Over the weekend my alma mater’s football regular season ended in a pretty humiliating 52-15 ass whoopin’ at the hands of the Texas Tech Red Raiders. “Regular season,” of course, because in the modern era a team that struggles to 6-6 still gets to go to a bowl game nobody’s ever heard of before, so there’s still the chance to finish the season with a losing record! The nature of the defeat led to the firing of head coach Neal Brown, who leaves with a middling 37-35 record over six years.
Six years ago, nearly to the day, I wrote a piece examining the WVU football program and making the “sobering, but fairly obvious, conclusion” that we are “only a mediocre football program.” In that post I characterized the acceptance of mediocrity as “heartbreak,” but over the ensuing years I’ve come to view it differently – it’s really more liberating than heartbreaking.
The shift of perspective came not so much from WVU football, but from following the US Men’s National Team during those six years. 2018, of course, marked the World Cup in Russia for which we did not qualify, the first time in decades we’d been absent from soccer’s biggest stage. The time since has been an interesting experience when it comes to fandom.
On the one hand, these have been halcyon days for the USMNT. More American players than ever ply their trade at top European clubs. Hell, Christian Pulisic played a regular role for a Chelsea team that won the Champion’s League in 2021 and is currently tearing it up for AC Milan. And the team, as a whole, rebounded. We qualified for the 2022 World Cup and have reestablished the US as the dominant player in our region, winning all three editions of the new CONCACAF Nations League over old rivals (Mexico) and new (Canada).
On the other, we kind of appear to have found our ceiling and it’s not elite. In the World Cup we did about as well as we ever do, making it out of the group stage and losing in the first knockout round. And while being kings of CONCACAF is better than the alternative, the truth is our region is one of the weakest and coming out on top here isn’t saying a whole lot.
Where does that leave the USMNT? About where we’ve been over the past few decades. Our current FIFA ranking (for what those are worth) is 16, which is not bad when you consider there are 210 members of FIFA. A solid top-20 program is nothing to scoff at, but it’s hardly exceptional. We’d not be favorites to win any major tournament outside our own region and haven’t had a signature win against a European or South American power for a long while.
Overall, it’s hard to conclude that, in global terms, the USMNT is fundamentally mediocre.
Capable of big results, sure, but also frequently struggling to defeat Central American nations with a fraction of the population, too. We are entirely capable of making a deep run in the World Cup we co-host in 2026, but it will be a great story precisely because it would involve some upsets.
And I’m OK with that. I’ve come to terms with the fact that we will never be Brazil or France or Argentina or Germany (seriously, only eight countries have ever won the World Cup!). At best, in the right circumstances – a particular group of skilled and experienced players, a coach who can maximize all that, a favorable draw, etc. – we can make a good run and maybe even win the thing, if we get lucky. You know? That’ll be way more fun, anyway, than constantly worrying if we’re falling short of a goal we can never achieve in the first place.
I should, at this point, assure readers that I’m not arguing in favor of giving over to mediocrity in every part of your life. When it comes to your work, your family, and other important things you should always try to be the best version of yourself you can be. I’m talking about interacting with stuff that is, fundamentally, beyond your control. I have absolutely no control over whether WVU wins their bowl game or whether the USMNT wins another Nations League title next spring.
But when it comes to sports, it’s a pretty good deal. Particularly for things like colleges and national teams that, maybe, you can’t just up and dump for better teams, tamping down expectations means that when they win it’s great and when they don’t, eh, it’s no big deal. Sport is a diversion, right? It’s supposed to be fun? For all the talk hard-core fans of INSERT TEAM HERE make about how difficult it is to be a fan, if you really aren’t enjoying it then get another hobby – life’s too damned short.
So, come with me, friends. Embrace the almost certain mediocrity of your favorite teams. Wins will mean more, losses won’t hurt. Return sport to the proper place in your life!
DISCLAIMER: Again, this post gets into very spoilery details of a couple of recent Apple+ shows, Sugar and Disclaimer. If you’ve not seen either and want to experience them cold, bookmark this and come back later. Otherwise, onward!
There are, at least, two kinds of twists that writers can employ. One simply pulls the rug out from underneath you and changes the game going forward, but doesn’t do much to recontextualized what you’ve already seen. A few weeks ago I talked about the big “Colin Farrell is a blue alien” twist on Sugar, which falls into that category. Whatever the reveal entails for the show’s second season, it doesn’t cause you to look back at what came before and nod knowingly about how things have changed.
Another kind of twist is just the opposite, one that really turns all that came before on its head and makes you seriously rethink all you’ve already seen. Another recent Apple+ endeavor, Disclaimer, does just that.
Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (adapted from a novel of the same name by Renee Knight), Disclaimer is about a celebrated journalist/documentarian and mother, Catherine, (played by Cate Blanchett) whose life is turned upside down by the appearance of a slim work of fiction (no way it’s long enough to be a “novel”) that appears to be based on a traumatic event from her past. The book is self-published by the father, Stephen, (Kevin Kline) of a 19-year-old son, Jonathan, who died in said traumatic event, although the book was written by his deceased wife.
