Author: Ridley

Friday was a holiday at my office. I spent the day reading Kafka’s The Trial and assisting an employee I’d never met at a company I didn’t know I supported upgrading software I’d never heard of. Life, it seems, has a dark sense of humor. The Trial is a fascinating book. Kafka is unmatched when it comes to creating a suffocating, paranoid atmosphere. The entire novel feels like being stuck in a crowded room with no ventilation waiting in a line that never moves. First and foremost it’s a critique of bureaucracies in a totalitarian society, but there’s a good deal more going on. Every new character undermines the protagonist’s (and reader’s) understanding of what’s going on. There’s a religious allegory in there as well as no small amount of self-criticism and questioning whether or not the victim is really a victim at all or is rather complicit in his own imprisonment. Which is all to say that it’s a genuinely fascinating piece of literature that’s also a terrific read. It’s not what I would describe as “fun” but c’mon, who’s reading Kafka for laughs? I genuinely do not want to know the answer to that question. 

Since I follow The Onion’s AV Club on Facebook, I see their Q&A feature pop up in my feed on a regular basis. They’re the sort of writing prompts I can’t resist and I’m not going to let the fact that I’m not technically (meaning “in any sense”) in the AV Club prevent me from offering up my answers to their questions.  This is the third one I’ve done. Here’s the first, and here’s the second. There are going to be more, so let that be your warning. What fictional animal’s death affected you the most? There were some good selections in the AV Club’s list, with Futurama’s Seymour Asses at the top of the list. However, I believe that the only way someone wouldn’t chose Pirate the rabbit from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s WE3 would be if they haven’t read the book.  I’ll be honest-I’m tearing up thinking about it right now. All of the animals in the book live in uncanny valley where their personalities are both affecting and deeply disturbing, They’re able to express awareness of their situations and their actions in a way that’s just close enough to believable to get under the reader’s skin. So, when Pirate finds himself in a hopeless situation, he knows it, and he acts in the only possible way that he can to make his demise meaningful. It’s utterly heartbreaking, but it is not in vain. Just a page or so later, Morrison and Quitely give the readers what I believe is the single greatest panel in comic book history. I wont’ say what it is, but I guarantee you’ll know it when you see it…especially if you’ve read The Dark Knight Returns. What’s the worst movie you ever saw in a theater? The writers for the AV Club avoided the films that were never conceived as anything more than schlock, so I’ll do the same. Besides, as someone who saw Robot Jox, Spice World, and Tank Girl on the day they were released, I genuinely enjoy that kind of film. Heck, I even liked Mortal Kombat. So really, the question isn’t what was the “worst” move so much as the “most disappointing” or even “the one you hated the most.”  I have many, many candidates to chose from, but in terms of “falling a mile short of expectations,” it’s hard to top The Blair Witch Project. I saw it in a packed theater at the height of the hype,  but as soon as the film started, the energy just drained out of the room. It wasn’t just me; no one in the theater was buying in to it. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t interesting, and it most definitely wasn’t scary. When it ended and the lights went up, the room was completely silent. Finally, a guy a few rows in front of me blurted out “Well that was kinda stupid.” Everyone burst out laughing. It was, by a wide margin, the most enjoyable part of the film. Who is your favorite “unlikable” character? Pretty much every character on “Arrested Development” was unlikable, and I’m sorely tempted to select Lucille, but in the end, it really has to be GOB, doesn’t it?  His combination of insecurity and confidence, utterly unencumbered by self-awareness may not be completely unique, but Will Arnett played him with such an aggressive brittleness that you almost felt for him. Of course, every time you let your guard down, he’d demonstrate why he would never be the protagonist in any story, even his own.  What song is inextricably linked to a film or TV show for you? Back when I worked in a record store, my manager played The Big Chill soundtrack no less than three times a day, every day. Because of this, I will probably always cringe when I hear any Motown standard. That soundtrack gave us those awful montages of white people in khakis drinking wine and have a suspiciously jolly time drinking blush wine and listening to “Mustang Sally.”  But…man, the opening scene played against the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is kind of spectacular. It’s exactly the sort of match of mood to music that Wes Anderson does so well. The songs’ epic, orchestral embrace of disappointment and settling for “good enough” suits the movie’s themes perfectly. If the rest of the film had been as good as the opening credits, it would be a considered a classic.  Which actor is so good, you’d watch them in anything? No long intro for this one: Hugo Weaving, all day, every day. I genuinely wonder if The Matrix would have worked without Weaving’s incredible Agent Smith. Watching him snarl “Mr. Anderson” gives me the jibblies every time. It could easily have been a nothing role and Weaving made it unforgettable.  I have a little rule of thumb for declaring someone a “great actor:” If they play a key role in three great films, they’re probably great themselves. It’s not a perfect method, but it’s not a bad quick-and-dirty test. Weaving’s work in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and of course, Babe would put him in the club even without The Matrix. He’s always worth watching, even when the movie isn’t.  

