A quickie review of a quickie book:
Like a lot of people, I primarily know Dave McKean through his association with Neil Gaiman. McKean drew the cover for every single issue of Sandman, and while the artists within the pages rotated frequently, McKean's steady influence at the front helped define the character of these series: dreamlike, surreal, disturbing, apprehensive. More recently, I was surprised to see his art in Violent Cases, where I could see a wider range of his artistry at work.
I finally picked up his book "Pictures that Tick," which collects a wide variety of his... work... from a long period extending both before and after the seminal run of Sandman. It's almost impossible to categorize just what this is. It's too high-brow for a comic book; it's too narrative for an art book; it's too lyrical for short stories. I guess that ""illustrated poems" is the closest I can get to describing it, although that doesn't begin to do justice to the feel of it. The book is thoroughly adult, and displays the same sense of unease that I associate with his Sandman work.
Of course, he has many modes to work in. Some of the tales are very spare and elegant. Often they'll focus on a single image or idea, and he'll circle around it for a while with his beautiful collages, drawing out what he can from it while an essentially unknowable core remains at the center. Some of the pieces are very short and funny. Some will haunt you, particularly one tale about a young girl who grows up pierced by a tree. Others have a dreamlike wonder to them; I'm particularly fond of a piece about a woman who goes exploring with a found map and a bag of marbles.
I think I would have gotten more out of this if I had a better grounding in poetry. As it is, I tend to read things too literally, and I don't think I properly appreciate the rhythm of poems. Still, the imagery McKean works with here is astonishing, and the art alone makes the book well worth grabbing. His haunting words only add to their impact.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Le compositeur est mort! Vive le compositeur!
The Unusually Active January continues with The Composer Is Dead, another awesome play from the Berkeley Rep.
This is now the third performance that I've seen there, and the second on the Roda Stage. All have been terrific. after the quake was a haunting, elegiac, and yet hilarious transformation of my favorite living author's stories onto the stage. The Lieutenant of Inishmore was one of the most disturbing and macabre things I've seen... but also surprisingly funny. I think it's safe to say that residents of the Bay Area have great senses of humor, and we're willing to laugh in situations that many others would find unsettling.
"Funny" and "unsettling" are probably the two best words to describe Lemony Snicket, who wrote the original book The Composer Is Dead and oversaw the adaptation to the stage. I've been calling it a play, but that only begins to describe it. Even the original story was a trans-media work; the story shipped with a CD of music performed by the San Francisco Symphony.
Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) is a great lover of classical music, and TCID was written in part to help create a new generation of music appreciators. The theatrical version as originally written took only about 30 minutes to perform, and so they went to work at... I don't want to say "padding it out," but... let's say "extending" the book into a scope that would merit an actual show.
And so, as the Charming Host says at the beginning of the performance, we get to experience "the wonder and magic of living, breathing theater, where ANYTHING can go wrong!" The host struts around the stage, telling corny jokes with great aplomb, and giving special attention to the children, "because they're so very young." He proceeds to give the worst-ever ventriloquist act with a sock puppet, then hurls the puppet against the podium, announcing that it has a speech impediment. But, not to worry, because today we'll get to meet the world's greatest living composer, live on the stage. In order to properly explore the characteristics of living, breathing theater, he shows us a movie, wherein the dramaturge will explain how theater works. "In this context," the (live) host explains, "'Dramaturge' means a person who explains the history of a play, hopefully without being too boring.
Within the movie, a puppet introduces himself as the dramaturge. The puppet says that it will explain the purpose of the theater, using a slide show. The slide show contains slides of the dramaturge, his older brother (who, he sneeringly says, "claims to be a 'major historian'"), and his mother. The (live) host comes back out, and starts chastising the dramaturge for distracting the audience (us).
So, just to make it clear: the host is arguing with deeply nested layers of artifice: a recorded movie (1), starring a puppet (2), showing a slide show (3), that contains other puppets (4). Aw, yeah! Now we're getting somewhere!
Even though The Composer is Dead is ostensibly a children's play, it's hands-down the most avant-garde example of one that I've ever seen. Much of the first half of the play consists of the (live) host carrying on elaborately detailed arguments and fights with the (recorded) puppets. It follows some of the style of a good children's book: fairly repetitive language that grows more amusing through its repetition. Almost every puppet he meets prompts him to say something like, "The audience came here to see someone with an artistic temperment, not throwing a tantrum!", to which the puppet will reply, "An artistic temperment and a tantrum are the same thing!" "No, they're not!" "Yes, they are!" "Nuh-uh!" "Yuh-huh!" It's also a very clever exploration of just how the theater works: in addition to the dramaturge, the host meets with the stage manager, director, actor, understudy, lighting director, stagehand, and so on. Each is introduced with the same construction, like "'Understudy,' in this context, means someone who is just as good as the actor, but who only gets to perform if something terribly bad happens." We learn more and more about how demented everyone in the theater is, and just when it seems like things can't get worse, we discover that the world's greatest living composer is dead. The host runs away screaming, and the inspector arrives to investigate the crime.
While the first half of the play happens entirely through the movie (with the live interaction of the host), the second half unfolds completely on the stage, with one human actor playing the inspector, and dozens of puppets. (The puppets were performed by Phantom Limb, a San Francisco-based outfit who did amazing work here. I do not believe that they are affiliated with the notorious Guild of Calamitous Intent.) The inspector questions everyone in the orchestra - and, in the process, the audience learns what an orchestra is, who makes it up, and what everyone does.
However, this is all done through Lemony Snicket's twisted view. Some of my favorite lines included:
"The first violins are the best violinists in the orchestra. The second violins are more fun at parties."
"We oboes couldn't have murdered the composer! Everyone in the orchestra trusts us!"
"'Composer' is a word which here means 'a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.' This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called DEcomposing."
Besides the orchestra (which sits, appropriately, in the orchestra pit), they had a gorgeous backstage that transformed throughout the second half of the play with a variety of sets and still more puppets. These were more simple but also effective and amusing; bees flew down from the top, and rotating cutouts on runners rolled out to spin around in waltzes or to march in a parade. (My favorite non-sequitor was a bear who kept popping up during the patriotic sequences.) During his questioning of the brass section, a white curtain fell, and a shadow play continued the story of a wild night of drinking and dancing.
MEGA SPOILERS
In the end, the inspector finishes questioning everyone and concludes that none of the instruments in the orchestra could have done it. Then, in a flash, he realizes that it must have been the conductor. In the line that got the biggest laugh of the night, he said, "After all, conductors have been murdering composers for YEARS!" He elaborated that wherever you find a live conductor, you'll find a dead composer, and listed off the names of dozens of greats while their tombstones popped up from the stage floor. The orchestra explains that, while the conductor may have killed the composer, they also keep him alive by playing his music.
END SPOILERS
Did I mention that the music is really good? Well, it is. The theme that plays for the dead composer was my favorite, but all of it is well-done. There's a cool rock-inflected bit that opens the second half and shows the inspector driving to the theater. As he interrogates the orchestra, it rotates through a variety of classical pieces, each one highlighting the instrument under questioning.
Anyways, this was another clear win for the Berkeley Rep, and I'm now three-for-three there. As a bonus, I got to spend a few hours before the show wandering around the Berkeley campus, including the trails leading up to the Lawrence Lab. Hiking and culture, what a great combination!
This is now the third performance that I've seen there, and the second on the Roda Stage. All have been terrific. after the quake was a haunting, elegiac, and yet hilarious transformation of my favorite living author's stories onto the stage. The Lieutenant of Inishmore was one of the most disturbing and macabre things I've seen... but also surprisingly funny. I think it's safe to say that residents of the Bay Area have great senses of humor, and we're willing to laugh in situations that many others would find unsettling.
"Funny" and "unsettling" are probably the two best words to describe Lemony Snicket, who wrote the original book The Composer Is Dead and oversaw the adaptation to the stage. I've been calling it a play, but that only begins to describe it. Even the original story was a trans-media work; the story shipped with a CD of music performed by the San Francisco Symphony.
Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) is a great lover of classical music, and TCID was written in part to help create a new generation of music appreciators. The theatrical version as originally written took only about 30 minutes to perform, and so they went to work at... I don't want to say "padding it out," but... let's say "extending" the book into a scope that would merit an actual show.
And so, as the Charming Host says at the beginning of the performance, we get to experience "the wonder and magic of living, breathing theater, where ANYTHING can go wrong!" The host struts around the stage, telling corny jokes with great aplomb, and giving special attention to the children, "because they're so very young." He proceeds to give the worst-ever ventriloquist act with a sock puppet, then hurls the puppet against the podium, announcing that it has a speech impediment. But, not to worry, because today we'll get to meet the world's greatest living composer, live on the stage. In order to properly explore the characteristics of living, breathing theater, he shows us a movie, wherein the dramaturge will explain how theater works. "In this context," the (live) host explains, "'Dramaturge' means a person who explains the history of a play, hopefully without being too boring.
