Alexx's Journal

kestrell and I have a running joke / piece of wisdom about how important it is to know what genre of story one is in.

I recently read the latest issue of Hellboy, which included a major story element that has been recurring in various forms in most Hellboy stories since the beginning. And it struck me that what that element *is*, is an argument about genre.

The Dark Chthonic Forces tell Hellboy: "This is a horror story. You are the destined Dark Prince, the Antichrist who must inevitably take up his Crown of Evil and bring about the Apocalypse."

Hellboy says back to them: "Screw that noise. This is a pulp adventure story, and I'm the two-fisted hero. Yeah, yeah, so one of those fists is an ancient demonic stone artifact, so what? I'm still gonna use it to punch bad guys like you in the face." *WHAMMMM!!!*

In the latest issue of PC Gamer, there is an ad for an MMO called Zu Online. It contains some extremely quotable material. Here are my favorite two sentences:

Players will be able to taste flying by riding a sword, consubstantiating gods, forging mystic weapons, creating sects and other else amusing.

Zu Mountain has become the pronoun of the millenarian oriental culture of immortals and monkery.

There's a lot more, including a character class called "Bead Fairy". Methinks they need to invest a bit more in their localization team.

In one of her historical novels, Mary Renault depicts a king who is firmly opposed to this new-fangled invention of 'writing'. He worries that it will erode the treasured oral tradition. His opinion changes when, one day, he hears a traveling bard recite a piece of Homer's Iliad -- which he had never heard before! Realizing that writing can prevent such passages from being lost, he embraces the new technology.

This story came up in a conversation between kestrell and myself. We both were quite familiar with the story, having heard it recounted numerous times -- although neither of us had actually *read* it.

The conversation was about the complicated relationships between orality and written texts. The Renault story thus was not only relevant in what it said, but in the manner in which we had experienced it. Written texts by no means eliminate oral culture; the effects are far more complex and interesting than that.

(The above anecdote may be incorrect in some details. I see no point in 'correcting' it, however. The folk process moves on...)

kestrell and I went out to see the free Shakespeare on the Common, which this year is "A Midsummer Night's Dream". There we ran into bess and cristovau, always a fine thing, and we sat together.

Tonight's performance was billed as a "dress rehearsal" before the actual run starts on Teusday. In fact, they were behind schedule, so this was more of a tech rehearsal, starting in Act II, and with lots of stops and starts. If the show had been particularly compelling, we might have been willing to watch a lot of that. Not so much, as it turns out. The fairies are costumed in day-glo neon colors, with unfortunate big hair, and when they sing, it's like a bad 80s MTV video. So after not very much of this, we split, with B&C going to a movie, and Kes and I coming home.

One particularly fun thing did come out of the evening though. We had a bunch of meta-theater discussion with B&C before the "show" and during the stopped bits, which led at point to Kes uttering the pivotal phrase: "Huh, I've never considered this play as a slasher flick before." We worked out many more details on the journey home. So I here present the outline of "A Midsummer Night's Scream":

( Violence, profanity, and rampant Shakespeare abuse below the cut. )

Over the last week, I've been watching lots of theater-based media.

First up, was a recording of the recent BU production of Edward II, by Christopher Marlowe. kestrell and I had seen a different production about four years ago. My god, this play has become a *hell* of a lot more timely since then!

It's all about a Chief Executive who thinks that his branch of government is the only one that matters, and that he should never have to compromise (and who whines when people try to get him to compromise). He also views political offices as gifts for his friends, or (under duress) bribes for his foes, with no acknowledgement that offices might come with duties as well as revenues, and that certain competencies might be desirable in the office-holders. Of course, in the play, this monster faces strong opposition; something that our current monster sadly does not.

Mind you, the production took no steps to underline this. It was a straightforward design, in period dress. The parallels were just obvious on the face of it. Well, they did make one change which seemed to be in service of timeliness. Near the end of the play, when the deposed Edward is being imprisoned in flithy conditions and tortured with sleep deprivation (all in the original text), there's a scene where, in the original stage direction, Edward has his face washed and shaved in "puddle water" as a further humiliation. In this production, the jailers forced Edward's head into a bucket of water for mock-drowning, several times, which made the Gitmo connection quite explicit. And it's an interesting connection. His captors want no information from Edward. No explicit motive is given for his harsh mistreatment. The only two that come to mind are 1) to break his will, so that he doesn't pose any further threat to the state, or the more likely 2) simple sadism. Human nature hasn't changed much these last 400 years, there are just new excuses for the same old behaviors.

