Monthly Archives: April 2022

Series Review: Slow Horses

 

Originally, I hadn’t planned on adding Apple TV+ to my collection of streaming services. While they proposed a few films and television programs that interested me the lack of any back catalog made the service less than appealing. However, after a year of free access for buying a new computer, I have found that there is more than enough content to justify the affordable price and among that content if the series Slow Horses.

Adapted from the espionage novel of the same name by Mick Herron Slow Horses centers on

Apple TV+

Slough House a division of MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence service, where disgraced, burnt-out, and embarrassing officers are sent to wait out their careers performing pointless, mindless, and route tasks far from the bright and shinning center of Britain’s spy service.

The Leper Colony of intelligence officers newest addition is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), grandson of a legendary officer, but River has disgraced his family name with a disastrously bad terrorist training exercise and is now exiled to Slough House where he answers to Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) an apparent drunk and burn-out.

When Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), MI5’s Director of Operations, has a false flag operation go spectacularly badly endangering the nephew of Pakistani general, she sets up Slough House to take the blame for her operation. Cartwright, Lamb, and the other misfits derogatorily called Slow Horses, must not only outwit Taverner and reveal the truth of her operation but must rescue the kidnapped nephew before fascist nativists murder him.

Slow Horses is much closer to John le Carre’s fiction that to Ian Fleming’s super spy stories, though in addition to the gritty, grimy, and dirty world of killers and spies, Slow Horses adds office humor and humanity to the bottom barrel officers trying to do the right thing. With five of the six episodes released, Slow Horses has very nearly reached its conclusion in adapting the first novel. The acting to superior, particularly Oldman’s portrayal of Lamb, a man who has seen too much of the worst of humanity but still harbors a strong sense of right and wrong hidden within a flatulent disguise. The production design is spot on with sharp contrasts between ‘the palace’ MI5’s modern steel, glass, and cyber enhanced headquarters and dirty, broken, and drab building that is the home to cast offs of Slough House.

Apple has already produced a second season of Slow Horses coming late 2022 and I for one am up for it.

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Pluto and Our Sexual Politics

16 Years after its reclassification as a minor-planet discussion of Pluto as a planet can still kicked off spirited, heated, and intense debate. The faction that defies the International Astronomical Union’s classification in 2006 can be quite passionate about Pluto’s status as a planet even though the vast majority of that group are not astronomers or scientists. By and by they are laypeople and Pluto’s status as a planet or minor planet makes no material difference in any of their lives. Their paycheck, home equity, or personal freedoms are utterly unimpacted by the IAU’s decisions and declarations and yet they can be most vocal in defending that ‘Pluto is a planet!’

Of course, they never researched, observed, or studied Pluto. As children that learned that the Solar System has nine planets and talk of Kuiper Belts, or Trans-Neptunian Objects is uninteresting but the fact learned in grade school that there are nine planets these are their names became a foundational fragment of knowledge and something that undercuts something learned so completely as a child is on some level unsettling. Even if that fact has no bearing on their self, identity, or well-being.

A key simplistic fact we all learn as children, and one that is essential to many in their self-identification is that people are either boys or girls. There are no other categories, and like Pluto’s status as a planet, there is no doubt in the classifications, the declaration is the definition.

Unlike the debate surrounding Pluto the boy/girl classification is critical to many people’s sense of self. The classification of either girl or boy defined the roles one is expected to assume, the course of one’s life, the goals and objectives ones is expected to pursue, and can dictate everything from the clothing someone wears and the words they use to the nature of their loves and bonding commitments.

Is it really surprising then when the simplistic worldview imparted to children is redefined with new and enlarged with concepts such as trans or non-Binary that these expansions are met with fierce resistance, a resistance that is no more grounded in ‘fact’ or ‘science’ than those insisting that Pluto remains a planet simply because they were told this as a child? Particularly when so much of what so many people think of as their self-concept is tied to those first formative years when their classification was given and the course of their life ‘determined.’

None of this excuses the hatred, persecution, and prejudice that is heaped unjustly upon those who do not slot neatly into childish categories. To insist that everyone must live wholly within a category of either boy or girl with hard impermeable boundaries is as rational and defying of reality as to insist that that every has either Black hair or blond ignoring that everything nature does is a continuum, a spectrum, and the difference between girl and boy is as slippery as the difference between planet and not-planet.