Within the movie, a puppet introduces himself as the dramaturge. The puppet says that it will explain the purpose of the theater, using a slide show. The slide show contains slides of the dramaturge, his older brother (who, he sneeringly says, "claims to be a 'major historian'"), and his mother. The (live) host comes back out, and starts chastising the dramaturge for distracting the audience (us).
So, just to make it clear: the host is arguing with deeply nested layers of artifice: a recorded movie (1), starring a puppet (2), showing a slide show (3), that contains other puppets (4). Aw, yeah! Now we're getting somewhere!
Even though The Composer is Dead is ostensibly a children's play, it's hands-down the most avant-garde example of one that I've ever seen. Much of the first half of the play consists of the (live) host carrying on elaborately detailed arguments and fights with the (recorded) puppets. It follows some of the style of a good children's book: fairly repetitive language that grows more amusing through its repetition. Almost every puppet he meets prompts him to say something like, "The audience came here to see someone with an artistic temperment, not throwing a tantrum!", to which the puppet will reply, "An artistic temperment and a tantrum are the same thing!" "No, they're not!" "Yes, they are!" "Nuh-uh!" "Yuh-huh!" It's also a very clever exploration of just how the theater works: in addition to the dramaturge, the host meets with the stage manager, director, actor, understudy, lighting director, stagehand, and so on. Each is introduced with the same construction, like "'Understudy,' in this context, means someone who is just as good as the actor, but who only gets to perform if something terribly bad happens." We learn more and more about how demented everyone in the theater is, and just when it seems like things can't get worse, we discover that the world's greatest living composer is dead. The host runs away screaming, and the inspector arrives to investigate the crime.
While the first half of the play happens entirely through the movie (with the live interaction of the host), the second half unfolds completely on the stage, with one human actor playing the inspector, and dozens of puppets. (The puppets were performed by Phantom Limb, a San Francisco-based outfit who did amazing work here. I do not believe that they are affiliated with the notorious Guild of Calamitous Intent.) The inspector questions everyone in the orchestra - and, in the process, the audience learns what an orchestra is, who makes it up, and what everyone does.
However, this is all done through Lemony Snicket's twisted view. Some of my favorite lines included:
"The first violins are the best violinists in the orchestra. The second violins are more fun at parties."
"We oboes couldn't have murdered the composer! Everyone in the orchestra trusts us!"
"'Composer' is a word which here means 'a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.' This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called DEcomposing."
Besides the orchestra (which sits, appropriately, in the orchestra pit), they had a gorgeous backstage that transformed throughout the second half of the play with a variety of sets and still more puppets. These were more simple but also effective and amusing; bees flew down from the top, and rotating cutouts on runners rolled out to spin around in waltzes or to march in a parade. (My favorite non-sequitor was a bear who kept popping up during the patriotic sequences.) During his questioning of the brass section, a white curtain fell, and a shadow play continued the story of a wild night of drinking and dancing.
MEGA SPOILERS
In the end, the inspector finishes questioning everyone and concludes that none of the instruments in the orchestra could have done it. Then, in a flash, he realizes that it must have been the conductor. In the line that got the biggest laugh of the night, he said, "After all, conductors have been murdering composers for YEARS!" He elaborated that wherever you find a live conductor, you'll find a dead composer, and listed off the names of dozens of greats while their tombstones popped up from the stage floor. The orchestra explains that, while the conductor may have killed the composer, they also keep him alive by playing his music.
END SPOILERS
Did I mention that the music is really good? Well, it is. The theme that plays for the dead composer was my favorite, but all of it is well-done. There's a cool rock-inflected bit that opens the second half and shows the inspector driving to the theater. As he interrogates the orchestra, it rotates through a variety of classical pieces, each one highlighting the instrument under questioning.
Anyways, this was another clear win for the Berkeley Rep, and I'm now three-for-three there. As a bonus, I got to spend a few hours before the show wandering around the Berkeley campus, including the trails leading up to the Lawrence Lab. Hiking and culture, what a great combination!
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
The Gnome
In the first of a trifecta of Fun January Outings, I had the pleasure of attending an interview with Patton Oswalt at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Thanks, Pat!
The interview was part of the City Arts and Lecture series, which I haven't previously attended in person, but which I almost always catch on KQED radio. I love these - they're invariably insightful, generally amusing, and either bring up interesting people or provide rare fresh glimpses into familiar figures. The broadcasts are always edited down into hour-long segments, so in addition to the thrill of Oswalt I was curious to see how the live event compared.
First off, Herbst Theater itself is great. It's in a kind of sketchy area of town, but once you get inside, the building is pretty impressive.... smaller-scale than great theaters, but with an understated elegance that's really pleasant. I arrived about half an hour early, and so had plenty of time to buy a copy of Patton's new book, "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland." Would there be an author signing? Why, yes, there would! Hurray! I haven't been to one of those in, gosh.... since Terry Pratchett came through Kepler's or Chris Kimball came to Books, Inc., I guess.
The event was the final entry in a series to benefit 826 Valencia, a great local non-profit. It looked like most of the crowd was there to see Oswalt. It was mainly people around my age, but plenty of folks my parents' ages as well. There was a lot of chatter and a good vibe in the lead-up to the event proper.
The interviewer was Andrew Leland, the editor of The Believer magazine, which I am vaguely aware of but have not read. He introduced Oswalt while acknowledging that we all knew who he was, paying special attention to his recent major film roles. Oswalt came on stage, and they went to it.
The early stages felt a little rough... still enjoyable, but Andrew would typically start asking a question, Patton would start answering, then Andrew would try to interject another point or clarification, and they'd muddle through it. Patton was game for answering "serious" questions (very early on, Andrew did actually say, "But, no, seriously..."), but in general he seemed to enjoy getting on a riff and doing something funny with it. We loved him for this, of course. After a while he and Andrew fell into more of a rhythm, where he would get a full question from Andrew, spent several minutes doing whatever he wanted to with it, then he'd take a sip of water and give a barely perceptible nod to Andrew.
Early on, Andrew said that he'd detected a common thread among the various roles that Patton had played. "You mean, someone offered me a part?" Patton replied. "Yep, that's it! The common element that ties everything together. Either I auditioned for a role, or someone offered me a role, along with money, and I said 'Yes!'" Andrew eventually clarified that, in King of Queens, Ratatouille, and Big Fan, Patton has played obsessives: characters who are completely enthralled by a topic, whether it's comics, food, or the New York Jets. Patton whole-heartedly agreed. He's been obsessed by a lot of things ever since his youth, and continues those obsessions forward today; and, having that kind of experience with his particular topics of fascination, he can understand what it feels like to have a similar level of dedication to other areas.
The interview ranged all over, but a lot of it was at least loosely related to Oswalt's new book. Here are a few fairly random remembrances:
Early on, Oswalt talked a fair amount about imagination. He credits some of his inventiveness to growing up in the suburbs, with limited access to artistic resources. He would collect comic books, but wouldn't be able to find all the issues, so he'd have to imagine what happened in the story, to fill in the gaps in a satisfying way. Andrew asked him how that related to his experiences working in a [very bad] movie theater, whether he felt inspired to "fix" the [very bad] movies he saw there. Oswalt said "no" - at that stage in his life, he could fill in the gaps for incomplete works, but a movie was a fully-realized thing... he could dislike it, as he did, but didn't feel like he had the capacity to, say, rewrite the script or provide alternate direction.
He also talked a lot about comedy tours, and the state of comedy in general when he was starting out, from the late 80's through the mid 90's. These were some of the most hilarious moments of the evening, reminiscing about the truly horrible venues he'd played at. One place was called "Sir Laffs a Lot". It was a comedy venue in a hotel. Basically, they would drag in exercise mats to block off the area underneath a grant staircase from view. They would set up folding chairs inside for the audience, erect a portable bar, bring in a Radio Shack microphone, then shine a desk lamp at the comedian. That was it. When the show was over, they would take the mats down, cart everything away, and poof! Like that, the comedy club was GONE. Oswalt said something like, "I realized that I had been performing under somebody else's stairs, like a comedy goblin."
He remembered one time that he was doing a show, and a table full of loud, drunk, obnoxious women was right in front of the stage. He decided that he'd just ignore them and do his show. Things were going well, until at one point one of them shouted at him, "You aren't even listening to us!" "And," Patton said, "She was right! I didn't know what to say to that." In a more philosophical sense, Patton strongly believes that when an audience comes to see a show, their focus is all on the comedian. And the comedian's focus is... all on the comedian. Nobody should be paying any attention to the audience. If the comedian isn't having fun, if he or she isn't loving what they're doing, then the show will suck and nobody will enjoy it. So, Patton doesn't worry about, say, whether he's being "too literate" for the audience, or if they'll "get" a pop-culture reference, or whatever. His job is to be funny, and that humor can only come out of exploring stuff that he finds amusing.
