December 2008 Archives

Street Fighter began in the arcades of Japan 21 years ago and has since become not just the most famous fighting game of them all but the most recognizable game ever. It's still going strong despite all the competition. You have to admit, that's not a bad run. I have to admit, I haven't played an awful lot of it.

But over the years it has been ever present in my popular consciousness. The arcade, buzz-bop sounds, the anime characters, the crazy game music are easy for me to recall. I also remember the Jean Claude VanDamme movie, but I recall little except Raoul Julia hovering about in his awesome General Bison outfit and mincing the furniture. I also quite enjoyed the animated Street Fighter 2.

Best of all was Jackie Chan's Street Fighter skit in City Hunter.

This year Street Fighter turned 20 in the US and that has been celebrated. In October, Capcom, the creators of Street Fighter, published Street Fighter Tribute; original art depicting characters from the games in various scenes, poses and actions. I guess you can call it a fan art tribute, but the artists are largely professional and all are talented. They bring a nice cross section of styles to the already well designed Street Fighter look, quite nice for any manga, character or low brow art appreciator. All are poster worthy works and are most successful at capturing the pop-myth-iconography of the Street Fighter universe.

It reminds us that Street Fighter isn't just a landmark in interactive entertainment but is a pop cultural institution. Its influence outside the arcades and home consoles is undeniable. Not just the massive influence on game design, but present in graphic design, sequential art, subculture iconography, the development of a swag of Saturday morning cartoons, fashion and even music. Basically, if Capcom stopped producing Street Fighter games tomorrow, its legacy would be influential for a very long time to come.

In short, Street Fighter forever!

Christmas on Mars

Christmas on Mars is about a Martian colony struggling to function with a demoralized crew who are slowly going psychotic from the solitude and confinement of space. The central character bears witness to the slow degradation of everyone around him while getting ready for the colonies first Christmas party. He struggles with the set backs while trying to hold on to his own sanity made feeble by seriously disturbing visions and an enigmatic alien visitor.

Christmas on Mars is a work of love heavily reminiscent of late '60s - early '70s arthouse type of sci-fi cinema. It plays largely in grainy black and white with colour moments, has built in scratches for nonexistent reel changes and plays (on the dvd) with Russian subtitles. While watching this Tarkovsky's Solaris immediately came to mind, but Dark Star turns up in spirit as well. Christmas on  Mars also harks seriously back to the more allegorical form of storytelling from that era. It makes no bones about its pretensions as a message movie. But it's not an easy message to decipher. Indeed, if it could be said easily there would be no point to the film.

Christmas on Mars is an existential panto rich with images and symbolism that often requires decoding via Kafka, David Lynch and the music and performance of The Flaming Lips themselves. It is funny, disturbing, dreary, surreal, bewildering, charming, stylistic, nihilistic, cynical, hopeful, absurdist and joyful. It plays all this contradiction on cheap but nicely designed sets, on very terrestrial looking but alien locations, with cheap but effective special effects and a remarkable soundscape that demands to be played very loud.

Christmas on Mars is not a film I can say entirely works. I cannot say it is a brilliant success. I cannot say it will be remembered in the pantheon of great, even good cinema. I can't say this is a movie I can comfortably recommend to anyone.

Christmas on Mars is a film I can say is exceedingly cool. I can say it is destined, deservedly, to be a culty. And I can say that despite all the weirdness it is a genuine Christmas movie. And I can say I loved it.

Philip Kindred Dick was a legendary science fiction writer and one of the great paranoia fantasists of post-war America. He would have just turned 80 if he had not died back in 1982. Dick had been chemically harsh on his body over the years (including the taking of amphetamines to keep writing for long, long hours) and the resulting physical breakdown led to a stroke from which he did not recover. P. K. had been writing and being published for years but his cult status only really took off after his death. Certainly he never really saw the fame and fortune his name now associates with.

So, I've been wondering. If Dick had looked after himself better, perhaps taken life easier when his health was failing, let himself be looked after by friends and family (five ex-wives, three children), could he have lived to a ripe age of 80 and seen how his legacy has flourished? How would he feel knowing his 120 short stories and 36 novels were still in print? Would he see how much of an influence he has had on contemporary fiction and on writers like Jonathan Lethem, William Gibson, Matt Ruff, David Mitchell, Chuck Palahniuk, Darren Aronofsky, Charlie Kaufman, David Cronenberg, the Wachowski brothers, Michel Chabon, Richard Kelly and many others? How would he feel about the acknowledgment of his influence by leading philosophers like Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek?

What would he think of all those Hollywood adaptations? He read the script and saw some preview material for the adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, retitled Blade Runner, and he was very enthusiastic. But what would he have thought of Total Recall (based on his short story We Can Remember it for You Wholesale)? And instead of the Verhoven auctioneer with Arnie, would he have preferred the cancelled version by David Cronenberg with Richard Dreyfuss in the lead? Would P. K. have liked Minority Report or Screamers (based on short story Second Variety) or Imposter or Paycheck or Next (based on The Golden Man)? I think he would have quite liked A Scanner Darkly; it is the most loyal adaptation of any of his work and the only piece that was trying to invoke the feeling of Dick's writing. I can easily imagine he'd have a cameo in that one. Indeed, how much control would he have wielded over these projects if he was around to give them his blessing or not?

