defrog | Entries tagged with pop culture will eat itself

There’s a new TV show on Amazon starring Nicole Kidman called Expats, created by Lulu Wang and based on a novel, which is – as the title implies – about wealthy expats. Specifically, American expats in Hong Kong, where I also happen to live as an expat – although in my case, I’m a poor expat rather than a wealthy one, so the first thing I should say is that anything you see in the show is like no life I have ever lived, here or anywhere else.

Many of the HK scenes were actually filmed here on location, and if you haven’t heard, it caused a big stir here because the scenes were shot in the thick of the COVID pandemic when HK had serious restrictions in place (masks at all times, only four people allowed to eat together in restaurants which must close after 6pm, etc), the most stringent of which were immigration rules under which people entering HK had to be quarantined in a hotel for anywhere from one to three weeks, depending on what country they departed from.

Kidman and the film crew were all given exemptions to all of this, which did not sit well with those of us whose lives had been impacted by rules that made increasingly less sense as the pandemic continued. It didn’t help that for some outdoor scenes, where Kidman is walking around a street market in Mong Kok, the film crew reportedly decorated the street with lanterns, bird cages and other things – supposedly to make it look more “Chinese”.

Anyway, a lot of people were annoyed by this and promised to boycott the show when it came out. I am not boycotting the show, mainly because (1) I don’t subscribe to Amazon’s streaming service and (2) the premise of Expats doesn’t interest me, regardless of its setting. Put simply, I can’t legitimately claim to boycott a show I wouldn’t have watched in the first place.

(Update [added Jan 27, 2:44pm): Also, it seems Amazon isn’t making the show available in HK, for reasons that are currently unclear, but I think we can guess. Developing ...)

So I haven’t watched it – but I’ve read some of the reviews, which have been mixed. And this one from Linda Holmes at NPR is quite interesting, as she notes that a big problem with the show is that it seems totally disinterested with the fact that it is set in a city at a time of significant political upheaval and change.

The show doesn’t really engage with any of this apart from one episode that has a protest scene, but according to Holmes, it’s done in a very non-specific way that doesn’t say anything about why protests are happening. It’s a backdrop, and barely a plot device as far as the main characters are concerned. And it’s never revisited again.

There’s been speculation that this was an intentional choice in order to avoid displeasing the HK govt and Beijing. We don’t know. But I think all of this raises a good question in terms of writing:

Does a story HAVE to have something to say about its setting?

I don’t think so. The setting doesn’t have to BE the story. You don’t have to set a story in, say, Barcelona, and be obliged to explore the issue of Catalan independence. Ergo, I don’t think Expats is obliged to say anything meaningful about the pro-democracy movement or Beijing’s encroachment thereon, etc. And as some have noted, a show about rich self-obsessed expats being oblivious to the realities around them is at least realistic.

However, based on the reviews, it sounds like Wang squandered both the premise (rich oblivious expats with problems) and the setting (HK during a time of political turmoil). She made a rich-people-with-problems drama that could have been set anywhere and uses HK-specific issues at most as shallow plot devices.

Again, I don’t think Wang is obligated to tell a story where the developments in HK are more central to the story arc, or to make some kind of social commentary. But I do think it’s a lost opportunity. There’s so much you could do with a story about rich expats living in a city undergoing profound changes. But it sounds like the only reason the show is set in HK is because the original novel was (and from I’ve heard, the novel itself took a similar approach).

That might be fine for Wang and her (presumably) US audience, but for those of us who live here it’s yet another example of HK being used as a generic backdrop for Western cinema, mostly for aesthetic reasons (urban canyons, Blade Runner neon, etc).

And, you know, it’s nice y’all think our city looks cool (I agree!), but we’re more than a pretty face. So forgive us if we’re not impressed.

And yeah, breezing in here during COVID and decorating Fa Yuen Street to make it look more “Chinese” didn’t help.