Andrew asked how Patton writes his jokes. He replied that he can't write his bits. He's tried, and he knows that lots of other comedians can, but he's incapable of writing off the stage. EVERYTHING that goes into his act comes from him being on stage. He'll come up there with some ideas about what he wants to talk about, and over the course of many shows he'll gradually arrive at the right mode of expressing what he wants to, but it's an organic process that comes out of the presentation. Patton says that the down side of this is that the first few audiences to encounter a new bit generally get screwed over. "Like, a few years ago, I would say, 'Ummmm.... you know what's really, really awful? KFC. It's like.... really gross. And stuff... Sorry, I'm still working on that bit.'"
Andrew asked Patton if he'd read something from his book. Paton gave a stage laugh. "Oh... I don't think these people came here to listen to me read.... DID YOU?!?!" People started clapping and cheering. Patton's gaze shifted to one of mock horror, and he shook his head sternly while glaring at us. Finally he opened the book and started to read, quickly stopping in a fit of giggles. "I'm so bad at this!" he said. "I've never been on a book tour before, I have no idea what he hell I'm supposed to do. I'm just spinning on this chair like a mad gnome, dispensing gnomish words to you all." He picked it back up and began reading again. The excerpt describes his FIRST experience writing - ZSW is his first published book, but back in high school, he wrote two "novels." They were both inspired by The Road Warrior, and fit into the "wasteland" category of the Zombie/Spaceship/Wasteland characterization. I don't want to spoil it here, you should read the actual book, but it's awesome. In one of his stories, the main character spends the first 80 pages equipping himself; the book ends after he gets the really cool gun, because Patton couldn't think of anywhere to go after that.
Patton thinks that the Internet is great for comedy. Everyone alive now has a chance to see everything that's been done before; at any time, you can watch SCTV, or SNL, or Monty Python, or Kids in the Hall. That's inspiring people to be even greater, to build on and exceed the best of what's come before. In the next generation, though, he expects that there will be a reaction against the omnipresence of the Internet. The big thing will be getting offline: building mystique by staying offline. He's waiting for the first person who will put one of those cell-phone-signal-blockers in their performance room, blocking anyone from being able to document the event. (Sadly, of course, people could just record it and then re-broadcast once they regained signal. Still, it's an interesting thought.) Honestly, I wasn't totally sure whether this was really a "serious" prediction from Patton, or if it's, um, a new bit he's working on.
Patton didn't name-drop a whole lot, but the one comedian who he repeatedly invoked, always in very warm terms, was Louis C. K. For example, at one point he (Patton) was talking about how his comedy has evolved. When he was starting out, he was fairly young, and inexperienced, and didn't totally understand how the world worked (which, itself, is manifested by the "zombie spaceship wasteland" theory that he posits in his book - fascinating stuff!). Because of that insecurity, his early jokes were focused outward on the problems of the world. "Oh, look at that dumb thing! Boy, I sure am smart to see the problem with that!" Now, though, his comedy is almost all about himself: specifically, the dumb things he thinks, the dumb things he does, etc. Andrew had asked whether Patton was worried about bringing his family into his routine; whether he thought about how his daughter would react to jokes about her once she grew up. Patton said that he doesn't worry about that too much, because his humor is always against himself. His jokes aren't, "Boy, my daughter is really stupid!", they're, "Wow, I did something incredibly foolish to my daughter." Anyways, he said that Louis C. K. is another comedian who works in this kind of mode, which is why he likes Louis so much.
As Andrew wrapped up the interview portion of the evening, he closed with a question that went SOMETHING LIKE the following. "I'm not a... I used to read comics, but I haven't for years, and you have. I keep hearing that there are really good comics now. The 'hero' comics. What do you think makes them so awesome?" Patton cracked up. "That has to be the worst question ever. 'So... comics. Sup?'" He did give a really, really great response, though. He specifically called out who I've come to think of as the three masters of the renaissance: Gaiman, Miller, and Moore. (Through sheer coincidence, that's the same order in which I encountered them, although it isn't the order they wrote.) He says that what they did in the 80's is basically what Mel Brooks did in his early films. Mel Brooks had some topics that he absolutely adored - Broadway musicals, Western movies, and the movie Frankenstein. He'd gone so far as to buy the props for the Frankenstein movie and was keeping them in his garage. When people would ask Brooks why he held on to them, he said, "I don't know! I just have to have them!" Mel's love of these topics led him to ask questions and perhaps be more critical. "Frankenstein is awesome, but isn't it weird how...." or "Broadway is great, but it's kind of silly that..." These things didn't diminish his love of the subject; rather, they came out of his love, and when he then had the opportunity to create his own works, he incorporated a higher level of appreciation that included comedic criticism into his approach. That, Patton (convincingly) argues, is what made the first wave of the new comics rennaissance so exciting. These were people who great up with Superman and Batman and all the rest, who loved the medium and all that it could do, and through their love could see the flaws in the genre, and when they started creating their own comics, it raised everything above. We're now seeing the second generation of artists following in their footsteps, and the upwards trend continues.
At the end of every City Arts program, there's a set ritual they follow; even though I've never been to one before, I know it by heart from the radio. They bring up the house lights, send out roving microphone-bearers to interested parties, and direct the interviewee's attention to each person in sequence. Either Patton hadn't heard this before (and, really, why would he?), or he'd just decided to have some fun with it, because he kept giving better and better reactions each time someone said, "The next question comes from the left of the orchestra" or "The next question comes from the center of the balcony." He'd respond with, "Wow, that's some Spider-Man s*** going on there!" or "I feel like you're giving instructions to a sniper. 'In case this next guy tries to rush the stage.... he's at the right center of the orchestra!'"
The questions he got were really good. Here are my recollections of a few and the responses:
"I'm from Madison, Wisconsin, and I thought you totally nailed how those Midwestern cities are. You grew up on the East Coast, so how did you get to figure out what these places were like? Did you just pick it up from your tours?"
Yes. Patton loves places like Madison and Athens, oases of culture and awesomeness within a sea of mediocre, blah surroundings. He had a great time in Madison one Feburary when he was touring with a group of other comedians. They had to do shows in Sheboygan and a bunch of other places, but they got to spend a few days in Madison. Patton remembers sitting in a cafe on an unseasonably warm February day, talking with one of the other comics about how great it was to be in a town with great coffee and good bars and lots of books. Then, a group of wrestlers in town for the high school national championships walked by and yelled "Faggots!" at them. So... Madison is awesome, expect when the wrestling champsionships are happening.
"What happened with your Broadway show?"
[This was totally news to me, so I didn't understand any of the names in the reply - sorry!]
They were in previews, but someone (the director?) quit, so they had to shut down the show. Apparently, this happens a lot on Broadway - every year dozens of shows start previews on Broadway, and many of them close before they ever open.
"Can you compare and/or contrast what it was like working with two of our greatest filmmakers, P T Anderson and Steven Soderbergh?"
Patton really enjoyed answering this one. He loves them both, but they're very different. Anderson is very much an auteur. He has this complete vision in his head about what the movie will look like, and nobody but him can see the whole thing. When you're working with him, you can see him editing the film in his mind while they're shooting. Patton remembers standing in a custom-made wetsuit, when it was scorching hot outside, as the crew poured bottle after bottle of Aqua Fina over him... he was so hot that he was sweating profusely, and then he was so incredibly hot that he stopped sweating. He asked Anderson what he was doing there, and Anderson said, "You're the first frog to fall from the sky." And so he was.
Soderbergh, on the other hand, seems to want to make as many movies as he can, as quickly as he can. He's like a modern-day incarnation of the great Old Hollywood directors. He'll show up, point out where everyone needs to go, take the shot, ask the DP if it looks OK, maybe take it once more if necessary, and then move on to the next shot. He's a craftsman, who turns out great work with minimal fuss. Soderbergh wants to release several good movies every year; P T Anderson wants to make an AMAZING film every two decades.
"I need to challenge something you said earlier. You claimed that the performer needs to just focus on themself, not on the audience. However, you also said that you refine your act over multiple nights, so doesn't that mean that you ARE focusing on the audience?"
No. It's absolutely essential for the comedian to pay attention to their internal voice telling them what's funny; trying to chase after the audience's whims will destroy everything. "I understand what you're saying, man, but... you're f***ing wrong."
"Two questions. First of all, I moved to California from the East Coast, and I totally get what you say about that experience. To me, it feels like the West Coast is way more laid-back, but also really anal about it. So, how do you explain that difference in cultures? And my second, totally unrelated, question is, when will we finally get to see 'Rape Stove: The Stove that Rapes People'?"
