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aion-rsa · 4 years

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30 Rock’s Best Running Jokes

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When 30 Rock drew its final breath in 2013, yards of column inches were devoted – deservedly so – to praising the work of creator Tina Fey. Article upon article applauded the characters, cast, performances and seven seasons of energetic, inventive, satirical comedy.

More than anything else though, 30 Rock was always about the gags. It was fruitcake-dense with jokes, regularly fitting in more quotable laughs before its opening credits than many shows manage in a full half-hour. As it returns for a one-off reunion special, join us in celebrating the many, many running gags of its seven-season history, from the fake movies, to the terrible yet incredibly catchy songs, Frank’s hats, and those godawful TGS sketches…

The fake movies

The presence of Tracy Jordan (a bonafide Martin Lawrence meets the Wayans Brothers-style movie star) in the TGS cast opened up the world of film parody to 30 Rock.

Admittedly Jenna Maloney also enjoyed a movie career of sorts, but while she was being offered the part of “any blonde actress” in torture porn flicks by the producers who watched and rented Saw, Tracy was turning down the lead in Garfield 3: Feline Groovy to pursue his serious acting career. The latter climaxed with the release of spot-on Precious parody Hard To Watch (Based on the novel Stone Cold Bummer by Manipulate), for which Tracy received the O in his EGOT plan. Sheer class.

Over the years though, who couldn’t not smile at Tracy’s blaxpoitation-filled back catalogue, from the timeless romance of A Blaffair to Rememblack, to Sherlock Homie, Who Dat Ninja?, The Chunks 2: A Very Chunky Christmas, and last but by no means least, Honky Grandma Be Trippin’. The man is a chameleon (in that he’s always a lizard).

Two of Jenna’s TGS projects however, bring back the fondest memories of 30 Rock’s stinging movie satire: small-town legal drama The Rural Juror (based on a Kevin Grisham novel), and her GE-produced life rights-avoiding Janis Joplin biopic, Sing Them Blues White Girl: The Jackie Jormp Jomp Story.

The TGS sketches

The quality of TGS’ output was never under question in 30 Rock; the sketch show was unremittingly bad (when the absence of their star meant a ‘Best of TGS’ series had to be run in lieu of live shows, Legal objected to their use of the word ‘Best’, and when a review dubbed it the worst comedy ever made, Liz was thrilled they’d defined it as a comedy). Liz Lemon’s opus was a fluorescent collection of fart gags, dodgy caricatures, Jenna’s songs, and misjudged celebrity impressions.

Beginning life as, in Kenneth’s words, “a real fun ladies comedy show for ladies”, TGS was Saturday Night Live’s idiot brother, the unsophisticated thorn in NBC’s side, under constant threat of controversy and cancellation. Forced to synergise backward overflow, advertise parent company products and promote GE interests, 30 Rock’s show-within-a-show satirised both the TV industry and tired trends in comedy (the always hilarious combination of a fat woman who’s sexually confident! Old ladies are crazy! Farts!).

Lemon may have seduced pilot Carol (Matt Damon) with her Fart Doctor skits, but TGS failed to win many hearts. With sketches like Pam the Overly Confident Morbidly Obese Woman, Ching-Chong Man Who Loves to Play Ping-Pong, Fat Hillary Clinton, Bear vs. Killer Robots, Me Want Food, and Gaybraham Lincoln, why it wasn’t more successful is a mystery.

Astronaut Mike Dexter

Lemon may have ended up with James Marsden’s Criss Chros, but fictional boyfriend Astronaut Mike Dexter will always hold a special place in her heart. Handsomer than Dr Drew, less British than Wesley Snipes, less living-in-Cleveland than Floyd, and a million times better than Dennis Duffy, Astronaut Mike Dexter had it all… except of course, a corporeal self.

The fake songs

Over the years, Jenna Maroney’s singing career has vomited up some truly dreadful creations, and topping the list has to be Muffin Top (a big hit in the king-making music markets of Israel and Belgium). Seguing from its pop insanity chorus “My muffin top is all that, wholegrain, low-fat” into a Madonna-style spoken-word rap “I’m an independent lady, so please don’t try to play me. I run a tidy bakery. The boys all want my cake for free”, the song is a battery assault on the senses.

But is it worse than Jenna’s summer dance jam, Balls, which earned her the princely sum of $50 in royalties? Or her computer generated, generic benefit song in aid of an unspecific natural disaster, which urged viewers to donate to “help the people the thing that happened, happened to”? How about the Jackie Jormp Jomp performance she gave of Chunk Of My Lung, written by Jack five minutes before the show, containing the classic line “You know you’ve bought it if life makes you sweet food”? Or Fart So Loud, the un-Weird Al-able song she and Tracy wrote after he parodied the theme to Avery Jessup TV movie Kidnapped? Such riches…

It’s not only Jenna who’s provided 30 Rock’s musical intervals of course. Season three finale Kidney Now! welcomed an eclectic collection of stars including Sheryl Crow, Mary J Blige, Elvis Costello, Moby, two of the Beastie Boys, Wyclef Jean, and Cyndi Lauper to perform a We Are The World-style anthem at the Milton Green benefit gig. Angie Jordan famously released a fifteen-second single My Single Is Dropping, to ride on the wave of her reality-show fame, Frank and Pete’s Sound Mound came up with unforgettable rock anthem Weekend Woman, and in the very same episode, even Tina Fey got in on the action by providing excellent Joni Mitchell parody, Paints and Brushes.

The legacy award though, as in the 30 Rock fake song that will continue to bring joy to the hearts of fans decades from now, has to go to one song, and one song only: Tracy Jordan’s Werewolf Bar Mitzvah.

Frank’s hat slogans

Off-set, stand-up Judah Friedlander favours his ‘World Champion’ trucker hat, the one he claims to have been awarded as the winner of the World Championships of pretty much all sports, martial arts, and that time he karate kicked Chuck Norris’ beard off his face and forced him to legally change his name to Charles.

On-set as Frank Rossitano though, Friedlander wears a series of self-designed trucker hats, each bearing a different gnomic slogan. Often incongruous, sometimes suggestive, and always odd, Frank’s hat slogans are part of the bricks and mortar of 30 Rock. In terms of favourites, we’re quite fond of ‘Alabama Legsweep’, or the laconic enigma of ‘And’, though ‘Shark Cop’, ‘Half Centaur’ and ‘Space Gravy’ also caught our eye over the seasons.

Jenna’s Mickey Rourke sex stories

Like Dot Com’s intellectualism, this running gag may have been introduced late into proceedings, but Jenna’s torrid sexual history with putty-faced beefcake Mickey Rourke gave J-Mo some of her best lines. Jenna’s allusions to Rourke’s sexually deviant and murderous attempts on her life paint a fascinating picture for 30 Rock fans. Here are some of the finest:

“Your new vibe is a double-edged sword, much like the kind Mickey Rourke tried to kill me with”, “Nice try Hazel, but you made the same mistake Mickey Rourke made on that catamaran. You didn’t kill me when you had the chance.”, “I’m going to have to reinvent you. Break you down completely and build you up from scratch. Just like Mickey Rourke did to me sexually.” “Next time you’ll tell me Mickey Rourke catapulted you into the Hollywood sign.” “You know what they say, if you can’t stand the heat, get off Mickey Rourke’s sex grill.” Wise words.

Kenneth the immortal page

To this day Kenneth Ellen Parcell remains something of an enigma to 30 Rock viewers. In later seasons, Jack McBrayer’s character went from being a simple country rube from Stone Mountain, Georgia to the flesh vessel for a mysterious immortal with no reflection, no age, and links to a world beyond our own.

Plenty of reference has been made to Kenneth’s ageless and supernatural state over the years, including the suggestion that not only is he unable to die, but he’s also an angel, sent to oversee the transition of souls from one world to the next.

The fake TV shows

It’s either a credit to the 30 Rock team or a condemnation of our times that Jack Donaghy’s hit reality viewer vote show, MILF Island, no longer feels like a parody. In generations to come, time will no doubt erode the boundaries between fact and fiction, and we 30 Rock fans will be telling our kids about the time we watched Deborah beat her competitors and claim MILF victory in the same breath as educating them about those people who ate kangaroo anuses for public approval.

MILF Island stands head and shoulders above the rest of 30 Rock’s fake TV shows (including TGS itself, lest we not forget), but that doesn’t mean that Gold Case, Los Amantes Clandestinos, Black Frasier, Homonym, or the inimitable Bitch Hunter deserve any less respect. Our fallen brothers, we salute you.

We could go on indefinitely listing the recurring jokes that made 30 Rock great, from Liz’s sandwich lust and desire to go to there, to Jack’s gloriously thatched head of hair and Republican conspiracies. As the show prepares to return, which of the above will live again?

30 Rock: A One-Time Special lands on NBC on Thursday July 16th at 8pm in the US.

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Betrayal at Krondor

During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game. These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm shift this entailed was such that for many players these games ceased to be games at all in the zero-sum sense. When a group came together to play Squad Leader or Dungeons & Dragons, there hung over the plebeian kitchen or basement in which they played a shared vision of the beaches of Normandy or the dungeons of Greyhawk. The games became vehicles for exploring the vagaries of history or the limits of the imagination — vehicles, in other words, for living out shared stories.

In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that some of the stories generated in this way would make their way out of the gaming sessions which had spawned them and find a home in more traditional, linear forms of media. And, indeed, just such things were happening by the 1980s, as the first novels born from games arrived.

Needless to say, basing your book on a game you’ve played isn’t much of a path to literary respectability. But for a certain kind of plot-focused genre novel — the kind focusing strictly on what people do rather than why they do it — prototyping the whole thing as a game makes a degree of sense. It can keep you honest by forcing your story to conform to a simulated reality that transcends the mere expediency of what might be cool and exciting to write into the next scene. By pushing against authorial fiat and the deus ex machina, it can give the whole work an internal coherency — an honesty, one might even say — that’s too often missing from novels of this stripe.

The most widely publicized early example of the phenomenon was undoubtedly the one which involved a humble insurance salesman named Tom Clancy, who came out of nowhere with a techno-thriller novel called The Hunt for Red October in 1984. The perfect book for a time of resurgent patriotism and military pride in the United States, it found a fan in no less elevated a personage than President Ronald Reagan, who declared it “my kind of yarn.” As the book topped the bestseller charts and the press rushed to draft their human-interest stories on the man who had written it, they learned that Clancy had gamed out its entire scenario, involving a rogue Soviet submarine captain who wishes to defect along with his vessel to the United States, with a friend of his named Larry Bond, using Harpoon, a tabletop wargame of modern naval combat designed by the latter. Clancy’s follow-up novel, a story of open warfare between East and West called Red Storm Rising, was a product of the same gestation process. To the literary establishment, it all seemed extremely strange and vaguely unsettling; to many a wargamer, it seemed perfectly natural.

Another line of ludic adaptations from the same period didn’t attract as much attention from the New York Times Book Review, much less the president, but nevertheless became almost as successful on its own terms. In 1983, TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, decided to make a new series of adventure modules for the game, each of which would feature a different kind of dragon — because, as some of their customers were writing in their letters, the existing Dungeons & Dragons modules “had plenty of dungeons, but not many dragons.” The marketing exercise soon grew into Dragonlance, an elaborately plotted Tolkienesque epic set in a brand new fantasy world — one which, yes, featured plenty of dragons. TSR asked employees Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman to write a trilogy of novels based on the fourteen Dragonlance adventure modules and source books they planned to publish. Thus Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first volume of The Dragonlance Chronicles, was published in the same year as The Hunt for Red October. It promptly became a nerdy sensation, the biggest fantasy novel of the year, spawning a whole new business for TSR as a publisher of paperback novels. In time, said novels would become as big a part of their business as the games whose names the books bore on their spines.

A third, only slightly less heralded example of the games-into-books trend actually predates the two I’ve just mentioned by a couple of years. In the last 1970s, a group of students at the University of California San Diego took up the recently published Dungeons & Dragons. Growing dissatisfied with TSR’s rules, they scrapped them one by one, replacing them with their own home-grown versions. Meanwhile they evolved a world in which to play called Midkemia, complete with its own detailed history, bestiary, sociology, and geography. Forming a little company of their own, as so many Dungeons & Dragons fanatics were doing at the time, they published some of their innovations to modest sales.

Raymond E. Feist

But one of their number named Raymond E. Feist had bigger ambitions. He wrote a novel based on some of the group’s exploits in Midkemia. Calling it simply Magician, he got it published through Doubleday in 1982 as the first volume of The Riftwar Saga. It sold very well, and he’s been writing Midkemia novels ever since.

