Second Skin

Second Skin is the best, most profound, and most significant of these three films inspired by geek culture. It is a true achievement, both in documentary film-making and in public discourse about online gaming. Artistically, Second Skin is beautiful—compelling interviews interspersed with machinima sequences and illustrative animations. It succeeds in storytelling because of its focus on several story lines; as the narrative focuses on different aspects of online gaming, the narratives are emphasized or de-emphasized. In a segment focused on addiction, one gamer receives particular attention because his around-the-clock habit wrecked havoc on his life. Another gamer is shown in proximity whose lesser (but still alarming) addiction seems to cause a deepening rupture with his wife.

But the filmmakers do not solely focus on the negative—love lives are formed and disabled people are liberated through the virtual world. The positive and the negative do not cancel each other out; rather, they help formulate a cultural critique that should disturb us all—the reason we want to retreat into the virtual world is that we are dissatisfied with the real world.

Nerdcore Rising

Nerdcore Rising is a vibrant, engaging, and surprisingly profound exploration of so-called nerdcore hip-hop. The film follows MC Frontalot, who coined his genre’s name, on his first nationwide tour—a significant step forward, considering that his music was basically a hobby to that point. Nerdcore Rising is a hybrid between a tour/concert film and a talking-heads documentary; it features live concerts (interspersed and overlaid with brilliant and hilarious animations), a travel narrative with goofy moments, observations from the band and their fans, and interviews with other musicians (other nerdcore artists, hip-hop artists, and even Weird Al Yankovic). The film that emerges from this hodgepodge of techniques is insightful at times, particularly when exploring the disenfranchisement of nerds and geeks that necessitates a music written for them (see especially “I Heart Fags,” derived from expectations on young men to assert false, chauvinistic masculinity).

Nerdcore hip-hop is always presented as self-effacing, but never as a simple parody of mainstream hip-hop. Amid the fun of MC Frontalot’s performances and his various antics, the film makes an argument: nerdcore hip-hop is in the true spirit of the wider genre’s emphasis on expressing who one is. It is, the film declares, a worthy subgenre.

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet

The subject of Reformat the Planet—chip tunes, i.e., electronica using outdated video game systems—is, unfortunately, much more interesting than the film itself. It’s worth viewing, to be sure, but it features little cultural critique and suffers from a weak narrative. There is a narrative formed from the rise of chip tunes and the Blip Festival that signals the arrival of this unique musical “scene,” but the film wanders between topics and frequently repeats itself. The argument of this documentary, much repeated but nonetheless lacking the punch of Nerdcore Rising, is that the participants in the chip tunes scene are musicians who want to return to a simpler, grittier style. There’s some meat to that claim—the style subverts both the commercial aim of the video game systems and the extravagance of electronica—but wider implications are mostly eschewed.

What saves Reformat the Planet is the stunning cinematography and editing. The performances imitate the music in multimedia innovation, sucking in the viewer. These sequences do not resemble a music video or traditional concert footage—they’re something new and beautiful in their artistic extravagance and technological simplicity. These sequences often make a better case for chip tunes than any of the interviewees.

Sex Positive is an important film. That sounds like hyperbole, especially if one considers that I attended the world premiere in a half-full theatre, but you wouldn’t think so if you always this brilliant documentary about AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz—irascible and confrontational, but also profound and impassioned. Whether we disagree with him, we have to respect that he legitimately wants to do good, first by fighting the gay establishment in calling attention to promiscuity, then by promoting the concept of safe sex. The most significant contribution that Sex Positive makes is its analysis of what AIDS did to the people in the gay community—the interviewees paint a picture of young, productive men dying at an alarming rate without any real explanation. Sex Positive is shot beautifully, with a shaky or still camera as the interview demands, and interspersed by stock footage that is sometimes shocking but never indulgent. Berkowitz is a compelling subject, and the filmmakers explore his complexities to the extent they are able, even venturing into his years spent as an S&M hustler and a drug addict. What I appreciate about this film is that it explores without being too preachy—though there is some preaching.