I gave in to my inner Anglophile last week and read a couple of British books which otherwise have absolutely nothing in common. The first was A Race of Minds by Simon Horrocks. If it doesn’t exist in cyberpunk-land, you can at least see it from there. It’s a page turner that doesn’t come across as deeply weird until you catch your breath and look back on it. The main character is in a coma for the entire novel, although that limits her participation less than you might imagine. There’s a good deal of messing about with memory so that, not only is the reader not always certain which side a character is on, sometimes the characters themselves aren’t sure of their own place on the board.  At first I struggled a little to keep up with which characters were which. In the tradition of William Gibson, the reader is expected to pick it up as they go, a technique which contributes to sense of breakneck pace. Speaking of pace, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Mr. Horrocks credit for finding a neat workaround for the “ticking clock” trope. You know the one: An arbitrary deadline which forces the pace when there’s otherwise no reason to get X done within twenty four hours. It can be a bomb (obviously), a ransomer’s deadline, or “this potion only lasts for one hour!” There’s a countdown in A Race of Minds, but handled differently and, I’d say, better. So, I enjoyed A Race of Minds. It is, however, more of an episode than a complete novel. The ending wouldn’t be particularly satisfying if that were The End, but it clearly isn’t. The deeper I got into the book, the more I liked it, so it was a little jarring to land on what amounted to a “tune in next week!” Which, of course, I will be doing. P.S. I haven’t read Volume 0 of Horrocks’ “Kosmos” series and now I’m thinking perhaps I ought to have done so. If you’re interested in reading this book, it’s probably a good idea to go back to the introductory volume, huh? 5000-1 The Leicester City Story is Rob Tanner’s account of Leicester City football club’s miraculous 2015/16 championship season. I was a little surprised to see this book in a local book store, and as such I felt a moral obligation to buy it. I can recite the high points of the Foxes’ year by heart, but Tanner, who write for the Leicester Mercury, somehow turned a story I knew by heart into a riveting tale all over ago.  All of the matches receive a writeup, and there are multiple stories filling in the backgrounds and personalities of the key City players. I’ll admit to a massive, massive bias, but reliving those matches, especially the comebacks, made me grin like a loony. In retrospect, the stories about Claudio Ranieri, City’s manager last year, are bittersweet given his sacking a few months ago. He was, and remains, a very classy man and I’m gutted that he was let go regardless of the fact that it seems to have been a necessary move. If you’re underwhelmed by the quality of writing in American sports, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Tanner’s work. He’s a fine writer who avoids the cliched hyperbole you see in so many sports-related books. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he has a novel or two in him. This is a better-than-expected recounting of what is arguably the greatest upset in sporting history. If you’re in to that sort of thing, it’s a fine read. If you’re a Leicester City fan, it’s scripture. -RK

I get whipped up into a righteous anger over all of the reports indicating that “We could save the NEA with the money we spend to guard Melania Trump in Trump Tower (possibly true)” or “If the President would cut down on his golf, we could save Meals on Wheels. (likely true).”  There are more examples out there, but you know the kind of report I’m talking about: The ones that demonstrate that many popular federal programs are a drop in the bucket with respect to the federal budget and could easily be funded if we just cut a little here (the military) or there (presidential perks).  While the reports are, in theory, correct from a numbers standpoint, they miss the point. These programs would be cut even if they cost one dollar. This isn’t about saving money; it’s about ending programs that some legislators believe have no business being part of the federal government.  Some of them are libertarian, free-market zealots, some of them have a strict-constructionist view that the federal government should restrict itself to making treaties and defending the shores, and others are in it for, let’s say, less idealistic motives. The bottom line is the same, though: If the government is doing it, then there’s no room for business to make a profit on it.  In 2005, Rick Santorum proposed a bill that would make it illegal for the National Weather Service to offer free weather reports on the principle that they prevented businesses from being able to charge for weather reports.  Here’s the relevant part of the text of the bill: Prohibits the Secretary from providing or assisting other entities in providing a product or service (other than a product or service for the preparation and issuance of severe weather forecasts and warnings as described above) that is or could be provided by the private sector… So, the takeaway here is that cutting funding for social service, education, and the arts this isn’t a war on spending or an attempt to balance the budget, even when they’re advertised as such. It’s an attempt to prevent the government from providing services that could prove lucrative to the private sector.  Everything else is just a smokescreen. -RK

