Take the Prize (Please)

My sour grapes personality comes out when literary prizes are announced. To my mind, Paul Auster should have been nominated for (and received) the Man Booker Award for Moon Palace. Rules didn't allow for this, of course, but now they've been changed he gets nominated for a work I regard with suspicion. That ain't right. In fact, I think it delivers a message aspiring writers ought not to hear.

Yet George Saunders gets the prize for a book I've not yet read, and . . . I'm happy for him. I'm even happy for the prize. I like Saunders' writing, I like Saunders -- I'm looking forward to reading the novel (or, perhaps better yet, hearing it performed).

In the meantime check out Eleanor Wachtel's funny, moving interview with Saunders. And while you're at it, check out this revisit of a funny, moving interview with Linda Barry.

Other places, other words

• "Best Rock" lists are never without controversy, and this list is no exception: "The Best Band From Every State." Go ahead and see if "New York" doesn't raise your ire (like it did mine).
• "Who are you comparing us to? The Barenaked Ladies? Our music is entirely different. Nickelback? Avril?" RIP, Gord Downie.
• RIP, John Dunsworth -- "Mr. Lahey," to fans of The Trailer Park Boys. One of the hardest-working actors in Canada.
• "It's chaos; be kind" -- Patton Oswalt, living by his late wife's mantra.
• Further reflection on Blade Runner 2049 (with SPOILERS, of course): Priscilla Page caught the Nabokov reference, and ran with it; and John David Ebert ponders vulvic power and digital archaeology in my current favourite BR-2049 piece (via Erik Davis, natch).

The allusion to Joseph K I got; the JOKE ("Joe K") I missed.

Blade Runner: Dare To Compare, Part 2

**Spoilers Galore, people.**

Scott's version of the Pinocchio Story is by now very familiar.

"Run it by me one more time..."

Whether or not Deckard is a Replicant (an open, and to my mind pointless, question) he very much is: 1) a dim-wit, low on charisma; 2) an inept killer; 3) a rapist. He is thoroughly pathetic, if not repugnant -- reviewers who coo over what a welcome sight Deckard is in the new movie have completely lost touch with what a shit-heel he was in the earlier one.

"Stop! There's a sequel!"

It is the "villain" Roy Batty who brings life abundant to the characters he encounters -- just before he kills them, more often than not.

Batty meets his Maker.

Batty is the Angel of Death, or Flannery O'Connor's "The Misfit," bringing the heightened recognition that comes to those on the cusp of shedding their mortal coil.

Eyes are a big deal in this movie.

Scott breaks script, however, in the final act, when Batty brings physical salvation and enlightened self-awareness to the hapless and undeserving Deckard -- then gives up the ghost. Deckard returns to Rachel, a Replicant whose life he is now determined to protect. If there is a hero in Blade Runner, it is Batty -- a tragic figure.

Rescuing with nail-pierced hand.

Blade Runner 2049 is also a Pinocchio Story, but it takes its time getting there.

The first two-thirds of the film masquerades as an Annointing Of The Chosen One story, and devotes the time to fleshing out exactly what the Chosen One will need to rescue humanity from -- a stratified and misery-inducing caste system, basically.

This time there is no doubt whatsoever about whether or not this story's Blade Runner is a Replicant -- his name is KD9-3.7, or "K" for short.

That's "K" for Kafka, or PKD, etc.

K's human boss (he calls her "Madam") assigns him to find and eliminate the Chosen One. While K sniffs out the trail, the audience takes in a grocery list of what the caste system has wrought -- a defoliated Earth, the universal acceptance of child labour, cramped living conditions, festering resentment among all classes, materialist discontent ramped up to a cosmic scale. The Chosen One has a lot of work to do.

It becomes increasingly apparent to the viewer that K has internalized and accommodated himself to this class-structure to a degree he is not aware of. He behaves imperiously toward technology designed to serve him, including not just his faithful drone but fellow Replicants offering sexual favours. When his human boss pointedly suggests she too might be up for a shag, he politely declines and returns to his job. In what passes for his private life, he's managed to do one better than Madam -- he has a compliant virtual helpmate and intimate he has purchased, to whom he slowly grants an incremental form of agency.

As events unfurl, K is persuaded that he is the Chosen One, and his carefully ordered world falls to pieces.

An unhappy moment: the Blue Fairy revealed as hoax.

He tracks down and confronts his Maker -- in the reality-frame K has come to accept, that would be Deckard.

Fortunately for K, Deckard is still crap at killing Replicants.

