The Little Stranger

I just finished reading Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Little Stranger, and I'm pleased to report that it's something of a return to form for my favorite contemporary novelist.

Not that I thought The Night Watch was a bad novel. Quite the contrary, in fact. It's just that after her first three novels, with their engaging narrators and fascinating fusion of the genre conventions of the Victorian era with insights into elements of Victorian culture that the Victorians themselves would never have discussed (for instance, unless Silas Marner or Romola turn out vastly different than I'm expecting, I don't think George Eliot ever gave us an informed look into the wide, wonderful world of Victorian pornography), it was a little jarring to read a very modernistic tale of WWII era England delivered by an utterly dispassionate 3rd-person narrator. I agree wholeheartedly with these sentiments of Rohan's:

I would also appreciate some exposition, a thicker layer of narrative commentary, even some philosophizing! Waters's touch is so light that I find it hard to be sure what she thinks is important about the moment she has chosen, or why she develops the kinds of characters and linkages she does.

Where Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and especially Fingersmith all draw the reader in to their richly imagined worlds, The Night Watch almost seems determined to hold you at arm's length. Again, it's not a bad novel; in fact, it's an excellent read. I'd certainly rate it higher than Tipping the Velvet, which, for all that it's a fun read, is more than a little overstuffed and less than a lot focused. But, all the same, three years after I first read them, I can still intimately remember the plots of her first three novels. Hell, I can still shut my eyes and imagine myself into their settings, as though I were a fly on the wall watching Sue's first departure Mrs. Sucksby's home, her final showdown with Gentleman, or (*blush!*) her first awkward lovemakings with Maud. I read The Night Watch more recently than all three of those, and all that springs to mind when I think of the novel is it's reverse-chronological structure and one particularly squirm-inducing scene involving a botched abortion.

So I opened up The Little Stranger with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I was certainly expecting a great read, but would it be a great read like The Night Watch, or a GREAT read like her previous novels? Turns out it's GREAT. Not on the level of Fingersmith, but certainly a cut above Tipping the Velvet and maybe even Affinity, to which it bears the most similarities.

Waters doesn't return to the Victorian settings of her early works: we're dealing again with post-War England. What she does return to is a heartfully (my spellchecker claims that's not a word, but fuck it, I'm coining it) rendered first-person narrative that draws you in to the emotional lives of its characters, all the while confronting you with more interesting questions to ponder than "are we going backwards in time for a reason?" and "why is the narrator so bored with its own story?" Here some thorny, fascinating thematic issues are presented without the aseptic subtlety of The Night Watch. Hell, without any subtlety at all: Waters probably could have cut ten pages worth of narrative asides from her final draft had she simply opened the novel with a disclaimer announcing "This is a novel that considers the complex thoughts and feelings people of both the upper and lower social classes have to the stratified history of English society, and how those thoughts and feelings are upended by the rapid social change of the post-War era." I don't mean that as a criticism, mind you. While Waters' chosen theme is very, very obvious, it is skilfully used to inform every aspect of the book, from the possibly supernatural "ghost story" elements of the plot, to the motivations and aspirations of all the beautifully realized characters.

At the same time, Waters' outright abandons the lesbian themes of her previous work. We're dealing here with a straight male narrator, surrounded by a handful of well-developed straight supporting characters, both male and female (well... one of these women might be gay, but the thought certainly never occurs to the other characters, or especially the narrator). And, being a red-blooded young straight male, it's a relief to be able to report that I find Waters' ability to weave a compelling narrative in no way diminished by a lack of hot lesbian sex scenes.

To sum up: this is a well-crafted, occasionally suspenseful, definitely gothic, possibly ghostly novel that makes up for any occasional lapse in the momentum its gothic narrative by simultaneously telling a compelling human story about some fascinating characters. This is a great novelist at work, people. I don't really care what your usual literary tastes may be: do yourself a favor and pick it up as soon as it hits paperback.

What Would Jesus Do?

Apparently, he'd beat a 7-year old girl to death with a quarter-inch plumbing supply line. Because children must be beaten into perfect obedience, and a proper spanking leaves a child "without breath to complain."

B.I.G. and Me: Things Done Changed

Banger, who I'm told by XXL was a member of Biggie's posse, Junior M.A.F.I.A., said of his mentor that he "absorbed his whole life;" that when anything happened to him he'd "analyze it and absorb it and suck it up and then make a song about it."

