Linkblogging for 23/08/08
A few quick ones today – I’ve still got 3400 unread items in my feed reader from the week and a bit I was away, so I’ve probably missed all sorts of things I *should* be linking to today. Anyway…
The Mindless Ones are still doing their own special thing, with bobsy using the I Ching to try to divine who the villain is in Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP, while Zom reminisces about childhood attempts to form a superhero team.
Various writers in The Grauniad are talking about how good everything is in the north of England. Obviously, you, as a reader of this blog, are a person of taste and discretion, so you already know this. However, in that strange other country called London they appear to believe they are the only ones who have running water and electricity. Some even seem to believe that this ‘London’ is in some way superior to Manchester, God’s Own City (it’s not even superior to Liverpool or Leeds, though I have been told that some parts of London do reach almost Newcastle-esque levels of tolerability). This link, patronising as it at times appears (Manchester has orchestras too! They eat food in Yorkshire just like the real people darn sarf!) might help these Cock-er-knee people see how misguided they are…
John Conway and Simon Kochen have proved a result that has always seemed intuitively obvious to me (and which ties in neatly with the Darkseid post below) – determinism and the concept of ‘free will’ are mutually incompatible, and thus any hidden variable model of quantum mechanics (such as for example Bohm’s model) means free will doesn’t exist. This means that either other interpretations (such as the standard Copenhagen interpretation) are true, or that free will is a mirage. It still leaves the question open of course – and since I’ve never found a definition of free will that has any operational definition at all I have no problem with the assumption that it *doesn’t* exist – but it will predispose a lot of people towards non-hidden-variable models.
The tube cleaners in London have won a living wage (of sorts – £7.45 an hour is barely a living wage even in a proper city, let alone That London), which is something to celebrate.
And I know this makes me a terrible, horrible person, but all I could think about when reading this Amnesty bulletin about terrible violence in the Philippines was the mental image conjured up by the headline, of “civilians under threat from MILF units and militias”. However, it is a serious situation, and if you’re not already a member of Amnesty, why not?
Darkseid Is
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Well, I’m back… I’ve got a few posts worked up after my absence. Tonight or tomorrow you can expect the second post on Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, tomorrow a post on Master (the first Big Finish I’m going to talk negatively about), and some point soon a look at Final Crisis and its tie ins.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Darkseid recently, partly because of Final Crisis… some of what I’ve got to say here will be familliar to people who’ve read some of my previous writing about the character, but I’m trying to get to the bottom of why I think he’s a great character, possibly the best villain in comics, even though you could count the good stories in which he’s appeared on the fingers of one hand (Kirby’s original Fourth World comics, Rock Of Ages, Seven Soldiers, Final Crisis (and those three are all really ‘Morrison’s DCU story’), possibly The Great Darkness Saga, and that’s about it (I’m not counting his appearances in Ambush Bug here…)).
While I was away in Oxford, I picked up a copy of Michael Bywater’s book Lost Worlds from a remainder bookshop. Bywater’s book is a collection of short humorous essays on things that have been lost from the world, be they meerschaum pipes, Bywater’s maternal grandfather, Proper Doctors or attitudes to life. It seems at least in part to have been inspired by Bywater’s thoughts about the then-recent death of his friend Douglas Adams (who is only mentioned very occasionally, but whose ghost haunts almost every page), and the conclusion it comes to, in so far as it comes to one, is that without loss we would never know true happiness.
That in turn brought to mind a few other things, but it made me think of a book I read a couple of years ago, which I’ve wanted to post a review of ever since, but couldn’t formulate a proper response to – The Singularity Is Here by Ray Kurzweill.
For those who don’t know, the concept of the Singularity has been accurately described as ‘the Rapture for geeks’. The idea is that we are incredibly lucky to live in a time when a bunch of Baby Boomers who are terrified of their own mortality will not have to face it, as somehow just before they would be expected to die according to the actuarial tables we’re going to invent artificial intelligence, life extension and nanotechnology, so they’ll be able to turn into immortal robots and just keep growing and expanding til they become the entire universe.