This is all, it turns out, a plot of the Stephen’s to ruin the Catherine’s life, as well of that of her husband and adult son, Nicholas. The book tells the story of a younger Catherine seducing Jonathan who then, in his besotted horniness, drowns rescuing five-year-old Nicholas from dangerous seas. It paints Catherine as not just an adulterous but a bad mother, concerned only with her own hedonistic pleasures rather than taking care of her kid.
But that story is, of course, fiction. You can tell by the way it’s shot and the fade ins/outs used to transition in and out of those scenes. Fiction can get at big truths sometimes in a better way than nonfiction, but in terms of the details of reality it has issues, particularly given the fairly flimsy basis (some apparently-sexy photographs) upon which this fiction is based.
The twist, which finally arrives at in the seventh and final episode but isn’t much of a surprise,* is Catherine’s side of the story: it was not a fling, an affair, or a lost weekend, it was sexual assault. She tells Stephen about how she didn’t actually know Jonathan, but that he managed to get into her unlocked hotel room, threaten her and her son with a knife, and then repeatedly assault her over the course of hours. This, of course, makes all we’ve seen before feel very different as a lot of what Catherine does can be viewed through the lens of her being a survivor of sexual assault, not just a brittle hothead.
Does that mean the twist works? I think it depends on the audience. This review goes into good detail as to why it doesn’t, although it can be summed up fairly succinctly: it’s not really much of a twist. It’s not hidden where the book comes from or what it is (apparently there’s a little bit more mystery in the novel) and you quickly realize that what you’re seeing in the gauzy Italian flashbacks is the product of someone’s imagination. It’s only a matter of figuring out when the other shoe drops, which the show gives away easily. Seriously, there’s a trigger warning before every episode about (among other things) sexual violence, none of which shows up in the first six episodes – guess what happens in the seventh?
But that assumes that the only point of a twist is to shock and surprise, to leave an audience thinking “I did not see that coming!” What if you’re after something else? Interviews with Cuaron (like this one) suggest that he was more interested in luring viewers into the headspace of those who read the book cold – several of whom comment that the Cahterine stand in “got what was coming to her” and that was a good thing – to judge her as a mother and a human being. The twist, then, forces viewers to confront their own biases and assumptions. It should make them feel bad about themselves.
Still, the “this is not exactly a twist” does undercut that idea a bit. So does the fact that Disclaimer is so very much. Cuaron is on record as saying this couldn’t have been done as a movie, but lots of viewers and critics, including yours truly, think otherwise. It would have to choose which movie to be – the serious study of grief, untold truths, and the aftereffects of abuse or the very pulpy revenge story in which Kevin Kline in old man makeup turns into a would-be murderer (the whole time I kind of wanted him to slip it Mr. Fischoeder territory, maybe have a golf cart). Part of the issue with the series is that it whiplashes back and forth in tone.
And then there’s the endless voiceovers (in at least two, if not three, voices and POVs) that mostly exist to make sure anybody who’s never watched a moving picture before doesn’t miss important stuff. There’s one scene, a flashback when Stephen and his wife go to Italy to recover their son’s body, and he finds evidence the kid’s been smoking again in his hotel room. The wife snaps that it was probably due to the girlfriend, and the Kline in voiceover explains that the wife never really liked the girlfriend. No shit!
Which is frustrating, because there are several good stretches in Disclaimer, some good performances, and it looks great (in the sense that sometimes “great” means drab and dingy). And the whole idea of luring viewers into one state of mind about Catherine then pulling a switcheroo has promise, but the whole fails to come together as a whole. And the twist, while vital to what it’s trying to do, doesn’t land like it should given what came before it.
As I said in my other post, twists are hard to get right. They’re also risky. If the point is to change a viewer or reader’s focus on all that came before it risks ruing it. A “gotcha!” twist my land flat, but it doesn’t necessarily blow up the rest of the work. I’m not saying the twist in Disclaimer ruins it, but I think there were much more interesting ways to reach the point it was trying to make.
I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse. They both ooze atmosphere and can get by on that alone, but they’re also seriously weird, to boot. The kind of movies you walk away from asking, “what did I just see?” So while Viking revenge fantasy isn’t necessarily high on my list of favs, I did take the chance to watch his latest, The Northman when it came along.
The Northman is the story of Amleth, a 10th-century Viking prince who sees his father killed by his uncle, who then promptly carries off his mother. Amleth vows revenge and if you think this sounds a little like Hamlet, you’re right – they both riff on the same legend. His journey involves Viking raids, mysterious seers (one of who is played by Bjork!), a witchy ally, and, eventually, a mano-a-mano battle on an active volcano (shades of Revenge of the Sith? You bet!). It’s worth a watch, even if not up to the same level as Eggers’ prior work.
I do have some thoughts . . .
Can something be too accurate?
Eggers has a reputation for exacting precision in world building, going all in an getting the details right of the world of each particular movie. Not for nothing have all three Eggers films been set in the past (in one interview he laughed at the idea of making a contemporary film). For The Northman he engaged several experts on Viking history, ritual, and the like to create a world that sure feels awfully “real,” even if does involve things like unshakable faith, sorcery, and Valkyries carrying souls to Valhalla (as detailed in this profile).
I dig the detail. The world of The Northman is so gritty and granular that it feels “real,” even if there’s a lot about it that doesn’t exactly jive with reality. But can it go to far? I found a couple of reviews (one here, for example) that suggested that Eggers and crew get so caught up in details and being “right” about all sorts of small things that maybe other important parts of movie making get lost in the shuffle.
