizes she is now alone on board the Nostromo with the alien. She activates the ship’s self-destruct and races to the shuttle with Jones’ cat carrier. As she rounds the bend to the shuttle entrance, the alien suddenly leaps up, blocking her path. Ripley drops the cat carrier and backs up, racing back to abort the self-destruct function. Arriving at the bridge, she restarts the cooling unit, but ‘Mother’ states that it is too late to stop the countdown and the Nostromo will explode in 5 minutes.
Ripley returns to the shuttle loading area, ready to make her best attempt to fight off the alien and get to the lifeboat. The alien is nowhere to be seen, so Ripley and Jones board the shuttle with 1 minute to abandon ship. Quickly running through the launch sequence, the shuttle lowers to launch position as ‘Mother’ starts counting down the last 30 seconds of the Nostromo‘s life. The shuttle’s engines ignite and the ship races away from the Nostromo, which grows smaller by the second. A series of mighty explosions follow as the Nostromo vanishes in fire, destroying the refinery and ore it had been carrying – and apparently destroying the alien.
As Ripley prepares for hypersleep, a hand reaches out to her from a wall; the alien had in fact stowed away aboard the shuttle, its external physicality making it blend in with the ship’s machinery. She retreats to a locker with a pressure suit inside, and gets an idea. Ripley dons the spacesuit & arms herself with a gun & grappling hook, then straps herself into a chair. Opening a series of air vents above the alien’s head, Ripley tests them one at a time, and then finds one that directly blasts high-pressure steam onto the alien, driving it from its hiding spot. As the monster stands to its full, menacing 2-meter height, ready to attack with its piston-like inner throat & teeth, she opens the shuttle’s airlock, blasting the creature into space with the grappling gun. The door slams shut, trapping the alien outside.
Undaunted, the alien attempts to re-enter the ship by climbing inside one of the heat thrusters. Ripley sees the opportunity and fires the engines, incinerating the alien. Before she and Jones enter hypersleep for the trip home, Ripley records a log entry stating that she’s the last survivor of the Nostromo.
2179, the Aliens plot, 57 Years Later
The events of Aliens (1986) take place 57 years after the events of Alien (1979) in the years 2179 – 2182 and again on the planet LV-426.
**8,500+ hits (as of Apr ’14) from around the world to this post, which was written when it first opened in theaters. Please do answer poll. Thanks**
The writer William Gibson recently tweeted (@GreatDismal) that he’s also noticed strong and divided opinions about Director Ridley Scott’s new science fiction spectacular, Prometheus, in theaters now.
Gibson tweeted on June 14th: “Split on Prometheus (which I haven’t seen) is vast and deep, with smart friends on both sides. In that situation, there’s often something going on with the dichotomy.”
Similar critique surrounded Scott’s Alien three dozen years ago and Bladerunner received the same treatment when it came out in 1982; the producers felt disrespected. On the DVD of the Director’s cut, with commentary, one of them snarls that Gandhi won the award for Best Costume Design over Bladerunner that year.
What if Ridley Scott’s worst crime is he’s a visionary unable to express ideally within the constraints of Hollywood’s demands and thus left us with a mess to interpret? Over the years in sci-fi we’ve considered far less quality product with far more attention.
Here’s excerpts of interviews with screenwriter Damon Lindelof and some actors from the film (not Ridley Scott, who is pretty closed-mouthed), that reveal a lot of this movie was edited out for the time constraints of Hollywood’s ‘Summer Blockbuster Marketing Mentality’.
This certainly has contributed to the confusion. Lindelof goes so far as to say that in Hollywood they just don’t want a movie to last more than two hours. The run-time is 2:03.
Frustrated fans have a right to be upset if this is true. A story takes time to tell. Marketers and groovy executives must be kept out of the calculation when it comes to run-time.
We’ll see if future extended versions and Director’s cuts of Prometheus flesh out the film. I propose we have to work harder to imagine the story wholly, but that it’s worth it.
To describe the story in Prometheus, Alien and Aliens taken together, I’ll use both my own writing and plot synopses written by others. [Prometheus from IMDB by WellardRockard; Alien by Colin Tinto].
Please respond to this poll of your thoughts on the film:
The “Other” Comments
Nine poll respondents used “other” to comment:
“both awesome and full of shortcomings,”
“Intense, positive for sure, but lacks full disclosure. Leave em wanting more?!”
“amazing brilliant movie.”
“Expecting more than a thinly disguised Alien remake.”
“Lot of plot holes and overall inconsistencies”
“Great. and visual!”
“I fell Asleep Watching it “
“flawed.”
“lacking information”
Explaining Prometheus
Ridley Scott is an avant-garde of the first two decades of multi-episode, scalar, sci-fi sagas.
I say Ridley Scott is avant-garde in the context of a continuum of sci-fi film-making that begins with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then, only after nearly a decade of Planet of the Apes (1968) sequels, moves on to Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and finally Bladerunner, The Thing and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Spielberg’s hand was what made the genre more popular until Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) come along and blow it up.
In Alien, his breakout, Ridley Scott established a unique and very specific blueprint: a slow build with the first half of the film to establish grand settings and an ensemble of characters within an immense context and then a hell ride for the second half of the film to its fantastic, terrorizing conclusion.
Perhaps Scott’s failing, if it can be called that, is avant-garde-ism coupled with a density of information that startles and cows some contemporary viewers, preventing appreciation of the work the first time through.
A second major problem seems to be an issue of control over editing. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof was meant to bring human dimension to Scott’s immense vision, but it sounds like much of the tempo and dialogue required to do this ended up on the cutting room floor.
It requires imagination to appreciate imagining of this scale and one has to have two things to enjoy the movie: a willingness to wholly go on the ride, and active interpretation of subtle motivations described in a limited fashion by the cut.
I’m definitely eager for the Director’s Cut, which I hope will be a vastly improved film.
(editorial note: the death of Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony, within weeks of the release of Prometheus, must have interrupted any post-release work)
The Grand Plot Begins on Earth Before the Dawn of Man
Human life on Earth began millennia ago because a being – perhaps twice human-size, capable of interstellar travel and to whom we refer hereafter as an Engineer – drank something toxic and died while visiting Earth, collapsing into a waterfall.
I gather this from the title sequence of Prometheus. This Engineer’s DNA co-mingled with the primordial soup to jump start evolution and ultimately to create us: smaller, weaker, less advanced versions of the Engineers. It is unclear whether this is a purposeful act, but the pain the Engineer endures in disintegrating implies not.
An oblong shape is seen above him in the sky – a ship? It appears to be getting smaller, leaving? I wondered whether he was being left here to commit suicide?
2089 A.D., Humans Discover the Engineers
A series of ancient cave paintings are found all over Earth, each depicting one of these oversized human figures (the Engineers) pointing upward to a constellation pattern. In the year 2089, archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discover this star map among ruins and archaeological sites of several otherwise unconnected ancient cultures.
Shaw and Holloway divine a location in space to associate with the star pattern. The two interpret this as an invitation from humanity’s forerunners – an interpretation which may or may not be one of many misreadings in the grand narrative.
Throughout his career, Ridley Scott has succeeded in imbuing contemporary human hubris onto our future behavior, making viewers unsure whether the actions and opinions of any of his characters, save Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien films, are sound.
The events of the film Prometheus take place between 2089 and 2094. Shaw and Holloway are hired to lead an expedition to the theorized location depicted in the cave drawings,a moon that orbits the immense ringed-planet LV-223. They achieve interstellar travel via cryogenic suspension with the crew of the ship USS Prometheus.
2093, the Prometheus plot
Peter Weyland, the elderly founder and CEO of the Weyland Corporation, funds the creation of the scientific deep space research vessel USS Prometheus to follow the cave painting maps to a distant moon orbiting the planet LV-223, many light years from Earth.
The ship’s crew travels in stasis at light speed while the android David stays awake, pilots the craft, studies ancient languages in order to translate for possible interactions with humanity’s makers, and monitors the passengers in cryo-sleep on their voyage, going so far as to read their dreams.
Note: One flaw is that if LV-223 is, as stated, many light years away and the Prometheus arrives in just over two years, the craft must have traveled faster than the speed of light to cross the distance in space between Earth and LV-223. This remains unexplained and mere cryo-stasis is not sufficient to explain it. It can only be a maximum of two light years away. (wormholes?)
The android David, the scientist Shaw and the CEO Weyland are direct parallels as characters to the androids Ash and Bishop; to Ripley; and to the Company in the Alien films. These tropes are significant on multiple levels because Scott makes use of the image we have of these characters. He constructs them to be knocked about so we can see a range of human experience – and in so doing, he acknowledges, subtly, sci-fi blockbusters of the past.
In David, one senses not only Ash and Bishop, but also the cold, insouciant, horrifying spirit of HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; in Shaw, the naive wonderment of Jodie Foster’s Ellie Arroway in Contact meets Ripley’s stubborn righteousness; and in Weyland, we’ve the aging hubris of Jurassic Park‘s Jon Hammond, played so deliciously by Richard Attenborough, and the billionaire boys’ club attitude, ever-forward pushing like Contact‘s S.R. Hadden, as played by Jon Hurt. There’s a movie sci-fi continuum.
Here, Weyland is portrayed by Guy Pierce as a cold, calculating, demanding CEO, the inventor (of David) and aging corporate raider obsessed with extending his own life above all other concerns.
In Prometheus, there’s continuity of feeling with Alien and Aliens, and nuanced shades of many science fiction films and characters of the recent past, but there remains a doomed feeling throughout that much of our human spirit is weak and flawed. Maybe that’s why people don’t like it.
The principle criticism I hear from fans so far, who like the work in general, is that the characters are not developed. Very few of the characters are given much depth, and it’s painfully obvious that the “Hollywood Summer Blockbuster” cut is brutal. One has to imagine a lot, and much if it isn’t good. That’s not easy and folks don’t like doing it.
That said, the relationship between Shaw and Holloway is the most explored. It’s revealed that she has faith in Christ and that he is an atheist. In making their discovery Holloway chides Shaw about her faith. She claims to be unfazed, a believer. This is what Weyland saw in her.
Holloway, her atheist colleague and lover is, for his part, unbothered, he loves her and would do anything to pursue her interests. Holloway’s faithless willingness to do anything leads to his doom.
In 2093, the ship arrives in the orbit around LV-223. This is not the same planet first seen in Alien (1979) and in Aliens (1986) as confirmed by Ridley Scott in an interview on Friday June 1st on BBC radio 5 live.