In the city,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Pacific Coffee
Current Music: Ambient cafe soundtrack

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Los Bitchos, "Trapdoor"

I am in a library, where Dolly Parton is telling a story to an audience. There is a little girl sitting on her lap holding a box of unpopped caramel popcorn. Dolly illustrates the story by setting the box on fire to make the popcorn.

She continues talking as the popcorn starts popping, and the fire blazes furiously until it consumes the box, the girl and Dolly. Throughout it all, Dolly keeps telling her story and the girl keeps listening, and we keep watching all this.

The fire burns until there is nothing left but a pile of golden brown skulls that shrink in the embers until they are popcorn sized.

The librarian thanks Dolly and tells us it’s our turn to make caramel popcorn.

And then I woke up.

Cooking with fire,

This is dF

Current Location: TST
Current Music: ELO, "Strange Magic"

Picking up speed!

Only When I Laugh by Len Deighton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve read and enjoyed all of Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer novels and Bernard Samson novels, but this is my first time reading a Deighton novel that’s not a spy novel of some kind. This one is a crime comedy from 1968 featuring three con artists – veteran Silas, his lover Liz and young Bob – who work as a team to stage elaborate cons, typically in the form of fake business investment deals. All three characters take turns as narrators, and unreliable ones at that (as you might expect con artists to be).

The story follows a fairly standard template – Silas, Liz and Bob take on a new con that doesn’t go as planned and the team starts to fracture as young Bob gets impatient with Silas running the show, and has designs on Liz, etc. But it’s also an exploration of the generation gap of the late 1960s – Silas is a WW2 vet who (his criminal aspirations aside) embodies the disciplined, stiff-upper-lip values of that generation, while Bob is an impulsive working class yob who has done time and resents the older generation telling him what to do. Liz is somewhere in between as a not-so-neutral observer.

Despite all that, I confess I didn’t get much out of it. The basic story is okay, but Deighton’s characters get sidetracked by unannounced flashbacks (which in Silas’ case are rather lengthy, possibly because WW2 scenarios are Deighton’s comfort zone). The multiple-narration device also makes it hard to get a grip on who these people really are, especially when Silas and Bob start improvising scenes just to see how long they can stay in that character. Maybe that’s the point, but still, I found myself skipping a lot. Anyway, there’s a lot to like here, but for me is just never really gelled into a likeable whole.

The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I tend to enjoy Ursula Le Guin’s novels, but this is my first time reading her short stories. This 1975 anthology was the first collection of her short stories, and of the 17 tales here, I’d read only one before. The opener, “Sembley’s Necklace”, also serves as a prologue to her debut novel Rocannon's World, and is an early display of her tendency to blend SF and fantasy tropes in her work.

In fact, a number of stories here are connected to her more famous novels, if only by location. For example, "The Word of Unbinding" and "The Rule of Names" are stories set in Earthsea. "Winter's King" takes place on Gethen, the planet that became the setting for The Left Hand of Darkness. And "The Day Before the Revolution" is a prequel of sorts to The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. However, there are plenty of other stories here: A banished astronomer seeks the stars in a silver mine; a planetary survey team receives ambiguous telepathic signals on a world without animal life; the sole survivor of a clone-group weathers the loss of his other "selves."

For whatever reason, I found that the stories linked to the novels worked the best for me – I suppose because they were wonderfully familiar territory for me, and reminded me why I loved those books. "The Day Before the Revolution" is especially good, not least for its concise exploration of the fate of ageing revolutionaries. But the others are also worthwhile, particularly her famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", which describes a summer festival in a utopian city of whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child. Like with any collection, a few don’t clear the bar set by her best work, but then it’s a pretty high bar.

Mondo Barbie: An Anthology of Fiction & Poetry by Lucinda Ebersole

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All the current kerfluffle over Barbieheimer and the conservative meltdown over Barbie’s alleged wokeness reminded me that somewhere buried in my bookshelves is this 1993 anthology that collects short stories and poems about Barbie in some form or fashion. The whole point of the book is that Barbie is (and has always been) so much more than a toy. Just as there has been many iterations of Barbie (Malibu Barbie, Flight Attendant Barbie, etc), she’s also a feminist icon, a pop-culture phenomenon, a coming-of-age catalyst of sexual discovery and so much more. So of course I had to re-read it.

