Noise by Darin Bradley — Abhorrent & Fascinating

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One of my recent reads was Noise, by Darin Bradley.  This book got lots and lots of buzz when it came out (at least online), but it wasn’t until last month I picked it up, as my original response was ‘that sounds like I’d hate it.’

Turns out that response was correct, just not in the way I’d expected.

The book is all filtered through the perspective of one disaffected youth, with his life-long BFF at his side.  These guys grew up playing D&D, playing boffer swordfighting, and learning survival skills in scouts.  So when the digital changeover leaves a gap of frequencies that pirate broadcasters hijack to share their apocalyptic warnings, the boys listen.  They start planning, preparing, assembling their own ‘how to survive the apocalypse’ manual, a manual that assumes violence.  Not just violence to survive, but lots of violence, as a primary tool of obtaining what you want.

Noise is a book about the ways that personal mythology can be used to completely transform your thinking, and how cultural narratives and groupthink can be used to justify all sorts of horrible acts.

The book is far easier to understand just by reading it.  I found that as much as I deplored what was going on in the book, it was compellingly told, and I could imagine that there would be no small number of people who, in the event of a collapse as described (sketchily, I’ll add — either viewable as a bug in the book or a feature if you think that the main character doesn’t really care about the collapse, just the response), would go off the deep end like that.

It’s not an easy book to read, and it is not a clear condemnation or valorization of geeks, boy scouts, or anarchists.  It is, instead, a fascinating character study of how a pair of suburban boys try to transform themselves into the kind of people who can survive and thrive in an apocalypse and post-collapse world.

Reality is Broken (review/essay/gushing)

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I think my life has just been changed by a book again. The last book that blew my mind this much was Henry Jenkins‘ Convergence Culture.  I’m not counting novels right now, because fiction and non-fiction blow my mind in such different ways.  This kind of mind-blowing is the one that is potentially career-changing (I want a career as a writer, but other careers along the way might be useful to pay the bills).  More organized thoughts may come later, but right now I want to share my enthusiasm and talk briefly about some exciting things.

The author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World is Jane McGonigal, whom you might know from her TED Talk:

Reality is Broken is a continuation of the thread of logic that McGonigal puts forward in the TED talk and in support of her biggest dream: she wants to see a game designer win the Nobel Prize for Peace by 2032.

The book is a concerted effort to take a reader through many of the corners of game design and to show off each area’s lessons, and presents a paradigm which enables every person on earth to participate in saving the planet and the human race: Games.  Gamers, she says, are humanity’s secret weapon in our struggle to survive, thrive, and protect our planet.

Disclaimer: I’m a life-long gamer.  Some of my earliest memories are playing computer games on my dad’s lap, as we pushed our Commodore Amiga to its limits with games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Land of the Rising Sun, and more.  I started playing D&D when I was eight, Magic: the Gathering when I was 11, and so on.  I was too young to be a part of the first video-gamer generation, but I am totally a representative of the 2nd-gen gamer.  From what I can tell, this book is written in no small part to people like me, lifelong gamers, as an inspiration and challenge to go out in the world and turn our gaming experience to achieve Epic Social Win.  And for this gamer, the inspiration has certainly been successful.

It’s actually somewhat difficult for me to talk about this book, for several reasons.  For one, it’s got a crapton of material and ideas contained within.  McGonigal puts forward fourteen ‘fixes’ for reality based on various ways that gaming is superior to reality in letting us be more optimistic, more connected, more engaged and so on.

Here’s Fix#1, from p.22:

“Fix #1: Unnecessary Obstacles

Compared with games, reality is too easy.  Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use”

The idea here is that adding an unnecessary obstacle to a chore or job lets you take it from a chore, a burden, and turn it into a game with a challenge.  I have dirty dishes, and they should be cleaned.  I hate washing dishes, unless I add something to the task.  If I challenge myself to do the dishes while dancing to my favorite music, or to do the dishes using the least water possible, filling a bowl and cleaning everything out of that one bowl of soapy water, or something in that mode, I take control of the task again — I’m doing dishes, because they have to be done, but I’m doing more than just the dishes — I’m playing a game and the result of that game is both 1) clean dishes and 2) A happier Mike (having played a game, set myself a voluntary obstacle and met it).

McGonigal talks a lot about positive psychology/happiness psychology, looking at the ways that we think we can achieve happiness vs. the ways that current science thinks we actually achieve happiness.  Unsurprisingly (since she mentions it), games, especially social games that involve touch, are great for happiness.  I found this section one of the most illuminating, since it covered an area not of my expertise (My formal psychology experience begins and ends with Psych 101, a class on brain chemistry).