Ready to Die, his debut album, is riddled with social observations, but they aren't phrased overtly in the way the commentary on a song like 2pac's "I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto" is. Where Pac would takes a more global view with a line like "I see no changes/All I see is racist faces," Biggie maintains a street-level perspective: "I hear you mother fucker's talk about it/But I stay seein' bodies with the motherfuckin' chalk around it."

The opening lines of "Things Done Changed," the first song on Ready to Die, illustrate Banger's assessment of Biggie beautifully. "Things Done Changed" is not the first track on the album. True to Sean Combs' love of excess (for the uninitiated, that's Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or Diddy, CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment and Ready to Die's producer), the album opens with a nicely constructed audio collage that introduces you to Big's world: a medley of song samples and urban ambiance that takes you from Big's birth in the comparatively peaceful Harlem of the early 1970s to the then-present urban hellhole of the early '90s. Like I said, it's nicely constructed, but you have to wonder why anyone thought it was necessary when Biggie opens the album up with:

"Remember back in the days? When niggas had waves,

Gazelle shades and corn braids,

Pitchin' pennies, honeys had them high top jellies

Shootin' skelly', motherfuckers was all friendly,

Loungin' at the barbecues, drinkin' brews,

With the neighbourhood crews, hangin' on the avenues,

Turn your pages to nineteen-ninety-three,

Niggas is gettin' smoked, G: believe me."

Few novelists can paint a picture for you with so few words. I'll tell you right now, I do not have any memory of back in the days, when African-Americans had waves. But with just seven lines (or approximately seven lines... obviously there's some degree of arbitrary editing on my part to put a verbal art form into written words), half of which focus on nothing more than fashion trends, Biggie puts you in a sepia-toned idealization of a thriving community and subculture. Your brain almost wants to block out the harsh street beat he's rapping over and replace it with some Motown. And then at the end of the stanza, with a single line, he flips the script on you: this isn't a song about nostalgia; it's a song about the horrifying contrast between what once was, and what is now.

From there, the song stays focused on the urban blight of post-crack Harlem, presenting a street-smart and brutally blunt assessment of the social mores of Big's mileu ("Instead of a Mack 10, he tried scrappin'/Slugs in his back and that's what the fuck happens") that can resonate even with those who have no personal experience of those conditions (like me!).

At the same time, Big crafts a deceptively broad social comment, that ranges from depicting the horrors of the endemic poverty that pushes people into a life of crime (Shit, it's hard bein' young/From the slums/Eatin' five cent gums/Not knowin' where your meal's comin' from"), to calling out the political establishment's apathy to the blight afflicting Harlem (the aforementioned "I hear you mother fuckers talk about it..."), to warming Republicans' hearts by refusing to absolve his own generation from at least a partial share in the responsibility for their situation ("Back in the day our parents used to take care of us/Look at 'em now, they even fuckin' scared of us"). And then at the end, he brings it all back to the personal, opining "shit, my Mom's got cancer in her breast/Don't ask me why I'm mother fuckin' stressed/Things done changed." Even in the midst of this social horror, the universal horrors of every day life go on.

Not too shabby for a single song from an artist who's never really gotten props for his political side.

Next up: we discuss "Gimme the Loot" and whether Biggie glorifies violence. And we make fun of my least favourite widely-respected music critic (who's that, you ask? Stick around and find out!).

My Friend Robert: An Earnest, Productive Member of His Community

[Note: One thing I hope happens if I keep up with this blog is that, as a result of my being a somewhat eclectic person, I'll end up with a little something for everybody. And, by extension, I'll get people to read about stuff they wouldn't normally be interested in. In that spirit, this post is the beginning of a new series designed with the intention of expanding the appeal of my blog to my friend Robert's mother (Hi Kathy!), who apparently read the blog and didn't find my posts about musical theatre, hip hop, and video games interesting.]

My friend Robert Hammer works full time as a high school teacher at Citadel High, the fanciest public school in town. Now, if I had to spend 40 hours a week dealing with high school students, probably the only thing I would want to do when I got home is huff paint and watch slasher movies. But not my friend Robert! In whatever spare time he has, Robert volunteers for the NDP, knocking on doors when there's an election, attending meetings and colloquiums when there isn't, and presumably also doing some sort of third thing under some sort of third condition for the purpose of completing this list.