There are parts of The Northman that seem to be there solely because Eggers (or Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Amleth and was a producer) found out some cool things about Viking lore and wanted to put them on screen. I have no objection to that, but your mileage may differ. In fact, I can’t think of anything that feels like it could have been done “better” by fudging the details of the setting (most of the dialogue is in English, to be fair), so I don’t think Eggers puts verisimilitude as the highest and only value, but it’s clearly important. The film’s flaws (Amleth is a pretty boring hero with no apparent inner life or ability to reconsider his fate) are more down to the kind of story Eggers wants to tell rather than a fault in how it’s told.
Destiny versus storytelling
As I mentioned above, the legend of Amleth was the basis for Hamlet long before The Northman, but it makes for an interesting point of comparison. As this New Yorker review explains, Eggers’ Amleth is really nothing like Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane:
In regressing to Shakespeare before Shakespeare, Eggers replaces intricate and complex poetry with thudding banalities. He voids Amleth—a muscular warrior raised in crude ways and trained in cruder ones—of any inwardness, as if in fear of rendering him effete or off-putting. Eggers’s action-film Hamlet is neither bookish nor inhibited nor speculative nor plotting with far-reaching imagination of complicated stratagems—nor witty nor, above all, endowed with a sense of humor.
In other words, Hamlet is a tragic figure you can at least sympathize with – Amleth, not so much. Again, I don’t think this is a fault in Eggers’ execution as much as it is the kind of story he’s telling and the kind of world he’s telling it in. In Amleth’s world the constraints of fate are as real and binding on him as the law of gravity. If his destiny is to take revenge on his uncle it matters not that his uncle’s already had his downfall (his kingdom was taken by another king and he was exiled) or that his mother comes clean about who Amleth’s father really was (and her role in his death). Even the promise of a normal life in Orkney with the witch and their children can’t keep him from his destiny.
That’s the problem with destiny or fate or prophecy as a storyteller. Generally, writers and readers/viewers want characters – heroes, at any rate – who have agency. Or if they don’t they at least recognize that fact and rail against it or unsuccessfully avoid their fate. Tragedy is when you can’t stop yourself from doing what you shouldn’t, not when you just shrug your shoulders and go along for the ride. That said, the idea of a life free from moral choice – if I’m fated to die on a volcano, why live a moral, upstanding life – is one worth exploring, but it’s not what Eggers was after, for better or worse.
And, yes, the actual film doesn’t match the tagline on the poster.
The berserker and the office drone
Through sheer serendipity I saw The Northman while one episode away from end (of the first season?) of Sweatpea, a British TV offering showing on Starz in the United States.
Sweatpea is about an outwardly mild and meek office drone, Rhiannon, who been bullied by various people all her life and starts working towards bloody vengeance. Her primary target is Julia, a school bully (leader of a clique, in fact) whose abuse was so bad Rhiannon was literally tearing her hair out. Julie is first and foremost on Rhiannon’s list of “people I’d like to kill,” so she kidnaps her with every intent of doing her in.
Except there’s a complication – Julia, it seems, is a victim of her own, as her fiancé is abusive to her. Rhiannon is thus confronted with a person she wants dead who is suffering through the same stuff she’s gone through – but does that make right all the abuse Julie perpetrated in the first place? I don’t know how it’s going to play out as I write this, but the contrast with Amleth is striking. If Rhiannon goes through with killing Julia it will no doubt be her choice and I doubt it will be portrayed as glorious. Certainly, she’s not going to be flown off into Valhalla. But, then again, she lives in a modern world where things like fate and destiny are only found in, well, in movies and the like.
I wouldn’t go so far as “great,” but Eggers’ refusal to try and tell a story that’s such a throwback at least makes for an interesting watch. Consume in a darkened room and you may wind up thinking you’re back in Iceland, with the spirits of the dead all about you.
NOTE: I don’t normally warn about spoilers, but if you’re at all interested in the Apple TV+ series Sugar, I would bail out at this point. I do recommend the show, so go check it out and come back when you’ve had a chance to see it for yourself.
Twists are hard to get right. Leave too many breadcrumbs in the early parts of the story and people will see it coming. Don’t leave enough and the twist comes along and makes no sense, as if it was just thrown in for shock. There’s a happy medium, where the twist isn’t obvious but, upon reflection, makes perfect sense in light of what came before it.
In many ways, I wish I hadn’t read anything about Sugar, the Apple TV+ series, before we watched.
We were always going to watch it because Colin Farrell is in it and he’s one of my wife’s “guys,” which is fine with me since he usually does interesting stuff. Still, I read a review when the show first came out, just to get a feel for the series, and it said straight up there was a big twist coming near the end of the season that, essentially, turned it into an entirely different show. That review wasn’t wrong.
Farrell plays John Sugar, a high-end private eye who specializes in finding people who have gone missing. Naturally, he has a mysterious past and an affinity for old movies (primarily film noir). After a prologue that sees him rescue the missing child of a high-ranking member of the Yakuza, he returned to Los Angeles where he takes a case of another missing girl, the granddaughter of a famous film producer. Sugar’s handler or partner (it’s unclear which, at first) tries to keep him from taking the gig, apparently because it’s too close to home – Sugar’s sister went missing when he was younger and the missing girl reminds him of her.