As a game designer, McGonigal seems to approach her world in terms of problems, and ways to make games to solve them.  When she was recovering from a concussion in 2009 and unsatisfied with her rate of recovery, she designed a game called SuperBetter to help her take control of her own recovery and restore a sense of power.  The game asks the recovering person to conceive of themselves as a superhero, their disease or injury as the supervillain, and to recruit allies to round out your team, identify power-ups which can help in recovery (taking a walk, doing things you love that aren’t effected by the injury/disease, etc) and making a superhero to-do list of things that will let you feel good about yourself, set goals to aspire to (gather enough energy to go out and do X).

SuperBetter let her ‘gamify’ the recovery process, taking control and empowering herself by applying an interpretive framework that cast herself as the heroine, possessed of the motive and means to get better.

There are countless games, designed for various objectives, but they teach us many lessons.  These lessons, McGonigal argues, equip us to tackle the world’s largest problems — we can take big big issues like peak oil and gamify them, applying a framework that will inspire, challenge, and enable people to be creative, innovative, and collaborate to find solutions together (the peak oil example comes from the game World Without Oil).

Not just any old game will save the world.  But everyday games can still do things like let us feel powerful and accomplished.  They can give us a way to stay in touch with friends or family, give an icebreaker for meeting new people, and countless other things.

Games, McGonigal argues, are a central facet of humanity, and one of our greatest tools.  Now we just need to take all of the time and energy we’ve put into games, evaluate and acknowledge what it’s taught us, and put those skills to use on social issues, political issues, environmental issues, and more.

If this sounds like your bag, read the book, then consider signing up with gameful.org, a social-network/collaboration tool for game designers working to make ‘gameful‘ games.

5 Things I Learned From Clarion West

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Clarion West co-administrator Leslie Howle challenged Clarion and Clarion West alums to share 5 things they learned from their time at the Clarion workshop. As part of my efforts to transition this blog into a more general “Mike talks about stuff” blog, I’m putting my entry here.

Clarion and Clarion West are intensive writing workshops primarily focused on science fiction and fantasy writing. Students eat, drink, breathe and sleep writing for six weeks, critiquing peers’ stories, writing their own new shorts, learning from industry veteran writers and editors, and participating in a supportive community of other writers, professionals, and professional fans.

I attended the workshop in 2007, following a friend’s fantastic experience at the workshop in 2004. Among my classmates were mathematicians, historians, fashion bloggers, science teachers, lawyers, bakers, truckers, and more. I wrote five stories at the workshop, two of which have now been published. And here, in five short examples, is what I learned, one lesson for each story I wrote.

1) What you try hardest to do well, may be the thing you fail at the most. Don’t worry, it will also be the thing you learn most from.

My first week, I wrote a story called “In His Image.” The premise is that in the near-future, a social movement creates a technology which allows people to become pure hermaphrodites — possessing both sets of genitals and being functionally both male and female. The main character, Maria, a widow and mother of one, discovers that her only son, the last living reminder of her dead husband, wishes to join this group, caught up in their idealism that if everyone undergoes this procedure, it will end all gender and sex-based discrimination. Maria struggles with trying to convince her son not to pursue the procedure, then shows her confused reactions when her son goes through with the procedure and returns half a stranger.

I challenged myself to tell the story from a more difficult perspective — the mother’s, rather than the son’s, as well as making the mother a devout Christian who interpreted things through her religious paradigm. I wanted to tackle gender issues, and familial issues, using the SFinal technology partially to investigate familial reactions to transsexuals who pursue Hormone Replacement Therapy and Sexual Reassignment Surgery.

The result was a colossal failure. I managed to deeply offend several classmates, and had gone over-the-top in my efforts such that the issues I was so intently trying to get right were all spectacular flops. But from the story and the feedback, I learned that when you push yourself on something, failing can be tremendously instructive, and help you do better the next time. I saw the ways that in my effort to spotlight an issue, I’d been too overt, too clumsy, and in failure saw the ways I could go back and do it better. A first draft is a place where you should allow yourself to fail, almost expect to fail.

2) Fun is a very powerful aesthetic, and buys you a lot of trust from an audience.