He doesn't do it for the money (because he isn't paid!). He doesn't do it for the glory (because their isn't any glory involved in provincial politics). He doesn't do it for the thrill of victory (because the candidate he worked tirelessly for in the last election was the only NDP incumbent to lose). No, he does it because he believes it's the right thing to do. Because he believes in giving something back to his community. Because he wants, in whatever small way he can, to make the world a better place.

I admire him a lot for that; although, of course, I'd never tell him, because it might seem like I was coming on to him. As annoying as it may be to call your best friend and say "Hey, it's Saturday night, let's drink some beers!" and hear "I can't, it's a by-election weekend!" (seriously, folks, true story), and as annoying as it may be to have to be dragged from the comfort of your apartment SEVERAL TIMES to go knock on doors in Dartmouth and try to convince old ladies that Darrell Dexter doesn't actually plan to sell Nova Scotians into slavery building monuments to the NSGEU, the fact remains that spending your spare time working for the betterment of your community is a truly noble undertaking.

Applaud this man, folks!

Overheard at the Neurosurgery Clinic

"Dumb and Dumber? I found that movie so stupid."

Those Crazy Evangelicals

I know that evangelicals and other Christians, when trying to defend themselves from the charges of homophobia and bigotry that result from their decision to dedicate their lives to the advancement of the causes of homophobia and bigotry, often recite the slogan "Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner." You know, because it's not really gay people that gross them out. Gay people are fine! It's just all the gay things they do that are problematic, like pursuing members of the same sex for their romantic relationships, or demanding equal rights under the law.

Anyways, I had a thought: given that so many of these prominent purveyors of religiously inspired hatred turn out to be deeply fucked-up closet cases who are perfectly happy to do what they want in their secret lives while punishing those who have the integrity and courage to live their's openly, a more accurate slogan for their movement might be "Hate the Sinner, LOVE the sin!"

The Ladies of Nintendo: Princess Peach

Even from an early age, I think I've had a pretty clear feminist bent: I can remember that in 3rd grade, when once a week we had to write FIVE SENTENCES on any subject and read them to the class, I wrote an (eloquent, powerful, and remarkably well composed) paragraph explaining that two of my best friends were girls and that I didn't care that people made fun of me because of it.

What I don't know is how I managed to arrive at that point, given that my earliest feminine ideal was Princess Peach (or, as we called her back then before the Japanese revealed her first name to the West, Princess Toadstool). Because, love her as I do, I can hardly deny that she's a ridiculously sexist character. It almost seems pointless to develop an argument for such an obvious proposition, but let's just take a look at her:

The outrageously pink dress. The dainty white gloves. The even more dainty posture. The vacuously cheerful stare. I'm not going to post a sound clip of her voice, but would you believe me if I told you that it's high-pitched and bubbly? This is not a lady who's at all likely to grace the cover of Ms. And we haven't even gotten into the fact that she's constantly getting kidnapped and passively waiting for Mario to come save her. Or that the one time that Mario and Luigi got kidnapped and Peach got to come to the rescue, she did so by...

...summoning her incredible emotion powers, like the ability to cry on command. But really, using primary evidence isn't even necessary. Instead I'll just point you to this Gamespy article. I'm not prepared to endorse every word in the article, but let's just face the facts: when a staff writer for an online video game magazine sets aside his latest draft of "Epic Boobage: The Top 15 Shots of Tifa's Chest in Final Fantasy VII" to complain that a video game character is setting the clock back on feminism, you know that you're representing some pretty retrograde gender ideals. Hell, even when she ditches the damsel-in-distress, whiny spoiled rich girl persona to, say, play some extreme soccer, she chooses to dress like this:

And when I was five, Princess Peach did that little floaty jump of hers right into my heart. This was the girl. The girl worth charging through eight crazy worlds filled with obstacles for; the girl worth learning how to do running jumps across the narrow platforms of world 4-2 when my cousin Andrew refused to continue doing it for me. It's really quite amazing that I never developed any sort of complex about pretty, spoiled rich girls. Ahem.

And, even now that I'm older and I can peer through the lens of my liberal arts education to see that Peach represents some pretty retrograde gender norms, I still love her. I play as her in Super Smash Bros, and any other game where she's playable (and I firmly believe she should have been playable in New Super Mario Bros). Hell, it's entirely possible that it was the degree to which I wanted to go to the Mushroom Kingdom and hang out with Peach's court that made me so comfortable at a young age with having girls for friends, even if the other kids made fun of me, and laid the groundwork for my later feminist outlook. That's a bit paradoxical, but I've never claimed to be anything less than a complicated and deeply fascinating man.

