FIRST THOUGHTS ON 'V FOR VENDETTA'

(parts of this message were originally posted as comments at The Washington Note, reposted here for the convenience of friends):
Alan Moore wrote "V for Vendetta" years ago when he was in a fit of disgust at Margaret Thatcher's England: "It's mean and damp and I don't like it here anymore," I seem to remember from the introduction.
As literary fantasy, I've always been a fan of the book. Moore and the artist David Lloyd are up front about borrowing from 1984, then stirring in elements of Batman and The Shadow (if they were fond of quoting from the Oxford Book of English Verse).
The premise is simple, and doesn't pretend to be Lord Acton: what if one of those 'disappeared' people survived the government camps and came looking for the government that put him there? For me, the most important part of the story comes when the girl Evey, about to be taken "out behind the chemical buildings and shot", discovers a contraband note left by a nameless prisoner for whoever might find it in this time of plague. In the note Moore tries to sum up his definition of simple humanity and humane conduct in the face of despair.

Moore has since apologized for the violent cynicism in pop culture inspired by "V" and "Watchmen", and I'll happily recommend his later work for any readers without prejudices. At this stage in his career he seems capable of writing almost any genre, from Mad-style humor to occult esoterica to police procedurals.
This is the only time Moore has sued to have his name removed from a film's credits. Since he HAS taken screen credit as the source material for some of the most execable movies in living memory, that says something about how he feels about the Wachowskis.

Funny thing is, this is already shaping up to be the most successful movie ever made from a Moore book, and will probably greenlight "Watchmen" and lots of other adaptations.

Moore apologized in an interview for what the Watchmen did to comics, calling it a "very bad mood" that created a genre. I loved "Watchmen", but Jesus Christ, it has led to vile excrement like Marvel Zombies, Sin City and the Ultimates, where we're treated to the Wasp being beaten by her husband, Nick Fury a tool for the powers that be, and the Hulk devouring his opponent. Gore and easy cynicism sells, so comics' creators have gone for the gruesome without any moral or social responisbility of any kind, as if they were emotionally trapped at sixteen. This is NOT what Raymond Chandler had in mind when he lauded Dashiell Hammet for throwing crime "back into the streets where it belongs", and created his own hero: "down these mean streets a man must walk who is not himself mean."

Back to the ironies: The New Yorker hated the "V" film as terrorist pornography, and yet the film is resonating with audiences that want a big explosion and a 'kill all the bad guys' resolution. Like most of the noir cynicism in pop culture, there is no need to act once your naievete is shattered; go back to sleep walking your way through a life of selfish consumerism. You can't do anything, Jake; it's Chinatown.

One more irony, for now: watching this film might be the only time Americans think about what it really means to put a black bag over someone's head and declare them a friendless enemy of the state. I originally hated the casting of Natalie Portman instead of a British rose, but now I'm not so sure. Like many a murder, it only seems to matter if it happens to a pretty white girl. Instead of wearing what Harlan Ellison called "the fan sneer", we might recommend the film as an entry point to political awareness for all and sundry.

THE DEMIGOD'S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE

Panels written by Kurt Busiek and Alan Moore, two writers more skilled than I at articulating the problems inherent in the genre. And you thought religion holds up an impossibly perfect role model...?

Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of "The Left Hand of God" notes on C-SPAN that society sometimes regards cynics as "wise" and knowing, and other times its concept of objective reality shifts towards an optimistic worldview. These shifts are writ large in the dreamland of comics.

