Jumping the tracks (if not the shark)

We're all familiar with the venerated Turkey City Lexicon, which compiles many, many little things writers do wrong to screw up their stories. Well, Nalo Hopkinson has drawn upon her editorial experience to compile a list of 23 somewhat different things writers do to screw up their stories. There is some amount of overlap with the ol' Lexicon, but Nalo's generally looking at writing from a different perspective.

I don't know

for some strange reason, I am already feeling nostalgic for the (presumably dissipating) unintentional surrealism of it all.



As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

— D.H. Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002.

(Acknowledgements to Hart Seely, Pieces of Intelligence (2003).)

Separated at Birth? (Kree-Deutsch Edition)

The Chancellor.



The Supreme Intelligence.


With due acknowledgement.

Rose tint my world

For the past couple of months, I've been undergoing total Rocky Horror immersion, culminating over the weekend with the arrival of the 15th Anniversary boxed set. Four discs: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack, The Rocky Horror Show: Original Roxy Cast, Rocky Horror International and Songs from the Vaults: A Collection of Rocky Horror Rarities. I wanted this set desperately when it was first released way back when, but the $40 price tag at the local Camelot Music was too steep for my threadbare student budget. Thanks to the miracle of eBay, I finally got my own copy for the bargain price of $9. Yes, I did go through a Rocky Horror phase in my misspent youth, but haven't participated in the mayhem in more than a decade. Hadn't even heard any of the songs save for an occasional airing of "The Time Warp" on the Dr. Demento Show. So why the sudden change?

I blame the Texas State University Theatre Department, which recently completed a sold-out two week run of The Rocky Horror Show, directed by Jay Jennings. I wrote an in-depth article on the production for HillViews, the alumni/university magazine, and extensively interviewed Jennings and some of the cast members in the process. My wife and I got tickets and took in the show as well--and a dazzling, spectacular show it was. You know you're in for a ride when the production values of the stage play are far superior to the better-known movie. The costumes alone were worth the price of admission--it was as if Las Vegas exploded and the glitziest, tackiest contents of all the showgirl wardrobes landed in San Marcos. Micah Sudduth, who played Frank-N-Furter, boasted some of the most elaborate costume changes, going from the traditional black corset and fishnets made famous by Tim Curry to the virginal white ostrich-plumed monstrosity (see left) for the big "Floorshow" sequence.

What I found amazing was the fact that while the plot and overwhelming majority of the dialog in the play (save for the song "Once in a While") was identical to the film the two really couldn't be more dissimilar. The Texas State version was downright hilarious, whereas the film is absurd at best, funny only through the catcalls and antics of the audience. It all comes down to interpretation of the material, which is, once you get down to it, what Rocky Horror is all about at its core. Rocky Horror is a science fiction narrative, but ask anyone and all they'll remember is the overwhelming amount of cheese on display (okay, okay--what they'll really remember is all the sex. But it's cheesy sex). Yet once you get past all the cornball 1950s B-movie sci-fi trappings and post-60s sexual boundary pushing, Rocky Horror is a simple retelling of the Frankenstein archetype (much as Forbidden Planet is a retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest or Strange Brew is of Hamlet).

"Hollywood has done over a hundred different films on Frankenstein, the 'creating the monster' myth," said Jennings. "In almost all of them, the monster turns out badly. I'm going with the premise that the reason that they turned out badly is because (the monsters) are all just technically inspired. So we've added the myth of the Great Feminine, since Frank-N-Furter is both male and female. His monster turns out pretty, at least. We've added that to the creation myth, and the creation myth to the technology."