My second week, I dove into writing a New Weird Superhero short story “Shield & Crocus,” which would become my novel, keeping the original title. The original short story was a piece far too large for its britches. I tried to introduce and develop a novel’s worth of material, but along with that doomed effort, I provided colorful characters, action, and enough Bombasticity that the absolute most common comment of the story was “fun.” We tell stories to challenge, to provoke, to educate, but we cannot forget the entertainment aesthetic. Fun is not the only way to be entertained — being lead to think deeply and contemplate serious issues is a form of successful entertainment, but as Donald O’Conner said,

Now you could study Shakespeare and be quite elite
And you can charm the critics and have nothin’ to eat
Just slip on a banana peel
The world’s at your feet

After all of the deconstruction of the excessive world detail or plotting issues, I was left with the confidence that this setting was fun. It was fun for me to write, and had proven that it was fun for readers, even readers who were not particularly fans of superheroes, the New Weird, or action-adventure stories. Therefore, when I left Clarion West, that sense of fun compelled me to take Shield & Crocus and give it a full life as a novel.

3) Get into a scene, do what you have to do, then get out.

Just as in conversation, I am sometimes prone to verbosity in writing. In week 3 of Clarion West, I tried to focus on scene structure. I wanted to pay attention to the beginnings and endings of scenes. I wanted to make my scenes as sharp as possible, cut out all the flab. In “Kachikachi Yama,” which later sold to Escape Pod, I pushed myself to write short scenes that were as efficient as possible, getting through setup to the meat of the scene, then getting out with momentum pushing forward to the next scene. By making most of the scenes closer to bite-sized, I gave myself permission to not have to do all the setup possible for the scene. Instead, I tried to be a narrative guerrilla — performing hit-and-run attacks with my story, keeping things punchy, so that the very structure of the story conveyed information about my heroine — that she was efficient, sharp, and did not deign to dally.

I was also very happy with what I pulled off in my main character (Usagiko)’s voice, but one lesson per week is the name of the game, so we move on to…

4) For a truly strong relationship-based story, you have to pay specific attention to every single relationship in the story — one-on-one relationships, but also group relationships and relationships in context.

A number of RPGs these days, especially “indie” RPGs, have been using the idea of Relationship Maps. In doing a relationship map, you can visually organize the dynamics between a set of characters in one or more groups. During week 4, I wrote a story called “Three Loves for Horue,” a character-focused drama where in addition to other things, I challenged myself again to write a story without external violent conflict, just internal conflict and interpersonal social conflict.

The main character, Horue, is part of a society where triadic marriage is the norm. For the people of Aehen, a normal marriage is a Husband (male), a Wife (female), and a Mediator (either). Horue is a mediator. When an invading force siezed Aehen, they forced its people into dyadic marriages, just Husbands and Wives. The Mediators were pulled out of their marriages and paired off with one another. And two years later, the invaders leave, stretched too thin to maintain an occupying force in Aehen. Most people go back to their triadic marriages, as could Horue — except that in the two years of occupation, he’d fallen in love with the female mediator assigned as his new life. So Horue finds himself torn between three loves. In the story, I had to establish and develop a great deal of relationships. I had to show Horue’s relationship with each of his spouses (Husband, Wife, and Mediator-Wife), as well as those spouses’ relationships with one another. In order to get to the ending I wanted, I had to show changes in eight dynamics (Horue-Husband, Horue-Wife, Horue-MediatorWife, Husband-Wife, Husband-MediatorWife, Wife-MediatorWife, as well as Wife-Husband-MediatorWife and Horue-Husband-Wife-MediatorWife).

Applying that way of thinking, that I had to show the change in eight distinct but inter-reliant relationships, cast light on the complicated social fabric that underlies every story. Even in stories where the central conflicts were not merely interpersonal, the Relationship Map was as crucial to good storytelling as anything else. If only one or two relationship in any story’s Relationship Map has changed by the end of the story, that story might need another look, or some more focus on character relationships.

5) When Re-decorating the house of a genre, don’t do it like a guest trying to be unobtrusive. Do it like a new owner claiming your own space.

In week 5 of the workshop, I was excited and terrified to write my last story of the workshop, a story that would be critiqued by Science Fiction Legend Samuel R. Delaney. All of the CW07 instructors were awesome, but Chip Delaney is a living legend.

Therefore, I wanted to bust out all the stops. The story I wrote for the last week was “Dancing at the Edge of the Black,” which would eventually become “Last Tango in Gamma Sector,” which appeared in Crossed Genres. I applied my love of Argentine Tango to the genre of Space Opera, and in feedback, I was urged to go all-out in that re-decoration of the house of Space Opera. And so, in re-writes and revison, I made the story as Tango-riffic as I could, from clothing to food to textures and colors. And in doing more and more to re-work the execution of the story as a Tango Space Opera, the story become more distinct, more notably mine, not a Battlestar Galactica ripoff with bad math and a touch of tango.