Unlike the later cases of Tom Clancy and Dragonlance, Magician wasn’t widely publicized or advertised as being the product of a game. It was seen instead as merely the latest entry in an exploding branch of genre fiction: lengthy high-fantasy series inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien, often to the point of one-to-one correspondences between characters and plot events, but written in a manner more immediately accessible to the average Middle American reader, with more action, more narrative thrust, less elevated diction, and markedly less digressive songs and poetry. Dragonlance, of course, is an example of the same breed.

I must admit that I’ve personally read only the first book of Feist’s series, and not even to completion at that. This sort of derivative high fantasy doesn’t do much for me as a rule, so I’m not the best person to judge Feist’s output under any circumstances. Anything positive I do say about it runs the risk of damning with faint praise.

To wit: my wife and I used the book as our light bedtime reading, and we made it about two-thirds of the way through before terminal ennui set in and we decided we’d had enough. If that seems like less than a ringing endorsement, know that it’s farther than I generally get with most fantasy novels, including ones with considerably more literary credibility. I thus feel comfortable in saying that at least the early Raymond E. Feist novels are well-crafted examples of their breed, if you happen to like that sort of thing. (I do understand from others that the quality of his work, and particularly of his plotting, began to decline after his first handful of Midkemia novels. Perhaps because he was no longer basing them on his gaming experiences?)

The world of Midkemia is most interesting for our purposes, however, for the computer game it spawned. Yes, a series of novels based on a game got turned back into a very different sort of game. And then, just for good measure, that game got turned into another novel. It’s a crazy old transmedia world.

The more direct origin of Betrayal at Krondor, the game in question, can be traced back to June of 1991 and a chance meeting between John Cutter and Jeff Tunnell at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show. Both names may be familiar to regular readers of these histories.

John Cutter

Cutter had spent several years with Cinemaware, helping to craft many of their most innovative creations, which blended strong narrative elements with play styles that were unorthodox in story-heavy computer games at the time. In late 1990, with Cinemaware in the process of collapsing, he and several colleagues had jumped ship to New World Computing, best known for their Might & Magic series of CRPGs. But he was trapped in a purely administrative role there, without the freedom to create which he had enjoyed at Cinemaware, and was already feeling dissatisfied by the time he met Tunnell at that Summer CES.

Jeff Tunnell

Tunnell, for his part, was the founder of the studio known as Dynamix, now a subsidiary of Sierra Online. They were best known for their 3D graphics technology and the line of vehicular simulators it enabled, but they had fingers in several other pies as well, from adventure games to a burgeoning interest in casual puzzle games.

Recognizing talent when he saw it, Tunnell asked Cutter to leave Southern California, the home of the erstwhile Cinemaware and the current New World, and come to Eugene, Oregon, the home of Dynamix. Not only would he be able to have a creative role there once again, Tunnell promised, but he would be allowed to make whatever game he wanted to. Cutter jumped at the chance.

Once in Eugene, however, he struggled to identify just the right project. His first instinct was to make a point-and-click adventure game in the Sierra mold, but Tunnell, having made three of them in the last couple of years to less than satisfying effect, was feeling burned out on the genre and its limitations, and gently steered him away from it. (Absolute creative freedom, Cutter was learning, is seldom really absolute.)

At last, Tunnell came to Cutter with an idea of his own. He’d been reading a very popular series of fantasy novels by this fellow named Raymond E. Feist, and he thought they’d make a fine CRPG. Dynamix had never dabbled in the genre before, but when had that ever stopped them from trying something new? He suggested that Cutter give the first few of the books a read. If it turned out that he liked them as well and agreed that they’d make a good game, well, perhaps he should ring Feist up and have a chat about just that possibility.

Glad to finally have a clear sense of direction, Cutter did the one thing and then did the other. Feist was very busy, but was himself a long-time computer gamer, having sat down in front of his first Apple II some twelve or thirteen years before. He liked the idea of seeing Midkemia come to life on a computer screen. Although he didn’t have much time for working personally on such a project, he told his agent to make the deal happen if at all possible. So, a contract was signed that gave Dynamix the right to make Midkemia games until January 1, 1995, with Feist given the right of final approval or rejection of each title prior to its release. By one account at least, it was the most expensive literary license yet granted to a game developer, a sign of Feist’s ongoing popularity among readers of fantasy literature.

Another, slightly less welcome sign of same followed immediately after: upon being asked whether he was interested in authoring the game himself, Feist said that his time was money, so he’d need to be paid something beyond the terms of the licensing agreement itself — and, he noted flatly, “you couldn’t afford me.” This posed a dilemma. Cutter believed himself to be a better designer of game systems than a writer, and thus certainly wasn’t going to take on the job personally. Casting about for a likely candidate, his thoughts turned to one Neal Hallford, an enthusiastic young fellow with a way with words whom he’d befriended back at New World Computing.

Neal Hallford

A fresh-out-of-university Hallford had joined New World in the role of writer some months before Cutter himself had arrived. His first assignment there had been to make sense of the poorly translated English text of Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan, a project New World had chosen to outsource to a Japanese developer, with underwhelming results all the way around. After that truly thankless task, he’d worked for a while on Might and Magic III before playing a pivotal role on Planet’s Edge, an ambitious science-fiction CRPG that had tried to do just a little bit too much for its own good. He was just finishing that project when his old friend John Cutter called.

Like Cutter before him, Hallford found Dynamix’s offer difficult to refuse. Eugene struck him as idyllic by contrast with the crowded, smoggy streets of Los Angeles; meanwhile Dynamix’s offices enjoyed the well-deserved reputation of being just about the most stylish and comfortable in the entire industry, vastly outdistancing even the parent company of Sierra in that respect. Certainly they compared favorably with the chaotic jumble of tightly packed cubicles that was the domain of New World. Thus on Halloween Day, 1991, Hallford shook hands with his old colleges there for the last time and hopped into his Geo Metro for the drive north.

Upon Hallford’s arrival in Eugene, Cutter pulled him into his office and kept him there for a week, while the two hashed out exactly what game they wanted to make and wrote the outline of a script. Hallford still remembers that week of frenzied creativity as “one of the best weeks of my life.” These two friends, different in talents and personality but unified in their vision for the game, would do the vast majority of the creative heavy lifting that would go into it. Broadly stated, Cutter would be the systems guy while Hallford would be the story guy, yet their visions would prove so simpatico that they’d seldom disagree on much of anything at all.

Jeff Tunnel had initially fallen in love with a Midkemia novel called Silverthorn, and the original plan he’d pitched to Cutter had been to make the game a fairly straightforward adaptation of that book’s plot. But such a thing is inherently problematic, for reasons I’ve had ample cause to discuss in earlier articles. Players who buy the game because they read and liked the novel — who are, after all, the whole reason for making a licensed game at all from a business perspective — won’t be excited about stepping through a plot they already know. At the same time, it’s all too easy from the design side to make a game where victory hinges on taking all of the same idiosyncratic, possibly irrational actions as the protagonists of the novel. And so you end up with a game that bores one group of players to tears, even as it frustrates another group who don’t happen to know what Character A needs to do in Situation B in order to replicate the novel’s story.

The biggest appeal of the Midkemia novels, Hallford believed, was indeed the world itself, with its detailed culture and geography and its cast of dozens of well-established characters. It would be better, he thought, to set a brand new story there, one that would let Feist’s many fans meet up with old friends in familiar locales, but that wouldn’t force them to step by rote through a plot they already knew. During the crash course on Midkemia which he’d given himself in the few weeks before starting at Dynamix — like Cutter, he’d come to Feist fandom cold — Hallford had identified a twenty-year “hole” in the chronology where he and Cutter could set a new story: just after A Darkness at Sethanon, the concluding volume in the original Riftwar Cycle that had started the ball rolling. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Feist was willing to entrust this young, unproven writer with creating something really new in his world. Betrayal at Krondor was off and running.

Hallford may have come to Midkemia late, but his dogged determination to capture the world exactly as it existed in the novels would come to a large degree to define the project. He calls himself a “born fanboy” by nature. Thus, even though he wasn’t quite of Feist’s hardcore fandom, he had enormous empathy for them. He points back to an experience from his youth: when, as a dedicated Star Trek fan, he started to read the paperback novels based on the television series which Pocket Books published in the 1980s. I read them as well, and can remember that some of them were surprisingly good as novels, at least according to my adolescent sensibilities, while also managing to capture the spirit of the series I saw on television. Others, however… not so much. Hallford points to one disillusioning book in particular, which constantly referred to phasers as “ray guns.” It inculcated in him a sense that any writer who works in a beloved universe owes it to the fans of said universe — even if he’s not really one of them — to be as true to it as is humanly possible.

So, Hallford wrote Betrayal at Krondor with Feist’s fans constantly in mind. He immersed himself in Feist’s works to the point of that he was almost able to become the novelist. The prose he crafted, vivid and effective within its domain, really is virtually indistinguishable from that of its inspiration, whose own involvement was limited to an early in-person meeting and regular phone conversations thereafter. Yet the latter became more rather than less frequent as the project wore on; Feist found his enthusiasm for the game increasing in tandem with his surprise at how earnestly Hallford tried to capture his novels and the extent to which he was managing to succeed with only the most limited coaching. The fan verdict would prove even more telling. To this day, many of them believe that it was Feist himself who scripted Betrayal at Krondor.

But Betrayal of Krondor is notable for more than Neal Hallford’s dedicated fan service. It’s filled to bursting with genuinely original ideas, many of which flew in the face of contemporary fashions in games. Not all of the ideas work — some of them rather pull against one another — but the game’s boldness makes it a bracing study in design.

Following the lead of GUI advocates working with other sorts of software, game designers in the early 1990s were increasingly embracing the gospel of the “mode-less” interface: a single master screen on which everything takes place, as opposed to different displays and interfaces for different play states. (For an excellent example of how a mode-less interface could be implemented in the context of a CRPG, see Origin Systems’s Ultima VII.) Cutter and Hallford, however, pitched this gospel straight into the trash can without a second thought. Betrayal at Krondor has a separate mode for everything.

The closest thing it has to a “home” screen must be the first-person exploration view, which uses 3D graphics technology poached from Dynamix’s flight simulators. But then, you can and probably often will move around from an overhead map view as well. When interesting encounters happen, the screen is given over to text with clickable menus, or to storybook-style illustrated dialog scenes. When you get in a fight, that’s also displayed on a screen of its own; combat is a turn-based affair played on a grid that ends up vaguely resembling the Battle Chess games by Interplay. (Thankfully, it’s also tactically interesting and satisfying.) And then when you come upon a locked chest, you’re dumped into yet another new mode, where you have to work out a word puzzle in order to open it, because why not? All of these modes are accompanied by different styles of graphics: 3D graphics on the main exploration screen, a no-frills Rogue-like display for the overhead movement view, pixel art with the story scenes, digitized real-world actors with the dialog scenes, the sprite-based isometric view that accompanies combat, etc.

The first-person exploration view.

The overhead view.

A bit of exposition. Could this be a side quest before us?

The combat view.

A puzzle chest. The answer to this one, for the record, is “die.” Later riddles get much more complicated, but the mechanics of the puzzles ingenuously prevent them from ever becoming completely insoluble. Many a male player has had a significant other who couldn’t care less about the rest of the game, but loves these puzzle chests…

This mishmash of approaches can make the game feel like a throwback to the 1980s, when genres and their established sets of best practices were not yet set in stone, and when many games that may strike us as rather odd mashups today were being produced. We can certainly see John Cutter’s roots in Cinemaware here; that company made a career out of ignoring the rules of ludic genre in favor of whatever systems best conveyed the fictional genre they were attempting to capture. By all rights, Betrayal at Krondor ought not to work, as so many of Cinemaware’s games tended not quite to work. All of these different modes and play styles — the puzzle chests in particular seem beamed in from a different game entirely — ought to add up to a hopelessly confusing muddle. Somehow, though, it does work; Betrayal at Krondor actually isn’t terribly hard to come to grips with initially, and navigating its many modes soon becomes second nature.

One reason for this is doubtless also the reason for much else that’s good about the game: its unusually extended testing period. When development was reaching what everyone thought to be its final stages, Dynamix sent the game to outside testers for what was expected to be a three-month evaluation period. Even this much usability testing would have been more than most studios were doing at this time. But the project, as so many game-development projects tend to do, ran way longer than expected, and three months turned into nine months of constant player feedback. While our universe isn’t entirely bereft of games that seem to have sprung into being fully-formed, by far the most good games attain that status only gradually, through repeated iterations of testing and feedback. Betrayal at Krondor came by its goodness in exactly this hard, honest way. Unlike a dismaying number of games from its time, this game feels like one that’s actually been played — played extensively — before it got released. The niggling problems that dog even many good games from the early 1990s (such as the infuriating inventory management and rudderless combat of Ultima VII) are almost completely absent here. Instead the game is full of thoughtful little touches to head off annoyance, the sort of touches that can only come from real player feedback.

