The Bigger World

I remember the first time I came into contact with the Bigger World.

I don't remember the specifics, but I must have been in my room with its tiny black and white television when I was in seventh or eighth grade or so. This much have been some time after January 1978, which was a red letter month in the CINCGREEN household because it was the month we got cable television. Undoubtedly, I was flipping through the channels (twisting the dial, not pushing the buttons) to see what was on television and the dial came to rest on a bunch of guys wearing robes. I knew they weren't Klansmen because they spoke with British accents.

The robes were not from some sort of backwoods social club, but were Roman garb. Our state's education television network was showing I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theatre. I have to say that State Educational Television was a godsend. I saw both The Prisoner and Monty Python back-to-back on Saturday nights, and as it turned out Monty Python ended exactly when Saturday Night Live began...but back to I, Claudius. I ended up starting with Episode Three or Four just when the really good stuff was happening and I made sure never to miss an episode after that. As far as I knew, I, Claudius was an independently-realized television drama springing from no source other than the mind of some British scriptwriter.

In junior high school, our math class took a field trip to the fine establishment of learning known as Eastern Kentucky University. (I suspect we were there to watch a basketball game, the particulars were extremely hazy.) Part of the field trip involved visiting the college bookstore. Most of the kids picked up a banner or a sports T-shirt or something, but I enjoyed looking at the books - even in Richmond (*), the selection at the college bookstore beat the sorry-ass offering of books in my hometown.

And then, I saw it. I, Claudius. It was a book! I didn't even know that! Having been given a few bucks to buy lunch or something, I spent all of my cash on buying that book, and I didn't even wait to get home to start reading it. I tore into Robert Graves's period piece like a starving man at a Chinese buffet. I was so eager to consume the book that I skimmed over a lot of it, the equivalent of gorging. As I got to the end of the book, I realized, "hey, the writer's never going to get to the stuff about Messalina by this point." I would learn sometime thereafter that the miniseries covered not just I, Claudius but its sequel Claudius the God. I only owned half the story.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with I, Claudius, let me explain it. It was written by Robert Graves, a British writer and poet well-versed in the classics. It purports to be the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, the step-grandchild of the wife of the Emperor Augustus through a previous marriage. Unfortunately for young Claudius, he suffers two maladies from birth - a horrible stammer and a limp from a weakened leg. The result is that he's considered an idiot and a cripple by the rest of his family, and is either ignored, insulted or outright abused by most of them.

My understanding is that there were two overlapping entries into the Roman political world of the optimates era: one could be a patrician and pursue a career as an Equestrian and then a Senator, or one could serve in a level of political offices with progressively increasing responsibility supplemented by a successful career as a military officer. Due to his infirmities, both of these avenues were closed to Claudius. With scholarship as his only comfort, Claudius retreats into a world of books and resolves to be a historian.

This gives him a great advantage, for as a member of the Imperial family he has a front row seat to Roman power politics. Furthermore, his stammer and limp prove useful in a perverse sort of way. The rest of the family concludes that Claudius will never amount to anything and in their world of power plays and political murders Claudius is always overlooked for the simple reason that he's not worth killing. He survives the reign of his step-grandfather Augustus, his uncle Tiberius, and even his insane and murderous nephew Caligula. After Caligula is killed by his own bodyguards the Imperial genetic timber has been whittled down to firewood during the reigns of the previous three emperors with few surviving contenders for the throne. After Caligula's death the Imperial Guard run riotand decide that if there's going to be another emperor, they'd better be the ones choosing him. They find Claudius hiding in the palace to avoid the killing and looting, and decide that Claudius has the pedigree if nothing else. (**) Therefore, Claudius is implausibly installed as the next emperor. (That's Book One.)