So far, so neo-noir. For six of the show’s eight episodes the series hums along in that mode as Sugar pulls back the veil on a sleazy underworld into which the missing girl has disappeared. It’s not anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s well done and an enjoyable watch. Then at the end of the that episode, after a furious explosion of violence, Sugar, alone in a hotel bathroom, decides to just “go home” for a while. He injects something into his neck and we watch as Farrel turns into a bald, blue alien.
It’s a hell of a swing, creatively, to turn the show’s premise on its head three-quarters of the way through. Except it really doesn’t. Sugar is part of a group of aliens on Earth to “observe and report” and their existence is now in jeopardy, but that’s about it. He still needs to find the girl and solve the mystery, except “aliens” is kind of sprinkled over the top.
Does the twist work? I’m still not sure. As I said, the big reveal doesn’t actually shift things all that much. Part of me thinks the sci-fi/noir blend might have worked better if we’d known about the alien stuff from the jump. The conflict between the “observe/report” mission and Sugar’s inherent need to help people would have been a good source of tension, particularly given the end resolution to the mystery of the missing girl.
But even if the twist does work, it seems to me that such a shift in the narrative so deep in the show (or book or whatever) makes it a difficult sell for audiences. After all, there are people who love noir movies that will never go near sci-fi and vice versa (one of the interesting things about having a table at book festivals is people often have no hesitation in telling me they don’t read “that kind of thing”!). How do you reach both audiences without spoiling the entire setup?
It makes me think of story ideas I’ve had that have made me wonder just how to present them. For example, I have a long-standing idea (it was my first failed NaNoWriMo project) about a regular guy who finds a book that purports to be filled with magic spells, which he uses to try and make a better life for himself (it backfires, obviously). I’ve toyed with rewriting that idea as a kind of epistolary novel (letters to his lawyer), but I wonder if that would lead to questioning whether the “magic” stuff is just conman bullshit or if it’s real? Does it make a difference if I’m generally a fantasy writer? Do readers have expectations?
I can only imagine someone who had settled into a nice, twisty neo-noir watching Farrell go blue at the end of that episode. Would they feel betrayed? Or would they be so invested in what was going on that they would just roll with it? Maybe that’s the point – being up front about the sci-fi element would scare some people away in a way that dropping it near the end wouldn’t.
While I still can’t say whether the twist really worked, it appears we’re going to have another chance to find out. Sugar has been renewed for a second season and it’ll be impossible to move forward without addressing the elephant in the room now.
It’s been a while since I shared my collection of Halloween stories that have collected over the years. All those linked below you can read here on my blog for free.
In addition, there’s a very early spooky story of mine, “The Mask,” that’s available at the Flash Fiction Podcast (it’s also in The Last Ereph and Other Stories, if you’re interested). And in addition to that, if you’re into the idea of demons policing their own, I contributed a story, “The Consequences of Sin,” to The Dancing Plague: A Collection of Utter Speculation, which you can get here (paperback) or here (Kindle eBook).
The year of the plague, was hard on everybody, demons included. Picture something like the opening of an episode of Hill Street Blues, but not quite, and you’ll have the right idea. Everybody’s got a job to do.
Devil summoning is a an old trope, but I thought I’d have some fun with it. This arose, if I’m remembering it right, from a factoid I learned about raising the devil by tossing a heel of bread over your shoulder into a fire. Probably won’t work (playing a tri-tone while you do won’t help). The title is a riff on a Marillion song, naturally.
This is the second of two stories that Eric mandated be precisely 100 words long – not up to 100, exactly 100. It’s a fun, if frustrating, exercise. This story is about wishing well (or not).
A few weeks ago my wife and I watched Casablanca. I’d seen in long ago, way before I was really into movies (contrary to what my wife thinks, we’d never seen it together) and it seemed like something worth revisiting.
It’s as good as advertised, a rare example of a film of that vintage that’s not just great in the context of its times but has aged very well.
Something really struck me about one of the early scenes. A lot of the action in Casablanca takes place at Rick’s, the club run by Humphrey Bogart’s character. Our introductory scene to that place is one of the long shots (like the famous Copacabana entrance shot in Goodfellas) that lets us get the scope and feel of the place, all the while dropping in on various conversations as the cameras pass by (and getting a song from Sam).
Two of those conversations are a great example of how to get a viewer necessary information about the world we’re in without being too heavy handed about it. The movie is set in the early part of the Second World War and the city of Casablanca itself is a kind of waypoint for refugees fleeing the conflict, somewhat under Nazi control but not entirely (or at least they want it to look that way). That people are desperate is part of the fabric of the film.
In the first conversation, a well-dressed but clearly distressed woman is negotiation the sale of some diamond jewelry to a buyer. He offers her “two thousand four hundred” francs (presumably) for it, because the market is saturated with diamonds right now (presumably sold in similar circumstances). The woman clearly thinks this is too little, but as viewers we don’t really know if she’s right. After all, the piece she’s selling might have great sentimental value but be fairly common (of even a fraud). That bit of conversation leaves us hanging somewhat, partly because the camera has other places it needs to be. There’s no time for context.