I’ve heard of a few of the contributors, but most are new to me. The stories and poems here cover a wide range of Barbie experiences and opinions, though a common theme is the contrast between her “perfect” plasticine status-symbol life and the messy complicated real world. There’s also lots of dismemberment, sexual drama (both hetero and LGBTQ) and “Ken has no dick” jokes. Sometimes Barbie is the character, sometimes she speaks to her owners, sometimes she is merely a catalyst for the plot. One SF story is a murder mystery on the moon that takes place amid a religious cult where members transform into Barbie-like people. Another recalls a traumatic childhood visit to a Mattel factory.

As with any anthology, the quality varies, but it’s one of those rare collections where the sum is more interesting than its parts. It all adds up to the inescapable truth that Barbie has been central to so many childhoods and sexual awakenings (whether you had a Barbie or not). Plenty of non-fiction books have been written about the Barbie pop-culture phenomenon, but these fictional stories get to the heart of the matter by taking us to the front lines with the people who came of age in a Barbie world. It also highlights how she has always been something of a sociopolitical lightning rod, especially as American society underwent its own sociopolitical upheavals – which also means the current hoo-ha over the Barbie film is neither new nor original.

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t seen the Barbie movie, and I have no plans to do so anytime soon.

BONUS TRACK: : My sister had some Barbies, and we usually combined them with my Steve Austin, GI Joe and Big Jim action figures. When she decided she’d outgrown them around age 14, my friend Steve and I took the townhouse, the camper van, the surf buggy, Big Jim’s Jeep and all the dolls, and staged an elaborate action sequence in the backyard that also involved fireworks and a can of gasoline. There were no survivors.

View all my reviews

Put another shrimp on the Barbie,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Ambient highway

I should open by saying he’s one of those artists where I’ve never heard any of his songs but I’ve heard ABOUT them, for the same reasons we’re all hearing about “Try That In A Small Town” now. He’s made his political views clear, and he knows what his audience wants to hear. So, Aldean is gonna Aldean, is what I’m saying.

What interests me more is the whole city vs country trope that has existed in country music (and literature before it) for a long time. Aldean’s take is more extreme (as befits the MAGA audience he is obviously targeting), but it builds on a tradition of country music artists portraying small town country life as little libertarian utopias and cities as multicultural atheist cesspools of crime and loose women.

NPR has a really good thought piece on this.

One thing I’d add is that it also gets me to thinking of John Mellencamp’s “Small Town”. Mellencamp has a rep as a champion of small-town America, but “Small Town” doesn’t really say that small-town life is better or that big cities suck – it just says there’s no shame in being from a small town or living in a small town your whole life, if that’s what makes you happy. There’s no city vs country antagonism. And of course, Mellencamp has recognized the downside of small-town America in other songs.

Also worth noting that “Small Town” is Mellencamp writing about his life, while “Try That In A Small Town” is a culture-war talking point based on a myth and sung by a man who did not write the song and is not in fact from a small town.

“Small Town” remains in heavy rotation on classic rock/adult hits radio all over America, almost 40 years after it came out. Will “Try That In A Small Town” still be in rotation 40 years from now?

Let’s get small,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Ambient highway

Evidently the latest WorldCon has (among other things) revived the old gripes of “real” SF/F fans and what is or is not “real” SF/F.

I’d have thought the answer was obvious. If you like SF/F, you’re a fan. The end.

But no.

There are at least three threads of this argument I’ve come across in the last week:

1. The new writers who are winning Hugos are not “real” SF/F writers (or fans) because they haven’t read the canon. Put another way, you can’t write (or even appreciate) good SF/F until you have read the Golden Age classics first – your Heinleins and Campbells and EE Doc Smiths and Asimovs and Tolkiens and whatnot.