Anyways, I say all this so that, a little later on, when I write a post defending the other major Nintendo princess (that's Zelda, of course... I don't have much to say about Daisy) from feminist criticism, I have something to point to to establish that I'm capable of acknowledging the problematic elements of characters that I retain a nostalgia-tinted fondness for.

[Edited February 18, 2010 to make the Tifa joke funnier.]

Of Imaginary Editors

Is there any writer's joke more consistently unfunny and obnoxious than the wacky fake editorial interjection? [ed. We checked, and no! There really isn't!] Does anyone actually think that this seems irreverent? It's even worse because of the internet: with blogs and webzines and various forums for people to write into, the actual need for editors is much smaller, and yet because of that same lack of editorial oversight, these damn editorial interjections are free to proliferate. People who obviously don't have an actual editor can still use the wacky fake editor to... show what crazy rebels they are? Reinforce their own points in an assumed other voice? I don't know about you, but I've never seen a wacky editorial interjection that didn't either faux-reject the writer's point by way of referring to him like he's some irrepressible truth teller or enthusiastically boost it with its own fake authority [ed. stop ruining this gag I've got going, man!].

I Could Murder Your Ass If Only I Had a Spread Gun

I'm really, really good at the Contra games. Super C in particular. How good am I? Think of how good you are at Super C. Now imagine someone who's ten times better than you. That guy would have to do the same exercise you just did in order to imagine someone who's as good as I am. I don't claim to be a math expert, but I think that makes me 100,000 times better than you.

Recently, I was breezing through Super C (with,*ahem*, no continues) when I realized something. I'm pretty dangerous with the Machine Gun. I can cause some damage with the Laser. I know my way around the Flamethrower. I can even hold my own for a while with nothing but the standard weapon.

But my game really comes to life when I get the spread gun. Pretty much the only thing that can stop me when I have the spread gun is if I accidentally pick up a different weapon. For those of you not in the know, here's a handy illustration of what the spread gun does:



Five big, beautiful red bullets, each approximately four times the size of a man's head. One goes straight forward. Two go forward on upward inclines, two go forward on downward. It's a beautifully effective video game weapon.

But don't take my word for it. Go google the phrase "contra spread gun." Go on, don't worry: it's probably the only phrase including the word "spread" that you can type into a Google search while there are children present or you're at work. As you can see, this is not an original idea on my part: a lot of people really do feel compelled to pay tribute to the spread gun after a good game of Contra.

And I started to think to myself, "Given my demonstrated warrior prowess in the Contra world, is it possible that a career in the Canadian Armed Forces could be just the thing for me?" Had I finally found the direction my life had heretofore been lacking? Could half-a-year's time see me off in Afghanistan, stoically setting out to help accomplish whatever the latest goal is that we've convinced ourselves we have over there? It was a crazy idea, but a crazy idea that just might work. I couldn't dismiss it out of hand without conducting further research.

Alas, judging from a few minutes on the Job Explorer at the Canadian Armed Forces website, the Canadian military doesn't even have a spread gunner unit that you can join. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the spread gun hasn't even yet been invented yet in real life. Which seems a shame, especially when you consider the potential humanitarian benefits of having a gun that fires five giant bullets simultaneously at different angles on the same vertical plane. Just imagine how much bloodshed humankind could have been avoided if only more of history's great conflicts had been decided by the exploits of one shirtless commando, charging relentlessly forward through wave-upon-wave of enemy soldiers, firing from his unlimited supply of ammunition, occasionally accompanied by a similarly dressed but contrastingly colored partner, across about seven distinct environments each with their own unique hazards, before finally reaching the enemy's main base and climbing inside their giant alien master's head to destroy its brain.

