Myths for hire.

For the last week or so Steph and I have been watching the Stephen Moffat / Marc Gatiss / Sue Vertue miniseries Sherlock, and this is what I was talking about months ago when I said that most people forget how weird Sherlock Holmes actually is when they read the stories.   Sherlock here is a manic scarecrow, absolutely confident and yet slightly uncertain in his own abilities, an ex-druggie and current Nicotine patch abuser, given to firing bullets into his own wall from boredom.  Unlike the (still fun) Robert Downey Jr version, though, Bernard Cumberbatch’s Sherlock comes off as a very strange man who is an inseparable part of our world, rather than the inhabitant of a Victorian adventure-drama pastiche (not that there’s anything wrong with such pastiche – there’s just a limit to what you can do there).

In three 90-minute episodes, this series does the practically impossible of nailing the Sherlock Holmes feel in a thoroughly modern setting.  The actors (Martin Freeman of Life on Mars as John Watson and the brilliantly-named Bernard Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes) are inspired, Cumberbatch as a Holmes always one step away from committing some heinous crime just to keep himself from boredom, and Freeman as a Watson drawn to Holmes’ adventuring lifestyle.  The cinematography is brilliant without going out of its way to seem so, the music serves as an excellent accent, and of course there’s the script.  Between them, Moffat and Gatiss craft stories that are hilarious at one step, and deadly serious (even terrifying) the next, much as Holmes stories always were.  The villains are truly chilling creations, and Sherlock in his way is their mirror, even as he struggles to deal with the most elementary of human interactions.

The show isn’t entirely even – the second episode veers a little close to Yellow Peril/inscrutable Oriental territory for my comfort, and also in that episode Holmes verges on being an incarnation of the Doctor – but it’s always fun, witty, and mysterious.  There’s so much to praise here, from the plots that spin off old-school Holmes adventures to the amazing chemistry between the two leads to the cinematography, but this should be enough to convince you that you need to watch:

The series starts when Doctor John Watson, recently invalided home from the war in Afghanistan with shrapnel in his leg, meets an old school friend of his who tries to convince him to share a flat with the eccentric consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.

The same opening works as well for Gatiss, Moffat, and Vertue today as it did for Doyle more than a century ago.  Kind of sad, now that I think about it, but at least they make the most of it.

Last night at Club Passim, Stephanie, Dan, visiting Sylvia and I participated in a memorial concert for Dave Carter, an amazing folk singer and songwriter who died of an untimely heart attack, aged 49, in 2002.  ”Participated” I write, because I can’t write “saw,” or “listened to,” really — it wasn’t a passive kind of concert.  Watching, I gave myself to the performers gathered to remember someone I never knew save through music.

Dave Carter wrote and sang what Roger Zelazny might have called high mimetic folk music–songs in which the characters lived their daily lives in an epic context.  His song “The Power and Glory” belongs in the same breath as Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, bridging a world greater and older than our own with the common tale of a man seeking his fortune in Nashville.  ”236-6132,” a love song centered around the beloved’s phone number, dances through a complicated relationship with lyrics and driving guitar — a song a genius might sing to herself driving down the highway between gigs, when she wasn’t afraid anyone would hear:

236-6132 is the number of my love

Even though it’s been some time

Since he made fair to answer

‘Cause he feints and fades from view

Like a fighter ducks a glove

Though I play the highway kind

And he the China dancer

These songs are not embarrassed by their own intelligence or virtue; they do not shrink from challenging the listener, even as they invite her inside.  Wonderful as the lyrics are, though, they’re just a shadow of the full effect of the songs: Dave Carter worked together with the amazing Tracey Grammer, forming a brilliant folk duo replete with harmonic melodies, counterpoint, and solid fiddle-work.

I could go on about the music here for pages, and I’ve only ever heard one of their albums (though after yesterday’s concert I’ve downloaded two more, but my mp3 player has betrayed me and refuses to actually play the music (!!!!), so my teeth will be on edge until I make it home tonight), but as much as the music struck me I was blown away by the love and strength on display last night.  Tracey Grammer emceed the evening like patience on a monument, though smiling more in memory and celebration than in grief; guest artists played great sets, and musicians rose from the audience to sing and celebrate Dave’s songs.  One man delivered a wild, spoken-word version of Carter’s Snake Handlin’ Man, invoking the audience and the Spirit like a wandering preacher; a woman shaking with joy and nerves slammed out a heartfelt rendition of “Phantom Doll,” the last song Dave Carter wrote, the last song too that he ever played.

