So It's Come To This: SpaceSquid On Musicals

Sometimes the universe folds back in on itself in strange and surprising ways.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved the musical Chess. Well, if we’re rigidly accurate about things (and we all know how much I love rigid accuracy, unless it gets in the way of the dick jokes), I can’t claim to live the musical itself, because I’ve never seen it. Moreover, there at least two very different versions of the show, and I’m not talking about either of them. I’m talking about the original work in progress double CD released back in 1984. From what I understand, the West End version of the musical (which kicked off in 1986 and ran for three years) bears great similarity to this recording. The Broadway version, though, not so much. They gutted the whole thing, setting it over one tournament instead of two, and in the process pissed all over the core concept in a way that forever proves that the Americans hate art, chess, the Swedish, and, er, Elaine Page (even the Broadway critics were smart enough to recognise that it was bilge). Since then, apparently, newer variants of the show have combined the two versions in various ways.

None of which particularly matters. It’s the original concept album that fascinates me. My mother listened to very little music whilst I was growing up, and my father almost none. The one piece of music that I was ever likely to catch whilst we drove around my dearly departed home county was the bearded half of ABBA’s latest project. Sometimes I wonder if this lack of input as a child is what left me essentially entirely uninterested in music until I was into my late teens, but that’s another story.

As a young child there was very little about the story I understood. Obviously, something was going on with chess matches and such, and the Cold War was involved (of course, I was still in primary school at the time, so the Cold War was something I only understood in the vaguest terms: the Russians didn’t like us, and if we were very lucky no-one was going to get blown to pieces for no good reason). All I really took from it, though, was there was one song about a man whose father had left him at twelve, and whose mother had ignored or berated him throughout the following years (I banned Dad from playing that one because it upset me so much, which I‘m hoping is an admission people class as sweet rather than pathetic), and another one which made use of the word “bastard”, a truly thrilling prospect to any prepubescent boy.

The months went by, added up to years, and eventually my father tired of the increasingly worn tapes [1], and I got to get my sticky mitts on them. On and off, they began to soundtrack my teenage years, and ultimately my time at university and beyond. Of course by then I finally had a grip on the story as well.

And what a story it is. The chess World Championship is to be played between East and West in the very middle of the Cold War (this actually happened in the early Seventies when Spassky Boris Spassky faced Bobby Fischer). The Russian (neither player has names in the original) and the distinctly Fischer-like American [2] will be playing each other in the mountains of Tyrol . For their respective countries, this is an opportunity for a glorious propaganda victory (this desire is most overtly expressed by the Russian’s adviser and party-man Molokov, for whom beating the American is the only consideration for the entire competition, but one assumes the Americans are just as bloodthirsty). The problem is that neither player wants to, forgive me, play along. The Russian dreams of defecting, not due to any love of the West but because he is so tired of the endless machinations of The Party who believe they control him utterly and can take the credit for his victories. The American, on the other hand, simply wants the adoration of the public (likely due to the neglect he suffered at his parents’ hands, hence the song that made little Squid so miserable). More importantly, though, he wants the love of his second, Florence (though the exact nature of that love is ambiguous). She, however, quickly falls for the Russian, and joins him in exile when he defects at the end of the first act [3], having beaten the American to a pulp over the course of the tournament.

The fall-out to this is extreme. The Russians are furious that they have lost their prodigy, and the American is devastated that he has lost not only the title, but Florence too. A year passes, and the Championship begins again, this time in Bangkok (“One Night In Bangkok” being officially the second most famous song from Chess). The Russian will be facing a former countryman (this time of unquestionably loyalty to The Party), with the American acting as a kind of MC to the whole affair. The Soviets plan to embarrass the “traitor” by allowing his wife Svetlana to join him in his exile, a development that leads to him leaving Florence since he refuses to deal with her concern at the cost of the tournament.

The American, for his part, demands the Russian forfeit the match, or else he will tell Florence the secret of her father’s betrayal during the Hungarian Uprising in ‘56 (information she doesn’t possess, and which has been handed to the American by a wrathful Molokov).

It’s almost too obvious to point it out, but the characters themselves are of course trapped within their own chess game, as oblivious as their pieces.