Sorry. I’ve given up on C.S. Lewis. Not on his scholarship or his apologetics (though I’m skeptical of those at this point), but on his didactic, overbearing fiction.

It’s useful to trace how I got to this point.

First, there was Narnia. I remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid–or, rather, I remember having read it. I don’t think I read any of the other volumes, though they were in my library. Fast-forward to a couple years ago, when that book’s adaptation was brought to life by Disney. The film was decent (not great, certainly not as good as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings), so I was interested enough to pick up the Narnia books again. I didn’t remember anything from them, so I went into my one-volume Chronicles of Narnia with the expectation that I would enjoy it. I should also note that I was reading J.K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket at the time, so I was generally positive toward children’s literature.

So I read Lion.

I hated it. There were some spectacular lines, but the story was disjointed to the point of near-incoherence and the dialogue was stilted, like the worst of Victorian prudishness. It was one of the most singularly horrible reading experiences I had subjected myself to.

Being a glutton for punishment, I read Prince Caspian. More of the same, really; the dialogue improved somewhat, but did Aslan have to jump in, deus ex machina, without any connection with the previous 75 pages? Finally, I gave Lewis a third shot and read The Magician’s Nephew. The only thing–and I do mean the only thing–I got out of it was the observation that Neil Gaiman stole his beginning to Anansi Boys from the creation of Narnia. Other than that, it was crap.

I know I’m being pejorative, and I know I have some Lewis aficionado friends who occasionally read this, but I simply must be honest: I found all three books pretentious, awkward, and intensely overrated.

My impression of Lewis improved somewhat when I listened to John Cleese’s reading of The Screwtape Letters. Finally, here was the Lewis I had been told of–clearly a prose stylist who understands the subtle hypocrises and real triumphs of modern religion. The words themselves, not just Cleese’s performance of them, were marvelous. Screwtape is the only reason I hold out hope for Lewis’s apologetical and scholarly writing.

Unfortunately, I was duped again by Lewis when I also downloaded Out of the Silent Planet from Audible.com. It started out well, more or less. Ransom is a lovable, solitary professor at the beginning–a stock character if there ever was one–and I had hopes he would develop out of that. The séroni are truly terrifying in their first appearance, and the narrative held me on the edge of my seat until the lowly doldrums that is Ransom’s encounter with the hrossa. This sequence reveals the total flatness of Ransom; the book might have been called C.S. Lewis Goes to Space. Ransom’s two-dimensional self-righteousness, and the weird neoplatonism of the author, weigh down every paragraph. Ransom learns from the hrossa, but only their language and some transparently didactic religious points that Lewis wanted to get across (particularly when Hyoi tells Ransom about the restrained sex life of hrossa). It was at this point in the narrative that I truly resented the early confrontation between Ransom and Weston; the latter plays the nihilist (we’re supposed to boo and hiss at him, I guess) and the former plays the dignified humanist who is against vivisection. I had recognized Lewis’s precise honing of that conversation for his didactic purposes, but I didn’t realize the extent of it until Ransom meets another species and utterly fails to change.

But the oddest things about the encounter with the hrossa is its parallel with Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, too, is a fool in a strange land. In each voyage, he–like Ransom among the hrossa–is instructed in the local language and learns it quickly because of his supposed facility for languages. Ransom is an anti-Gulliver in some respects; he is an Oxford philologist, so it makes sense that he recognizes Hyoi’s linguistic capabilities when they first meet. But in other respects, he is a pale imitation of Gulliver; neither character changes, but at least Swift’s protagonist is delightfully complex in his chauvinistic idiocy. Ransom is just the stereotype of an Oxford don who makes strange lands and strange peoples dreadfully boring.

So I gave up. I downloaded Jonathon Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude from Audible.com and was delighted, in the first five minutes, to know that I was going to be given complex characters and questions rather than propositions.

I am profoundly disappointed in my reading of Lewis. I was intrigued by the idea of a Christian science fiction novel, but I won’t be picking Out of the Silent Planet up–or anything else by Lewis–for a long, long time.