I know we live in a fallen world, I know you can’t trust what you see, and that the fairest face can hide something dark, but watching that show, watching Tracey, and hearing people talk about Dave Carter, about his love of songs and songwriting, his sharing spirit and his eager, good-natured jealousy of Townes Van Zandt for having truly written a song in his sleep, I can’t help but feel that he was the Real Thing: a Tzaddik of folk music, one of the 36 secret kings in each generation without which the world falls to pieces.  At the very least, he seems to have been that rarest of creatures, a brilliant man who was also good, or a good man who was also brilliant.

It was a pleasure to be a part of the concert yesterday, and I can’t wait to get home and put more of Dave and Tracey’s albums on the stereo.

This Saturday by mutual agreement the Lady and I put our wedding preparations on hold and took a mutual day off.  I pulled up stakes and headed to Readercon, which was amazing!  Some key events:

• John Crowley (crowleycrow on livejournal) was kind enough to take me around and introduce me to folks.  Good times had by all.  Which means, of course, that I…
• Hung out with a whole host of incredible people!  Generally this took place in the hotel bar, a chintzy Irish pub pastiche, but the servers are more than patient with crazed writer-types, and the beer is cold.  The bar was two doors down from the dealer room, where I…
• Found the same hardcover Hyperion Cantos omnibus I read back in high school!  Or the same edition anyway.  The dealers were a charming couple, incredibly generous; the husband of the pair turned out to be a huge Zelazny fan, and it turned out he…
• Had a few Zelazny books I haven’t found in years of searching – finally I have my own Jack of Shadows!  So of course I…
• Ran over to the NESFA table to pick up the last two volumes of the 6 volume Zelazny short fiction collection, which all-in-all touched off the…
• Crazy book acquisition festival.  I’ve resisted looking at my bank statement since returning from Readercon, but my two bags were brimming with books on the way back.

All-in-all, top quality time.  I’m definitely going again next year!

It’s Urban Fantasy Month according to Tor books, and as part of the celebration, Carrie Vaughan, author of the Kitty series (which I haven’t read, but appears by her own admission to fall squarely in the midst of the current vampires-and-werewolves trend), posted a timeline of urban fantasy informed by her own experience, talking about where her books were shelved throughout the development of the trend.

She mentions briefly the proliferation of covers in “urban fantasy” that feature the female main character, butt-to-camera, generally wearing some sort of midriff-bearing shirt to show off the tattoo just above their belt line.  I’ve noticed this myself; Juno Books has a good description of the design here.

The Juno Books post asks “why so many butts,” which is a good question – I think it’s a combination of sexual advertising and the proliferation of video games in which a protagonist is viewed almost exclusively from behind (seeing these ladies from behind, we’re invited to project ourselves into them), which plays also into the number of these books written in first person.  But (natch) nobody I know of has produced the timeline I’d like to see for the urban fantasy genre:  “rear view” covers released per month over time.  I wonder what that curve would look like in comparison to the Fabio-chest covers of romances in the 80s and 90s…

Any grad students out there looking for a truly pointless semester project?

No city does fireworks quite like Boston.  Around 7 o’clock in the evening on July 4th, as the sun declines, the entire city makes its way to the banks of the Charles and clusters upon the grass to hear the Boston Pops over the PA, and once night falls like a magician’s handkerchief over the city, the Charles erupts in flame.

Boston fireworks are more ordinance than amusement: though they burst into gleaming fish that dart across the sky turning and dancing as if to evade a hidden pike, make no mistake, these are rockets.  They have red glare, and like bombs they burst in air.

Of course, being a geek, mere aesthetics did not consume my attention.  I spent a solid five minutes of the show estimating the height of the highest blooms of fire and thinking, “Oh, so that’s what something bigger than a skyscraper looks like.”

Happy belated 4th of July, everyone.  May your fireworks not have tentacles.

I debated opening with some joke about how the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, but I think Mark Twain would personally return from the grave and smack me upside the head for that.