2. The SFF of the past was relevant and had Things To Say and nearly all modern SFF is pulp trash that doesn't say anything and isn't relevant and isn't worth reading because all the old stuff is still important, etc.

3. Today’s SF/F is all PC PoC LGBTQ+ SJW writers now (or books translated from the original Chinese) because publishers have decided that white cis men are not allowed to write SF/F anymore, thus there’s no “real” SF/F anymore because PoC LGBTQ+ SJW writers only write about PoC LGBTQ+ SJW stuff and not SCIENCE.

So, yeah. To address these one by one:

1. Nonsense.

2. Yr kidding, right?

3. Oh you poor lambs.

To save me a lot of typing I’ll refer you to some good responses for each of these from:

1. Catherynne Valente

2. Bibliotropic

3. John Scalzi

As for me:

What I can tell you is that (as a white cis dude) I am spoiled for choice in terms of interesting new SF/F to read, and the diversity of voices has a lot to do with that.

As for SF/F “canon”, there is one very obvious problem with the argument that you must be well-versed in SF/F canon to read or write modern SF/F: no one does this. People generally tend to read whatever is available at the time, and that is typically the contemporary stuff. Also, the availability of classic SF/F at that time will depend partly on what year you started. Today a lot of Golden Age SF/F is pretty easy to find – in 1977, when I started reading SF/F, it was limited to whatever might be available in the library or what was still in print at Waldenbooks. In short, it wasn't a lot.

This also means that what counts as classic SF/F is somewhat subjective. For example, in my case, anything published before 1977 is “classic” SF to me. For a millennial, anything by William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley or any of the cyberpunk people would be considered classic (or at least old).

Anyway, I didn’t really spend much time with “canon” books when I got started. I remember trying Poul Anderson, Frederick Pohl, Michael Moorcock, Frank Herbert, JRR Tolkien and Isaac Asimov when I was in high school, and I simply could not get into them. A lot of my fellow students was into Dune, Lord of the Rings and Battlefield Earth (yes, I know, but bear with me) and I just didn’t get it.

My SF/F jams when I started out were contemporary writers like Douglas Adams, Pier Anthony, Alan Dean Foster, Steven Brust, Elizabeth Boyer, Charles de Lint and Ron Goulart, to name a few. I did dabble early in some classic stuff by the likes of Lester del Ray, Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, Ray Bradbury and Heinlein (via Starship Troopers), but for the most part I stuck with the more contemporary books.

Over the years I would occasionally try a “classic”, but it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago that I started making a bigger effort to try out the Golden Age and New Wave authors. What I’ve found is that – perhaps unsurprisingly – some of it is great and I can’t believe I didn’t get into them before (Ursula K Le Guin is my go-to example here). And some of it is awful – great ideas, maybe, but bad writing, bad dialogue, bad characterization, and yes, a lot of macho racist sexist homophobic claptrap.

I can afford to overlook the latter because of white privilege (though it’s a lot harder for me to overlook it now than it was in high school), but I can totally see why people who have to deal with systemic racism, sexism and LGBTQ+phobia every day of their lives might not be able to overlook it, and I can think of no plausible reason why they should overlook it in the name of honouring the “canon”.

I fully recognize this also applies to the stuff I grew up reading that would now be considered “classic” by the young people reading contemporary SF/F today. Some of the books I read then may have aged well – Piers Anthony probably has not (though I’d need to re-read him to be certain, but I have a feeling I will cringe if I ever do).

Anyway, the point is that, frankly, there is no “canon”. You are under no obligation to explore older SF/F. It won’t make you appreciate the stuff you like any more than you already do.

I mean, this is just an obvious thing to me that I can’t even believe it needs saying, but here we are, so:

Read what you like. Don't let other people tell you what you ought to like. By all means explore older books when you think you’re ready to appreciate them or evaluate them – especially if your favorite authors name-check them. There’s much pleasure in discovering a great classic – you may well be rewarded. But if you don’t like it, that’s cool.