Alien is set on LV-426, or Acheron, while Prometheus is set on a moon of LV-223.
After being awakened from hibernation, the crew are informed of their mission to find the ancient aliens, the “Engineers”. They also view a holographic message from Weyland himself, which tells them that he, Weyland, has since died, but that he has funded the mission under the direction of the scientists.
The Weyland hologram introduces Shaw and Holloway to the others, and the two explain what they have discovered and their intention to respond to what they perceive of as an invitation from humanity’s creators.
The other scientists are agog at the scale of the mission and the geologist Fifield and biologist Milburn express real skepticism. Mission director Meredith Vickers orders all present to avoid any direct contact if the Engineers or any other aliens are found.
The Prometheus lands near an alien structure and a team including Shaw, Holloway, and David explores it, while Vickers and Captain Janek remain aboard the ship and monitor their progress.
Flying drone scanners are employed to zoom through the immense curved structure beaming red, analytical light across the interior surface and allowing 3d mapping to be simulated as a visual model back on Prometheus and the data to be shared among the scientists simultaneously – rad.
The explorers find breathable air within the alien structure, discover hundreds of vase-like artifacts and a monolithic statue of a humanoid head. Other bodies are later found, and the Engineers are presumed to be extinct.
Using his polyglothic array of ancient languages, David sorts out how to use the controls for projectors within the structure and makes visible 3-Dimensional video replays of the final moments of the Engineers.
The replays show the oversized human beings, the Engineers, running through the structure, and yield valuable archaeological perspective of the events that led to the death of one of them, who tripped and was decapitated by a fast closing doorway. When David rapidly interprets the commands etched in a wall beside where this occurred, and opens the door, they find the actual large humanoid head of the Engineer behind it.
A rapidly approaching storm forces the crew to return to the Prometheus. Shaw insists they take the Engineer’s head back to the ship with them and they barely make it back alive. A biologist and geologist, Milburn and Fifield are stranded in the structure after becoming lost trying to find the way out.
David, the android, meanwhile, returns to Prometheus with one of the vases, while back in the structure, apparently induced by the presence of the away team, dozens of the remaining vases begin leaking black, gooey liquid. Small worm-like creatures are seen writhing in the goo – there’s life here. Upon entry the vases were dry and clean. Something about the entry of these people here has begun what is occurring with the vases, which the scientists told David to avoid.
David secretly bringing the vase back is the first of three covert acts that make us question his motivations.
In the ship, Shaw and medic Ford analyze the Engineer’s head, bringing it to life with electrostatic shock. They find some kind of disease, illness or growth on the surface of the head, which comes to life and endures a lifelike pain and exacerbation of the skin growth, eventually rupturing, causing the head to explode. “Mortal, after all,” remarks the android David.
Taking a sample of the tissue, Shaw discovers that the DNA of the Engineer is identical to that of the human race, confirming our relationship to these predecessors.
Note: this DNA match makes no sense whatsoever – if it is an exact match then, they would be, essentially us, and since they are in fact different from us in size, it seems likely there would be some difference in genetic structure.
Meanwhile, revealing an unnamed covert purpose, David investigates the vase he has secretly brought aboard and discovers a vial containing a black liquid.
David removes a drop of the black, organic goo within and puts it on his finger. There’s a beautiful ECU of David’s finger – instead of prints he has the Weyland logo subtly carved into his fingertip.
Earlier in the film, during stasis, we see David standing over the cryochambers and realize that he is able to see into the dreams of the sleeping passengers. Now, we see him again standing over a passenger. It is unclear who is within the chamber, but someone on the mission has not yet been awakened. David is communicating with the person in stasis.
Vickers confronts David about this, asking, “What did he say?” To which David initially responds “He” wouldn’t want David to tell her, but pressed by Vickers physically, responds the message from “him” was “Try harder.”
While it’s unclear to whom they’re referring, the fact that it’s Weyland, Vickers employer, who created David, is inescapable. Vickers intimacy implies a deeper connection between her and to whomever David is communicating.
David’s android reasoning is revealed further by this conversation; caught by his Master’s need for secrecy, he cannot lie to Vickers and yet cannot tell her the whole truth. This is the first of David’s conundra that result in unusual behavior.
Two Possible Directives Explaining David’s Behavior
Weyland is directing David to act from within the cryochamber via both some kind of direct communication and David’s ability to read the dreams of the sleeping passengers.
There are two basic directives:
1. to find a living Engineer; take Weyland to the Engineer, and convey Weyland’s wishes for immortality.
2. David is also being told to explore the organic goo and the parasitic creatures found aboard the Engineer’s ship – for the purposes of Weyland’s corporate goals.
These two directives are being interpreted by a first-generation, one-of-a-kind synthetic human, who:
a. is instructed by its maker to both function covertly and serve the mission of the Prometheus.
b. is a prototype and predecessor by 29 years of the android Ash, who was also programmed to act covertly in Alien aboard the Nostromo (which the Company calls a malfunction), and by 81 years of the softer, safer version of synthetic person, Bishop in Aliens.
c. has spent two years interpreting the dreams and thoughts of Weyland, Shaw and the entire crew bound to meet their maker, all while studying human culture and ancient human culture.
Long before the Prometheus arrives at LV-223, questions of identity abound for David.
Upon opening the vase and taking a drop of the liquid for his own analysis, David realizes that to follow through on the second directive he must infect a passenger.
David’s scene with Holloway in the billiard room is an excellent example of an android reasoning out how to proceed with the problem of his orders being covert. He asks Holloway a series of leading questions meant to bring Holloway to implicit approval of David’s plan to infect him.
The dialogue ends with David saying,”Then it’s time for a drink” – only then does David infect Holloway by briefly tapping the tiny black drop of the gooey substance on his finger into a glass of champagne he has poured.
Android reasoning – David gets Holloway’s tacit approval for experimenting upon him. It is subtle but clearly by design and only after a series of statements and questions that David allows himself to deposit the drop in Holloway’s glass.
Holloway downs it,”Here’s mud in yer eye, pal.” It’s such a Deckard line – most of my friends think it cheesy, I love it.
David predates Ash by 29 years and Bishop by 81 years. He is also a unique, a one-off – the first, a prototype. There is little compassion in him, little emotion. His quirk of having a fascination for one single human movie – Lawrence of Arabia – is hyper-constructed and yet gives him so little sweetness. The android is calculating and emotionless in 2093.
Shaw and the infected Holloway have sex. It is revealed that Shaw is sterile. Holloway follows her blindly and experiments wildly alongside. He loves Shaw and takes her as she is, a believer, a Christian, unable to bear children. He truly loves her and would be led by her to the end of the universe, to this Godforsaken place.
Holloway later looks in a mirror and sees his eyes are changing – mud in his eye – first evidence that he has been poisoned with the black goo by David. He still does not know how he came to be infected.
Meanwhile, trapped back inside the structure by the storm, Fifield and Milburn meet and are attacked by snake-like creatures which invade their suits, their skin and their minds. The slithery tentacle-like snakes have a bulbous head of folded skin that unfolds to reveal a triangular head with gaping mouth and teeth.
Note: just as in Alien, the first appearance of the ‘monster’ isn’t until one hour and one minute into the film. Scott’s blueprint is intact.
The snakes penetrate first the suit and then the skin of Milburn, who is killed, and perhaps made a host for an embryo – the snake goes into his mouth. A corrosive fluid (yellow acid blood) from one of the creatures melts Fifield’s helmet, exposing him to the dark liquid leaking from the vases. The “acid for blood” immediately recalls to mind the facehugger in Alien.
The crew returns to the Engineer’s structure after the storm passes to find Milburn’s corpse and no sign of Fifield.
David, meanwhile, separates from the others and discovers an immense cargo hold filled with the goo-filled vases. Though he is connected digitally to the Prometheus and specifically to Vickers, David intentionally severs this connection, revealing for the second time a covert intent.
In another room David discovers a living Engineer in stasis and video replays that allow him to see a holographic star map of the universe. The map highlights Earth.
Then David discovers the bridge of what is obviously a spacecraft. We’ve seen this huge, C-shaped ship with a giant chair in it already. It’s the one occupied by the skeletal remains of an oversized humanoid pilot with its rib cage pushed out in Alien and Aliens.
David learns how to operate the craft from the videos of the extinct Engineers, and how to liberate the living Engineer from cryostasis. He does all of this alone, cut off from the Prometheus, adding to the aforementioned covert mystique.
This is a trillion-dollar, private, corporate expedition and there are unseen hands at play – the undead Peter Weyland is acting through the robot David. We come to realize that Weyland is in cryogenic stasis and that David has been communicating with him throughout. The agent behind David’s covert activity becomes more clear.
David can thus be seen as part of a progression in robot design over 81 years – from David to Ash in 29 years of development and from Ash to Bishop in 57 more years. But he is also the first, a unique, like HAL. Weyland’s crowning achievement in synthetic people, like HAL, is subject to philosophizing, wonderment, and devious, purposeful action in the pursuit of its directives.
Holloway’s infection rapidly ravages his body, and he is rushed back to the ship. Shaw doesn’t understand why he is sick and no one else is. As he visibly deteriorates, Vickers, holding a flamethrower and standing at the ramp to the Prometheus refuses to let Holloway aboard. Holloway is in immense pain and finally he steps forward demanding she kill him. Vickers immolates him at his request.
Shaw is shattered, and stunned because she does not know how her lover was exposed singularly. She doesn’t know David gave him the black goo in his champagne. She doesn’t understand what is happening. Her naivety takes its major slam in the face. This, of course, is very reminiscent of Ripley’s experience in the Alien films and it’s horrifying and emotional.
To make matters much worse, a medical scan reveals that Shaw, despite being sterile, is in an advanced state of pregnancy impregnated with an alien creature that in 10 hours has grown to the size of a basketball and is still growing, all as a result of having sex with Holloway who has been poisoned by David with the black goo. David – removed, eerie, in the revelatory moment says, “Well, Doctor Shaw, it’s hardly a traditional fetus,” then – HAL-like, Ash-like – attempts to subdue her.
One feels obvious parallels here: Weyland has instructed David to return Shaw to Earth in stasis as a container for the creature which he considers a biological weapon. It’s exactly what the Company, Ash and Burke hope to do with Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo and Ripley and Newt, in 30 and again 87 years in the future from these events.
But Shaw, like Ripley, escapes and uses an automated surgery pod to cut a cephalopod-like creature from her abdomen. It’s a female parallel to crewman Kane’s stomach-rip in Alien in some weird way.
