Freckles & Doubt

Week still noxious, and that's quite enough of that. Otherwise I'm going to rant about last-minute venue changes, at length, with profanity and invocations to strange, disagreeable gods, and you'll all leave in entirely understandable disgust. (Except for those weirdos among you who are mildly entertained by profanity and strange, disagreeable gods. I know you're out there, but I refuse to pander to you.)

Instead, I shall randomly disseminate random links which have randomly kept me sane in the last few days.

Superheroes! Superheroes always make me feel better. This picture is beautiful because of the story which attaches to it, which may or may not be apocryphal but is perfect anyway.



Small boy loses parents at a comics convention, panics, approaches the Flash for help because he knows and trusts the character, presumably from comics or cartoons. That's the ideal essence of the superhero right there, that is - the symbol is about trust and agency and the simple, essentially childlike belief that someone out there has the power and is both willing and able to help. The emblem transcends all other concerns, all boundaries between real and imagined. That's as it should be.

And, weirdly enough, Joy Division. Joy Division might not leap to the eye as the perfect pick-me-up, but by gum it's cheery when played by a Caribbean steel band.



They also do Love Will Tear Us Apart, but it's a much shorter and lower quality clip.

Gah. One of those days when I've boiled the kettle four times and still haven't managed to make the cup of tea. This is the time of year when I most hate my job: I am juggling four major and complicated organisational challenges, at least part of all of which involves students phoning me up and being plaintive. The Nibbled To Death By Hordes Of Mice quotient is very high. Also, insomnia last night doesn't help, while I lie awake remembering important things I haven't done. Just to add to the joy, the campus internet has decided to nominate today as one of meditation, which means there's a fractional delay on every letter I type. It's very annoying.

On the upside, the amazing people at Loot have apparently arm-wrestled the Evil Anti-Season-4 Smallville Cult into submission, because my copy has apparently been shipped. Owing to Smallville's tendency to finish its seasons on cheesy cliffhangers with practically everyone possibly dead or incarcerated in insane asylums, I'm more than usually twitchy at the lack of instant gratification. Also, I really miss Joss's tendency to damned well finish a season arc. It suggests an actual confidence in the return of his audience which the Cheap Shot Cliffhanger simply doesn't. Sigh. I am, nonetheless, rather looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with oodles of kryptonite, bucketloads of teen angst, the ongoing train smash that is Luthor family dynamics, and Clark Kent's cheekbones.

Now I shall go back to assessing the curricula of student appeal cases, wrangling OLs, fielding plaintive admissions emails and herding curriculum advisors into training. Much of the actual hard grind of finishing up handouts and websites and things for these projects is, alas, going to be done this weekend. I think my Evil Landlord's fell influence on the weekend work front is rotting my moral fibre.

The very first crush I ever had was on Superman, the Christopher Reeve version; going by the date of the movies, even with the characteristic Zimbabwean delay in releasing them, I must have been about twelve years old. It was a very childish crush. Whether as Superman in skin-tight primary colours or as Clark Kent with his goofy, farmboy dweebishness, Superman's a good guy, and thus ultimately unthreatening to a twelve-year-old's devotion. It's an uncomplicated good: of all the superheroes Superman must be the most clear-cut, his angsts alien and distant and human only at one remove. He's all the more a good guy because his powers are almost limitless, and he's bloody near indestructible; not for him the hard-won grittiness of Batman, or Spiderman's joyous exploration of every possible combination of swooping and string. Superman is possibly my favourite superhero because he's just so reassuring to watch, the epitome of strength modified by chivalrous restraint.

Fortunately, Smallville mostly seems to get all of the above. I cannot say this is great television, or even great teen television; watching it over the last couple of weeks has been a guilty pleasure very much akin to an ill-advised and dodgily enjoyable relationship with an extremely hot young man about twenty years my junior, motivated mostly by his cheekbones, slightly bone-headed sweetness and naively earnest desire to please. This series wants to be Buffy, with all of Buffy's use of the supernatural to explore teen angsts. It wants to be Buffy so bad it hurts, but alas, it simply doesn't have the brain. It is, nonetheless, extremely watchable, its best episodes kicking in at somewhere around the middling-solid of Buffy, and some of its narrative and mythological choices being interesting and creative.

