Writer, Writer, Show

With the arrival of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, what was already fairly clear has now become undeniable: Sorkin is television's answer to M. Night Shyamalan.

There are two seemingly cast-iron rules to Shyamalan's output, starting with Sixth Sense and ending with The Happening (I've not seen Last Airbender): each new film will be somewhat disappointing considering what has gone before, and each new film will be treated by critics as being, at a bare minimum, ten times as shitty as the last film Shyamalan slapped together.

I can't remember the last time I read a review of a Shyamalan film that was recognisable as discussing the film I had watched.  Signs, maybe? More likely Unbreakable, though even that is underrated.  Certainly by the time The Village came out, there was significant grumbling that the film was poor, as oppose to what it actually is - reasonably good with a frustrating ending.  More interestingly, though, the amount of column inches spent on discussing the director increased dramatically.  It wasn't enough to review The Village; everyone had to bitch about how they didn't like Signs, and how Shyamalan was a dick for always giving himself cameos.

Then, when Lady in the Water (entirely lightweight with some good moments) appeared, reviews seemed to discuss the film almost as an afterthought, and then only to argue that Shyamalan's role as a visionary writer was proof his colossal ego was ruining everything, including a cynical film critic who's horribly mauled was evidence that he couldn't take being slated in the press, and mocking him for being overly-reliant on twist endings, which doesn't actually describe the film at all unless you take "twist" to mean "new development".

(The Happening, of course, was generally hailed as one of the worst films ever created, by reviewers so blinded by their contempt of Shyamalan that they didn't even bother considering whether or not what they were writing made sense any more.)

Aaron Sorkin has had a similar problem over the years (Ryan Adams too, but that's a different post), though since The Newsroom is only his fourth TV series, there's been less opportunity to observe the phenomenon.  Sorkin pissed off a spectacular number of people with The West Wing.  Conservatives hated it because it cast them as the bad guys forever stymieing the geniuses inside the White House.  Liberals hated it because it spent so much time presenting "reasonable Republicans" at a time in US history where the left was convinced the GOP was nothing but a collection of bullies hypocrites (which is true, obviously).  And lots of people in the middle hated it just because of the aura of smugness the show demonstrated.  Reports of Sorkin himself being something of a jerk didn't particularly help, either.

This background hum of disgruntlement came to the fore when Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip began.  Now,  there are a lot of reasons to not like that show, chief among them the fact that it never gave us any reason to care what happened backstage at a comedy show, and couldn't sell that show as being even remotely funny. When one of your characters is trying to justify why a comedy show should be worth writing an article about,   something's gone wrong.

So it was a disappointment.  An extremely expensive, po-faced disappointment that I enjoyed, but couldn't find it in my heart to argue deserved a second season.  From the reviews the show got, however, you could be forgiven for thinking each broadcast downloaded an electronic variant of bubonic plague straight into the viewer's eyeballs.  Tellingly, many of these screeds focused not on the show's failings, but on Sorkin himself. What made Sorkin think he could handle comedy? Did the main character being told he wasn't great at writing for black cast members mean Sorkin himself didn't know how to relate to black actors?  Which of Sorkin's ex-girlfriends was Harriet Hayes most based on, and why should we care about his personal life anyway?  On and on and on, an outpouring of dislike for a writer hastily disguised as comments on his work.

Five years after Studio 60 concluded, Sorkin has returned with what I can only describe as a classic Shyamalan move: a show about how the American media are a bunch of cowards and/or pricks.

Now, obviously, the American media are a bunch of cowards and/or pricks, at least in general, but that in itself doesn't mean the show is necessarily any good.  What it does mean, however, is that it was always going to have a rough ride.  Right now it's being decried as the worst work of fiction since Jud Suss by pretty much anyone who's paid for their critical opinion, and once again, much of the ire is directed at Sorkin himself.  Two thirds about the writer, one third about the show.  Kind of like this post, really, though I have an excuse: I didn't get paid for handing this in and calling it a review.