Besides school books (of course), here’s my priority reading list (with current publisher, original publication date):

1. Toni Morrison, Mercy (Random, 2008): Wikipedia tells me that this will be released in October.  I will be there the day it comes out.  That is all.
2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984): I’ve been wanting to read this because it so often comes up in critiques of modern SF literature; it’s sort of the book equivalent of Blade Runner.  I’ve started to read it, and I’m amazed at how it seems to have a coherent story despite its disorienting premise.
3. David Michaelis, Schultz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper, 2007): I love the idea that the man behind Peanuts was a tortured artist and that one of the most ubiquitous commercial properties in American culture has a great deal of pathos behind it.  I was first introduced to this idea by a comic artist (I forget who) who pointed out that the absent parents are the most striking feature of Schultz’s strip; when I heard that Michaelis had uncovered the reason for this pathos, I knew I had to read his biography.
4. William Empson, Milton’s God (Greenwood, 1961): I don’t know if I’ll agree with all of Empson’s conclusions (probably not), but I’m intrigued by the idea that Milton was so towering a poet that even the most ardent atheist had to pay attention.  Also, I think one of the greatest heresies of Milton scholarship is the one that supposes that he always and everywhere wrote orthodox poetry.
5. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1967): This one is more of a line of research, while my interest in Empson is mostly curiosity. I’m intrigued by the endings of GenX novels and, specifically, how the endings relate to the tension between cool disaffection and melodramatic sincerity.  My hope is that Kermode, having written the definitive book on endings, will aid me in my research.
6. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (Harper, 2007): This was recommended by the Internet Monk as a cogent and sometimes damning history of the Reformation.  I like the idea of scholars committed to a certain religious cause taking a serious look at its origins.
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Harper, 1942): Last year, I fell in love with Hurston’s writing.  Few modern American writers are so poetic (for me, she is only eclipsed in this regard by Morrison), and none provide such eloquent–if occasionally shocking–expositions of racial inequities.  Dust Tracks is her autobiography, and it now includes what her white editors made her cut in the interest of political correctness.
8. Toni Morrison, Paradise (Penguin, 1997): It is my understanding that Paradise completes a trilogy started by Beloved and continued in Jazz.  Both of the latter novels are remarkable, and I simply must know how Morrison binds her books together.
9. Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (Random, 2008): Most anti-Bush books are foaming-at-the-mouth affairs, but I like Weisberg’s approach.  He begins with the assumption that Bush is a failure–debatable, but not debated here–and uses his book to examine the man’s character.  It sounds like solid journalism from what he describes in interviews (I recently heard him on Fresh Air).
10. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (Harper, 1995): I adored Generation X, even though the ending was extremely odd (see above), and I’m desperate to learn more.  Though I didn’t enter the corporate workforce until the 2000s, I’ve always felt drawn to the business and technology culture of the 1990s.  The tech boom to the tech bust is the most interesting period of business history for me, probably because I grew up with it.  Also, there’s a wild-west/hopeless-slacker combination going on.  I’ve heard good things, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

The 1972 documentary Marjoe follows Marjoe Gortner as he takes the viewer behind the scenes of the Pentecostal tent revival circuit.  That description is paraphrased from the IMDB plot summary, and it doesn’t even approach a good description of the film.  Marjoe is part character study, part investigative journalism.  We get a close-up view of Gortner’s strange life, from his manipulation by his parents to be the “youngest ordained preacher” at 4 years old to his hippie lifestyle as he presented himself to congregations as a mature man of the cloth.  At the same time, the filmmakers show candid conversations with high-profile pastors as they count money and talk about their extensive foreign properties.  The brilliance of the film is the way these two purposes interact–we are inclined by the corruption we see behind the stages of the revival tents to perceive Marjoe as heroic but we are disturbed by his character flaws and blatant self-interest.