The scene is epic: The robotic, automated surgery chamber, a gurney in a tube, uses spray-on anaesthetic, robotic hands and metal clamps to fold back Elizabeth’s belly skin. A small robotic crane enters her exposed gut and brings out the placenta-covered, squid-like creature which then emerges, alive, spraying pre-birth from within its amniotic sac all over her. The machine closes Shaw with a staple gun, while the tentacled squid-thing flops angrily above her, held tenuously by the robotic crane arm.
Note: The idea that a machine capable of conducting such COMPLEX, delicate operations on human beings would somehow not be designed for males and females is ridiculous.
Shaw escapes crawling out from under it and, stumbling around like a little girl who has had everything horrible revealed to her, discovers Peter Weyland alive, sitting calmly on a bed, being waited upon by his doting robot.
Shaw realizes Weyland has been alive the whole time in stasis aboard the ship. She finds him and the cold, bemused David – who considers her resilient for surviving the implantation of an alien within her – preparing to meet the Engineer.
David is an excellent predecessor to the androids Ash and Bishop of Alien and Aliens, colder, more calculated, less concerned about human beings than either. He dotes on his creator, who made him singularly and treats him like a son.
Weyland and David explain to Shaw that Weyland intends to ask the Engineer to help him avoid his impending death. The subtle devotion that David has for Weyland, the blind following, reveals much about his actions in the film thus far.
Outside the Prometheus, a mutated Fifield attacks the hangar bay and kills several crew members before being killed himself. Janek sees what is happening and theorizes that this moon is actually a facility where the Engineers designed weapons. He proposes it was a military base until they lost control of their biological weapon: the vases and the black fluid they contain.
Vickers attempts to stop Weyland from going through with his plan. She tells him he will be killed. Weyland is stoic even as, in departing, Vickers calls him father and the connections are all made clear. Weyland’s invented a son in David and abandoned his connection to his daughter. Vickers grew up hating the old man – something David takes to be normal in all humanity – “Doesn’t everybody hate their parents?” he asks Shaw.
Weyland, David, Shaw and Ford return to the structure to awaken the Engineer David discovered in cryogenic stasis. It becomes clear that the Engineer is occupying a space ship (the same design as the crashed alien space ship seen on LV-426 in Alien and Aliens). It’s a spaceship with a cargo hold filled with toxic chemical and biological weapons that can destroy whole worlds with parasitic aliens.
David shows Weyland, Shaw and Ford the bridge and cryo-chambers of the Engineer. He then wakes the Engineer from cryogenic sleep. This is the moment Weyland and Shaw have been waiting for: to meet our maker. But now, after all that has happened, each has very different requests.
The immense Engineer slowly comes to its wits from hypersleep and attempts to understand the small human beings before it. Shaw, realizing Janek is right, screams in English “Ask him what’s in his Cargo Hold?” Why is he taking it to Earth?” and then at the Engineer: “Why do you want to kill us? What have we done?”
Before the Engineer can respond, the selfish and decrepit Weyland has Shaw silenced to put forth his android, his son – the perfect specimen of human likeness, capable of speaking in multiple languages, indeed having translated those of the Engineer to learn the controls of the craft and its devices – to explain his purpose.
The Engineer responds by decapitating David and killing Weyland and Ford. Shaw escapes the alien ship as it is activated for launch by the Engineer. Weyland dies, pathetic, broken. Vickers, observing from aboard the Prometheus, and hearing the flatline confirming the death of her father Weyland, orders Janek to return to Earth.
The still-active David lies disembodied on the floor of the Engineer’s craft, but maintains contact with Shaw and now begins to tell what he knows. The craft begins to initiate take-off and Shaw is hurled from within the ship and crawls and runs across crevasses created by the launching of the immense craft.
It’s a scene that mimics the headless Ash being brought back to tell the crew of the Nostromo what is actually happening to them in Alien. David’s severed body and still-conversant head are similar to the final state of the android Bishop of Aliens as well, who ends divided yet able to cling to the floor of the Sulaco and grab Newt to save her from being thrown out the airlock. It’s as if the fate of all Scott’s androids is a milky decapitation.
David reveals to Shaw that the Engineer is starting up the ship and is intending to release the vases of black goo on Earth. She hears David and tries to warn Vickers and Janek that the ship is headed to Earth with the intention of killing off humanity.
Vickers, aboard the Prometheus, orders Janek to return to Earth, but this is the Captain’s shining moment. Janek, in a brief exchange with Shaw, assesses the threat to humanity if they allow the Engineer’s ship to leave. He defies Vickers and tells her to abandon ship if she doesn’t want to die. While Vickers flees in an escape pod, Janek and his crew, straight-forward, no-nonsense and generally non-involved in the mission throughout, save humanity by crashing the Prometheus into the Engineer’s ship as it attempts to take off.
The disabled ship of the Engineer crashes onto the planet, falling onto Vickers, crushing her. The ship continues to tumble and nearly crushes Shaw, but she escapes.
Shaw goes to the escape pod to get oxygen and retrieve supplies and finds her alien offspring has grown to gigantic size. The Engineer survives the crash, enters the escape pod and attacks Shaw, who releases the tentacled creature. It subdues the Engineer by thrusting a tentacle down its throat. When the Engineer falls with the immense tentacled creature atop him, the creature looks very much like the “facehuggers” in the Alien films.
David, still functioning and decapitated, lying on the floor of the bridge of the downed spacecraft, communicates with Elizabeth Shaw who lies, crying on the moon’s rocky desolate surface. David says he would like her help, that if she can collect him and carry him, he could help here to leave this place because there are other crafts like this one on the moon.
Shaw recovers David’s remains from the alien ship, and asks if he can operate the craft. He responds that he can fly them back to Earth.
Shaw asks if he can fly them to the place of origin of the Engineers and he says that he can. Together they activate another Engineer ship. Shaw and the remains of android David then take off to travel to the Engineers’ homeworld in an attempt to understand why they created humanity and why they attempted to destroy it.
In the final shot, back in the Prometheus escape pod, the immense tentacled facehugger has died (just like the facehuggers do after implanting the embryos in Alien) and the Engineer’s body begins to convulse. From within his chest emerges an alien (very similar but not the same as seen in later movies) The creature bursts out of the dying Engineer’s chest and we see the mouth within a mouth and familiar head structure and body shape of the “chestburster” xenomorphs in Alien.
2122, the Alien plot – 29 Years After Events of Prometheus
The events of Alien (1979) take place June 3rd to 6th in the year 2122 A.D.
USCSS Nostromo encounters what is assumed to be a distress signal emanating from the planetoid designated LV-426, in the Zeta-2-Reticuli system. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert investigate a derelict spacecraft that contains the fossilised remains of an unknown alien species, and thousands of Xenomorph eggs. One of the xenomorph spore (‘facehugger’) attaches itself to Kane’s face and plants an embryo in his throat, which then hatches, killing the host. The hatchling (‘chestburster’) grows to over 7 feet tall and kills Dallas and Engineer’s Mate Brett.
Warrant Officer Ripley discovers that Weyland-Yutani want the Alien specimen and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable. It is revealed Science Officer Ash is in fact a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android, who has been protecting the Alien.
Chief Engineer Parker renders Ash inoperative when Ash attacks Ripley. Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien whilst evacuating the Nostromo. Ripley rigs the ship to self-destruct and escapes on the shuttlecraft Narcissus with the ship’s cat Mr Jones. The Alien also escapes on the shuttle, but Ripley manages to blow it out of the airlock, effectively killing it.
Plot Summary of Alien (1979)
(scenes in red are only in the Special Edition)
Nostromo, a commercial towing-vehicle en route to Earth towing several million tons of mineral ore, carries a crew of seven: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Warrant Officer Ripley, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, Chief Engineer Parker, and Engineering Technician Brett. When the story opens, the Nostromo is heading back to Earth.
A computer the crew calls “Mother” monitors the ship’s operations. Mother intercepts a strange signal from a nearby planetoid and wakens the crew. The crew believe at first that they’ve arrived at Earth, however, they quickly determine that they’re charged with investigating the strange signal, which is assumed to an SOS. Before they prepare the “tug” craft to land on the planet, crew members Brett and Parker argue that they’re not a rescue team and that they should be compensated for the extra work. Ash tells them that there is a portion of their working contract that states the crew must investigate any occurrences such as this one.
The tug portion of the Nostromo lands on the planet (with the ore and mining facilities left in orbit); the landing is rough, causing repairable damage that will take some time to fix. Dallas, Kane and Lambert leave the ship to investigate the signal, walking through the planetoid’s inhabitable atmosphere. They soon discover a derelict spacecraft of unknown origin, losing contact with the Nostromo upon entering the massive ship. Inside they find the remains of an enormous alien creature in the pilot chair, now fossilized. There is a hole in its ribcage, indicating that something burst out from inside its chest. Meanwhile, Ripley’s analysis of the unidentified transmission reveals that it is not an SOS, but a warning. Ripley wants to go after the search party but Ash talks her out of it.
Kane descends into a chamber beneath the pilot’s chair, discovering thousands of leathery objects that resemble large eggs. He also discovers a strange mist covering the eggs that reacts when broken. Moving in to investigate further, Kane illuminates one of the eggs from behind with a flashlight & discovers movement inside; a strange, spider-like organism is the resident. The egg opens, and as Kane moves into for a better look, the strange life form inside leaps out, dissolves the visor of Kane’s spacesuit, and attaches itself to his face.
Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. Ripley, who is the commanding officer in the absence of Dallas and Kane, refuses to let them back on board, citing quarantine protocol. However, Ash disregards Ripley’s decision and lets them in.
In the infirmary Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the creature from Kane’s face, but they discover they cannot because it will tear Kane’s skin off. Kane is examined with sophisticated equipment which shows that the creature has inserted a tube into his throat and is feeding Kane oxygen despite his comatose state. Dallas makes the decision to remove the creature from Kane’s face, no matter the consequences.
When Ash tries to cut off one of its legs, a yellowish fluid pours out and begins to eat through the floor. Dallas is concerned that the acidic fluid will breach the hull, but it stops it’s corrosive effects. Dallas says the substance resembles molecular acid, and Brett comments the creature must be using it for blood. ‘Wonderful defense mechanism – you don’t dare kill it’, Parker growls. Kane is left in his coma and is tended to by Ash.
Ripley later confronts Ash about his defiance of her orders and allowing the alien organism onto their ship, which put all of their lives at risk. She distrusts him, as well as his seeming inability to give them any useful information about the creature. The damage to the tug is repaired by Brett and Parker, and the crew takes off and docks with the refinery & cargo in orbit. The Nostromo then resumes its course for Earth.