We shortly get the context, anyway. The camera pans across another conversation, lingering just long enough for us to overhear a man negotiating with a smuggler to get him out of the city. The price? 15,000 francs – “in cash,” he says, more than once. Instantly we know that the woman with the jewelry is probably getting screwed on the price, but she has to sell because she’s raising money to get out of town. It’s a perverse example of supply and demand, played out over the course of a minute or so. “Info dumps” are sometimes relegated to the concerns of fantasy and sci-fi writers, but the truth is that all fiction requires the kind of world building that can lead to info dumps. Casablanca has a great example, right up front, of how to do that quickly, efficiently, and without bogging down the important part – getting to Bogey!
The Major League Soccer regular season wraps up on the other side of this current international break. Every team but one will be in action on “decision day,” as the final playoff spots are booked and seedings secured. DC United are still alive for playoff berth (it’s been a few years), so I’m fairly excited.
With the regular season winding up, that means there’s talk about end-of-season awards, including who should be named Most Valuable Player. An early favorite for that award at the start of the season would have been Lionel Messi, who was expected the lead Inter Miami CF to the Supporters’ Shield (awarded to the team with the best regular season record), top playoff seed and, eventually, MLS Cup. But a funny thing happened on the way to that Supporters’ Shield, which the club wrapped up a couple of weeks ago – Miami proved that maybe they didn’t really need Messi that much after all.
Before we go any further, I’m not here to rip on Messi’s talent or career. He’s an amazing player, easily in the running for GOAT status when it comes to soccer, and I’ve enjoyed watching him play even though he’s never played for any of my teams. I’m just talking about whether, in this particular season, Messi deserves the title of MLS MVP.
Let’s get the numbers (all sourced from FotMob) out of the way – going into the final weekend of play Messi has scored 17 goals and dished out 10 assists in only 18 games. That’s an insane rate of production, down to a combination of Messi’s freakish talent and MLS not exactly being the most competitive league in the world. For context, DC United’s Christian Benteke, who leads the league in goals scored, has 23 in 29 games (with 5 assists to boot), while assist leader Luciano Acosta (of FC Cincinnati – and formerly DC United!) has 16 assists and 14 goals in 31 games. If it was just a matter of per-game production, Messi is the easy choice.
But that’s not the award. There are purely stat-based awards for scorers and assisters and such. One could argue that those should be based on something other than raw numbers (goals per 90 minutes played, or something), but that’s a debate for another day. Other leagues award the best player. The crux of the biscuit when it comes to MVP awards, however, is the word in the middle – “valuable.” What does it mean to be the most “valuable” player on a particular team, much less in the league?
By one measure Messi would clearly be the most valuable player in MLS, given the eyeballs and money he’s brought to the league. Messi isn’t the league’s first big signing (his owner/operator at Miami, David Beckham, literally changed the way MLS operated when he came to the Galaxy in 2007), but there’s no denying he’s had a huge impact on the league’s profile globally. Haters may call it a “retirement league,” but if the retirees are the best who ever played the game does anybody really care?
Of course, that’s not what “valuable” really means in this context. It has to do with on the field performance, what a player means to the success of his team. That said, it’s not purely about who has the most talent or who had the gaudiest stats. Therein lies the problem with Messi being MVP, at least this year.
The 2024 MLS season was semi-interrupted by Copa America, with the nominally South American championship being held in the United States. Messi, of course, played for Argentina in that tournament. His last MLS match prior to the tournament was a 3-3 draw with St. Louis City on June 1. At the time, 18 games into the season, Miami was in first place in the Eastern Conference and overall with 35 points, 2 points clear of Cincy.
While Copa America was going on, Miami played 5 MLS games (the league doesn’t actually stop for these big tournaments, which makes it look pretty amateur, honestly), of which it won 4. The only blemish was a 6-1 drubbing by Cincinnati. In spite of that, Miami slipped behind Cincy by a point at the top of the table. Maybe Messi’s absence was a big deal?
Here’s the thing – Messi was injured during Copa America and didn’t play again for Miami until September 14. In the interim, Miami played 4 more league games (we’ll leave to one side the Leagues Cup), all of which they won, including a 2-0 win over their Cincy nemesis. As a result, when Messi came back, Miami was right where they were when he left for Copa America – at the top of the table and 8 points clear of Cincy.
In other words, while Messi was away for either international duty or due to injury, Miami played 9 league games, won all but one of them, and were in the same place in the table as when Messi left, but even more secure in that perch. Given that, how can it be said that Messi was the “most valuable” member of that team? Sure, the other big name players that have flocked to Miami over the past few years – Jori Alba, Luis Suarez – are largely there because of Messi, but evidence suggests if Messi had simply vanished from the face of the Earth during preseason Miami would have been just fine.
Who is the most “valuable” player from MLS this season? I can’t say, as I haven’t seen many games outside of DC United’s and I’m biased towards Benteke because of that. But I am fairly certain it’s not Messi, at least not this year. Best player in the league? Almost certainly. The most valuable on a team that barely noted his absence? Certainly not.
Sometime last fall (after Halloween, if I’m recalling correctly), I was flipping through the channels and saw that the 1931 James Whale version of Frankenstein was going to be on Turner Classic Movies. Having never seen it, but seen plenty of stuff riffing on it, I decided I had to check it out.