Rambling

Sometimes, I must admit, I have a tendency to ramble. It's strange, because when you see people rambling, you tend to assume that they're really invested in the conversation, or at least in their own part of the conversation; yet, most of the time when I ramble it's when I'm uninterested in what I'm saying, and am just saying it to fulfill my part of the conversation. I don't really like to make idle small talk, so when people say something, I try to come up with something interesting to say that's related. Sometimes, I just don't have an interesting observation to make. Someone will say "Did you ever notice that Cadbury chocolate is always so much richer and creamier than other brands?" and I'll say "Oh, yeah? No kidding... I, well actually it was only even recently pointed out to me that mass-produced chocolate would be consistent across companies, rather than just brands, you know? Like, that every Nestle bar [it would be much easier for me, at this point, to at least stick to the established Cadbury example, but I'm dedicated to broadening the scope of any discussion I participate in.] would have the same type of chocolate, rather than just every different Aero bar, like Aero Caramel or whatever, having one kind of chocolate, and then every different Crunch bar having another, you know? I haven't had that frame of reference for long enough to really investigate the differences between the major candy companies' chocolate formulations, so I can't really agree or disagree with your assertion that..."

And usually somewhere in there, a voice in the back of my head goes "James! You're rambling!" and I realize what's happening and I try to get quickly to the end of whatever clause I'm currently at in the endless run-on sentence I've got going and somehow salvage the situation so I don't look like I'm really intimidated by a simple conversation with this person. "Whatever you do," calls the voice, "do not say something that calls attention to the fact that you were just rambling." At which point I usually say something like "Blah! Man, got off on a ramble there, huh? I'm sure you're riveted by my fascinating observations about the state of the various candy companies' chocolate formulations..." and off I go, stringing together quips and pointless observations, extending sentences into paragraph form and just generally failing to get to any point worth making.

I think that may get to the heart the appeal of writing to me: as it's a more deliberate process than speaking, you can easily avoid getting in to situations like that.

B.I.G and Me

I know everyone says they have eclectic musical tastes, but they're all lying except for me. If I bought more CDs online, it would totally screw up the Amazon recommendation list: you'd go to buy a Snoop Dogg album, and it'd say "Customers who bought this also bought Rod Stewart's The Great American Songbook Vol. 3 and Jets To Brazil's Orange Rhyming Dictionary." And when I really love an artist, I buy all of their albums.

One big result of this is that I end up with a lot of albums that I don't listen to regularly because my tastes have moved on (my complete collection of Get Up Kids CDs doesn't really see a lot of play, for instance). I try not to be one of those people who constantly assumes that now is the moment where he's achieved real musical maturity and that those CDs he bought a year ago are kids' stuff now. I can pop in 24 Hour Revenge Therapy now and then, and I still quite enjoy a song like "Do You Still Hate Me?" even if that kind of naked emotional earnestness stopped being the main thing I looked for in music somewhere around grade 11. So I listen to an oddly broad range of music at any given time: a little jazz here, a little classical there, some pop-punk now and then, a whole lot of hip hop, etc.

But there are a select few artists for whom my love runs just as deep now as it did when I first encountered them. And since they are few, I make a point of, at least once a year, taking a couple of weeks to re-engage with their entire oeuvre. I think most of these tend to be bands with multiple writers, who have a large body of work and a great deal of musical and lyrical variety: the examples that spring to mind are They Might Be Giants (surprise! I'm a nerd), Barenaked Ladies (fuck you, they're massively underrated), and the Beatles (yeah, that's right. I like the Beatles. Deal with it).

So my abiding love of the work of Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G, aka Biggie Smalls, aka the Black Frank White sort of sticks out as unusual: not because he's a hip-hop artist (I love a lot of hip hop), but because he only released two albums in his all-too-brief career. When you can spend two weeks every few months listening to nothing but the work of a man who put out fewer than 45 tracks during his life, you know there must be a special connection there. And it runs pretty deep. I go on 2-4 Biggie kicks a year lately, and every single time I end up spending a lot of time feeling really, really upset about the fact that he's gone. And he's been gone for about 13 years. He was gone a few months before I first encountered his music. And it just kills me, because as much as I love the work he completed during his career, I feel very confident I'd have loved the work he would have done in the intervening years even more.

But it can be hard to explain this attachment to other people. What's the connection between a middle class white slacker/academic (slackademic, to coin a phrase!!! neologism!!!) who grew up on the mean streets of suburban Nova Scotia and a black dude from Harlem who came up during one of the most horrifying periods of urban blight in modern American history? What could his work possibly say to me to make me care about it so much? Shouldn't my main engagement with his work be to cluck my tongue and criticize it for glorifying misogyny and violence and crime and materialism? By all rights, if I'm going to feel this passionately about a rapper, it should be an alternative hip-hop artist, a Mos Def, a Kweli, a Jean Grae. And I love all three of those artists. But not the way I love Biggie. Why?

