Play Ya' Charactah'

All the worlds a stage... 

In my case (and the case of most recovering academics and definitely most bloggers!) that world is more like a podcast studio (and not like a nice one, rather one where one of the participants is sitting on a bed, which is next to an IKEA desk which is also "the board")...

 My DM (and yes, as an old person i urban dictionaried that to make sure i wasn't going to sound too stupid - turns out it's #5!) is a young fella, DM Steve, and as a young white man he has a lot of opinions (as i did {and do!} when i was/am a young white man).

...Among these [is] that Star Trek: Picard is not truly a Star Trek show.  His premise is (i've been taught that the best way to argue is to first state your opponents case as well as they could have ever said it so they can only say, "i agree with that") that Picard isn't Star Trek...  It lacks Gene Roddenberry's foundational vision that the future is bright and the human project (for early Star Trek read that as the American Project) is optimistic.  DM Steve pointed to the fact the Raffi, the only major black (and female) character we've met (or seemingly will meet) lives in a trailer after her Star Fleet career has (been) ended, because she was Picard's right hand and he decided to quit.

Furthermore, the inclusion of swears is highly un-Star Trek (notable fanFeeds notwithstanding).  DM Steve contends that the new show may be quality sci-fi (tho as yet that is to be determined), but it is decidedly not a part of the Star Trek universe, because it doesn't adhere to the defining vision...

The story of Star Trek (production-wise) is complicated and varied.  When The Original Series (TOS) was on TV, it was struggling for continued existence and was limited by the constraints of its era as a monster-of-the-week series with minimal character development.  As a result, every problem was wrapped up by the end of the hour.  TOS had just one single two-part episode in its three year run...

Thus, it wasn't until the movies (and really not until the second - The Wrath of Khan) where any problem - with a monster of the week; or with the larger world (er, galaxy) - had real stakes.  The Wrath of Khan ends in a victory, but it is partial, and at great cost (sorry, Spock!). 

When The Next Generation (TNG) came about, it also began as a monster-of-the week series.  Through its run of seven seasons there were 9 two-parters, but only one before the end of season 3 (and that was the series premiere, where both episodes aired on the same evening).

As TNG came in to its own, it started to venture away from the straight "one episode, one new problem" formula, and explore recurring conflicts in the larger world.  First external, like Q, the Ferengi, the Crystalline Entity - but TNG also started to explore the concept that Star Fleet - the human institution at the core of the entire Star Trek Universe - was perhaps not infallible.  I think first with "The Measure of a Man" where Star Fleet sanctions reclassifying Data, a graduate of their academy, as property.

More importantly, as the series progressed, was the relationship with the Borg - and particularly how Picard deals with them (and particularly the changes in his behavior after his assimilation).  The Borg are the perfect test case - an enemy so heinous that any action to thwart would be justified.  When Picard has the opportunity in Season 5's "I, Borg" episode to infect the Borg with what might constitute a genocidal pandemic he plans to use it right up until the last minute when he is swayed to take another course.

Picard's moral dilemma (much like his rampant revenge motive throughout much of First Contact, the best of the Next Gen films) is what makes it Star Trek.  Roddenberry's vision was one of a future that had achieved much - an optimistic outlook to answer the dystopian imagining that makes up most science fiction.  But the Star Trek universe is not a utopia.  It is utopian in its ideals, but that work (like our work) is an ongoing project, toward betterment.

In Star Trek: Picard, there is a clear moral balance - "good guys" and "bad guys" (some are what we expect - e.g. Romulans bad | but some teams aren't matching our expectations - e.g. Borg, Star Fleet, or androids).  What's unfamiliar about it is the pace - i expect that by the end of Season 1 we will have resolution of the moral order and clarity and what has gone wrong.  It's a season-long episode, and good will triumph in the end (though perhaps just a partial victory).

The world of Star Trek isn't achieved.  Even at its origin (whether that's TOS, Enterprise, Zefram Cochrane or even the Kelvin Universe reboot), the utopian ideal was a work in process.  And a core value of the world is betterment.  There were cracks in Star Fleet in The Undiscovered Country, TNG and DS9.  Too long resting on its laurels assuming it was good because it was Star Fleet.  In Insurrection, the corrosive corruption had taken full hold, and 10 years later when Mars is destroyed (by whom, we're not quite sure yet - though it sure seems it wasn't the synths), it has taken full hold... Selfish protectionism and the path of the human project seemingly lost...

Call to Order

The March 2020 meeting of the Commune starts in 20 minutes...  (as a reminder, first Friday of each month 6pm - 8pm CT).

Please feel free to text me with any new business, or we can use the comments section...

Let me know if we need to set up a group chat or anything...