My first reaction on reading this piffle was “Well, I can see why he wants that, but he’s an idiot”. Immortality and omniscience seem to me like the only rational goals which humanity should be aiming for, long term – to go for anything less would be rather pointless – but Kurzweill seemed both unimaginative (he assumes that ‘intellectual property’ either could or should be protected in a world in which every problem of scarcity had been solved) and, frankly, so blinded by wishful thinking he’s become functionally stupid. In particular, he seems to think that all straight-line trends you can draw can be extended out to infinity, without ever taking account of limiting factors.
But then my second thought (and I *am* getting to Darkseid, I promise) was “WHY do I think this is a rational goal?”
Kurzweill, of course, takes it as read that most people want to become, in essence, gods, but I don’t think it’s true. There are a large number of people – Bywater apparently amongst them – who actually take comfort in the fact that everything is transitory. But in my case, and apparently Kurzweill’s, two realisations caused me quite major trauma as a child. The first was that I, like everyone else, would eventually die. The second – and I can remember exactly where I was when I realised this – was that there was no way I could ever possibly know *everything*. I was about seven, and it horrified me to think that there were things that I could never, ever know.
It’s quite probable that many people have had similar reactions. After all, one of our primary instincts is to survive, and evolution has consistently favoured those organisms that could best process information about their surroundings. But most people have learned to deal with it – either through religion, or through acceptance.
Darkseid, however, (I told you it was getting to him) hasn’t.
To quote from Rock Of Ages – “I will remake the entire universe in the image of my soul, Desaad… and when at last I turn to look upon the eternal desolation I have wrought… I will see Darkseid, as in a mirror… and know what fear is.”
Darkseid has looked at the Second Law of Thermodynamics and thought “fuck that”. Or, more likely, “Bother not Darkseid with your ‘entropy’ and your ‘universal laws’ Obeisance to laws, made by man or nature, is the morality of the slave. The morality of Darkseid is conquest. Darkseid is all.”
Because Darkseid has taken that childish realisation and decided it doesn’t apply to him. He’s going to be everything. Because this, ultimately, is what an attempt to deny entropy means. It is entropy that prevents any tyranny from being absolute – Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (one of the fundamental scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, but never as regarded as many others) states that control requires as many options open to the controller as there are degrees of freedom in the thing being controlled, so complete control is impossible. This is because entropy always increases – freedom and death are, ultimately the same thing. You can’t have one without the other.
So Darkseid takes this to its logical conclusion. Remaking the entire universe into himself – getting control over every last quark and meson in it – is the only way he can beat entropy, so that’s what he sets out to do. In this way he’s far more direct than the cheap photocopy Thanos – Thanos *sublimates* his desire – he wants to have sex with Death. Darkseid just wants to destroy death, along with the universe itself, and exist alone, changeless and eternal.
(As Woody Allen put it, “Some people want to acheive immortality through their children. I want to acheive immortality by not dying”.)
But of course, existing changeless and eternal, unaffected by time, is the same as death, isn’t it?
Kurzweill talks in his book about how, once the entire universe has been turned into an information-processing machine in service of immortal human intellects, we’ll have to create new universes in order to keep growing.
This is ultimately why Darkseid is such a compelling villain – because he’s so human.
Linkblogging for 18/08/08
I seem to find all kinds of interesting things about brains. From Mind Hacks again, was Sherlock Holmes suffering from amphetamine psychosis? If so, he’s lucky enough to be able to function better than almost everybody else who’s experienced it.
Brad Hicks gives us a grand sweeping view of the current USian preoccupation with offshore oil-drilling.
As she follows Stark during a year of crisis, exclusively for Vanity Fair, Christine Everhart explores the many contradictions of the man behind the mask, uncovers tales of personal loyalty, patriotism gone awry and corporate betrayal, and asks whether Iron Man is the embodiment of an outdated American fantasy—a self-made, unilateral, technological solution to hopelessly complex problems—and whether he can survive the violent encounter with reality. …Okay, not really. But I think it’s a great piece of…is this what you call fanfiction?
And finally, from the Presurfer, here’s something that just makes me smile: The Ikea Job Interview. The link to “Google and Microsoft interviews” is worth a look too.
Linkblogging for 17/08/08
Hello, Holly again.
Okay technically it’s past midnight, but these are definitely yesterday’s links. This time I was the one with the migraine. Better now.