Big laugh. "Well... we started previews, but the director quit, so we had to shut it down." Bigger laughs. "It was artistic differences. I wanted the rape stove to swing down from the top, others wanted it to swing open from the side, and we couldn't resolve it."
He totally gets the east-to-west thing. When you first get here, everything seems wonderful. Everything's more relaxed, people are having fun, and you can just do drugs, hang out, and have a blast. The problem is, that isn't the real world. That's true of Berkeley, and also of those other cool little oases around the country. You can wear your jester cap while riding a unicycle down to the park, but it doesn't really mean anything. People eventually feel like they need to grow up. So... yeah. He can't articulate it yet, but there's definitely a huge difference there.
"Years ago you described a comedian named Dr. Pepper who performed at an open mike in Toronto. Has anyone ever stepped forward to claim the title?"
No! To this day, nobody knows who Dr. Pepper is. It totally happened, but it seems like he's vanished.
And with that, we gave Patton a HUGE round of applause and filed out. I grabbed a relatively early spot in line, and soon was happily departing with my personalized book. As usual, I failed to think of anything interesting to say to him... I should start studying for book-signings ahead of time, so I can present something better than, "Thank you for coming, I really enjoy your work!" He was super-nice, and we (very) briefly chatted about R.E.M., which (as I learned while frantically reading the first chapter of ZSW prior to the event) was a formative influence on his teenage years. Oh, yeah: right after writing about the horrible movie theater, he synthesizes Philip K. Dick with "Fables of the Reconstruction" (AND manages to show off both his depth of knowledge of R.E.M. and his innate niceness with a pithy footnote that simultaneously acknowledges and dismisses the album's alternate title).
Obviously, I had a blast. I'll try to post a notice (here or on Facebook or something) when I hear word that the interview is ready for broadcast. Sadly, City Arts does not post past programs online for later listening, but it will totally be worth your time to make the time to listen to the live broadcast... Patton was funny and insightful, and did his own part to advance the state of the art of this lecture series.
The interview was part of the City Arts and Lecture series, which I haven't previously attended in person, but which I almost always catch on KQED radio. I love these - they're invariably insightful, generally amusing, and either bring up interesting people or provide rare fresh glimpses into familiar figures. The broadcasts are always edited down into hour-long segments, so in addition to the thrill of Oswalt I was curious to see how the live event compared.
First off, Herbst Theater itself is great. It's in a kind of sketchy area of town, but once you get inside, the building is pretty impressive.... smaller-scale than great theaters, but with an understated elegance that's really pleasant. I arrived about half an hour early, and so had plenty of time to buy a copy of Patton's new book, "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland." Would there be an author signing? Why, yes, there would! Hurray! I haven't been to one of those in, gosh.... since Terry Pratchett came through Kepler's or Chris Kimball came to Books, Inc., I guess.
The event was the final entry in a series to benefit 826 Valencia, a great local non-profit. It looked like most of the crowd was there to see Oswalt. It was mainly people around my age, but plenty of folks my parents' ages as well. There was a lot of chatter and a good vibe in the lead-up to the event proper.
The interviewer was Andrew Leland, the editor of The Believer magazine, which I am vaguely aware of but have not read. He introduced Oswalt while acknowledging that we all knew who he was, paying special attention to his recent major film roles. Oswalt came on stage, and they went to it.
The early stages felt a little rough... still enjoyable, but Andrew would typically start asking a question, Patton would start answering, then Andrew would try to interject another point or clarification, and they'd muddle through it. Patton was game for answering "serious" questions (very early on, Andrew did actually say, "But, no, seriously..."), but in general he seemed to enjoy getting on a riff and doing something funny with it. We loved him for this, of course. After a while he and Andrew fell into more of a rhythm, where he would get a full question from Andrew, spent several minutes doing whatever he wanted to with it, then he'd take a sip of water and give a barely perceptible nod to Andrew.
Early on, Andrew said that he'd detected a common thread among the various roles that Patton had played. "You mean, someone offered me a part?" Patton replied. "Yep, that's it! The common element that ties everything together. Either I auditioned for a role, or someone offered me a role, along with money, and I said 'Yes!'" Andrew eventually clarified that, in King of Queens, Ratatouille, and Big Fan, Patton has played obsessives: characters who are completely enthralled by a topic, whether it's comics, food, or the New York Jets. Patton whole-heartedly agreed. He's been obsessed by a lot of things ever since his youth, and continues those obsessions forward today; and, having that kind of experience with his particular topics of fascination, he can understand what it feels like to have a similar level of dedication to other areas.
The interview ranged all over, but a lot of it was at least loosely related to Oswalt's new book. Here are a few fairly random remembrances:
Early on, Oswalt talked a fair amount about imagination. He credits some of his inventiveness to growing up in the suburbs, with limited access to artistic resources. He would collect comic books, but wouldn't be able to find all the issues, so he'd have to imagine what happened in the story, to fill in the gaps in a satisfying way. Andrew asked him how that related to his experiences working in a [very bad] movie theater, whether he felt inspired to "fix" the [very bad] movies he saw there. Oswalt said "no" - at that stage in his life, he could fill in the gaps for incomplete works, but a movie was a fully-realized thing... he could dislike it, as he did, but didn't feel like he had the capacity to, say, rewrite the script or provide alternate direction.
He also talked a lot about comedy tours, and the state of comedy in general when he was starting out, from the late 80's through the mid 90's. These were some of the most hilarious moments of the evening, reminiscing about the truly horrible venues he'd played at. One place was called "Sir Laffs a Lot". It was a comedy venue in a hotel. Basically, they would drag in exercise mats to block off the area underneath a grant staircase from view. They would set up folding chairs inside for the audience, erect a portable bar, bring in a Radio Shack microphone, then shine a desk lamp at the comedian. That was it. When the show was over, they would take the mats down, cart everything away, and poof! Like that, the comedy club was GONE. Oswalt said something like, "I realized that I had been performing under somebody else's stairs, like a comedy goblin."
He remembered one time that he was doing a show, and a table full of loud, drunk, obnoxious women was right in front of the stage. He decided that he'd just ignore them and do his show. Things were going well, until at one point one of them shouted at him, "You aren't even listening to us!" "And," Patton said, "She was right! I didn't know what to say to that." In a more philosophical sense, Patton strongly believes that when an audience comes to see a show, their focus is all on the comedian. And the comedian's focus is... all on the comedian. Nobody should be paying any attention to the audience. If the comedian isn't having fun, if he or she isn't loving what they're doing, then the show will suck and nobody will enjoy it. So, Patton doesn't worry about, say, whether he's being "too literate" for the audience, or if they'll "get" a pop-culture reference, or whatever. His job is to be funny, and that humor can only come out of exploring stuff that he finds amusing.
Andrew asked how Patton writes his jokes. He replied that he can't write his bits. He's tried, and he knows that lots of other comedians can, but he's incapable of writing off the stage. EVERYTHING that goes into his act comes from him being on stage. He'll come up there with some ideas about what he wants to talk about, and over the course of many shows he'll gradually arrive at the right mode of expressing what he wants to, but it's an organic process that comes out of the presentation. Patton says that the down side of this is that the first few audiences to encounter a new bit generally get screwed over. "Like, a few years ago, I would say, 'Ummmm.... you know what's really, really awful? KFC. It's like.... really gross. And stuff... Sorry, I'm still working on that bit.'"
Andrew asked Patton if he'd read something from his book. Paton gave a stage laugh. "Oh... I don't think these people came here to listen to me read.... DID YOU?!?!" People started clapping and cheering. Patton's gaze shifted to one of mock horror, and he shook his head sternly while glaring at us. Finally he opened the book and started to read, quickly stopping in a fit of giggles. "I'm so bad at this!" he said. "I've never been on a book tour before, I have no idea what he hell I'm supposed to do. I'm just spinning on this chair like a mad gnome, dispensing gnomish words to you all." He picked it back up and began reading again. The excerpt describes his FIRST experience writing - ZSW is his first published book, but back in high school, he wrote two "novels." They were both inspired by The Road Warrior, and fit into the "wasteland" category of the Zombie/Spaceship/Wasteland characterization. I don't want to spoil it here, you should read the actual book, but it's awesome. In one of his stories, the main character spends the first 80 pages equipping himself; the book ends after he gets the really cool gun, because Patton couldn't think of anywhere to go after that.
Patton thinks that the Internet is great for comedy. Everyone alive now has a chance to see everything that's been done before; at any time, you can watch SCTV, or SNL, or Monty Python, or Kids in the Hall. That's inspiring people to be even greater, to build on and exceed the best of what's come before. In the next generation, though, he expects that there will be a reaction against the omnipresence of the Internet. The big thing will be getting offline: building mystique by staying offline. He's waiting for the first person who will put one of those cell-phone-signal-blockers in their performance room, blocking anyone from being able to document the event. (Sadly, of course, people could just record it and then re-broadcast once they regained signal. Still, it's an interesting thought.) Honestly, I wasn't totally sure whether this was really a "serious" prediction from Patton, or if it's, um, a new bit he's working on.