Well, I obviously think there's more to his work than the things obnoxious white music journalists fret about even as they call him one of the greatest MCs of all time. I think there's something wonderful about it. And to try to explain just what that something may be, I'm going to start my blog's first regular feature: B.I.G and Me. I'll go, track by track, through Biggie's body of work, and try to explain what it is that I think is just so damn special about it. I hope you'll come along with me even if you're skeptical. I think I can win you over. Or, rather, I think Biggie can.

So the first song in question shall be "Party and Bullshit," a single Biggie released before either of his albums. And I'm going to say very little about it. I don't have a strong attachment to the song. Almost nothing about what makes Biggie so great seems to me to be in the song. The flow, the rhyme schemes, the beat, the lyrics, and even the voice just aren't there yet. It's mainly of interest so that you can see how quickly he took things to a whole other level once Puff signed him to Bad Boy and he didn't have to split his focus between hustling and rhyming. So in lieu of a discussion for this one, I'm going to post this totally awesome mash-up with Miley Cyrus, and save my energy for the really important stuff (which, I happen to think, is almost every single track on both of his albums):



Next up: "Things Done Changed," the first track on Ready To Die.

This is Calcutta. Bohemia is dead.

I love musicals. Love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. Love 'em when they're mainstream, candy-coated, toothache-inducingly sweet confections like Hairspray. Love 'em when they're dark, serious, literate bloodbaths like Sweeney Todd. Or, at the very least, I love fat girls dancing and over-the-top violence. So I thought I'd take a look back at the very first musical I was ever intimately familiar with: Rent.

Even though an image of the poster for Rent actually appears next to the Miriam-Collins dictionary entry for the adjective "dated," criticizing the play's myriad flaws is an ever-timely endeavour, thanks to the constant presence of poorly-received film adaptations and poorly-received revival tours, all of which surprisingly continue to feature the increasingly grizzled original cast, who I believe are now in their mid-to-late 60s (it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because of the different sample sizes, but it's nonetheless interesting to note that the combined ages of the eight members of the original cast of Rent are now actually higher than those of the four CIA scientists who invented AIDS in the 1970s in the hopes of finally bringing down the Black Panthers).

But I digress. The point is that Rent is a musical that will leave a lasting impact on you the first time you see it, as long as you try really, really hard not to actually think about it. So it's fortunate for me that I first encountered the OBCR (Original Broadway Cast Recording, for those of you who lack my musical theatre pedigree) of Rent in the 11th grade, back when listening to Jimmy Eat World was a profound emotional experience and getting a hand job was a profound sexual experience. So even today, I can watch the Rent movie and actually feel a little bit touched now and then. It can put a smile on my face. And then it ends and all I can think about is how damn stupid it is.

Specifically, I'd like to set aside concerns like how the entire second act has no pacing or structure, or how a play so frequently noted for the ethnic and sexual diversity of its cast has two straight white guys as protagonists, and focus on how, for a play that at its heart is about about artists and their struggle to create, Rent has incredibly juvenile, poorly thought out views on art: views that I've encountered in the real world, and that I think are rather pernicious. And just to drive home the point that I'm a Serious Man With Serious Views On Art, I'll make some reference to Chekhov's The Seagull.

Rent tells the tale of Mark and Roger, two young Boho types living in New York in either the very late 80s or the very early 90s, their quirky minority friends, and their struggle to make it as artists while dealing with the ramifications of the AIDS epidemic. Mark, a filmmaker, and Roger, a musician, are both struggling with creative block. In fact, Roger has apparently never written a song. They spend the one night of the first act and the one year of the second act trying to make their respective grand artistic statements. A goal which they pursue primarily not by working hard on their craft, but by congratulating themselves for being poor and living in a rat-hole loft in a crumbling building.

Throughout Rent, emphasis is repeatedly placed on the notion that the main characters, mostly artists proudly living "La Vie Boheme," are inherently superior to their sellout friend Benny, who used to be just like them but now works for a CORPORATION. Owned by his soon to be father-in-law. A rich white man. Benny's black. Mark and Roger are white kids from the suburbs, whose parents leave messages on their answering machine in the first act promising money if they need it. They barely restrain themselves from spitting on Benny when they see him. They openly imply that he's an automaton doing the bidding of his soon-to-be-white-daddy. They deride him for trying to achieve financial security, when their own starving artist lifestyle is a phone call home away from ending if it ever gets too rough. It's more than a little bit tone deaf, though at least they refrain from actually calling him "Uncle Tom."