I believe that William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is most likely a work of genius. It’s exceedingly difficult to be sure, though. At the extremes, revolutionary structure and slapdash organization can look much the same. There may be no better example of this than Naked Lunch, since, by design, it’s meant to be a book you can open to any page and start reading. I took it as a series of thematically linked vignettes, but at a certain point, who really knows?  It’s a shorter book than it looks; the edition I read contained only one hundred and ninety or so pages of text. Its padded out by extensive notes by both the author and the editors of this particular version of the book. It felt a good deal longer. It was probably the most difficulty book I’ve read, surpassing Pynchon by a good distance.  It’s fierce, it’s evocative, and it’s funny as hell if you squint at it. It’s also obtuse, repetitive, and not nearly so shocking as it surely was when it was first released. That’s the danger of being a trailblazer. The efforts of cutting the first path through the forest are seldom appreciated decades later when an interstate now runs directly over the trail you blazed. That doesn’t diminish Naked Lunch, but it certainly changes how the reader experiences the book. Unlike most books, I’d say that reading the material at the end of the volume is essential to Naked Lunch. The sections covering the process which produced the book explain a great deal about the finished product. Burroughs’ unflinching descriptions of his experiences with opiates and their various cures is not only gives you more conventional view of what he went through, it also shows what a clear, concise writer he could be when he chose to do so. It’s a hell of a book, utterly unique in my experience, and not at all the sort of thing you should read on a train surrounded by fellow commuters. I know this from personal experience. Trust me. -RK

(there will be spoilers aplenty here, so if you don’t want to read about plot points and overall arcs from the sequel to Trainspotting, you probably don’t want to read any further. I guess if you haven’t read Gateway and you’re planning on doing so,  you might want to put a pin in this for later.)   My initial thought after seeing T2: Trainspotting was just how much it reminded me of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. Feel free to scratch you head a moment. Let me explain: In Pohl’s book, the protagonist is in a spaceship approaching a black hole. The “hero” and his handful of shipmates come up with a plan that might allow them to escape. Instead, perhaps by intent or maybe by accident, screws up the plan, allowing himself to escape while dooming his shipmates to eternal falling into darkness. You can see how that rhymes with the ending of the first Trainspotting. Renton betrayed his mates and, as the film ends to the tune of Underworld’s Born Slippy, he recites a litany of ways he’s going to turn over anew leaf and live his old life behind. It’s a naive and cynical recitation. He’s mocking “you” when he says he’s going to be “just like you.” Twenty years go by, and Renton returns home. His abandoned mates are still slowly falling towards oblivion: Begbie’s in prison, Spud’s back quit heroin and then relapsed and trying to kill himself, and Sick Boy, now calling himself Simon, is running a dingy pub when he’s not running blackmail scams and scheming to open a brothel with his perhaps-girlfriend Veronika. No one is particularly happy to see Renton return. So why did Renton come back? He had a respectable life in Holland with a wife and a steady job as an accountant. At first, his return seems strangely pointless, just an excuse to get the movie in motion. However, it’s revealed that Renton’s escape was a failure. His wife is leaving him, his company’s about to fire him, and he’s got nothing. He fucked over his friends to get out, he blew it, and now he’s tumbling back in to his old life. The first film isn’t just the jumping off point for the sequel; it’s an anchor that keeps tugging at every attempt to break away from its gravity. It’s a fascinating way to make a sequel. The first film haunts every shot, and the music echoes the legendary soundtrack of the original. There are messages, subtle and otherwise, all through the film warning of the futility of trying to recapture the past and obviously, those warning could apply to both the making of the film and the viewing of it. The performances are terrific, particularly those of Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller as Renton and Simon. Renton’s boyish charm is intact, but it’s a good deal less charming. Simon’s intensity is riveting and their relationship is what carries the movie. They love each other, but there’s no trust and they can’t get over the past. Veronika, who has been wrongly called an example of the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope, is just removed enough and observant enough to see how things are going and plan accordingly. Begbie and Spud are more peripheral, providing menace and comedic pathos respectively. They’re good, but they’re not really central to what the movie is about. Ewen Bremmer as Spud is particularly good and you’re left with the sense that he might just have a chance at a brighter, or less dim, future. A few of the other characters from the original return: Mikey Forrester, Rents’ father, and, most poignantly, Diane. She’s only got one short scene, but it’s memorable. She was never really on the same trajectory as the guys, and now she’s in an entirely different universe. She offers some good advance that Renton obviously won’t take. The key scene, for me at least, was  a dinner conversation between Veronika and Renton where she asks him what “Choose life” is all about. Renton launches into another monologue, similar in form to the one from the first film, but wholly different in content and meaning. It’s now the cautionary tale of the damned who has, in fact, attempted to chose life, and every word he speaks is now bitter experience instead of a glib, mocking recitation of other people’s values. Even though you knew this scene had to happen, it still works and it’s devastating. The plot felt more like an excuse to explore aging, betrayal, attempting to recapture the past, and failure than to tell a story, but those are some pretty good excuses. There’s some incredible camerawork that exhumes and expands upon the first film. My only gripe, technically, was that the bombastic music wasn’t as on the nose as the first time around. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Wolf Alice; it just didn’t feel as essential to the film as that razor cut from “Temptation” to “Atomic” in the club scene the first time around. Which is a long way of saying, it’s a really odd experience watching T2: Trainspotting. At times, it feels like it’s pointing a finger at the audience, chastising them for wanting to relive the thrill of the first film. It’s a joyless affair for all its energy. It’s shot inventively and, like I said, the performances are terrific and it leaves you with a lot to chew on. In some ways, this was a legitimately better film than Trainspotting, but I didn’t enjoy it as much and I doubt I’ll revisit it as often, if that makes any sense. -RK    