But the most important question in my wonderings is what would he have written? In his later years Dick had suffered from "reality" issues for some time (for a quick lesson I suggest checking out Robert Crumb's take on it). Would he have continued on that course of perception, gone over the edge, become a guru for enthusiastic followers? Or would he have taken advantage of the mental health revolution, taken some effective medications, settled down to a less brainstorm existence? Would that have had a good or bad effect on his writing? Would we have still gotten novels like Valis or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, where Philip K. Dick's divine madness seem to be reaching new heights? Would he have mellowed or become harsher? Would he get more surreal or even written more mainstream? Would Dick have written spirituality books about alternate states of consciousness? Would he have finished his Exegesis, thousands of hand written pages of philosophical speculation? Would his works be getting the accolades from a literary community that they didn't while he was alive? Would he have quit writing altogether?

I have many other questions I'd like to ask. Would he have done panels with people like Timothy Leary or Ram Daas or Robert Anton Wilson? Would he have been doing literary panels with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and J. G. Ballard? How chuffed would he be with the prestigious The Philip K Dick Award? What would he have thought of Michael Bishop's novel The Secret Ascension in which a demonically possessed Richard Nixon has had all of P. K. Dick's SF banned? What would he have thought of Lawrence Sutin or Emmanuel Carrere's biographies emphasising his madness? Would he prefer the feature length documentaries The Gospel According to Philip K Dick and Philip K. Dick - The Penultimate Truth? Would he go see the two forthcoming movies detailing his life?

And I wonder what he would think of this changing world; of the events of 9/11, the so-called War on Terror, the fall and rise of the Soviet Empire, out of control commerce, post-humanism and string theory. Would he be the publishing equivalent of a hysterical man running down the highway screaming, "They're here, they're here"? Or would he be a voice that turned from paranoid madness to vindicated reason? How would he have coped with the rapidly changing culture, of all this post-modern ephemera, of the fast changing technologies as we head towards the theoretical singularity?

And what would he have thought of the Internet? Would he have shunned it or embraced it? Would I have been able to post to his facebook and say how much I have been affected by his work? Would he have written back to me?

And could I have wished him a happy birthday?

She became one of America's most demanded pin-up and fetish models of the 1950s. She was Playmate of the Month in the January 1955 issue. In that same year she won the title of "Miss Pinup Girl of the World". In 1957 she ceased modeling. Although it may involve the Senate hearing into her bondage photos, the reasons for her departure vary, but essentially she went on to have the normal up and down life of any average person. She went, by choice, into obscurity. 

She was not forgotten. It took time, but her image and her movies, kept circulating, and eventually something was suddenly realised. That over the generations, as cultural perceptions changed in society and politics, as the tastes in media and entertainment developed, as generation added another generation and another, her image endured. That seemingly out of nowhere, she had become a post-modern idol.

She became a new poster, she became a t-shirt, she became a car panel decal, she became a tattoo, a fanzine, she became a deck of playing cards, a doll, a statue, she became a video and then a dvd, then a download. Artists had come to idolize her image. Dave Stevens turned her into a comic character, which in turn became the most iconic female image of lowbrow comic inspired art. She proceeded to inspire artists of different disciplines. Most prominent being Olivia De Berardinis who created new fantasy images of her, all iconic, that have become posters and a best selling art book.

Models and actresses were inspired by her look, numerous doing photo shoots, from porn stars like Jenna Jamison to academy award winning actresses like Renee Zellweger. She has influenced Madonna, The SuicideGirls, fashion lines, burlesque revival shows and fetish balls. Perhaps the person who has done the most to promote her to the modern mainstream is Dita Von Teese, especially in her hugely successful book Burlesque and the Art of the Teese/Fetish and the Art of the Teese. In 2005 there was the biopic The Notorious Bettie Page. She is still being impersonated and paid tribute in magazines like Playboy and Vogue.

But what was really cool about this person? That though this rediscovered fame came as a surprise to her, this ordinary person thought it was rather neat. She had no shame about her past, no recriminations, no want to turn her back on it. She did request no photographs of how she looked in her later years. She wanted her image to be of the past and not to be connected to a current reality. She wanted that image to remain forever as we see it today.

And that image, that person, has become one of the icons of 20th Century pop culture.

Who was she?

Who is she?

She is Bettie Page.

