The Time Is Always Right...

Rod Sterling, creator of The Twilight Zone, said this about TV shows: "How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form."

I found that quote the other day, and it is eerily similar to my point whenever someone asks me why I only seem to watch TV shows on DVD. I can't stand the ads. Also, the majority of the shows don't hold much interest for me. I loved The Twilight Zone because it was how I thought the world would be when I got older - at it's core, the show deals with karma, and the episodes that stuck with me the longest (Nick of Time, Walking Distance, and One for the Angels) were the ones that weren't so much "scary" as they were meditations about choice, life, and what it means to be human. They were always the deeply personal ones - or ones that I took personally. Good gets to live a happy life - or at least a happy end - while evil is punished.

There have been several attempts to remake the series, but it never seems to work. They do the scary stories, but they're never as plausible, and they seem to focus on just scares rather than real terror. One for the Angels - the first episode I ever saw - is scary in a way that Terror at 20,000 Feet isn't. They are two distinct stories, but both come back to the same idea: normal people put in a situation that doesn't happen.

And while Terror is spin chilling (fear of the plane crash, the monster, and the Fort Worth Star Trek Convention all rolled into one), it can be applied to any future story collection. Planes, rockets - hell, even hover cars! - all of these can be applied to the formula that ends with "There's a man on the wing of this plane!" Even Doctor Who did a version of it (Midnight). You can modernize Terror at 20,000 Feet - but One for the Angels would be more difficult. These characters don't exist any more - the toy vendor has mostly vanished from popular vision and the idea of a group of kids waiting for an older man now has a sinister cast to it.

Does that mean that we'll never have another Twilight Zone? No. Of course not, don't be ridiculous! Before TV there was an anthology show on the radio called The Clock, which can be looked at as The Twilight Zone in adolescence (the episode Personal Recommendation is a bit of a sweeter version of Nothing in the Dark). And just as there were differences between the mindset at the time of The Clock and the mindset during which The Twilight Zone was born, there are new differences now. We just need one that speaks to our time. Night Visions had this to an extent - the stories were pretty much a post modern take on the Sterling classics, and more realistic in that, for the most part, the karma was all kinds of fucked up.

What does it mean about us - and if you take the shows to be art, then they must in some way speak about us? That we've grown more cynical? That we now want to guess the twist ending rather than just enjoy the story? Hell if I know. io9 had a nice article about trope chasers and good writing - but I honestly think there's a few more levels here. There's only one story - everything else is just a weird take or twist on it. "Once upon a time someone fell in a hole. Then they got out of it." That's pretty much it. We twist the depth of the hole, the length of time spent there, the number of people involved, how they are involved, and even if they fall into/get out of the hole.

We do these things, and then we have this picture of ourselves - be it creator or observer. Slasher film excess in the '80s went hand in hand with Wall Street. Torture porn flicks of the aughts along side pretty invasive reality TV and the celebrity gossip machine - one goes inside people through various violent means, and the other floats around in the images they wish to project, and neither one really gets close to the truth about people because of either market demands or the subject matter itself.

But we keep trying, bless our crooked little hearts, and for various reasons to. And maybe the only reward we can really expect is to see our own reflections in the work and smile. At least that's the lesson I learned from The Twilight Zone.

Returning Awareness...

I have a bad history with summer. Usually when things fall apart for me, it's in the summer and it seems to fall apart harder than ever. I'm beginning to think that it was always a matter of perception - time stretches in the summer, the days last for years and the months go by like a week. Now that I have little time for anything, I have the feeling that all this period of my life will be a constant summer - but I haven't really had anything that could fall apart on me.

Hell, the only thing that's really gotten to me was the cat dying (yeah - the dogs got it), but beyond that everything else has been just static.

But summer has always been a personal autumn - things just seemed to end. Relationships, strings of ok news, and the like would always get claimed just around the time I didn't have anything else going on except the weird, seasonal ennui. But this year, I don't know. I have a new job, went on a date - all stuff that is fairly well out of the norm for me. I'm even waking up at an unreasonable hour - but for a reason. It's all new and a little scary for me - I still have no sense of direction in terms of where I'm going, but that's nothing new. The new part is, I have a scheduled time to worry about it.

For as much as I'd like to like this new phase of my life, nothing 'new' is ever completely good. I'm having trouble acclimating to the a lot of the changes, even the stuff I like. I'm not ever sure if I want to pursue writing under a pseudonym, or if I should just scrap it all and fill up my hours some other way. After years of being mildly obsessed with clocks, I feel the pressure of time now more than ever. Even setting aside two hours a night has become quite the task as I pick and choose things to no longer do.

But still, I do find it a little thrilling in a dull kind of way - change happens and we have to change with it. And I think I'm up to the challenge, except the challenge keeps shifting on me - every new change has multiple challenges, and a few of them I haven't even guessed at.

Some of the new challenges are nice though.

Time will tell, I guess.

M.A.D....

You cannot really say what's "rebellion" anymore when it comes to the social sense of the word. The idea of a counter culture is damn near laughable - with how quickly every sub-culture is subsumed into the main, acting counter to the culture at large is the matter of a few weeks of wackiness followed by a reality TV show and then bored acceptance.