Patton didn't name-drop a whole lot, but the one comedian who he repeatedly invoked, always in very warm terms, was Louis C. K. For example, at one point he (Patton) was talking about how his comedy has evolved. When he was starting out, he was fairly young, and inexperienced, and didn't totally understand how the world worked (which, itself, is manifested by the "zombie spaceship wasteland" theory that he posits in his book - fascinating stuff!). Because of that insecurity, his early jokes were focused outward on the problems of the world. "Oh, look at that dumb thing! Boy, I sure am smart to see the problem with that!" Now, though, his comedy is almost all about himself: specifically, the dumb things he thinks, the dumb things he does, etc. Andrew had asked whether Patton was worried about bringing his family into his routine; whether he thought about how his daughter would react to jokes about her once she grew up. Patton said that he doesn't worry about that too much, because his humor is always against himself. His jokes aren't, "Boy, my daughter is really stupid!", they're, "Wow, I did something incredibly foolish to my daughter." Anyways, he said that Louis C. K. is another comedian who works in this kind of mode, which is why he likes Louis so much.
As Andrew wrapped up the interview portion of the evening, he closed with a question that went SOMETHING LIKE the following. "I'm not a... I used to read comics, but I haven't for years, and you have. I keep hearing that there are really good comics now. The 'hero' comics. What do you think makes them so awesome?" Patton cracked up. "That has to be the worst question ever. 'So... comics. Sup?'" He did give a really, really great response, though. He specifically called out who I've come to think of as the three masters of the renaissance: Gaiman, Miller, and Moore. (Through sheer coincidence, that's the same order in which I encountered them, although it isn't the order they wrote.) He says that what they did in the 80's is basically what Mel Brooks did in his early films. Mel Brooks had some topics that he absolutely adored - Broadway musicals, Western movies, and the movie Frankenstein. He'd gone so far as to buy the props for the Frankenstein movie and was keeping them in his garage. When people would ask Brooks why he held on to them, he said, "I don't know! I just have to have them!" Mel's love of these topics led him to ask questions and perhaps be more critical. "Frankenstein is awesome, but isn't it weird how...." or "Broadway is great, but it's kind of silly that..." These things didn't diminish his love of the subject; rather, they came out of his love, and when he then had the opportunity to create his own works, he incorporated a higher level of appreciation that included comedic criticism into his approach. That, Patton (convincingly) argues, is what made the first wave of the new comics rennaissance so exciting. These were people who great up with Superman and Batman and all the rest, who loved the medium and all that it could do, and through their love could see the flaws in the genre, and when they started creating their own comics, it raised everything above. We're now seeing the second generation of artists following in their footsteps, and the upwards trend continues.
At the end of every City Arts program, there's a set ritual they follow; even though I've never been to one before, I know it by heart from the radio. They bring up the house lights, send out roving microphone-bearers to interested parties, and direct the interviewee's attention to each person in sequence. Either Patton hadn't heard this before (and, really, why would he?), or he'd just decided to have some fun with it, because he kept giving better and better reactions each time someone said, "The next question comes from the left of the orchestra" or "The next question comes from the center of the balcony." He'd respond with, "Wow, that's some Spider-Man s*** going on there!" or "I feel like you're giving instructions to a sniper. 'In case this next guy tries to rush the stage.... he's at the right center of the orchestra!'"
The questions he got were really good. Here are my recollections of a few and the responses:
"I'm from Madison, Wisconsin, and I thought you totally nailed how those Midwestern cities are. You grew up on the East Coast, so how did you get to figure out what these places were like? Did you just pick it up from your tours?"
Yes. Patton loves places like Madison and Athens, oases of culture and awesomeness within a sea of mediocre, blah surroundings. He had a great time in Madison one Feburary when he was touring with a group of other comedians. They had to do shows in Sheboygan and a bunch of other places, but they got to spend a few days in Madison. Patton remembers sitting in a cafe on an unseasonably warm February day, talking with one of the other comics about how great it was to be in a town with great coffee and good bars and lots of books. Then, a group of wrestlers in town for the high school national championships walked by and yelled "Faggots!" at them. So... Madison is awesome, expect when the wrestling champsionships are happening.
"What happened with your Broadway show?"
[This was totally news to me, so I didn't understand any of the names in the reply - sorry!]
They were in previews, but someone (the director?) quit, so they had to shut down the show. Apparently, this happens a lot on Broadway - every year dozens of shows start previews on Broadway, and many of them close before they ever open.
"Can you compare and/or contrast what it was like working with two of our greatest filmmakers, P T Anderson and Steven Soderbergh?"
Patton really enjoyed answering this one. He loves them both, but they're very different. Anderson is very much an auteur. He has this complete vision in his head about what the movie will look like, and nobody but him can see the whole thing. When you're working with him, you can see him editing the film in his mind while they're shooting. Patton remembers standing in a custom-made wetsuit, when it was scorching hot outside, as the crew poured bottle after bottle of Aqua Fina over him... he was so hot that he was sweating profusely, and then he was so incredibly hot that he stopped sweating. He asked Anderson what he was doing there, and Anderson said, "You're the first frog to fall from the sky." And so he was.
Soderbergh, on the other hand, seems to want to make as many movies as he can, as quickly as he can. He's like a modern-day incarnation of the great Old Hollywood directors. He'll show up, point out where everyone needs to go, take the shot, ask the DP if it looks OK, maybe take it once more if necessary, and then move on to the next shot. He's a craftsman, who turns out great work with minimal fuss. Soderbergh wants to release several good movies every year; P T Anderson wants to make an AMAZING film every two decades.
"I need to challenge something you said earlier. You claimed that the performer needs to just focus on themself, not on the audience. However, you also said that you refine your act over multiple nights, so doesn't that mean that you ARE focusing on the audience?"
No. It's absolutely essential for the comedian to pay attention to their internal voice telling them what's funny; trying to chase after the audience's whims will destroy everything. "I understand what you're saying, man, but... you're f***ing wrong."
"Two questions. First of all, I moved to California from the East Coast, and I totally get what you say about that experience. To me, it feels like the West Coast is way more laid-back, but also really anal about it. So, how do you explain that difference in cultures? And my second, totally unrelated, question is, when will we finally get to see 'Rape Stove: The Stove that Rapes People'?"
Big laugh. "Well... we started previews, but the director quit, so we had to shut it down." Bigger laughs. "It was artistic differences. I wanted the rape stove to swing down from the top, others wanted it to swing open from the side, and we couldn't resolve it."
He totally gets the east-to-west thing. When you first get here, everything seems wonderful. Everything's more relaxed, people are having fun, and you can just do drugs, hang out, and have a blast. The problem is, that isn't the real world. That's true of Berkeley, and also of those other cool little oases around the country. You can wear your jester cap while riding a unicycle down to the park, but it doesn't really mean anything. People eventually feel like they need to grow up. So... yeah. He can't articulate it yet, but there's definitely a huge difference there.
"Years ago you described a comedian named Dr. Pepper who performed at an open mike in Toronto. Has anyone ever stepped forward to claim the title?"
No! To this day, nobody knows who Dr. Pepper is. It totally happened, but it seems like he's vanished.
And with that, we gave Patton a HUGE round of applause and filed out. I grabbed a relatively early spot in line, and soon was happily departing with my personalized book. As usual, I failed to think of anything interesting to say to him... I should start studying for book-signings ahead of time, so I can present something better than, "Thank you for coming, I really enjoy your work!" He was super-nice, and we (very) briefly chatted about R.E.M., which (as I learned while frantically reading the first chapter of ZSW prior to the event) was a formative influence on his teenage years. Oh, yeah: right after writing about the horrible movie theater, he synthesizes Philip K. Dick with "Fables of the Reconstruction" (AND manages to show off both his depth of knowledge of R.E.M. and his innate niceness with a pithy footnote that simultaneously acknowledges and dismisses the album's alternate title).
Obviously, I had a blast. I'll try to post a notice (here or on Facebook or something) when I hear word that the interview is ready for broadcast. Sadly, City Arts does not post past programs online for later listening, but it will totally be worth your time to make the time to listen to the live broadcast... Patton was funny and insightful, and did his own part to advance the state of the art of this lecture series.
Monday, January 03, 2011
The future? Like... with jetpacks?
Scott Pilgrim may be my kryptonite. Or my ambrosia, whatever. It perfectly combines virtually everything that I like into one compelling package, and I can't help eating it like candy.