Here are some things.
The lovely InnerBrat talks about Wonder Woman in a way that makes sense even to me!
From Mind Hacks, an intriguing perspective on schizophrenia… “from the inside”. Peter Chadwick, a trained psychologist who experienced a period of psychosis himself, found himself able to bridge the unfortunately enormous gulf between mental health professionals and mental health patients.
Yet another theme familiar to me from science-fiction might start to have real-world implications now: Psychologists are contemplating the effects that longer, more demanding missions to the Moon or even Mars might have on astronauts’ mental health. They outlined these challenges recently at the American Psychological Association’s 116th Annual Convention. I hope they called their presentation Brains in Space!
Junkfood Science highlights a string of spurious correlations in the news lately. Let us open our hymnals to page 23 and sing together… CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSALITY. And you can lie with statistics!
Okay, back to bed with me. Good night!
A Big Finish A Week 3 – The Kingmaker
Well, I’ve managed to get my odd mixture of hardware and software working with the wifi connection at the hostel where I’m staying. However, it’s extortionately expensive, so don’t expect more than one more post before Friday.
Because I was unable to get anything written before leaving, I’m not making this week’s Big Finish A Week be Master, as I originally planned – I had to make it one I’d brought with me to listen to for fun. So I’m going to do The Kingmaker – apologies to Jennie, who wanted me to hold off on this one for a bit. Forgive me, as well, for the relative lack of analysis in this one – I’ve got one hour of internet time, so this is all first draft without any thought.
I’m afraid that to talk about this one, once again I will have to ‘spoil’ the plot, as it’s quite a plot-intensive one, so read beyond this at your peril.
Did you know that Richard III wrote The Tempest, while Shakespeare died on Bosworth Field?
While Doctor Who ran for twenty-six years more or less continuously, it’s always felt to me like three different series – roughly the 60s series, the 70s series and the 80s series. And while my favourite Doctors are probably the first two, and I think the best episodes of the TV show itself are from the Tom Baker era, the show I grew up watching, and the one I have affection for despite its faults, is the 80s series, and in particular the fifth and sixth doctors.
The Big Finish audios in many ways are an effort to rehabilitate the shows from that era – I’ve read interviews with various of the Big Finish producers in which they’ve stated that part of what they wanted to do with the show is to give those Doctors the scripts they deserved.
But while this is arguably necessary for Sylvester McCoy, who had a very patchy mixture of scripts, and it’s *definitely* necessary for Colin Baker, who was the most ill-served of all the actors to play the role by the production team, it’s always felt less important for Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor, who’s widely acknowledged to have had a fairly decent run of scripts (they always felt a little too pseudo-hard-SF for my tastes, but they were competent and didn’t involve megabyte modems or giant Bertie Basset men).
However, Davison’s episodes did have one huge problem, and that was Davison himself. Neil Gaiman’s description of him as the blandest Doctor is absolutely true. It’s not Davison’s fault as such – he’s the best actor to have played the part in the ‘classic series’ – but at the time he took on the role he was simply far too young to carry off what is really an old man’s role. And his restrained performance didn’t really sit well with scripts written by people who had years of experience writing for Tom Baker’s pop-eyed hamminess.
So for Davison, the audios serve to reinvent his Doctor as a far weightier character than the rather lightweight, affable character he first appears.
Like the other Doctors, Davison’s Doctor is also given a new companion – the Pharaoh Erimem. Unlike Evelyn, Erimem comes along with a pre-existing companion, Peri (one of the less interesting characters from the TV series, who primarily existed to show an inordinate amount of cleavage, Peri’s character has been improved in the audios, mostly because Nicola Bryant, the actor playing the role, has had twenty years to improve her American accent from execrable to merely poor. (She actually gives a good performance in the role – she just can’t do accents)).
Erimem, on the other hand, has always been an excellent character *idea* who’s never really come together properly. Her characterisation seems to flit wildly between an interesting take on someone from a truly different culture and ‘generic companion #5223′. Most of the time they seem to compromise, though, and write scripts for Leela (the warrior-woman companion of the fourth doctor) and then do a search-and-replace to change the name. Certainly actor Caroline Morris’ performance is very similar to the earlier companion – she speaks in a very stilted, overly formal manner, which may well be a deliberate choice (the character is supposed to be both royal and speaking a language that she’s only recently learned) but sounds to my ears rather forced.
