Art | unobtrusive lucidity

Hello? Is This Mic On?

Where have all the blogs gone?

I was thinking this this morning as I was perusing my RSS reader. Being a sucker for fond remembrances of days gone by, I’ve gone through many iterations of RSS readers through the years. Each time, I port over all of the feeds that were in my previous reader. As a result, I have…well, a lot…of feeds in NetNewsWire at the moment, only a fraction of which are ever currently updated. As I scroll down the sidebar list of blogs that I have subscribed to through the decades, I remember so many fondly. I’ve met some really cool people and made friends through blogs, back when blogs were at their prime. Most of these, however, have been dormant for some time. The feeds that update on a weekly basis belong to certain prolific and popular bloggers, or larger publications. Those like this one? People who were passionately contributing their thoughts to the public sphere? I suspect that only a few of us remain.

As a rule, I’m not a trendy person. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that I use an RSS reader to collect my feeds, as I’m guessing there are some out there who are even questioning what that is. As social media was introduced and eventually evolved to do irreparable harm to our social fabric, most readers outsourced their reading preferences to the Algorithm and stopped (perceiving themselves as) having the time to look for good writing. If something isn’t being thrust in front of our faces, we forget that it exists. My friend, that’s not a byproduct of the technological evolution. It’s by design.

So, I suppose that writers such as myself are, if not a casualty of the Internet’s impossibly fast and unhealthy evolution, then certainly relegated to a niche. In the before times, I posted two or three times weekly, and now struggle to post monthly, so this is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy. I miss those days, though, don’t you? Back before the web was weaponized?

I think that part of the phenomenon, though (and I’m being intentional to not call it a “problem”) is less engagement. I actually have little insight into who reads this as I don’t invade your privacy with analytics, so there could be hundreds of readers on each post who simply don’t comment. That would actually make sense, because I think that commenting died before engagement did in the blogosphere (and yes, I’m aware at how much I just dated myself by using that term).

I suspect that things may change though, and that this will be reflective of a cultural change. I say that because I hear…feel?…rumblings of discontent at being a culture comprised of those who consume rather than those who engage.

The first time I heard the phrase “consume media,” I had a visceral reaction. This should not be the case and has become a sad state of affairs. To consume is passive, to sit back and allow one’s brain to be flooded with entertainment without that entertainment having any substantive impact on them…the equivalent of elevator music. And, while there is a conversation to be had about minimizing the vision of the artist by refusing to look longer than 10 (metaphorical) seconds at their work, the point I’m making here is that engaging media, and, by extension, art, is an entirely different experience than simply consuming. Engagement involves thinking, unpacking, permitting oneself to be impacted by the story.

When I was in theatre, the experience of seeing a play was twofold. There was the experience of going to the show, of course, which is magic in itself. Beyond that, however, was the experience of going for coffee with your friends after and discussing what you had just watched. What did you see in the show? What did it make you think? How did it make you feel? Layers of substance are revealed in these conversations that begin to get us closer to what the playwright was trying to convey.

To some degree, that happens today in discussion forums, but not in the same way. After all, it would be impossible to meaningfully watch or listen to the amount of media that various platforms prefer us to consume in an endless stream, which maximizes the profits of them and their advertisers. One would think that, with all of this volume, smaller and more independent voices would be able to have a better chance of getting their work to you, but you see, their work doesn’t rank in the Algorithm, and we long ago ceded those RSS feeds because we didn’t want to think for ourselves.

Were blogs a solution to this? Hardly. In the days when we aggregated our own reading, though…when we went looking for things that interested us…new work had a better chance of making its way to the top.

So, I think the winds are changing, because readers and viewers and listeners are willing to pay for what they like, and are pushing back on the so-called attention economy. As they do so, and culture hopefully begins to go back to a better way of doing things, I think that blogs will regain some popularity. I’m hopeful, not because its better for the bloggers, but because its better for everyone.

Please engage. Don’t consume.

Why the Acolyte’s Cancellation is Good News

A model of the Millenium Falcon from Star Wars. Used under Creative Commons.

I sort of have difficulty believing that I’m writing a post about Star Wars. There’s one other that I’ve written to my knowledge, a review of the Force Awakens (spoiler: I wasn’t impressed), which I ended by affirming my stance that there had only been three Star Wars movies. When I introduced my daughter to Star Wars, I began with A New Hope, and sort of pretended that the rest hadn’t happened. The prequels were of very poor quality (you can’t have Jar Jar Binks and a good movie…they’re just mutually exclusive), and it was obvious to me with the Force Awakens that Disney was just recycling stories to squeeze more money out of the franchise.