The whole problem with Superman is that he's invulnerable and pretty much invincible, which doesn't offer a whole lot of potential for narrative tension. This, of course, is what kryptonite was made for, and one has to be struck by the way that the series weaves Clark Kent's inherent limitations into the fabric of life in Smallville: kryptonite arrived, in large quantities, in the same meteor shower that delivered the young superhero, and liberally peppered the Smallville landscape. From there, things simply fall into place with an audible click that's almost too pat: of course kryptonite crystals will be present at the moment of narrative climax, rendering Clark's powers moot, or in worst case scenarios turning him momentarily evil. (I hate red kryptonite in this series: it destroys everything I really enjoy about Superman, which is his Lawful Good-ness. Also, Tom Welling brings the pretty in large quantities, but his acting skills, at least this far, are not quite up to Evil!Clark, who really needs to be played by Damon Salvatore to be in any way compelling).

Apart from the eternal quadrille with kryptonite, the show so far revolves around two main tensions, Clark/Lana and Clark/Lex. The Lana thing is making me realise how good Joss is at this, in that Buffy's relationships were never this eternal electron-orbiting-a-nucleus thing, doomed never to touch. Buffy's relationships were mostly disastrous, but by gum she had them. Here, Clark's gosh-darned secrecy is a sort of repulsion field, always pushing Lana away with misunderstandings or secrets or save-the-world priorities which exclude her at the moment when you think they might actually stop being bone-headed teenagers and get it together. It's so inevitable you stop hoping after a while. As an exploration of the price of a superhero identity it's frequently poignant and insightful, particularly in the ramifications of secrecy out through the Kent family and Clark's friends, but in terms of narrative satisfaction, not so much. Of course, I'm only halfway through the second season, so they might still surprise me, but the pattern of eternal-foreplay-no-climax is beginning to wear on me.

On the other hand I'm really, really enjoying the Clark/Lex relationship. Lex is interestingly conflicted, and his beyond dysfunctional relationship with his father is a twelve-step how-to on creating supervillains. His complexity is beautifully set off against Clark's stubborn and slightly one-dimensional nice farmboy thing, but you still believe in their friendship. Again, the necessity for secrecy about Clark's powers is cleverly used to complicate the relationship, with a horrible inevitability which allows you to appreciate its necessity at the same time that you can watch it effectively destroying Lex's struggles towards light rather than dark, people rather than power. For a Lawful Good guy, it's ironic how Clark's interactions with Lex are an ongoing betrayal headed inevitably and horribly for disaster. It's also fascinating to watch the incestuous intertwining of Luthor and Kent fates in an unstable web of deceit and compromise and manipulation. (Is it just me? I really don't like the actor who plays Jonathan Kent. I don't believe he's a good guy).

The problem with Superman is that everyone knows the story. I'm impressed, actually, by how the writers of the series have used this to layer the interactions between the characters; it has something of a Greek tragedy's attitude to fate. The series is possibly most fun, however, in its throwaway nods to the mythology, its larding of the episodes with passing, deadpan references to men of steel and tights and secret identities and being from another planet. It's playful and, again, poignant, and makes me wish I'd actually read some Superman comics at some point. (Memo to self: hit Loot).

So, overall I suspect there are a good few seasons of Smallville in my future. There are moments when I wander out of the room in the middle of an episode in sheer frustration or embarrassment or irritation, but its pleasures are many. Why, yes, Smallville, you may take one of my favourite superhero mythologies and expand it for my viewing pleasure for ten seasons, with a modicum of insight and an attractive and largely likeable cast. Happy Christmas to you, too.