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The Three Lorraines of Back to the Future

 

In this essay I am going to look at the three representations of the character Lorraine Baines-McFly presented in 1985’s Back to the Future and what might be suggested about the character and her history. This piece will not deal with subsequent variants presented in the two sequels.

Lorrain — Prime

Lorraine McFly as she first appears in the film is a woman struggling with alcoholism, a prudish defensive approach to sexuality, and who is deeply unhappy. She doesn’t give voice to the unhappiness, having long ago surrendered to her despair with all traces of self-confidence and agency vanished from her personality. She is in short, a broken person. Adding to the tragedy is that her pain, her shattered nature is invisible to the men in her life. Her husband, George McFly, blindly laughs at the dinner table while watching re-runs wholly unaware of his wife’s grief. Neither of her son appear to notice. the painful evening, the large amount of alcohol is so routine as to be invisible. This suggests that Lorraine’s fractured psyche is decades old.

The only other male present in the prime timeline that has any notice of Lorraine is the bully Biff Tannen. While the two characters have no direct interaction in the establishing scenes of the film Biff does tell Marty, Lorraine’s youngest son and the story protagonist, ‘tell your mom I said hi.’ An innocuous statement but actor Thomas F Wilson’s line reading fills it with menace and meaning. There is a clear implication of a deep and unsettling history.

Lorrain — Base

Lorraine Baine, Marty’s mother before marriage and a lifetime of crushing pain, in 1955 is a vibrant, outgoing, and bold teenager. She is unafraid in her risk taking, groping crushes under the dinner table with her parents present, venturing to a stranger’s house in pursuit of that crush, and adventurous in her dating, willing to make confident first moves rather than wait on her partner. It would seem to be inconvincible that this self-confident teenage loses all her fire and vitality simply from the confines of matrimony.

Lorraine — variant

After Marty’s excursion to 1955 and his interference with his parent’s courtship and lives, including alteration that prompted to his father to interrupt Biff sexually assaulting Lorrain, Marty returns to discover that his entire world has changed.

Lorraine now is fit, healthy, and confidence. Vanished has all traces of her sexual prudishness and defensiveness as she exhibits both an open sexuality with her husband, a George variant that is successful and confident, and accepting of her son’s sexual life. The Lorraine variant is logical progression of the teenage Lorraine the audience was introduced to. Marty’s meddling has dramatically changed both his parents.

What broke Lorraine prime?

It would seem to be down to two possible explanations. Life with a George that never found his self-confidence or success drained Lorraine of his own agency and vitality. This explanation reduces Lorraine to simply an extension of George and would seem to be tension with the Lorrain that existed before George entered her life. It also ignores the relationship between Biff and Lorraine. 30 years after their high school days Biff still feels the need to make vague and unsettling comments about Lorraine.

Everything seems to suggest that Lorraine suffered a deep and shattering trauma that psychologically damaged her and coming to adulthood in an era that disparaged psychological health and treatments she was left to suffer, dealing with her trauma by self-medication with alcohol.

The alteration of history with George interrupting Biff’s sexual assault in a manner that forever reduced Biff to simpering subservient character is the also the event that prevented Lorraine’s trauma, providing her with the space to blossom into the woman she always had the potential to be.

Perhaps not the night of the ‘Enchantment under the Sea’ dance as it happened in the Marty altered timeline, but it would seem likely that at some point in the original timeline Biff completed his sexual assault on Lorraine, and bereft of resources and mental health treatments, she shattered.

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Movie Review: The Batman

There have been quite a few feature films of DC’s ‘The World’s Greatest Detective’ Batman, 1 quickly rushed production derived from the campy television series, 4 in the franchise launch in 1989, Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, 1 where he shared titular billing with Superman, and another 1 or 2, depending on how you count Justice League, where is a driving force and a major character and now Director and Co-writer Matt Reeves brings us The Batman, another relaunch of the character and continuity, and perhaps my favorite Batman film yet.

The Batman brings us into the story two years into Bruce Wayne’s ‘Batman experiment,’ as Bruce is suffering doubts about the effectiveness of his vigilantism. Despite his nightly patrols crimes seems not only unabated but growing. When the mayor is brutally murdered days before the election by a mysterious madman obsessed with riddles Batman’s investigates pull

Credit: WB Studios

him in a dark web of conspiracy, corruption, and crime entangling Gotham’s political and economic elites. The trail of clues in his hunt for The Riddler leads Batman through the city’s organized crime, its police force, and crossing paths with a dangerous cat burglar on her own path of vengeance. The answers to the Riddler’s horrific murders and his motivation erodes Batman’s sense of self and history leading him to finally understand himself and what his experiment’s actual results.