I was perfectly content with that perspective for years.

Then, there was a pandemic, and while exceptionally bored one night, we decided to try the Mandalorian. This brought me back into the newer Star Wars programming in a positive way, because the Mandalorian is excellent. Since then, I’ve found the small screen adventures overall have been hit and miss…there are complete wastes of time like Obi-Wan Kenobi, and exceptional standouts like Andor. I’ve watched most of the Star Wars canon through the latest series at this point. I still have little room in my life for the prequels, and I’ve never seen (and don’t intend to see) the last two films. In general, though, a new series will get me in front of the television.

The first episode of the Acolyte grabbed my attention. I’m largely unfamiliar with the High Republic era, and this episode did what a good first episode should…left the viewer with so, so many questions and pondering how this fit into the larger timeline. By the halfway point, though, I was tuning in out of a determination just to finish what I had started, not because I had any interest whatsoever.

The reason for this isn’t any that I’ve encountered among blogs and podcasts of the Star Wars faithful. There are rants everywhere in that very vocal community, including the inevitable accusations of racism and intolerance being thrown at Disney leadership. Everyone has an opinion, and the Internet allows the vocalization of those opinions, but there is something deeper at play here, I think.

My issue with the direction of Star Wars in general is its departure from Lucas’ original vision in a fundamental, metaphysical way. Star Wars, at its core, is about good vs. evil, which is why it resonated with so many viewers at its debut. The Jedi and the Rebellion were good, the Empire was evil. Now, let me say that I’m not arguing that the canon should never have expanded. Lucas’ genius was dropping small references to events of the past or other people in the characters’ lives without ever digging into them, which leaves so many potential story arcs for a generation of new writers. More than perhaps any other franchise I know of, he set this up for continuation from the beginning, and that was brilliant. With these new stories will undoubtedly come new perspectives. When those perspectives depart from the original world-building at such a foundational level, though, we run into issues.

The most recent iterations of Star Wars…I would argue even going back to the prequels…have been increasingly obsessed with the fact that the Jedi can’t actually be as good as we’ve been led to believe. This isn’t unique to Star Wars, either.

For the past decade or more, it seems that most heroes are antiheroes. The dominant opinion of our cultural moment is that no one can be good, that there is actually no such thing as good. All is subjective. Postmodernism has reached its conclusion. This cynicism makes its way into the writing of our popular culture, and deconstructs fictional character groups like the Jedi. A group that originally stood for good in the universe is now revealed to have been so hopelessly flawed from the beginning that our faith in them is found to have been misplaced. That sort of good can’t exist.

So, what to do, then? If we allow this cynicism to carry us on its current, then the Rebellion must be cut of similar cloth. So, why resist the Empire? Perhaps Thrawn should be our new role model. Give in to the evil, this thought process would tell us, because the good is an illusion.

Nihlist, much?

A lot has happened in the world over the decades since Star Wars first made its impression on my generation, much of it bad. My glasses are not rose-colored. I don’t blame anyone for reaching a point of pessimism in their lives. To give up on the concept of good, however…to refuse to believe in heroes…is to give up on what makes us human.

My issue with the Acolyte is its embracing of evil. My issue with the Acolyte is its message that all attempt at good is doomed. My issue with the Acolyte is its lack of hope, that it left me feeling empty at its conclusion.

Were this to be the pattern of Star Wars moving forward, my opinion would revert to where it was prior to experiencing the Mandalorian. That is, I would be finished with the franchise in its current state. The fact that the Acolyte has not been renewed gives me hope that future stories will return to good triumphing over evil.

That is, after all, a message that we desperately need in our own universe.

Image attribution: Michael Panse under Creative Commons.

Thoughts on Black Panther II: Wakanda Forever

When someone passes, they leave a void in the lives of those around them. When that person is a performing artist, and they are known for a role that was deeply impactful to a huge audience, that void is magnified exponentially. That was the case when Chadwick Boseman, who played the role of T’Challa, a.k.a. the Black Panther, passed away in 2020. He drew us into a classic character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before appearing in his own film, Black Panther, which I would argue is possibly the best film that Marvel has produced. As fans around the world reeled at the news, many of us wondered what would happen to the character, to the story arc?

The worst thing that directors can do in a circumstance in which an actor, especially an actor who has mastered such an important role, passes, is simply re-cast the role and continue the story arc as-is. With few exceptions, audiences just won’t be on board. The beauty of the art form is that the character has now come alive for us, embodied in this actor, and, Time Lords aside, new faces might be accepted, but they just don’t work in the long run.