Eventually, the creature detaches from Kane’s face on its own and the crew find it dead. Kane wakes up, seemingly unharmed, and he and the crew decide to have one last meal before they re-enter hypersleep. During the meal, Kane begins to choke and convulse. While he lies on the table & the crew try to aid him, a new alien creature bursts from his chest. Parker moves in to kill it with a knife, and is stopped by Ash. The creature then scurries away, leaving the crew stunned and horrified.
After a short funeral for Kane, the crew members split up into two teams to capture the small creature. Ash rigs together a tracking device, while Brett assembles a weapon similar to a cattle prod. Picking up a signal, Parker, Brett, and Ripley think they have the creature cornered, only to discover the crew’s cat, Jones.
Realizing they might pick up the cat on the tracker again later, Parker sends Brett to catch Jones. As he searches for Jones, Brett finds a mysterious object that appears to be skin on the floor. He continues on, eventually catching up to Jones in a huge room. As he tries to coax Jones out, the cat hisses as a huge shape drops down behind the engineer. It is the alien, now fully grown and enormous, and it attacks him, dragging him, bloodied and screaming, into an air shaft. In the 2003 re-release of the film, Ripley and Parker hear him and arrive in time to catch a glimpse of the monster as Brett disappears.
The crew debate their next move. Ripley again questions Ash and his inability to give them helpful information. They all agree that the alien is using the air shafts to move around, so Dallas enters the network of air shafts with a flamethrower, intending to drive the alien into an airlock in order to blow it out into space. Using the trackers, the crew picks up the alien’s signal, but the signal vanishes, leaving Dallas unsure of the creature’s location. He finds the alien’s slime on the tunnel floor. Dallas is disoriented in the cramped space and starts to panic when the signal returns, indicating it is heading directly for him. In his attempt to escape, he runs right into the creature. The remaining crew members find only his flamethrower left behind.
Ripley queries Mother for advice on destroying the alien, but in the process discovers that “the company” (unnamed in this film, but identified in the sequels as “Weyland-Yutani”) had recognized the signal as a warning and wanted one of the alien creatures brought back for study, considering the crew expendable. This information is related in just four screen shots of text from Mother – an excellent scene.
Ash attacks Ripley after she learns of the Company’s “Special Order”, but Parker and Lambert arrive before he can kill her. Parker dislodges Ash’s head with a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash is an android. With Ash disabled, Ripley and the others reconnect his disembodied head to see if he can give them any advice on how to deal with the creature. Ash tells them they have no chance against it, as it is “the perfect organism”.
Ripley decides to follow Lambert’s earlier suggestion; set the Nostromo to self-destruct & escape in the shuttle, leaving the Alien to die on the Nostromo. As they leave the room, Parker turns the flamethrower on Ash’s corpse to ensure he will not be re-activated and come after them. While Ripley preps the shuttle for launch, Parker and Lambert go to gather coolant for the shuttle’s life-support system.
On the ship’s open intercom system, Ripley hears the cat and realizes Jones has been left behind. Alone, she goes out into the hallways of the Nostromo to find him. Expecting the alien at every turn, Ripley finally locates the cat and puts him into his traveling container. She then hears the sounds of the alien attacking Parker and Lambert in another part of the ship, and Parker shouting orders to Lambert to get out of the way. The alien corners Lambert against a wall, but Parker is unable to get a clear shot at it with the flamethrower without killing Lambert. Finally he charges at the creature, but it spins on him and kills him with its bizarre inner jaws. It then turns back to Lambert and Ripley hears the sounds of it killing her as she rushes to try and save her friends. Ripley finds the bodies of Parker & Lambert in the storage room they had been working in, and then races back towards the bridge.
In another restored scene, Ripley finds Dallas in a storage chamber. He has been cocooned by the alien in an unidentifiable substance (the creature’s secretions) and very weakly begs Ripley to kill him. Ripley also sees Brett, already dead, whom appears to be transforming into another of the species’ eggs. Ripley burns them both with the flamethrower and rushes out of the chamber.
Ripley realizes she is now alone on board the Nostromo with the alien. She activates the ship’s self-destruct and races to the shuttle with Jones’ cat carrier. As she rounds the bend to the shuttle entrance, the alien suddenly leaps up, blocking her path. Ripley drops the cat carrier and backs up, racing back to abort the self-destruct function. Arriving at the bridge, she restarts the cooling unit, but ‘Mother’ states that it is too late to stop the countdown and the Nostromo will explode in 5 minutes.
Ripley returns to the shuttle loading area, ready to make her best attempt to fight off the alien and get to the lifeboat. The alien is nowhere to be seen, so Ripley and Jones board the shuttle with 1 minute to abandon ship. Quickly running through the launch sequence, the shuttle lowers to launch position as ‘Mother’ starts counting down the last 30 seconds of the Nostromo‘s life. The shuttle’s engines ignite and the ship races away from the Nostromo, which grows smaller by the second. A series of mighty explosions follow as the Nostromo vanishes in fire, destroying the refinery and ore it had been carrying – and apparently destroying the alien.
As Ripley prepares for hypersleep, a hand reaches out to her from a wall; the alien had in fact stowed away aboard the shuttle, its external physicality making it blend in with the ship’s machinery. She retreats to a locker with a pressure suit inside, and gets an idea. Ripley dons the spacesuit & arms herself with a gun & grappling hook, then straps herself into a chair. Opening a series of air vents above the alien’s head, Ripley tests them one at a time, and then finds one that directly blasts high-pressure steam onto the alien, driving it from its hiding spot. As the monster stands to its full, menacing 2-meter height, ready to attack with its piston-like inner throat & teeth, she opens the shuttle’s airlock, blasting the creature into space with the grappling gun. The door slams shut, trapping the alien outside.
Undaunted, the alien attempts to re-enter the ship by climbing inside one of the heat thrusters. Ripley sees the opportunity and fires the engines, incinerating the alien. Before she and Jones enter hypersleep for the trip home, Ripley records a log entry stating that she’s the last survivor of the Nostromo.
2179, the Aliens plot, 57 Years Later
The events of Aliens (1986) take place 57 years after the events of Alien (1979) in the years 2179 – 2182 and again on the planet LV-426.
( a one hour talk delivered to students at Academy of Art University in San Francisco on Friday, March 1, 2012. There was no recording. Slides appear in order here as images, and some video clips and links have been added to this online version).
Good afternoon, I am M.T. Karthik.
I’ve organized this talk chronologically, and into three general parts, starting first with historical examples of mass media used for sociopolitical language here in the US;
then second, a line between politics of the past and the present drawn by the invention and use specifically of television,
and finally politics in the Digital Age, which will conclude with some discussion of the contemporary situation.
The largest arc of this one hour talk is pluralism of mass media in sociopolitical language – from pamphlet to newspaper to radio to television to cable television to the Internet to FB to Twitter over the last 236 years.
In the last part of the talk, I will also be sharing some of my original work in the field. I have sought to report upon, document and portray through art, certain social interests primarily because I believe they are being written out of history, even covered-up by specific interests and aggregation of public opinion around a monocultural viewpoint of our nation’s political past.
No discussion of American political thought and expression can start without the Declaration of Independence –
– Thomas Jefferson’s seminal document authored against the monarchy in England, which set off an age of revolution on behalf of individuals against kings and nation-states and which, with the U.S. Constitution, created the bond between the Colonies that holds as Federalism to this day.
It’s important to read the Declaration in context, because of the scale of Jefferson and the Colonists’ reach.
Jefferson was influenced by the French and other European thinkers as a result of visits there, but really, the scale of the task was unprecedented.
How would you author a letter to all the Kings and governments of the nations of the world declaring the creation of your own new country – led collectively – with an unprecedented democratic governmental structure set up by its citizens?
It’s said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, has supported secession of Texas from the United States. How would his Declaration of Independence read, today? Would he address it to the UN, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court? – none of these institutions existed for Jefferson to appeal to. He was writing to the nebulous notion of a “world at large” and against the British Monarchy.
What kind of persuasive language do you use in such a context?
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Epic.
But how was it possible for Thomas Jefferson to set down these words in Virginia with such confidence? The seeds had been sown by a Philadelphian, who wrote and published a pamphlet which became an instant best-seller here and abroad.
Perhaps more than any text in that nascent revolutionary period, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense – addressed audaciously to “the inhabitants of America” – pushed the colonists toward independence. The text demanded an immediate declaration of separation from England a full year before Jefferson sat down to write the great document.
With Common Sense, began the era of the political pamphlet in the United States. The authors of the Revolution used the format in the next ten years to author the Constitution. Should we refer to the American political pamphlet as a medium?
Here’s a recent one:
The pamphlet brings with it the creation of whole industries: printing, typography, stenography, journalism, cartooning, and begins an arc of American sociopolitical language that pluralizes to include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable television and the Internet. This talk will discuss the use of all of these and pluralism of media over the 236 years since the Declaration of Independence was written.
The serial publication of essays, viewpoints and even texts of speeches became the normative method for political discourse in the Colonies. It birthed the centralization of thought in new-born cities and the media channel of our oldest newspapers and journals.
The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.
77 of these were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of the 77 and eight others were published as The Federalist or The New Constitution in two volumes in 1788.
From these documents and the discussions they generated, came our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Promptly thereafter, colonial cities birthed the “two-paper town” as the newly minted First Amendment of the Constitution produced contrasting viewpoints in the form of newspapers, which bore, defined and built the “constitution” of American political thought for a hundred and fifty years.
The era made editors-in-chief men of great power a hundred years before Citizen Kane.
Note that the Presidents of the US at this time are mostly forgettable bureaucrats. Perhaps Van Buren stands out for his hemispheric reach, but great debate and intellectual work wasn’t being done by the President. It was occurring in the Senate, at the level of the Supreme Court and with the birth of newspapers’ Editors-in-Chief like Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune – who began to take on greater responsibility for political language.
During the period of 1840 – 1860, after years of the establishment of new civic centers and States, with their own newspapers and journals, the country faced its greatest sociopolitical unrest. Correspondingly, an era of great newspaper publishers and editors representing contrasting viewpoints emerged.
By 1858 it was common for newspaper-editors to employ stenographers to attend speeches and to publish the speeches in totem in their papers.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, US Senators were elected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were vying for control of the Illinois legislature.
The main issue in all seven debates was slavery and ultimately all of the issues Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 Presidential Election – issues which would lead directly to the first dissolution of the Union and the first Civil War in U.S. History.