The final verdict on its mishmash of graphical approaches, on the other hand, must be less positive. Betrayal at Krondor wasn’t a notably attractive game even by the standards of its day, and time has done it no favors; the project desperately needed a strong art director able to impose a unified aesthetic vision. The parts of it that have aged the worst by far are those employing digitized actors, who look almost unbelievably ludicrous, cutting violently against any sense of Tolkienesque grandeur Hallford’s prose might be straining to evoke. Most store-bought Halloween costumes look higher rent than this bunch of survivors of an explosion at the Loony Tunes prop department. John Cutter acknowledges the problems:

We digitized a lot of the actors, and we assumed they were going to be so pixelated that the makeup and costumes didn’t have to look that great. They just kind of had to be… close. But by the time we launched the game the technology had improved… yeah. You could see the elastic bands on the fake beards. It was pretty bad. I wasn’t crazy about a lot of the graphics in the game.

Tellingly, the use of digitized actors was the one place where Betrayal at Krondor didn’t blaze its own trail, bowing instead to contemporary trends.

For all of Betrayal at Krondor‘s welcome willingness just to try lots of stuff, its approach to story remains its most memorable and interesting quality of all. This aspect of the game was so front and center in the mind of John Cutter that, when he wrote a brief few paragraphs of “Designer Notes” for the manual, it came to occupy more than half the space:

We decided the game should be an interactive story. Characters would be multidimensional and capable of stirring the player’s emotions. The story would be carefully plotted with lots of surprises, a good mix of humor and pathos, and abundant amounts of mystery and foreshadowing to keep the player intrigued.

Balancing play against plot is the most confounding job any game designer can face on a fantasy role-playing game. In Betrayal at Krondor, we have integrated our plot so that it provides ample gaming opportunities, while also giving the player a sense of time, place, and purpose. This is achieved by making an onscreen map available to the player at all times, and by creating short-term goals — the nine chapters in the game — which give us a unique opportunity to tell a progressive story that still gives the player plenty of freedom to explore and adventure without being confined to a scripted plot.

In thus “balancing play against plot,” Cutter and Hallford were attempting to square a circle that had been bedeviling game designers for a long time. All of the things that mark a rich story — characters with agendas of their own; big reveals and shocking turns; the classic narrative structure of rising action, climax, and denouement; dramatic confrontations with expressive dialog — cut against the player’s freedom to go wherever and do whatever she wants. As a designer, says the conventional wisdom, you can’t have it all: you must rather stake out your spot on a continuum where at one end the player does little more than click her way through a railroaded plot line, and at the other she does absolutely anything she wants, but does it in a world bereft of any larger meaning or purpose. Adventure games tend to lean toward the set-piece-storytelling end of the continuum, CRPGs toward open-ended interactivity.

Even CRPGs from around the time of Betrayal at Krondor which are written expansively and well, such as Ultima VII, generally send you wandering through other people’s stories rather than your own. Each city you explore in that game is full of little story stubs revolving around the inhabitants thereof rather than yourself; your role is merely to nudge these dramas of others along to some sort of resolution before you disappear again. Your larger agenda, meanwhile, boils down to the usual real or metaphorical collecting of pieces to assemble the big whatsit at the end — a series of actions which can be done in any order precisely because they’re so simplistic in terms of plot. You’re in the world, but never really feel yourself to be of it.

Cutter and Hallford, however, refused to accept the conventional wisdom embodied by even so markedly innovative a CRPG as Ultima VII. They were determined to deliver the best of both worlds — an adventure-game-like plot and CRPG-like freedom — in the same game. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t quite work as a whole. Nevertheless, the attempt is well worth discussing.

Betrayal at Krondor positively trumpets its intentions via the metaphors which its user interface employs. Once again ignoring all of the fashions of its time, which emphasized the definitively non-textual aesthetic of the interactive movie, this game presents itself as an interactive book with an enthusiasm worthy of the 1980s heyday of bookware. The overriding look of the game, to the extent it has one amidst all its clashing graphical styles, is of an illuminated manuscript, ink on yellowing parchment. The story is told in a literary past tense, save points become “bookmarks,” and, as Cutter himself noted in the extract above, the whole experience is divided into nine neat “chapters.”

The game is relentless about describing every single event using full sentences worthy of one of Feist’s novels. Sometimes the end result can verge on the ridiculous. For example, every single time you search the body of an opponent you’ve just killed — something you’ll be doing an awful lot of, what with this being a CRPG and all — you’re greeted with a verbose missive:

Owyn looked for supplies. Feeling like a vulture, he turned the body this way and that as he searched for anything that might be of value to them on their journey. All in all, he supposed that if he were the dead man, it wouldn’t matter to him any longer what happened to his belongings.

Every character has the exact same feeling when searching a dead body, despite very different personalities. This is one of many places where Betrayal at Krondor‘s verbosity winds up undercutting rather than strengthening its sense of mimesis.

Of course, you can and quickly will learn to click right through this message and its one or two random variations each time you search a corpse. But it remains an amusing sign of just how committed Cutter and Halford were to their “interactive storybook” concept in even the most repetitive, mechanical areas of their creation. (Imagine what Pac-Man would be like if the title character stopped to muse about his actions every time he swallowed a power pill and killed another ghost…)

All of this past-tense verbosity has an oddly distancing effect. You don’t feel like you’re having an adventure so much as reading one — or possibly writing one. You’re held at a remove even from the characters in your party, normally the primary locus of player identification in a game like this one. You don’t get to make your own characters; instead you’re assigned three of them who fulfill the needs of the plot. And, while you can guide their development by earning experience points, improving their skills, and buying them new spells and equipment, you don’t even get to hang onto the same bunch through the whole game. Characters are moved in and out of your party from chapter to chapter — again, as the needs of each chapter’s plot requires. The final effect almost smacks of a literary hypertext, as you explore the possibility space of a story rather than actually feeling yourself to be embodying a role or roles in that story. This is certainly unique, and not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just… a little strange in relation to what we tend to think of CRPGs as being. These are, after all, role-playing games.

As I’ve described it so far, Betrayal at Krondor sounds more akin to the typical Japanese than the Western CRPG. The former tend to lie much closer to the set-piece-story end of our continuum of design; they provide a set, fairly linear plot to walk through, generally complete with predefined characters, rather than the degree of world simulation and open-ended exploration that marks the Western tradition. (A Japanese CRPG is, many a critic has scoffed, just a linear story in which you have to fight a battle to see each successive scene.) Yet Betrayal at Krondor actually doesn’t fit comfortably with that bunch either. For, as Cutter also notes above, he and his design partner were determined to “give the player plenty of freedom to explore and adventure without being bound to a scripted plot.”

Their means of accomplishing that relies once again on the chapter system. Each chapter begins and ends with a big helping of set-piece plot and exposition. In between, though, you’re free to go your own way and take your time in satisfying the conditions that will lead to the end of the chapter. In the first chapter, for example, your assignment is to escort a prisoner across much of the map to the capital city of Krondor. How and when you do so is up to you. The map is filled with encounters and quests, most of which have nothing to do with your central mission. And when you eventually do finish the chapter and continue on with the next, the same map gets repopulated with new things to do. This is the origin of a claim from Dynamix’s marketing department that Betrayal at Krondor is really nine CRPGs in one. In truth, it doesn’t quite live up to that billing. Only a subsection of the map is actually available to you in most chapters, much of it being walled off by impenetrable obstacles or monsters you can’t possibly kill. Even the repopulation that happens between chapters is far from comprehensive. Still, it’s an impressively earnest attempt to combine the pleasures of set-piece plotting with those of an emergent, persistent virtual world.

And yet the combination between set-piece storytelling and emergent exploration always feels like just that: a combination rather than a seamless whole. Cutter and Hallford didn’t, in other words, truly square this particular circle. There’s one massive block of cognitive dissonance standing at the center of it all.

Consider: you’re told at the beginning of the first chapter that your mission of escorting your prisoner to the capital is urgent. Political crisis is in the air, war clouds on the horizon. The situation demands that you hurry to Krondor by the shortest, most direct path. And yet what do you do, if you want to get the most out of the game? You head off in the opposite direction at a relaxed doddle, poking your nose into every cranny you come across. There’s a tacit agreement between game and player that the “urgent” sense of crisis in the air won’t actually evolve into anything until you decide to make it do so by hitting the next plot trigger. Thus the fundamental artificiality of the story is recognized at some level by both game and player, in a way that cuts against everything Betrayal at Krondor claims to want to be. This isn’t really an interactive storybook; it’s still at bottom a collection of gameplay elements wired together with chunks of story that don’t really need to be taken all that seriously at the end of the day.

The same sense of separation shows itself in those lengthy chapter-beginning and -ending expository scenes. A lot of stuff happens in these, including fights involving the characters ostensibly under your control, that you have no control over whatsoever — that are external to the world simulation. And then the demands of plot are satisfied for a while, and the simulation engine kicks back in. This is no better or worse than the vast majority of games with stories, but it certainly isn’t the revolution some of the designers’ claims might seem to imply.

Of course, one might say that all of these observations are rather more philosophical than practical, of more interest to game designers and scholars than the average player; you can suspend your disbelief easily enough and enjoy the game just as it is. There are places in Betrayal at Krondor, however, where some of the knock-on effects of the designers’ priorities really do impact your enjoyment in more tangible ways. For this is a game which can leave you marooned halfway through, unable to move forward and unable to go back.

Dead ends where the only option is to restore are normally less associated with CRPGs than adventure games; they played a big role in all but killing that genre as a commercial proposition by the end of the 1990s. CRPGs are usually more forgiving thanks to their more simulation-oriented nature — but, sadly, Betrayal at Krondor is an exception, due to a confluence of design decisions that all seem perfectly reasonable and were all made with the best of intentions. It thus provides a lesson in unexpected, unintended consequences — a lesson which any game designer would be wise to study.

The blogger Chet Bolingbroke, better known as The CRPG Addict, made these comments recently in the context of another game:

One of the notable features of CRPGs in contrast to some other genres is that they almost always support a Plan B. When one way of playing doesn’t work out, you can almost always resort to a more boring, more banal, grindier method of getting something done. I tend to mentally preface these fallback plans with “I can always…” Having a tough time with the final battle? “I can always reload again and again until the initiative rolls go my way.” Can’t overcome the evil wizard at your current level? “I can always grind.” Running out of resources? “I can always retreat from the dungeon, head back to town and buy a ton of healing potions.”

The most frustrating moments in CRPGs are when you suddenly find yourself with no way to finish “I can always” — when there is no Plan B, when luck alone will never save you, when there isn’t even a long way around.

This is precisely the problem which the player of Betrayal at Krondor can all too easily run into. Not only does the game allow you to ignore the urgent call of its plot, but it actually forces you to do so in order to be successful. If you take the impetus of the story seriously and rush to fulfill your tasks in the early chapters, you won’t build up your characters sufficiently to survive the later ones. Even if you do take your time and explore, trying to accrue experience, focusing on the wrong skills and spells can leave you in the same boat. By the time you realize your predicament, your “Plan B” is nonexistent. You can’t get back to those encounters you skipped in the earlier, easier chapters, and thus can’t grind your characters out of their difficulties. There actually are no random encounters whatsoever in the game, only the fixed ones placed on the map at the beginning of each chapter. I’m no fan of grinding, so I’d normally be all in favor of such a choice, which Cutter and Hallford doubtless made in order to make the game less tedious and increase its sense of narrative verisimilitude. In practice, though, it means that the pool of available money and experience is finite, meaning you need not only to forget the plot and explore everywhere in the earlier chapters but make the right choices in terms of character development there if you hope to succeed in the later ones.

On the whole, then, Betrayal at Krondor acquits itself better in its earlier chapters than in its later ones. It can be a very immersive experience indeed when you first start out with a huge map to roam, full of monsters to battle and quests to discover. By the time said map has been repopulated three or four times, however, roaming across its familiar landmarks yet again, looking for whatever might be new, has begun to lose some of its appeal.

And then, as Neal Hallford would be the first to admit, Betrayal at Krondor is written above all for Raymond E. Feist fans, which can be a bit problematic if you don’t happen to be among them. This was my experience, at any rate. As an outsider to Feist’s universe, watching characters I didn’t know talk about things I’d never heard of eventually got old. When an “iconic” character like Jimmy the Hand shows up, I’m supposed to be all aflutter with excitement, but instead I’m just wondering who this latest jerk in a terrible costume is and why I should care. In my view, the game peaks in Chapter 3, which takes the form of a surprisingly complex self-contained murder mystery; this is a place where the game does succeed in integrating its set-piece and emergent sides to a greater extent than elsewhere. If you elect to stop playing after that chapter, you really won’t miss that much.