Hit the books,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Lou Reed, "The Original Wrapper"
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1652829.html

Amity means friendship,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: The Rolling Stones, "Dance (Part1)"

I am attending a media event hosted by Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses. It’s an annual thing that I have attended before, and she remembers me. She says that this year she is starting an online cookie business, featuring different kinds of cookies that she baked herself from family recipes, as well as some she invented herself. She brings out a sample platter for us to try. I get one with an oatmeal base topped with pineapple, crème and candied maraschino cherries. It’s pretty tasty.

Later Kristin meets me in a hotel room for an interview. I’m trying to get my MP3 recorder ready, but it’s full because I left it running during a Sparks documentary. I’m trying to figure out how to delete the file so I can record Kristin’s interview. In the meantime we make small talk about past events and how things are going generally.

At some point we are interrupted by a Nazi Gestapo officer, who shows up unannounced for a surprise inspection of the room, which is when I become aware of the dream’s overall context: we are in either Nazi Germany or some Nazi-occupied country. The officer is all mock politeness, and we go along with it. This is his regular beat, so we’ve dealt with him before, and we know his routine – he’ll do a Columbo, pretending he’s done then coming back almost immediately for one or two additional questions.

After he’s gone, we wrap up the interview and prepare to leave the hotel. This requires changing into traveling clothes, which we do. As I pack, I come across a Kindle wrapped in a nice red leather case – Kristin gave it to me at last year’s event. She’s pleased I still have it because it means I found it useful.

Outside the hotel, we wait for our ride, which turns out to be Kristin’s husband. He is well dressed with a luxuriant black beard. He shows us two kinds of local sausages, and tries to explain the difference between them. This is not easy because both have thick red casings, and the insides look very similar when you cut them in half.

We get in his car and go. We are immediately pursued by SS ninjas riding black motorcycles and dressed in black uniforms and helmets. They chase us moto-cross style, hopping around on either side of the road. Luckily, they are caught by traffic cops and arrested for dangerous driving. So it turns out we’re not in Nazi Germany after all – we’re just being hounded by Nazis who don’t know the war is over.

We arrive at another hotel and go to a large outer deck in the rear that overlooks the mountains. The view is spoiled by Mike Huckabee, who is there giving a lecture on Obama. Kristin gets really irritated by him, but I advise her to keep calm – he’s not worth the emotional energy and he’ll never be president, so don’t worry about him.

Apparently Huckabee overhears my comment, because he directs his attention to me. He comes over to me and says, “I’ve noticed the way you’ve been rubbing yr neck.”

“I slept on it wrong,” I reply.

“I’m a doctor, you know,” he says. “I can fix that with a Heimlich maneuver.”

“Forget it,” I say. I’m not sure about his doctor credentials, but I don’t trust him to put me in a headlock, or whatever he has in mind.

And then I woke up.

Hands off,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: David Lynch, "Crazy Clown Time"
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1632722.html

via GIPHY

Your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Caterwaul, "Stumped"
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1621484.html

Millennials and Gen Z may not know this, but MTV used to play music videos.

From the early 80s until somewhere around the mid-90s, MTV became a cultural touchpoint of sorts for almost every teenager in America whose household could afford basic cable (or knew someone who had cable at their house), particularly once it started producing dedicated genre shows like Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation, Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes.

Robert Dean at Consequence of Sound wants to bring that back. His reasoning: in the age of Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and generic commercial radio, it’s ironically harder than ever to discover new music, in large part because there’s no shared community to hip you to new stuff and force you out of your comfort zone:

Like our politics, everything exists in an echo chamber; we’re not sharing a space to find things anymore. We link directly to a Spotify playlist and let it do the work. There’s no unexpected magic. It’s not rock and roll. It’s safe.

Dean argues that MTV served this purpose admirably in its heyday:

Those shows worked on the simple premise of if you like this thing, let us show you these other things like it. There are blogs curated to tastes and algorithms that help us to discover similar artists, but the shared cultural experience of the music video, not knowing what would come next, the charisma of the host … all of those things played a role in the growth of the music. There’s value to that magic.