The Kingmaker itself is one of the very best of the Big Finish audios, again playing with the limits of what a ‘Doctor Who story’ can be.
Structurally, it’s quite interestingly done – the Doctor and his companions get separated across time, rather than across space, and we learn the story from both perspectives, the companions’ adventures happening simultaneously with the Doctor’s, but functioning as flashbacks til the two narrative strands meet up. This is such a strong idea for a Doctor Who story in itself that it’s amazing that it’s not been used more often – the Doctor knowing part of the fate of his companions, but never the whole situation.
But it’s in the plot itself that this is a unique story, playing as it does on our expectations of what a ‘Doctor Who story’, especially one featuring this Doctor, should be. From early on we know this is a comedy – it’s an historical, but one set in a history that owes more to Blackadder (and Monty Python, and 1066 And All That, and the Carry On films) than to the real world, with lines like “Good evening, sir, I am Susan and I will be your serving wench for this evening. Would you like to sit in carousing or non-carousing?”
Despite this, though, it still feels like a relatively straightforward Doctor Who story. In the future, all publishers from throughout history are owned by one company, which has realised that many of its authors have never met their deadlines. It sends a robot after the Doctor, to get a manuscript on pain of death.
While the Doctor at first tries to convince his companions that he’d been an author of serious, weighty works (“How Green Was My Gallifrey? The Female UNIT, something like that…”) he eventually admits that the books he wrote were the “Doctor Who Discovers” series for children. (These were a real series of books from the 70s, and the Doctor explains the name by saying it was originally meant to be “The Doctor, Who Discovers…” but someone missed the comma.)
As a result, the Doctor has to complete “Doctor Who Investigates Historical Mysteries”, and so he goes to investigate the mystery of the princes in the tower and whether they were killed by Richard III (after a brief stop-off in Shakespeare’s time to see the premiere of the play, for reasons that are handwaved away). As well as serving as a decent McGuffin, this also allows the first appearance of the Fourth Doctor in the audios, in the form of the tape-recorded notes for the abandoned early draft of the book. (The Fourth Doctor is played not by Tom Baker, unfortunately, but by comedian Jon Culshaw – his relatively poor impression is explained away – “When you record yourself on tape it never does sound like your own voice, does it?”)
By the end of the second episode, we’ve been given enough information that armed with our knowledge about how Doctor Who stories work, we, like Peri, have figured out that Richard III is being advised by the Master, who has killed the Princes and replaced them with robots. This would be a pretty normal story for this era of Doctor Who.
Instead, it’s revealed that the story isn’t a ‘Doctor Who story’ – it’s a Shakespearean comedy. The Doctor had got drunk with Shakespeare, who upset at the idea that it wasn’t Richard III who killed the princes but the ancestor of his own queen, sneaked onto the TARDIS to ensure that Richard III *did* kill them (the description of him of course matches that of the Master). Meanwhile, the metal part of one of the princes that falls off, convincing Peri that he’s a robot, turns out to be a fake penis – ‘he’ is a ‘she’, and Richard didn’t kill them – he sent them into hiding as women because he knew the deception couldn’t last.
Through various twists and turns Shakespeare and Richard end up changing places in history, with the ‘princes’ ending up as Shakespeare’s daughters.
(There’s actually a feint in the story as well – Richard III is played with the same voice and mannerisms as Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor from the new series, and the Eccleston Doctor makes a brief offstage appearance, delivering a message from the future to the past. Given the presence of the impersonated Fourth Doctor, I think we’re meant to think that Richard *is* the Doctor, and be trying to work out how that would work with the plot. He’s not – he just has a Mancunian accent and says ‘Fantastic!’ for what must I’m sure be good reasons…)
But if this weren’t enough, what’s really impressive about this story is the way it deals with the role of fate (or ‘the web of time’) in Doctor Who. Richard III, as a famous historical villain, has been visited throughout his life by people of various species from different time periods, all of whom have very strong opinions on whether or not he should kill his nephews. Presented as a relatively decent ruler (willing to go to any lengths to hold his country and his family together, but not ‘unneccessarily’ cruel) he’s in the horrible position of knowing exactly how history plays out, and being powerless to affect anything – being willing to go to his death on Bosworth and be remembered as a monster, for the sake of his country.