So there you go: 5 things I learned from Clarion West. The workshop was and remains the single most important game-changer in my writing career thus far, in craft lessons learned as well as connections made with fellow writers who continue to inspire and challenge me, colleagues who are also becoming life-long friends.

So here’s the commercial part — If you’re an aspiring SF/F writer looking for a way to kick-start your career, develop your skills, and make incredible connections, consider applying to Clarion or Clarion West this year.

A Geek’s Insider View of the Publishing Industry Pt. 2 — Indies

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This NPR piece was thought-provoking, mostly in the ‘I have lots to say about this’ fashion: http://www.npr.org/2010/12/14/132026420/end-of-days-for-bookstores-not-if-they-can-help-it

When you say ‘bookstore,’ the exact image evoked will be different for almost everyone, but there’s a lot in common. The shape of that image has changed over the years, and these days, independent bookstores are right in the middle of a lot of pressures and changes in the publishing industry.

I love independent bookstores for a lot of reasons, including the fact that they’re my professional lifeblood. Chain stores offer a lot of perks, but with size comes timidity and uniformity of stock and a grand lack of agility. A local big box store is constrained in a lot of ways by their corporate higher-ups, with imposed practices, obsession with metrics, and more.

But indies, as quintessential small businesses, have an incredible degree of flexibility and are in prime position to adapt quickly to change in the industry, but they are also walking a razor’s edge. The ‘imminent doom of the independent bookstore’ is a meme that’s been around for quite a while now, and has been in the national consciousness since at least 1998 with You’ve Got Mail, featuring Meg Ryan as a friendly local independent bookseller and Tom Hanks as the heir to a big chain that threatens her business’ very existence. And in fact, many independent bookstores have closed due to pressures from the chains, and more recently from loss of sales to Amazon.com and eBooks.

But the NPR story above mentions that the changing landscape of publishing may in fact be a great opportunity for indie bookstores. They trot out the encouraging example of Greenlight Books in Brooklyn (which I went to last year and is fantastic), a newer indie bookstore that is thriving. The owners found a location that was under-served and has proven supportive.

Here’s the thing. Not everywhere is Brooklyn. Highly urban centers are great places to have independent bookstores. Most of my territory doesn’t fall under that definition. When you’re a bookseller in the heartland, the circumstances are very different. There’s a lot of places where there isn’t a bookstore around for 50 or more miles — and when gas prices are re-approaching record highs, I can understand why someone might not want to spend a 1/4 tank of gas to go to a bookstore when they could browse and buy online.

Fortunately, indies have responses for this, too. IndieBound allows indie bookstores to band together and offer internet sales through a consolidated web presence. And just this month, Google eBooks went live, with a number of partnerships with indie bookstores (http://www.indiebound.org/google-ebooks) — there are differing opinions on what exactly this will do for indies, with some seeing Google being likely to want to circumvent the retailer and sell directly themselves (http://www.bnet.com/blog/publishing-style/why-google-ebooks-could-hurt-independent-booksellers-instead-of-helping/1058)

One of the things I’ll be looking at this coming season is asking my customers who are partnered with Google eBooks what it’s meant to their business.

All of that aside: Here’s what indies mean to me. Indies are community centers, they are cultural commons, they are cultural gatekeepers.

For many people, the local independent bookstore is a Thirdplace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), where they meet with peers and neighbors and build community. The increasing prominence of coffeshop/cafes built into/alongside bookstores helps this impulse in a big way. Come for the coffee, stay for the books. Many indies work closely with their local school districts as business and educational partners, which is good business, when the grants are still flowing, at least. Indie booksellers, in order to survive, must be brilliant handsellers. Since they can’t compete with chain stores in breadth and depth of stock, they have to adapt to the customer and sell to their aesthetic more actively.

But Mike, what’s handselling? (just go with me)

Say you walk into a bookstore where I’m working (I have in fact done handselling at accounts when visiting for a sales call. Once a bookseller, always a bookseller), and you’re looking for a new science fiction novel.

First, I ask “what have you been reading lately?” And you say, for example “I’ve been on a M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock kick, but I’m looking for something new.”

So I go through my brain, think about what I know about Harrison and Moorcock, their style, content, and role in various literary communities such as the New Wave and what they’ve been doing lately. Then, walking over to the SF section if I haven’t already, I think about what I have in stock, because it’s far easier to sell a book I have on hand than to get someone to order it from my online store or special order to pick up later or get shipped to their home. So while I have them in the store, I try to find the right one-to-three books that will pique your interest.