Jalapeño Serioso

We ate last night (for about the 500th time) at Jalapeño Loco - hands down the best Mexican restaurant in Milwaukee.  Just north of the airport (5067 S. Howell Avenue), it looks from the street like a place you'd pass by, but inside it's cozy, particularly on the bar side (best option if you're two or one is the bar, which is friendly and plenty of space for food).

Order the High Taste Margarita while you consider your menu options.  It is a superior concoction made with the Sauza Conmemorativo.  The house and gold versions are fine - and there are flavors if that's your speed, but if you don't go high taste you're selling yourself short. 

The reason there are so few great Mexican restaurants is finding a balance of a great margarita with exceptional authentic food.  Jalapeño Loco (or "Jalapanoes" {hard 'J'} as my in-laws fondly refer to it) specializes in Oaxacan cuisine, and dabble in a number of other regions of Mexico.  You really can't go wrong on their menu, although their moles are quite special and not to be missed.  The weekly specials are also generally quite good, and we frequently visit and only stay on this ever-changing list.  Last night, it was the Chalupas appetizer and Pollo Estofado and a few High Taste Margaritas. 

As we were entering last night, we were bemoaning the fact that Milwaukee doesn't have any truly upscale Mexican places, which are coming into favor in larger metros.  So we propose a new restaurant in Milwaukee - in the same vein as Jalapeño Loco (perhaps even with the exact same menu!).  I think we should call it Jalapeño Serioso, and it should probably find a location in the 3rd Ward/5th Ward fluidity.  A lofty, industrial space - if Hugo and Janet want to start it, that would be awesome (!), but if they don't want to, that's okay... your spot is a favorite already. 

But i duly submit this as a brilliant idea...

Stakes, rare...

A dozen years ago today, I started a post where i was going to (i think) review the holiday show we'd been to see a few days prior.

I have these past few years been working on a reclamation project for Roman Numeral J - finishing the "draft" posts that were never released to the public (quite a tragedy, i know).  Generally, i've tried to recapture what i remember as the original intent of the post.  (On occasion, these have been "important" RNJ contributions, really furthering the thinking and mission of this blog.  Other times, including the John Waters one).

As i watch the 4th quarter of the 200th matchup of the Bears & Packers (Anthony Miller just scored to bring them within one score), i wonder for a moment what it's all about...  Why write this?  Why post it publicly?

My answers are manifold.  I do still primarily consider myself a writer.  And a thinker.  Success in this capacity is nebulous for me.  Or any capacity, really.  I write because i enjoy it.  I write because i value the ability to look back at how my thinking has changed over time.  I write to commit myself to the thoughts i thought at a certain time.  (Our era is one of self revisionist thinking - where we can pretend we always knew the things we now know.  The era of truthiness is all around us). 

Happy Christmas to all of y'all.

i get it now!

I have been re-watching the Star Wars saga chronologically in preparation for Episode IX.  I've reached, at long last, The Last Jedi (Die Letzten Jedi, as i like to refer to it, to show that it's plural!) and have been watching all of the Forces of Destiny shorts in order as well as a few of the other ephemera.

So far, i have read several of the comics and working my way through a few novels that are now considered "canon".  Of course, i have throughout my days read some of the Star Wars universe literature (Timothy Zahn's trilogy, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and Splinter of the Mind's Eye), now all disavowed.  But now i plan to make a slow crawl through this new canon.

Source: funko.com

I promise not to drag it out here and bore you all with an epic play-by-play (as i have been guilty of for some other sci fi universes...), but the pop-cultural mass-production machine has put a mythology together which is vast and rich.  They will spend the next decade exploring it in upcoming tv shows and a new trilogy and more Star Wars Stories (i expect)...

With this third trilogy about to finish its arc (as well as put a closing argument on the entire nonology), I think it's worth noticing both how each trilogy was a set of its time, but the themes of the entire story are timeless and timely.

Much attention has been paid to Kylo Ren's line about "killing your past to become who you were meant to be".  I think this has been read largely as a millennial claim of the future (from the hands of the likes of, say, Boomers like Kylo's annoying dad and his former teacher).  While this trilogy does serve to pass the torch to a new generation, it's also a reminder to us all to leave behind the vestiges of the prior generations that would hold us back in our whole new world.

Kylo's request of Rey (implicitly at this moment and explicitly later) to join him and join the existing corporate power structure {aka "The Dark Side"} and help him overtake it) is one of multiple poles in the power nexus in this galaxy far far away (and so too ours as well).  We will call this particular position the Zuckerberg Lane, a young upstart acquiring a vast amount of power while the primary great powers of government (The Empire & The Rebellion) are focused on consolidating their own power against each other.  