The debates were held in seven towns in Illinois, but became so popular that they were distributed by papers elsewhere.
But editors of papers who favored Douglas would take the stenographers’ notes and clean them up, fixing errors of notation, context or even meaning only in Douglas’ words. Papers that favored Lincoln did the opposite. The power of the Editor was never before so clearly visible.
Lincoln lost the Senate election, but afterward he had all the texts cleaned, edited properly and republished as a single book – which was read broadly and helped lead him to the nomination in 1860.
The issue of Slavery was defined for vernacular discourse by the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history and language. Here’s the Centennial Stamp:
And so for long years newspaper men and politicians were bound in this country and great cultural and social consciousness that helped define the nation emerged through muckraking and whistle-blowing, but also, inevitably, corruption and yellow journalism.
The Spanish-American War may have been born from such yellow journalism, as the sinking of The Maine, falsely attributed to the enemy by papers in the U.S., pushed Americans into the war. More examples exist, and indeed as media pluralizes over the next century, this cozy corruption between politicians and journalists has been exacerbated by new media.
By the turn of the 20th century, the dominant medium was the printed word, and then, the word as heard through radio and both were being used to push political interests and social agendas.
Radio, a warm medium, a tribal medium with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the fireside chat, became the primary media tool for information about the wars abroad that defined the century. As Wiki points out, Every US President since Roosevelt has delivered a regular radio address.
News and official information delivered by voice over the airwaves is warm and available, lucid by the intimation of the sound of the voice, not subject to interpretation of the reader. Baseball and music and DJ’s sounded great on the radio and political communicators quickly recognized it.
Writing for broadcast began.
An excellent metaphoric example of the power of radio before television as a vernacular medium in politics can be found in the Coen Brothers musical film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
Set in the southern state of Mississippi before television, one narrative thread of the film follows a Governor’s race. Throughout the film, various people in the State are shown at home following the Election by listening to the radio.
Three escaped state prisoners form a musical group on the run, and anonymously record a single at a rural radio station which becomes immensely popular throughout the state through the power of radio. The men appear in disguise to perform their song live at an event which both candidates are attending.
The Governor’s opponent is insensitive to the popularity of the group, focusing instead on denigrating the men for both their fugitive status and their race. In a moment that predates television’s power in this regard, the challenger is revealed to be a racist statewide over the air. The challenger, unlike the incumbent, has no grasp of the power of the radio.
In the climactic scene, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi, seeing the immense popularity of the three escaped state prisoners, pardons the musical phenomenon the ex-convicts have become. The whole of the dialogue is shown to be carried out on radio throughout the State to the folks listening at home, who even hear the challenger run out of the hall on a rail as the Governor leads the crowd in a rousing chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.”
The entire scene is here:
[with respect to the Coen Brothers]
These scenes are remarkably faithful to the truth. In Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, a popular singer and the attributed author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine, became Governor.
The blogger LaLouisiane is eloquent on this matter:
“I remember my granddaddy saying that if Jimmy Davis would come around and sing “You Are My Sunshine”, (he wrote it you know), that everybody in the state would vote for him and never even ask him about a policy, a road, a bridge, nothing. We just really like that song down here, I guess.”
This talk, Political Media, Messages and More, is a follow-up to a talk I gave as News Director and Elections Coverage Producer for KPFK 90.7fm in LA, seven years ago at C-Level Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, which was subtitled, Pluralism of Media in the Age of Surveillance [mtk 2005].
Pluralism of media is evident at the addition of each new mass medium – radio doesn’t arrive at the newspaper’s exclusion or the pamphlet’s exclusion.
The pamphlet and certain newspapers remain significant modes of sociopolitical communication. They are at the heart of some, arguably all, of the United States’ greatest movements. Women’s Suffrage,
Socialism, the Labor movement’s successes in the first half of the 20th century.
So Pluralism of Media means we media-include, not media-exclude.
Where before you read pamphlets, now you read pamphlets and newspapers. Where before you read print, now you read print and listen to the radio – you add TV.
We add each medium and the media morph to fit our desires of them. Talk radio, drive-time radio, live radio, each is its own form.
This is what Marshall McCluhan meant when he said any new medium contains all previous media in it.
This is all changing now, of course, as Pluralism of Media has matured since 2005 to become the fluid, the cloud, the totality of data that we swim in today, post-TiVo, at the dawn of the streaming era of the web.
END PART ONE
Part Two: THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008
The Television Presidency, born when Truman used it to announce the end of World War II , instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV – and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.
Ike was the first President on the tube, and in his most important moment on TV, his exit speech, President General Eisenhower famously warned against the growing presence of a “Military-Industrial Complex”
… perhaps it would have worked in color.
But forever the line that defines the Television Presidency will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960. If you’ve seen Frost/Nixon you know that Nixon to the end of his days considered television, and the close-up, his undoing.
In the televised debates with Kennedy, Nixon’s problems with perspiration accumulating on his lip and his jitteriness in general on TV, came over as nervous and untrustworthy – on radio or via text this would never have been transmitted to the public-at-large. Nixon was ridiculed mercilessly for it by critics.
Imagine the contrast, Kennedy’s cool, youthful good looks and Nixon’s shiftiness.
Kennedy garnered the potency of the new medium, and, thanks in part to the work of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson in delivering Texas, won the election by a slim margin.
I really like the blogger J. Fred McDonald’s take on this, who states, in his excellent essay on Kennedy’s relationship with TV: “For JFK, television could turn defeat into victory.”
Kennedy addressed the people of the country often and personably, but politically used the tool at critical junctures to save himself: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of television was pitch-perfect.
So, the relationship between live color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness but then, typically of all things new, was taken promptly after discovery to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination.
TV then exposed LBJ and Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism.
The 1968 Olympics were the first televised live and in-color around the world. They took place at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in history, a year I refer to as The People’s Year. This image of a staged protest against race and class oppression, thanks to live television, was impossible to stop:
I participated in making a monument to this moment on the campus of San Jose State University, when in 2006, I worked intimately with others assisting the artist Rigo 23 in the creation of this:
(At this point in the talk, I describe the Tommie Smith/John Carlos statue project anecdotally and include personal, non-published images of the construction of the statues.)
The impact of the moment as seen on television is described well by this Mormon blogger, who tells of being young and white and American and watching with her father. She describes his reaction both at the time and after watching ceremonies of the courageous act on video 20 years later – his change of heart is set in universal terms.
TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War. It ended the Nixon Presidency. But politicians, as they had in the past, reacted by learning to manipulate the new medium to their advantage. Predictably, it was an actor who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda.
Ronald Reagan overcame the tool’s power to reveal – with charisma. TV’s investigative potency withered with the mic in his hands.
TV buoyed Reagan into the White House with a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.
Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out.
Reagan asserted our freedom to shop and drive and declare vast spaces ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, he powered through TV.
Consumer technology was represented in its farthest reach by television, broadcast into millions of homes then on four channels, perhaps a fifth. It was a medium dominated by the Networks, and owned by private corporations. The unholy alliances between corrupt newspaper men and politicians had become de rigeur for relationships with corrupt television execs.
TV was manipulated on the greatest scale by Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in real-time” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.
Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested; others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed.
A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers – ate it up.
Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with these TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”. (cf. The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis)
It was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year.
That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and enslaved citizens to a national narrative – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.
Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push corporate, private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings. But even then, his “I can’t remembers,” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook.
The Dawn of “Pluralism of Mass Media”
By my senior year of high school in 1985, say 10% of students were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever.
Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter are all but dead. Content began its high-speed ascent. USA Today and CNN were born.
But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer. It was still television, which had expanded through digital technology that created cables delivering far more visual information directly into American homes.
George Herbert Walker Bush, the former head of the CIA, wasn’t close in the primaries when he ran for President in 1980, but was appointed to the bottom half of Reagan’s ticket and became Vice President. Now the actor was termed out.
The Republican Party seized the lessons of the small screen, and having had eight years of method training by a great actor, extended that training to a former serviceman. George H. W. Bush’s team was precise and almost militaristic at staying on message.
Bush repeated phrases without giving policy details, promised Americans more of what Reagan gave them and then repeated the same two or three positive phrases again.
Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis’ imagery was by contrast horribly clunky – footage of him in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet had the opposite effect of projecting the desired image of a strong leader.
Bush had the immense advantage of the Office of the Vice President for air-time, but used it sparingly, with few details. When Bush’s campaign did use TV ads, it was to attack – the Willie Horton ad ran ad nauseum and painted Dukakis as a bad judge of character.
This was the beginning of catchphrase culture.
A culture manifest most strongly on television by ads, and in political communication as satire of the timeliest manner on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, featuring Dana Carvey as a repetitive robotic message man George H.W. Bush against John Lovitz as an exasperated Michael Dukakis, who finally shrugs, and delivers the punchline:
[click that link above to see the bit … Chevy Chase birthed portraying the President on SNL, but Dana Carvey nailed it before Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell]
Though we have been pluralizing mass media from the pamphlet to the television, this era is the dawn of the Pluralism of Mass Media that delivers us to the Internet Era of sociopolitical propaganda – not only because of the birth of word processing and cable television, but because radio returns for what it’s good at.
RADIO and TV in concert
Radio broadcasting shifted from AM to FM in the late 1970s because of the opportunity to broadcast music in stereo with better fidelity.
Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show was first nationally syndicated in August 1988, in a later stage of AM’s decline. “Limbaugh’s popularity paved the way for other conservative talk radio programming to become commonplace on the AM radio,” states his Wikipedia entry.
Radio became the drumbeat for the President’s made-for-TV messages. The cool medium was used sparingly for headings and rubrics and catchphrases, while radio was used for tribal intercommunication of long, warm discussion of the message.
Limbaugh had an immense following and Bush made sure he got as much access as he needed. My father remembers seeing footage on network news of President George H.W. Bush welcoming Rush Limbaugh, shaking his hand and then picking up his bag for him before turning to walk into a personal meeting.
This potent image deliverable only by television (wordless communication in background footage, not a press conference with the President) was transmitted for the conservative President and his media agent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and perhaps PBS and the TV message – short, cool, specific – conjoined with the radio message, long, rangy, warm – to create a uniform statement.
The 1988 Election was the last Network News Election. The four-channel era of television was over.
Cable News Network, CNN, began and had its watershed moment by being the first embedded network live during wartime. At last, TV had provided war,itself, live and in-color.