There is a certain segment of Christianity in general and in any denomination that seeks to reduce charges of sinfulness and corruption–Catholic Answers is famous for this, as demonstrated in its tract, “The Inquisition” (filed, notably, under “Anti-Catholicism”).  That segment of Christians and Pentecostals would be hard pressed to work around Marjoe; the film doesn’t show anyone other than Marjoe admitting to using evangelism as a business, but all the evidence is there.  This is shown marvelously when Marjoe guest-preaches and exhorts the congregation to make a “donation” for handkerchiefs that offer spiritual benefit.  During the laying-of-hands segment after his sermon, he and the lead preacher go into a back room and count money.  The film cuts between the counting of money and the Spirit-stricken congregation–then, the preacher hands Marjoe a stack of cash.  For some, this is evidence enough that Christianity has always been about collecting money from the less fortunate, but I think the corruption is more subtle than that.  What the filmmakers have shown is a symbiotic relationship; the guest preacher, especially a celebrity like Marjoe, brings in a crowd who is willing to part with some cash.  That’s why the guest preacher gets a “cut,” and that’s the problem.  An honorarium is a set amount, so the guest preacher is not impelled to force further payment; but the corrupt lead pastor brings in Marjoe hoping he’ll convince the congregation, explicitly or implicitly, to give abundantly and then rewards his guest according to the results.  It is the subtlety of this corruption that convinces me it is both ingrained and widespread.  Marjoe is, therefore, not a film about a select group of nasty preachers and their enablers.  Rather, it is about a corruption that reigned and continues to reign in American Pentecostalism (witness Senator Grassley’s investigation of six televangelists).

But corruption mainly occupies the first third or so of the film–the rest is about Marjoe.  We pity him at the beginning as scenes of his preaching at four and five years old are interspersed with images of him in his mid-twenties, when the film was shot.  He tells us that he was programmed by his parents to preach for money, and we believe him.  What’s more, I think the filmmakers revealed the extent of his programming, though unwittingly.  I think that the filmmakers, good skeptics that they are, believed that just showing a five-year-old claiming to be a preacher would be evidence enough of such programming, but their audience includes believers in miracles.  Who is to say that God may not call a young child and gift him with inspiration?  But that supposition is refuted before we even hear from grown-up Marjoe, when four-or-five-year-old Marjoe declares that he is convinced–not he believes–that the Bible is the Word of God.  The line between conviction and belief is fuzzy at times, but few (if any) four-or-five-year-olds would have the intellectual capacity to honestly assess the evidence and come away convinced in the veracity of Scripture.

As the film examines the grown-up Marjoe, our pity doesn’t fade entirely, though it is significantly complicated.  The filmmakers are shown in the film, laughing along as Marjoe makes fun of the congregants that he hoodwinks, but there is no direct commentary or voiceovers from them.  After a couple of scenes in the beginning, the filmmakers disappear from the film altogether, lending the film’s focus entirely to its titular subject.  We see Marjoe at his best and worst–he claims he is “over” his parents’ manipulation of him because he believes they will receive bad karma as a result.  Obviously, Marjoe is emotionally shallow to still want his parents to suffer and spiritually shallow enough to believe in a complex Hindu principle without any education in that religion.  Later, we see him justify the film’s morally ambiguous setup–no one, including his father at one point, knows the film is an expose or that Marjoe no longer believes in what he preaches.  He’s “bad, but not evil,” and he wonders aloud what he’ll do afterward.  He mentions he would like to go into film, and we should all raise an eyebrow at that point.  Clearly, there are other motives than journalistic honesty at work in the film.  In short, Marjoe is shown as a human being with good traits and bad (but not evil) traits.

Given the film’s emphasis on corruption and on Marjoe, one wonders why there is so much footage of the revivals, on the performance of the preachers and the crowd interaction and reaction.  I suspect there is a strong element of debunking that’s intended here; maybe, like Marjoe, the filmmakers are convinced that the “work of the Spirit” in Pentecostal congregations is mostly the result of a warped crowd mentality.  But I think there’s something more going on, because the filmmakers do not just focus on the parts he tells them to; they fix the camera after they’ve been touched or “baptized in the spirit.”  They show the choirs dancing without suggestion from the pulpit and the people along with them.  Marjoe’s girlfriend states on camera that she can’t believe that the crowd, deep down, believes they are having a genuine spiritual experience, and Marjoe reduces revivals to the same status as rock concerts (a way of “getting off”).  So it seems that the filmmakers are concerned with a question that Marjoe dismisses: can we take these spiritual experiences seriously?  Even if the ethical questions are silenced (they aren’t in the film, but let’s pretend they are for a moment), the question of individual authenticity remains.  The congregation believes Marjoe, believes in God’s power to heal, and the congregants are never presented as stupid or as dupes.  They are presented as they are, and extensively so.  The film left me wondering about these congregants, whether they would feel cheated or satisfied that God had spoken to them, somehow.  That I couldn’t get them out of my mind, that I couldn’t resolve them away with theological or psychological explanations, is an indication of that Marjoe succeeds, and succeeds abundantly.