In Claudius the God, Claudius attempts to be what he considers a "good emperor". Years of experiencing the a Rome where the Republic exists in name only convince Claudius that only the true restoration of the Roman Republic can save Rome - he shall turn over power to the Senate, and then retire. However, the problem of power-hungry senators and surviving relatives is a serious one - they believe that due to Claudius's reputation of being an utter imbecile that he can easily be removed in a coup. Claudus knows they'd never let him survive if he turned over power, as the potential would always exist that some faction could yank him out of retirement and force him to become their figurehead. Therefore, Claudius has to hang on to the throne to save his own life....and then, since he has to repair the damage of the previous emperors to strengthen Rome, the restoration of the Republic is moved further and further down on the agenda. Claudius always promises himself that he'll get around to it when the conditions are right.

But the greatest danger to Claudius is...at his side in the form of his teenage wife Messalina (whom he was forced to marry by his crazy nephew Caligula). Messalina is sweetness and charm, and Claudius is enthralled with her - but Messalina has designs on the throne herself. Eventually, Messalina's plot is discovered at the last second before the coup and Claudius is forced to have Messalina executed. A bitter Claudius concludes that people would never accept the Republic even if he did bring it back - things have to be very, very bad for a revolution, so Claudius will speed one along. He decides to marry his niece Agrippinilla who already has a child from a previous marriage - Nero. He knows that they should never be entrusted with power, but that's exactly who he intends to trust it to. Agrippinilla can never rule as a woman, and she'll have to run the Empire through Nero, and Nero will then rebel against Agrippinilla because he's a douchebag and will assume absolute power and then Nero will ruin the Empire, and after that, people will be clamoring for the Republic...won't they?

Luckily, Claudius has a Plan B that will ensure that the next form of government shall be a restoration of the Republic. Shame that Plan B falls apart, and Claudius knows in the end that he - and the Republic - are screwed. The End.

If any of the above sounds interesting, wait until you see the BBC version.

Derek Jacobi as Claudius.

Brian Blessed as Augustus.

Sian Phillips as Livia.

George Baker as Tiberius.

Patrick Stewart (yes, Captain Picard, when he still had hair, or at least a good toupee) as Sejanus.

Patricia Quinn (yes, Magenta) as Livilla.

John Hurt (yes, that John Hurt) as Caligula.


It's absoutely kick-ass. I'd recommend it to anyone.

So why do I call this post "The Bigger World"? I think that my introduction to I, Claudius was my first inkling that there was a bigger world out there beyond the television shows of the 1970s and the required reading from middle school. It was the first notion that serious books - and serious television - could and should be fun. For better or for worse, what I am today is because of I, Claudius - so if you ever get to Robert Graves's grave, you know where to spit.

"Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud - hatch out!"

_____

(*) - An amusing side-note is that as Kentucky became populated in the 19th century town founders looked to European cities as town names. Therefore, there is a London in Kentucky, as well as a Paris and a Richmond and a Madrid. However, just because you name a town something doesn't mean that the common people can pronounce the spelling. Therefore, you get Athens, whose "a" is pronounced just like in the word "day", and Versailles, which is pronounced to rhyme with the word "sails". This never fails to astonish both visitors and Kentuckians, amused that someone would ask where Ver-SIGH is.

(**) - It helped that Claudius's brother was Germanicus, a much-admired Roman general and potential ruler until he succumbed to not having his food tasted.

To Hell with Realism

I've jumping on the bandwagon of a new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. I've heard it described as a combination of The Sopranos and The Wire. The show is set in 1920 - Atlantic City, USA just after the signing of Prohibition. City treasurer Enoch "Nucky" Thompson is as corrupt as they come, and he plans to make a killing with the banning of alcohol. However, there are other people around who plan to make a killing as well.

We've watched the first two episodes and we like what we've seen. We'll hang in there.

Interestingly enough, I was flipped on to an essay by George Orwell who writes about the difference between two modern crime stories, Raffles and No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The difference is that in the older story, Raffles - ostensibly the bad guy, a gentleman crook - has a sense of morality. He only steals whenever he's been invited to someone's home, and he only steals from the other guests and never the homeowner. He would never think of killing anyone. Whereas, No Orchids for Miss Blandish is what we call a realistic crime novel. Orwell has this to say about realism:

[The author of No Orchids for Miss Blandish] is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right.