Bettie Page April 22, 1923 - December 11, 2008

Scarlett Thomas' protagonist Ariel Manto is a sexually frustrated philosophy post-grad who finds a rare book, The End of Mr. Y, that has the reputation of causing the mysterious death of anyone who reads it. It's safe to guess that Ariel is going to find out how. She does so by discovering the troposphere. This is a different level of existence. It's sort of the operating system to our reality where all thought operates through. Thus, a little like with Being John Malkovich, you can go into the minds of others. It comes at a price, which is the source of the curse, and the troposphere itself can be a dangerous place if others know you're where you shouldn't be.

The End of Mr. Y moves along like a light thriller, but that's the hanger the real clothes of this novel hang on. It's an existential thought experiment, a quest fantasy, a play on the Matrix style of riff, an amusement on academics and their obscure obsessions, on sexual politics and a smart and witty writer's vehicle for insights on coffee, religion, history, quantum physics, mythology, literature, campus life, zeitgeists, hard sex and romantic defrocked priests. It pulled me in and along and shot me out the other side feeling very satisfied. I almost wanted a cigarette when it was over.

Ian McDonald's Brazyl is up for the Warwick Prize worth  £50,000. It already won the British Science Fiction Association award and received a Hugo nomination. It is an ambitious and complex book with three concurrent storylines. The first is a contemporary story about producing bad television and football. The very flawed heroine's world begins to unravel in a P K Dick paranoid kind of way. The second story is set in 2032 about a street hustler who gets involved in some strange and deadly quantum engineering. The third tale is set in 1732 and is a Heart of Darkness style adventure where a Jesuit priest journeys deeper into the jungle in search of a mad missionary.

All three tales are involving in themselves, but how they involve each other is the magic trick of this book. The links don't always work, but most do and well enough to understand the quantum physics, super-computers, psychoactive drugs, football politics, alternate realities and the science voodoo that combines it all. Huge chunks are riveting and the intended confusions tweak your brain towards different ways of seeing. One has to note how effectively Brazyl stages full-bore car chases and epic jungle battles of swords and muskets with lessons in quantum mechanics. There are minor flaws but not enough to take away from my enthusiastic recommendation.

Dorothy Porter died on Dec 10th from complications with cancer at the age of 54.

Major works of poetry are not a common thing these days, certainly not in a way that gets real attention, but one of the few that still made it a cultural event was Dorothy Porter. Her verse novels were not just works that felt alive, but vibrant, exciting and, most importantly, her works were immediately and poignantly accessible to the general readership, including those who otherwise never seriously read poetry. She wrote awarding winning bestsellers in verse. That makes her unique.

There are numerous reasons to lament the passing of Dorothy Porter, she was loved, respected and honoured. The lament we'll express here is that more often when saluting someone who has passed on we are saluting them for their glory days and for their body of work which had reached fulfillment. But Dorothy Porter showed no sign that her heyday was passing; she was still in her creative prime. We lament the works we'll now never see that in some alternate world will enrich other peoples.

If you've not read any of her work, even if poetry has never been your bag, I suggest The Monkey's Mask, Wild Surmise and El Dorado. Instead of reading a big poem, you'll more likely feel like you're reading an involving intellectual thriller, lyrical and probing to the psyche. She was a class act. And with those final words we raise a chilled chardonnay, a shot glass of ice-cold vodka and a hot cup of coffee to the fresh memory of Dorothy Porter. May it remain fresh for a long time.

Europa

Let us travel
the three hundred and ninety million miles
to Jupiter's smoothest moon,
Europa.

You can't miss Jupiter
hanging over its moon
in a whirling rainbow mass
of push, pull and poison.

Feel Europa's freezing
toxic silence.

You're standing on a raft
of thick alien ice,
but you're moving -
foating like a berg
on the deepest ocean
in the unknown world.

This is the roof, the shield
of a black liquid world,
where you may one day
drop like a warm stone.

A new world
where you might learn
colder lessons
than nothing.

-----------------

Opening verse of Wild Surmise

Some of the best Japanese comedy has a distinct flavour of irony, and what's more, they have no problem flicking the dial over to high absurdity. The latest example of this is Big Man Japan. It is co-written, directed by and starring Hitoshi Matsumoto, a comedian of the underplay school of character comedy. He plays a forty something eccentric that is being followed by a camera crew as they document his unremarkable and somewhat depressing life.

He desperately holds onto the one thing that makes him exceptional. When he is called upon, he transforms into Dai-Nipponjin, a giant that defends Tokyo from intruding monsters. Of course, he confronts these enemies of civilisation pretty much like the lost soul he is when normal size. You do like him for trying, but his lack of style means the general populus aren't exactly cheering him on.

He battles the strangest of giant monsters that, and this is precisely the point, don't make any sense at all. You can quickly guess there is something intrinsically Japanese about this. It helps to understand the tradition of not just Japanese monster movies, but their superheroes and even some of the classic anime. But it still works if you just let the absurdity of it all wash over you.

How this all ends hurt my brain. My conscious mind is somewhat bemused and still trying to figure it out.  But I think my unconscious got the point. I suspect this because though my head still aches a little, it does in a delightful way.