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Monday, June 12, 2006
How to disappear completely
This seems to be the summer where I dive into irrelevancy. I’m actually soaking up more books, TV and movies than before but it’s all stuff from past eras. I’ve been spending enough times in used book and video rental stores to forget the latest “cool new thing” and instead draw from decades of almost forgotten pop culture.
That means this area of my life suffers. To keep coming up with dynamic and interesting blog posts I should stay on top of the latest in comics or movies or what have you (I do really want to see Prairie Home Companion and read the third Scott Pilgrim book sometime soon but who has the time these days?). So in one meaty and probably annoying (and certainly unnecessary!) blog post I present to you what I’ve been wasting my time with.
The second season of Twin Peaks (from 1990/1991)
Not yet on DVD I’m blazing through sixteen year old VHS copies to continue the story of Washington’s craziest little town. Before starting this season I kept hearing how the show loses the plot but all comes back in the end for some real crazy David Lynch stuff. I just finished “The Orchid’s Curse” (it’s the one where Cooper and Sheriff Truman rescue Audrey from One-Eyed Jacks) and still feel interested in the show. The challenge for the show is now that Laura Palmer’s murder investigation is wrapping up can the quirky characters stand on their own with their own stories. For the main players like the Hornes and the law enforcement I would say yes but I’m still not sure about lesser characters, such as Big Ed’s wife reverting back to a teenager. It’s a neat idea since the actual teenager characters and their journey from innocence is a big part of the show, hopefully they’ll tie those two storylines together.
Apparently the problem came from Kyle McLachlan not wanting to do a central storyline where Cooper gets involved with Audrey, the best of the teenage characters. I agree with this decision. The big secrets of Twin Peaks deal with men like Ben Horne and Leland Palmer taking advantage of “the girls behind the perfume counter.” Cooper should be above that. Of course, he’ll still have his own secrets revealed as the show progresses. When his ex-partner Windom Earle shows up will see more (I haven’t seen those episodes, I just researched ahead).
”The City of the Dead” episode of Doctor Who (From 1979 and looks it)
So I decided to try some Doctor Who, a favorite of my Dad’s growing up and other smart people I know. I just never could get into it as a kid but I figured as an older and wiser person I could appreciate the show. I picked this episode because it was co-written by Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame.
There are a lot of elements of the show I like. I like Tom Baker’s Doctor. He’s smart and has plenty of good one-liners. The idea of Earth’s savior not being Captain Kirk/Han Solo type but an eccentric and aloof egghead with a love of long scarves is a cool one. No one has pulled off the combination of bug-eyes and prominent teeth better than this man. I like the way The Doctor and Ramona saw Earth as outsiders (although I was baffled by Ramona’s choice in wardrobe, which seemed to be a mix of Japanese schoolgirl and Italian gondolier) and the romantic undertone in their relationship. Julian Glover was a fun villain as The Count and I liked his look under his mask. I enjoyed seeing John Cleese and Eleanor Bron show up for a cameo. The storyline of multiple Mona Lisa’s and the beginning of the human race was pretty interesting, although it felt more like a standard time travel story near the end.
BUT good gosh does that dated BBC look just not do it for me. The parts of Paris that were filmed were okay although I don’t know why they decided to dwell on that for so long other than to make-up for the travel expenditure (see also: Carmela’s recent trip to The City of Lights in The Sopranos). When the show is videotaped on a set, which is most of the show, it just has this limp look that I’ve never warmed up to. I usually enjoy low-budget sci-fi settings like that of the original Star Trek. Here the leisurely pace, spare use of score and cheap sets don’t hold any charm for me. I’m just reminded that the show was being produced in a bygone era. Do the new episodes airing on the Sci-Fi channel remedy this? I want me some good British sci-fi but not feeling like I’m watching a midday American soap opera.
And man oh man does that theme song rule.