George H.W. Bush and his Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein over Kuwait gave CNN more than a billion viewers worldwide, birthed CNN International and pushed Cable News past Network News in terms of relevance.
Television production became tighter, faster, snappier, with jump-cuts and camera motion. Technology was on the cusp of the fluidity of digital. The TV talk show incorporated radio stylings.
The cable news era, which is only just winding down, began with The Gulf War, and the 1990’s are littered with what cable TV invented: Newstainment, and, critically because it signals the demise of the Academy, the creation of star faculty and pundits.
These define cable TV in the 90’s, composing formats used today by Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and so many more pseudo-intellectual, corporate-financed, opinion-making cable TV “shows,” designed by marketing and legal teams, by groovy execs and demographers more than journalists.
Whole channels have emerged – and here the Daily Show/Colbert are uniquely successful – from what was drawn so poorly in the 1990’s. The medium’s highly refined message delivery system operates full-tilt, 24/7, and millions call it real-time.
[END PART TWO]
PART THREE:
The21st Century : The Internet Meets the Television Presidency
Part Three notes are much less formal as the latter part of the talk is filled with anecdotal descriptions of several projects I have engaged in. However, I am writing it up cohesively and will add it here when finished.
This section starts with the 2000 Election that ended in the Florida Fiasco and into Howard Dean’s successes with the Internet, then moves through the Kerry-Bush Election, the first-ever Congressionally-contested election and then the Obama-McCain election, ending finally with the unique situation of politicians in SF running for Mayor and using Twitter for the first time even as they granted Twitter a huge tax-break to stay in the City. I reference works of my own that parallel these circumstances.
at the Warfield in SF last December. Also, check out Holly’s comment which includes a good interview with Teri Gender Bender, founder and lead singer of le butcherettes
77-year old Sonny Rollins absolutely lifted 2,000 plus in a wowing two-hour set Thursday night at Zellerbach Hall on the Berkeley campus.
The gig was the first before a worldwide tour over the next two months for the tenor giant that includes Singapore, Japan, China and Rollins’ first trip to Korea. The group returns to the US briefly before moving on to Europe in the summer.
The irrepressible genius called tunes and blew glowing chord support throughout the show and was positively still energetic backstage – after two hours of uninterrupted performance. The Rollins feel remains, an unmistakably witty and stable voice in jazz and the sextet has found a dope new heartbeat in drummer Kobie Watkins who, churning the toms, created a pulsing drum-and-bass groove that Rollins, and all of us, felt. If they were strolling it would be sick.
Rollins’ broad tone blends seamlessly now with long-time collaborator, trombonist Clifton Anderson, whose fluidity is technically superior and, at moments, gorgeous. Rollins continues to experiment with African percussionist Kimati Dinizulu.
Highlight of the evening for me was witnessing novelist Ishmael Reed and Rollins share a fistpound backstage after the show, and hearing the former introduce his wife to Rollins, thus: “Meet my wife, Carol, Carol … The Colossus.”
The Power of Nightmares, a BBC documentary in three one- hour parts by Adam Curtis, is available free online and free from intellectual property burdens. It is in the Creative Commons so you can just download it from
Watch it and rebroadcast it anywhere you can. The series takes as its subject a comparison of two ideological groups that have tried to shape the entire world for the past fifty years using money, power, influence, religion, violence and finally fear.
This doc also seeks to define and address a change in policy makers: from positivists who seek to represent humanity toward a better life into negativists who perpetuate stereotypes of fear to remain in power. But fundamentally the series is a comparison of two radical groups who now hold the world in their grip:
The Islamic Fundamentalist Extremists and
The US American Neoconservatives
The series begins with an examination of the intellectual pursuits of Egyptian philosopher and Islamic Fundamentalist scholar Syed Qtub and Neo-conservative Scholar and University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss in 1949 and details how their pursuits led to what would become the ideology behind these two currents of hyper-conservative thought that have been extremely active: struggling against their own societies, subsequently working together to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and ending up in direct conflict in a Winner-Take-All-Fight-to-the-Death, which is taking place even now in the guise of the War on Terror [which ought rightfully be called the War of Terror].
But more, this series properly addresses the tactic of fear used by both groups, and especially that used by the neocons, to propagandize humanity into electing politicians willing to use the fear model for their own selfish interests – Tony Blair is really exposed as an opportunist by this series.
I deeply wish more people could see this doc so we could begin a discussion to reframe the global power conversation that is being dictated to us by military and militant authorities.
Curtis’ series does not address the possibility of Neocon or US American complicity in the attack on 9/11 nor does it properly address the Clinton era in context:
He says 9/11 was executed by extreme readers of Islamic Fundamentalism and leaves it at that [he says the actual events were executed by a plan drawn by KSM (that’s Khalid Sheik Mohammad in CIA-speak)] and that Clinton was a fundamentally good agent who was buried by a neocon cabal which trained its powers of attack at him [painting Clinton as a victim].
In these readings, I have differences with Curtis, but he doesn’t take a stance on these matters that threatens the possibilities lined out by many other researchers and documentarians with more access and focus on them. He simply leaves them as generally accepted media ideas for the sake of a wider, more historiographic perspective that is really very brilliant.
He proposes very effectively that the neocons have used the exact same exaggerative tactics to take down first the Soviet Union, then Bill Clinton and now, finally, Muslim Fundamentalism under the vague rubric of Terrorism.
The series goes further and proposes that “there is no al Qaeda.” And fully debunks the Bush administrations claims of successful anti-terror work in the USA post-9/11.
This is a GREAT historical view of conflicts authored by and between the Neocons and the Islamist Extremists … really important work.
Please find some one with high speed connection universities would be perfect places to achieve this – and broadcast them widely.
Film clubs, organizations, peace groups, non-profits, NGOs, students or professors or faculty or staff with access to computer labs with high-speed connections: please download this important three part series from the BBC and have public viewings and showings.
I urge this because I think it would make a great beginning to reframing the 21st century conversation.
The latest incarnation of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia – a wickedly clever postmodern play about meaning, mathematics, sex, literature and academia – will open in Tokyo on October 14, with a cast of actors from across the English-speaking world.
Irish Director Conor Hanratty’s education in classical Greek has included Bachelors and Masters degrees in theater and trips to Greece to observe the ancient dramas live. He is in Japan on academic exchange from Dublin to study iconoclastic Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa (about whom he is writing a book) and, in his spare time, has connected with Tokyo International Players (TIP) to direct the dense and witty Stoppard two-act, which, as he puts it, poses far more questions than it answers while still managing to leave the audience wondrously sated. “The questions Arcadia raises really don’t go away,” Hanratty says, “asking, why we’re here and ‘why do things survive’ and ‘why do things get lost’ and ‘do we find them again’?
“There’s a wonderful moment in the play when the tutor turns to his pupil and says, “It’s okay, you know, we lose things and we carry things with us but it doesn’t matter because the important thing is the march that we’re on, and there’s nothing outside that, so even if we drop something, someone else will pick it up later.’ And they talk about all of the lost plays of the Athenians in Greece – which is, of course, close to my heart. Just very recently they found a big lump of a new Sophocles play that we didn’t have before, so it’s quite timely that they talk about these things that will reappear eventually … they do.”
The play takes place in one room in different times set apart by two centuries, and pits academics in sexual dalliances against a discussion of events muddled by history. American assistant director Robb Dahlke says, “I especially find intriguing Stoppard’s theme of not knowing exactly what has happened in the past – the mistakes that can be made by circumstantial evidence; how something can be read one way leading in the wrong direction from what actually happened.”
TIP is the oldest English language theater company in Japan, having a history of a remarkable 109 years and employing an entirely volunteer cast and crew made up of English-speaking actors and hands that happen to be in Tokyo. “That’s the difficulty,” remarks Briton Alice Hackett, who plays Hannah in the production, “you never can be sure you’re going to be able to cast a play with exactly the right pool of people. You have to count on what’s available. But that’s also very challenging for the actors who are available … you might find yourself playing slightly older than you normally would or in an accent you might not normally be acting in. It’s a great opportunity to try out new things.”
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Directed by Conor Hanratty, October 14-16, will be performed at the Tokyo American Club, for more information: http://www.tokyoplayers.org
I anchored news coverage for KPFK radio in Los Angeles during Governor Davis’s Recall to perhaps a quarter million listeners. Backed by solid investigative reporting and original interviews with numerous sources, my staff and I wrote what I would deliver after Schwarzenegger declared victory.
I co-authored and authorized the use of these words to introduce the new Governor. Much thought and weeks of effort went into it – listen:
I was initially suspended for my actions, but listeners protected me and I defended myself with sources and original reporting we had done into Schwarzenegger’s background for each of the adjectives we used to describe the new Governor.
In the end the phrase “sexual predator” was the issue. But I had, myself personally interviewed women for our news program who claimed it. Several others on our staff had interviewed other women complaining of it as well.
These were women who had been unheard by the State, likely because of Schwarzenegger’s power. We were the only news outlet affording them airtime. I made that call. As a journalist, I felt obliged.
I don’t know if anyone else described it like this on mass media, but I doubt it. Now years later, Arnold’s sexual problems have been revealed publicly and his marriage dissolved from it. We were right. We said it … and few people heard.
and just a few minutes later, I was asked to describe and explain it to Londoners, who were just waking up to the fact that the movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger had just won the Governorship of California.
MTK on British morning drive time radio.
That was 12 years ago, I was 33 and a news director with the backing of a huge progressive community in Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network – we were a voice for that community. That was the last of many lonely moments in that year for myself and our listeners.
An Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger, stole the Governorship of California because Democrats couldn’t effectively prevent a Republican-forced Recall Election of Governor Gray Davis, nor, once the Recall was in effect, competently back the supremely qualified Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante to victory (many in the State claimed it was because he was a Latino. ouch … 2003.)
Despite the sheer volume of the events of September 11, 2011 masking the years near them, anyone interested in the arts who lived in New York City at the turn of the millennium – and particularly the borough of Brooklyn – will remember the arrival of the Sensation! touring exhibition of Young British Artists [YBAs] of the 1990’s that opened on October 2nd of 1999.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani protested the exhibition and in specific a work by Nigerian-born, British National Chris Offili – an image of the Virgin Mary made of many materials from his homeland, but which contained elephant dung as a medium, a paint, a process natural to the production of image-based art throughout the tropics or near deserts.
Giuliani protested that it was offensive to Christianity and attempted to prevent the showing of the work. It’s this time I define the end of post-modernism, at the exact moment that Mayor Giuliani stated publicly to the press,
2/18/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon on the third of several grey, cloudy rainy days
Last night I heard the New York Philharmonic perform the St. Matthew Passion, by J. S. Bach, under the direction of Kurt Masur at Avery Fisher Hall (formerly Philharmonic Hall) at Lincoln Center.