As I noted already, Betrayal at Krondor ran dramatically over time and over budget. To their credit, Dynamix’s management didn’t push it out the door in an unfinished state, as was happening with so many other games during this period of transition to larger and more complex productions. Yet everyone, especially poor Neal Hallford, felt the pressure of getting it done. Not only did he write almost every word of the considerable amount of text in the game, but he also wrote much of the manual, and somehow even wound up on the hook for the puff pieces about it in Sierra’s customer newsletter. After weeks of virtually living at the office, he collapsed there one day, clutching at his chest. His colleagues rushed him to the hospital, believing he must be having a heart attack even though he was still in his twenties. It turned out that he wasn’t, but the doctor’s orders were clear: “You’re not going back to work for a week. Get some rest and eat something proper. No pizza. No soft drinks. It’s either this or next time you leave work it’ll be in a hearse.” Such are the perils of commercial game development.

Betrayal at Krondor finally shipped on June 15, 1993, an inauspicious time in the history of CRPGs. Origin Systems was about to take the Ultima series in a radically different direction after a less than overwhelming response to Ultima VII; Sir-Tech was about to put their equally long-running Wizardry series on ice for similar reasons; SSI was facing dwindling sales of their Dungeons & Dragons games and was on the verge of losing the once-coveted license; other publishers were quietly dropping less prominent franchises and would-be franchises. The several years to come would be remembered by CRPG fans as the Dark Age of their favored genre; relatively few of games of this stripe would be released at all, and those that were would be greeted by the marketplace with little enthusiasm.

Initially, Dynamix’s first CRPG performed about as well as you might expect in this environment. Despite some strong reviews, and despite whatever commercial advantages the Feist license brought with it, sales were slow. Cutter and Hallford had gone into Betrayal at Krondor imagining it to be only the first entry in a new series, but it soon appeared unlikely that a sequel would come to pass. Sierra, Dynamix’s parent company, was having an ugly year financially and wasn’t in the mood to make another expensive game in a passé genre, while Jeff Tunnell, the man who had had the original idea for Betrayal at Krondor, had stepped down from day-to-day management at Dynamix in favor of running a smaller subsidiary studio. Cutter and Hallford begged their new bosses to give the game time before making any final decisions, noting that good reviews and positive word of mouth among fans of the novels could yet pay dividends. The leadership team responded by laying Cutter off.

But over time, Betrayal at Krondor continued to sell steadily if not spectacularly. Then a genuine surge in sales came in early 1994, when a CD-ROM-based version featuring a lovely soundtrack and enhanced if still less than lovely graphics was released, just as the influential magazine Computer Gaming World was crowning the game the best CRPG of the previous year. Dynamix now made a belated attempt to start work on a sequel, asking Neal Hallford to helm it. But he considered the budget they were proposing to be inadequate, the time frame for development far too compressed. He turned it down, and left the company shortly thereafter. Dynamix would never make a second CRPG, whether set in Midkemia or anywhere else.

Nevertheless, that wasn’t quite the end of the story. Feist had been profoundly impressed by Betrayal at Krondor, and now took the ludic possibilities of his series of novels much more seriously than he had before seeing it. As soon as the Dynamix license expired at the beginning of 1995, he began to shop the property around once again. Initially, however, he found no one willing to pay his price,what with the current state of the CRPG market. While interactive Midkemia was thus in limbo, Sierra came up with another, cheaper idea for capitalizing on the first game’s belated success. Lacking the Midkemia license, they decided to leverage the first half of the Betrayal at Krondor name instead, releasing the in-house-developed Betrayal in Antara in 1997. It copied some of the interface elements and gameplay approaches of its predecessor, but moved the action to a generic fantasy world, to less satisfying effect.

And yet the story still wasn’t over: as the CRPG market began to improve in the wake of Interplay’s Fallout, the first real hit in the genre in several years, Feist licensed the Midkemia rights back to Sierra of all publishers. Sierra turned this latest project over to an outside developer called PyroTechnix. Feist played a much more active role on Return to Krondor, the game which resulted, than he had on Betrayal at Krondor, yet the result once again pales in comparison to the first Midkemia game, perhaps because Cutter and Hallford once again played no role. Its mixed reception in 1998 marks the last implementation of Midkemia on a computer to date.

Two of Feist’s later books, 1998’s Krondor: The Betrayal and 2000’s Krondor: Tear of the Gods, were based upon the first and second Midkemia computer game respectively. Thus Midkemia completed its long, strange transmedia journey from game to book to game to book again. Feist continues to churn out books apace today, but they don’t sell in the same quantities anymore, bearing as they do the stale odor of a series long past its sell-by date.

For many of us, Betrayal at Krondor will always remain the most memorable entry in the exercise in competent derivation that is Midkemia as a whole; the game is ironically much more innovative in its medium than the novels which spawned it are in theirs. Indeed, it’s thoroughly unique, a welcome breath of bold originality in a genre usually content to rely on the tried and true, a game which doesn’t work perfectly but perhaps works better than it has any right to. As a writer, I can only applaud a game which takes it writing this seriously. If it’s not quite the revolutionary amalgamation of narrative and interactivity that its creators wanted it to be, it’s still a heck of a lot more interesting than your average dungeon crawl.

(Sources: the book Designers and Dragons by Shannon Appelcline; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Winter 1992 and June 1993; Compute! of December 1993; Computer Gaming World of February 1993, April 1994, June 1994, and August 1996; Electronic Games of October 1992 and June 1993; Questbusters of November 1991, August 1992, April 1993, and August 1993; Retro Gamer 84; Dragon of January 2004; the CD-ROM Today bundled CD-ROM of August/September 1994. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interviews with Neal Hallford, Jeff Tunnell, and John Cutter in Matt Chat episodes 191, 192, 201, 291, 292, and 293; Neal Hallford’s blog series Krondor Confidential; the “History of Midkemia Press” on the same publisher’s website.

Betrayal at Krondor and Betrayal in Antara are available as a package purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/betrayal-at-krondor/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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everythinkaloud · 6 years

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My first blog post, please be gentle (assuming anyone care’s enough to read :-)

Be gentle, this is my first blog post. Hopefully, the start of something wonderful but who knows?

I attended a wonderful ayahuasca retreat recently. It really was a beautiful experience. I had many insights that I would like to share with others. This blog will be my outlet for those and my other musings about life. I hope you the reader enjoy it.

I have a propensity to read. A lot! My reading is quite varied but mostly business-oriented of late. However, my other interests include philosophy, personal development, leadership, health and wellness (particularly diet) and even bizarrely quantum mechanics (mostly to explain my experiences on Ayahuasca). Basically, I love to learn, and now I am learning to share! This is largely prompted by a friend who keeps encouraging me to redress the balance between input and output. That is, my intellectual output is dwarfed by my consumption of others intellectual output. She has a point!

And that my friend is how you came to be reading these words right now! I am writing under a pseudonym not to protect my identity but to give myself freedom of speech unencumbered by the identity that the world imposes on me! I have no problem being open and I am working day by day at prising myself even more open millimetre by millimetre. Sadly, others do not necessarily share this view. I attribute much of our misery to the fact that we do not share openly with one another our thoughts, feelings and beliefs leading us to believe that we are uniquely broken. However, the more I open up to others and the more they share with me in return, the more aware I become that we are all really very weird and wonderful in the pretty much the same ways. Those strange (and sometimes dark) thoughts you have don’t actually belong to you but more on that later.

Those pesky intangibles such as our identity and ego, seem to be the source of so many of our biggest problems. Assuming that you actually wanted to locate them, where on earth are these things anyway? Exactly, the problem being that we actually perpetuate them by chasing after them. And might the ego not actually be a wonderful thing? A work of fiction for sure but nonetheless a wonderful thing. After all, its fundamental purpose seems to be to keep us alive so why the movement to kill it? I realised just how wonderful a thing a mind is whilst taking Ayahuasca. Its many facets revealed to me in all its wonder, giving me a newfound appreciation for the workings between my ears, which I hasten to add are by and large complete fiction. Lest we not forget that there is a subject and object. What I think about the object is not the object itself! Perhaps objective reality does exist but can we as subjective beings ever experience it?

I plan on writing daily. Some musings will be more in depth than others. Some might be supported by science other just merely perception (or just plain speculation). Ultimately, its just my take on the world (or rather universe) we all co-habit (for now and actually maybe eternally given my recent psychedelic and meditative experiences).

Anyhow, now the introduction is out of the way, I must write something of substance for you have given me the privilege of your time. What more precious is there to give in life than time, the most finite of all resources? I heard an enlightened comment earlier from a friend who noted that we cannot control outcomes. How true this is! I believe that misapprehending this point is perhaps one of the main sources of our dissatisfaction with life. There are just far too many variables in life to control anything but the most mundane things such as what one eats for tea tonight. Even that to some extent is beyond my control since the food available for purchase is entirely contingent upon the labour of others from the growers, to the distributors, to the retailers. Seems obvious right but even the car I use to travel to the shop and the gas supplied to the cooker (and the cooker itself) are fruits of countless beings labour. Essentially, anything we can see or touch, contains everything else when viewed from this standpoint. This is what is known as the interconnectedness of all things. It truly is wonderous. Nothing exists independently. That’s is, there is no separate self. When I say that I did something, what I really mean is that the whole universe supported me in doing something for I could not have done that thing were it not for everything else that ever existed!

It seems crazy I know but ultimately true. And does it matter even if it isn’t true? I would argue not. This is because believing in interconnectedness will result in more wholesome actions which in turn will produce more happiness in the world. We should not be asking whether our beliefs are true but rather are they beneficial! And where do beliefs come from anyway? Our beliefs are important. They shape our worldview more so than supposed objective reality. Watch this YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo) by Anil Seth to find out how.

Spend a moment meditating and you will soon discover that it isn’t you doing the thinking. As the heart beats, so the brain thinks. The Buddhists describe thinking as the ‘sixth sense’. Do not take it personally! Discovering this, over time you become less attached to your thoughts (and feelings), recognising at last that they were never actually ‘yours’ to begin with. Merely an endless stream of consciousness. Quite wonderful from the point of view of the witness merely observing the ‘movie’.

So if you can’t control the output, what can you control? Well I would argue to some extent the input. That is, our thoughts apparently emanate from our subconscious. Therefore, what we put into our subconscious is of paramount importance. It is your choice whether to read from ‘The Book of Joy’ or watch a horror movie. Which of the two do you consider would lead to more wholesome thoughts and actions? If you watch pornography all the time what do you expect that you will see in your external reality? Might everything look like an object of sex?

So, to sum up, I posit that our beliefs combined with incoming data combine to produce our mental output, which whilst perhaps uncontrollable is capable of being influenced by us in a deliberate way.

Lastly, I would return to the point that most if not everything in our lives is beyond our control. What we can, however, control is our effort. Ultimately, in life, you can only do your very best. Beyond that you are in the hands of the Gods (whoever or whatever they may be)! So, focus on effort not on outcomes and you may find yourself living a happier, more fulfilled life!

Here’s to hoping that reading this blog contributed to more positive mental output for you the reader 😊

#spirituality #love #happiness

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homestuckhomestuckhomestuck · 7 years

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Summary of Homestuck fandom after [S] Cascade.

(2011) Homestuck as a general phenomenon was very active and developed at a swift pace from the time it was published (2009) onwards, especially in 2012-2013, including and past the first years of the Homestuck Kickstarter Project, a.k.a Hiveswap.

Between 2009 and 2012, Homestuck as a webcomic was infamous for updating daily, constantly, multiple times a day, at all hours, for years. There was a calculated average that Homestuck updated 5.5 pages per day, dropping entire bundles of updates of character interaction and plot reveals frame by frame, posted as fast as Hussie could write it. Though it wasn’t immediately obvious, this pace was sleeplessly breakneck, Hussie allegedly didn’t do anything but live, breathe and dream Homestuck for at least four years straight. I’m serious when I say updates came at all hours. I would wake up 2am on a week night and idly check MSPA to see if there was a new update, sort of like a trained parrot. Then in five minutes I’d tab back over to the Homestuck tab and refresh, just in case.