So I go to my shelf and I pick out China Mieville’s The Scar, asking “Have you tried anything by Mieville?” and then mention how Harrison heralded Mieville as a Bright New Hope for fantasy, and maybe talk up the New Weird if you seem interested in chatting, or just talk about the book if you’re not. I put the book in your hand, which then puts the onus on you to put it down.

And if you seem amenable, maybe I grab something by Steph Swainston or K.J. Bishop to add on, building on the New Weird theme, or maybe I go back to a J.G. Ballard to sell you more work by New Wave SF authors. It’s an ongoing process, and every bit of information you give me refines my approach. If I misfire on something, don’t grab your interest, I probe for more information, not satisfied until I’ve given you at least one book that should float your boat. And sometimes, if you’re the kind of customer who all booksellers love, you’ll keep asking for more, and we’ll spend maybe half an hour building you a leaning tower of awesome.

That’s handselling. Sell to the customer and their tastes, not just pushing the same new Hardcover Besteller down everyone’s throats because ‘if it sells, it must be good!’ Many of the bestsellers get that way because they’re good, but there are far too many books out there to read all of them, so you might as well read books that you will enjoy, that will challenge you when you want a challenge, will comfort you when you need to be reassured, will take you away to another world when you want to take a break from this one.

The indie bookseller, at their best, is a literary guide and advisor, helping you find the right book for the right mood — they’re a matchmaker for an audience of serial bibliovores.

Amazon.com can’t do that for you anywhere near as well as a good bookseller can. I’ve used Amazon’s systems for years now, as well as the systems of the other chain online retailers. And it’s my firm belief that we’re nowhere even remotely close to the time when a computer algorithm can handsell and recommend as well as a living-breathing bookseller.

And if the Google eBooks turns out to be a credit to the bookseller, then they can handsell you books right out of the online catalog if there aren’t any in stock, or if you have a preference for eReaders.

The big problem with eReaders as far as indies go is that they steal away stores’ most prolific buyers. If we apply the 80/20 rule to bookstore customers, where 20% of customers make up 80% of your business, then what happens if half of those 20% of your customers buy eReaders? It’s logical for them, because they’re buying maybe 5 or more books a month, and shelf space is becoming a premium, or they travel a lot for work, etc. That steady business that the indie had been depending on then vanishes. But if that customer knows they can continue to benefit from the expertise of the bookseller, get the recommendations as eBooks and support the store which has been a part of their lives for years, it could be a great match.

The story of the indie bookstore is far from over, but the upcoming chapters are going to be very interesting, and pretty much no one knows how they’re going to unfold — not the chains, not the publishers, not the book reps, and not even the booksellers themselves. It’s a thrilling and terrifying time to be in publishing, which means we all have lots to talk about.

A Geek’s Insider View of the Publishing Industry Pt. 1

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Since I’ve been doing my job as a sales representative for a year and a half now, and I continue to get to explain what it is I do, I thought I’d do a series of posts here about my view of the publishing industry, centered on the ‘what I do in my job’ aspects, but also covering things like eReaders, agents/copyright/publication, and so on. For this series I will rapidly switch between my professional hat and my writer hat.

Item the first: Who I’m talking about — I sell to independent bookstores, museum stores, book wholesalers, and some specialty accounts (in a category we call ‘special sales’). My accounts range from online-only children’s bookstores to local mom and pop bookstores to small chain bookstores. My business is, these days, a very small percentage of the overall book business. Independent bookstores (as in not Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon or the chain Books-a-Million) comprise only 8-15% of the book business these days. The big money is in fact in the chains and Amazon/online retailers, and more and more in eReaders and the electronic book market. What is important about the independent bookstores is both the local business aspect and the fact that the indies have a strong effect on award recognition and reviews.

What this means, though, is the fact that the people who do my job for Amazon, B&N and Borders are incredibly important and can have a strong effect on a book’s potential. In the book biz, we call these accounts the ‘major accounts’ or ‘national accounts’ — and therefore one can be a ‘major account rep’ which grants a large degree of cache because your company has trusted you with handling a crucial part of the business.

Given that I’m still relatively new (especially compared to people who have been reps for 20+ years), I’m not yet selling to the major accounts, but I do have my own specialties which I have developed to help push our business the best I can. One of the ways I do this is by assisting buyers with social media — this will deserve to be its own post, later on. The other thing I do is take the lead for our Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror publishers, which will also be its own post.