(Which is not to say he’s presented as a ‘good’ man. He’s someone who tortures and kills without mercy and without regret for what he perceives as the greater good. But he’s presented as human).
There’s a wonderful scene where Richard dares the Doctor to judge him – the Duke of Buckingham is dying, because Richard has had him tortured to death for treachery. Both Richard and the Doctor know that Buckingham actually died at that time, but Richard tells the Doctor to save Buckingham if he wants to judge him, knowing the Doctor can’t.
This brings home in a way that most Doctor Who stories never attempt just what power the Doctor has, and how different his morality actually is – how truly alien a character he is. Unfortunately, these moral conundra are all resolved by deus ex machina – but then, it wouldn’t be a Shakespearean comedy if they weren’t.
The Kingmaker probably works best if you have a reasonable knowledge of Shakespeare and of Doctor Who, as well as the historical period, but it’s often laugh-out-loud funny, cleverly structured, tightly-plotted, mostly well-performed (veteran comedian Arthur Smith does a wonderful turn as Clarry, who is later the inspiration for Falstaff) and occasionally thought-provoking. It plays games with the cliches of Doctor Who stories and suggests several new paths that they could take, and while the humour stretches suspension of disbelief past normal limits, it’s still funny enough (for the most part – I wish people would learn that while Monty Python was funny, quoting lines from it is almost certain to kill any attempt at humour stone dead) that it works.
The Kingmaker is probably not the best of the Big Finish audios, but it’s definitely in the top few, and it shows exactly why these recordings still have a place, and vitality, even in a world where we have the new TV series.
Again, apologies for the slapdash nature of this one – I’ve done this in very little time. I’ll possibly tighten this up and repost sometime in the future, but I’m taking the ‘one a week’ thing seriously.
Linkblogging for 16/08/08
Hello! I’m Holly, Andrew’s wife. While he’s in Oxford for his course, Andrew has graciously asked me to do some linkblogging for him if I so choose. My interests, while overlapping with his enough for domestic bliss, do not involve as much music and hardly any comics, but I hope I can interest the usual readers of his blog in one or two of these things that have interested me.
io9 has a good and necessary explanation of why the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is, well, pure sucky evil. Couldn’t have said it better myself. I shall have to memorize some of this for the next time I mention this movie and get a blank stare in return.
Another favorite blog of mine, Scholars & Rogues, highlights a worrying trend in USian print media: newspaper publisher Gannett is getting rid of 1000 jobs. Coming from the US and living in the UK now, I’m keenly aware of the impact that non-commercially-motivated media can make on the general population, and I think it’s tragic that the US is so severely lacking in that. This is one of the many reasons that it’s such a shame. We’re long since past the point where proof is needed that news influenced by money isn’t worth the pixels it’s printed on, but this is a sad reminder nonetheless… especially as it means 1000 more people will be looking for jobs in such a poor economy.
Liberal Conspiracy looks at the possible benefits of irrational beliefs, and the different kinds of irrationality that provide just one more reason that Richard Dawkins isn’t going to change anybody’s mind.
And, just for fun, here’s a unique view of the most recent solar eclipse: from 30,000 feet! (Or something. I don’t know how many thousand feet, it’s not specified, but you get the idea.) Just when I think that one total eclipse looks pretty much like any other, here I get to see parts of the sky that aren’t even dark. I like the commentary and squealing from the passengers too.
Andrew says that if he can finagle some wireless access there will be a Doctor Who post for you tomorrow.
Linkblogging for 15/08/08
This might be my last post for a few days – I’m off to Oxford for my summer school and exam, and won’t be back home til Friday. I’d been hoping to write a backlog of posts that my wife could post in my absence, but I’ve been too busy this week with revision and preparation for my promotion at work.
I am taking my laptop down, so I may be able to get some stuff posted, but it depends if I can get Debian to play nicely with my wireless card (words cannot express my frustration with manufacturers who only release proprietary drivers for GNU/Linux…). You can either expect the next Big Finish Of The Week on Sunday, and occasional posts after that, or a huge chunk of posts coming at you from Friday onwards.