The space is considerably less well designed than the Opera Hall in the same Center. I have not yet visited the Alice Tully Hall space which completes the three.
Crossing the plaza and passing the small fountain as you approach the high-ceilinged, great glass front of the Metropolitan Opera House, two very large canvasses painted by Marc Chagall are visible from all directions. They are something like 50 feet high and 30 feet wide. The main stairway of the Opera House passes between the two pieces. The Avery Fisher Hall is the auditorium to the right when facing the Opera House. It is lower and more box-like, though it too has a tall, glass-fronted facade.
The Philharmonic Hall is long and rectangular. The seats are arranged in horizontal rows forming a long rectangle from the stage back to the main doors on the floor of the auditorium. Above these seats there are four tiers of balcony seats. The box seats on the side are smaller and a little cramped. They provide only an angled view of the stage and so one must continually turn one’s head to see the orchestra, the balcony seats in the rear of the auditorium are maybe 100 yards from the stage, but the line of sight is good and straight on from any of the seats in the back of the Hall.
Last night’s performance marked the second time I have heard the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. I checked it out in San Francisco in 1997ce (see previous material). This time, the stage set was completely different and the orchestration was somewhat changed as well.
The choir consisted of Thomanerchor Liepzig (The choir of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig) that Bach himself led, several hundred years ago. They were perhaps 90 strong and provided the choir solo voices for the Apostle Peter and other parts from within their number. They were split and arranged on benches at stage front left and front right, featured prominently. The orchestration consisted of a small chamber group surrounding the conductor and a harmonium. The harmonium was played by the director of the boy’s choir. The chamber group was comprised of a cellist, bassist, first and second violins, and reeds. On a platform behind the group were the six soloists. The secondary strings and flutes and reeds were placed in the rear of the stage behind the soloists and Mr. Masur stood on a raised platform just to the right of the harmonium.
The performance was microphoned and amplified but the volume was far too low to enjoy complex changes in dynamics. The sound in the corner seats in the rear boxes where we were (went with D.) was good but could have been louder and with more dynamic variance. The seats were angled hard and somewhat cramped so we had to turn our heads to face the stage stereophonically.
The New York Times ran a review of the performance from the weekend past on the morning I saw the show (cf.: NYT, FEB 17, The Arts, p.4, aside: Siva Vaidyanthan on the cover for an unrelated story regarding a lost scrap of paper written upon by Mark Twain). The article said the work was among Masur’s first with the Philharmonic and suggested the changes and alterations (i.e. using St. Thomas Church choir from Liepzig) were Masur’s continuing efforts to come to know the music of Bach.
The performance was at a quick tempo, not workman-like, but regular. There were some lovely voices in the context of the piece, including the mezzo-soprano whose work was so beautiful. The tenor who handled the part of the Evangelist may have been a little tired from a weekend’s worth of performance. He was good, though.
The quality of live music performance in New York City is generally extremely high. Everywhere I go I hear bold, confident, passionate performances. The players are eager and well-prepared. In New York, the level of energy and play and quality of sound by any given performer is so much More More More than anywhere else I have been in the US. There is little doubt or wavering. The performers have in the context of their relationship to the venue and the audience, a certain confidence that frees them to try to be their best. Or maybe they are scared witless and just playing their asses off so they can “make it in New York.” But it doesn’t “fee’” like the latter. Rather it is just the general level of play, that the town attracts the nation’s best. That is how it feels to me so far. (so why is the coffee so bad?)
The performance had some interesting moments: the second mezzo-soprano solo in the second part, is predecessed and accompanied by an instrumental sectional. There is a relationship here between the melody here and the melody of one of the six Violin Concerti for Violin and harpsichord. The theme is augmented and then toyed with slightly, but check it out.
The section I awaited, had remembered from the last performance, was the simple harmony (or is it even unison?) calling out of the name of Barrabas. It lacked the impact it had in SF. There, the choir erupted in the name of Barrabas so loudly and strongly, one could hear the maddening crowd calling the name. Here the section passed relatively quickly. The tempo was speeded up and even-handed without such lingering drama. Perhaps that is an aspect of performance here or by Masur.
He was beautiful to watch. Had a relationship with the music as he conducted. His body language, his expressiveness coaxed, pushed and pulled on the sound. It was nice. Masur’s an older man, balding (big centered patch over grey, evenly-cut hair all around), with a big frame. maybe 6’2” or 3” tall.
2/18/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon on the third of several grey, cloudy rainy days
Last night I heard the New York Philharmonic perform the St. Matthew Passion, by J. S. Bach, under the direction of Kurt Masur at Avery Fisher Hall (formerly Philharmonic Hall) at Lincoln Center.
The space is considerably less well designed than the Opera Hall in the same Center. I have not yet visited the Alice Tully Hall space which completes the three.
Crossing the plaza and passing the small fountain as you approach the high-ceilinged, great glass front of the Metropolitan Opera House, two very large canvasses painted by Marc Chagall are visible from all directions. They are something like 50 feet high and 30 feet wide. The main stairway of the Opera House passes between the two pieces. The Avery Fisher Hall is the auditorium to the right when facing the Opera House. It is lower and more box-like, though it too has a tall, glass-fronted facade.
The Philharmonic Hall is long and rectangular. The seats are arranged in horizontal rows forming a long rectangle from the stage back to the main doors on the floor of the auditorium. Above these seats there are four tiers of balcony seats. The box seats on the side are smaller and a little cramped. They provide only an angled view of the stage and so one must continually turn one’s head to see the orchestra, the balcony seats in the rear of the auditorium are maybe 100 yards from the stage, but the line of sight is good and straight on from any of the seats in the back of the Hall.
Last night’s performance marked the second time I have heard the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. I checked it out in San Francisco in 1997ce (see previous material). This time, the stage set was completely different and the orchestration was somewhat changed as well.
The choir consisted of Thomanerchor Liepzig (The choir of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig) that Bach himself led, several hundred years ago. They were perhaps 90 strong and provided the choir solo voices for the Apostle Peter and other parts from within their number. They were split and arranged on benches at stage front left and front right, featured prominently. The orchestration consisted of a small chamber group surrounding the conductor and a harmonium. The harmonium was played by the director of the boy’s choir. The chamber group was comprised of a cellist, bassist, first and second violins, and reeds. On a platform behind the group were the six soloists. The secondary strings and flutes and reeds were placed in the rear of the stage behind the soloists and Mr. Masur stood on a raised platform just to the right of the harmonium.
The performance was microphoned and amplified but the volume was far too low to enjoy complex changes in dynamics. The sound in the corner seats in the rear boxes where we were (went with D.) was good but could have been louder and with more dynamic variance. The seats were angled hard and somewhat cramped so we had to turn our heads to face the stage stereophonically.
The New York Times ran a review of the performance from the weekend past on the morning I saw the show (cf.: NYT, FEB 17, The Arts, p.4, aside: Siva Vaidyanthan on the cover for an unrelated story regarding a lost scrap of paper written upon by Mark Twain). The article said the work was among Masur’s first with the Philharmonic and suggested the changes and alterations (i.e. using St. Thomas Church choir from Liepzig) were Masur’s continuing efforts to come to know the music of Bach.
The performance was at a quick tempo, not workman-like, but regular. There were some lovely voices in the context of the piece, including the mezzo-soprano whose work was so beautiful. The tenor who handled the part of the Evangelist may have been a little tired from a weekend’s worth of performance. He was good, though.
The quality of live music performance in New York City is generally extremely high. Everywhere I go I hear bold, confident, passionate performances. The players are eager and well-prepared. In New York, the level of energy and play and quality of sound by any given performer is so much More More More than anywhere else I have been in the US. There is little doubt or wavering. The performers have in the context of their relationship to the venue and the audience, a certain confidence that frees them to try to be their best. Or maybe they are scared witless and just playing their asses off so they can “make it in New York.” But it doesn’t “fee’” like the latter. Rather it is just the general level of play, that the town attracts the nation’s best. That is how it feels to me so far. (so why is the coffee so bad?)
The performance had some interesting moments: the second mezzo-soprano solo in the second part, is predecessed and accompanied by an instrumental sectional. There is a relationship here between the melody here and the melody of one of the six Violin Concerti for Violin and harpsichord. The theme is augmented and then toyed with slightly, but check it out.
The section I awaited, had remembered from the last performance, was the simple harmony (or is it even unison?) calling out of the name of Barrabas. It lacked the impact it had in SF. There, the choir erupted in the name of Barrabas so loudly and strongly, one could hear the maddening crowd calling the name. Here the section passed relatively quickly. The tempo was speeded up and even-handed without such lingering drama. Perhaps that is an aspect of performance here or by Masur.
He was beautiful to watch. Had a relationship with the music as he conducted. His body language, his expressiveness coaxed, pushed and pulled on the sound. It was nice. Masur’s an older man, balding (big centered patch over grey, evenly-cut hair all around), with a big frame. maybe 6’2” or 3” tall.
2/13/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noonish on a Friday
Yo, I was set up … by Mingus and knocked down … by The Mingus Big Band over gin and tonics at the Fez.
Last night after work I went to a lecture by David Dinkins, former Mayor of New York, sponsored by The New School. It was a part of a series of lectures taking place this semester entitled, “Media and Race Relations.” Dinkins feels like a really positive old guy. Very forthright and direct and even-handed. He read a prepared speech and then fielded questions from the crowd of maybe twenty or thirty people on hand. The speech was rhythmic and well-paced, addressing the topic in general terms and peppered with a couple of extemporary examples.
He did not say anything too unusual, said what the ex-first-Black-Mayor-of-New-York-City-who-was-embattled-throughout-his-administration-and-who-lost-re-election-by-the-same-slim-margin-he-won-by-first-time-round might be expected to say, that, and I’m paraphrasing here, things under the current administration pretty much suck … unless you’re rich. That the crime rate being down is a good thing, but that it was his previous administrations programs that were primarily responsible. That the current Mayor is a bully. He defended himself against the main controversy of his term.
He is a politician after all and was obliged thus to say some things about America and “this great City,” and so on. He spoke eloquently about the disparities of this city, though. Mentioned that the infant mortality rate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is 5.4 per 1,000 live births and in Fort Green Brooklyn, less than twenty miles away, it is 24 per 1,000 live births. A frightening and sad statistic. He mentioned another statistic that I found staggering: regarding the media and it’s treatment of women and women’s issues.