It's almost impossible, then, to form any kind of opinion about what the show is like without seeing it for yourself.  Here, for what it's worth, is my take on the season opener, "We Just Decided To".  The two problems that sank Studio 60 have both been rectified by the change of location: The Newsroom isn't under pressure to be too funny, and the relevance of the show is clear.  The downside is an increase in sentimentality and mawkish speeches about the awesomeness of America, along with an entirely unbearable (and unlistenable; WG Snuffy Alden's absence is noticeable here) title sequence that felt like it went on for sixteen minutes and was trying to subconsciously compel me to blow Edward R Murrow.

If you can take such moments (there's two or three in the entire seventy-minute episode), and those who watched The West Wing probably already know whether or not they can, then there's a great deal to enjoy here.  Jeff Daniels is excellent as Will McAvoy, and though his character seems a little over-the-top and cliched in his egotistic belligerence, and the rest of the cast are strong too, particularly jittery delight Alison Pill and reptilian malcontent Thomas Sadoski.  Only Dev Patel seems ill at ease, but then he didn't really get anything to do this time around in any case, so maybe that explains it. It's interestingly shot: far more expansive and coldly lit than Sorkin's previous shows, and the dialogue feels very differently paced.  If anything, it's more reminiscent of The Social Network in look than anything from Sorkin's TV work, which is presumably partially due to the absence of Thomas Schlamme. 

If nothing else, then, it's fascinating for longtime Sorkin fans to watch purely to see how differently one of his shows can seem when his usual collaborators aren't involved.  Fortunately, there seems to be plenty else, and if we're never going to get to see anything as wonderful as The West Wing spring from Sorkin's pen again, this could end up finishing a respectable second.  Just so long as the show avoids the greatest danger presented by its format: taking real news events and having the cast cover them, which is that Sorkin simply writes down exactly what he wished he could've said to everyone involved at the time.  Twitter can only get you so far, after all.  Is it really just coincidence that this first episode mentions the difficulty of saying things of any real meaning on Twitter and OH MY GOD NOW I'M DOING IT TOO.

The Song Remains The Same

I took a bit of a detour from my usual genre stomping grounds recently, on the request of a friend who wanted a book review without having to go to the trouble of actually reading the book in question.  Happy for a change of scenery, I agreed.  That's how I came to read Madeline Miller's debut novel, the Orange Prize-winning Song of Achilles.

I don't get it.

Homer's Iliad is well over 2000 years old - and closer to 3000 - and even it wasn't being original when it told the story of Achilles' endeavours in the war between Greece and Troy.  Nor is it as though the tale of Helen's flight from Menelaus and the resulting conflict something fiction writers have chosen to ignore until this point (there's been two feature films and a TV miniseries on the subject just whilst Miller was writing the novel).  If you're going to jump into such a crowded and longstanding market, you've either got to rejig the basics to the point where they become original again, or you've got to tell the standard story with enough style to make a well-worn path seem new and interesting again.

Miller ultimately fails to do either.

The central conceit to Song of Achilles is that Achilles and Patroclus were not merely close companions, but gay lovers.  When asked where she got the idea, Miller says she got it from Plato. I'm sure that's true.  But she could also have gotten it from any GCSE student who's been exposed to the Iliad, or even the story of the Trojan War more generally. As twists go, "What if Achilles was shagging Patroclus?" is only slightly less obvious than "What if God was an alien?".  Miller was still the first (so far as I know) to actually put the idea into practice, but even so, if your foundations are this obvious, you need to put an awful lot of effort into ensuring the completed structure is pretty enough to disguise its prosaic beginnings.

Song of Achilles just doesn't really manage that.  It's prose is pleasingly concise, and the whole book rattles along at a reasonable pace, which is certainly a plus point, but minimalist doesn't necessarily need to feel bloodless and stark, but for too much of the book that's the impression generated.