That’s why I think that Wakanda Forever is exactly what the story needs, and what audiences need, as the MCU moves forward. This story is about the void. It’s about those left behind. It’s about a nation and a people that still need a hero, but find that hero to be suddenly taken away from them. This is a story about mourning. It is a hero story without a hero.

Accordingly, the movie begins letting the audience experience the grief of the loss, giving us a few moments…not rushed…to mourn with the rest of the characters on the screen, before being thrust into the aftermath of T’Challa’s death. The central character here is Shuri, T’Challa’s sister, and, while we’re introduced to new characters such as Namor the Sub-Mariner and Ironheart, this is very much her story. The through-line is her grief, and the nation-state conflicts and political power-struggles between Wakanda, Talokan, and the United States are really just vehicles to walk her character through the grief process. The action sequences mostly concede (final climactic battle excepted) to character development, especially the Wakandan characters that we’ve seen in previous films, which really gives the audience something to digest. It is difficult to watch a hero film without a hero, difficult to sit with that emptiness of grief, but it is the only way to give this story arc the treatment that it deserves and, given other recent catastrophic failures in this phase of the MCU, I’m both relieved and respectful that the writers did so.

This film is more, though. It deals with the natural human reactions to trauma: confronting the collision of faith and empiricism in un-answered prayers, and the desire to strike back at the world in anger. More than grief explored, Wakanda Forever is a story of faith vs. uncertainty, and, perhaps most of all, a morality tale on the dangers of seeking revenge.

It’s not that I didn’t have problems with the film. While I think that the depth of not only African but Aztec cultures are beautifully presented, the decision to make Namor and his people not be from Atlantis just didn’t work for the comics purist in me. I can see why the decision was made from a writing standpoint though, as it wouldn’t be seen as original given that DC got there first.

All in all, though, Wakanda Forever stands out for me in a Phase 4 that has been, at best, about 50% worthwhile. This was a fantastic film with which to end this phase, and, above all, it pays respect to Boseman’s legacy with the character, while building a solid foundation for where the new Black Panther will take us. I highly recommend this film.

My Middle School Life: A Retrospective

Over the Spring, when we, like most everyone else in the world, were under stay-at-home orders due to the pandemic, I was doing a lot more reading along with my “quarantine projects.” I was actively digging for new books, sometimes random books that would pop up from my memory and of which I no longer owned a copy for whatever reason. During one of these digging expeditions, I dug up the Books of Swords trilogy from Fred Saberhagan on Audible. Wow, did these take me back.

I remember discussing this series in depth with my best friend. I was in middle school, he in high school. The mythology of Saberhagen’s world was prominent in my imagination for more than a year during that time. I went through the series quickly this Spring, loving every moment of its fantasy adventures. There were times that I felt I was in my middle school bedroom again, devouring the fantastical tales.

This, of course, led to me remembering and searching for other authors that I had originally discovered during that period of my life: Isaac Asimov, Piers Anthony, Robert Henlein. I wanted to be talking to my best friend again (I have, to my discredit, no idea where he is these days), to be rattling on to my parents about these amazing books that I was reading, somehow oblivious to their facial expressions as they stood before the firehose of my mental landscape.

I make a trip to my local comic shop every weekend to collect my pull list for the week. Last weekend, I was on my way there, listening to an 80’s hair band station on Pandora that I’ve been carefully curating over the course of several years. I was always sort of conflicted about life goals, but these two things have always been true: I wanted to write books for a living, and I wanted to be a drummer in a rock band. And, honestly, I’ve done a bit of both, but life has taken strange and unexpected turns with me, as it does with everyone else.

In grad school, there was a point in which I found myself missing my college theatre days. A lot of the books that I read…and searched for at local bookshops then…were driven by that desire to regain something that had been, not lost, but misplaced. I phased out of this for a bit, no longer looking for Beth Henley plays…but now, lately, I have been drifting back to high school (in music) and middle school (in books). In an odd way, I’m sort of being selective about the time period of my nostalgia. Maybe this has been more pronounced because of the stress in the world…we all just want to escape. However, after going through a period of near-asceticism in seminary, I remember what hit me in the face when I was reading Donald Miller, an extremely popular author amongst students of religion at the time. In Blue Like Jazz, he writes:

“Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am. It feels like I should go back and get the person I am and bring him here to the person I should be.”
Donald Miller, “Blue Like Jazz,” p. 98

I don’t want to regress to childhood, or to my teenage years. However, it is important to recognize that all of these “phases” that I went through made me, laid the foundation for who I am today. Some of that is better, some of that is worse, because I, like everyone else, have made really good and really bad decisions at various points in my life. All of this, however, can be providentially woven together for the good, and walking away from it, as I initially did in my early seminary days, carries the risk of idolizing the present and rejecting the past. The past needs to be remembered, including our personal pasts. Where there was bad, we learn from it, and where there was good, we embrace it. There is a wisdom gained from a life lived. In additional to reading some really good books, this recent internal retrospective has taught me that.