Funny, that seems to be the doctrine of The Sopranos. And The Wire. And Boardwalk Empire, for that matter.

Orwell concludes:

Several people, after reading No Orchids, have remarked to me, ‘It's pure Fascism’. This is a correct description, although the book has not the smallest connexion with politics and very little with social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say Trollope's novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery, and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way. The average man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U. and the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the English liberal intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar gulf.

Ouch.

Orwell's point - to repeat it - is that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a Fascist novel, even though the book has absolutely nothing to do with political philosophy. I don't know if Orwell is making the unintentional point that everything is political, down to the shows we watch, the books we read and the clothes we wear. All of these choices are choices grounded in philosophies of one sort or another, and all politics is is philosophy applied to human relations on a large scale.

You know you've read something great when it makes you think about the choices you've made in your own life. And furthermore, it makes you think about the meaning that is taken away from media. A person can watch The Wire because it reflects her own philosophy that an political system, corrupted by modern prohibition (the Drug War), will grind people up. Another person can watch it and say "if I ran a crew, I'd run it like Marlo Stanfield". Same medium, different philosophical interpretation.

Today's Blurbs

* Ruth has bought our tickets to see Casablanca in an actual theatre.

* She also bought me two bow ties. Not clip-ons. Actual ties. I'm sure there's a YouTube clip somewhere with instructions.

* The Nanny: It's good as light-weight sitcoms go: occasionally funny, rarely insulting and essentially harmless.

Doctor Who: The Aztecs

Since I'm enjoying the Doctor Who that I've watched over the most recent season, I decided that I would try to watch some of the earliest episodes. As it turns out, I managed to find a website (or websites) that have stored the complete Season One of Doctor Who. This is the 1963-64 season, with William Hartnell and Carole Ann Ford.

As of now, I'm 2/3 of the way through. Last night I finished "The Aztecs"; I'll need to get through twelve 25-minuteish episodes of "The Sensorites" and "The Reign of Terror" and I'll have a complete season of Doctor Who under my belt. "The Aztecs" exists in four black-and-white episodes and if you watch them back to back you can probably finish in an hour and thirty minutes.

The ride has been slightly bumpy. One problem with the Doctor Who of the 1960s is that the BBC did not have a policy of archiving all of its broadcasted material. The sad result is that Doctor Who episodes of the 1960s were treated the way a video cassette was treated in the 1980s - if you ran out of space and didn't have another cassette you just shoved the cassette back in the machine and taped over what you had previously recorded. There are several episodes of Doctor Who which are "lost episodes" - although the hope still remains that some of these episodes can be recovered. Some were recovered when it was learned that the BBC sent an episode overseas for broadcast and the episodes were relocated in the vaults of some other country's television archives. In all cases, devoted science fiction fans would record the episodes on their tape recorders - a very primitive way of saving the episodes, but the audio exists or has been recovered for every single episode.

For episodes whose video was not recovered, a handful of promotional clips might survive. For episodes that don't even have that much, some episodes had a lot of promotional photos taken. I also suspect that these photos exist for continuity reasons - if a glass is on the right side of the table in one scene, it should not move to the left side of the table during the next day's shooting. Photos help keep track of what's going on.

Luckily for Season One only one sequence of episodes is lost: "Marco Polo". The seven episodes that comprise "Marco Polo" are all missing. However, there were a crapload of photographs taken and I watched these episodes in a recreated form with audio backing. It was like watching one of those old slide shows for those old enough to remember the classroom experience of the 1970s.

In order to set up "The Aztecs" I should explain Doctor Who for those unfamiliar with it. In the first season, a pair of schoolteachers - Ian and Barbara - find themselves trapped in a time-traveling device piloted by a crotchety old man known as The Doctor and his granddaughter Susan. The device can not only travel through time, but through space as well, allowing a variety of adventures.