In the 30 years that have taken place in the Blade Runner universe, Deckard has come to look and behave a great deal like Harrison Ford does in this universe -- taking a breather from grumpily punching Replicants in the face to savour the pleasures of Elvis singing "Can't Help Falling In Love." Over a post-beating cocktail, Deckard sets K straight -- K is just another Replicant, albeit one who has in fact met the actual Chosen One, but was too thick to recognize it.

The scales fall from K's eyes, and he willingly sacrifices himself in the cause of reuniting the Creator with the Created Chosen One. If Batty was Milton's Lucifer, K is the ode-writer who reassures, "They also serve who stand and wait."

Or shoot, depending.

2049's final act is laudable in construction but lamentable in execution, as it relies on Villains Who Are Villainous And Nothing But. The final confrontation is a scene that does not penetrate nearly as deeply as Batty murdering his Creator, never mind Batty's final confrontation with Deckard.

"I'm so glad we had this time together."

Most would suggest this is due to the absence of Rutger Hauer, but I thought Sylvia Hoeks (Replicant "Luv") showed considerable promise as the new Unhinged Super-Athletic Dutch Heavy. She did an admirable job of flexing what she could, but the script kept her hamstrung, alas.

Luv, in action.

Hopefully this is not my final word on the film, as there are other subtleties and complexities to mull over. But I would perhaps assert what Roger Ebert* did about the earlier film: 2049 fails on a fundamental level, while delivering on levels this viewer did not anticipate -- surely a fitting achievement for a sequel to a 35-year-old oddity that wound up changing everything.

*Mistakenly, to my mind.

Blade Runner: Dare To Compare, Part 1

This weekend I joined the stalwart few and went to see Blade Runner 2049.

"Let me show you to your seat."

Some stats indicate the audience tilted toward older males, by up to 71%. In our theatre, the women outnumbered the men by a ratio of two-to-one. Mind you, my wife, daughter and I were the only ones there. (I jest, but only just.)

Denis Villeneuve's movie was, as I expected, very much its own thing -- focused on his particular concerns and obsessions, utilizing and subverting stock-and-trade narratives in a manner that has become peculiar to Villeneuve, and recognizably so. While watching I thought it somewhat unfair to compare and contrast his film with Ridley Scott's from 35 years ago -- a film that subsequently dictated the visual grammar of Western cinema and became, for many, passionately loved not just despite its narrative flaws but because of them.

Still, Scott's is the property Villeneuve agreed to work with, so comparisons aren't just inevitable, I think they are called for. Here are a few of my own -- with NO SPOILERS (yet).

The aesthetic: Scott's Blade Runner aesthetic is arguably the tipping-point for the hesitant fan.

You know it. You LOVE it. Los Angeles, 2019!!

So visually saturated was Scott's Los Angeles of 2019 that cyberpunk godfather William Gibson reportedly fled the theatre within the first ten minutes of the movie.

The rest of us stayed put. Scott's future was vibrant . . .

. . . exotic . . .

. . . recognizable . . .

. . . off-putting . . .

Mezcal, with extra worms.

. . . but comfy. Sure, it never stops raining in Scott's LA, but who didn't want to live in Deckard's bachelor pad?

"Help me with the dishes, will ya?"

Villeneuve's LA some 30 years later is decidedly less shiny and more Brutalist.

At times I felt like I had returned to the halls of the University of Winnipeg.

"Walmart says they need my student transcript..."

The blue/yellow hue imbalance that Scott brought to the screen is turned beyond "11" by Villeneuve, heightening viewer discomfort. Will anybody but the perverse ever get sentimental over this aesthetic? For the rest of us this is a decidedly cold and unwelcoming visual palette -- considering how it serves the narrative, this comparison is a "win" for Villeneuve.

Film score: Vangelis' original score was the stuff of legend, in large part because it was decades before anybody could get a copy to play on the home stereo. 2049's score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfinch can be streamed at your immediate convenience. Odds are you won't play it at the eardrum-shredding volumes we endured in the theatre -- even so, none of the tracks are likely to become ubiquitous at Manhattan Ayahuasca ceremonies. This, too, serves Villeneuve's story well, as Vangelis' did Scott's, so I will declare this comparison a "tie."

Story: both films retell the Pinocchio story. But there are twists.

Guillermo del Toro, "At Home With Monsters" at the AGO

Friday we drove downtown, picked up the younger college student at Union Station and checked out the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the AGO.