Ultimately, the American and Molokov are ignored. The Russian annihilates his opponent, losing Florence and Svetlana, both of whom realise he doesn't care about anything but winning (both had begun to suspect that, of course, that's what the song "I Know Him So Well" is about, which every person reading this post has heard). He, for his part, realises that winning is a necessary condition for him, his unquestionable dominance of his chosen field is essential to his self-worth. Women and countries come and go, but his abilities are unquestionable. All he ever really wanted was the chance to show his victories were his, that he was responsible for the movements of his own life (hardly surprising for a chess player, did I mention this works on two levels yet?). No matter how obvious it is that he needs to win, though, he seems to find it harder to persuade himself that winning is sufficient.

The American has always been convinced that winning is sufficient, not for its own sake, but because he is sure that it will immediately lead to the respect he has been searching for his whole life. Of course, he will never get to find that out. He lost the actual chess tournament a year ago, and he has lost the meta-game now. The Russian has ignored him as irrelevant, Florence has abandoned him. The only bullet left in his gun is the secret regarding his former assistant's father. Which, of course, knowing that it will do him no good and will cause her nothing but pain, he fires anyway. It's literally the only move left to make in the game.

These ideas about finding one's necessary and sufficient conditions for happiness/self-respect correlated to thoughts I had been having at the time, and continue to have to this day. Am I best attempting to excel in one particular area of my life, or would I be more content striking a balance between various things? Most importantly, how much of one aspect should you deliberately sacrifice in exchange for advancement in another. I still haven't decided, and of course it strikes me as massively unlikely that there is just one answer (or that that my answer and your answer would, or should, match). Sometimes I wonder to what extent I enjoy Chess because it ties in so closely to those themes, and to what extent those themes were something I subconsciously acquired through repeated exposure to the musical in the first place. [4]

So its important to me; important to a degree very few artifacts from my childhood can match. Given all of that, it’s tempting to leave my view of the musical frozen in the past, just reach for my CD’s again, and pretend that nothing ever changes.

Except that on Wednesday I discovered that there’s going to be a performance of Chess in my humble little town come November. My better judgement tells me that I shouldn’t go, that it can’t possibly measure up the images my brain has constructed from the songs and singers I’ve been listening to for two decades now. On the other hand, the chance to finally watch the story unfold rather than to just read a synopsis is pretty hard to resist, even if I know that both main story variants dare to end on less of a bummer than the original does.

Plus: night at the theatre. I could get myself right purdy. Scrub m’sel’ up all posh like. And, of course, they have a bar…

[1] He’d started playing the flute and wanted to listen to as many flautists as possible, presumably to maximise his self-loathing. I love my Dad.

[2] If you’ve never heard of Bobby Fischer, please take the time to read his Wikipedia entry. The man was a grade A lunatic. His refusal to defend his title in 1975 is a high point of advanced nuttiness. The entry doesn’t go into full detail, but he refused to play because the ICF would only agree to 178 of his 179 conditions for attendance. Condition 179: if the tournament ended in a nine-all tie, he won.

There’s much more in there (I keep meaning to try playing some Fischer Random Chess with Danny, though I am certain to lose fast and ugly), and it gets increasingly unpleasant (Fischer was a notorious anti-Semitic) , but it’s a fascinating story about a true genius, who also happened to be a total douche.

[3] The Russian lays out his feelings just before he is smuggled out by a Western embassy in the song “Anthem”, one of the better known pieces from the musical. He opines that nations and borders are all wastes of time, needless barriers to humanity. Of course, he has a natural advantage in that his pride and self-belief are so bullet-proof that love of ones home would never occur to him. Who needs a place to belong when everything you give a damn about you get to carry with you?

Incidentally, Michael Ball massacred the song without mercy on his 1996 album The Musicals, proving once and for all that there exists nothing in this universe too great for Michael Ball to be unable to reduce it to foetid excrement with his touch. Seriously, he’s like King Midas, if Midas has wanted everything he touched to be turned to sewage. And then sold to idiots.

[4] I know full well that I’m heading out of my area of expertise, but I would think there are some fascinating discussions to be had on the effect our favourite fiction has upon our emotional and intellectual development, and to what degree our personality chooses our best-loved works as oppose to our best-loved works shaping our personality. The phrase “X changed my life” probably exists for a good reason, and I have several things that could replace the unknown in that sentence.

Took His Time

I've been waiting two days for someone to say this:

But the nomination of Palin ahead of the plainly more qualified Kay Bailey Hutchison is only intelligible in the context of the GOP's anti-choice base.

Damn right. Far as I can see, McCain picked a woman mainly to combat the historic nature of Obama's campaign [1], but he had to choose the right type of woman, i.e. one that energises the right-wing Christians that have been looking increasingly unhappy of late.