Midway through the movie it occurred to me that I’d never read the Mary Shelley novel upon which it was based, either, so I read it immediately afterwards.
It’s a fascinating study in adaptation and how stories can shift based on how they’re told.
The basics are the same – a scientist working on the cutting edge of technique and ethics, the guy actually named Frankenstein, cobbles together a creature from dead people parts and reanimates it. Said creature then stalks about the countryside.
But really, the differences are much more interesting and really take each version of the story in a completely different direction.
The movie is short (not much more than an hour) and constitutes what I think of as the generic “Frankenstein story.” That is, the creature gets out of control and is chased down by a pitchfork wielding mob. Indeed, he appears to die in a blaze and building collapse at the end of the movie, but there were sequels to be had so they retconned that starting with Bride of Frankenstein in 1935.
The book, by contrast, is much more personal. The terrors perpetrated by the creature are smaller in scale but land much more heavily because they relate directly to his creator, Frankenstein himself. Not for nothing is the book named after him as it is really the scientist’s story, not so much the creature’s. If the movie is the easily replicable template for monster movies to come, the book is much more thoughtful about what it means to create life in the first place and what that responsibility does to someone.
Which makes the differences between the movie creature and book creature so interesting. The movie creature, played famously by Boris Karloff, is essentially an innocent cast into the world and unable to cope with it. The event that incites the populace against the creature comes when he accidentally kills a young girl while playing with her. It’s completely the sort of thing that a being without any real understanding of the world could do, not out of any malice but through sheer naiveite.
The book creature is, by contrast – well, he’s a monster, one that’s all too human at his core. Abandoned by Frankenstein and utterly alone in the world, he saves a small girl rather than accidentally killing her – and gets shot for his troubles. Pissed at the world, and Frankenstein in particular, he cold bloodedly kills Frankenstein’s brother and frames an innocent for it. He extorts Frankenstein into making him a mate (which never comes to fruition in the book), threatening the rest of the Frankenstein family. He kills Frankenstein’s best friend and bride. Honestly, he’s pretty much a serial killer with a very particular set of victims. Whatever empathy you feel for the creature at the get go dissolves away by the end of the book.
Which, of course, is a very real world way of thinking about murder. It’s not uncommon for killers, even serial killers, to have upbringings that would make your eyes water. Nonetheless, it’s hard to feel too sorry for them once they’ve taken another life (or lives). I don’t know if Shelley intended to book to function in this way but to this public defender’s eyes it plays like the paradigmatic capital case mitigation argument – yes, he’s a beast, but who wouldn’t be after all he’s been through?
In other words, book creature is much more deserving of the fate of movie creature, even though their respective endings both say interesting things about human nature.
The other really interesting difference, to me, was in the characterization of Frankenstein himself. Movie Frankenstein – who for some reason is renamed Henry from Victor, but his friend Henry is renamed Victor! – is the prototypical mad scientist. His lab crackles with insanity and hubris just as much as electricity and bubbling chemicals. He doesn’t really feel conflicted about what he’s doing, or what he’s done, until the creature becomes a problem that needs solved. He’s just not a very interesting character.
Book Frankenstein, by contrast, falls way deep into the issues created by his creation. He doesn’t sound like he’s just about to slip over the cliff into insanity, although he is a loquacious mother fucker. In fact, Shelley’s book pulls off the trick of being beautifully verbose to start, before becoming frustratingly overwrought, then back to beautiful just be sheer force of will.
Without a doubt, the movie Frankenstein is much more fun. It’s a scary romp with just enough pathos to make the conclusion feel tragic. Frankenstein the novel is more of a thinker and I can see why later attempts to make a movie (or TV show) closer to it didn’t come out too well. Each has their purpose and I’m glad I’ve consumed both, but if I had to pick only one – it’s book for me all the way.
When I was first pulling together the world of the Unari Empire, one of the character ideas I had was that of an Imperial censor. That character would kind of pop up throughout the story, struggling to hold on as the Empire shattered around them, slowly losing their will to do the job that had defined them. I shelved that particular idea since I didn’t have a good handle on what the day-to-day life of a censor looked like.
Darnton explores the nitty gritty of how censors actually did their jobs during three historical periods – pre-Revolutionary France, India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries under British rule, and East Germany right around the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s a dry work, without a lot of compelling through lines for casual readers, but it does offer some fascinating insights into what it means to be a “censor.”
Primarily, what censors did (or what these censors did) on a daily basis wasn’t squelch explicitly political speech aimed at criticizing the regime for which they worked. In a lot of ways they worked as hyper-powerful literary gatekeepers, helping to shape literature by acting as a kind of quality control. The French censors, many of whom were writers themselves, wanted to ensure the quality of French literature. The British censors in India were hopeful they could guide the Indians into writing great literature (“great” here meaning “what British thinkers consider great,” of course). The East Germans helped literary works get trimmed and massaged to reach an audience.
To an extent, in crafting these portraits, Darnton is trying to humanize the censors. They weren’t faceless thugs grinding ideas into the dirt under their bootheels – they were just people doing a job in which they believed, at least most of the time. This isn’t to say that Darnton comes across as a fan of censorship (he emphatically doesn’t), but it does create a more nuanced picture of what they do most of the time.