I'm talking about the comics here, although I'm now highly curious about the movie as well. The comics combine:
MINI SPOILERS
I enjoyed the books from the very beginning, but didn't realize how special it was until... probably about halfway through the first volume. The story opens on a group of friendly young folks, mostly in their early 20s. Some of them play together in a rock band, and otherwise they work simple jobs, hang out, reflect on past experiences, and date one another. It's enjoyable because of the great attitudes everyone has. I was initially tempted to use the word "slackers" to describe these folks, but that doesn't really fit. This isn't an early 1990's-style sense of ennui, pointlessness, and general alienation from the universe. These people seem interested, interesting, dynamic; they just haven't sorted out exactly what they want to do yet, but they're enjoying the journey, not rejecting life.
The cool bit comes after Ramona enters the scene. She's a delivery girl for Amazon.ca. It turns out that she's the ONLY delivery girl in all of Toronto. They only need one, because she's so fast. Why's she fast? Well, she uses roller blades, for one thing. For another, she can access subspace to teleport between points nearly instantaneously.
Yep.
Scott doesn't understand Ramona at first, but his lack of understanding doesn't come from a place of, "That's physically impossible!" Instead, it's the same lack of understanding that makes Ramona think that Canadians worship the Queen: it's more of a cultural gap than anything else. Once Scott gets his head around subspace (which he can do more easily than, say, realizing that he knows someone who owns a car), it becomes a matter-of-fact part of his life, just like video games and sushi.
I absolutely love this attitude, and it permeates the whole series. The author doesn't slyly wink at you about how there's a mixture of "real" and "imaginary." He's fully enthusiastic about every aspect of the comic. This is a work of fiction: EVERYTHING is equally real and imaginary. And it isn't just Scott and Ramona; the whole ensemble approaches subspace, glowing heads, destructive martial arts combat, and more with the same elan that they bring to concerts, cooking, and romance. I love how much the book downplays the really amazing stuff; after Scott defeats a villain, he complains that he didn't take the skateboarding proficiency in 5th grade and so cannot use the skateboard item the enemy dropped.
Random thoughts:
Scott may be the most endearing dope I've run across yet. He's so ludicrously dense about so many things in life; my favorites included how he was convinced that the second evil ex-boyfriend was Luke Wilson, his vague recollections of prior romantic relationships ("omg scott u r so awesome!!!"), the way he fails to recognize people who he's met multiple times the day before, and on and on. For all that, he's so cheerful, and pleasant, that you have to root for him. (I do find it hard to believe that he's dated so many great girls, but whatever, it's fiction!)
I liked pretty much everyone in this entire series, with the sole exception of Julie, who you aren't supposed to like. Even the evil exes are mostly good guys; you can imagine them hanging out with Scott, and sometimes they do, before attempting to kill him.
I think the video game angle was played just about perfectly. When I had first heard that there were video game references in SP, I had assumed that it would be a significant part of the comic. Instead, they're just accent notes, perfectly inserted in small amounts at just the right places. When Scott defeats an evil ex-boyfriend, they typically drop coins. He levels up a couple of times, obtains two special swords (the POWER OF LOVE and the POWER OF UNDERSTANDING), an extra life, and the aforementioned skateboard item. This isn't played as a Penny Arcade type of thing, where those in the know are rewarded with extra humor; it's more proletarian, something everyone can enjoy. (Well, I guess there are a few exceptions. At one point Scott asks Stephen Stills whether working as a dishwasher will be like a "job system", which is a Final Fantasy reference; and, Scott and Ramona's special move that finishes off the final villain looks an awful lot like one of the combo attacks from Chrono Trigger.)
MEGA SPOILERS
Like I said before, I like pretty much every character in this book, to the point where I could have been perfectly happy if Scott had ended up with one of the other love interests. I mean, Ramona is great, but I also really really like Kim. For a while in Book 6 it looked like they might get back together, and I thought that would be a great ending. Knives is extremely sweet, even when she's in assassination mode, and Lisa has a really refreshing openness. That said, I'm perfectly content with where the storyline ended up.
That said, just who is going to get these great girls? I was amused and surprised to discover at the end of the book that, other than Scott and Young Neil, every character in the book is either a girl or gay. Young Neil seems likely to end up with Stacey, another great female character who we don't get to see enough of.
The ending itself was perfect. Not exactly ambiguous, but open-ended. I liked the thoughtful but low-key way that they worked a message of sorts into the story at the end. "People change, but you can find the right people and then change together."
END SPOILERS
Like I said before, I'm curious now to check out the movie sometime. I tore through this series very quickly, and find that I'm still hungry for more.
One last random thought - as I continue to read more and more comics, I've been interested to notice that the most idiosyncratic ones seem to come from singular artists, dedicated individuals who both write and draw their own ideas. The two I'm thinking of right now are Bryan Lee O'Malley and Jeff Smith. In contrast, more mainstream comics usually follow the standard combination of separate writers and artists. I'm not totally sure what to make of this. It isn't that there isn't anything important happening from within the comics establishment, of course; Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller all came out of more traditional comics publishers, and did really inventive things to the medium. Still, I don't think any of them come off as quite as out-of-nowhere as Bone or Scott Pilgrim do... those latter two comics have a unity of vision, and a vision so utterly unique, that it would be hard to imagine it coming from a collaboration.
Um, that's it. Ooooh... I just discovered the Power of Understanding! New T-Shirt unlocked! Yay!
I'm talking about the comics here, although I'm now highly curious about the movie as well. The comics combine:
- Humorous characters and situations
- Video game references
- Manga drawing style
- Epic fight sequences
- Fantastic situations rendered matter-of-factly
- Rock music
- Politeness
MINI SPOILERS
I enjoyed the books from the very beginning, but didn't realize how special it was until... probably about halfway through the first volume. The story opens on a group of friendly young folks, mostly in their early 20s. Some of them play together in a rock band, and otherwise they work simple jobs, hang out, reflect on past experiences, and date one another. It's enjoyable because of the great attitudes everyone has. I was initially tempted to use the word "slackers" to describe these folks, but that doesn't really fit. This isn't an early 1990's-style sense of ennui, pointlessness, and general alienation from the universe. These people seem interested, interesting, dynamic; they just haven't sorted out exactly what they want to do yet, but they're enjoying the journey, not rejecting life.
The cool bit comes after Ramona enters the scene. She's a delivery girl for Amazon.ca. It turns out that she's the ONLY delivery girl in all of Toronto. They only need one, because she's so fast. Why's she fast? Well, she uses roller blades, for one thing. For another, she can access subspace to teleport between points nearly instantaneously.
Yep.
Scott doesn't understand Ramona at first, but his lack of understanding doesn't come from a place of, "That's physically impossible!" Instead, it's the same lack of understanding that makes Ramona think that Canadians worship the Queen: it's more of a cultural gap than anything else. Once Scott gets his head around subspace (which he can do more easily than, say, realizing that he knows someone who owns a car), it becomes a matter-of-fact part of his life, just like video games and sushi.
I absolutely love this attitude, and it permeates the whole series. The author doesn't slyly wink at you about how there's a mixture of "real" and "imaginary." He's fully enthusiastic about every aspect of the comic. This is a work of fiction: EVERYTHING is equally real and imaginary. And it isn't just Scott and Ramona; the whole ensemble approaches subspace, glowing heads, destructive martial arts combat, and more with the same elan that they bring to concerts, cooking, and romance. I love how much the book downplays the really amazing stuff; after Scott defeats a villain, he complains that he didn't take the skateboarding proficiency in 5th grade and so cannot use the skateboard item the enemy dropped.
Random thoughts:
Scott may be the most endearing dope I've run across yet. He's so ludicrously dense about so many things in life; my favorites included how he was convinced that the second evil ex-boyfriend was Luke Wilson, his vague recollections of prior romantic relationships ("omg scott u r so awesome!!!"), the way he fails to recognize people who he's met multiple times the day before, and on and on. For all that, he's so cheerful, and pleasant, that you have to root for him. (I do find it hard to believe that he's dated so many great girls, but whatever, it's fiction!)
I liked pretty much everyone in this entire series, with the sole exception of Julie, who you aren't supposed to like. Even the evil exes are mostly good guys; you can imagine them hanging out with Scott, and sometimes they do, before attempting to kill him.
I think the video game angle was played just about perfectly. When I had first heard that there were video game references in SP, I had assumed that it would be a significant part of the comic. Instead, they're just accent notes, perfectly inserted in small amounts at just the right places. When Scott defeats an evil ex-boyfriend, they typically drop coins. He levels up a couple of times, obtains two special swords (the POWER OF LOVE and the POWER OF UNDERSTANDING), an extra life, and the aforementioned skateboard item. This isn't played as a Penny Arcade type of thing, where those in the know are rewarded with extra humor; it's more proletarian, something everyone can enjoy. (Well, I guess there are a few exceptions. At one point Scott asks Stephen Stills whether working as a dishwasher will be like a "job system", which is a Final Fantasy reference; and, Scott and Ramona's special move that finishes off the final villain looks an awful lot like one of the combo attacks from Chrono Trigger.)