Latest movie club last night, Jo's theme, that being "unsuccessful superheroes" (and, I have to say, supper consisting of superlatively good rolls with rare fillet steak and salad, on the Whole Earth Market principle, and tiramisu, because I felt like making it). We watched Mystery Men and Kick-Ass, which was an extremely interesting experience despite the fact that neither are great movies. Both are highly uneven in tone and effect; both have glorious moments of humour, commentary or heart, and inglorious moments of slapstick, camp, gross-out, or predictable, glossy Hollywood stupidity. They make me realise how much of a steel-boned electric eel the superhero mythos is; how it twists and turns in the film-maker's grasp, and frequently turns to sink its six-inch teeth into the unsuspecting camera's eye.

Mystery Men is actually bearable for a Ben Stiller movie, which from me is something akin to high praise. It has dated rather; I suspect some of its inversions and assaults on heroism would have been fresh at the time, when they seem old hat now. (I can certainly see its influence on Doctor Horrible). It is blessed with a mostly highly accomplished cast who seem to be enjoying themselves to an almost indecent extent, and production values which appear to have consisted of giving the art director a very large budget and a very large supply of very good drugs, and then locking them in a room full of B-movies. I loved the look of it, although it also made me realise that Western civilisation needs to feel very, very embarrassed about disco. And if nothing else, it won my heart by the delirious rightness of a supervillain called Casanova Frankenstein. (Geoffrey Rush, as usual leaving no scenery unchewed).

Kick-Ass is something else entirely; I can now see why there was so much of a furore over it when it came out, although, true to hypocritical type, Western civilisation needs to feel very, very embarrassed about the fact that it got its knickers in a twist about an 11-year-old girl saying "Fuck" a lot when it should really have been chilled to the marrow by the 11-year-old girl merrily and bloodily dismembering people with a dirty great sword. I'm a bit saddened by the way in which this film missed being a very bleak, black, vicious commentary on the nature of violence and moral polarity (what Tarantino could be if he wasn't a dick), copping out instead to a feelgood Hollywood ending which removed most of the teeth from the issues. I am, however, pleased to see that Nic Cage managed to sneak away from Nic Cage's Hair for the duration of the film, and deliver a performance bizarrely able to exist in the same sentence as words such as "nuance" and "restraint". Chloe Moretz was brilliant. Chloe Moretz is always brilliant. We are watching Miss Moretz's career with considerable interest.

To tell stories of superheroes is to grapple with the nature of agency, of individual responsibility, of violence, and no more so than when you attempt to do it ironically. Ironic superheroes lose the glossy, effortless ease of the heroic intervention, and thus deconstruct their own assumptions; they blow apart comic-book innocence to deal, inescapably, with the fact that at base all superheroes are crazed vigilante serial killers. Superhero conflicts dramatise the fact of our own human nature, which is unpleasant. The classic superhero defeats human evil, but it's not so simple when the gaze is ironic. Mystery Men turns that moral spotlight inward to the superheroes, Kick Ass turns it outward to the world, but under both spotlights we have to confront that people are either weaklings or bastards, the world is fucked and needs fixing. The black/white simplicity of the superhero dissolves under the postmodern gaze, and quite right too.

Mystery Men's play with violence is mostly to undercut it playfully (I rather fell for the concept of a "non-lethal tank"), but occasionally to redirect it senselessly - the fate of Captain Amazing was horrible and perfect (and Greg Kinnear is great. Why haven't I run across him before?). Kick-Ass is more interesting: the way in which wrong and right, good and evil, shifted between the characters and the hero/villain axes, was endlessly fascinating. Big Daddy is mild-mannered and says "Darn it!" where his daughter is cheerfully psychotic and says "Fuck", but he's the one who's perverted a child into a killer. The bad guys are murderously amoral druglords except when they're transfixed in front of the Youtube version of superhero violence, in which case they're ordinary guys uncomprehending before the bloodily psychotic. The usual ramifications of identity and masking in the superhero tropes here multiply endlessly out into the world at large: it's no accident that the dweebish central character is playing the Gay Best Friend ploy, it neatly shadows the inherent conflict at the heart of the idea that the immoral becomes moral when you're hiding behind a costume, or a mask, or a label.