It was heaps of fun, needless to say. The exhibit is built as a mini-mock-up of del Toro's actual house (or houses, more like, as I gather he divides his time between Toronto and LA) which he has modelled after Forrest J. Ackerman's. From the '70s to the '90s, the "Ackermansion" was something of a tourist destination for (ahem) sentimental nerdy types, chock full of Universal Monsters memorabilia he'd collected over several decades -- gone to the four winds since his passing, alas.

The Ackermansion, before the clutter.

Here we have "Bleak House."

There is indeed an abundance of STUFF: film props . . .

. . . comic book ephemera . . .

. . . wax figures galore . . .

"Tussaud can bite my shiny wax..."

. . . Freaks sits close to the director's heart, as can be expected . . .

. . . plus bundles of weird tchotchkes that have captured del Toro's eye and earned a place in Bleak House.

If you've seen Pan's Labyrinth or The Devil's Backbone you already know del Toro's taste for the macabre runs a tad deeper than Ackerman's likely did. Many of the pieces on display are unsettling, quite moving, or both. The prime example to my eyes is this Boris Karloff-Frankenstein's Monster bust.

"That's right: Toronto."

Photos don't do it justice, but the size and the articulation are surprisingly affecting -- the eyes are displaced, giving you the impression he is avoiding your gaze.

You feel sorry for the brute -- and so you should!

It's an experience, in other words -- not to be missed. In Toronto until January 7, 2018.

Tom Petty

I wasn't a fan -- not really. I liked his music well enough, rarely changing the station when one or the other of his 50-or-so hits came on. When I finally took a knee to the Infernal Device and the bloatware that would own it I even shelled out for a few Tom Petty songs. And I've attended to a few of his albums, but never had one in my collection.

I see no reason to get into specifics as to why this is so -- it's not an interesting line of inquiry, and it distracts from the man's remarkable capacity to craft a song that climbs into the deepest caverns of a person's lonely heart. He knew his voice, he knew exactly what he wanted to hear from it -- that's what he brought to the stage and the platter, and that's why people loved him.

Three things, however:

1) Listen to the kids. My takeaway quote from Bill (not the Rolling Stone) Wyman's excellent memorial of Petty:

While Petty’s image was laid-back, almost hippielike, you don’t get to be a star and stay one without some grit. His kids, he told Zollo, know the truth: “They said, ‘The world pictures you as this laid-back laconic person, but you’re really the most intense, neurotic person we’ve ever met!’”

2) Further to 'Point #1 (above): watch Peter Bogdanovitch's Tom Petty doc Runnin' Down A Dream. Think four hours is too much time to devote to the subject matter? Think again. I've watched this doc twice and am queuing it up for a third viewing. And I'm not a fan.

3) This picture, circa Damn The Torpedoes:

Something about this picture -- the public-school slouch who pulled it all together and finally became a force everyone had to acknowledge -- typifies what Petty and his music embodied for me. Summers in my small town, listening to the sort of music he loved and made. Summer. Cigarette smoke and motor oil. Bruises. Childhood, really -- the good, the bad, the ugly of it -- and the fact that one can endure and eventually reflect upon it with some tenderness.

Quite the achievement. Godspeed and God rest, sir.

"Looking for adventure/And whatever comes our way..."

So long as I'm recalling Zen and the artlessness of youthful errors in judgement and enthusiasms, here's a shot from my motorcycle trip in '86, taken just as we've exited the northern perimeter of Yellowstone National Park. To my mind it almost perfectly encapsulates the trip as well as the pleasures and displeasures of riding a motorcycle.

If you meet the adventure on the road ... whatever.

That's my travelling buddy. We'd come from Salt Lake City that morning, and had a late lunch in the Old Faithful Dining Room. After lunch we moseyed over to the legendary geyser. While we waited we speculated what it might look like if you dumped a bunch of garbage into the hole. It spouted at roughly the appointed hour. Then we consulted the Yellowstone brochure.

"Any other geysers you want to see?"

Rhetorical question.

Back to Robert Pirsig, and Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. 

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

What a load.

Take a look at that picture again.

Motorcycles.

Nobody talks about what an annoyance it is to get in and out of your rain gear, or to clear bugs off your helmet visor, or how a helmet visor makes you feel like your head is trapped inside a really small car -- thus removing the "thrill" of being out in the elements, "in contact with it all." Even if you take the staggeringly-less-safe option and wear a mixing-bowl with goggles, you're still getting bugs smeared across your visual plane and you're still looking through a screen.

You're still sitting -- passively consuming.

You're just doing it on a slightly less-comfortable, and more vulnerable perch.

What a feeling.