This lead to an phenomenon appropriately dubbed “upd8 culture,” which became the basis of the sheer evangelical furor people still associate with the Homestuck fandom. Quick history: MSPA/Problem Sleuth fans originated and migrated over from the Penny Arcade forums, Reddit, and 4chan to nestle permanently within the bowels of 2011 - 2013 tumblr, and were best described from a distance as ‘zealous.’ Even remembering it now almost feels like recalling a distant riot. If you didn’t cosplay, write up a detailed theory post, or scribble up a crazy level of appropriately detailed fanart within 10 or so minutes any given upd8, you were buried under the force of post overload and were officially late to the party. After years of this, fans had some idea of just how dedicated it came off as, which was used to further spur on fandom and made Homestuck into the most meme filled in-joke community you could possibly imagine.

What’s frustrating about describing Homestuck and Homestuck fandom is they both heavily affected each other and were both unique experiences within themselves, which makes actually trying to get across the atmosphere of the early 2010s a wordy process. Homestuck heyday updates regularly crashed tumblr servers, which became an actual fake rss way of seeing how much the plot progressed that day, which is unusual even if the tumblr servers 2011-2013 were not funded by the corporate might of Yahoo. The bigger the update, the faster the crash. I could tell you Homestuck dominated tumblr to the point it had a virulent hatedom of people who had never even read it and constantly saw it and never understood what was happening in it, and fans couldn’t stop themselves from chattering about it all the time. One thing that has to be noted is all this continual bickering and movement and development and competitive content production was honestly fun as hell.

Besides constant updates and a continual stream of new content, the story was completely unpredictable. Game-changing plot twists continued to happen up until the very ending, and while this made Homestuck’s plot happily convoluted, for fans this meant one thing they never lacked for was barely solvable mystery. Even the (fan)artists and (fan)musicians hired to work on Homestuck had to guess what would happen next even if they were part of animating the next update. Under similar principles of an ARG, story presentation was created with the vague expectation fans would work together to explain to each other what just happened.

What this meant in conjunction with Hussie’s oddly accurate tabs on fandom theory was that when an update dropped you had to release whatever you were doing fast, or you would be outdated, wrong, inaccurate, or irrelevant at some undisclosed unspecific time, very soon. Canon and fanon directly pulled from each other, especially in the small character details. The very fact the comic spun on such accurate knowledge of fandom that was purposefully fostered between fandom and canon means that even now reading Homestuck while updating is considered an experience different from an archival read, even though Homestuck was always a self-contained story.

Upd8 culture followed like this: Popular fan theories had multiple fanfictions written on them just to better explain what could happen next, and fan projects from voice acting to art to music to fiction were constantly being corrected, updated, and replaced by a deluge of new information and characters to pore over every single detail with a fandom magnifying glass. An endless amount of hyper ambitious fandom projects, games, animations, multi media fanstories made in rotating teams were abandoned for new starts JUST because the information they were working off became too outdated by the newest few weeks of updates. Cosplays were mocked up in hours (for the next morning of con,) art in minutes, theory in seconds. You threw everything out as fast as you could so someone else could build off of it. It did give a strong impression of collaboration and possibility. As the fandom grew bigger and younger Hussie seemed to shade more politic in his fandom communication, but Homestuck managed to maintain an “open channel” like feeling between fandom and comic for a long time.

Innovative form encouraged innovative output. The point was to create. Another aspect feeding upd8 culture was in the way Homestuck was told. Not only were Homestuck’s detailed plot points hard to predict, but so was what would happen to the site in a meta way. A page could range from a scribble to a 3 hr fully programmed rpg or 18 minute asset heavy style swapping animation, or most commonly, sprite art followed by several hundred words of dialogue and character interaction. Pages came by different artists, different styles, different mediums, different paces and focuses, but with a breadth-spanning understanding of memes and the internet. Factors of style, innovation and novelty affected the diversity of fan output. Part of my extreme willingness to take part in Homestuck fandom was that Homestuck was so crammed to the brim with open ended creative potential, just the multiplicity of cool ideas and plot mechanics and vivid characters and weirdly novel framing that had really good ideas and existed literally nowhere else, and I say that as a huge sci-fi fan. Time travel in Homestuck was excellent. It was an ambitious story and I really do think it pulled it off. Homestuck was once described as the fossilized excrement of someone’s personal creative experiments, and I think that’s a good way of putting it. Enthusiasm and confusing daring teemed off the page, and translated into a wide variety of fanfiction and art, in style, content, theme, and pov.

Lastly, Hussie had a tendency to canonize fan content and hire fanartists and fananimators if their output was solid enough with a gentle horse kiss of approval and a naturally internet-transparent hiring process, like a forum. This was a purposely fostered atmosphere in the spirit of experimental adventure, and was just fucking nuts. Fans never wrote the story, but they did heavily influence aspects of how it was told and where it went (by design, fans were pretty much involved in making the comic) and even get to actually flesh out the details, like the main character’s names, memes, romances, character, and scope. Everything from canon sprite art to bits of the Midnight Crew to Caliborn’s character to Calliope’s art skill to music and trickster arcs were all originally based on years of fan jokes and fandom. Homestuck was definitely Hussie’s sole property and precious baby, but he built it as interactive-ish and creatively as he could. It added an extra layer of galvanizing egging on to fandom purpose. I don’t know how else to explain everything that came of it. Fandom was like a roiling morass of bullshit activity, like a breaking news bullpen 24/7, there was so much energy sparking off of all facets of fandom because it was just so fun. Fan output was borderline insane in 2010-2013.

Hussie said fandom grew exponentially at the introduction of the Trolls in Act 5 in mid 2010, but I can honestly say I think fandom really started treating Homestuck like a hidden gem worth proselytizing right after the events of [S] Cascade at the end of 2011. Before then, Homestuck was tenuously good, and had a rep on tumblr for having weirdly ubiquitous fans and over- detailed fancontent, but [S] Cascade was the moment every single gamble asked of the reader in the story actually paid off. In fact, Homestuck’s plot was generally constructed to climax at [S] Cascade, as was apparent from the big explosion of fan reaction after the fact. At this point, you would be hard pressed to find a fan that wouldn’t say, “Homestuck is good.”

THE KICKSTARTER (2012)

Right after [S] Cascade, a lot of things happened in quick succession. Act 6 started, revealing what endgame would probably look like. It was slated to be shorter than Act 5, envisioned as a kind of denouement. Lord English, the final villain, was revealed. Hussie stated he thought the comic would end the following year. I think Hussie saw the ending was in sight and started trying to merchandise for real at this point, god tier hoodies started releasing at a faster rate, Homestuck book 1 came out (in addition to Problem Sleuth book 3), there was a Homestuck music (and track art) contest announced with hundreds of fan submissions, and the incongruous but hilarious public induction of Dante Basco, Hollywood superstar, who was instantly whisked into the Homestuck fandom’s fold as soon as he formed a tumblr. Homestuck had a bit of a reputation by then so the fandom (+ Hussie) was legitimately trying to woo him gently. This was entertaining for everybody, including Dante Basco. (For those who haven’t gotten that far, Dante Basco is a character in Homestuck.) (As some trivia, Grey DeLisle also briefly made a tumblr in this time, influenced by the instant rapport Dante Basco had, voiced some Vriska lines, then left due to some unrelated but tumblr-typical drama.)

There probably weren’t even specifics on who was going to be programming, illustrating, producing, and writing Hiveswap- and I’m still vaguely convinced Hussie scrolled through Promstuck and then hired deudlyfirearms (Calliope’s official artist) on the spot to illustrate all his future creative endeavors. I know Guzusuru got hired at least partially due to Lullaby for Gods, not to speak in the least for Paperseverywhere or Toastyhat (tumblr usernames used just in case, dril), plus a literal list of artists you could follow through various Homestuck fan production to official product lines. With Hiveswap, Homestuck went from hobby to full time job for some people. But before all that, in 2012 Homestuck as source material was apparently endless and constant, and let’s just say by 2013, Hussie never had to ASK for specific fan content, assets, musicians, artists, programmers, writers, even money. He just had to allow fandom a place, an address, an email, anything, to let them throw it at him. I have actually never seen anything like it, this weird businesslike use of talents within and out of comic. This is why mid 2012 art assets and minigames suddenly start becoming more populous, culminating in the nearly entirely guest art illustrated, programmed, and animated EOA6 and A7 and guest written post-canon snapchats in 2016. (This is also the time the MSPA forums crashed.) Also the art, programming, and music team for Hiveswap seem comprised of former fan musicians and artists.

One thing that’s no concern for Hiveswap: it will be was beautifully illustrated, scored, and animated by people who loved Homestuck.

In sum: 2012 Homestuck was in full swing. Homestucks flooded cons, more than usual, to such a volume of painted gray tweenagers that cons in general (and hotels) had to rewrite the rulebooks surrounding such things as panels, photoshoots, and draw meets. MSPA servers were still barely holding up, especially after big upd8s, and were constantly being upgraded. Tindeck made a whole genre tag on their site for Homestuck fanmusic. What Pumpkin and Topatoco couldn’t keep up with demand, everything was constantly out of stock. Staff and even Hussie didn’t announce when new products were released until weeks later because if they did, the entire store server would immediately crash for long periods of time. This remained true even into 2016, apparently. There were homestuck plushes, furniture, tattoos, rooms, board games, video games, cards, dolls, products you wouldn’t even think of– a whole years long scrum about establishing copyright and what could sell where to who. Promstuck was a once-a-year reality in random cities around the US or otherwise. Art Team and Music Team had quick fame gain, I know at least Music Team members could feasibly live off of Homestuck revenue as their day job. Ben Nye grey paint actually sold out before a con, and even to this day any gray paint on amazon will be utterly dominated by troll cosplay reviews. Even small trivially related products like the record of the guy who posted “I’m a Member of the Midnight Crew” on youtube was convinced to list the record on ebay for a couple hundred dollars in a sprightly fan bidding war. This was completely unremarkable at the time.

The most interesting thing about Homestuck is that it was a) entirely spread by grassroots efforts and word of mouth, and b) a free webcomic. Though unlike the T.V syndicated and advertised shows like Sherlock or Dr. Who or anime, or the multi-billion dollar industries of Marvel or Nintendo, with nearly zero effort to be anything but weird and internet obscure, Homestuck seemed just as bafflingly popular and literally impossible to avoid as professionally advertised hollywood blockbusters, popular anime, television serial shows, and multi million video games, at least on tumblr, reddit, and 4chan, and conventions. Because of all the factors that went into it’s circuitous development, if you hadn’t read through a huge chunk of Homestuck, you wouldn’t even understand and you couldn’t even properly explain why such a niche but undeniable popularity existed. It was such a phenomenon.

People who had (reasonably) never even heard of Homestuck would stumble upon a fandom antic and observe with growing confusion the busy masses hard at work. Bright blue horse dildo fundraised and sent dutifully to creator? (At least three different dildos on 3 different social media homestuck fan sites were fundraised publicly.) Gruesome artwork of puppet fetish websites carefully placed with pages of critiqued meta with way too much attention? Even the usual deluges of upd8 fanart and fantheory? Entire forum sites and rp sites and chat clients enthusiastically founded just for the constant need to discuss the story? Homestuck became recognizable by horns and grey paint and terrifyingly huge meetups, a nearly frantic aura and art meets or prom dances just for fans - “What the fuck is Homestuck?!” became a fandom catchphrase, because it was always being commented on. Tbh, Homestuck is the r rated precursor for Undertale in memetic inclination and story framing style. Memes, man.

And in the midst of this, in September 2012, Hussie suddenly announced a Homestuck Video Game Kickstarter. The long awaited scalemate plushes were introduced as a reward tier. And unexpectedly, a lavishly illustrated ostensibly Kickstarter exclusive Homestuck tarot deck by popular fanartists as one of the reward tiers.

For context: The entire premise of Homestuck is that it was a transcribed gaming session of a video game that didn’t exist. Opening a Homestuck Video Game Kickstarter was a fitting sequel, the equivalent of waving an 8th book prequel in front of Harry Potter fans, as illustrated by the cream of the crop, if every previous iteration of the Harry Potter series was also free. In addition, the goal was $700,000, and Homestuck had over 2 million online fans. There wasn’t a question if $700,000 was going to be feasible as a funding goal, it was more a question of how far the fandom could goad itself into trying to overshoot it. In fact, I remember being kind of disappointed we didn’t reach 3 million. We capped just below 2.5 million including the paypal donations. Homestuck started making “official” waves in news articles and such, of people who noticed a completely incomprehensible kickstarter got a lot of money somehow, and this in addition to the typically update culture-fast result (the funding goal was reached in about 30 hours of a month long campaign,) was regarded as very bizarre by everyone who didn’t know what Homestuck was.