So who are the people at these bookstores? Many of my accounts have been in business for 20+ or 30+ years, and some have become inter-generational now, with the business being handed down or partially run by the younger generation within their family. Some stores are newer, open for a handful of years and one account that opened just this fall — proving that there is more than one trajectory for indies. Most of my buyers are women between the ages of 30 and 65. I have some male buyers but I’d say they are less than 1/3 of my account’s buyers. As a rule, my buyers are tremendously bright, very well-educated, and left-leaning (sometimes notably left-leaning compared to their area). It’s been fantastic to get to know these people who are on the ground-level, selling books in the trenches and doing their best to get good books in people’s hands. They’ve got a combined cache of experience that would fill the Library of Alexandria, and I’ve really enjoyed learning from them.

Many of my accounts are also closely connected to their local school districts, buying children’s books and/or educational materials to sell to educators as a group or individually. This means that my children’s books are an essential part of my business and by selling them, I know that I’m part of enriching the education of kids across the midwest (which warms my heart).

My independent bookstores range in size from hole-in-the-wall to old houses filled with books, bookstores in malls, and bookstore/specialty stores in tourist towns, and more. Each store has its own demographic based on their location and based on the readership which they court. Two bookstores across the town from one another can have wholly different readerships based on their focus as a store as well as their location within a town.

In addition to the indies, I also sell to some museum stores, which is fun because then I get to hang out in the museums/gardens/exhibits. I also sell to some wholesalers — wholesalers buy the books on a higher discount and then re-sell to their own list of retail customers. Some wholesalers are the clearing house for a set of bookstores, some are notably different (one account is a re-binder, that buys paperback children’s books, re-binds them into hardcovers and sells them to libraries), and each of them requires a different approach for selling.

One of the things I had to learn most quickly about this job is how important flexibility and adaptation are to my success. I can have my general strategy, but to get the best orders I can and most effectively serve my accounts, I try to filter the material to present the books with the best potential for the market while also probing to see where there is other demand or where there have been difficulties that are facing a category (‘travel books don’t sell for me anymore’).

Many people are in a gloom-and-doom mode about independent booksellers, but I think that it’s premature at worst and mere anxiety at best. But that’s a whole other can of worms.

I’m Still Alive, I Swear

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I haven’t been blogging much, despite an abundance of bloggable media in the last few months. More of my free time has been alloted to creating geek culture rather than just consuming it.

I started submitting query letters for my New Weird Superheroes novel

    Shield & Crocus

this summer, and recently started a new novel, which is currently known as

    Codename: Metaphysical Fencing Academy

.

In the meantime, I’ve sold my short story “Kachikachi Yama” to the Escape Pod fiction podcast. Once the story goes live, I will link it directly.

For now, watch

    The Event

and make sure you see

    The Social Network

.

Fall 2010 New Show Roundup

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Having watched a number of the new shows that debut this fall, here are some thoughts:

My Generation: I was interested in this show in no small part due to the fact that the main characters, nine students from the class of 2000 at an Austin high school, are nearly my age-peers.  I graduated in the class of 2001 (we did not play Space Odyssey, I’m sad to say), and am far away from where I thought I would be at that time.

This show takes the mocumentary style and applies it to a drama, where filmmakers followed nine students throughout their senior year, and is now checking in with them ten years later.  The characters are introduced with their High School clique labels, such as “The Nerd,” “The Brains,” “The Jock,” etc.  and then shown in their current lives, often very far away from where they’d expected to be.  Circumstances in the characters’ lives bring many of them back to Austin, re-connecting with those who had never left or already returned.

The pilot clearly set the stakes, established the characters and their current trajectories vs. their self-professed worlds that they had imagined for themselves in 2000.  It’s not fantastic, but it’s compelling so far and I’m likely to keep watching for a little while, if for no reason than the degree to which it makes me think about what has been happening in my own life vs. what I expected when I was a senior in HS.

The Event — This is the new The New LOST.  The Event uses mosaic-style storytelling, jumping between characters and time frames in a fairly jarring manner, though over the episode, the rhythm became less distracting for me.  The focus on Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) in the first episode brings the audience into the middle of The titular Event, balanced with POV sections from President Martinez (played by Blair Underwood — no relation) and others.

For me, much of my level of ongoing interest will depend on the truth of the Mt. Inostranka facility.  Who are these people, and how are they connected to The Event?  Once we know more about that, it’ll be easier to decide how much I care.  There are several options that are yawn-worthy, and some others that could prove quite compelling.

Undercovers — The new sexy spy offering from Alias-creator J.J. Abrams is cute and fun.  It’s not fantastic, but it does show a happily-married african-american couple as series leads, which is still noteworthy for network TV.   It’s Sexy People Doing Sexy Spy Things, but it’s pretty well-done, and the leads are both gorgeous and likeable.  I won’t stay home for this one, but I’ll probably catch up via Hulu every so often.

