Saturday, November 26, 2011

Too Far - Rich Shapero

It took me about 10 hours to read Too Far. You can save yourself a lot of time by reading the description at the end of the book:

"On the outskirts of Fairbanks, six year-old Robbie meets a mesmerizing girl his own age, and together they explore the mysterious woodland surrounding their homes. The world they discover is built from their fantasis, and inhabited by creatures from their dreams. 
"But while Robbie and Fristeen grow inseparable, Robbie's parents are drifting apart, and Fristeen's mother is coming undone. As their homes become increasingly unstable, the children travel deeper and farther into their private world. The forest -and the gods who inhabit it- becomes their refuge until, at summer's end, they are forced to choose between the crushing prospects of the real world, and the lethal demands of their ideal one. 
"Told as a parable, and vividly observed, Too Far is an exhilarating and heart-breaking story of an end to innocence that captures the triumphs and follies of the child's imagination as it struggles to remain boundless and free."

In case you were wonderint, at the end Robbie and Fristeen are separated. And that's it. End of story.

To be fair, Too Far is not the total failure you would expect after listening to Dawn Remembers, the music album that comes with the book.

The dialogues between adults are just bad and flat, comparable to what you can find in any amateurish novel. The child porn scenes are copied from The Blue Lagoon, and the fantasy scenes are a mere adaptation from The Never Ending Story. The main problem of the book are the dialogues between the two children.  The dialogues are not only flat (which is a constant throughout the book), but don't sound entirely "childish", they seem to be taken from adults' mouths and put into children bodies after changing a couple of words. The only dialogues that sound "childish" are the ones with incomplete and incoherent sentences, as if being a child is equal to being mentally disabled. To be fair with Shapero, replicating children's dialogues is one of the hardest things to do. Few serious writers have actually done it, but in that case, I wonder why he tried.

As I said in my previous post, you can download Too Far from the Apple Store for free. Here's a Youtube video selling Too Far as a multimedia experience and a sign of the things to come in literature:



Indeed, if Too Far is the future of literature, then there are reasons to be worried...

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Sanctuary - William Faulkner

Sanctuary is probably one of the most underestimated novels by William Faulkner. This is partly explained by the fact that Faulkner himself considered it a potboiler. Sanctuary also contains one of the first explicit rape descriptions in American literature, which was widely criticized at the time. Having said that, the rape is nothing compared with what you can see in hardcore porn movies in the web. Technology has pushed our tolerance for violence and sadism in ways that were unthinkable less than a century ago.

The book also has a very depressing end, which does not bode well with American optimism -although, to be fair, America was a very depressing place in 1931, when Sanctuary was written. The Great Depression produced a tremendous amount of sad and depressing literature, of which The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck is probably the ultimate example. Considering that the comparisons between the current economic situation and the Great Depression are rampant, there is reason to expect a revival in depressing art, or even a revival of the American writers of the 1930s. Google's n-gram indicates that the Faulkner's days of glory are behind and are far from coming back:



I really liked Sanctuary, and I would recommend it for the following reasons:

You can see that the attitude towards women is starting to change. The women of the novel start questioning (only among themselves) the scale of values and the way relations with men are carried. This obsession with the new role of women and their sexuality would be a recurrent them after World War II. I'm thinking about Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's

This is one of the last books where you can see the term nigger. There is also an anti-Jewish rant by a Senator. Both things are unthinkable today. *

From a technical perspective, it is interesting to see that the main character (Temple) is more of an object than a person. Temple's dialogues are innocuous and superficial, and she doesn't appear in more than half of the book, but the entire plot spins around her.

I don't wanna close this post without recommending this blog, which also has a pretty decent commentary on Sanctuary from a literary and psychological perspective.

*Now that I think about it, Sanctuary shows how society has become more open to explicit sexual violence but more politically correct in terms of ethnic references.


The Pearl - Alfredo Zacarías

Normalmente me gusta escribir en el idioma original en el que está hecha una obra. Pero me gustaría hacer una excepción con The Pearl, porque creo que esta película concierne más a los mexicanos que al público angloparlante.

