At the Sonic Zoo

Much electronic music aims to create a sense of navigable sonic space, but that's not the only sort of world-creation available to laptop deities. I'm particularly fond of works that create musical ecosystems populated with alien creatures. Three come to mind in particular. Most recently, there's "Creatures" from Black Dice's "Creature Comforts." But then in the Mesozoic era of electronic music we have the "Forbidden Planet Soundtrack" by Louis and Bebe Barron, and Iannis Xenakis's Gendy compositions. The Barrons' (analog!) work provides both background music and sound effects for the movie -- titles like "Battle with Invisible Monster" and "Nothing Like This Claw Found in Nature" say it all. Xenakis's "Gendy3" is algorithmically generated, so you could argue that it creates a kind of musical artificial life. The timbres themselves are generated on the fly, resulting in a biodiversity that is occasonally painful but always interesting.

Get Your Bleep On

If you enjoy the work of Black Dice, autechre, Phoenecia, Eno, or others who build sound waves from scratch with electronic tools, here's a recommendation you aren't likely to get from Pandora or last.fm: pick up a copy of The Csound Book, just for the accompanying CD-ROM. Csound is a standard tool for digital synthesis--essentially a programming language for sound processing--and the book provides an excellent introduction to it. But if you just want to consume sound, not produce it, ignore the book. For a mere $60 you get almost 8 hours of mp3 music from masters of academic computer music and their students. Even if you find only 6 hours to be listenable (not everyone can appreciate pure sine waves), it's a bargain. If you've ever struggled to find computer-generated blurbles that are unpolluted by techno beats but still spicier than new-age ambient, this will be your mother lode. And who knows: if you find Csound itself intriguing and decide to start doing a little experimentation, you may even turn into one of those "laptop musicians" that the real musicians love to hate.

Bob Dylan as American Liar

In his essay "The Right to Lie" Thomas Disch asserts that a national admiration for liars (Tom Sawyer, Oliver North, etc.) has made it easy for Americans to "pretend to believe." This willed credulity has in turn paved the way for UFO abduction stories and Dianetics (and has, according to Disch, given science fiction "a special claim to be our national literature"). But what Disch calls an unfortunate blurring of the line between truth and fiction, Keats called negative capability : the ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

From his self-portrait in "Chronicles: Volume One," we can see that Bob Dylan is an admirable liar, an embodiment of Keats's ideal, and, as a result of these qualities, a fantasist. He happily confesses to some whoppers: pretending to rediscover Judaism, fabricating a biographical blurb for his first album to pump up his folk cred, and others. But he never comes across as a con man. Rather, he seems to regard surface truth as trivial compared to deeper emotional truths and purposes. And this same approach to outer truth has endowed him with a powerful credulity when it comes to the mythology of folk music:

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom (236).

Similarly, when he tells us with a straight face that Johnny Cash "killed a man in Reno just to watch him die," Dylan is pretending to believe order in order to illustrate how a culture possessed him. With respect to "Chronicles" itself, this ability to channel myths yields an additional benefit. Young Dylan is a sponge who absorbs vivid details of the characters and places of the folk scene so that old Dylan can echo them back to us. It's worth suspending your disbelief long enough to absorb some of these vividly drawn archetypes of humanity.

Full Metal Alchemist Follow-up: NY Times Mention

Just a quick follow-up on my December 11 posting re nostalgia for empire in "Fullmetal Alchemist": FMA got a nod from the New York Times in this Sunday's Arts section (free registration required, article available for free for a week). The Times praises FMA, "Naruto," and "Samurai Champloo" as story-driven coming-of-age tales that put American cartoons to shame.

Planetary

If the great achievement of Watchmen was to bring psychological realism to the improbable notion of costumed super-heroes, the achievement of Warren Ellis' Planetary is to dissolve the barrier between our reality and the sphere of the super-powered without compromising the weirdness of the uber. Drawing on the high paranoia of postmodern classics like The Crying of Lot 49 and the reality-meddling of Dick, Ellis creates a secret history in which versions of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Fu Manchu, Sherlock Holmes, Godzilla, and various other famous characters coexist and interact. In one of the title's most brilliant maneuvers, the Fantastic Four have their echo in an inscrutably villainous group known only as The Four, who apparently became the "secret chiefs" of the planet a long time ago. The four-member Planetary team (our heroes) in turn echo The Four. The distinction between the ideologies of the two groups is subtle: while the Planetary team act as historians and conservationists of the bizarre (their motto is "It's a strange world...Let's keep it that way"), the Four horde and exploit wonders. "We're adventurers, my crewmates and I," one of the Four tells us, "on the human adventure. And you can't all come along." Ellis himself walks the fuzzy line between these positions, dropping just enough hints about the big picture to make you believe there is one, but not enough to let you see it.

The first 18 issues have been collected in three paperback volumes.

The Alchemy of Empire

In the introduction to his recent novel The Dreamthief's Daughter, Michael Moorcock offers an explanation for the popularity of his work in Japan:

As a very early anti-monarchist and anti-imperialist I wasn't sad to see the institutions crumbling, but at the same time it is your culture that's crumbling, so it doesn't necessarily feel that good to you as an ordinary individual. It's a bittersweet thing, from my side, the end of Empire! It could also be why Elric was so phenomenally successful in Japan!

This shared experience of conflicted nostalgia for empire could also explain why the anime series "Full Metal Alchemist" uses a fantasy world heavily inflected with British colonialism to create moral ambiguity for its hero. "Alchemy" stands in for technology in this world, and helps a militaristic empire keep control of various subject cultures that include a thinly disguised muslim population. Our hero, a talented young alchemist, goes to work for the state but quickly finds himself sympathizing with its victims.