No Ordinary Family — The Pilot of this one hasn’t actually aired, but I got to watch a preview last month when they had it in limited availability.  No Ordinary Family is very nearly a Live Action The Incredibles, with an origin closer to the Fantastic Four, who were an obvious inspiration for the Pixar film.

Michael Chiklis is Jim Powell, police sketch artist and under-appreciated dad.  He feels fairly powerless and disconnected from his family, including his Bigwig Scientist Wife, Stephanie Powell (Julie Benz).  Their children are Just-Trying-To-Fit-In Daphne (Kay Panabaker) and Undiagnosed Learning Disability Kid Brother JJ (Jimmy Bennett).

Jim convinces the family to take a vacation, which leads to their plane crashing into the Amazon — their trip is ruined, but shortly after their return, the members of the family begin manifesting super-powers.  Jim gains incredible strength and toughness, Stephanie gets super-speed, Daphne becomes telepathic and JJ gets a massive intelligence boost.

The show’s formula seems like it will include Jim using his powers and police connections to fight crime while the rest of the family goes about their lives trying to deal with their powers — there are also hints of a larger super-world which will likely play a role as the show goes forward.

Of the new shows this season, I’m probably most excited about No Ordinary Family — it’s fun, doesn’t take itself to seriously, and seems to be respectful of its genre roots.

Hawaii Five-O — The joys of remakes.  I didn’t really watch much of the original, as it was mostly before my time.  However, the new show keeps what some say is the best part of the original show — the opening theme.

Alex O’Laughlin plays Steve McGarrett, who is brought out of the Middle East and offered a position heading a new state police unit in Hawaii, with no red tape and vast resources, tasked with bringing down TV-worthy criminals across the state.

He crosses paths with Danny “Danno” Williams, a divorced father who moved to Hawaii to be near his daughter (who primarily lives with her mother and step-dad), and also recruits Chin Ho (Daniel Dae Kim), a disgraced cop who worked with McGarrett’s father.  Rounding out the cast is Grace Park, playing Chin Ho’s cousin Kona “Kono” Kalakaua, a hotshot rookie policewoman.  McGarrett recruits her right out of the academy, as she’d have trouble getting respect in the normal force due to her familial connection to the disgraced Chin Ho.

The exotic locale, nostalgia, and charming cast are likely to be the show’s best assets, at least to begin with.  I admit that if the show finds a way to highlight Grace “Boomer” Park’s gorgeousness on a regular basis, that will help by willingness to watch.

Pilot: The Event

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Behold, NBC’s intended successor to LOST.  It’s tightly-paced, unfolds in a mosaic narrative style, with interlocking character arcs, mysteries abounding, and a plane.

The plane is important.  It increases the LOST resonance, and is important in the plot.

Only one episode has premiered, but sofar, I’m intrigued.  Go below for Spoiler-ed discussion.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the Narrow Demographic

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This is going to get deep into Spoilers, friends.  See the movie, then read this post.  If you’ve generally agreed with my reviews, than just go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and come back to read this post after.

The film adaptation of Bryan O’Malley’s geek-tastic Scott Pilgrim comic series hit the big screens last week…to unimpressive monetary results, bringing in just over $10 million, 5th place behind 1) The Expendables 2) Eat, Pray, Love 3) The Other Guys and 4) Inception.

Its rating is in the high 80%s, higher than all of the movies which beat it monetarily (except Inception).  It has tons of geek appeal.  So why did it “bomb”?

Here’s the thing — it’s very particular geek appeal.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is for people who (preferably) share several or more of the following traits:

  1. Played a lot of video games as a kid
  2. But they have to be games of the NES to SNES era with MIDI music
  3. And should include a lot of 2-d fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, as well as Legend of Zelda.
  4. Have been in a band.
  5. Follow their town/city’s underground music scene.
  6. Enjoy hyper-kinetic narratives.
  7. Understand what a Bob-Omb is.
  8. Know what a 1UP does.
  9. Watched Seinfeld.
  10. Have had several painful breakups and carry around romantic baggage.
  11. Enjoy expressionistic and highly stylized storytelling.

Moreso than possibly any movie in recent memory, the very celluloid upon which the Scott Pilgrim movie is filmed is comprised of Geekdom.  Geekiness was like oxygen.  The film is densely coded with visual and auditory references to geek culture, from comics to video games, but also to sitcoms and with commentary on the romantic comedy genre.  It starts with a chiptune version of the Universal theme as the screen shows a slowly turning old-school video game graphics rendering of the Universal globe.  The opening credit sequence is rife with visual allusions to video games and comics.