Life’s been busy, but here’s an update:

• I’m getting married next month!  In case you were wondering why I hadn’t posted in a while.
• Alana Abbott was kind enough to include me in a group interview of urban fantasists on Flames Rising.  The subject: Vampires!  Check here for my thoughts on why Dexter is the best vampire currently running, as well as a list of underrated pain-in-the-butt vampire weaknesses.  The other panelists have some great answers, too – I haven’t seen Barnabas Collins name-checked in a while, and kudos to Jeri Smith-Ready, whose first exposure to vamps was Love at First Bite.  Awesome film.  Dracula gets kicked out of castle by Transylvanian gymnastics team, comes to New York City!
• By vote, the most feared vampire power is mind control, either tied with or slightly ahead of immortality.  Good choices.
• The new book continues apace.  I’m a little over 2/3 of the way through, and the story is about to start Getting Real.  Or, as real as you can possibly get in a story about the California Power Crisis with zombies — which is pretty real actually.
• Another project I’m involved with just gained (1) new artist!  More here as this develops.
• The Pandorica opened.  You need to see it.  Matt Smith wins acting forever.

More on all this in the coming days!

Rock on.

I’ve been loving Fritz Leiber short stories recently, after discovering them on the Kindle.  This is from “The Seven Black Priests,” the seventh story in the anthology Swords Against Death, in which our heroes are pursued through Nepal and periodically ambushed by seven mysterious priests of a lava god.

–

“The seven black priests-” Fafhrd muttered.

“The six,” the Mouser corrected.  “We killed one of them last night.”

“Well, the six then,” Fafhrd conceded.  “They seem angry with us.”

“As why shouldn’t they be?” the Mouser demanded.  “We stole their idol’s only eye.  Such an act annoys priests tremendously.”

“It seemed to have more eyes than that one,” Fafhrd asserted thoughtfully, “if only it had opened them.”

“Thank Aarth it didn’t!” the Mouser hissed.  “And ‘ware that dart!”

Fafhrd hid the dirt – or rather the rock – instantly, and the black dart skirred on the ice ahead.

“I think they’re unreasonably angry,” Fafhrd asserted, scrambling to his feet.

“Priests always are,” the Mouser said philosophically.

—

Retyping this now, I notice some blemishes on the prose: Leiber is reluctant to use the verb ’said’, for example, except in Tom Swifty style (“I love the high jump!” Tom said vaultingly.).  Still, write dialogue and situations like that and your readers will be too excited to notice, unless of course they’re trying to retype the story onto their blog.

Enjoy your Friday!

Quick update today, because I have to get back to the Things that Must Get Done.

In the couple weeks I’ve read a lot of Merlin Mann’s writing, in coffee breaks at work.  In addition to having a name that makes him sound like a time traveler in disguise, Merlin spends a lot of time thinking about how to be better, happier, and more productive, only not in a creepy Radiohead-esque way.  If your attention is in high demand every day, you could do much worse than watching this improvised talk he gave at Rutgers on Time & Attention.

Among other things, what really strikes me about Merlin’s work is his emphasis on how non-renewable a resource like Time is.  Me being me, I extrapolate this out from petty day-to-day concerns to big, long-term questions: our time is really limited, unless we get blasted by some sort of posthuman immortality gun.  We have fourscore and ten, or twenty, or whatever, if we’re lucky, and that’s it.  No matter what you find important in this life, be it your writing, your friends, your love life, your family, the sight of sunrise on a new horizon or your rocking chair, when your hour glass runs out, it’s out.

I don’t mean for this to be depressing, though at first brush it was for me: you mean I’m never going to get these eight hour days I spend at the office back?  But, from a different perspective, it can be heartening: given that limitation, the question is, what do I want to be doing right now, and how can I do it?  How can I use my time and my life as well as possible, without being bowled over by my own schedule?  In this light, managing my own time and my own creative work lies on the other side of the fuzzy shadow-line separating chores from holy obligations.

And on that note, back to work.

I don’t read Doctor Who blogs, generally.  That’s important to understand the following, much as it’s important to know that Marley is dead if you want to understand the beginning of A Christmas Carol.

Watching Flesh & Stone on Saturday, I was struck by one particular sequence of scenes: the Doctor’s sidekick, Amy, must wait crosslegged in a forest clearing with her eyes closed (lest something horrible eat her from the inside out) while the Doctor goes off in his shirtsleeves to solve a problem.  “Later,” the Doctor says, and then, to someone out of screen: “I need your computer!”; “Later,” Amy says, and the Doctor leaves.

A beat passes, in which Amy sits alone and scared, wringing her hands in the silence.

The Doctor’s hands reach in from out of frame and grab hers.  We have not heard him approach, and neither has Amy.  She feels his hands, tries to look at him but cannot open her eyes.  Their faces fill the frame in iterative shots.

“You have to learn to trust me,” the Doctor says.  And then: “Remember what I told you when you were seven.”