The Batman delivers on the promise Matt Reeves made when he took over the project to redirect the character back to its detective roots. Tim Burton’s films luxuriated in a brooding Gothic aesthetic, Schumacher’s run were neon and gaudy, Nolan’s trilogy attempted a realism never before seen with Batman, and Snyder’s tone can be best described as brutalism with The Batman Reeves has reached back into Hollywood’s classic era for a film noir interpretation of a superhero movie. Very little of the film takes place in daylight and nearly none of that involves the Batman. As the character narrates himself into the experiment’s logbook, he is not in the shadows, he is the shadows. And unseen by himself, there is a shadow over his heart that is the story’s psychological center. The three characters close the Batman provide the emotional and psychic tension to pulls at him, Alfred with the debt of family and history, Gordon with the drive for justice, and Selina Kyle with a thrust for vengeance. resolving these competing tensions is the real story of The Batman.

Beautifully photographed by cinematographer Greig Fraser and with deliciously detailed production design by James Chinlund The Batman creates a Gotham that feels real, feels lived in, while preserving the epic scope required for our modern mythology that is the superhero movie.

The Batman is still currently playing in a few theaters and is now streaming on HBO Max.

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The Results of Trumps Endorsements are Irrelevant

Among the political reading and podcasts, I follow there has been a debate concerning if Trump is losing his grip upon the Republican party. For those assessing the environment and concluding that his influence is waning a key item of evidence is that Trump endorsed candidates are doing poorly in the GOP primaries and his win/loss record when the primaries are completed may be negative.

I think these people are wish-casting, seeing the outcomes as indicative of a political environment that want to be true not the reality that is before them.

Yes, many, perhaps even most, Trump endorsed candidates in the current Republican primaries are faring poorly and may be likely to lose. But they are not losing to candidates that repudiate Trump’s administrations, who plainly and cleanly recognize that the 2020 election was fair, free of any result altering fraud or corruption. The winning candidates from coast to coast all repeat the core conspiracy-ridden Trump approved accounts of the election and the mythical fraud. None stand athwart the conservative tide and shout STOP! None endorse Cheney and her election. They are all, with or without his endorsement, Trump’s people.

But if Trump backs losers, puts his finger on the scale and it matters not, doesn’t that prove his influence is not that great?

Here is rule one for Trump and politics, ignore it at your peril.

Objective reality does not matter to Trump and his political fortunes.

Hundreds of thousands dead from a pandemic he denied and dismissed? Inconsequential.

Massive Tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy when he campaigned otherwise? Meaningless.

Disparaging and disrupting alliances in favor of geopolitical enemies? Irrelevant.

Issuing directives against LGBTQ when he had promised to be their best friend? Trivial

What Trump does, as long as it does not directly contradict a white supremist narrative, is without any weight or meaning. Trump’s political power is not generated by policy, principle, position, or actions but solely from emotion. And that emotion is anger. Anger at the ‘other,’ anger at the ‘elite,’ anger at the world not catering to his voters’ whims. So what if Mandel wins the primary in Ohio over Vance, they are both stoking the anger, they are both bending the knee to the Orange God-King, they are both Trump’s men and he wins if either does.

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A Tale of Two Movies: Silence of the Lambs & Pulp Fiction

 

1991 Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs was released to great commercial and critical success eventually winning 7 Academy Awards including a sweep of the ‘Big Five’ some only three films have accomplished.

In addition to accolades the film also drew protests and criticism directed towards the film’s serial killer antagonist Jame Gumb. Protesters picketed theaters and there were even concerns that the national broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony might be disrupted. The fictional Gumb stalks, abducts, kills, and skins women in pursuit of making a ‘woman suit’ to fulfill a twisted and erroneous self-image as a transsexual. The script goes out of its way to lay out that Gumb is not a transsexual but rather his distorted self-hate had created the self-deception. Furthermore, the audience is informed that Gumb was not born a monster but made one by years of systematic abuse. Something very true of serial killers. Both the transsexual and homosexual communities presented grave concerns that the character perpetuated harmful, disparaging, and untrue stereotypes about gay and trans people. Such a viewpoint is quite understandable given cinema’s history with the gay community and their frequent depiction as dangerous deviants. I will leave it to the reader to determine for themselves if the script did enough to separate the character of Jame Gumb from the hurtful stereotype. What is important to this essay is that there were public protests about this character and the man he was depicted.