One of the CDs in my recently-acquired box set is Rocky Horror International, which is, appropriately enough, a kind of patchwork assemblage of a soundtrack made from pieces acquired from disparate productions. There are performances from the original London cast (not too terribly different from more familiar versions, since Tim Curry starred here as well), as well as Australian and New Zealand productions. These Anglo productions are essentially lighter shades of pale--each unique, but none diverging too far from the established baseline. The Norwegian performance of "Alltid Lys Hos Frankenstein" ("Over at the Frankenstein Place") is most definitely not the same old, same old, and if there were any justice in the world, the Norwegian version of the Charles Atlas Song, "Muskellmann Sangen," would replace the English version in all subsequent performances of the stage play in the U.S. and its territories. As brilliant as the Norwegian is, however, it doesn't approach the sublime inspiration of the Mexican cast recording. A glorious four tracks from the Mexican soundtrack are included, and for my money, that's 11 too few. Meatloaf's anthem, "Hot Patootie," is recreated as "¿Que Le Ha Pasado El Sabado?" complete with the original lyrics in the refrain, "Tooty fruity! Live it up!" The infamous "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me" is particularly effective in translation as "Toca Toca Toca Toca," and even those who never took Spanish in high school should be able to sing along without too much strain. I'm serious, folks. It is now one of the (many) driving goals of my life to see a live production of this thing performed entirely in Español. There's bound to be something like this down in San Antonio...

Interpretation. That's the key. One simple, unremarkable example of source material given new life and possibilities by virtue of different spin and interpretation. Probably no single element of the play symbolizes the divergence of vision so much to me as the song "Eddie's Teddy." In the movie, Jonathan Adams' portrayal of a wheelchair-bound Dr. Everett Von Scott is more than a little evocative of Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove. In Texas State's take, however, Dr. Scott, as played by Kelley Harmon (above right), couldn't be more different.

"(Music director) Gordon Jones, he took a different approach to the song," explained Harmon. "We're bringing a more gospel feel to it, a real down-home, soulful, Southern Baptist gospel approach. It's something nobody's ever seen before--he reorchestrated the whole thing. It's not going to sound like any other production."

And it didn't. That Deep South spiritual approach blew away the camp elements--if only for a moment--and gave the number a gravitas it didn't have before. When Dr. Scott's solo ends and the rest of the cast comes in to sing, the tempo shifts to more of a Motown-inspired style, and that works on every level. What was old is new again. What was camp is now classic. There are no new ideas, or so the truism goes, and for a writer that can be a depressing prospect. But the fact that a finite number of ideas can inspire an infinite number of variations... that is where the challenge lies.

The Utopiales Festival in Nantes, 02-05 November

Here are six photos taken at the Utopiales Festival held in Nantes, France, 02-05 November 2006. (I humbly hope they appear here...)

Starring Ethan Hawke as Bakunin, Billy Crudup as Belinsky, and Jerry Mathers as the young Kropotkin

(Revolution, Utopia, Science Fiction and Popular Culture)

Am I the only one puzzled by the well-coordinated establishment media plugging of the new Lincoln Center production of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, featuring a cast that includes a bunch of Hollywood actors subtextually marketed as the ones that can read?

It’s such a fearless dance with self-parody, you have to admire it. I only wish it were a musical. With Hugh Jackman belting out some bombastic number about Fichte, Schilling, Kant and Hegel. That would completely rock.

The Sunday profile of Stoppard by Daphne Merkin is so over the top in its Byronic adulation…

"…Stoppard would be a striking presence in any setting, with his glamorous half-rocker, half-brainiac looks: the poetically shadowed dark eyes, voluptuously puffy mouth, pre-Raphaelite head of tousled graying hair and elegantly insouciant style of dressing, which all three times I meet him feature as its centerpiece a chicly weathered (but brand-new) leather jacket that looks like something out of a John Varvatos ad and one or the other natty pair of shoes — today’s are a Tod’s white canvas number, and on another occasion he wears a pair of elegant leather sneakers by Zegna.)… I look at him and am struck by the aura of louche glamour he carries — like a lounge lizard who reads Flaubert — daring you to cause ripples in his carefully arranged and well-defended image…"

…that this minor spectacle feels like a fresh illustration of Thomas Frank’s thesis about how good American business is at co-opting revolutionary spark to turbocharge the machine.

Here, some presumably earnest effort (a sprawling trilogy, no less) to explore the personal social experiences behind the birth of 19th century anarchist theory and revolutionary action, repackaged as the Russian Les Miz. After all, we outspent them into the dustbin of history, so now they’re a bunch of harmless Bohemians no more threatening than characters from Woody Allen’s Love and Death.

(And it's probably good, though I personally will have to wait for the road show to make it to Texas, no doubt featuring Donny Osmond and the rest of the cast from the touring version of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat).