But enough about politics; I should say at least a few words about the production. It was well above-average for amateur theater, and their primary concern was with telling the story clearly and compellingly, which they did. The costumes, as I said, were period (or at least decent approximations). The nobles were all armed with swords, and the swords themselves were sufficiently distinct that they were a useful aid in keeping the large cast of characters identified. Sadly, they decided not to do any significant stage combat; but their symbolic stand-ins for the battle scenes were well executed and short. They did have a pretty good severed head for the final scene. Like most modern productions of Elizabethan theater, there were too many dramatic pauses, but otherwise the actors were quite excellent. I will definitely make an effort to catch the next show this company puts on.

A friend had loaned Kes the first two seasons of Slings & Arrows on DVD, and we have now watched them both. What a marvelous show! For those unfamiliar with it, it's about a Canadian theater company putting on Shakespeare (and other) plays, and all the travails -- and passionate love for theater -- that go along with that. The show is structured along BBC lines, with each season being a mere six 'hour-length' episodes, describing a specific story arc. There is one major Shakespeare play at the center of each season (Hamlet and Macbeth for the first two), and the storylines that weave around the actors and directors tend to echo the themes of that play, in ways both obvious and subtle. In some ways, this is the TV series version of Kenneth Branagh's movie "A Midwinter's Tale".

Recently read: _The Sandman Papers_, ed. by Joe Sanders. It's a collection of (light) academic papers about Neil Gaiman's masterwork. A mixed bag, as these things usually are: some excellent, some pointless, some well-researched, some error-ridden. The editor has 2.5 pieces in it himself, and they are all in the good-to-excellent range, so that bodes well for possible future installments. Mildly recommended if you're into both Sandman and academia/media-studies.

One down side of having read this is that I woke up at 3:30 in the morning last night, with a thesis in my head that demanded I do a few hours of work outlining it before letting me go back to sleep. Tentative title: "Crisis on Earth-Sandman: The Uses of Continuity in Neil Gaiman's Sandman".

Less than a week after my most recent praising of them, Computer Games Magazine is no more. It wasn't even due to poor circulation. Their corporate owners, TheGlobe.com, just lost a huge pile of money due to a lawsuit, and are shutting down many of their operations.

Shit.

My high school alma mater recently put on a production of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Mikado". I didn't get to actually see it, but it got me thinking about the show. It was first written, at least in large part, to take advantage of the recent surge in public interest in Japanese culture. We've got just such a surge going on today in the US. I wonder if anyone's yet done a production where the costumes, set, choreography, and so on -- are anime-inspired?

A while back I posted about an ad for the upcoming Lord of the Rings: Online game. In one of this month's mags, I saw a 2-page ad for the game. It has the same basic imagery as the one-page version, but with more and different people gathered beneath The One Ring. So, here's an update.

More women this time, up to about 30% of the population. They're also much less clumped than they were in the first ad, mostly appearing in sngles and pairs.

Two clearly identifiable black people. One female, front and center, one male off near the edge, and back a bit. A few more people in the middle who might possibly be identified as black, but no more definites. Given that this ad is twice as large as the previous one, I hink that has to count as "no change".

Last weekend, I made it out to the comic book store for the first time in ages. Between the holidays and work hecticness, I estimate it's been 10 weeks. Steve had to give me a short-box to carry it all home in. Good thing I had managed to borrow the car!

The Outer Limits will be moving again soon, just a few doors down. They had been in their current location for many years, but I've been a customer for even longer. This will be the fourth storefront of theirs that I've shopped at.

Having been away so long, I had 3 catalogs to go through. I'm trying to cut back on my buying, but I still want to pan for new gold. It can take a lot of panning these days; a 500 page catalog often produces less than 5 new items I want.

And going through the catalog is depressing in other ways, too. Even though I avoid *buying* the worst excesses, I still become aware of them. And this latest catalog includes a series of items that makes me despair for the satirists of the world, if reality can offer up something like this.

( rant cut for length )