MEGA SPOILERS
Like I said before, I like pretty much every character in this book, to the point where I could have been perfectly happy if Scott had ended up with one of the other love interests. I mean, Ramona is great, but I also really really like Kim. For a while in Book 6 it looked like they might get back together, and I thought that would be a great ending. Knives is extremely sweet, even when she's in assassination mode, and Lisa has a really refreshing openness. That said, I'm perfectly content with where the storyline ended up.
That said, just who is going to get these great girls? I was amused and surprised to discover at the end of the book that, other than Scott and Young Neil, every character in the book is either a girl or gay. Young Neil seems likely to end up with Stacey, another great female character who we don't get to see enough of.
The ending itself was perfect. Not exactly ambiguous, but open-ended. I liked the thoughtful but low-key way that they worked a message of sorts into the story at the end. "People change, but you can find the right people and then change together."
END SPOILERS
Like I said before, I'm curious now to check out the movie sometime. I tore through this series very quickly, and find that I'm still hungry for more.
One last random thought - as I continue to read more and more comics, I've been interested to notice that the most idiosyncratic ones seem to come from singular artists, dedicated individuals who both write and draw their own ideas. The two I'm thinking of right now are Bryan Lee O'Malley and Jeff Smith. In contrast, more mainstream comics usually follow the standard combination of separate writers and artists. I'm not totally sure what to make of this. It isn't that there isn't anything important happening from within the comics establishment, of course; Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller all came out of more traditional comics publishers, and did really inventive things to the medium. Still, I don't think any of them come off as quite as out-of-nowhere as Bone or Scott Pilgrim do... those latter two comics have a unity of vision, and a vision so utterly unique, that it would be hard to imagine it coming from a collaboration.
Um, that's it. Ooooh... I just discovered the Power of Understanding! New T-Shirt unlocked! Yay!
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Revolutionary Idealists
I first encountered computer gaming through text adventures. The state of the art has dramatically improved since then, and my tastes have evolved as well, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for the story-driven adventure game, and probably always will.
For many years I've meant to check out Radical Dreamers, which holds the seemingly impossible dual role as an entry in the Chrono series of RPG games, as well as a late entry in the text adventure genre. My ambition would prove difficult to accomplish. Not only was Radical Dreamers never released outside of Japan; even within Japan, it was only distributed via a custom satellite modem add-on to the SNES, and so had no "ROM" in the traditional sense.
I finally managed to assemble the necessary pieces to try it, and am glad I did so. It provided everything I was looking for, along with some pleasant surprises along the way.
I would have gladly played this game just for the music. Square is famous for their amazing composers, and Radical Dreamers doesn't disappoint at all in this regard. I continue to be stunned at the incredible sound that they could pull off with 8-bit and 16-bit chips. It all comes down to melodies, and they've crafted more amazing ones here. Much of the music in the game is subtle or ambient, but the themes they do have is incredible.
I was also shocked at how good the writing was, all the more impressive since the game never saw an English release. A group of fans managed to create a language patch that replaces all the Japanese text with English text, but this isn't some slap-dash Babelfish affair. The writing is quite moving, appropriately colorful without seeming baroque, with a wonderful cadence and style to it. All of the characters' voices are well realized as well, down to habits of speech and idioms that they favor.
Navigation through the game is pretty much the same as in any of the great old text adventures, except that instead of North, South, East, West, it's forward, backwards, right, left. That requires you to keep your orientation in mind in addition to your position; on the bright side, it increases your sense of immersion in the world and helps you really visualize the area. It might have been overwhelming on a larger map, but altogether the main game has... probably something less than two dozen rooms, several of which you will probably only visit once. It took very little time for me to become familiar with the geography, so I never did need to draw that map I was planning.
Combat is also oddly fun. For the few text RPGs that I've played, I've been used to very static types of combat: you have a few stock options, like "Attack," "Magic," and "Run,", that show up for each stage of each encounter. Here, the battles are done in storybook mode, "Choose your own adventure" style. For example, one section might prompt you with, "You leap back just in time, and the goblin's morning star smashes into the ground! He moves away from you, snarling. What do you do?" The choices might be, "Grab it!", "Throw my knife at him!" and "Chase him!" Some of the outcomes are random (for example, if you throw the knife, it may only hit him 50% of the time), but others are consistent. Therefore, the standard pain of Square-style random battles is alleviated, because once you figure out how to handle a particular encounter, you can win every time with minimal damage. And, yes, you can take damage. There's no visible health meter, but it's communicated through the text as your bandages grow and your breathing becomes ever more labored.
Before heading into plot spoiler territories: this game also has a really fun variation on Chrono Trigger's "New Game +" mode. You can replay the game after you beat it, but your future playthroughs actually unlock additional stories; since there's no XP, levels, or currency in the game, you can't really bring over any stats from previous runs through the game. I'll get into more detail on these additional stories down below, but I'll mention here that it's well done. All begin in the same manner, but based on some early choices you make, the setting and tone of the game shifts radically. This proves to be a great way to experiment and draw out the possibilities of the creators. Some are flat-out hilarious, while others are macabre and deeply disturbing. Setting each as a separate tale allows this game to cover a wide range of emotions without a jarring internal shift in tone. Think of a Final Fantasy game: typically you'll get some pathos, some drama, some excitement, and some comic relief, staged throughout the game. Radical Dreamers lets them break those elements apart, so you can play one game that's all darkness, and another game that's practically non-stop laughter.
Okay, let's move into spoilerville!
MINI SPOILERS
The relationship of Radical Dreamers to the Chrono universe isn't immediately clear. As best as I can tell, it's vaguely a sequel to Chrono Trigger - you eventually learn through backstory how two of the characters are related to major CT characters. However, it isn't really a prequel to Chrono Cross. This game was created prior to CC, and I guess you can see it as sort of a dry run at some of the ideas from that game. Two of the three major characters in RD, Serge and Kid, are the two main characters in CC. Kid's personality is largely the same in both games. Serge is the narrator of RD, and so has a bit more personality than the silent protagonist in CC, but they seem to be the same character.
In terms of setting, all of RD (at least the main story) takes place in Viper Manor, which the three heroes/thieves are infiltrating in order to steal the Flame. This setting was later loosely adapted into an episode within CC.
Thematically, both RD and CC deal with multiple, parallel universes, in much the same way CT dealt with timelines. This theme is pretty subtle in the main story of RD, only coming out during the endgame sequence. However, it can be seen as part of the whole point of the game, especially when it comes to the alternate stories told after the game finishes. Each of those is a story in another universe, with some similarities to the main one but still fundamentally different. Each has three people named Serge, Kid, and Magil entering the manor; in one, though, Magil is a lovestruck aristocrat who pines for the lost love of his youth; in another, Magil is an intergalactic bounty hunter who has been tracking a nefarious Martian villain.
I do like how the game puts the choice of universe into your own hands. It isn't that you're randomly or sequentially thrust into one and need to respond appropriately. Instead, your own actions determine your reality, including your past. This is a cool, up-to-date variation on the idea that our thoughts create our destiny, which is a nifty mental framework to have.
Back to the main story: it's a pleasant mixture of adventure game and RPG, and thoroughly story-driven. Even the main story itself probably deserves multiple play-throughs, since your choices help reveal more about the characters and their situations. Other than advancing through the plot, which largely centers around tracking down the Flame, the most important factor is your emotional connection with Kid. Serge has a crush on Kid, and the way you treat her (and other decisions you make) help determine whether she will reciprocate that affection. This isn't a dating sim; rather, Kid will be more impressed with you if you act more forthrightly, if you respect her opinions, and so on. Most of these come from one-time choices during the story's span, but you can also further your relationship during some of the random battles you fight.
MEGA SPOILERS
Boy, those Square guys sure can write, can't they? A lot of their plots can sound melodramatic on paper, but as presented within the context of a game, they become extremely moving. Given the short span of RD, its climax is surprisingly heartfelt. Kid sacrifices Lucca's gift in order to save Serge's (your) life; this essentially breaks the bond with CT in order to create a bond with CC.
Lynx's multiple personalities were intriguing, especially in the context of his eventual (re)appearance in CC. In the main story he is cold, calculating, arrogant, and violent. In "Magil: Caught between Love and Adventure" he starts weeping as he sees his daughter elope with "Gilbert". Probably the darkest portrayal comes from the darkest story, wherein he already died years earlier, and has created a cataclysm of suffering in his spirit's wake. I even enjoyed the pathetic, begging Lynx who appeared in Shea's story.