As in the best anime, there are few true villains -- just multiple competing interests and perspectives in a complex society. There's a sympathetic side even to the psycho-killers whose souls have been alchemically bound to hollow suits of armor to serve the twisted purposes of the state.

"Full Metal Alchemist" can be viewed on The Cartoon Network or on DVD.

Call It Sleep

This week I urge you to read Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth. This is my first almost complete departure from the scifi/fantasy theme of my recommendations so far (although otherworldliness does figure as a theme in the book), but so be it. The next proselytization will pertain to anime, I promise.

You could call this a book about a Jewish immigrant kid, but that would be like saying To the Lighthouse is about a British mom. The story is heartbreaking, but it's just an occasion for the transcendent games with voice and point of view. One moment you're listening to the mind of young David Schearl, and the next it's as if the New York cityscape has transformed into one big burning bush whispering revelations. High modernism in the ghetto, written by a janitor.

Top 20 Geek Novels Poll

In case you didn't see it on Slashdot, let me draw your attention to a list The Guardian has published of "the best geek novels written in English since 1932," based on an informal poll. It isn't all science fiction and fantasy, either (even if you count Cryptonomicon as science fiction).

That Thing about Strange & Norrell

If you were turned off of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by the initial hype (see the New York Times Magazine article) and subsequent lukewarm reviews (see Janet Maslin's review for the Times), take advantage of the new paperback edition to rectify that mistake. Contrary to Maslin's condescending assessment, I would assert that this fantastic history of the rediscovery of magic in early 19th century Britain is a rich and carefully constructed book, not in spite of its own profusion but because of it.

With passing reference to "Aficionados of such tales" and "those who find enchantment in books about magicians" Maslin carefully marks the distinction between herself and "those who find enchantment" (fantasy readers, presumably). With her reference to "footnotes -- endless footnotes" she marks herself as too hurried to absorb the dark hints and embedded tales in this overgrown garden of marginalia. No doubt it's hard to appreciate generous footnotes in a 782 page novel when you're writing a review under deadline, but, for whatever reason, she missed a key subtext of the story. Within the novel, the tendency to tell wandering and irrelevant fairy tales is a symptom of enchantment by a fairy lord -- a curse that prevents the thrall from telling anyone about the true nature of the enchantment. What, then, are we to conclude when the novelist fills her novel with wandering and irrelevant fairy tales?

The Bear

I had this thing about Strange and Norrell all worked up, but then I picked up Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home and reread a few pages. So this week's recommendation is The Bear. I suspect that you don't have to be into jazz to like this novel about a bear who plays saxophone, although I can't verify that from personal experience. In any case, it's about the nature of improvisation and nature as improvisation. It's on my lifetime list, right up there with The Lord of the Rings (not that it's fantasy). Try it.

Tezuka Explores Ethics of Cute Engineering

Imagine that you're reading a comic from the late 40's featuring a boy genius named Doctor Shikishima and a cute talking rabbit who looks Disney's Oswalt. The story promises to be an adventure in the Carl Barks vein, until on p17 the bunny explains, "You see in the Doctor's laboratory he takes the brains of animals and surgically changes them into the brains of humans!" Welcome to The Lost World, an early work by Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy. There's no irony here: the cuteness is always sincere, and unrelenting. But there is self-consciousness. One character remarks to the bunny: "you're like something straight out of a comic book!" The Betty Boop lookalikes made out of seaweed take the notion of engineering cuteness to even stranger places.

With this dark utopian fantasy about the technological realization of fantasy, Tezuka reveals himself as a descendent not only of Disney but also of Wells and Verne, and as a progenitor of cyberpunk anime.

The Lost World is available from Amazon.

Silent Cthulhu Movie

For a movie made by a fan organization (The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society), "The Call of Cthulhu" is amazingly watchable. It may be the most successful distillation of mythos aura into film this side of "Hellboy." The HPLHS pull it off by means of a clever trick: the story is presented as a silent film. This maneuver not only lends an appropriate atmosphere to the movie, but also covers over the amateur acting and cinematography. Only the fight scenes are truly painful. Is cyclopean architecture any less cyclopean if it's made of styrofoam? Perhaps, but creature effects can be even more effective if they're fleeting and old-fashioned. Cthulhu lives. I will say no more.

You can order the DVD through Amazon or directly from HPLHS.

Wachowskis Do Frankenstein Comic

The Wachowski brothers do love their utopias. The world of the Matrix has Zion, complete with Cornell West and raves, while Doc Frankenstein has a fortress in the desert founded by the Frankenstein monster. In the Wachowskis' recent venture into comic writing we discover that the monster from Mary Shelley's novel has survived to the present of Bush's America, where he has established his desert stronghold as a rationalist haven for freaks and free-thinkers. The existential anti-hero of Shelley's novel has become a superhero in the Wachowski book: instead of confronting a silent God in lonely angst, he confronts a Catholic military organization, guns ablazing. As in the Matrix movies, the utopian prospect is ultimately just a dramatic backdrop for the action. Nevertheless, the backdrop makes the action particularly satisfying for the like-minded. Here's an excerpt from issue 2: [Note that the monster has capitulated to common practice and now simply answers to the name of his creator, Frankenstein]:

Soldier of God: Do you have any sins to confess?
Frankenstein's girlfriend: Only that I didn't kick you harder.
Soldier of God: Then may God have mercy on your soul.
Frankenstein's girlfriend: May Frankenstein have mercy on yours.
Frankenstein (crashing through ceiling): Okay, we can do this the easy way, where you drop your guns, or we can do this the hard way, where I rip your arms out of their sockets.
Soldier of God: I don't need a gun, monster.
Frankenstein: That's Doctor Monster to you, God-boy.

Good clean fun.