La mayoría de las críticas a la película en Amazon o en IMDB coinciden en que la película es pésima: la cinematografía es deprimente, el casting está mal hecho (gringos a medio broncear que pretenden ser mexicanos de la costa de Baja California), las actuaciones son poco creíbles, y las escenas de violencia son de risa. Los únicos comentarios positivos son de profesores de inglés de primaria que señalan que, dado que las diferencias entre la película y el libro son tantas, la película les sirvió para detectar qué alumnos habían visto la película en lugar de leer el libro, o para iniciar debates entre sus alumnos sobre cómo el libro pudo tener finales distintos, o cuáles son los puntos en los que la historia puede ser diferente.

No puedo comentar sobre las diferencias entre la película y el libro dado que no he leído la obra de Steinbeck, pero suscribo los demás comentarios: The Pearl es simplemente patética, combinación mal hecha de documental de National Geographic sin presupuesto, de The Blue Lagoon, la trilogía de Pepe el Toro, y cualquier película mala que se les ocurra.

Cuando hice mi investigación para este post encontré el por qué. Alfredo Zacarías, el director, lo fue también de muchas películas mexicanas hechas durante la era nefasta del cine de ese país: en su haber tiene una de las últimas de Tin Tan, todas las de Chucho el Roto, El Santo contra Capulina, y la legendaria (por mala) Karateca Azteca, también con con Capulina. Cabe destacar que Zacarías ya había hecho sus pininos en el cine estadounidense en 1978 con The Bees, una película de terror-ficción que emula a las de El Santo.

La dirección de Zacarías explica todo. Las tomas hechas las 10 de la mañana con el sol de frente vienen de Chucho el Roto; las escenas de violencia ridículas, de El Santo y Karateca Azteca; el drama barato es congénito a la época en la que el director dirigió en México.

La pregunta, por lo tanto, no es por qué The Pearl es tan mala, sino por qué diablos alguien decidió financiar esta basura. En realidad, nadie arriesgó dinero. Zacarías la financió de su bolso a través de sus dos compañias productoras. La distribución en DVD estuvo a cargo de Maya Entertainment, una compañía hasta hace poco especializada en distribuir cine chicano de bajo presupuesto en Estados Unidos.

The Pearl fue, al parecer, la última película dirigida por Zacarías. A excepción de Lukas Haas, ninguno de los actores que participaron en esta producción triunfó. Jorge RiveroRichard Harris, dos actores consolidados, actuaron en este churro. De Rivero no me extraña, pero sí de Harris; quizá era amigo personal de Zacarías y decidió actuar en esta película como un favor.

Hacer cine en Estados Unidos no es barato, incluso grabando en locación como lo hizo Zacarías, quien hizo fortuna en la época en la que el cine en México recibía una cantidad ridícula e insultante de subsidios gubernamentales. No sé si The Pearl fue un capricho personal de dirigir en Estados Unidos antes de morir o retirarse, o si Zacarías creía que estaba haciendo arte y que podría llegar a ganar algún premio que consagrara su larga carrera. Lo que sí es un hecho es que el "abandono gubernamental" del que se tanto se quejan las personas relacionadas con el cine en México ha hecho que los directores mexicanos se vuelvan más creativos, más competitivos, más responsivos a los gustos del público y, eventualmente, con mayor proyección internacional. Nos podrán gustar o no las películas gringas de Cuarón o del Toro, pero cualquier persona con dos dedos de frente reconoce que la más mala de ellos es infinitamente superior a The Pearl.

The Pearl no vale la pena para nada. Las tomas de la naturaleza de Los Cabos, que son lo más rescatable, son superados por cualquier video en Youtube, como este:


Thursday, November 17, 2011

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn - Pink Floyd

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was Pink Floyds first album, and the only one with Syd Barrett as leader of the band. Roger Waters is coauthor in only two songs. The eternal and futile question asked by members of the band is how the band would have been different had Barrett remained in it.

The first albums of Pink Floyd are very different from their most famous works. From a purely musical perspective, The Piper of the Gates of Dawn has nothing to do with albums like The Wall, or The Dark Side of the Moon other than the spirit of innovation that can be heard in every song. This is not a good introductory album to the Floyd, but it is definitely a great album.

I have argued before that the way technology is shaping the way of producing and understanding music would have limited bands like Pink Floyd, which understood their albums as a whole rather than as a collection of singles. While this is evident for productions like The Dark SideThe Wall, or even Wish You Were Here, this also applies to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. With songs 10 minutes long and lyrics that really don't make too much sense,  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the testimony of an age more than anything else. I don't say this to demerit the album. Quite the contrary. For instance, in "Pow R. Toc H." you can appreciate how rock is a byproduct of jazz. "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" is also another example of how bands in the sixties discovered the possibilities offered by electrical instruments.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

If you put the verbosity of Dostoevsky, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and a relentless faith on selfishness in a mixer, what you would get is Ayn Rand.