That's why it's Palin instead of one of the more weighty female names in the Republican Party, who just aren't far enough along the pro-life, climate change-denying, gay-bashing scale to help McCain's problems with his base.

I suppose that, if nothing else, the worst case scenario for this election now involves the first female VP in history, which ain't nothing. Cracks in the glass ceiling, and all that. It'll probably give me a warm inner glow about the inclusiveness of it all. Course, that will presumably be swiftly replaced with a warm outer glow because McCain's started a nuclear war with Russia, but c'mon, people. The glass is half full!!!

[1] This is not to say that a woman couldn't be picked as the Vice Presidential candidate purely on her own merits, obviously. I just think it's just fairly obvious that Palin wasn't. I also think anyone suggesting that this choice is designed to appeal to frustrated Hillary supporters is underestimating their intelligence, and overestimating their numbers.

Another Jenny

Yesterday morning an old acquaintance of mine lost her fiance to suicide. Every time I hear about someone ending their own life, I am reminded of this poem.

Jenny

Our Father who art in heaven
Jenny walked in front of a train last night
Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come,
She was only thirty seven
Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven
You knew what she was
going to do didn't you Lord?
Give us this day our daily bread,
She had no hope left
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
trespass against us
Jenny is forgiven, isn't she?
Lead us not into temptation
Lots of us are on the edge of darkness
And deliver us from evil,
The only strength we have is yours
For thine is the kingdom
And she's living there now
The power and the glory
She's yours Lord
For ever and ever,
Jenny
Amen.

I've only met Adrian Plass once, at a talk he gave at a local church, but differences in religion notwithstanding, he clearly has a fairly smart head screwed on to his shoulders. I hope he forgives me for ripping this poem out of Cabbages For The King and parading it on the blog.

Also, heartfelt thanks to Pause for rooting this out for me.

Creatures Of The Night

You know what I miss? Television programmes that scare me. I can't remember it happening since the early days of The X-Files. The episode "Squeeze", to be precise, which I watched upstairs alone so Dad could watch the football (or possibly just pass out in the living room). That was a pretty big mistake (though these days the fact it was set in Baltimore just makes me think of McNulty and co trying to investigate murders in locked rooms in which livers have been removed).

Since then, obviously, I've grown up (in the most literal sense if not in others), so the fact that TV no longer gives the willies can at least be partially attributed to be being all big and manly (shut up, it can). I'm not sure that's the only problem, though. Scaring people at the movies isn't especially difficult. I accept that a) I'm not a fearologist and b) I just made that word up, but it seems to me that the key to terrifying people is immersion.

Of course, that's true to some extent of instilling any emotion into people with flickering pictures. If you're not caught up in a film, you're unlikely to feel sadness at a character's death, for example. But the degree to which this is true varies on the specific feeling you want to evoke. You don't have to be paying much attention to a comedy to laugh, after all. So there's a difficulty scale in play here, and I reckon fear is very much near the end of that scale, just before the label that says "bastard hard".

In a cinema, immersion is a lot easier. The size of the screen, the volume of the incidental music, the surround sound, the darkness, it all aids in drawing you in (there's also something to be said for being surrounded by other people who are just as immersed as you are). Sat in your living room, in familiar surroundings, watching the glowing box in the corner, doesn't have the same impact. That doesn't mean you can't get scared (The Orphanage on DVD did a reasonable job of freaking me out a couple of months ago)

So shows like The X-Files already have the odds stacked against them. This is compounded by a comparative lack of budget. Creepy things that go bump in the night are often expensive to create. Which means unless you're damn careful you just end up with a crappy rubber mask or Knightlore-level CGI bogeyman that's impossible to take seriously.

There's even more to it than that, though. Whatever one thinks about the later seasons of The X-Files (and Big G is far less convinced about its meteoric plummet in quality than I am), it seems to me that after the first year of the show it was almost never scary again. It began to rely more and more on the funny/self-parody episodes (which is not to say they weren't enjoyable), "mythology" episodes (a strong story incompetently told, and certainly not scary beyond the fact that people were still buying it) and increasingly tripped-out ideas (trapped inside a hospital in another dimension, anyone?). As I say, I'm not dismissing any of that as being terrible (not in this post, at least), but it took the show to a place where any chance of a creepy atmosphere was pretty much lost. One of the main problems, though, was that Mulder and Scully were government agents. They had the resources of the entire FBI to count on. The public, by and large, gave them their trust and assistance, and they could call in a SWAT team whenever they felt the whim. Add this to the fact that they spent a lot of time wandering around the concrete jungle, and you lose the sense of isolation that works so well in horror.