I’m reading…

• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman (Pantheon, 2007; via Audible.com): Just started this one, and it’s a true delight.  It’s a dual reading, appropriate for its dual voice narrative.  Grossman seems to take superhero and supervillain tropes seriously and provides a world to explain how they operate.
• Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2007; via Audible.com): Just finished this one, and I’ve concluded that audio is the only format to read a Keillor book.  Pontoon begins with a transcendent description of Heaven and descends to the earth, to Lake Wobegon, to examine what happens when a citizen dies.  The strength of the novel is that the situations and the characters are both unique and universal; you feel that these people are down the street from you, but you also feel they’re unlike anyone else.  You feel that these situations have happened to you, but they never have.  But most importantly, Pontoon is an example of what happens when an author truly understands oral literature and incorporates it into the Western novel.  Thus, the narrative is recursive, with each person’s story being told, as if the novel itself represents what future generations of Lake Wobegon will say about these people and these events.

Of Kahlil Gibran’s Collected Works, by Alan Jacobs, in First Things.  (Via Little Professor)

Say what?  There’s something between Iowa and New Hampshire?

The only reason I knew at all was that NPR’s nifty Election 2008 map breaks down the primaries and caucuses for you.  I’ve searched elsewhere for any info on the results, and have only found an article on CNN that’s being updated as new information surfaces.  Also, there’s the aforementioned NPR Election 2008 page, which gives results in tabular form.

Well, that’s not the conclusion of this article on MSN Money (via my dad, a BlackBerry user).  The iPhone wins for me because it combines all the things I want in a portable device into one.  The nice thing is that I don’t forget my iPod or CDs or calendar at home; I have to have my phone on me, and it’s all there.  As for corporate email–my personal mail is Gmail, and I don’t make use of it, except when out of the state.

That’s not to say that the iPhone is perfect.  I’ve had one for a few months, and I’ve discovered a couple of odd kinks.  For one, the internal speaker automatically shuts off if you remove the headphone jack from it when you’re playing music or receiving a call.  To get it back, you have to make and complete a phone call with the headphone jack inserted
and then remove the headphone jack.  Annoying, but minor.

A while ago, I read Brian D. McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy as a sort of theological test. Could I support his values and, by extension, the emergent church as a whole? In the end, my faith decisions were determined by community rather than theology–almost always a better determinant. McLaren’s book made me think a great deal about a lot of important issues, but I’m not sure I can give it as enthusiastic an endorsement as, say, Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel.

I should say, first, that I think McLaren’s book is well-written, and that is not ordinarily a qualification for writing a Christian book. Whether academic or not, most books published by Christian publishing houses are painful to read for a variety of qualitative reasons that I won’t go into here. So it is no small thing to say that McLaren’s writing style is lively, informative, passionate, and rarely cheesy. He avoids exclamation points (the most overused punctuation mark in Christian literature) and says exactly what he means.

And because he’s so clear about what he means, there’s a lot to think about after finishing the book. I think the first, most important point to make about McLaren’s theology in this book is that it’s not established. He’s not laying down a theological system or a way to structure a church. Rather, he’s asking the most important question facing the modern Church–do our practices and beliefs serve the church (small c) or the Gospel? Are we so concerned with being Christians (i.e., operating within a particular denominational identity to the exclusion of others) that we aren’t doing the sorts of things that exemplar Christians would do?