On Sunday, my wife and I met up with my sisters and my stepmother to spread my father’s ashes in the Brazos river.  That’s a tough line to follow.  We meet by the FM2114 bridge, a place which held a surprising emotional resonance for a farm to market road bridge in the middle of something within spitting distance of nowhere. We used to canoe on that stretch of river on a semi-regular basis. We owned a fiberglass canoe which was heavy, but very, very quite in the water. The current below Lake Whitney was pretty weak and the wind was always in our face, so it wasn’t particularly easy paddling. That was especially true since I was usually fishing and letting my dad do most of the work.  He never complained about that, at least, he never complained to me about it. I know I would have been ticket. The water was usually so clear that you could see the bottom of the river. It was one bend after another, white limestone cliffs on one side, rocky sandbars on the other. The banks were lined with cottonwoods, which are second only to the aspen in my opinion when it comes to the sound of the wind through the leaves.  We usually made a day trip of it, going about eight miles or so from the dam to the bridge. Sometimes, we’d stay on the water for three days, canoeing down to the headwaters of whatever lake is in Waco (Lake Waco, I presume). I’d get sunburned, usually lose a bunch of very expensive lures (rapalas were my favorites), and mostly, I had a great time with my father. That’s the man I want to remember. He was healthy, happy, silly, and he seemed to really enjoy my company. So, it seemed fitting that the last of his ashes *would be cast into the river at that location. One of my sisters prepared a speech and it was perfect and impossible to follow. I tried to follow it anyway. My younger sister, who wasn’t going to speak, did so, and there were tears all around.  I don’t know that there was any closure or anything of that sort; I’m not sure what closure feels like and I suspect you can’t recognize it when you get it. But this felt right and it was good to be with my family and say our peace and eat lunch together.** -RK   * His best friend Norm took some of his ashes to Arizona to one of the spring training ballparks. This, too, was appropriate, both in terms of location and the fact that Norm, who was as good to my father as a man could have been, was the one doing it. ** This is probably not something that belongs in this sort of post, but the Texas Great Country Cafe in Whitney, Texas, was aces. You can get your chicken fried steak deep-fried or (correctly) pan-fried. It’s the best chicken fried steak I’ve had since R.O.’s shut down.