If there is one last bastion of rebellion, it is against the world, lacking the trappings of fashion or "look at me" fame whoring. It is a kind ripping at all the external until only the self remains, and then probably rejecting even that as false. There is something of the Rinzai school of Buddhism's maxim here: "First you kill your parents. Then you kill your teachers. Then you kill your gods."

It's also why I loved Off With Their Heads since I first heard their 2008 release From The Bottom. There was no time for bullshit, and what little mercy they showed to the outside world just threw into contrast the utter lack of it that they showed to themselves. After years of emo's self-loathing attempts to get laid, the theme of self-examination continues in punk, but now it's broken off from either experimental time signatures/instrumentation or just dealing with romance - now it's everything. Every possible part of life - from broken homes and the dreams of finding a place to live a normal life to the intake of news to the loss of loved ones (even when they're not terribly fond of them) - is examined and deconstructed from the ground up.

I picked up In Desolation - if you want to follow the band's time line, the themes and personal input are still the same as From The Bottom, only now they're dealing with all of those problems. The broken homes are still shattered and the hope for some point of stability a promise that grows more distant with every passing day. This makes it sound like a retread, which is a disservice to the album - true, the lamenting of destructive urges is still omnipresent, but there is this sense of fighting back when there's a chance of winning, and knowing when to cut your losses and run rather than just wallow in misery.

That might be the major saving grace of the album - the band - as people and as musicians - know their limitations now, and they know how to make a good Off With Their Heads album. While some bands can get away with experimentation, there's not much these guys can off the mainstream, and they know that - they know where they can be now, and they have traces of the Ramones and Motorhead in the repetition of rhythm and beats. In lesser hands, this would make the four LPs in their catalog dull as old shit, but somehow - again, like the Ramones and Motorhead - it has staying power.

Worth a spin for casual listeners, a Must Buy for revivalists.

Here's the lead track, "Drive"

"We Need This Hell"...

I watch a lot of movies. I mean, a lot of movies. And if there's two things that cinema loves, it's big battles and quiet moments. In the hands of the right people, either end of the spectrum can become things of beauty, literally motion pictures - like the paintings of the masters given life. The problem is, Sturgeon's Law is always in effect - 90% of everything is bullshit - and movies are not immune. For every films that makes you think, make you feel, or anything else that art makes you do, there's nine Dude, Where's My Cars - films that aren't even entertaining.

"Good" and "Bad are, of course, relative terms. There's tons of people who love all three Rush Hours, where as I think buddy comedy cop flicks peaked with Midnight Run. I'm sure people will always remember The Dark Knight - but Batman Begins holds up better to repeat viewings (the "social experiment" suffers the law of diminishing returns - but the training sessions take on a more sinister tone once you know the twist). Does this take away from an argument of "good or bad"? I don't think so - but in terms of entertainment value, I'd say it is fairly damning. I'm not a good judge of skill, but I know what I like, and the films that stick with me are usually the arty ones, or the ones that I can relate to.

A further example: I liked The Hurt Locker. I liked it better in the form of Alatriste. The former is about war as an addiction. The latter is about war as a way of life, no more different than accounting or masonry.

There's a good chance you haven't heard of it, or the series of books that inspired it - this is a shame, since the books are rollicking adventures in the vein of Dumas, and the film is really a meditation on the life of a solider with some great fight scene thrown in. Viggo Mortensen's Diego Alatriste is a man who takes comfort in his friends, who takes his ward under his wing as a matter first of honor and later in a kind of familial sense, and leans on (and is lent on by) them during their times in between combat. Having served in the Spanish army since the age of 13, warfare and combat is all he knows in the world. The Spanish Golden Age is already on the decline, and Alatriste and his companions sense it, even as they attempt to cling to the ideals of the age - courage, honor, artistry.

Now, the film is limited compared to the books - and it is best taken not as a single cohesive movie but rather a series of vignettes that follow the protagonist from his agreement to look after Inigo (Unax Ugalde as Alatriste's ward) to his final stand. The movie does follow fairly closely to the high lights of the books, with a few minor tweaks that either work well enough or are different enough that they work well within the film's world. One of the strong points of the film, but lacking a few of the layers presented in the books, is the roaming duels between Alatriste and Malatesta (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) - an Italian mercenary and a dark mirror of Alatriste. The strugle between these two is one of the major lynch pins of the film, countering the father/son pattern of Alatriste and Inigo.

Alatriste's relationship with Maria de Castro (Ariadna Gil) is likewise mirrored by Inigo's budding romance with Angelica de Alquezar (Elena Anaya), with both betrayals of trust and quiet moments of romance and relationships that do sometimes border on melodrama but for the most part come across as honest.

And through it all, there is war. War between the Spanish and Dutch, war between France and Spain, war between Alatriste and Malatesta, and the home life skirmishes that can sometimes be doused by the bonds of family, and other times cannot be healed because of those same bonds. After a misadventure, as conflict flairs once again between the Spanish and the Dutch, Alatriste is given a chance to return to the very field of combat that introduced us to him, and to leave his poverty and the mark on his head behind. It was war that taught him how to make his meager way in the world, war that granted him a kind of son in Inigo, and it is war that he is good at. "Flanders is Hell," he says, and he is answered, "Without Flanders there is nothing. We need this Hell."

See this film.