The conflict beautifully encapsulates the shortcomings of Jonathan Larson's conception of art (oh, right, did I forget to establish that the creator of Rent's name is Jonathan Larson?): simultaneously demonstrating an absurdly reverential view of the figure of the artist (being an artist makes you better than other people!) and the bizarre conception of what an artist is (basically, a poor person who doesn't play by society's rules).

The first act centers around the heroes (everyone but Benny) trying to stop Benny from evicting homeless people who are squatting in a building his company owns. Now, I'm a big ol' lefty, and I think the existence of homelessness is one of the great moral catastrophes of our society. But of the many crimes against the homeless that we're all somewhat implicated in, requiring a tent city to be moved to a different abandoned building than the one you own is just not even in the top ten.

Here's the kicker: Benny wants to use the building to build a community center for artists, a "state of the art, digital, virtual interactive studio" where artists can "do our work and get paid." Benny calls it a "cyber-center." If Benny's nice looking clothes weren't enough to tell you that this center is a sinister thing, the fact that it's "state of the art" and would allow artists to "get paid" should surely get the message across. Technophobia and willful poverty being essential traits of the artist.

Rent romanticizes the artist while presenting the view that being an artist isn't about creating works of art, it's about living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents values. Now, look: the walls, door frames, ceiling, window frames, and doors of my place are done up in a paint color I believe Color Your World calls "white-ish with lots of cracks and blemishes." My mother and father are decent, honest, hardworking people. So I can relate to the joys of living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents' values. But you won't hear me calling myself an artist until I've produced some works of art.

Rent's utter unconcern with the creation of art is beautifully underlined by the play's ending. Mark finishes his film and Roger finally writes his song. Mark's film happens to be a shaky, hand-held shot, soundless montage of two-second clips of his friends hanging out, edited together randomly (I've heard it derisively referred to as a home movie, but most home movies I've seen at least achieve coherence). Roger's song is literally the worst song in the play. It's odd. Larson poured himself into creating his works of art. But then, when he wrote a play about artists struggling to create, he gave no thought whatsoever to their creative processes or their results. He venerates the artist as an image rather than as an identity.

Not unlike Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull. (See? Name-dropping Russian plays= instant Intellectual cred.) Konstantin, the protagonist and would-be artist, spends that whole play obsessing over his own notably terrible, defiantly non-mainstream play and congratulating himself for his superiority to actual writer Trigorin. He feels this sense of superiority because, even though Trigorin notably produces actual works of art (that even Konstantin begrudgingly admits are good), he doesn't spend all his time acting like an artist (he likes to fish, for instance, instead of sitting around agonizing about how to change the world with his art). The play makes this point quite beautifully, and even Konstantin seems to realize that he'll never actually be an artist due to his inability to create art (sadly, he expresses this by burning his unfinished manuscripts and then blowing his own head off). And yet, when we discussed this in seminar, the average classmate's comment went like this: "Of course Konstantin kills himself! It must be maddening for a true artist who rejects the conventions of society and the tastes of the masses to have to see someone who isn't even an artist like Trigorin succeed while he labors in obscurity!" That's why I said Rent's views on art are pernicious. Because they resulted in me being annoyed during an honours seminar.

So, to sum up: artists create art. Whether they do that while congratulating themselves for "riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits" and drinking "hand-crafted beers" is immaterial. No matter how much you venerate the figure of artist, no matter how superior you show him (or her!) to be to middle Americans, if your primary criteria for identifying who's an artist is a particular aesthetic/attitude, you're not celebrating art, you're demeaning it.

Ars Blogica

So why start a blog? Why start a blog, now, in 2010? Eight or nine years on from the days when I began ceaselessly ridiculing my friends for wanting to write LiveJournals? Approximately seven years after blogging became the next big thing? Nearly six years after checking my favourite blogs became a daily ritual? And, for that matter, something like eight months after everyone got so over blogs and realized than anything worth saying could be said in 140 characters or less?

Well, for starters, I'd like to hold off on getting a Twitter account until everybody's moved on to DotPage, the social networking site where people express their innermost selves by forming collages of primary colored dots (but no more than 13 dots per collage!).