And that’s why we need to make MTV all about music again and become that central cultural community, he says.

I agree that some kind of community is essential to discovering new music. I strongly disagree with the proposition that MTV is the solution.

1. For a start, I think MTV’s role as community enabler is overstated. I mean, yes, programs like Headbangers Ball or Yo! MTV Raps had a fan base. But a shared cultural experience is not the same thing as a community. Communities are generally local and interactive. MTV was not that – it was a standard top-down model where tastemakers are telling you what cool bands you should be checking out (most of which are already signed to majors or imprints of majors). Personally, I’ve gotten more worthwhile music recommendations from actual people I’ve met and hang out with than from MTV block programming.

2. To be sure, MTV played a role as an aggregator to play music their audience might not have heard before, and then those people would go and report to you, or you’ll watch it together and share that moment of discovery. But radio can serve the same purpose – and in fact did just that at one point before everything became computer-generated playlists from corporate HQ distributed to the local affiliates.

Yes, radio is also a top-down tastemaker model, but it has the potential to be much more responsive to the community, and it’s more interactive in the sense that you could phone up the DJ, particularly for block programming shows where the DJ presumably loved this music as much as you did.

Nowadays, maybe MTV could do that by leveraging social media channels. But again, radio can do that too. NPR already does it, to astonishing effect via things like Tiny Desk Concerts, Viking’s Choice and All Songs Considered – and while NPR is a national network, it makes use of hundreds of local affiliates to explore more localized music options (or be the place to catch someone like Jeff Lynne while he's in town).

3. In fact, thanks to social media and the internet, I think the “community” hasn’t disappeared so much as fragmented into smaller tribes that defy geography and genre. I participate in several Facebook pages that serve as an example of what modern music communities look like – a bunch of people from similar but slightly different musical backgrounds sharing what they love. It might be fairly eclectic or highly specific (for example, I’ve seen various pages dedicated to fans of Syd-Barret-era Pink Floyd). But it’s still a community – and IMO it’s more of a community than any MTV block program ever was.

4. Which is why I don’t think MTV can serve as the music-discovery community Dean thinks it used to be – at least not by simply by returning to its music roots and focusing more on block programming, which is what Dean is suggesting. MTV came of age in an era when linear broadcast TV was the only option and hardly anyone else was doing what MTV was doing. We don’t live in that era anymore, and the Millennial/Gen Z crowd grew up with a completely different reality. You might as well ask a teenager to trade in their iTunes account for a Walkman.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess I wasn’t a big fan of most of MTV’s specialty shows in the first place, although 120 Minutes was alright, but I didn’t tune in regularly. To be honest, the only 90s era MTV show I watched regularly was Liquid Television, which wasn’t even a music show.

In terms of discovering new music (and I’m old enough to say this), I have to say that MTV was at its most interesting in the early 80s when it first started – partly from the novelty, but mostly from the fact that not many bands were making music videos, so MTV would literally play almost anything to fill up 24 hours, so you would end up seeing all kinds of nifty bands you’d never hear on the radio, especially late at night.

So for my money, MTV broke more new bands for me in its first couple of years than it ever did on a given block show that only aired for two hours per week.

Money for nothing and chix for free,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Ambient television
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1590455.html

Apparently they’re planning another Woodstock festival this year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original.

Because, you know, the 25th and 30th anniversaries went so well.

Anyway, the lineup has been announced, and NPR ran a piece on it with the following headline:

Can Woodstock 50 'Re-Create The Magic' Of The Original Festival?

Here’s my short answer:

No.

Here’s my slightly longer answer:

Hippie jokes aside, Woodstock was a one-off product of its time, unprecedented in scale and ambition – so much so that the organizers lost control of it early on. Which was in a way in keeping with the times themselves.

To be clear, I think the mythos of Woodstock gets overplayed a lot. But it WAS a culturally significant moment because of the youth-culture ideology that drove it, the sociopolitical changes in play at the time, and the unique role of rock music as an interactive motivational soundtrack for those changes.