Libertarianism would not be what it is in the United States without Ayn Rand. In a best case scenario, Libertarianism as we know it would be a snobbish-academic project, similar to Ralph Nader's. Our traditional ngram shows how mentions of Rand have increased with time, with occasional spikes whenever taxes go up, or a Democratic administration takes power. In 2009, The Economist issued an article on how the sales of Atlas Shrugged in Amazon behaved in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman, peaking every time that the government took a "collectivist" measure like bailing out the banks, or approving TARP.




After reading Atlas Shrugged, a mammoth of 1070 pages which Rand considered her masterpiece, it's easy to see why it has become influential. Rand has been neglected by academics (though there's an Ayn Rand Institute, dedicated 100% to research on her thoughts and ideas) but common people who have read her books love her. I think Atlas Shrugged always comes on the highest positions of most surveys asking what are the most influential books in the United States, along with the Bible and the Constitution.  And the thing is that Rand touches a very basic string in political psyche: the idea that taxes are bad.

The book also tries to emulate the epic style of Victor Hugo's novels, whom Rand admired. Atlas Shrugged is the story of an entrepreneurial woman struggling to thrive in a world taken over by collectivists and parasites. Atlas Shrugged is an apology of selfishness. In Rand's view, rational actors will always find a market-based solution. Market failures and natural monopolies don't exist in her world, and taxes should be abolished or kept to a minimum in order to keep the government limited to punish thieves. Though I dislike them, I will not go into the politics of the book. For one thing, you can always google "critiques to rational choice" or "Coarse Theorem" to see what's wrong with this vision of the World. Additionally, there is a huge number of novels written by committed authors trying  to sell and impose their view of the World rather than engage the reader in an intellectual discussion. Atlas Shrugged tries to simplify reality in good guys versus bad guys plot, but so do other masterpieces as Les Misérables, The Karamazov Brothers, War and Peace, Oliver TwistDemian, and practically all  Latin American novels written during the "boom" years. Libertarians have the right to get supporters through literature just as communists do.

Putting politics aside, the book is repetitive and predictable, as its 30 chapters follow the same structure: the protagonists see some light at the end of a plot designed by the government, there is a dialogue between the protagonists and the bad guys where the stupidity of the bad guys is put in evidence, and then the government designs another plot to destroy entrepreneurship. The only exception to this structure is chapter VII, part 3, which is a pseudo-philosophical monologue of 70 pages.

Ayn Rand's ideology is on the rise. Some Tea Party members think that we are entering the dystopia presented in Atlas Shrugged and wear t-shirts with the emblematic question of the book, "who is John Galt." A movie on the first part of the book was released recently (trailer here), though apparently it was not very successful from a commercial point of view.

The people who don't like Ayn Rand will have problems countering her ideology. Again, she praises selfishness, and that's really cool when you are 14 or you are a single young adult with no attachments. She will not be beaten through academic debates, as Hitchens and Nader try to do, but with the most lethal and straightforward political weapons since the French Revolution: humor. John Colbert does it here.

This is Ayn Rand's first interview on TV. To see parts 2 and 3, just go to Youtube.

Monday, November 14, 2011

The Scarlet Letter - Rick Hauser

Not so long ago, Americans understood that taxes were necessary for the functioning of a society. It was possible to run on the promise of raising taxes to provide better public services for all, and people supported projects like PBS or NPR. But suddenly, selfishness installed itself in the U.S., and the idea that not depending on anybody else is good became trendy.

One series that deserves to be remembered from the golden years of PBS is The Scarlet Letter, produced in 1979. At that time, PBS was trying to compete with the BBC, which had issued a series called Fall of Eagles, a fictionalization of the lives of the members of Europe's royal families. When you look at the role of the BBC in the UK and PBS in the US, you start to understand what public goods are, and what idiocy means.

I haven't read Hawhtorne's original novel, but this adaptation is fantastic in and by itself. The dialogues are deep, and the production mixes theatrical techniques with the technological resources offered by television in a fascinating way.