Anyway, linking:
Reading Bully’s blog today, I was surprised to find a post, not by everyone’s favourite stuffed bull, but rather his helper John. John is calling for San Diego Comic Con to get a proper policy in place for dealing with sexual harassment. The treatment of women in comics/genre fandom is still a disgrace, and it really has to stop.
XKCD explains computer security.
Abhay continues reviewing Secret Invasion, but the good bit of this is really his savage takedown of the questions fans ask at conventions. I’ve listened to a few of those “DC Nation podcasts” that are recordings of con panels, but I had to stop because otherwise I would have had to destroy the whole of humanity. Seriously, if you’ve got Grant Morrison sitting there and you can ask him any question you want – about writing techniques, comics theory, his ideas about the universe, any of a million other things – would you really ask “so are we going to see Batman in Final Crisis?”
In the US, Doctors will now be prescribing based on what patients can afford. I’ve heard libertarians and other fools put forward the fact that USian Doctors don’t take price into consideration while the NHS does as an argument against a national health service. EVERY health care decision takes cost into account – it’s just that the government probably has slightly deeper pockets than any individual…
Nice article on Grant Morrison’s Mister Miracle as an Afro-Futurist text
And And Vista’s security is even more fundamentally broken than anyone thought.
Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and The Smile That You Send Out – Part 1: Dumb Angel to Smiley
In a few weeks, Brian Wilson will be releasing his new album, That Lucky Old Sun. It’s one I’m looking forward to more than I have any album in years. A collaboration with his keyboard player Scott Bennett and his old collaborator Van Dyke Parks, both the live performance of the piece I saw last year and the demo versions I’ve been lucky enough to get hold of suggest it’ll be one of Wilson’s best works.
It’s best seen as part of a trilogy with two other Wilson/Parks collaborations (both of which have also had other collaborators – and Scott Bennett may have contributed more than Parks to That Lucky Old Sun, in fact – but it’s thematically linked), so I’m going to try to put it – and those other albums – in context. This week I’m going to write about the failed Smile experiment of the late 1960s, and about Smiley Smile. Next week I’m going to write about Orange Crate Art. The week after, I’ll be discussing the remade and completed Smile from 2004, and then I’ll be reviewing the new album on the day of its release. This first post will be the weakest of the four – I’m telling you this so I can tell you the later things.
Before I go any further, though… I don’t normally do embedded videos – they’re a pain to those using feed readers, they often require the use of non-free software, and I just don’t like them. But there are a lot of preconceptions about the Beach Boys’ music out there – either “Pet Sounds is the only good thing they ever did” or “they’re just a crappy surfing band” or “I heard Pet Sounds and it’s overrated so they were just as useless as I always thought” or whatever. So here’s a song from Smile. If you like the song, or at least find it interesting, read further. Otherwise, you probably won’t be interested in anything that follows in this or the next three posts.
That song was written and mostly recorded in 1967 for the aborted Smile album (some vocals were added in 1971 when the track was pulled out of the vaults and released). Smile (originally titled Dumb Angel) was going to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds, the album we are all supposed to think is the Best Album Ever. I wouldn’t actually put it even in my top five Beach Boys albums, but it is a stunning artistic achievement.
Smile was going to top Pet Sounds, but it would have very little relationship to it. Smile was musically essentially a series of variations on the melody of Heroes & Villains, with lyrics to be provided by Van Dyke Parks, a songwriter who was himself every bit as good as Brian.
Only four Wilson/Parks songs were recorded in anything like a finished state for Smile – all songs that they claim to have written in the first writing session they had together. Those songs – Wonderful, Surf’s Up, Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence – contain to my mind possibly the two best songs ever written (Wonderful and Surf’s Up) and two extremely good ones (Heroes & Villains and CabinEssence). The rest of the songs recorded for Smile either had inconsequential lyrics by Brian ( Wind Chimes, Vegetables (credited to Wilson/Parks but the original lyrics were very different)) no lyrics at all (Fire, Prayer) or never had their lyrics recorded (most of the rest).