In a recent media study, he reported, it was found that when a person is referred to in the Main section of the paper, 86% of the time it is a male person, in the business section 85%, and in the Metropolitan sections 76% of the time references are to men. Of the occasions when women are mentioned in the paper, more than 50% of the time it is as a perpetrator of some crime or in some other negative connotation.
These numbers are weird and I can not understand really how they are conceived. I’d like to look into that.
It’s funny how a thought becomes a statistic becomes a fact and a part of social truth. Paz: “the North American … substitutes social truth for real truth which is always disagreeable.” Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950.
The lecture was good. I look forward to the next one in the series by the Reverend Al Sharpton.
(Afterward, I came back here to the office and edited the third draft of “Mahmoud Singh.” It’s a good first story for New York. I feel tired of it now though. It doesn’t breathe enough. Need to make a new one. When? When I get some peace of mind.)
MB made 9:00 reservations for us at the Time cafe and Fez Supper Club.
While I was waiting for him at the school, I was chatting with the security guard and a young woman who was also waiting, to meet someone after class. I said to the guard, “You’ve heard of home-sickness, right? … what do you call it when you have no home and yet you feel a sickness? That is, you have no place to be homesick for but you feel a sickness for a home that exists in your mind?”
The young woman said, “Identity Crisis.”
I waited for MB at my building until ten minutes to 9, then we hopped in a cab to the club at Great Jones and Lafayette streets in the East Village. Arrived right at 9 and went in. “Time” is labyrinthine with an upstairs glass-walled, fishbowl restaurant and then a blue archway leading to an inner red-boothed bar, both filled with the pretty people and then a stairwell down into the sanctum, a blue walled hallway leading to the supper club known as The Fez, where we were met by a beautiful young bronzey Black woman wearing a wireless headset who was responsible for seating us. Girl was fine and had a sweet smile. I said to her, looking as deeply as I could into her eyes in the darkness of the low-ceilinged club, “it must be difficult walking around with disembodied voices in your head.” and I smiled. She looked puzzled at first and then was actually interrupted by the voice in the headset to which she responded first and then smiled that beautiful smile and said to me, “Yeah, it gets a little confusing when it’s busy.” Fine.
We sat and ordered a round of drinks. MB had the usual. I was hungry and ordered some Salmon which was not great. It was boring and tasted like nothing except the sauces and spices which were hardly placed on the plate. Even the supposed blackened salmon with wasabi-vinagrette that sounded so nice was boring food, and too expensive.
The deal on the gig was that the cover was $18 and there was a two-drink minimum, but you could stay for the second set once you were inside. Dinner was not included and we were wearing serious critics ears after dropping so much bread for the much-hyped Mingus Big Band. Much of it was choice of course, because I wanted to estimate the place, quality of the food, seating etc.
I spent three bucks on the coatcheck and 18 to get in and 63 on drinks and dinner. That’s $84 for the two of us with the show included. We were there at 9:00 and the show started at 9:30.
The set up:
The Mingus Big Band is a Workshop group that plays the music of Charles Mingus. They opened the set by telling us they were going to play some music they hadn’t practiced fully, that they hadn’t looked at in a long time. It was odd. The performance started with a chart called, “Slippers,” and they were literally signalling and calling out changes and sections to one another. It felt crowded and unrehearsed. They were working shit out while they played. It gave MB and I pause. We figured we had been taken. $18 and the drinks for this? We are new to New York, him a year and a half and me a few months, we didn’t know any better than to attend the Mingus Big Band, thinking we’d hear some Mingus wicked-like.
They were struggling their way through the shit when I actually wrote on a napkin at one point, “MINGUS DONE 20 YEARS and STILL KICKING ALL Y’ALLS ASSES”
The band also recognized their benefactor, Sue Mingus who was in attendance, a blonde, short-haired (business cut) older white woman with a kindly, smiley way about her. Then they introduced a Mingus contemporary, one Mr. Howard Johnson who played in a Mingus septet at one point and who charted an arrangement of “OP,” a tune originally written for Oscar Pettitford. Mr. Johnson was to direct the band in playing it. He introduced it with some discussion about his relationship with Mingus and then actually took a moment to remind the band of some changes and notations. Again it was odd. Like a practice session.
They flubbed the shit out of it so badly they had to be counted into the “D” section. It was almost comical. But occasionally our thoughts crept to how much we’d paid to see the show.
The set break came and we decided to take a little stroll around the block. We got back to try to find some better seats, since the second set was less crowded. The sweet hostess with the headset made a little small talk with me and smiled that beautiful smile again. She led us to a pair of seats front and center. Many people left, but there were several sticking around for the second half.
The Knock Down
Bam! How can I describe the second set to you without explaining that we were HAD! The dark, low-hanging ceiling of the Fez filled out with the radical sounds of Mingus! It was crazy. It was like a different group came on. They were wild and soloing like crazy and just out of this world. Hollering and yelling and playing tight tight tight Mingus licks like they weren’t even the same band as the first set. It was too much. MB and I kept staring across the table at one another and laughing. They completely turned us around. It ended with a raging take on Better Get Hit in Yo Soul which knocked the doors off the place. It was two different gigs: a rehearsal/workshop and a straight ahead performance! Cool.
An instructor from the New School is the bass player in the band and he had a student come up and jam on harmonica at the gig, too. It was right on to be associated with the cat. Big-ass shoes to fill, and he did so respectfully and with modesty. Even had some skills, too.
The deal
The Mingus Big Band plays at the Time Cafe in the Fez Club. $18 for both sets OR with student ID, $10 for the second set only!!! They’re saving the shit, man. Go second half!!! And find yourself the soul of Mingus kicking through a 15-piece, sweet-ass, tight-playing, booty-kicking band. The food’s overpriced unless you get something like hummus or chips, and the two-drink minimum is worth it if you’re coming in that late anyway. Mingus Big Band, a nice time.
So yo, I was set up and knocked down by the Mingus Big Band over gin and tonics at the Fez.
Afterward we walked for a while and ended up at the Coffeeshop on Union Square for a bite to eat, then I cabbed it home. Expensive nights are all too much fun in NYC.
2/10/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon
It’s a Tuesday morning and last night I saw the inside of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center for the first time in my life. I saw the Met production of Die Zauberflote by Mozart.
Lincoln Center is really beautiful. The main entranceway holds a grand staircase placed between two very large canvasses by Marc Chagall, bright colors and swirled lines. The interior of the Opera House is all golds and red velvet. I did a sketch at intermission of the stage lay out. Our seats were pretty far back and high up but the view was perfect. The performers are un-mic’ed and yet their voices and the music carry so beautifully through the hall. The place is intimate despite its size. It has five rows of box seats up the left and right sides of the stage. Everything is covered in red velvet.
The seats are equipped with Met Titles which appear on a small digitized computer screen placed in a railing before each seat. the titles provide simultaneous translation of the Opera. They can be turned on and off and will pick up at any given line as the production proceeds. Gracefully designed devices. You cannot “read” the screens on either side of you because of the angle of placement, however if you lean forward you can see in the dark theatre the seat by seat staggered glow of gold letters on screens before the seats below you. Marvelous technology which makes the production much more enjoyable for audience-members who do not speak German or Italian or etc.
“Die Zauberflote” means “The Magic Flute.” Ignoring the racist positioning of the White European in a position of superiority over the Moor and the general glorification of white over black features, light over dark which is established in the piece, the opera is a light-hearted romance about love and human longing for companionship. Papageno the clown and his Papagena provide the comic climax in the pa-pa-pa-pa scene which I saw first in the film “Amadeus.” There are high arpeggiated sequences by the Queen of Night who handled them with flair, and long tender arias by both Pamina and Tamino, the leads. There are also noble arias by the baritone who plays the King, Sarasanto. There are even roles for three young boys who play guiding angels to the hero, Tamino.
The racism in the opera isn’t about current ideas of race hatred, it is simply the ignorance and attitudes of an era gone by – lyrics by Papageno glorifying the beauty of the white, blonde-haired Pamina and several about the ugliness of the Black Moor. It is frustrating that such lines will exist in the context of a Meisterwork by a man like Mozart for so long. Frustrating to me at least whose face is brown and more like the black-faced white man who portrayed the Moor, than the blonde-blue eyed woman who played the princess.
The experience was a good first one for me at the Lincoln Center and with the Metropolitan Opera. The tickets were expensive ($66) and we were treated to them and to dinner – at the Italian restaurant Fiorello, just opposite the theatre on Broadway – by Alex and Sally, a lovely elderly couple who are friends of R. who works in my office. It was a good time. But I find socializing difficult. I had the seared tuna in capers, onions, roasted peppers and sundried tomate. (boring though it sounds nice … It was tasty but predictable).
Quickly now to last Wednesday to cover the lecture entitled “Lawyers of Political Prisoners in the United States,” at the Benjamin Cardozo Law School and pulled together by Michael Kasner and BALLSA (maybe it’s black and latin-american law students association??). A panel discussion hosted by Kathleen Cleaver and featuring Johnnie Cochran, Lennox Hinds, Leonard Weinglass and others. A powerfully inspiring lecture by a group of lawyers who care about people. It was meaningful on many levels.
Got straight dope on the cases of Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu Jamal, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, geronimo ji Jaga and others. Some heavy statistics: there are now 600,000 lawyers in the US. Of these 90% work for 10% of the wealth. “That leaves 10% for the rest of us.” Maybe 600 work in areas like political prisoners rights and etc. Stats about Mumia’s case that are still overwhelmingly frustrating to accept.
A letter from Assata Shakur to “his Holiness,” Pope John Paul II on his visit to Cuba in response to a request of the Pope by the New Jersey State Police to help them extradite Assata Shakur Too much. Lennox Hinds was fantastic. He spoke so eloquently of ethics. It was truly inspiring and the lecture was packed with people.
This was a very disappointing edit and when it appeared, I was enraged. My name was spelled wrong – and it’s the third typo on the page!
The first is in the image where the images of his work are labelled, “(Rigo)” – which isn’t his name, and shows the overactive hand of the newly minted fashion magazine’s editors –
whose next immediate typo is in the HEADLINE – an extra apostrophe where it should be “Maos”. The piece is also edited considerably from what I submitted and the editors took liberties adding and removing text that changed the meaning of full paragraphs. But anyway here is how it ran:
I began a friendship and apprenticeship with Rigo after this November interview, in the year 1996, which lasted ten years.
“
M.T. Karthik 