“What did you tell me?”

“No, that’s not the point.  I need you to remember.”

Amy is, if anything, even more confused than before.  The Doctor leans forward – the sleeve of his jacket brushes her face – he kisses her on the forehead and is gone.

Cut to: the Doctor in his shirtsleeves, hard on the heels of a soldier and a scholar stomping through the wood in a desperate attempt to save the universe, wisecracking all the way.

The shift in tone struck me as strange, as did that “Remember” line, which was never explained in the episode.  It never seemed critical that Amy remember anything in particular for the plot of this episode, much less anything the Doctor said when she was seven.

So what?  Writers drop threads all the time – but seldom so boldly, and anyway this is Stephen Moffat we’re talking about, not some kid fresh from the typing pool.

My initial thought: what if that was not the Doctor from the timeline of the episode?  What if it was the Doctor from another time entirely?  From the future, perhaps, come back to give Amy a warning, disguised as a reminder – or a crucial piece of advice.  That would explain the out-of-place dialogue, and the Doctor’s whiplash-inducing shift from flip, excitable, adventure mode to deadly serious and emotional mode and back again within the space of a single camera cut.

Then I forgot about this theory, because I don’t like to speculate too far in advance.  Last night, however, I watched the episode again, with friends.  My suspicion deepened, and, at the end of the episode I mentioned my theory.  Rolling back, we played those two minutes again, and there it was, the proof:

The Doctor, in the first scene, is in his shirtsleeves; his green tweed jacket has been stolen by the angels.  He’s also wearing a pale blue shirt.  The Doctor kneeling before Amy, the “Remember” Doctor, is wearing the jacket, and a different shirt to boot.

The future relies on River remembering something the Doctor said when she was seven.  Why?  At a guess: The Doctor will, at some point near the end of this season, be wiped from the timeline.  River’s memories of him before she started to travel in time will be erased, but not her memories of those memories.  Those are post-time travel sense experience, and she can access them.

I know some of this stuff has been figured out on other forums (I checked immediately after I saw the jacket), but it’s a thrill to “get it” all by myself, and have my wild suppositions confirmed.

Saturday’s amazing episode of Doctor Who pricked me into thinking about unresolved sexual tension, which is so common in media these days that it has its own acronym (UST).

Unresolved Sexual Tension is a great way to keep stringing your viewers along from week to week, if you have viewers who get off on that sort of thing, but in the end it’s a cop-out:  the characters never talk about their feelings for one another until the last possible moment in the series, which robs us of the chance to see what how their relationship would work – or fail to work.  The tension between the Doctor and Rose is precisely of this kind: the first move in their relationship is also the last (ditto with Doctor/Martha).  It’s not just lazy storytelling – it’s storytelling that renders itself pointless, because we never have time to see the consequences of either character’s choices.

(spoiler warning!)

That’s why Amy out-and-out propositioning the Doctor in Saturday’s episode was great television.  The Time of Angels two-parter was glorious and terrifying, full of near-death experiences and existential horror.  Amy nearly died many times, and in the aftermath any sane person would be asking herself, or himself: what, in my life, have I wanted to do more than anything, but talked myself out of because I was scared?  Of course she tackles the Doctor as soon as she has the chance!  And of course the Doctor rebuffs her – “You’re human!  You’re getting married in the morning!”  And now they can’t un-say these things, or un-do them; they’ll be a part of the characters’ relationships for the rest of the season.  Amy’s actions will affect her relationship with the Doctor, her relationship with her fiancee, and (apparently) the universe as a whole.

In the end, “actions have consequences” may be the overarching theme of this season.  The Doctor doesn’t let the Atraxi just leave after threatening to burn the Earth; he calls them to the carpet.  The Beast Below features a spacefaring Starship UK in which every citizen is torn between two horrible alternatives, and even the Doctor himself almost makes the wrong choice – saying even as he does it that he will live with the consequences.  The Doctor saves London in Victory of the Daleks, but in the process he lets the Cult of Skaro (or whatever) escape, and of course in Time of Angels/Flesh & Stone the military bishop accuses the Doctor of escapism: he gets to run from the massacres in his wake, but the bishop’s men are dead and someone will have to tell their families.  And of course River Song is a prisoner throughout the episode, most likely for killing the Doctor…

So, “Actions have consequences.”  And, “Time can be rewritten.”  Interesting dialectic there, Mr. Moffatt.

More on that later, though.  For now, back to work.