COMMONPLACE BOOK: RECENT ENTRIES

There are some people with a vested interest in keeping the world as it is, because that’s the world they have power over. – Alan Moore

It’s [publishing] not a rational industry either. Things get optioned but not made for reasons that absolutely defy logic and reason. It's like high school cliques crossed with offshore bankers: Who's in, who's out, what's cool, what's not, and the unbearable agony of not wanting to make a mistake, all overlaid with lots of money ...that's the movie industry. –Miss Snark

"Pat Buchanan is not an anti-Semite-- as a matter of fact, his grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp.
-- Well, he fell out of the guard tower...." --old joke, origin unknown

... if we are going to begin engaging in whisper campaigns against writers, thinkers, policy intellectuals, administration officials, Hill staff, and others because of who they are married to or where they were born or other irrelevant, private factors -- rather than make an empirical assessment of their work and thinking -- then we are in real trouble. – Steve Clemons, The Washington Note

"The thing about American intellectuals that so surprises me is the way they always take the entire menu. They endorse the foreign policy so they feel obliged to endorse the attacks against the private life of Bill Clinton, the defense of the death penalty, the sale of firearms, and so on. I had this conversation with Bill Kristol. When I met him I saw the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard in the waiting room and there was a truly disgusting article in there about Clinton and his girlfriends. And I asked Kristol why, of course. Bill Kristol doesn't care about the sexual life of Bill Clinton. But my sense was that he felt that his endorsement of the war in Iraq also obliged him to endorse the attacks on Clinton. This I don't understand. And maybe I'm wrong, maybe Kristol really, deeply thinks that Clinton is a bastard, and that a blow job is a crime. Maybe. But I don't think so. There's this idea that the world is black and white, and if you go with black then everything has to be black — very strange, in a country that is supposed to be so pragmatic. ... American intellectuals have this strange need to ally themselves with a single side. I believe that it is the duty of intellectuals to allow and make room for complexity, to ally with no one, and to move freely across all borders, political or otherwise." – Bernard-Henri Levy

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. Tell them they are being attacked and denounce pacifists for lack of patriotism and endangering the country. It works every time." - Hermann Goering

"Originally, editors at the paper [Jyllands-Posten. Denmark] asked 12 artists to draw depictions of the prophet after an author complained that no artist was willing, under his own name, to illustrate a book about Mohammed. A controversy then broke out between Danish Muslims and the paper which appeared settled after the paper apologized for causing offense, but defended its right to publish the material. The current crisis started, however, when European papers began reprinting the cartoons in a display of press freedom." -- from Bag News Notes, with links to the other cartoons here.

"You could never have a film called "A Canadian in Paris". Americans have this complete conviction, no matter where they go, they're still American. And they can be any kind of character they want: a shy American; a strong, ruthless American; a literary American; and athletic American. But most countries have a very strong national identity. You see it in Brazil, in people's minds abroad, and in Brazil's own mind. everyone will accept a story about favela violence, and possibly a story set in Carnaval, but they relate to what they know about the place. And that's terribly damaging to Brazilian's imaginations, because they actually find it difficult to tell stories that aren't about futbol, samba, favela violence, Amazonian Indians, the rain forest....It's exactly the same thing in Cambodia, too." --Geoff Ryman in Locus magazine

"As for anyone who doesn't believe in evolution, ask them how they got there-- because they probably came in a car, driven on gasoline, which comes from oil. I was an oil geologist, and I know they couldn't have found that oil without using stratigraphy, which is based on index fossils, which require evolution. So they shouldn't drive cars if they don't belive in evolution, right? If God created everything at once, then God was lying."-- Dave Duncan in Locus magazine

"The U.S. is the planet's sole remaining superpower, unrivaled in military might and reach, and yet our leaders have us leaping at every mouse ...a muscle-bound, world straddling fraidy cat."-- James Wolcott

"WHICH GOD DAMNED IDIOTS CHOSE KAINE TO DO THE REBUTTAL, AND IS ROVE GOING TO PERSONALLY THANK THEM WITH A GOLF VACATION OR A NEW SUV??? -- blogger identified as "Pissed Off American" on http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/


"Never ascribe to malice what could also be ascribed to stupidity."-- Unknown

See also: Commonplace Book:January, Commonplace Book: December

Personal Best of 2005

In spite the title, there are, alas, no naked pictures of Mariel Hemingway here, still a fine figure of a girl (forever younger than me, anyway.) An incomplete list of the best of what I read, saw, listened to, smelled, tasted or suspected this last year, in no particular order:
BOOKS:

Three by Raymond Chandler: "The Long Goodbye"; "The Big Sleep"; "Farewell, My Lovely": Damn, he's good. I wasn't old enough to appreciate Chandler the first time I read him, being all agog with John D. MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett. Believe the cover hype, Chandler really did "write like a slumming angel" and "as if pain mattered". Chandler is also instructive to read for all the, excuse me, psychopathic Frank Milleresque punks who spew out imitatation noir: both Hammet and Chandler (and Ellroy, and Welles, and etc.) believed in certain things that they found discarded, degraded or abused by the fallen world. It's not just chiaroscuro lighting, asshole attitude, guignol gore, treacherous-yet-sexy women, small mean souls and boxes of bullets.

Jim Harrison, "True North": Jim Harrison's look at the clear-cutting of the Michigan wilderness and the family echoes of the crime. God forgive us, we were once the model for Longfellow's "forest primeval"; north of the line it ALL looked like Hartwick Pines. The hero is using up his life trying to transcend his evil ratfuck bastard ancestors.

Mary Renault, "The Nature of Alexander": a short biography that I read chapter by chapter like a good novel. Renault changed my opinion of Alexander, who I'd thought of before as a glamorous psychopath.

John M. Ford, "The Last Hot Time": Elves, EMTs and a kind of dreamlike gangland Chicago, can't be bad, as the British say. An innocent hero growing wiser with experience but not harder; the toughness was already there. Also a startling apologia for light bondage.

Alan Moore, "Promethea" (Volumes 1-5): Holy shit, is this an amazing series. I know Moore is good, no matter what he turns his hand to, managaing to be both funny and sad in the same page, but this time he does his best to make incredibly abstract concepts into funny, sad, involving concrete characters. And the art by JH Williams III is just as wonderful. A synopsis of the first few pages won't do it justice, but here goes: In the last years of the pagan world (around the time of the death of Hyapatia) an Alexandrine father saves his daughter from Christian fanatics by transforming her into a mythical/fictional/legendary archetype called Promethea. Throughout the ages, a series of people have inhabited the archetype with all the danger and glory that implies. There are also (this is typical in Moore) hundreds of little throway gags going on in the background, like the Weeping Gorilla and a politician with Multiple Personality Disorder who becomes possessed by demons (but no one notices).

John Lukacs, "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred": a wonderfully written book about the dangers of populism. America is so busy congratulating itself about its triumphs over fascism and communism that we ignore-- or embrace-- "a dangerous and possibly irreversible-- populism.... the tyranny of the majority." Propaganda and publicity instead of thought and discourse, entertainment instead of knowledge, etc. How we got where we are since 1945, while amusing ourselves to death.

Lots of anecodtes and quotations from the personalities of the French Revolution, and a generation earlier, Voltaire as the flag bearer for religious freedom. Started with will and Ariel Duant's "Age of Napoleon" and working my way out from there.

FILMS: (Not as many details given; films are overly publicized anyway.)

"Syrianna": I think a masterpiece; I'm envious of the writer's ability to present a picture of the modern web of oil, power and terrorism. It takes me years to fully comprehend current events enough to write about them; I'm just now catching up with the French Revolution and just finishing my nemeses-come-home-to-roost 9/11 novel.

"Secretary": Every hand has its glove somewhere. A Domme/Sub relationship blossoms into love. Horny, too.

"Last Orders": Cockneys fulfill their best mate's last request to scatter his ashes out to sea.

"El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone)": The best ghost story I've seen in many a moon. Child refugees from the Spanish Civil War, menaced in a haunted orphanage.

"Kung Fu Hustle": Watch it in Chinese with the subtitles on. All the tropes of the genre and more. At least watch the scene where Stephen Chow tries to assassinate the landlady with a throwing knife.

FAVORITE NEW TASTES:
Kenyan AA coffee, fresh ground from beans.
Fresh French green beans as cooked by Josianne.
Pinaud aperitif (the red).

PERSONS MOST SORELY MISSED:

Fanny Foo Fountain, Best Bunny

Cleo by-the-Sea-O, a Little Black Cat

Richard Pryor

Saul Bellow