Neither film, ultimately, worked particularly well. Mystery Men should have come with a warning label "CONTAINS EXCESSIVE CAMP" on the box; its self-consciously ridiculous extremes too often overcome its heart and humanity. Kick-Ass has the potential to be a genuinely dark and disturbing meditation on violence, our desensitisation to it, and our willingness to accept it under the guise of mythology; it cops out, however, losing conviction and courage to deliver, instead of the warped moral lesson of an eleven-year-old serial killer, a feel-good Hollywood ending. It's a sadly lost opportunity, although I have to admit that any version of the film which remained true to its potential would have been almost unwatchably dark and twisted.

I personally prefer my superheroes unironic; I'd rather be charmed by illusions of agency than horrified by the realities of violence. But these were interesting films, and however flawed, have at least achieved something in that they've made me momentarily ashamed of my investment in the myth.

The combination of this iteration of Sid (second day of headache, laughs at Advil) and the urgent need to interview 60 potential orientation leaders before Friday, has robbed me of the little brain I possess at the best of times. I feel as though someone's been feeding me lubberwort, which was today's Worthless Word, and which basically means junk food that induces idleness and stupidity. Thus, another wayward puppy post! Narrative thread, who needs it. Also, bullet points are my friend.

• This Periodic Table of Superhero Powers is wildly entertaining. I am conscious of a wish that I was enough of a comic book geek to know the background story to Gt and Af.
  
  
• I promised this to various people the other day: Tom Cruise is kicked in sternum by small cute blonde, goes backwards over craft table. I am far more amused by this than I really should be.
  
  
• Doctor Hoo: the Doctor as owls. No, really. Wolsplosion! Ridiculously cute, and some of them are bizarrely accurate. Also, bonus points for neatly encapsulating two of my fixations.
  
  
• This image brought to you courtesy of my headache, which needs consolation. I finished Season 1 of Vampire Diaries, which delivered some relatively satisfying television for its cheesy teen format. I thank my lucky stars that I am now old and cynical enough to read "I am tortured and betrayed" as "I am a total dick", otherwise there'd be a serious level of Damon obsession. Plus, psychopath, so done. But he's still ridiculously pretty.
  
  The only thing preventing me from a desperate plea for Season 2 is the fact that I have to watch a metric buttload of Helsing this weekend in order to mark a student essay. My life is frequently surreal.

Now there shall be several gallons of tea, because I just interviewed 11 undergrads in a row, and my head hurts.

Woe! am without home internets at the moment, as (yay!) have finally vanquished my dad's computer and consequently have shuffled the Iburst off to him, like a mortal coil, only with more swearing. Telkom promise scout's honour they'll install the ADSL at home this week. Yeah, right. Twitch. On the upside I don't actually have to mud-wrestle them in person since the installation is being dealt with by my own personal Imaginet guy, who is sussed, courteous and quick to respond. He's also a bonus Doctor Who geek, which means the boring set-up emails are leavened with random Captain Jack squees. I feel much safer in the hands of my tribe.

The weekend was, however, almost entirely horrible. I managed to screw up the TV/DVD installation for my dad (snapped the AV cable accidentally while lugging the TV around), spend half the weekend fighting the Iburst drivers before I could take the computer round to him, and fail dismally to assemble the bedside light I'd bought (broken bits when I took it out the packaging). Self 0, Techno-Jinx several quintillion. Situation normal. Also, forgot the Vital Dad Food which I was supposed to bring. Rumours of my complete lack of brain are not exaggerated at all.