Rock was still new and evolving in the late-60s to the point that it was part of the anti-establishment social movement itself. Consequently, I think Woodstock 1 has the reputation it does precisely because the music was integral to the youth movement at the time.

By contrast, pop/rock today feels relatively static and part of the institution, and structurally independent of sociopolitical movements. Yes, youth are starting to get engaged politically again (gun control, climate change, trans rights, #BLM, #MeToo, etc), but the music is mostly incidental or at best reactive to that. Certainly none of the big-name acts I've seen booked for WS50 have much to do with whatever new social movements are underway (their particular political beliefs and opinions of Trump notwithstanding) – maybe Miley Cyrus, but apart from that, not really.

The organizers may have their hearts in the right place, but it sounds like to me they have no understanding of what made Woodstock 1 'magical' in the first place. In the end, Woodstock 50 (like WS25 and WS30) is just another overpriced corporate-sponsored music festival with a classic brand, and nothing more.

This concludes my TED Talk.

Goin’ down to Yasgur's Farm,

This is dF

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: Burning Sensations, "Belly Of The Whale"
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1503617.html

Recently the interwub has been raging over one of the most important questions of our time:

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

I have decided to weigh in on the debate over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. For me, I have a two-pronged yet simple answer:

1. Die Hard is not a Christmas movie

Obviously, the question mainly hinges on the criteria of what counts as a Christmas movie in the first place, and according to various articles I’ve read, the criteria varies but is generally narrowly tailored to ensure that Die Hard counts as a Christmas film.

Basically: “If it takes place during Christmas, it’s a Christmas movie.”

Based on that criteria, I could say The Fugitive (1993) is a St Patrick’s Day movie.

My own criteria goes like this: “It has to take place during Christmas, and this should inform the narrative in some fashion, whether it treats Christmas as a secular or religious holiday, or as a positive or negative thing. If the story itself can play out regardless of the holiday, it’s not a Christmas film.”

I would argue this is true of Die Hard. The Christmas setting doesn’t add anything to the story, apart from perhaps a nihilistic counterpoint to the main narrative, but the story could have been set any time of year without losing anything essential.

Not that it matters too much – I’m reasonably sure that most people who insist Die Hard is a Christmas film fall into four categories:

(1) People who are just trolling or trying to be punk-rock to annoy people who like proper Christmas movies
(2) People who hate proper Christmas movies
(3) People who hate Christmas altogether
(4) A combination of the first three categories.

2. Die Hard is a retroactive NRA propaganda film that embodies and endorses virtually every value embraced by the current NRA leadership.

There’s practically a checklist:

• Good guy with a gun
• The good guy with a gun is working-class rugged individual who doesn't like people telling him what to do
• The villain is an educated intellectual AND a foreigner
• Federal govt incompetence
• Justification of excessive deadly force by law enforcement offers
• Specific repudiation of Miranda and other “rules” that hinder police officers from doing their job (which is killing criminals caught in the act of committing crimes)
• Bad guys reduced to one-dimensional evil targets that can be killed off with sneers and one-liners, after which their dead bodies can be used as messaging devices.
• Wholesale murderous violence as redemption, proof of manhood and a way to win a woman’s love and respect (or in this case, win it back)

Probably the only reason the NRA doesn’t use it as a training video is they can't get licensing permission.

Anyway, no matter whether you consider Christmas to be a secular or religious holiday, there is nothing in the above list that even remotely reflects what Christmas is about.

ADDENDUM: Even if we agree that Die Hard is a Christmas movie if you narrow the criteria sufficiently, it’s ALSO an NRA right wing fantasy movie.

ADDENDUMDUM: I’m not saying Die Hard is a bad movie. On its own merits, it’s better than most 80s action movies, thanks mainly to Bruce Willis being an unlikely action hero, and Alan Rickman being so good.

But a Christmas movie? Only if you really hate Christmas. Or love the NRA.