The album became a legend, mostly because of the quality of those four completed Wilson/Parks songs, but was never released. Bits of it trickled out over the years on later albums, or on the band’s box set, but the album itself was never completed. There are many reasons for this – members of the band didn’t like the music, Brian was having problems with his mental health, the band were suing their record label.
My own hypothesis for the main cause is that Brian felt he was being pushed into making a record different from the one he had envisaged. Brian Wilson has always created music for the heart, rather than the head – his music is all about communicating emotion. I’m going to quote some bits here from a longer article I wrote last year, because this stuff is very relevant to what will come along:
“Even the most cursory critical listen to Wilson’s body of work shows the same themes, both musical and lyrical, occurring time and again over the forty-five years he’s been writing. Far from being an aberration, Pet Sounds is just one more iteration by Wilson of the themes that have haunted him throughout his life and work.”
“Wilson’s music is almost a private language, made up of allusions to other music. A lot of this is the music of his childhood — he will appropriate wholesale the melody of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” for a song like “And Your Dream Comes True”, or the structure of “Rhapsody in Blue” for Smile — but occasionally it will be more recent — Switched On Bach or Sail Away. More than anything else though, he comes back over and over to “Shortenin’ Bread” and “Be My Baby”; those two songs appear in mutated form throughout his career.”
“Remember, also, that this is a composer for whom the epiphanic and the bathetic are often the same. On his first acid trip, Wilson heard music he’d never been able to conceive before — and wrote “California Girls.” And yet, bad as that song is (although the faults in it are almost all down to the smug, leering Mike Love lyric), listen to the harmonies under the line “I dig a French bikini on Hawaiian island dolls.” That backing vocal part, in isolation, is as close to perfect as anyone has ever come with the mere human voice. But it wouldn’t exist without the appalling, near-monotonous, lead part.”
“The real recurring theme in Wilson’s work is an attitude towards women that comes close to goddess-worship. Over and over again, throughout his career, his songs take the point of view of a weak, imperfect man who loves and is loved by a woman he knows is too good for him.He even believes that the only reason she’s with him in the first place is because he’s tricked her. But more often, he knows that she understands him and accepts him, even with his faults”
“In his best work, be it full albums like Friends, The Beach Boys Love You or Smile, or odd tracks on otherwise terrible albums like “Happy Days” (on 1998’s Imagination) or “My Diane” (on 1978’s MIU Album), Brian Wilson’s work is the sound of a man opening his soul absolutely, with all the simplicity and complexity that entails. “
Van Dyke Parks, on the other hand, is an equally talented songwriter but with a completely different (and complementary) set of skills. Parks is a very intellectual songwriter, and also a very American one. He has a deep love and knowledge of American pre-rock music, whether Gottschaulk , Gershwin or old blues records, and it comes out in his own songs (which are often repurposings of bits of other people’s material). While Brian Wilson was in direct competition with the Beatles, Van Dyke Parks is like Randy Newman’s antimatter universe double – optimistic where Newman is cynical, happy where Newman is sad, but with a remarkably similar skillset.
The two blended perfectly, but a lot of the hangers-on around Wilson appear to have misunderstood what they were doing (not surprising, since Wilson may well be the least articulate person ever to have been called a genius), and if you look at the articles at the time about the album, the music they’re describing bears little relation to what was actually recorded. I suspect ideas that turn up late in the Smile recording sessions – like a suite based around the four classical elements – which have no parallels in either Wilson or Parks’ other work and are notably less focussed than the earlier songs, were created to try to make the album Brian’s new cool friends wanted, rather than the album he’d intended.
The early songs Wilson and Parks worked on together combined Parks’ wish to create a new vision of a progressive America rooted in its own history with the emotional core of Brian’s music. They’re about childhood, loss of innocence, looking back at youth from a perspective of age, and rebirth after disaster. With the exception of CabinEssence, they all have the same ‘arc’ – starting from a position of power, losing something valuable, and then looking back on the loss from a more mature position, with hope for the future. The musical quotes throughout the album, the repeated motif of the Heroes & Villains melody, all point to a very consistent vision for the album, which was abandoned without quite realising it long before the album itself was scrapped.