However! weekend was resurrected by particularly kick-butt Thai with jo&stv last night, and by the entirely happy and gratuitous discovery of The Middleman, which tngr_spacecadet recommended to me lo these many moons ago, and which I've only just got around to watching. It's... a bit indescribable, actually. Men in Black crossed with The X-Files (circa "Jose Chung's From Outer Space") and the deadpan delivery of Wesley from The Princess Bride, with a touch of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (only sans the acoustic David Bowie in Portuguese). It's straight-faced campy off-the-wall, features incredibly quick and complex dialogue with machine-gun delivery, plays rather fun games with subtitles, pop culture references and comic book stereotypes, and is batshit insane. Also, the lead character combs his hair like a mama's boy from the 1950s and says "dagnabbit", which is one of my favourite expletives ever and which I may have to adopt as the next step in my campaign to boycott the f-word. Also, Sensei Ping. I am totally in love. Possibly because I'm stressed and have no brain, but there you have it. Shall now have to hunt down the comic on which it's based. Oh, and they only made one season. Firefly Effect. Bollocks.

I've had a copy of The Shadow lurking on my DVD shelf for a while, now, having acquired it randomly on the grounds that (a) it's a superhero movie, (b) it was ridiculously cheap, and (c) someone I read once on the internets somewhere said that the set design was brilliant. Other than that, I had every expectation that it would be a dreadful little movie.

I am completely unashamed to say that I loved every campy, pulpy, badly scripted minute of it - I lay on the sofa sipping rosé and wriggling my toes in girlish glee. It's a direct throwback to the pulp sensibility of its radio and crime magazine roots, having incredibly quantities of period feel¹, glamorous women (her wardrobe is stunning), absent-minded scientists, hypnotic powers, secret networks, giant bombs threatening Manhattan and inscrutable evil orientals in full-on Mongol outfits. The special effects are unlikely but charming - the Shadow bounces around with smoke dissolves, glowing eyes and a rather cool morph from suave Alec Baldwin to a hook-nosed, piercing-eyed face behind a muffler and a hat. There's lots of the classic wavering shadow of the Shadow, and lingering manic laughter over portentous reference to the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. And the sets are, indeed, stunning, a sort of love poem to Art Deco, with meticulous attention to detail and some truly beautiful façades.

It also has a cast way, way in excess of its script - not just Alec Baldwin, but Tim Curry and Ian bloody McKellan, hopelessly underused as a hypnotised scientist. The disconnect between the quality of the cast and the quality of the script is a mite disorienting, but it's rather fun to watch them ham it up. If nothing else there's a slightly sadistic satisfaction in Alec Baldwin with long greasy hair living it up as a Tibetan warlord with a harem.

In other news, this weekend I will damned well start knitting again. Knitting acquaintances, please stand by the phones to rescue me when I've once more tied myself to the piano.

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¹ It is my contention that human civilisation would be immeasurably improved if everyone still wore hats all the time.

I have had the kind of day where I finally found time to eat my lunch at 4pm, and I haven't read my blogs. *is plaintive*. The world is far too full of failing students, looming deadlines and enormous piles of admin. Also, my inbox may have exploded. The reason I am watching Superman every night is because I'm too damned tired to do anything else.

Which reminds me. Superman III goes beyond cheesy into Great Leaping Gorgonzola territory, and also has the most incoherent and illogical storyline I've seen in a movie since Jumper. I found myself continually wondering if everyone was actually that naive and ill-informed about technology in the early 80s, or if the scriptwriters had, in fact, undergone surgical brain removal before concocting the story. Apart from green-screen computers accepting orders in complete sentences, it also gives us a weather-monitoring satellite which can not only cause tornadoes but can swivel around to search space with lasers for remnants of Krypton, and an oil industry so dependant on its computer controllers that if you snafu them up all production ceases instantly and irreversibly. On the upside, however, Bad!Superman is a lot of fun, Richard Pryor is kinda endearing, and I always get an unholy kick out of Lorelei critiquing Kant.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was climbing up the outside of Neil Gaiman's house in company with his daughter, to see the spot on the fancy pagoda-style roof where he does all his writing.

Gah. My beloved pea-brain feline Golux is clearly annoyed at the nose-freezing expeditions: she erupted into my bedroom at 6am this morning with a large mouse (or possibly a small rat) struggling feebly in her jaws, waking me from a sound and slightly post-gin-and-tonic slumber, and proceeded to chase it around the room to the maximum possible accompaniment of thumps, crashes and muffled squeaking. By the time I got the rescue mission out of bed the poor mouse/rat creature had expired, presumably of fright, behind the toilet. I am consequently a little frayed.