McLaren highlights this point by distinguishing orthodoxy from orthopraxis. He does not say that orthodoxy is unimportant (it is, after all, in the title of the book), and he does not propose abandoning theological truth (or, rather, Truth). He proposes instead that we tie our conception of orthodoxy to the resulting orthopraxy, or lack thereof. If a theological system does not lead us to do the sorts of things Jesus would want us to do–serving the poor, serving our neighbors, building stable communities–then it’s not worth the effort. Insular churches that speak a great deal about what a Christian should be without any connection to their community and the world at large are of little value, in the terms that McLaren sets. Thus, a “generous” orthodoxy is one that leads to orthopraxy; it is an orthodoxy that demands that Christians be Christians.

This point is the strongest in the book because it is so self-evident, though the results do not necessarily favor either side. One could point, for example, to the public vilification of homosexuals by religious and political leaders as failed theology. Certainly, the pop theology of conservative Christianity that treats these people as subhuman is a failure both for Christians and for the world. But we are also led to ask about the astonishing rise in priestly vocations in dioceses that uphold traditional Catholic orthodoxy–which includes relatively conservative teachings on sexuality. Clearly, these are separate teachings, the former based on hate and grand-standing and the latter based in a complex theological framework (that, in my view anyway, has some serious problems). We can complain about the failures in charity by protesters and politicians, but we must also ask why conservative men and women are drawn to a lifetime of service. It’s a terribly complex issue, and I certainly can’t resolve it. It’s a credit to McLaren that he doesn’t try to resolve it either–again, his work is about setting some general foundations for a “new kind of Christian.”

It is this “new kind of Christian” idea, though, that is (for me, anyway) the weakest point he makes. It’s worth pointing out that he does not believe in reducing all Christianity to “mere Christianity;” instead, he attempts to take from each Christian tradition what will serve a generous orthodoxy in the terms he has defined. I’m not sure if the term has been coined, but I see him as a theological integrationalist. It’s a bit difficult to describe unless you go to an emergent church with this idea. I’ve been to two–Ecclesia in Houston and Mosaic (my current home church) in Austin. At Ecclesia, you’ll see iconography, and at Mosaic, you’ll see Catholic devotional candles; at both, you’ll see PowerPoint presentations and rock-alternative music. Attendees and staff wear whatever they’re wearing. At Mosaic, the liturgical seasons are marked, especially Advent and Lent; Catholic call and response (”The Lord be with you. And also with you.”) also figures prominently here. International and community issues figure prominently in nearly every sermon, and Mosaic in particular is opposed to rampant commercialization. The churches are sometimes called interdenominational rather than nondenominational because they take from a variety of traditions. It’s an exciting thing to be a part of.

But as much as I support the efforts of Mosaic and Ecclesia to bridge the gap between Protestantism and the older traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I’m not sure I agree with McLaren’s take on it. I think the main problem is that he doesn’t appreciate the importance of difference–because even Mosaic asserts its strong Baptist roots. This leads him to conclude that evangelism in non-Christian areas of the world should seek make the people “followers of Jesus” while retaining their identities as Hindus or Muslims or whatever. As if you could be both–but it sort of makes sense because the subtitle to A Generous Orthodoxy* states that he believes himself to be nearly every type of Christian at once.

The problem is, of course, that you can’t be every kind of Christian at once, as hard as you try. Mosaic may incorporate Benedictine and Franciscan spirituality into its idea of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but it has not ceased to be Baptist. To try to escape the fragmentation of Christianity is an illusion. We can try to get around it, but we can’t deny it. If these separations are so profound, how can we expect or hope for people of other religions to be both one of us and one of them at the same time? McLaren dreams big, but this point is the greatest flaw in his argument.

But then again, it really isn’t an argument, is it? It’s more of a meditation with internal arguments about what Christianity is and should be. McLaren is not a rule-setting postmodern, the type that demands that everything be changed because Derrida said so. He’s not a hippie grown up to pastor a church where they sit around and talk about helping the poor without actually doing anything. He’s a passionate, reasonable Christian and that perspective shines through every page of A Generous Orthodoxy, even those that I take exception to.

*Why I Am a Missional, evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian (On the title page, the commas are plus signs.)