Pulp Fiction released three years 1994. A collection of sensationalist short stories connected by a common collection of characters Pulp Fiction also garnered commercial and critical success winning one Academy Award for its screenplay and the Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

In episode 5 of the film, The Gold Watch, boxer Butch, on the run from the mob after not throwing a fight he had been bribed to fix, finds himself and the local mob boss, Marsellus Wallace, captured and imprisoned in the basement of a pawn show by Maynard and Zed.

Maynard and Zed abduct, rape, and enslave unwary men and Butch and Marsellus are their next victims. While the pair are busy raping Marsellus, Butch breaks free, kills Maynard, and leaves Zed to the torturous death Marsellus plans for the rapist.

Pulp Fiction faced no protests over the psychopathic raping homosexuals characters of Maynard and Zed. No picket lines outside of theaters, no threats that might derail the live broadcast of the Academy Awards. Maynard and Zed inspired none of the outrage seen just a few years earlier with the character Jame Gumb.

Why?

There’s no genius, albeit criminal, psychiatrist explaining that Maynard and Zed are the products of cruel systematic abuse. There’s no backstory, no establishment of the history to serve as a reason for their horrific acts. The pair are presented fully formed, without comment or elaboration, and no one protests.

There is something that makes these two characters stand out from every other character in the film. Despite the film being set in Los Angeles Maynard and Zed from the moment they speak their first word are identifiable as southern. And there lies the answer to the lack of outrage and protest.

Their southern identities are the dominate ones overriding all other associations and characteristics. Harkening back to the classic adventure film Deliverance all manner of sadistic behavior can be explained with an accent. Characters speaking in such a manner can be stupid, cruel, or rapists, and it is simply accepted as true their nature.

Both The Silence of the Lambs and Pulp Fiction are masterworks of cinema, and both reside in my library, but it is always instructive to examine what we accept without question.

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Streaming Review: All Night Long

The United Kingdom’s All Night Long is a jazz-infused noir-ish retelling of Othello, Shakespeare’s tragedy of a Morish warrior manipulated into a lethal jealous frenzy by the trusted Iago.

Rod Hamilton (Richard Attenborough), a wealthy patron of London’s jazz scene, throws a one-year wedding anniversary celebration for band leader Rx and his retired singer/wife Delia (Paul Harris and Marti Stevens.) Rex’s drummer Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan) wants to found his own band but he can’t do it without backing from Rod and Rec’s talent agent, neither of whom will support him unless Delia comes out of retirement as Johnny’s lead singer. Because Rex doesn’t support the idea of his wife returning to the business Johnny begins a campaign of rumor and innuendo to break the marriage.

All Night Long transpires over a single evening’s party set in a single location. In addition to a find cast of actors the film boasts an impressive number of the UK’s premier jazz musicians along with American Dave Brubeck. In fact, the film’s chief flaw in my opinion are the jazz breaks where the story slams to a halt while the movie lingers on, albeit exquisite, musical performances that for the most part neither advance plot nor illuminate character.

McGoohan’s turn as the Iago-like Johnny is at times charming, sociopathic, and pitiful. Johnny is a man who has plotted and planned big dreams and on the cusp of realizing one of them breaks nearly everyone around him.

Paul Harris, whose physical stature and commanding voice is reminiscent William Marshall, delivers a subtle performance as a man seemingly confident of his place in place but subject to the erosion of self-doubt and jealousy.

The film is captured in black-and-white helping to create a noir sensibility but without the exaggerated stylistic impressions barrowed from German Expressionism. Here the monochrome, though perhaps a budgetary restraint, helps ground the film in a stormy night’s realism.

The soundtrack is naturally jazz but unlike many films that utilized jazz as a cost-cutting tool here some of the greats of the era are on display giving lovely performances, even if they did not always serve the film well.