If these references go over your head, Scott Pilgrim may not be for you.  It’s easy to position as a representative narrative for Generation Y (or Generation X, depending on who you ask), which also leads into another point that some have raised. Why, though, do some reviewers find it necessary to rag on the target demographic of a film that they (the reviewer) ostensibly didn’t understand or enjoy?

See, for example, this NPR story, which links to a number of the negative review (more of the film’s target audience than the film itself): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129150813

Did you read that story?  Ok.

So what we have here is a movie that is really most effective for a narrow demographic, and somehow that makes it a bad movie.  Do reviewers pan a romantic comedy when it doesn’t try to appeal to people outside the ‘chick flick’ audience?  Or rag on an action movie when it fails to transcend its genre and compete for an Best Picture Oscar?

What about Scott Pilgrim is it that attracted such rancor in reviews?  Is it the same thing that lead to the film’s mediocre box office performance?  i09.com’s Cyriaque Lamar gives several reasons in this article: http://io9.com/5613417/scott-pilgrim-vs-the-lamentable-weekend-gross-++-what-happened

But I don’t know if I think those reasons quite add up.

Some may call Scott Pilgrim’s “failure” a referendum on geek culture, heralding the end of the Age of the Geek.  I’m more inclined to point at the fact that the film uses a great deal of medium and genre emulation in its cinematography, as the film at turns replicates comic books, video games, the fighter genre of games, sitcoms and the indie drama/comedy. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World leaps nimbly between those styles and referents, and for a viewer conversant with the Recommended Reading/Viewing/Playing, it works.  I’ve never laughed so continually or so un-selfconsciously at a film in quite a long time.

This wasn’t a film where geek culture was being re-packaged for the majority, like the X-Men films or Iron Man or Spider-Man films.  In these cases, a character and/or story well-known in the geek community is re-told and re-purposed for a general audience, adapting it to be more understandable, with a smoothed-out backstory less laden with decades of continuity.  While Scott Pilgrim was adapted and streamlined for the screen, it was still (for me) very much a geeky movie for geeks, and never apologized for it.

It’s also important to discuss the Hipster aspect of the film.  Pilgrim of the movie is less actively a geek than he is in the comics, and instead comes off as in no small part a slacker hipster kid — he has little life ambition, plays in a band, but isn’t any good at it, and only shows agency and energy when it comes to Ramona and then his fight scenes.  There are a number of places where Hipster culture and Geek culture overlap, which I find amusing since for me, at their hearts, Geekiness and Hipsterness are antithetical.

In my evaluation, Geekdom is at its core a culture of geniune enthusiasm.  You “geek out” about something when your enthusiasm shows to a degree which may be seen as excessive to some.

By contrast, Hipsterness for me is about irony — it’s about taking an attitude/position towards something.  Hipsters associate with cultural materials or behaviors, but they do so to comment on them in a kind of Bertold Brecht way — Hipsters drink PBR because of its blue-collar associations, made ironic by the fact that most Hipsters come from decidely white-collar backgrounds — Hipsters listen to music and then take a ‘been there done that’ attitude to it.

Not being engaged in Hipster culture, my ideas about it are nowhere as developed as my thoughts on geek culture — but it’s worth the time to talk a bit about Hipsters for Scott Pilgrim, due to the associations on the part of both the film and the source comic (which delves deeply into the Toronto scenester world).

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World combines Romantic Comedy, Battle of the Bands, Fighting Game and Coming-of-Age tropes and tale-types, positing a world where young men and women have troubled romantic and personal histories as they fumble around trying to learn how to be themselves, but despite that complication, the world can be made simple by the application of the video game logic — Scott Pilgrim can bring his video game experience to bear and literalize the metaphor of “dealing with baggage from your S.O.’s exes” by fighting them in sequence.  Scott Pilgrim literalizes several more metaphors of romance/baggage, from the ex who can still “Get into your head” (the chip) to being your own worst enemy (Nega-Scott!).

Some have discussed Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as a musical, but instead of singing, the characters fight — they still have soundtracks that convey the emotions of the scene, but express themselves and resolve conflicts via juggles and 64-hit combos and leveling up rather than in singing.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World will likely even out or turn a profit, given the chance that it will develop a strong record of DVD sales and home-release viewing.

If you read this blog, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is probably for you.  I enjoyed the hell out of it, and plan to see it at least once more in theatres, delving deeper into the thickly-laid references.