Trivia: there was even a $10,000 tier introduced as a joke, where “your fantroll will become canon (for one panel, and then die),�� which was hastily closed after two people actually took it. (One was an army vet who thoroughly enjoyed the story and basically wanted to donate as thanks, and the other has remained impressively anonymous.) First time I saw Hussie publicly searching for words. I really could say 2012 Homestuck was approaching some kind of mania. Considering how Homestucks were, if someone named their firstborn off a Homestuck character, I wouldn’t have been shocked. The game was funded.

Homestuck hiatus’ started in earnest. This was due to the increased production schedule of both the Kickstarter game being punted into development, the troubled indie game development cycle, and more detailed HTML5 games (openbound) in the comic, and product production, which is, you know, was fair enough. Updates were frequent enough to keep fandom active and frothy well into 2013, where the lack of Game Updates in conjunction with comic hiatus’ were both uncharacteristic and concerning.

Homestuck was abruptly shifted off of regular upd8 schedules, and upd8 notifiers were sadly put to rest.

HIATUS FANDOM (2013-2014)

Here was a unique factor of 2013 Homestuck fandom, for the lack of content, fandom moved en masse to an alternative ‘hiatus fandom,’ in some kind of effort to keep together over the wait. This literally singlehandedly boosted the popularity of games like OFF, Dangan Ronpa, etc. Homestuck hiatus fans were already pro at boosting popularity through word of mouth, and these obscure-but-popular video games were fun to pimp in the meantime. A more recent, toned down example would be 17776.

Here was also something weird. In December 2013 Hussie apparently (as creative director only) had some kind of mysterious would-be trial run with Shiftylook with Namco ips, resulting in Namco High, the Homestuck and Namco character dating sim, where you could date Davesprite (who had a surprising amount of meta character development,) Terezi, Pacman, and Galaga. It was so out of nowhere nobody knew what to do with it. It was an indication of what Homestuck as a franchise was probably going to expand into, though, and an intriguing move on the part of Bandai.

In the comic hiatuses and throughout the roadblocked kickstarter game development, canon-side, the Paradox Space quasi-canon side project and WeLoveFine (later ForFansByFans, who took over merchandising,) continued on the spirit of fandom support- notably the original Art Contest to make new merch- now streamlined into a “fan forge” where any fan can go through a voting process to say, pitch a new product and later be hired on the most recent calendar, then show up working a new Friendsim.... etc.

After this a new generation of internet fans appeared to ‘notice’ Homestuck, hearing it was ending, and joined in, making the Kickstarter garner a kind of shadowed conspiracy-riddled rumortale more than anything, which really outstripped the simplicity of what happened: hardworking but troubled development.

The End of Homestuck was hanging like the sword of Damocles over our collective motivations, you can still find mournful farewell Homestuck fanart floating around to this day! In fact, the fandom believed it was the End of Homestuck several times in 2014-2015. Fandom was tamping down on the corners, cleaning up fanart (relatively), tucking away the crazily ambitious scifi world spanning AU fic. The wild, raw creativity that used to be so rampant through all corners of the internet seemed vaguely diminished, tidier, more understandable, trackable, and efficient. Big Projects never showed their roughs and drafts until the final products anymore, small circles of discourse popped up in pretty polite language and with almost no capslock. The discussions weren’t on What Hussie Would Pop On Us This Time To Overhaul The Entire Plot Of Homestuck, it was more like, did he make the gay Gay Enough™? Vriscourse remained eternal, though.

And it isn’t just nostalgia talking. I’ve noticed some Homestucks still think fandom is a rush of collective community like they’ve never before experienced, that upd8 celebrations are pretty dang wild, and Homestuck convention presences are well-established, but now? In 2015-2017? This is calm and active, there are still some cool projects going on, but nothing like the insanity that was associated with Homestuck. Homestuck was the ‘biggest’ fandom I’ve ever been in, in terms of sheer forced commiseration and activity, and it just has not reached anything close to the levels of 2011-2013 bullshittery and spark plugs.

But the fandom is still present- people treat it like a phase, but Homestuck is still a clever story that retains all the aspects that attracted readers to it in the first place. Also, the fandom still regularly accomplishes minor feats of economics like this even in 2016:

because that is the level of fan fervor that Homestuck inspires, forever, apparently.

I’d last like to note I’ve skipped a lot, I tried to keep it as zoomed out and as general as possible. I’d like to explain the true foibles of 2013 Homestuck fandom, such as the forced formation of entire rp websites, apps, programs, and platforms dedicated to fanning Homestuck more efficiently, how fans formed new mediums and literal ways of expression and vast organized contests on how to express themselves and collaborate better, how there was almost a fan project-pipeline system in place, and how exactly Homestuck influenced Undertale (think of the meta) and an entire mini generation of webcomics and tv show story boarders spiritually, and I haven’t even tried to explain the aspects of Homestuck’s use of framing and how genuinely interesting it is from a storytelling perspective, and how the interaction of Hussie and the fandom and serial updates affected people’s connectivity because out of scope.

...But just for posterity and context of update culture: Quoth Gankro, programmer:

So the biggest thing to keep in mind with MSPA is that it's based entirely off of collaboratively riffing off eachother's ideas. It started out as a faux text-based adventure where people would post prompts, and Andrew would take the ones he liked and riff off of them. As far as I'm concerned this is Andrew's super power: the ability to take a pile of things (comments, art, music, ideas, people) and rapidly recombine them into amazing things. The chatlogs in Homestuck full of amazing back and forths? That's just what talking to Andrew in chat was. Constant riffing and feedback loops....

Anyway, this is all to say that the genesis of ideas, and even how things got developed, is honestly really murky with Homestuck? Everything was kinda adhoc, a riff-on-a-riff, and done in incredibly little time....

I can't emphasize this scramble enough. Andrew was a ceaseless content machine, and I don't think I was ever "blocked" on him producing content. Which is ridiculous considering how much content is packed into our games. (like, hundreds of pages of dialogue)

Michael Bowman, music team:

Volume 5 going out of its way to include gobs and gobs of material definitely changed the project; the floodgates opened. I think people admired Andrew's astonishingly prolific pace from 2009 to 2012, and between 2010 and 2011 the music project had the same vibe: we released one or two albums monthly.

-fan interviews courtesy though the efforts of u/drewlinky

Homestuck and it’s fandom has the unique distinction of being nigh unexplainable, as in, it took this long just to fully outline how the Homestuck Kickstarter was always going to be wildly successful, and how development was always going to take years even without the incident with the Odd Gentlemen, who clearly didn’t understand why Homestuck was popular or even why that mattered, (pre- Undertale), in the first place, but with the news of Viz taking on Homestuck’s license on account of that viral-like marketability so now there’s an actual possibility that Homestuck will finally become…… anime, why not hearken back to the good ol days and be relentlessly picayune for the hell of it?

Happy 10/25!

#HAPPY 10/25!#homestuck #hiveswap development is such a saga too #i also didn't talk about specifics of recursive fandom (fans of fans of fans) but wow #2012-2014 #hscom

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nedflix-n-chill · 4 years

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31 Days of Halloween #2 Lifeforce I just wanna let you all know that I watched this movie very respectably. It was a respectable viewing because I consider myself a respectable journalist and you've all come to expect a certain level of professionalism from me. Now that that's out of the way... uh I'm not sure if you know this but this movie has a naked lady in it for like a majority if it's runtime (psst it's actually only 7 minutes). It might not sound like a big deal now since we all have smart phones which can access more porn than can fill the super computer at NASA but try to think back to the days pre-internet when catching a tiddy in a late night horror movie was basically a 13 year olds sexual awakening. This film would be the holy grail. But also shame on the producers for having that poor actress go full frontal for what seems like an eternity while not hanging dong once. There's 2 dudes yet every shot conveniently obscures peen. That's not right. Demand equality from your films. What the fuck am I talking about? Oh yeah Lifeforce is a crazy genre mashup sci-fi vampire movie from Tobe Hooper and Cannon Films (a match made in heaven). It's a serious hodge-podge of genre greatest hits. Part Dracula, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part Alien, part zombie apocalypse love story body swap etc etc etc, Hooper seems to be pulling from any and all places and surprisingly it works pretty well. At it's heart its a fun science-fiction spin on the popular vampire mythos with some awesome sfx that while might not reach the hights of Hooper's classic output (TCM and Poltergeist) is still a load of fun. Plus Patrick Stewart, who seems to have hit old age at 25 and then never aged again, gets possessed by a sexy lady. https://www.instagram.com/p/CF2pZK0FKy4/?igshid=5nasupgnbgpt

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someplace-that-is-else · 4 years

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GOOD AFTERNOON, LIKERS!!! How was the new week going for you all? I cannot believe that June (my #birth month) was about to be over. Time flew. It also looked like it was going to be a crazy week again. I can't stress this enough....BE SAFE.

So last week, I mentioned some of the #things that I would be working on. So how did those things turn out? Well...you know what that means. That's right!!! EDITING, TYPING, WRITING.

EDITING: I mentioned that I was working on a little somethin', somethin' for my Book page www.facebook.com/darkenverse. So I was editing for most of last week. And that...was #DONE.

And while I would be doing some more #editing today due to my forthcoming #blog, I felt there was a lot of editing that I wanted to do. And I found my mind trying to find things to edit.

I think I created a monster...lol.

TYPING: Life got a little bit in the way last week. My #apologies. In any case, I got some coffee in me earlier and the blog was back on! I expect that it would take all day. That appeared to be the theme with me lately. Not that I was hating. I really had been missing doing writing stuff. So maybe getting some more 'output' out there in the world was just what the doctor ordered.

WRITING: Surprising no one, I got a writing session in yesterday.

It just took all day. lol. Okay #rusty. lol.

However, it was nice to get back to writing again. And the latest writing project had yield an unexpected result. My mind started to think about ANOTHER novella.

Ugh! Evil mind. I still had a novella about my character Nicholas that I wanted to work on. Why would I add in another?

But...that was not the only thing that was on my #mind.

Ever since the George Floyd murder, BLM protests, and the general worries from the zombie apocalypse. I had been wanting to write a little bit more now. And when I was not thinking science #fiction, my mind was starting to really desire to write more...fiction. No vampires. No magical beings. Just humans and emotions and life experience.

Can we say uh oh? Or was that more oh, yeah?

More importantly, That need...was growing.

Well, there was nothing like #change in the world that made a person want to write more. And just generally be more creative. So...let's see where this week goes.

#goodafternoon #likers #blm #george floyd #protests #besafe #editing #typing #writing #mind #rusty #fiction #blog #birth #things #facebook #done #apologies #zombie apocalypse

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stevepotterwrites · 3 years

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A GLORIOUS THOUGHT EXCURSION: On John Olson’s Novel In Advance of the Broken Justy

https://bookshop.org/a/8227/9781935835172

John Olson's thoughtful and often humorous new novel, In Advance of the Broken Justy, opens with a somewhat Kafkaesque quest to find medical attention for the narrator's wife's infected eye late at night in Paris during a doctor's strike and ends on January 8th, 2015 with news of the previous day's terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices playing on the television in their hotel room as they prepare to leave for home.

In the pages between the personal crisis and the international one, we are introduced to the oddball mix of neighbors in the narrator's thin-walled building who are driving him and his wife, Ronnie, crazy with noise from construction projects, stomping feet, and rather explicitly audible sounds of digestive functions from a neighboring bathroom. Noisy neighbors are enough to drive any introverted, bookish homebody nuts, but our unnamed protagonist tells us, during a seemingly obsessive and often hilariously aggrieved section of narration reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, that he additionally suffers from hyperacusia — a heightened sensitivity to noise, and tinnitus — ringing in the ears, as well as Generalized Anxiety Disorder for which he has been prescribed a variety of antidepressants through the years.

It's not only their immediate living situation that is cause for aggravation, the couple are also dealing more generally with a growing dissatisfaction with life in rapidly-changing Seattle. Olson writes that his dislike of Seattle, “evolved over a period of time, like an allergy that starts out with a minor rash and then grows into strange secretions and the constant application of topical ointments.” As their disaffection with Seattle grows, so does their love of Paris. “...we each felt an attachment that had become deeply emotional, like a drug. We had become addicted to this city. It inhabited us, as Ronnie put it.”

The love of Paris among certain artistically-inclined Americans has a longstanding literary and cinematic history, of course. Mr. Olson's novel continues a lineage tracing back at least as far as Ernest Hemingway's A Movable Feast and F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Babylon Revisited” through Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road to Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Unlike Gil Pender, the protagonist of Mr. Allen's film, who is mostly enthralled with fantasies of Cole Porter, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and other American ex-pats in Paris during the Jazz Age, Olson's two protagonists are most interested in actual French poets, writers and artists such as; Rimbaud, Georges Perec, Michel Tournier, Gaston Bachelard, Raymond Queneau and Pierre Michon. And while their yearning for Paris is similar to that of the couple at the center of Revolutionary Road, it is a rather more grown-up and grounded love of the City of Lights. Olson's protagonists are a pair of older, working-class poets not young, upper-middle-class, suburban dilettantes like Yates's Frank and April Wheeler.