In the end, possibly the best explanation for what happened to Smile is Brian’s own – “it was inappropriate music for us to be making”.
But the loss of Smile wasn’t a wholly negative thing. In particular, in its place came the remarkable, and woefully underrated, Smiley Smile. Smiley Smile was a mixture of Smile recordings (Good Vibrations, Heroes & Villains), rerecordings of some Smile songs (Vegetables, Wonderful, Wind Chimes) and new songs made up from fragments and half-thought-out Smile ideas. And it’s incredible. It’s been described as ‘space-age acid casualty doo-wop music’ and that description sums it up perfectly. Obviously made under the influence – several songs contain moments where band members stifle laughs or giggle – the accompaniment is stripped down to the bare minimum, often just an organ or bass. The lyrics are nonsensical, but the vocals are extraordinary – some of the best ever committed to record – and the effect is rather like taking a stained glass window, smashing it, and using the pieces in a kaleidoscope.
Little, empty, half-formed songs with very little instrumentation (inadvertantly creating the same effect I wrote about in my recent Final Crisis post), sung angelically, Smiley Smile is as strange as some of Scott Walker’s recent music – like Walker, it makes me think “Where did that come from? How could a human being think of that?” – but has a warmth and feeling of love that is absent from Walker’s harsh challenges.
The album that never was and never could have been meant that the beautiful, strange, remarkable album that was released is still ignored more than forty years on. But like the cover says, the smile that you send out comes back to you.
Next week, I’ll skip forward 28 years, and talk about Orange Crate Art…
Linkblogging special – the best blog post ever?
I’m going to be posting quite lightly this week and next. I’m going away for a week on Friday, and I will have minimal net access til the Friday after. I’ve got an exam on Saturday, so revision is taking priority. However, over the next few days I’m hoping to write:
Two of a projected series of four posts on Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks,
A second post on Final Crisis
The next Big Finish A Week (probably Master).
These will be spaced out between now and Saturday 24th, when normal service will be resumed. My wife may also do some linkblogging for me next week as well.
But onto the linkblogging. Today’s is going to be a little different. I’ve been asked to name my favourite blog post of all time, and while I don’t normally do MeMes, I thought it as good an opportunity as any to go through some of my old favourites.
It’s actually quite difficult to find an individual blog post that I would consider ‘best’ – when thinking about these things I tend to think about post series. There’s Matt Rossi’s series of posts about Superman and Crisis On Infinite Earths at The Howling Curmudgeons – he’s more recently re-edited and rewritten these as a single post at The High Hat. Those posts (and the others in his blog, which is linked at the side) were some of the first things that convinced me that I was right to pay attention to comics and I probably should pay attention to blogging. Other comic-related blog posts I found fascinating were the posts about Seven Soldiers by Marc Singer and Jog.
Pretty much all of Andrew Rilstone’s posts could count too – I just went looking through his archives, and his entire Sceptic’s Guide To Richard Dawkins, his post on the laws criminalising ‘extreme pornography’, his tearing apart of Express articles… I don’t always agree with him (especially on religious matters) but he’s posted more genuinely interesting, good stuff than any three other people I can think of. His posts about Doctor Who, Dave Sim, Tolkien… all could go here.
Much of Brad Hicks’ stuff could go in the list too, especially under his ‘forbidden lore’ tag.
I really can’t think of a ‘best ever blog post’. The writers listed above have done so much between them, choosing just one post is impossible. I’m tempted to choose something stupid like Richard Herring’s Monkey Fucking post, because at the time it made me laugh more than anything ever before or since, but then I think about Andrew Rilstone’s posts in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s execution and think that maybe making up songs about monkey rape isn’t the height of achievement in the blogging world.
But I think in the end I have to choose Mark Steel writing about Karen Reissmann (technically a newspaper article, but it’s on his website and not on theirs). Everyone who has ever worked for the NHS trust in question knows that the only problem with what Steel says here is he doesn’t go nearly far enough…
no new content today
Got a pay-rise today. A much bigger one than I was expecting. Bought a banjo. Plunk. Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow.
(Incidentally I will be away most of *next* week on a summer school for my course. I’ll try to get some stuff written to be posted in absentia, but right now revision takes priority, so it might be a light week).
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