Life changes and so do politics. It would therefore be unfair to look at The Scarlet Letter with the standards of today. On the one hand, Hester Prynne decided to have her child, so that would make her pro-choice. On the other hand, she's a single mother who asserts her position and her child's in society, so that would make her an advocate of women's empowerment. I guess her position, if she has any at all, would be "pro-autonomy", in the Kantian sense of the word. Hawthorne (or at least this adaptation; again, I still have to read the novel) also decided to take Puritanism until its last consequences, and as a result all the characters are guilty in the end.

In short, The Scarlet Letter offers a nice moral conundrum for the Manichean predominant view of today. Highly recommended.

Friday, November 11, 2011

The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking - Roger Waters

The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking is Roger Waters first solo album. Because it was his first album produced after he left Pink Floyd, and because he conceived it at the same time he wrote The Wall, it should not come as a surprise that The Pros and Cons sounds a lot like Pink Floyd. In fact, some of the songs are actually songs from The Wall with different lyrics. The line-up of the album is fantastic: Eric Clapton plays the lead guitar, Ray Cooper the percussion, and David Sanborn the sax. The National Philharmonic Orchestra also participates in the album. The Pros and Cons is an OK album from a musical perspective. The story it tries to tell is the fantasy of a man in his midlife crisis who dreams about sleeping with a hitchhiker.

But I guess that the ultimate value of this album is that it is the closest thing to a natural experiment on the classical question on whether the whole is larger than the sum of its parts or vice versa. Waters wrote The Pros and Cons and The Wall at the same time. The other members of the band listened to both and picked The Wall,  enriched it so that it became an icon of popular culture. The Pros and Cons is just an OK album. The Wall has been re-issued recently for the penultimate time at a price of 120 dollars; you can get the import edition of The Pros and Cons for 8.99.

Waters is clearly a genius, but so are his band mates. It is sad that no member of Pink Floyd ever understood it.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Dawn Remembers - Rich Shapero with Maria Taylor

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a book packed with a cd in the lobby of my apartment building. The title of the book is Too Far, and that of the cd is Dawn Remembers, both of them released in 2011. I haven't read the book yet, but my only comment on the cd is the following: the cd lasts around 45 minutes, but it feels like 5 hours, it's slow and repetitive, and makes me skip the book from my reading list (Mr. Shapero, if you're reading this, don't worry: I will eventually read your book, probably the next time that I'm on morphine in a hospital).

Before writing this post, I did some research about Mr. Shapero and his book (as I always do before writing), and I found that he's a California venture capitalist who writes awesome books and beautiful music in his sparse time -or at least that's what he thinks. He's giving away his books (he has published two so far, with his own money) for free to enable people to see his own work. Or something. If you want to find out more about him, you can check his website and download Too Far and Dawn Remembers to your Ipad for free.

Shapero is not part of the new wave of self-published authors who have benefited from the reduction of market entrance costs to the editorial industry: he has put a lot of his own money to publicize himself and his work. There's something I don't like about that, probably the fact that Shapero thinks that he can buy readers as he can buy copies of his books.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Radio K.A.O.S. - Roger Waters

No other band has taken the idea of "concept album" as far as Pink Floyd has done. This has resulted in two things. On the one hand, the members of the band who are still playing under the Pink Floyd brand have actually found hard to decouple the songs of albums like The Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall from their original context to play them alive. As a result, the members of the band who kept playing under the Pink Floyd brand have become some kind of Cirque du Soleil of rock and roll: they perform different albums in different tours. One goes to see Pink Floyd playing The Wall plus a couple of other songs, just like seeing "Alegria" or any other Cirque du Soleil performance.

On the other hand, all the members of the band, whether they remained members of Pink Floyd or not, remained committed to doing concept albums exclusively. Thus, all the solo albums of Roger Waters are, in fact, concept albums, including Radio K.A.O.S. This is not bad in itself, but gets repetitive after a while.

Radio K.A.O.S. has been criticized for making too many references to Reagan, Thatcher, and the U.S.S.R. invasion to Afghanistan. I personally don't think this is necessarily bad. If nothing else, Radio K.A.O.S. is a testimony of the political environment of the time. For some reason, people today think that the 80's were this period of stupid and frivolous pop, and part of that is true, but the 80's (particularly the first 5 years) were also very harsh for many people in the developed country, and that inevitably created protests and with them rock and roll. Good rock and roll.

Radio K.A.O.S. is an OK album, with sad lyrics that try to convey a message. The only problem -if it's a problem at all- is that it's too pink floyd-ish, which is kind of sad when you think about how hard Waters tried to disentangle himself from his previous band mates.