The novel can be broken down fairly easily into three distinct parts: the meeting and growing closeness of Achilles and Patroclus during peace-time; the build-up to and first few years of the war; and the final days of Patroclus as destiny finally begins to catch up with our heroes.  The first two sections call to mind that old saw about writing that is both original and good: the first part is only the former, the second merely the latter. The opening third is all the more frustrating because of the obvious parallels to real life that Miller seems uninterested in exploring.   Who among us, in the bloom of puberty and of our first loves, didn't endow the object of our affections with supernatural qualities.  When Patroclus looks at Achilles and sees perfection, isn't that what we all did?  Exploring what that would mean in a situation in which the one we obsess over actually is as a god?

In Miller's defence, such an approach would require a very different book, one in which Patroclus either is not narrator, or shows a great deal more awareness and agency than he does here. Frankly, those are things he could really do with; there's only so many iterations of "I saw how awesome Achilles was, and thought I was rubbish, then it was time for cheese and olives" you can get through before you long for Hector to show up early and get down to some serious stabbing.  There's something very Marty-Sue about Patroclus, constantly thinking he's worthless whilst demigods, centaurs, and the Fates themselves keep alluding to his superiority.  A few references to the perverse difficulties inherent in being with someone you consider so much better than you are interesting to digest. Two hundred and fifty pages of it can fuck right off.

The biggest missed opportunity and baffling choice in Patroclus' pre-war adventures involves his time with Achilles in the mountains, under the tutelage of the centaur Chiron.  Achilles' mother Thetis [1], a sea-nymph, has made her dislike of Patroclus very clear, to the point that, unbeknownst to Patroclus, the only reason Achilles doesn't jump his bones when both boys are fourteen is for fear his immortal mother may be watching.

This state of affair lasts for two years after Patroclus first dares a kiss, and is silently rebuffed.  Two years in which Patroclus was with his love almost every minute of every day, in which they slept inches apart, in which there was plenty of wrestling practise and long dips in mountain pools and the gods alone know what else.  And through all of this, Patroclus doesn't know why Achilles won't kiss him.  Mixed messages don't begin to cover it.

A great deal of this will sound familiar to almost everyone.  How many of us got hit by our first real, breathtaking crushes (which we called "love" simply because we lacked a frame of reference) when at school, and so ran into those we wanted every day, unable or unwilling to admit our interest, or having already been discovered and desperate to believe that one day the calculus would change and we could get what - who - we wanted?  And whilst this might have hit for the first time when the deadline for algebra homework was still a pressing concern, it is a lucky man indeed (or perhaps simply an inexperienced one) who can say they never came across it again.

Miller deals with this ocean of melancholy possibility by writing "two years passed," presumably so she can hurry to the second third of the book, in which the early myths of Achilles are retold in a style which is breezy but entirely perfunctory.  But what kind of love story skips the tricky bits?  And if Miller didn't come to tell us a love story, then what exactly is she doing here?

The best answer I can find to that question comes during the book's final third which, to be fair, is a great improvement.  It is here that once again Patroclus goes through something familiar to us all, the realisation that those we loved as perfect are anything but.  What makes Patroclus' awakening so interesting is that it's precisely the aspects of Achilles he loves so much that end up wrecking everything. Achilles' lack of guile and willingness to forgive prove to be evidence not of empathy, but of having so little interest in others that it is difficult to make any impression on him, even a negative one.  His all-encompassing quest for immortality through glory seems entirely appropriate to Patroclus when it involves Achilles fighting battles alongside their comrades ("The assembled might of Greece Offended"), but it looks a lot less appealing when it leads to Achilles abandoning innocents to the wrath of Agamemnon so as to paint the latter as a petty tyrant.

In other words, it's about the point where you finally figure out that a relationship is not hermetically sealed; that they cannot be judged simply on internal interactions.  Watching Patroclus come to terms with this, and Achilles entirely fail to (indeed it's not even clear he comprehends whats happening) provides a surprising amount of pay-off to what has been for most of its span a fairly lacklustre novel, and does at least give the whole a purpose, albeit a shaky one.

Still, it's a quick read, it ends well, and for those with only a passing familiarity of Achilles, it might work rather better than it did for me.  Just don't expect much in the way of surprises, or pretty prose, or any help in understanding how this won the Orange Prize in the first place.