Of course, what they were doing all the time was still censoring writers (Darnton focuses almost exclusively on books, with some theater stuff thrown in), even if most of the time their motives were more benign than we might expect. The French censors Darnton talks about who squelched a bawdy insider narrative of life at Versailles might have thought it was low brow trash, but they were also aware that it made fun of the royal court and you can’t have that. That dynamic is even more clear with the British, who developed a real knack for decoding incipient strains of Indian nationalism and independence movements in modern retellings of ancient myths (not for nothing, but if you see rebellion in every work you read, maybe that’s saying something about you?). The East Germans, of course, made no bones that they were making sure new books were ideologically appropriate, regardless of the genre.
One interesting dynamic that plays out across all three eras is that every regime at least pays lip service to the importance of free speech. That is, none of the regimes saw their restriction of particular kinds of speech as any kind of violation. Hell, the East German censors (Darnton interviews two) don’t even think they engaged in censorship! This is true wherever you are, including the United States. The “freedom of speech” guaranteed by the First Amendment is term of legal art that excludes things like libel and obscenity. The grey areas of those definitions are where the rubber meets the road.
Given that these censors didn’t see their work as being conflict with a commitment to free speech, it’s not surprising that they tended to find objectionable material wherever they looked for it. If Hitchens was right that religion poisons everything then censorship does, too. There is no book or literary work so minor that it can’t be subversive or just not up to quality if you look at it from the right angle.
Which is perhaps the most important takeaway from Darnton’s work. Any censorship scheme is going to be carried out by human beings (or AI programmed by human beings, I suppose). Those human beings will come from different backgrounds, with different philosophies, shaped by whatever flavor of regime is in charge at the time. If you think there’s some kind of speech that should be obviously off limits – say, “hate speech” – it’s worth considering who’s going to decide what that is and what it isn’t. Chances are, they aren’t going to get it “right” all the time (but they’ll think they are).
Which is why I might come back to the idea of using a censor as a character in a story sometime. There’s more going on there than I suspected, even if it’s perhaps not as complicated as the person doing the censoring might want it to be.
A few years ago I did a post about what I called “minor” epics – songs that sprawled past 10 minutes, but wouldn’t have taken up an entire album side back in the good ole’ days. I decided that it was about time to address to “real” epics, of the kind that progressive rock loosed upon the world around the time I was born. Rather than pick a certain number, I decided I’d highlight my favorite epic from each decade. Some decisions were harder than others, believe me!
But first, some ground rules. By “epic” here I mean a song that would have typically taken up one side of vinyl (or nearly so), so longer than 15 minutes. I’m not including entire albums that are only one song (think Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick or echolyn’s mei) or albums with sides that flow easily from song to song, where those are still separate songs (e.g., Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood, side two of Abbey Road by The Beatles, etc.). Also, I’m excluding from consideration electronic and post-rock artists who tend to work on this kind of scale, simply because their epics don’t hit me the same way (even though I love some of them). Finally, as with any list like this, it’s completely subjective and highly personal – I can only opine on stuff I’ve actually heard.
Let’s go!
The 2020s – “Celebrity” (2020)
The current decade is fairly light in terms of epics. Partly that’s due to it only being half over, but I also suspect that it’s also partly due to the whole “side long” thing not meaning as much when most music is consumed in ways that don’t involve “sides” at all. So it really came down to a choice between two, the first of which is from the most recent album by The Decemberists, As It Ever Was, So It Will Ever Be. “Joan in the Garden” is a proper wild epic, complete with sections that hint back to something like “Echoes” more than the folky art pop they’re more known for. It’s really good, but it’s not my favorite from this decade.
That honor goes to “Celebrity” by I am the Manic Whale, from their 2020 album Things Unseen.
The song manages to do something I thought impossible – honoring folks who do well in those ubiquitous TV talent shows while gleefully skewering those who think they’ll just show up and (to paraphrase one lyric) “give it their heart and soul.” So, lyrically it’s quite fun. Musically, too, it’s great, with some unexpected bassoon in the bass line for a good bit. “Celebrity” is really the perfect distillation of what this band is all about, which is a good thing for an epic to be.
The 2010s – “The King of Number 33” (2011)
This is more what I was thinking about when I decided to embark on this project. There’s enough good stuff from the 2010s to make this a very difficult decision. I mean, all three epics from Marillion’s Fuck Everyone and Run (2016) meet the criteria! As great as they are, however, I didn’t land on one as my favorite. Other strong contenders included the excessively epic “Harvest Aorta” by Ephemeral Sun (from the 2010 album of the same name) and Resistor’s tale of epic musical adventure, “The Land of No Groove” (from Rise, also from 2010).
In the end, I decided to go with the title track from DeExpus’ 2011 album The King of Number 33.
A great, tragic, story song that has the feel of being based on a true story (although I have no evidence that it is). The “king” is a mentally ill man who rides the local bus everyday in full regalia until, one day, he demands obedience and attacked dissenters with a sword. Musically it’s solidly in the neo-prog realm, complete with Marillion’s Mark Kelly chipping in on keyboards. It soars, it rocks, it hits you in the heart. What more could you want?
Well, a version of the entire song available somewhere to link to. Here’s the whole album, which is worth a listen.