In addition to their dissatisfaction with home and city, the couple are also dealing with the loss of their beloved car, the broken Subaru Justy of the novel's title. After attempting to adapt to a car-less life, including several comic misadventures with public transit and Car2Go, the narrator takes some money out of savings to buy another used Subaru but somewhat spontaneously decides he'd rather take a trip to Paris than own a car again. Ronnie agrees. Plans are made, tickets are purchased, and their ongoing study of French is kicked into a higher gear. Away they go.

The narrator alludes to dark and outrageous moments in his past, back when he was still drinking and taking drugs. “At the age of eighteen, I left my father's house and struck out for California, following the scent of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I was into Dylan and the Rolling Stones. I liked the Beatles, but they remained a bit too wholesome for my rebel-without-a-cause setup. And after reading Aldous Huxley's seminal essay, The Doors of Perception, I had a raging desire to experiment with psychedelic drugs.”

He tells briefly of getting beaten up at a New Years Eve party in Burien, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and three failed marriages. One suspects Olson could write some fine fiction of wild times, drunkenness, heartache and despair in a Kerouacian or Carveresque vein if he felt the urge to mine his past, but part of what I love about this novel is that it doesn't do that. The image of the artist as a young wild man is a popular one and there have certainly been more than enough misbehaving poets, musicians, painters, novelists and so forth to give that cliché some weight, but what makes an artist an artist is serious, longstanding dedication to one's art. It's refreshing to read a novel that dispenses with the youthful misbehavior in a few short sentences and instead depicts the couple at its center as actual grown-up artists.

In Advance of the Broken Justy is not a novel which glorifies the wild kicks of youth or wallows in the despair of drunkenness and divorce, but rather one which celebrates more mature, quiet kicks like the contemplation of works of art in the Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre, and the Georges Pompidou Centre. It is a celebration of bookstores not barrooms. The narrator and Ronnie go on a sort of literary safari, with guidance provided by a list of the best bookstores in Paris received via email from the French poet Claude Royet-Journoud, and enjoy a cafe visit with the poet and translator Michel Deguy.

“One of the main reasons I wanted to go to Paris was so I could stand in a real bookstore once again before I die,” Olson writes. “The bookstores in the United States have deteriorated into something little better than a gift shop, or those book and magazine shops you sometimes see at the airport. Trashy titles. Nothing of any real interest.” He's not grown so jaded that he's lost all perspective, however, and can still see quality on those rare occasions it may be found. He goes on later in that passage to praise Elliott Bay Books and Open Books and elsewhere declares Magus Books in the University District to be one of the best, if not the best, used bookstores he's ever been to.

While at certain points it's clear that the author's imagination is at play, much of In Advance of the Broken Justy reads close to straight autobiography. That, of course, does not necessarily mean that it is, but the pleasures of reading the novel, for me, were often more akin to those of nonfiction. David Shields, among others, would argue that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is meaningless. Whiile there is some validity to that stance in that in either case the author is working with a blend of memory and imagination, I think it is a bit of an overstatement. Phillip Lopate writes in a section of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction in which he compares and contrasts the tendencies of nonfiction versus those of fiction that, “What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself.... None of these examples read like short stories or screenplays; they read like what they are: glorious thought excursions.”

It is Olson's surprising, well-stocked mind which is of the greatest interest here, the consciousness which regards what happens more so than the particulars of what happens, that takes interesting digressions into considerations of the work of Bob Dylan, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and organic chemist August Kekulé among others. Of the other books I've read recently, it is Patti Smith's second memoir, M Train, I find it most similar to in both tone and content. Smith, the poet-rocker legend, and Olson, the poet's poet who can count luminaries such as Michael McClure, Clayton Eshleman and the late, great Philip Lamantia among his fans, are exact contemporaries, Ms. Smith being the elder by only a matter of months. Their influences overlap to a considerable degree. Both books weave together narratives of domesticity and travel. Both books present the day-to-day lives of practicing artists and consider the lives of their artistic influences. Both books recount journeys to literary sacred ground in search of a sort of spiritual contact high with forebears and idols.

Mr. Lopate's phrase, “glorious thought excursions,” seems like the perfect description of much of Olson's output. Fans of his prose poetry will find moments replete with the reeling riffs of surrealistic, hallucinatory lyricism familiar from his books such as Oxbow Kazoo, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon and Eggs & Mirrors in the pages of In Advance of the Broken Justy. Preparations for the sale of their 500 square foot condo and a move away from their infuriatingly noisy building (preparations for naught, as it turns out, for neither sale nor move ever transpire within the pages of the novel) instigates a stream of thoughts on the nature of reality leading eventually to the following passage:

“When consciousness meets reality the result is milk. Traffic lights blossom into prayer wheels. Laundry folds itself into armies of tide pool angst and marches around like generalities of floral chambray. Rain falls up instead of down. The acceptance of frogs liberates bubbles of pulp. Time sags with basement ping pong tournaments. Garrets ovulate glass bagatelles. Realism percolates prizefight sweat. Details sparkle like crawling kingsnakes in the mouth of a Mississippi attorney.”

In Advance of the Broken Justy is a thoughtful, grown-up novel for the sort of thoughtful, grown-up readers who seek out real bookstores and is not likely to have much appeal to fans of those trashy, escapist titles found in the sad, little book and magazine shops in airports Olson derides.

Review by Steve Potter. Previously appeared in A Screw in the Shoe from Golden Handcuffs Review Publications.

#book review #john olson #in advance of the broken justy #contemporary fiction #paris #seattle

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humanistauno · 5 years

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Melody Leagogo’s Diary

Dear diary,

Monday might just be another day of the week, for months, for years, for decades, but is a new hope to look into a productive and fruitful week to start off. Many thought and widely believe the cliché that mon day is the worst day of the week leading the chronology of hitting the books or listening into early office rumors and I think I'm greatly believe in that. Dawn bothered my sleep as the sun greeted me this morning, tardily crawling and wriggling like a worm in my tiny little bed. That Monday morning feeling sometimes giving me a hard time and worst, it might ruin my whole plan for the day, luckily it wasn't. I faced cooking pots and boiling kettle for today as my morning chores and the rest were left to ready myself for today's session, session for learning. Because it is Monday, I left as early as possible to attend on our flag ceremony to perform our roles and some information dissemination. It took too long for the teachers to finish their meeting so we have a bundle of time to gossip on our neighbors and became story tellers not minding the free time to spend on the requirements awaited us, yikes! Our adviser returned to our classroom with a roll of papyrus in his hands, some earthshaking announcements including card day, exhibition of outputs, culminating day, graduation day and the no graduation ball, no yearbook and uniform graduation attire policy. How memorable to end our High school. Anyways, my first subject was culminating and for today's scope was all about writing. The intention is to measure our ability on writing such as construction of sentences with respect to its manner and mechanics. We were tasked to wrote an essay on who are we ten years from now. Well, I can see myself ten years from now wearing the suit of integrity as a lawyer, coat of purity as a psychologist or having a heart in giving a hand as a social worker. As the afternoon breeze goes, my remaining subject was community engagement and we end up planning on our community to immerse and engage of. These stuffs ran my day as the sun say its goodbye and the moon goodnight.

Dear diary,

Tuesday is another day of the week and the second day among. It is not as high profile as Monday or Friday but on its own way, it can give me impact. I through with a Monday not as much as fruitful I expected to be, somehow, laziness strike me and for this another dawn, I will try my best to squeeze lemon juice out of it. As the coppery sun skimmed the horizon, I feel its gentle kissed my cheeks and the lovely morning breeze awaken me. As usual routine of mine, facing cookery pots and kitchen stuffs greeted me this morning. It is around 6:45 when I arrived in school. I always flight as early as possible to train myself to be punctual. Anyways, my first subject for Tuesday schedule was trends. We just checked our papers and after counting on checks we discussed a brief scope for the last quarter’s lesson. We tackled on Local networks and introduce what are those networks that surround us. People need to form local networks to protect their life to right and I am greatly believe in the saying no man is an island. The second subject was creative non-fiction. For this content, our teacher gave as the 2 hours’ time for meeting our paper and pen to gradually compile our non-fiction stories. As the afternoon sky continue to bloom, my remaining subject to end the class hours was philosophy. As what the previous subject ran through we were intend to check on our examination paper and after that our subject teacher gave us the remaining time to do our stuffs and commitments. The whole duration of my day was not as good or bad, it was productive somehow by doing some of my requirement in creative non-fiction but suddenly cold air hit me and I have no enough fire to fight.

Dear diary,

After battling with morning Monday blues and beating Tuesday, it is now Wednesday. Taking the half of weekdays feels a little cool air passing through my nostrils as Friday slowly brightens up. Like Tuesday, Wednesday is an ordinary day for me not as impactful as Monday nor Friday but there may be unforeseen event will happen and turn into an impactful one. As the skies aflame with a rising sun, I woke up with a soft morning light from a serious nightmare I got from bed. My lost soul revealed the death of my father and my heart shrunk and digs deep with a massive crestfallen emotion above it. Fear kills me that moment because I love my father so much and I don't know what will happen to me if he suddenly gone that way. I already supposed to post the entire message I wanted to tell to my father with a picture of him and me at recognition day in Facebook but I immediately woke up and relief ruled me as I realized that it was all a dream and I thought that it was all true. I feel the tears ran through my cheeks while I am dreaming, eyes were closed and unconscious happening with that evil spirit inside me. I feel comfort as I switch on the light inkling the delusion. The deafening silence ruled me for a moment as I recover myself from recent happening and went into the kitchen to start my daily chores. My first subject for this day is culminating. The whole time was spent discussing our concept and plan for the upcoming exhibition of outputs and culminating day. My second subject is Entrepreneur. Our teacher thought that her class was on the afternoon the reason why she did not came on her time. As the sun continues its warm blazing, my final subject was community engagement. My subject teacher was not around but he left us some remainders for our community engagement and told us to plan for the upcoming immersion including the committees for the said event. I went home directly after class hoping to use my time writing my tasks. After some writings I've done, I end up scrolling my social media accounts and didn't went back to my stuffs.

Dear diary,

Surpassing three days of hoping for a productive day, yey! It is now Thursday and Friday say its hello. Moving on from yesterday's nightmare, I am so glad that it didn't try to ruin my today's mood. A glow in the sky awakens me before the sun fully rises. My sleep went well that I woke up 10 mins late after its five o'clock. Indolently and snaillike, I move into the kitchen eyes blinking while tugging my hair. As usual, I did my household chores and prepared myself going to school. For today’s session, my first subject was trends. We just fasten our seatbelt for the straight two-hour discussion. After passing through the local networks, we discussed today the networks of nature that emphasizes the connection of all organisms on earth and the biodiversity of species. Break has passed and the next subject is creative non-fiction. Before all, sir Jepte informed us about the outstanding awards in different fields to be applied by us graduating students. My classmates started to talked about their achievements and I remained steady as I have no award to be proud of nor extra-curricular except an award every convocation day but a moderate fire grew inside of me as I heard the news. Like we did last meeting, we just met our paper and pen to finish our non-fiction works and again, not much of my time was spent doing this given task and end up chit chatting with Catherine, my "cutie" seatmate. The midday heat of a tropical sun continue to spread and its warm wrapped me suddenly I feel sleepy. My afternoon is so sleepy but I need to fight this boredom feeling to listen to my philosophy teacher but she added my dozy as we discussed the whole time. As the sun set in the horizon, I was working on my assignments but I don't have the willingness to finish it and again, I end up facing my contraption.

Dear diary,

What beautiful early morning sunshine to start a day and thanks god its friyey! The long wait is over for me because Friday is my favorite day and I don’t want to deny being fond of that. It was a cold Friday morning because heavy rain stroked at around 1 or 2 am as I check it on my cellphone, I’m not really sure about the time matter because I am an oil every time I sleep. As the dimming surrounding slowly cracks, I did my daily assignment about facing cooking pots to cook rice and boil water and other stuffs to do. When I arrived at school, I am the first honor as no one arrive yet or just because I’m too early or just my classmates meant to arrive late because it is Friday. However, from 7:30 to 9:00, we are as free as bird because it is our free time and I use this opportunity to continue working on my non-fiction works. By the way, every Friday we are just taking 2 subjects, entrepreneur and p.e class and to continue the day, our second subject was entrepreneur and we just present the prototype of our innovated products, defended it and let Ma'am Visto choose the one that is unique and worth it to make for as our official product. As the afternoon engulfed by hazy blistering sun, we were on our second session for swimming lesson. I am not a swimmer so I have some struggles but I was able to perform well and reached the opposite side of the pool. I just need some practice to enhance the skill and to perform well the given task. After the tiresome stuffs on the water, Bernadith and I decided to go to Jollibee to make our tummy full and rest our heavy feeling as we floated our body and lost some strength. While on the fast-food chain, we noticed the cute service crew guy and both of us laughing the whole time doing crazy action and took a shot of him. Because it is Friday, I went into our home at Antong Lutayan and continue writing this diary.