[1] One of only four women in the whole book who have anything but the briefest of appearances, by the way. She and Deidamia are both deeply unpleasant, and Patroclus' mother is mentally retarded.  Only Briseis is particularly sympathetic, and it isn't until the book is more than half done before she shows up.  

Fiddling Whilst Jacksonville Burns

As the "world's greatest country" continues to experiment with determining exactly how cruelly it can treat its own citizens and everyone else on the planet who's country doesn't rhyme with Bisrael, we can now add "fatal diseases" to the list of dangers not all governors agree it should be their job to deal with, or even admit exist.

Of course, with a little bit of budget juggling it would be perfectly possible to reopen the tuberculosis clinic - though it would've been a damn sight easier if after the CDC filed report on the TB outbreak the brass hadn't ordered the hospital be closed ahead of schedule - by making use of the extra money the state is now eligible to receive following the ruling of the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality.

Will Rick Scott be accepting that money?  No.  No he will not.  If dozens of men, women and children have to die of a curable disease in one of the richest states in the world's richest country in order to demonstrate that... President Obama is really mean, I guess? - then that's not so bad, is it?  Especially when you consider how many of the bodies hitting the floor are homeless, or worse, black.

D CDs #500: Star-Crossed Brothers

Well, this should be interesting: the guy once voted his home town's whitest white guy - a town in which I shared my time at school with precisely three non-Caucasian families, no less - trying to write about the prelude to the era of Stankonia and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, two releases which even I paid attention to.

Fuck it.  Let's just ask Kanye to step in, shall we?

Yes, I heard about something a black person said once.

Ah.  Actually, that was less help than I'd hoped.

This can't come as a surprise to anyone who's read this blog, or met me for more than five minutes, but I'm not really a fan of hip hop.  It's an aesthetic thing: I like my lyrics sung.  It's not a simple a formulation as singing > rapping, of course.  It's just that for me, you get more emotional punch to a song when you can underscore the words with a tune.  This is almost certainly why I adore music, and have so little interest in poetry.  Set a poem to music, and I'm all over that shit.

Whatever advantages in delivery rapping presents over singing are lost on me, I suppose, which means whenever I listen to an album like this, my focus is on the quality of the lyrics themselves, along with the degree to which the backing catches my attention.  This is all by way of saying this review is at best a curious look at how out of touch white guys might view hip hop, and in no way of any use as a commentary on the strengths of the disc itself.

So, with all that said...

There's a lot I like about Aquemini (pronounced a-QUEH-min-iy, if you were wondering).  It starts particularly well with a quick intro ("Hold On, Be Strong") and the disc's statement of intent, "Return of the 'G", a track which treads the fine line between slamming "gangstas" for their attitude and lamentable choices in rap topics, but insisting that disliking confrontation is not the same thing as fearing it.  This is done by giving the former job to Andre 3000, and the latter to Big Boi. Sitting here in my white enclave in deepest Warwickshire, I'm not qualified to and have no intention of discussing whether this combination of attitudes is wise or even possible, but points have to be awarded for tackling the bifurcation of Outkast head-on here (that said, I'm not sure the subject matter of the rest of the disc is nearly so unique and "mind-unravellin'" as its creators would have you believe).

The other advantage of sharing rapping duties within the tracks is that it gives the illusion of development in each song, which is where in general the album ultimately comes a cropper.  Almost without exception, the tracks here do not build; they spring fully-formed from Zeus' cranium, and with an average song length of around minutes, even the best cuts here - "Rosa Parks" and the bonkers "Synthesizer" being the finest - tend to end at least a little time after you want them to; only the breezy attack of "Skew it on the Bar-B", the slow rolling "West Savannah", and the jittery apocalypse-warning of "Da Art of Storytellin' (Part 2)" feel completely free of flab.  The situation is hardly helped by the skits; I'm sure I'm not their intended audience, but that makes no difference to the fact that they take an already overlong album and pushes it into a serious endurance test.