The main reason for me to start I blog, I suppose, is just that I told a bunch of people that I was thinking about doing so, even though I wasn't really, and then they all seemed to think it was a good idea. So here we are. That simple answer, alas, doesn't beg, but does raise, further questions.

What to blog about? That's the big one. What is it that I have to say that's worth my time to type up and publish, and worth your time to read, ponder over, and be forever changed by? I turned first to the blogs I myself love to read. Perhaps I could start by imitating my influences and find my way to my own thing. Unfortunately, most of the blogs I read are about politics, and my own political opinions tend to be alarming to the sort of buttoned-down, conventional wisdom worshiping, so-called "moderates" who aren't used to hearing constant calls for the assassination of political leaders' children. I'd like this blog to have broad appeal, even if it's only to a broad range of my acquaintances, so that's out.

Setting aside the political bloggery, I mainly read various feminist blogs, from general cultural critics to body-image activists. But, frankly, I just don't think the ossified field of Women's Studies is ready to deal with the straight, white, middle-class male take on patriarchal oppression.

Next, I looked at the blogs of some friends of mine, to see if I could just steal their ideas. Amanda's theatre blog, TWISI, is popular and influential. But it seems to have got that way through tireless hard work. So...

Glen Matthews also has an interesting blog based on something I certainly don't have: an interesting job. Oh, well...

My sista-from-another-mista Meghan has quite a prolific personal blog, and that seemed like a model worth imitating. However, Meghan has several advantages over me in the personal blog-realm. She's living the romantic life of a playwright in Toronto, so she has lots of interesting experiences going to see exciting shows and presentations and whatnot: just look at the name dropping in this one post! Meanwhile, I'm here in my apartment in Halifax, and a big night out for me is when I put some pants on and walk over to Video Difference to rent a porno foreign film.

Not to mention that as both a playwright and a young woman, Meghan's filled with powerful emotions. Just look at the title of her blog: You'll Never See My Eyes. I haven't been that emo since I was in grade 10, and even then my sensitivity would have had to share space with my other fixations, resulting in a blog called My Heart is Like a Secret, Now May I Please Put My Hands On Your Great Big Ass?

So, stealing Meghan's personal blog idea may work, but I'd still need to figure out my own angle on it. So I started thinking about that. But then I started thinking about how if someone shot you with a ray gun that made one of your butt cheeks become incredibly hot, and the other at the same time become extremely cold, the worst part wouldn't be the singeing on one side, or the frostbite on the other, but the terrible steam burns right in the middle.

And right about there, I hit on an idea. You see, I have long suspected that I have ADD and was simply never diagnosed because as a child I was scared of getting in trouble and so expended great force of will to overcome the desire to act out. My mind wanders constantly from one idiot thought to the next. Often, I have to drop out of conversations in the middle because I've somehow made my way from following the topic at hand to crafting an intricate defence of the artistic merits of Commando or composing an oration on the legacy of Koji Kondo's legendary score for Super Mario Bros. It can leave me feeling very alienated (if you've ever been at a party with me and wondered why I wandered off in the middle to sit in a room by myself for an hour, it has something to do with that). But a blog can get around that. I can take these otherwise interesting-but-useless thoughts, which I keep to myself to avoid derailing conversations, and lay them out, with some semblance of order, for you, my friends, and maybe even eventually some strangers, to peruse. It could be a way for me to finally feel more connected to the world around me.

The theme of my blog could, maybe, just maybe, be it's themelessness. It could just be a melange of the various subjects that have been accumulating and ricocheting through my addled mind since I was five: video games, superheroes, politics, sex, comic books, superhero comic books, sex in politics, sex in video games, trashy genre films, serious art films, serious art films that rearrange and critique the tropes of trashy genre films, the sex scenes in all of those films, political themes in superhero comic books, which superheroes I'd most like to have sex with, and, of course, Victorian literature (not sure how that one got in there, but I am about to get a Master's degree). And people would love it for the same reason they love me: because they mistakenly believe that I'm independently wealthy, and they want into my will.

So I guess that's what we're going with. In keeping with the the ADD-theme, I picked a title (Grand Central Station of Thought), that will surely only seem more clever and less clunky every time you read it. When I can think of interesting things to say, I'll say them, and try to make some good jokes along the way. And when I can't, I'll say things that aren't interesting and fill them up with cheap jokes that try desperately to deflect attention from my own nagging sense of my intellectual vacuity. You'll probably never learn anything, but hopefully we'll both have a good time.

Shall we, then?