Another "power pole" (i don't love this term...) that explicitly states its case in The Last Jedi is when force ghost Yoda says to Luke that "we are what they grow beyond.  That is the true burden of all masters."  This is an acknowledgement of the idea that our next generation not only will be our betters, but must be.  It's a radical acknowledgement - and one that used to be inherent, unspoken.  When we look back, we (the "now people") look better, smarter, more intellectually sophisticated compared to our ancestors.  This doesn't mean we don't honor them and appreciate them, it's just a different stance from blind fealty.

It's easy to think of the Jedi (current and former) as a bloc of good - all light side, all the time - but I think they more closely resemble something like, say, "Democrats".  Sure, they mostly do good things most of the time and are generally on the right side of history, but in order for them to truly have power we also have to accept the Joe Manchins and John Bel Edwards who may think some things we don't want them to sometimes, but also mostly agree that governments (Galactic Senates or domestic ones) can do some good.  As a bloc, they have also accepted some evils (whether those be Southern Segregationists or an Imperial Clone Army), but those are products of historic naiveté, and must be accepted within its historical context in order to build the movement, n'est-ce pas?

Yoda's line about passing history on to your progenitors is fundamental to a progressive perspective of history.  Each generation must both believe itself to be the best, most enlightened, best suited to move history forward, and also willing to let the next generation be better than they were once their time has passed.  

This is the era we now inhabit, where our "resistance establishment' (pro-Biden Democrats - also perhaps Deval Patrick's constituency) is struggling to make arguments against The First Order (the Tea Party ==> the Trump Party), but hand wringing and hemming and hawing at the radical approach Democrats who want to let the system crumble and build it up new (here Yoda and Luke are played by, I guess Bernie and Warren?? - I think this all ultimately will come to mean that Rey is AOC & Stacy Abrams wrapped in to one, and we will pass the keys on to them soon enough...).

This closing trilogy of the Skywalker Epic is unfolding in tumultuous political times not just here in the US, but globally.  Trumpian politics are dripping even in the first installment in 2015 with the First Order taking out a vast portion of the inner planetary systems and the existing establishment politics.  "Draining the Swamp" as it were.  

The Prequels began in a pre-9-11 moment, and the world they introduce us to in the first installment, it's a dreamy vision of the always better erstwhile.  The Phantom Menace's Coruscant (and even moreso Naboo) are an idyllic past to the familiar worlds we knew from the original trilogy.  While there is a nod to Clinton-Era political squabbles and self-dealing, the world is an "OK, Boomer" dream status that will never be revived. 

It's the middle trilogy, the original set, that comes from an era of our world when they didn't know yet what they were really all about.  It's a big part of why the themes of the movies are so general and mythological.  The trilogy knows it's about struggle, but what that struggle is wasn't clear until much later.  1977 - 1985 was just at the start of the Era of Inequity that we live in now.

This is the struggle of our era - it's the fight of our lives.  We will see what the Rise of Skywalker has to say about it in a month's time.  And then, let's see what we do next in 2020 in our own response.

*      *       *

17 December 2019

Watching Star Wars: Behind Closed Doors from REELZ (is that a thing?), and the clarity of misunderstanding of the prequels is made clear.  A lot of the critique of the prequels is couched in storytelling - i.e. the original trilogy made the battle versus good and evil the main point, but the prequels are so bureaucratic, administrative and political.   The new trilogy has been exciting and modern and definitely better than those pesky prequels.  It's a fair argument, but i think is the argument for what i said above.

The simple way to say this is (unfortunately) that people were simpler.  But it's not just that.  The more important function of (American) history is that the era of the prequels (1999 - 2005) was an empty era (i know, i know - 9/11 happened then, but 9/11 is a logical conclusion of the 1970s/80s Islamic Terrorism that we ignored for most of the 80s and 90s).

Politically, and culturally, it's a kind of boring time.  1999 was a kick-ass year for movies, and the era of prestige tv was about to begin (or maybe did, i don't have exact dates), but it was sort of easy politically.  [NOT HISTORICALLY by the way!!!  Bush v. Gore, then 9/11, then re-electing the (up to then) dumbest person we had elected president.  And culturally, the technological superfuture was still sorta basic. 

My argument basically is that folks watching the original trilogy needy clarity (good vs. evil, dark v. light) because they'd just come out of Vietnam, Watergate, hippie reclamation, etc.  The prequels came out when it was only just becoming clear that all of the powers that be (Republicans and Democrats and large corporations and big tech {whatever that might be!} and all of it were aligning against actual regular people who weren't already rich and had maybe just trusted the hangover of the New Deal to carry them through to retirement could just start to grasp that everything was conspiring against us, the regular people.