Shitty science fiction books I get for cheap (from various years but all from before I was born)
I go to this bookstore on Irving street in San Francisco (I honestly cannot remember the name of it), go to their selection of sci-fi paperbacks and pick out what has the craziest covers. So far I’ve finished W. Watts Biggers’s (the co-creator of Underdog) The Man Inside, which wasn’t really a sci-fi book, and I’m now half-way through Richard Cowper’s (real name John Middleton Murry, Jr ) Clone. Up next is Avram Davidson’s Mutiny in Space, which I got because it promised “a bizarre army of screaming women.”
Biggers book, from 1968, was actually a parody of the stories about young men searching for a purpose in life. A short man with no memory of his past encounters psychologists who encourage the actual realization of the Oedipus complex, gets suckered into a paternity scam and finally becomes the toy of a rich Southern man’s son (this before Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason’s The Toy). It’s a funny idea although most of the situations are more bizarre than humorous. Biggers has a supremely cynical take on gender relations, leading to a situation with a transgendered person (the nephew of the Southern man…ah, it’s too complicated to explain) that’s in real poor taste. If the bad dialogue between characters is meant to be a part of this parody I couldn’t tell, I just thought Biggers had a tin ear for the way people talk. This was worth reading if you like nutty books from the ‘60s that tried to cash in on the youth movement but that’s about it.
Clone is better on a superficial level. Cowper’s dialogue is witty and so his description of London of 2072 (the book is from 1972). It reminded me of the aforementioned Adams’s work but not as thorough a comedy. Explore the book any deeper, really not that much deeper, and the book falls apart. The story of one of four cloned boys and his quest to find out about his visions is a loose plot to begin with and Cowper doesn’t really seem interest in moving it along. Instead we get plenty of description about intelligent chimps and apes that are now the resident minority in England. The use of human’s evolutionary cousins for social satire was done better in Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes. Here chimps just replace any racial or economic minority in real life, which was an odd choice. It proved to be dull when one when one of Cowper’s main attempts at satire is bringing out the well worn stereotype of ego-driven Marxist revolutionary. Then it proved to be disturbing when Cowper follows up an implied human/simian gang rape (oh the search hits I’ll get!) with a real one. This follows Cowper’s similarly irritating treatment of women in his story. All the good credit the author gets for predicating gay marriage is quickly lost when the lesbian scientist, the one behind the cloning, is written as a woman who is good at fainting a lot and pretty much nothing else. All this and we only really see one of the four clones and never get into the issue of identity, which one would think would be perfect for a story about cloning.
Oh obscure science fiction writers, why does it seem you just use your books to sort out any personal dysfunctions you might have?
The Raconteurs at Amoeba (this past Thursday)
Hey, this is actually relevant. A free show at super-record store Amoeba on Haight (they actually cleared out the store at 8 p.m. and filled it with fans waiting outside) was a pretty fun way to top a nice evening. This was their first show in San Francisco and I think this was their third show anywhere after the Henry Fonda theatre in L.A. and the Amoeba in-store appearance in that city.
Jack White’s new band does the ‘70s-tingned garage rock in a much more traditional way than The White Stripes. The two-guitar and rhythm section line-up is augmented by some new wave keyboards, which gave some songs a cool new dimension. I was only familiar with the single “Steady as She Goes” before this but it turns out a lot of other songs are pretty darn catchy, with plenty of rocking behind the tunes. The only misfire would be an acoustic song that sounded too much like Lionel Richie’s “Easy.” The band closed with “Blue Veins,” the sort of throw back to Led Zeppelin White likes to do now and again. White proved to me that he really is an underrated guitar player. When he solos he’s got this great melodic sense going through that most guitar players forget, more content to just show off a bunch of tricks. Now I just nee to see White’s full-time gig in concert.
The end of this post (now)
There we go, the reason why I haven’t talked about many comics lately. Nothing’s really grabbed my interest lately although I liked Megan Kelso’s new book coming out this month and I think Gilbert Hernandez is doing great work. Maybe I’ll think of something soon though. In the meantime I’ll probably play some 78s on an old record player then go see a five-cent nickelodeon in my furthering quest for the obscure.
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