To see this, just take a look at some of the best episodes from the first season. "Ice", "Shapes", "Darkness Falls", all of them are set either on the edge of the wilderness, or deep within it. Furthermore, all three deal with creatures with no obvious intelligence, primal forces that had to be destroyed or escaped from. "Squeeze" is the exception to both these rules (and that's because the episode is specifically about being attacked exactly in the places you thought were safe, hence Tooms jumping Scully in her bathroom). This was the show at its creepiest, when Mulder and Scully weren't investigating because it was what the government paid them to do, they were investigating because the alternative was getting eaten alive.

The X-Files did return to this sense of isolation from time to time, though with diminishing returns, mainly because of familiarity ("Firewalker", for example, was just "Ice" but with the alien maggots replaced with silicon-based mushrooms, which is a fun sentence to type), but in general the show seemed to drift further and further from this archetype. This is perhaps odd, since the show obviously owes a huge debt to Twin Peaks, which itself relied heavily on the town's remote location and proximity to the oppressive pine forests of the Pacific North-West.

In fact. Chris Carter has referenced Twin Peaks as an influence upon The X-Files since its inception. His main inspiration, though was apparently Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Again, he should have been paying closer attention. Kolchak was freelance, he wasn't trained, he didn't have the Federal Government backing him up [1]; which made any situation he found all the more threatening and thus scary.

So, The X-Files dropped the scary ball, and pretty much nothing on TV since made a successful and sustained attempt to freak me out. I began to wonder if the medium itself just made it too difficult to be worth the bother.

Then, thanks to BT, I discovered Supernatural.

Truthfully, Supernatural doesn't scare me either, but it comes a lot closer than anything's managed for a long, long time. I admit that I've only seen the first five episodes so far, so there's still plenty of time for it to become formulaic and lose its teeth that way. So far, though, the show is doing a large number of very sharp things, of which I shall highlight the top three:

1. Giving the main characters an immediate interest in fighting the supernatural. Yes, Mulder lost his sister years ago, and that was what drove him, but Sam and Dean both lost their mother in the past and their father (literally lost, rather than dead) and Sam's girlfriend over the course of the pilot episode. This gives them immediate motivation, and a genuine sense of an imposed time limit, rather than an emotional scar decades old. This advantage is heightened by the fact that Mulder was curious about the unknown, whereas Sam and Dean want to kick the unknown in the nuts and then run it over with a Chevy Impala.

2. Choosing locations wisely. As mentioned already, nine times out of ten, if you want to set up a scary atmosphere, you want to find somewhere remote to do it in. The American wilderness works particularly well. For all its power and development, the US is still a young country, and a big one; there are still vast tracts of the continent which are almost unknown to humanity. Meeting a Wendigo in the Colorado forests is innately more "plausible" than meeting a Black Dog on Salisbury plain would be. The land is not yet tamed. I made a glib remark earlier in the week about modern-day America's habit of co-opting the myths and ghost stories of the continent's original inhabitants, but the truth is that American folk-lore is an endlessly fascinating chimera of Native American and old European ghost stories, mixed in with modern urban legend. The elements swirl together, frequently merging (the Native American Garou and the European werewolf, for example) to create something truly unique. Take the powerful strangeness of these stories, and set them in the unclaimed wilds just beyond the streetlight, and you have an impressive mixture.

This is presumably why the Winchester brothers spend so much of their time on the fringes of civilisation. Sombre pine forests; deep, still lakes; the dark back roads of dark, back-road towns. The only time they drop the ball in this sense is in episode four, which is set in airports and jumbo jets. Interestingly, this is the most original of the stories I've seen so far, but it takes the show too far out of the Americana-drenched atmosphere it seems to employ so well.

3. Clever use of short-hand. The show so far has been almost breathtakingly derivative, but for the moment I don't care. People used to describe The X-Files as "like a movie every week". Well, maybe, but very quickly it was a tremendously badly written and confusing movie. Supernatural genuinely feels like a pocket film each time. Specifically, the films are What Lies Beneath (twice), Final Destination, and Ringu/Candyman [2], with some American Werewolf in London and House on Haunted Hill (the re-make, natch) thrown in for good measure. In fairness, all but the fourth episode involve mythology that predates any of the films mentioned, but it's still hard to miss the references.