I think in this context the prequels read amazingly well.  They are prescient, not just of Anakin's turn to the dark side, but of a vast chunk of America - first in the re-election of a war criminal president, and then later in the historic and wonderful and also par-for-the-course election of Barack Obama who governed as a Compassionate Centrist (and i love him dearly and what he accomplished, but by the time The Force Awakens comes out it is clear we are off the rails and are going to elect someone for our times like either Donald J. Trump {or Bernie!}.

EPIC (bad) Game Day

Few things in day to day life are worthy of being described as "epic".

Hangovers - to be sure.  A few times I've gone to a good man's home in Waukesha for Epic Game Day (and sometimes have played board games that fit the epic description).  There's a company that calls itself "Epic", but I don't think that it really is all that epic...

Today was an epic sports day for me, and it went so so badly...  Almost all of my selected sports teams were playing today - and they all failed to win.

My night ended with the end of this season's road for Minnesota FC, who a short time ago lost their first ever playoff game.  The Loons are in only their 3rd year of existence as an MLS team.  I started following them closely during the summer of 2018, when I started following a number of European Clubs closely - checking fixtures and watching games when they are available for tv consumption.

A few hours earlier, my Chicago Bears played a craptastic game and lost badly to fall to 3-3 for the season.  In a classic Bear's move, the team suddenly came to life and scored 2 TDs in the final 2 and a half minutes (and even appeared to grab a second onside kick) even though the game was fully out of reach at that point...

I've written of my Bears fandom, but never I think, specifically, about how completely they are the absolute worst fucking team to be a fan of ever with the way they give and take and seem like they're something and then pull a rug out from under and then totally suck, but show signs.  The Double Doink was pretty much the moment my entire Bear fandom had been leading up to for most of my life... and now this.

Prior to the Bears barf-fest, my Liverpudlians failed to win.  They did tie, but meh - now that we win so often, it's a bit of a let-down (though we were somewhat lucky to equalize...).  And, although it was available on ESPN+, I missed the earlier Nottingham Forest match - which we lost to fall out of the top spot on the table.

Tyler Ledger Joker Fi

I went and saw Joker last night - dutifully.  It was violent, very well made, well acted (and heavily acted), wonderfully shot, all like you've heard.

I would also like to submit that it may just be the most thought-provoking piece of cinematic commentary on our current socio-economic condition in decades.

It is a radical film full of radical ideas and radical violence.  Although it saddens me that it is radical to say that the current economic status quo is wildly immoral and that an existential cognitive dissonance is necessary to participate in the system honestly.

The central question of Joker is whether any of the events of the movie actually happened or not within the confines of the fictional Batman universe.  This question is revealed in the final moments of the movie when Arthur is locked up for treatment of his mental illness.  It becomes clear that this moment is chronologically prior to all of the violence that has previously occurred in the film.  Arthur describes all (or possibly just some) of that violence as a "joke" that as occurred to him as we was speaking with his case worker.  When she asks him what it was, he says that she "wouldn't get it".

Source: tvOvermind.com

This 'final reveal' parallels the 20-year-old final reveal of what I consider the last really radical movie focused on these same themes, Fight Club.  In that movie we learn that our previously reliable narrator was actually Tyler Durden the whole time.  (Also, in a partial re-viewing the scene where Lou drops in on a fight club evening, Tyler's hysterical laughter after having his ass kicked by Lou is preminiscent of Arthur's own manifestations of his mental illness).

Earlier in the film, it is revealed that Arthur's mother was diagnosed with delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder (a diagnosis that may be pretty close to part of Arthur's own plus a dash of schizophrenia - which is reified in the moment when Arthur is actually standing in the room as an adult when his mother is being booked into Arkham after abusing him as a child).  While many reviewers have made much of the portrayal of mental illness in the film, I think the underlying argument of both of these movies is that some forms of thought and action (including some violence) that we casually refer to as mental illness are in fact radical responses to the immoral status quo.

To be clear, I am not condoning any real world violence here, but I do think that artistic depiction of radical political violence can pose important questions that perhaps can't be voiced within the current socio-political climate.  Questions like - what might happen if we take the modern-era royalty (i.e. the super-rich) out of power.  In Joker the one piece of violence that we know "really happens" (although perhaps not exactly as we see it occur in the movie) is the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne.  This event is formative to the future Batman, so it has to occur within the larger mythology of the film.

We also tend to forget in our modern and enlightened era how rare it is to have massive social change without violence.  Although the "clowns" in Joker are easily read as violent criminal thugs engaged in looting and riots, they are also the lumpenproletariat activated by their clown prince.  They are engaged in a modern iteration of the French Revolution and their King Louis XVI (i.e. Thomas Wayne) needs to topple.  One wonders what, exactly, this makes Batman in this historical parallel?