I mean, we’re talking about a film where at one point the good guy takes the body of a man he just killed, sits it in a chair, writes a note in the guy’s blood to the villain, and puts a Santa hat on him. Which is not exactly in the spirit of the holiday.

It’s kind of psychotic, actually.

Like the current NRA leadership.

Ho ho ho,

This is dF

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Maryville-Alcoa
Current Music: The Romantics, "What I Like About You"
Crossposts: https://def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com/1478031.html

You probably have heard that Charles Manson passed away.

Which is mainly worth blogging about for a couple of reasons: (1) I’d rather forgotten about him, and (2) Manson’s strange role in the pantheon of pop culture. At least for my generation.

To be clear, he was a dangerous lunatic who deserved to stay in jail until he died. Which he did. I remember that whenever he came up for parole, the TV media would do a bunch of stories about it and the general consensus was: of COURSE keep him locked up.

They would also do TV interviews with Manson, who was, among other things, what they call “good television”. His interviews were a mix of stand-up comedy and Dadaist performance art. Which is how Manson sort of imposed himself upon the pop culture landscape as the world’s most dangerously entertaining mass murderer.

At least for those of us either born after the Manson Family murders or too young to remember them. We knew all about it either from the book Helter Skelter or the TV movie based on it. We knew it was a true story, and yet it was presented in the narrative form we usually associate with fiction. And the story had all the hallmarks of a Hollywood thriller.

Which is why ultimately – and perhaps inevitably – we reduced Manson to a cartoon villain.

This song by legendary Nashville hardcore band Rednecks In Pain sums it up well.

Watch on YouTube

Or, if you like, this Ben Stiller sketch.

Watch on YouTube

Which is not to minimize the horror of the Manson murders. It’s just that for those of us who came of age after the 60s were over, it didn’t have the same kind of impact that it did on people who were, say, high-school age or above when the murders happened, especially in the context of the cultural revolution America was undergoing at the time. Also, to be honest, by the time I knew who Manson was, serial killers were a thing (Zodiac killer, Son Of Sam, etc) and Jim Jones had his followers commit mass suicide in Guyana. So while the Manson murders were horrifying, they didn't exactly stand out.

That said, strange as it sounds, Manson was one of those monsters of society who was always present in the pop culture landscape, even if he was mainly just lurking in the background muttering to himself. The weird charisma he exerted on his followers also had an effect on those of us who were repulsed by him – a madman with the ability to make you question yr own sanity if you weren’t careful.

Or is that giving him too much credit?

Anyway, when I think of it, I wonder if maybe it was a good thing that he became a cartoon character for many of us. True Evil wants you to take it seriously. It wants you to be afraid. It hates being laughed at, being mocked. And in the end, we laughed at Manson. And in doing so we made him powerless to frighten us.

There’s a lesson there, perhaps, especially in this day and age where various groups of people are trying to frighten us into accepting their agenda.

FUN FACT: One of the many legends of Charles Manson is that he once auditioned for the Monkees TV show. Turns out that’s not true.

Helter Stupid,

This is dF

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Current Location: Tung Chung
Current Music: The Como Mamas, "Move Upstairs"
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Watch on YouTube

DISCLAIMER: Satire.

PRODUCTION NOTE 1: BTW, for everyone having a cow over D.Trump declaring Loyalty Day as if he came up with the idea? He didn’t. May 1 has legally been Loyalty Day since 1958, and every POTUS from then to now has recognized it as such.

Still …

PRODUCTION NOTE 2: If yr wondering, that video is meant to demo the fact that there were two soundtracks recorded for Flash Gordon – one by Queen and a more traditional one by Howard Blake. This one shows a scene with the Blake version.

PRODUCTION NOTE 3: In case yr thinking George Harris’ voice sounds different than on the Queen soundtrack album, yr right – the album version is Harris’ real voice. This is the overdubbed version. Contrast and compare here.

BONUS TRACK: Everywhere else in the world (i.e. outside of America) it’s Labor Day. So here’s yr Labor Day song.

Watch on YouTube

Possibly topical!

Without measure,

This is dF