Dear diary,

Bothered by the morning shines that pearly light, I woke up as early as I could be so that I will be working early on my non-fiction works but suddenly there was a power interruption. Power interruption? Brownout? Goodness my battery was empty from last night's use of typing my stuffs. I turtle-like walk toward the kitchen and I see breakfast was already prepared. I eat breakfast and proceed to my worn out clothes and uniform so that I could wash them. What a pleasing day. My cellphone was totally shut and the moment I needed this the most, the moment also for the power interruption to show. I ruined my whole plan for the day including my time management for today's works. I was done in everything but the electricity challenge me as nowhere to found. It was around 12 when it came back and I hurriedly recharged my dead contraption. I was working the whole day, from 1 in the afternoon up to 12 midnight doing on my required tasks. I forgot to take a bath and take dinner as I was that too busy and in a hurry to finish my business. I am already exhausted and running out of english words. My head was already aching but my determination to finish this fueled me. I was writing this exactly 12 midnight and I promise to take my sleep after I finish this diary. Good night.

Dear diary,

Sunday feeling is associated by going back to work, school or any duty. That Sunday blue giving me sadness but I am happy and thankful that there's another day to start of. As the sun poured through the windows, I don't want to move yet because I am still tired of yesterday's bombarded works. As I woke up the aroma of tinolang native na manok greeted me good morning and I eagerly grab utensils be fill my empty stomach from heavy sleep. As what I did yesterday, I was doing my requirements the whole time but this time is different because I took a bath first before I completely end the day without the touch of water as what yesterday to me.

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 7 years

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Diva of the Dustbins

The poor are always with us, especially if they’re sly, crazy, uppity, and usurious. This is very much the case with Mary Shepherd, the grubby heroine of The Lady in the Van (2015). An elderly, unwashed vagrant, craftily deranged and garbed in rags, she makes her residence in a rattletrap van stuffed with layers of filth and rubbish. Accustomed to having her own way and nothing else, Miss Shepherd has her demands rewarded by playing on the sympathy of strangers, pillaging their sense of reluctant decency, and repaying their charity with disdain. Reigning over her surroundings from her motorized cat box, she is, in her prickly, contrarian fashion, an inverted success.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the film adaptation of The Lady in the Van is the most recent version by Alan Bennett of his lengthy acquaintance with Miss Shepherd, which began in the late 1960′s. His first recounting of her puzzling life and times took the form of an essay, published in 1989 in The London Review of Books. He then went on to write it up as a factual novella, put on the market in 1999 by Profile Books; a play which had its premiere in the same year at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End; and a 2009 radio play for BBC Radio 4. The relationship between the lofty vagabond and the diffident author made its start when she beckoned him to push her van through the London burough of Camden to which Bennett had recently moved. Prefacing much toil to come his way, he accommodated her. Their acquaintance continued when she settled in his street, parking for indefinite periods before his neighbour’s homes, to their tolerant liberal distaste; then, finally, she bunked in front of his address. Thereafter he observed from his writing desk her comings and goings, her tantrums and waywardness, and the many wrangles she instigated with the locals, all of which became neighbourhood business as usual. But after Bennett more than once witnessed her being bullied on the street by passing hooligans, he offered Miss Shepherd refuge in his driveway. A kind and Christian gesture? No, apparently; he claims to have been motivated by his own interests, as the disruptions aimed at her were interfering with his work. The arrangement, he assumed, would last a short while; then surely she would move on, as was her habit. She parked her van in his front yard and stayed there for fifteen years.

What ensues in the film’s account of Miss Shepherd’s residency at 23 Gloucester Crescent is a dual set of duels. One is between Bennett, impersonated with ace aptitude by Alex Jennings, and his unsanitary tenant, played in a whirl of insolent bravura by Maggie Smith. The other is between Bennett and himself. In Bennett versus Shepherd, the victor is clearly the old lady, who infringes on her host’s life without a moment’s hesitation and nary an apology. Regarding him with the gaze of an imperious tortoise, she makes it plain that it’s she who tolerates him, not the reverse, and expects further accommodation, including the use of his electricity (for light and heating inside the van) and his bathroom (which she pollutes with scattershot feculence, often). He in return is torn between indulging her expectations and fuming at her arrogance. In Bennett versus Bennett we have duplicate versions of him in the split screen tradition: one is Bennett the man who interacts with the world at large, if, much of the time, barely; the other is Bennett the writer who takes care of the literary duties and interacts only with Bennett the man. A sort of West Yorkshire chorus--Bennett was born in Leeds--the inky-fingered Alan is forever dashing out text while challenging his other self to abandon his proper, passive existence and go have a real life. Personifying this bickering duo, Jennings literally co-stars with himself. This clash is pretty much a tie, with both Bennetts getting their jabs in, though the wordsmith is the more acidulous of the two.

Inevitably, it can be said that Maggie Smith plays Miss Shepherd for all time; the part was written for her and she originated it under Hytner’s direction in the play’s first production. She’s in her customary wondrous form here, turning throwaway lines into intonational near-zingers, peering suspiciously at Jennings through a tangle of wrinkles, and hobbling amok with a stiff, waddling gait. There’s no doubt that she makes the role hers, but I’m not entirely convinced it was worth her while to do so. Miss Shepherd’s reliance on her grab bag of survival tactics--her wheedling, dictating, and deflecting--is perfectly understandable; those who have nothing are forced to undertake desperate unpleasantries, not just for the sake of survival but for mere conveniences too. But she, like all manipulators and monomaniacs, becomes tiresome before long. Habitually dismissive and ungrateful for help and kindness, she milks her every opportunity to take advantage of others, and with no shortage of prim justification. “I’m a sick woman,” she’s fond of saying. “Dying, possibly.” The word “possibly” is employed frequently, all part of her ongoing refusal to be pinned down on anything. Her nuthouse utterances (like her claim that she’s been chatting at the post office with the Holy Virgin) pile up quickly and thickly, and though Maggie Smith keeps this diva of the dustbins knobby and lively, Miss Shepherd is, I think, too narrow, too reflexive to be truly interesting, and in her rare moments of happiness, she’s rather a bore--so skewed toward the adversarial that good humour produces nothing distinctive in her. Nor is her bountiful contribution of fecal matter of any great fascination. Her mephitic leavings seem to end up nearly everywhere: in her host’s toilet, on his floor, in his front yard, and Lord know where else. Bennett must have been exhausted by her, and, even worse, bored with her. (Those who serve emotional tyrants long enough are likely to find themselves depleted by boredom, even more so than by resentment.) No improvement at all is a moment of truce she has with Bennett when he consents to push her up the street in a wheelchair and she revels in a surge of childlike exuberance while rolling down the hilly pavement. It’s a needless sop to the audience, this episode; buffing her claws doesn’t redeem her in the least. There is also a worthless subplot wherein she’s persecuted by a former policeman (Jim Broadbent) who’s privy to a threatening incident from her younger days. This bit of narrative can be safely overlooked; it feels thoroughly fictional, and it is.

It’s not until late in the story that Miss Shepherd’s past comes into focus, and a diverse one it is. She was, Bennett learns, a talented pianist, and during her youth had studied under Alfred Cortot in Paris. Further to this, she had been a nun as well as a wartime ambulance driver, and was committed by a relative to a hospital for mental illness. All this, too, has a faintly ersatz slant, though it’s factual, and dramatically welcome. In the end, Miss Shepherd’s previous life is the component that opens her up as a character. It’s when, for example, she’s depicted playing a piano searchingly after a lengthy absence from musical activity that she becomes compelling. This time she’s exploring, not exploiting, and for once she’s confronting someone--herself--quietly and honestly. Similarly, she becomes affecting near the movie’s conclusion when speaking with fragile openness about her former existence, telling Bennett what music and its absence have meant to her. In these situations, she becomes a person, not a germy set of strategies and defenses, and finally this mismatched pair--both of them odd, intelligent, and isolated, both spawn of the arts--seems fitting company for each other. Even so, within Bennett’s literary archive, I much prefer the sportive political scrimmage undertaken by Guy Burgess (Alan Bates in top form) and Coral Browne (superbly cast as herself) in An Englishman Abroad (1983) and the ambiguous debate on aesthetics and identity between Anthony Blunt (smoothly represented by James Fox) and Elizabeth II (a savory comic triumph by Prunella Scales) in A Question of Attribution (1991), both among Bennett’s best scripted works.

As for the standoff between the two Alans, it proves to be more speculative and entertaining than the clash with Miss Shepherd. Putting both halves of himself outside the narrative as they interact, Bennett is depicted as a pair of squabbling twins with no authority figure to whom they can complain about each other. Miss Shepherd, in her way, is the closest they get to having a mother. She inhabits her own delusional fantasy kingdom as much as the two Bennetts belong to their imaginary sphere of existence, and they grouse and gossip about her as kids will do when a shared parent goes out of favour. Ultimately, it’s Bennett the writer--the one who stays out of her way--who understands her best. “It’s will, pure will,” he vents of her domination of the Bennett household. “She’s known what she wanted all along.” Weaving throughout all this are a number of thornily involving dynamics, such as the artist’s preference for the making of fiction over the duties of regular life. Also: how private thoughts and hidden emotions are aired in one’s creative output under dramatic cover, making it a more authentic portrait than what it’s presented to be while real life is managed with evasions and fabrications of all sorts and sizes, thereby rendering it an incomplete and faintly false version of itself. And further still: how casually and uncritically revisionism in general makes its way into our emotions, perceptions, and statements. “Will you write about me?” Miss Shepherd, momentarily withdrawing from her official spot within the story proper, asks the everyday Bennett. He looks to his literary doppelganger, exclaiming, “She didn’t say this.” Alan the scribbler is unpersuaded. “No,” he agrees, scrawling down the exchange. “But why shouldn’t she?” The Pirandellian layers are pretty much perfect: the actual Bennett has not only written about Miss Shepherd, he’s also written about writing about her--as does one of his fabricated reflections. The concentric gradations of all this could be endless, but the script keeps them in line, on the mark, and briskly incisive.

Ineffably English, Bennett is by now something of an aesthetic diagnostician of his country’s class perspectives and commonplace emotional adventures. Ever watchful, he brings a prodding, prosaic authenticity to the depiction of intimate disappointment and those small, revealing incidents that slip past but nag forever after from the sidelines. It’s this penchant for the narrow, stubborn dramas within conventional life that steers much of his work. We find it here during the uncomfortable, sidestepping interactions by Bennett and his de facto mother Lilian (referred to here only as Mam), who is sinking into depression and dementia and slipping out of his life, just as Miss Shepherd is burrowing deeper into it. Within their scenes together, there’s an expansive, troubling topic at work, that of the detachment via time and aging between parent and child, with its numerous insoluble dilemmas: the silently shared anxieties, the habits and burdens of blood loyalties, the sense of mutual avoidance and sentimental failure. He asks at one point if she’s been taking her medication, and she, with a trace of dodging discomfort, looks away and says, “When I remember...” It’s the most candid and emotionally costly moment we see her having with her son--reassuring him while admitting with resignation that she knows she’s slipping. This is a brief, finely judged performance by Gwen Taylor, one deserving of more screen time.

Even with such depictions of emotional wreckage, this film is a less doleful, more congenial effort than much of Bennett’s output--it hasn’t the loquacious desperation of his Talking Heads monologues--and it canters past likably enough, with a self-mocking conclusion in which a deceased Miss Shepherd, assisted by computer animation, is whisked beaming into the arms of God. But throughout the previous stretch of the storyline, there’s been a querying undercurrent of practical urgency: what is to be done with Miss Shepherd’s disassociated tribe--those who are castoff, defeated, addicted, and beset by mental illness, whose behaviour is difficult, unpredictable, and alarming, who don’t conform to expected standards or recognize the status quo, and are primarily viewed by many as a financial hardship? If they aren’t welcomed anyplace, where do they go? And how much do we involve ourselves in their misfortunes? The situation is of massive proportions, as old as humanity, and ignored by the majority of us--and no one in this part of the story finds anything resembling heaven.

Books

Writing Home, Alan Bennett, Faber & Faber, 1994

(Posted: 05/11/17)

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