All Night Long with a brief running time of an hour and a half is an enjoyable drama with noirovertones and worth the time. It is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

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Apologies to My Firearm Enthusiasts Friends

I have friend that collect firearms and I have friends that trade in curio and collectable firearms to supplement their income. I understand that domination of the federal government, enough to expand the courts, kill the filibuster, and admit new states to the union, would also bring draconian and in all likelihood ineffective gun bans. But I must still work for and hope for that Democratic party achieves such a dominate position.

I must take this stand because I also have friends who are trans, who are gay, who are black, who are female, and the GOP has made it crystal clear for some time now that individuals of such categories value far less to them than tax breaks, deregulation, and cultural hegemony.

Categorically I classify as a cis white male, free from the GOP’s insidious targeting, so why should I really care?

Beyond the dear friends in the above-mentioned classifications, I have more than a gram of empathy and imagination. I can see and foresee what cruelty this is even if I myself am untouched directly by such wanton malice. It is also philosophically consistent with my world view that unless they are harming others should be free to live their lives, their one and only life, in the matter that brings them the most satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment and that they are the sole judge of what meets those needs.

But aren’t I turning a back on the friends for whom happiness and fulfillment comes from a diverse and interesting collection of firearms?

I cannot politically help both. I must choose one side or the other and while the firearm issue may be important to some it is not a core component of one’s identity. You are not born a firearm fan you choose to become one but for all these others there was no choice, no option, and that crushing their rights in my opinion is a greater crime. When these people are free and secure then I can turn my attention elsewhere.

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Halfway There

After the brief suspension of daily writing while I looked after my sweetie-wife and then the week and a half it took to return to full speed clocking in around a thousand words per day at lunch, I have passed the halfway point of my current novel in progress.

This novel certainly has had a long meandering and strange journey. The central core concept, a telepath that planting ideas in your head but your inner monologue remains in your ‘voice’, so you are unaware that it is not your thought, dates to the late 1980s. Since then, the whole setting has been crafted, short stories, both of this idea and others in the same setting, have been written, and more than one novel has been written.

Yesterday the word count passed 53,000 words and with the momentum back I hope to have the first draft completed in about two months. Luckily for me my first drafts in terms of character, plot, and events, are fairly close to my final drafts. (An advantage to detailed outlining.) And subsequent drafts are principally about editing and proofing.

I will be thrilled to finish this novel and get it out the door. (Though sadden because one editor who had seen a novel of mine in the same setting and liked the character has now retired.) I am thrilled because I can’t wait to research and write my next novel a d dark noir sf set on Mars.

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Why The West Must See Ukraine Victorious

 

First off let me make clear there are numerous reasons why the Russian aggression in Eastern Europe must be repelled and repelled without Russia gaining material benefits from invaded its neighbor.

Aggressive wars of conquest must have consequences and that must be uniformly negative, or we invite other nations to follow in that profitable lead.

The horrors that have been visited upon the Ukrainians, which echo the history of the 20th century, must be answered. Ukraine was forcibly integrated into the communist empire by the Russian Bolsheviks and suffered greatly as subjects of the evil soviet empire as well as Nazi atrocities during the second world war. By both malice, such as the Holodomor when the Soviets starved millions of Ukrainians to death, or by incompetence such as when lies and budgetary short cuts instigated the greatest civilian nuclear disaster in history with Chernobyl the Ukrainians have suffered at the hands of the Russian and they deserve their freedom.

But there is another reason the Ukrainians must win, and it is a reason that matters to every person on this blue-green planet.

In 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence which shattered the USSR it took with it a massive collection of nuclear weapons, the third largest armory of these in the world, along with the technological ability to design and create more. The world stood on the precipice of a rapidly expanding number of nuclear armed states.

1994 Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal and committed itself to non-proliferation. As part of that commitment Ukraine received security assurances that most importantly the UK, the USA, and ironically Russian would provide assistance should Ukraine be subject to an act of aggression. They walked away from nuclear weapon on our promises.

If Russia topples the Ukrainian government or seizes large elements of its territory the lesson heard around the globe will be clear. Those without nuclear weapons can be subjugated by those with them. A lesson made crystal clear by Iraq and Tunisia and now if true for the second largest nation in Europe one that cannot but inspire a scramble for the only safeguard against the superpowers of the world, your own nuclear weapons. A world where Ukraine falls or loses great swaths of land may very well lead to world where more and more nations armed themselves with nuclear devices. And the world becomes a powder keg that endangers us all.

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