On the upside, as the Cosmic Wossnames set out to restore balance, I arrived at work at 7am all braced for a day spent in computerless exile while they painted my office, only to find that the super-efficient building manager had come in over the weekend and finished the job. It looks verray narce. He's also taken down the completely useless blackboard from one wall (what was with that, anyway? This office has been an office for all of recorded history, it's never been a tut room - do actual Real Admin People actually use blackboards for anything? I find it most mysterious) and moved the noticeboard to behind my desk rather than its previous exile in a pointless and non-utilitarian corner. This pleases me, although I shall now have to use the board for actual notices rather than for Terry Pratchett and Lemony Snicket posters. On the upside, my efficiency-and-professionalism quotient is certainly rising, any moment now I'll be forced to admit I actually am a Real Admin Person. Woe.

I have to record for posterity the amount of pleasure it gave me to re-watch the original Superman movie over the weekend - I don't think I've actually seen it since it prompted my hopeless ten-year-old crush on Christopher Reeve when it first came out. It's klunky, dated, and naïve; its Krypton sequences feature day-glo white jumpsuits, unconvincing explosions and incredible sexism (Jor-El's legacy to his son is central, his wife is clearly nowhere in the equation), and its alarums and excursions seem rather tame in comparison to contemporary special effects. This didn't stop me from loving every cheesy minute of it. I also realised, somewhat belatedly, just how heavily the Superman Returns reboot relied on the first film: it's a direct and deliberate homage in many ways. Apart from the casting of Brandon Routh as a Reeve-clone, great chunks of dialogue are repeated verbatim (especially Jor-El to his son). Likewise, the recent film simply inflates to grandiose extremes Lex Luthor's obsession with real estate - in the first film he buys up stretches of Californian desert and then hits the San Andreas fault with a nuclear missile in order to turn all his land into expensive beachfront. Kevin Spacey was also clearly channelling Gene Hackman for a lot of it, his body language is identical in parts. Some hopeless retconning, though, the planet Krypton quite definitively blew up in the first film.

Next up, once I have this paper under wraps: the next two Reeve films, and then Superman Returns by way of comparison. Well, darn.

The nice ophthalmologist man was completely unable to find anything wrong with my eyes, which is reassuring. The focus problem I had on Monday with the optician seems to have entirely disappeared. Either my left eye was playing silly buggers, or the optometrist had an Epic Equipment Fail, or possibly there was a semi-transparent ghost haunting the left eyepiece on the great big machine thingy. Now the only problem is that the anaesthetic drops have left me feeling all sleepy.

It's Friday! Random linkery seems appropriate. This is a pleasantly sarky superhero short story by John Scalzi. And this is a geekfest. Cute geek pics, and interesting list of terms MIT Media Studies uses in its Geek Entrance Exam, a horribly high proportion of which I recognise without the need for research. Has anyone actually read The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?

Today's Forgotten Childhood Gem: Lucy M. Boston's Green Knowe series. These are part of that tradition of English children's fiction which includes writers like Penelope Lively and William Mayne, whose novels deal with the misty, amorphous and occasionally chilling slippage between the past and the present. I love the Green Knowe books for their slow pace and their rich, sensuous depiction of the world of an English country house and gardens, as well as for the gentle intertwining of history, particularly folkloric history, with the contemporary (in this case, 1950s and 60s). Their main characters are Mrs. Oldknowe and her grandson Tolly, but other characters are featured in each of the books (including, memorably, an escaped gorilla whose presence is all about mystery and pathos rather than comedy or threat). It's difficult to convey the atmosphere of these books, their sense of intensity and significance despite the slowness of actual event, and the presence of the house itself as a locus of security and history. They also slide quite easily into the spooky: I remember being thoroughly creeped out by the nastily vivid witchcraft of An Enemy at Green Knowe.