Like I say, I don't care. It works. The visual cues (shadows in the mirror; jerky, jumpy ghosts), the soundtrack (and accompanying spooky tape messages and the like), that ridiculous way supernatural beings have of somehow becoming more powerful and imaginative as the film goes on are all present and correct. Hopefully some experimentation will come later (no more plane-based episodes, though, and stay away from aliens and time-travel).

I guess we'll see.

Anyway, I shall be watching the remainder of the Season 1.1 boxed set as soon as humanly possible (and once it's sufficiently dark outside).

[1] In fairness, Carter specifically chose FBI agents so as to explain why the creepy stuff kept happening to them. Of course, as is so often the way in long-running TV series, eventually the freaky shit eventually started happening just because. Mulder ends up trying to foil a bank robbery and suddenly it all goes Groundhog Day on his ass? Right....

[2] Episode five manages to steal from both the original end to Suzuki's novel and the Videodrome-inspired nightmare conclusion of Nakata's film version, which isn't easy to do considering the differences between them. Then it sticks Candyman on top. Because it can.

Use The Wobbly Stick To SING HIS PRAISES!

Christian-rock version of guitar hero to be released.

Thank goodness that dedicated proponents of the faith need no longer fake playing along to the Satanic chord progressions of the graven idols of RAWK!

Of course, if they were true Christian hard-liners, they'd consider video games, infrared sensors and synthetic polymers to be the creations of Old Nick as well...

Gender Identification

So, this is an interesting site (h/t to Dover Bitch). The idea is that you paste in a sample of your writing (fiction, non-fiction, or blog post), and it will attempt to determine your gender.

Never one to be insecure about an internet program misidentifying my genitalia (not that it's an issue that crops up all that much), I stepped up to the challenge.

On my blog posts, it did pretty well. By pretty well I mean that of the ten posts I gave it for analysis, nine of them came back as being written by a male (apparently my objecting to McCain's constant playing of the POW card made me sound feminine). Of course, the distinction between what constitutes as a blog post and what constitutes non-fiction is somewhat vague. It's at least arguable that my X-Men articles and the second piece I wrote on Midnight Nation (three of the former and the latter all being included in the ten above) are closer to being non-fiction. That's not a value judgment, I just think that maybe the Gender Genie (which sounds like something very different to what it turns out to be) might be expecting a bit more... personal expression in a blog post.

Regardless, since I'm a serious researcher and junk, I figured I'd give it some non-fiction by sticking in the progress report I wrote back at the end of my first year. I also gave it Time-homogeneous birth-death processes with probability intervals and absorbing state (minus the diagrams; I assume no amount of equilateral triangles is liable to change anyone's opinion as to my sexual identity). I figured this would be interesting, since although I did all the necessary research, and handled all the editorially mandated changes, the original draft was written almost entirely by the dear departed Dr P, very much of the female persuasion.

GG decided both articles had a female bent. I have no idea what to take from that, except that considering with and if "feminine keywords" is somewhat questionable when talking about a mathematics paper.

In fact, the keywords in general are very interesting. "Below", for example, is a masculine keyword. Why? Something to do with over-representation of men in business where they're always worried about being below something? There's a whole article in that, though I won't be the one to write it.

Finally, I handed GG some of my stories. This turned out exactly the way I was expecting, given the keyword system. I picked four stories, two short, two significantly longer. Each of the two pairs had one story with a man as the lead character, the other a woman (well, Gifts sort of flits between two main character, but it's mainly from a woman's perspective). All four came back with the adjudication that the writer shared the protagonist's gender.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I've wasted the morning. Still, kept me interested. It also revealed that I need to write more fiction from the female viewpoint, as there's currently a fairly obvious skew.

Oh, and GG considers this post to have been typed by a man. What a relief.

Sixty Second Film Corner: Get Smart

Jokes much funnier than expected.

Steve Carell less annoying than expected.

Anne Hathaway just as beautiful and gorgeous and all-over wonderful as expected.

This film is therefore endorsed by SpaceSquid.

Caution: film may contain trace elements of Terence Stamp being absolutely fucking terrible.

(I keep meaning to put together a "SpaceSquid endorses" image that I can use as a stamp of approval. Tragically, a cephalopod with all ten tentacles giving a thumbs up is anatomically impossible, and I'm not sure I'd be prepared to settle for anything less).

Days until exile: 10.