The 2000s – “In Earnest” (2006)
The Oughts were a good time for epics, from Ritual’s Moomin-inspired story-song “A Dangerous Journey” (from 2007’s The Hemulic Voluntary Band), the earnest sunniness of Moon Safari’s “Other Half of the Sky” (from 2008’s Blomljud), and the wild avant-garde piano runs of “Vertiges” by Present (from 2009’s Barbaro (ma non troppo).” I feel like I could have wrestled with this group for a long time, but for the fact that this decade provided what I think of as my favorite “new” epic of them all.
From 2006’s A Place in the Queue, it’s The Tangent and “In Earnest.”
Lyrics don’t impact me too much (vocals are an entirely different thing), particularly with epics, but when they do they really add an extra layer of enjoyment to the song. “In Earnest” is about an old man who spent his youth fighting the Nazi’s in the RAF, only to have his entire life reduced to that experience in the public’s mind. It’s a sad reflection on memory that ends with a stirring plea:
Don’t leave me nostalgic for the wrong things in my life
I don’t want adventures among your grand designs of war
I’ll take a clear morning with the wind in my hair
I beg you, In Earnest, for nothing more
That, combined with the soaring guitar and keyboard parts backing it, frequently chokes me up.
The 1990s – “This Strange Engine” (1997)
This one was really tough, as this decade includes some peak epics from some of my favorite bands. “The Healing Colors of Sound” by Spock’s Beard (Day for Night – 1999) is one of my favorites of theirs. “The Narrow Margin,” from IQ’s sprawling concept album Subterranea (1997), really clicked for me after I got to hear it live a couple of times. Throw in bangers from Anglargard (“Höstsejd” from 1994’s Epilog), Dream Theater (finally putting down “A Change of Seasons” on the 1995 EP of the same name), and echolyn (“A Suite for the Everyman” from 1992’s Suffocating the Bloom) – not to mention a pair of new epics from Yes (“Mind Drive” and “That, That Is” from the Keys to Ascension semi-live albums of 1996 & 1997) – and this decision could have landed on any of them.
But in the end, there could be only one – Marillion’s “This Strange Engine,” the title track from their 1997 album.
Marillion’s first epic in a while (and kind of a breakthrough return to the form they’ve returned to again and again in years since), it was also the first time in a long time that Mark Kelly got to rip off a big solo, which was fun to hear again – and see! Part of the reason this is my favorite epic for the decade is that that I got to see the band play it live on the fan-funded tour that helped give birth to crowdfunding. Every time I hear this song, I’m transported back to that night in a club in Pittsburgh.
The 1980s – “Promenade au fond d’un canal” (1980)
If the current decade is a little slight for epics, the 1980s were positively bereft, at least when it came to progressive rock. Prog by that time, to steal a phrase from Frank Zappa, wasn’t “dead, it just smells funny.” The neo-prog movement was all about presented a more direct, polished, and streamlined version of prog that scaled down the epic nature of things somewhat (although there were some – IQ’s “The Last Human Gateway” led off their debut album, 1983’s Tales from the Lush Attic and Marillion had the temerity to release 17+ minute “Grendel” as the B-side of a single in 1982!). Meanwhile bands like King Crimson were steering into new wave and other genres that didn’t exactly pride expansiveness.
There’s still at least one gem out there, though – the first track off of avant-garde band Present’s debut album, Triskaidékaphobie, “Promenade au fond d’un canal.”
Normally I’m sharing studio versions of these tracks, but this one from 2005 is just too good to pass up (and finishes in menacingly bonkers fashion). If this had been the last gasp of prog it would have been an awesome capstone.
The 1970s – “Awaken” (1977)
Yeah, so, this is the hard one. There are so many songs to choose from (more than a handful of Yes tunes alone!). There’s extensive explorations of inner and outer space (“Echoes,” from Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle), lengthy organ freakouts (“Nine Feet Underground” by Caravan, from 1971’s In the Land of Grey and Pink), and terrifying sci-fi epics that can’t always been contained to one album side (both from Emerson, Lake and Palmer – 1971’s “Tarkus,” from the album of the same name, and 1973’s “Karn Evil 9,” from Brain Salad Surgery). Then there’s whatever hypnotic nightmare fuel “De Futura” is (from Magma’s 1976 Udu Wudu).
Ultimately, though, it has to come down to Yes v. Genesis, two of my favorite bands. For Genesis there is only one entry, at least – “Supper’s Ready,” the psychedelic apocoalypse (in 9/8!) that wraps up 1972’s Foxtrot. By comparison, in the mid 1970s Yes cranked out four albums in a row with at least one epic (and one alum entirely composed of four of them!). All those epics have their charms, but in the end, I picked one of them to lead the way.
“Awaken” is not Yes’ first epic and the album that it appears on, Going for the One, is kind of the first of their 1970s albums that isn’t really pushing the envelope of what it means to be Yes. It’s still great, though, and the epic closer is the very refined endpoint of Yes in epic form (they wouldn’t produce another until 1994). It’s my favorite epic of prog’s founding decade – at least it is today.
That’s the awesome thing about favorites – they’re not frozen in time, decisions made that can never be revoked. If I wrote this post next week all the answers might be different. Ain’t music the best?
NOTE: Just to prove the point, shortly after I wrote this post I listened to Seconds Out, which has a fabulous version of “Supper’s Ready” and I wondered how I could ever choose anything else!
JD Byrne 