Since I follow The Onion’s AV Club on Facebook, I see their Q&A feature pop up in my feed on a regular basis. They’re the sort of writing prompts I can’t resist and I’m not going to let the fact that I’m not technically (meaning “in any sense”) in the AV Club prevent me from offering up my answers to their questions.  This is the second one I’ve done. Here’s the first. There are going to be more, so let that be your warning. “What non-2016 book did you finally get around to reading this year?“ More than I can list, but the one that stood out was Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. So many classics have disappointed me when I finally got around to reading/listening to/seeing them. So many of my favorite writers cite Chandler as an influence that I was a concerned that there’d be no way he could live up to expectations. He lived up to expectations. Reading Raymond Chandler is just flat-out fun. His writing is taut without being Cormac McCarthy-ish minimalist, he’s a genius when it comes to figurative language, and creates memorable, breathing characters. I’m not at all sure that the plot held together, but I didn’t care. I felt a sense of regret when I finished The Long Goodbye because I didn’t want to leave it, and that’s about the best thing I can say about any book. “What one piece of pop culture most reminds you of the inherent goodness of humanity?” Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods is not his most famous book (that would be Good Omens, co-written with Neil Gaiman) and it may not be his best (probably Night Watch), but it’s the one that I turn to when I need to be reminded that people can be good. It’s a beautiful, funny story. Pratchett was an absolute master at delivering a message in such a way that you never felt you were being preached to. The humanity of the one single man in the face of both a church and a god which had abandoned any pretext of existing for any purpose other than their own should come across as heavy handed, but instead it’s charming. And then there’s the coda, which is as graceful a landing as any book I’ve ever read has managed.  “What song always gives you goosebumps, no matter how many times you’ve heard it?“ Easiest question on this list: The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The proto-shoegaze guitar with that signature tremolo gets me every. single. time. Thanks to Soho using a sample of that guitar on their song “Hippychick,” I always hold my breath waiting for the drums to come it: Will it be The Smiths (yay!) or Soho (not yay)?   I know this is probably something that no one should ever say out loud about The Smiths, but I really wish there was a version of this song without Morrissey on it. There’s nothing wrong with his lyrics or vocals, but the instrumental track is just so perfect that vocals dull the impact a little. I could just put “How Soon Is Now” on repeat, put on some headphones, and I’d have all the music I’d ever really need. “Is there a supposed defining “masterpiece” in a genre or by an artist you love that you actually hate?“ I don’t get the film version of The Shining at all. It just feels like a slow, dull two hours that I forget as soon as I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I just don’t get it. For real hatred, I’d have to go with Anais Nin’s Henry and June. The first time I picked it up, I made it through one chapter, tossed it across the room, and took a shower. It’s not just that I find Nin’s point of view so ugly; it’s that she seems to be so very pleased with herself.  You know that guy, don’t you? That guy who goes around telling you about how he does horrible things to other people, but he thinks he’s the hero of the story? That could maybe make for a decent novel, but it makes for a profoundly ugly memoir. What’s your favorite movie poster?     Yes, that’s right. It reads “Two Men Two Machines Too Wild! Robot Jox accomplishes what all movie posters seek to do: It writes checks that the movie doesn’t even come close to cashing. The poster has everything you could ever want to see in a film (and by “you,” I mean “me in my 20’s”): Explosions, flying futuristic wedges, burning post-apocalyptic towns, and giant robots. Not just giant robots, but giant robots squared off to do battle! If you’ve seen the film, you understand just how wide the gap between the poster and the film is. For everyone else, I’ll just sum it up with one phrase: “Stop motion animation.” It’s almost as if the entire budget for the film was used to make this awesome poster and nothing was left for CGI, so they just used Play-doh to make the robots. A movie poster that makes me want to see a movie is a success and this one succeeds in ways that no poster since has ever managed. 

I just wrote a long, detailed post about my current physical ailments. Then I erased it. You’re welcome. Then I wrote a lengthy bit about working from home last week and that was exactly as interesting as a story about getting a chunk of my skin sawed out and it suffered the same fate. I guess there’s value in doing things that are important to you even when you don’t really feel like doing them.  So, that’s what I’ve done, twice, but I’m not going to take my perseverance out on you. If you made it this far, you deserve something nice, so here’s a list of the best Mr. Show sketches. It had embedded video. Treat yourself and click the link Treat yourself, You deserve it. -RK