Perhaps Aquemini is best considered as three separate suites.  Certainly, the first six tracks hang together very well, showcasing plenty of Outkast's undoubted range without stretching the point.  The second third, say from "Slump" (unfortunately though not inaccurately titled) through to the somewhat unlovely "Mamacita", can be bypassed without too much being lost, only the aforementioned "DAoS(P2)" standing out.  The final sashay towards the finish line picks up again, the five-way rap of "Y'All Scared" and the fuzz-guitar-laced "Chonkyfire" bringing things to a satisfying close, ebullient and sinister by turns, plus somewhat silly, which is always welcome. 

Brilliant though the song is, however, it stumbles into a slow-motion death march for its final minute, and segues into another skit.  It's just one more reminder of Outkast's refusal to tidy up the place after the party's over.  You can take almost any four or five tracks on here, listen to them together, and thoroughly enjoy the experience.  Try grinding through the whole thing and, assuming you're not doped up from toe to tongue, the sprawl just collapses under its own weight.

Six tentacles.

Five Things I Learned In (And Around) Shropshire

I'm newly returned from a weekend at The Other Half's parents, helping her celebrate her birthday through the application of cocktails, cooked meat, and zoo animals. Among the revelations of the last three days:

1. The chances of a train journey inside or just beyond Wales being free of intolerable fuck-ups is around 50%.  Maybe it was bad luck, but I travelled to Shrewsbury and Chester during my stay, as well as the actual trip to and from my flat, and every time something went wrong on either the outbound or return journey.  The smallest problem was a half hour delay on Friday; yesterday and today both involved cancellations all over the place.  Naturally, the staff involved ranged from brusque to actively objectionable.  How dare we ask for clarification on how to use the tickets we've already paid far too much for?
2. The Armoury in Shrewsbury is absolutely fantastic.  It's not exactly cheap (though neither is it exorbitant), but you're paying for both quality and quantity; concepts which all too often seem to work against each other.  Also, whilst you're eating, you can play with the pub's pile of games; TOH and I wiled away a necessary hour's worth of digestion by working through a copy of Articulate.  They've got an Etch-a-Sketch, too, which allowed me to present TOH with the worst rendering of a rose in assembled human history.  If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well, and if you can't do it well, it's at least worth doing so badly that it's at least worthy of comment.  There's also loads of explosives on the walls, which has to be worth something;
3. Another significant advantage to The Armoury is that it's less than ten metres from Ramdala Romolo, a restaurant that presumably serves food of some description, but which also has a kick-ass cocktail bar upstairs.  It has a far greater range than Ebony in Durham, and is cheaper than The Kenilworth in Kenilworth, my previous high watermarks for such things.  Try the Alaska Ice Tea, if you're ever in the area;
4. No-one would ever go poor betting on zoo crowds being filled with idiots and viciously callous idiots. How can anyone get into their thirties (at least) and not be able to tell the difference between a sloth and a koala? What possesses a father to encourage his child to mimic the behaviour of the mandrills through the glass, despite signs begging him not to and increasingly violent attacks by the primates on the glass in response (the toddler in question ended up in terrified tears: nice work!)?  What would possess a parent to take their kids to the zoo and complain about how boring animals are at every single enclosure?  And whilst it's entirely forgivable for someone to not be able to recognise an aardvark on sight, what hideous recesses of the lizard-brain could lead to someone arguing it's either a giant meerkat or an antelope? (Their companion tried to argue that they probably meant "anteater", only to be told that "an anteater is a type of antelope".);
5. I have finally been exposed to "original" Strongbow, which tastes identical to its more famous cousin (though is slightly less strong), but which gets some marks purely because the archer on the cans is clearly from Antiquity, rather than the Middle Ages warrior which is the standard symbol.  I'm not saying it makes the endeavour worthwhile, but it did make me smile. 

Last Gang In Town (Part 2)

Part 1

Time for another look at Game of Thrones' second season finale, as we consider how well the show adapted the travails of Jon in the north, Dany in the east, Theon in his father's shadow, and Stannis in a number of compromising positions with a sexy redhead.

(Spoilers etc.)

Cross-Cultural Leanings