A Review of “Ethel and Ernest”

Screenshot of the cover of Ethel and Ernest I found Ethel and Ernest waiting for me one evening on my nightstand. This is the home of my “to-read stack,” or at least the non-digital incarnations in my to-read list. This small volume had been laid to the side…not inserting itself onto the top of the stack, but rather existing as a suggestion off to the right. Initially thinking this was a book for our daughter’s reading lessons, I passed it by. Then Karen told me that she had checked it out from our library, and that I really should read it.

Opening its pages and discovering it to be a graphic novel intrigued me, so I allowed it to skip ahead of others on the list and read it next. I am unbelievably glad that I did.

Ethel and Ernest is an artist’s recollection of his parents…the story of their lives told as he remembers and has pieced it together. One reviewer called it a “love story,” and that phrase resonates as I have found myself thinking about the book…unpacking it, journaling through its impact on my life, an impact disproportionate to its small size.

We initially encounter Ethel and Ernest as they meet and fall in love in 1920’s London. We watch them work through their relationship as the world goes to war, the horrors of what was faced as they sent their son away to the country to be safe, the stories we’ve all read in history books taking on a completely new depth when we witness how it played out in the lives of this ordinary couple. We watch them become lost in the pace of industrial and technological change, loving the new conveniences (she cannot believe how fast the washing machine gets their clothes clean) while grappling with the enormity of how their lives are altered by them. I adore the scene in which they buy a car and go riding down the street, in disbelief that they could afford such luxury.

We walk through their remembering their early romance later in life, watch them struggle with the alienation from their son (the author of the book) as they struggle to adapt to the things that he just accepts.

I feel as though I know Ethel and Ernest now, like I’ve met them. I feel like I know how they tried their best as life rushed by, how they found ways to cope with their profound political disagreements. Perhaps this is inevitable with such a work, whether it’s Brigg’s intention or not, but I can’t help but see my own parents here. They still sit in the same house in which I grew up, and I can picture them waiting for their son to visit or call, uncertain at times of how to adapt to a world that is merciless in the speed with which it changes.

I can hear Brigg’s sorrow at his frustration with them. I can feel my own love for my daughter as I watch Earnest’s affection for his son. In short, I see that I have so much connecting me…all of us…with Ethel and Ernest, because their lives were ordinary, albeit lived in extraordinary times. Any of us can, and likely will, live through very similar struggles and triumphs.

I think that is why I fought back tears over Earnest’s loneliness in the end.

Brigg’s remorse over his broken relationship with his parents is never explicitly stated, but is an unmistakeable through-line, palpably felt in the jagged speech bubbles and the stark lines of his drawings of himself, making the reader painfully aware of his disproportionate responses. Ethel, always seeing their family as proper and never “common,” persists in offering him a comb whenever they see each other, which we see as adorable but which was a source of much friction in their relationship. I think that she just wanted to take care of him in a manner of which she was deprived by the war. Later, he accepts the comb, no longer feeling judged, some peace made before the end, before Ethel and Ernest pass away alone and in the cruelest of circumstances after giving their life together everything.

I see so much of not only my parents in them, but also of Karen and I. I wonder how our daughters will remember our lives when we are gone.

In the end, we find the author and his wife looking at the house which Ethel and Ernest bought together. He states with some wonder that they lived in the same house for 40 years and never moved. That home becomes a metaphor for Ethel and Ernest’s devotion to each other. The horrors that they witnessed, the turmoil through which they lived, made them stronger, more resilient in their commitment to their marriage and to their son. They stayed together until the end in a way that I hope to, and were stronger for it.

This achievement alone, if it can be replicated, can be called a successful life.

This little graphic novel carries so much weight. I am not the same as before I read it. I do not treat my relationships the same, I do not view our world the same. Neither, I suspect, will you. I am so glad that Briggs has given us the chance to become acquainted with Ethel and Ernest.

I encourage you to take the opportunity.