If this is what it takes for the American Mandarins to start thinking about Utopia again, who can complain? They apparently can’t count on either of the formerly likely sources: political activists and science fiction writers.

Fredric Jameson addressed the question with exhaustive cogency in last year’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

Is the idea of Utopia rendered completely frivolous in a world that has made the cyberpunk dystopia so completely real? In a world where the pragmatic inevitability of market capitalism seems to have proven the inherent truths of its basic assumptions about the innate self-interest at the core of human nature?

The line of Utopian political theories traced by Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station, from Fourier’s whimsically considered theories of young boys as society’s natural garbage collectors to Lenin as the ultimate Red World Historical Figure riding the rails to his date with History at the dawn of the 20th century, died with the Soviet Union and the permanent discrediting of Marx as a viable source of tenable theories of political economy. The last vestiges of socialist rhetoric have disappeared, even in their disguised forms, from the mouths of mainstream left-of-center politicians. Leaving a diluted nothing in their place, a non-ideology, an ad hoc set of reactions to the putative realism of their opponents - a kinder, gentler market capitalism.

Without Utopian aspirations for a better world, daring to imagine alternate paths whereby our entropic Hobbesian tendencies can be transcended in this life, our political discourse loses the weighty counterpoint to dismal (if pragmatic) realism that is essential to produce moral progress apace with the technological and creative progress propelled by capital.

Who let the Wolves out?



This intellectual and moral vacuum is a natural opportunity for science fiction to realize its social potential. But credible visions of a better society are scarce among the recent products of the self-proclaimed literature of ideas. It's so much easier to look backwards and spew out a few more Alternate Hitlers.

Any notable candidates for a compelling utopian vision among SF of the last ten years or so? Jameson has a nice piece on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy as a work of political realism exploring efforts to implement Utopian theories on a new world.



He has to look back further for the rest: Aldiss, LeGuin, Van Vogt, Stapledon, Dick.

How about some next generation revolutionary heroes, even if they don’t have a fresh program? China Mieville carries the Wilsonian torch in Iron Council (To the Perdido Street Station, as Michael Dirda suggested?)


One is hard-pressed to find any others - maybe Robert de Niro’s guerilla plumber in Gilliam’s Brazil?


Surely an age dominated by the mainstream dystopian vision of the immanent present depicted in Fox’s highly addictive Jack Webb-meets-William Gibson serial 24, in which American Presidents who oversee torture interrogations of pernicious political journalists are depicted as tough-minded realist champions of our precious way of life, is worthy of a fictional bookend that imagines a happy ending to the current geopolitical apocalypse-in-progress.

The United Federation of Planets doesn’t count.

Neither do Che Guevara T-shirts, even when they are mixed with the visage of Cornelius.


The best I can find: A couple of seasons back, 24 had an interesting narrative thread that wasn’t fully played out. Mia Kirshner plays Mandy, a hot American revolutionary living in an apartment complex full of other twentysomethings, into which she lures CTU Agent Tony Almeida. Melrose Place with AK-47s. How’s that for high concept?



Surely it’s only a matter of time before a culture that has produced as many bona fide Utopian experiments as ours, a culture that is premised on a revolutionary mythology, finds those threads resurgent in popular culture.

Consider the possibility for a spinoff that follows the adventures of 24’s L.A.-based anti-CTU: real American revolutionaries, bisexual Abercrombie narcissists with white teeth, clean pores, and credit cards, dedicated to blowing up all the ugly shit. It would make a hell of a reality program, worth it for the product placement alone.

And when you read that Mia Kirshner’s qualifications include studies of “Russian literature and the 20th century movie industry at McGill” (how’s that for a double major?), you’ve got to wonder how the Mandy Manifesto would read. HALO-drop her onto the Coast of Utopia, and see how revolutionary pulp action matches up against literate monologues.

On Writing Horror

The Horror Writers Association has asked its members to let people know that the new edition of On Writing Horror, edited by Mort Castle and the HWA, with chapters by Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Harlan Ellison, Ramsay Campbell and others, is now available. So I have.

I haven't see the book yet, but I did find the previous edition useful.