Oh, and since this is spoilerville: I loved Magil's reveal (in the main story) as Magus. Magus may be my favorite character from CT, and prepending that character's incredible story to Magil's mysterious actions here results in a highly compelling composite. From what I read online, the team originally had intended for Magil to also continue over to CC, and it's a shame that didn't happen.
END SPOILERS
I realize that text adventure's aren't everyone's thing, or even most people's thing, but this one is well worth checking out. It's a slight hassle to gather the necessary components, but once you do, you'll be rewarded with a relatively brief (especially in contrast with a typical Square RPG) game that's packed with story, great 16-bit synthesized music, and pathos. Stick around for the alternate stories once the main game is done.
Even if you haven't played in the Chrono universe before, you may enjoy this one. Most of this game has no explicit connection at all to the events or characters of those games, so you won't be missing out on any important plot. If you like what you encounter here, you should definitely consider picking up Chrono Trigger and/or Chrono Cross. CT was originally an SNES game, but has been modernized and redone as a Nintendo DS game; Chrono Cross is a PlayStation 1 game that is somewhat dated graphically, but still aces when it comes to story. Have fun!
For many years I've meant to check out Radical Dreamers, which holds the seemingly impossible dual role as an entry in the Chrono series of RPG games, as well as a late entry in the text adventure genre. My ambition would prove difficult to accomplish. Not only was Radical Dreamers never released outside of Japan; even within Japan, it was only distributed via a custom satellite modem add-on to the SNES, and so had no "ROM" in the traditional sense.
I finally managed to assemble the necessary pieces to try it, and am glad I did so. It provided everything I was looking for, along with some pleasant surprises along the way.
I would have gladly played this game just for the music. Square is famous for their amazing composers, and Radical Dreamers doesn't disappoint at all in this regard. I continue to be stunned at the incredible sound that they could pull off with 8-bit and 16-bit chips. It all comes down to melodies, and they've crafted more amazing ones here. Much of the music in the game is subtle or ambient, but the themes they do have is incredible.
I was also shocked at how good the writing was, all the more impressive since the game never saw an English release. A group of fans managed to create a language patch that replaces all the Japanese text with English text, but this isn't some slap-dash Babelfish affair. The writing is quite moving, appropriately colorful without seeming baroque, with a wonderful cadence and style to it. All of the characters' voices are well realized as well, down to habits of speech and idioms that they favor.
Navigation through the game is pretty much the same as in any of the great old text adventures, except that instead of North, South, East, West, it's forward, backwards, right, left. That requires you to keep your orientation in mind in addition to your position; on the bright side, it increases your sense of immersion in the world and helps you really visualize the area. It might have been overwhelming on a larger map, but altogether the main game has... probably something less than two dozen rooms, several of which you will probably only visit once. It took very little time for me to become familiar with the geography, so I never did need to draw that map I was planning.
Combat is also oddly fun. For the few text RPGs that I've played, I've been used to very static types of combat: you have a few stock options, like "Attack," "Magic," and "Run,", that show up for each stage of each encounter. Here, the battles are done in storybook mode, "Choose your own adventure" style. For example, one section might prompt you with, "You leap back just in time, and the goblin's morning star smashes into the ground! He moves away from you, snarling. What do you do?" The choices might be, "Grab it!", "Throw my knife at him!" and "Chase him!" Some of the outcomes are random (for example, if you throw the knife, it may only hit him 50% of the time), but others are consistent. Therefore, the standard pain of Square-style random battles is alleviated, because once you figure out how to handle a particular encounter, you can win every time with minimal damage. And, yes, you can take damage. There's no visible health meter, but it's communicated through the text as your bandages grow and your breathing becomes ever more labored.
Before heading into plot spoiler territories: this game also has a really fun variation on Chrono Trigger's "New Game +" mode. You can replay the game after you beat it, but your future playthroughs actually unlock additional stories; since there's no XP, levels, or currency in the game, you can't really bring over any stats from previous runs through the game. I'll get into more detail on these additional stories down below, but I'll mention here that it's well done. All begin in the same manner, but based on some early choices you make, the setting and tone of the game shifts radically. This proves to be a great way to experiment and draw out the possibilities of the creators. Some are flat-out hilarious, while others are macabre and deeply disturbing. Setting each as a separate tale allows this game to cover a wide range of emotions without a jarring internal shift in tone. Think of a Final Fantasy game: typically you'll get some pathos, some drama, some excitement, and some comic relief, staged throughout the game. Radical Dreamers lets them break those elements apart, so you can play one game that's all darkness, and another game that's practically non-stop laughter.
Okay, let's move into spoilerville!
MINI SPOILERS
The relationship of Radical Dreamers to the Chrono universe isn't immediately clear. As best as I can tell, it's vaguely a sequel to Chrono Trigger - you eventually learn through backstory how two of the characters are related to major CT characters. However, it isn't really a prequel to Chrono Cross. This game was created prior to CC, and I guess you can see it as sort of a dry run at some of the ideas from that game. Two of the three major characters in RD, Serge and Kid, are the two main characters in CC. Kid's personality is largely the same in both games. Serge is the narrator of RD, and so has a bit more personality than the silent protagonist in CC, but they seem to be the same character.
In terms of setting, all of RD (at least the main story) takes place in Viper Manor, which the three heroes/thieves are infiltrating in order to steal the Flame. This setting was later loosely adapted into an episode within CC.
Thematically, both RD and CC deal with multiple, parallel universes, in much the same way CT dealt with timelines. This theme is pretty subtle in the main story of RD, only coming out during the endgame sequence. However, it can be seen as part of the whole point of the game, especially when it comes to the alternate stories told after the game finishes. Each of those is a story in another universe, with some similarities to the main one but still fundamentally different. Each has three people named Serge, Kid, and Magil entering the manor; in one, though, Magil is a lovestruck aristocrat who pines for the lost love of his youth; in another, Magil is an intergalactic bounty hunter who has been tracking a nefarious Martian villain.
I do like how the game puts the choice of universe into your own hands. It isn't that you're randomly or sequentially thrust into one and need to respond appropriately. Instead, your own actions determine your reality, including your past. This is a cool, up-to-date variation on the idea that our thoughts create our destiny, which is a nifty mental framework to have.
Back to the main story: it's a pleasant mixture of adventure game and RPG, and thoroughly story-driven. Even the main story itself probably deserves multiple play-throughs, since your choices help reveal more about the characters and their situations. Other than advancing through the plot, which largely centers around tracking down the Flame, the most important factor is your emotional connection with Kid. Serge has a crush on Kid, and the way you treat her (and other decisions you make) help determine whether she will reciprocate that affection. This isn't a dating sim; rather, Kid will be more impressed with you if you act more forthrightly, if you respect her opinions, and so on. Most of these come from one-time choices during the story's span, but you can also further your relationship during some of the random battles you fight.
MEGA SPOILERS
Boy, those Square guys sure can write, can't they? A lot of their plots can sound melodramatic on paper, but as presented within the context of a game, they become extremely moving. Given the short span of RD, its climax is surprisingly heartfelt. Kid sacrifices Lucca's gift in order to save Serge's (your) life; this essentially breaks the bond with CT in order to create a bond with CC.
Lynx's multiple personalities were intriguing, especially in the context of his eventual (re)appearance in CC. In the main story he is cold, calculating, arrogant, and violent. In "Magil: Caught between Love and Adventure" he starts weeping as he sees his daughter elope with "Gilbert". Probably the darkest portrayal comes from the darkest story, wherein he already died years earlier, and has created a cataclysm of suffering in his spirit's wake. I even enjoyed the pathetic, begging Lynx who appeared in Shea's story.
Oh, and since this is spoilerville: I loved Magil's reveal (in the main story) as Magus. Magus may be my favorite character from CT, and prepending that character's incredible story to Magil's mysterious actions here results in a highly compelling composite. From what I read online, the team originally had intended for Magil to also continue over to CC, and it's a shame that didn't happen.
END SPOILERS
I realize that text adventure's aren't everyone's thing, or even most people's thing, but this one is well worth checking out. It's a slight hassle to gather the necessary components, but once you do, you'll be rewarded with a relatively brief (especially in contrast with a typical Square RPG) game that's packed with story, great 16-bit synthesized music, and pathos. Stick around for the alternate stories once the main game is done.
Even if you haven't played in the Chrono universe before, you may enjoy this one. Most of this game has no explicit connection at all to the events or characters of those games, so you won't be missing out on any important plot. If you like what you encounter here, you should definitely consider picking up Chrono Trigger and/or Chrono Cross. CT was originally an SNES game, but has been modernized and redone as a Nintendo DS game; Chrono Cross is a PlayStation 1 game that is somewhat dated graphically, but still aces when it comes to story. Have fun!
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