Here's a thought exercise: suppose it's 1963 and you're writing a first season episode of Doctor Who. The first question that would come to my mind would be "if the travelers get in trouble, why don't they just jump in their magic time machine and fly away?" All episodes would naturally fall into two categories:

a) they would fly away, but they can't get to the machine (or it doesn't work)
b) they could fly away, but they don't want to fail at our objective and flying away would be an admission of defeat.

It seems that just about every Season One writer jumped at "a" above as a tension-building device.

"One Hundred Thousand Years B. C. ?" Can't get to the ship. Cavemen.
"The Daleks": Ship's broken.
"Inside the Spaceship": Takes place inside the ship. Ship's sort of broken, anyway.
"Marco Polo": Can't get to the ship. Marco Polo.
"The Keys of Marinus": Can't get to the ship. Force field.

After "The Keys of Marinus" I would have never left the ship. Normally, one would assume "well, there must have been some cases where they left the ship, fooled around somewhere, and nothing bad happened" but the episodes are put together in a way that implies that each episode directly follows the preceding one - an amazing string of bad luck for the TARDIS inhabitants.

There might have been a break between "The Keys of Marinus" and "The Aztecs" which convinced the crew that, "no, if I leave the ship I won't be attacked by some interplanetary monster". Bad bet. As "The Aztecs" starts the TARDIS materializes in an Aztec tomb which contains a skeleton dressed up like Lady Gaga. Barbara helps herself to a bracelet and the crew decide to explore the tomb. They find a secret trigger which pivots one of the tomb walls out, and go foolishly exploring beyond the tomb as the triggered wall does not return to its former position right away. Unfortunately, the wall closes back and the TARDIS is now trapped behind several inches of stone with the crew on the opposite side of the wall.

The Aztec priests then arrive to figure out what's all the noise. When they notice Barbara's bracelet, they assume that she is the reincarnation of Yetaxa, the high priest buried in the tomb and begin to treat her with God-like honors. In order to fete her, they invite her to an Aztec ritual sacrifice. Barbara, a history teacher, specialized in Aztec history and has always believed that if ritual sacrifice wasn't a part of Aztec belief then the Spanish invaders might have let up a little on the Aztecs. She therefore calls a halt to the sacrifice - which upsets the man being sacrificed as to be a sacrifice was one of the highest honors an Aztec could earn, and he hurls himself from the pyramid.

Barbara's desire to end ritual sacrifice throws Aztec society into a tizzy. (There's a famous speech by the Doctor, who warns Barbara that she cannot change history - "not one word!") The chief sacrificer believes she's a false god almost immediately, but the Head Smart Guy still thinks that she's a god - but is somewhat confused.

The tension comes from the TARDIS crew having to keep these pretense up while trying to find a way to get back to their ship - they can't ask the Aztecs to do it because a) knowledge to the entry is lost, and b) wouldn't Yetaxa already know the way to get in to his/her own tomb? In the meantime, the chief sacrificer has a strong motive to prove that Barbara is a false god. It then becomes half-race, half-conspiracy episode as the crew hopes to find a way back inside the temple and locate their trapped TARDIS before things blow up in their faces.

I learned a few interesting facts about the episode. The author of the episode had studied Aztec life and culture before writing the script, having lived in Mexico. One problem with the portrayal of the Aztecs/Mayans/Incas is that since people write TV/movie scripts without caring about the particulars of a culture, all three cultures are sometimes mashed together, an "Indiana Jones" version of Central/South American history. Many details are mentioned - particularly regarding the intricacies of Aztec mythology - that give the script authority. For the most part, the writer doesn't mix in any detail more properly associated with either the Mayans or the Incas.

The costumes are surprisingly good - I can only dream of how they must have looked in full color. This is typical of Season One Doctor Who, where it appears that they spent a lot more on the budget than late 1980s-Doctor Who, a victim of the rubber mask syndrome well known in science fiction. As I watched the episode, the costuming was almost movie quality, and the sets looked pretty realistic for the 1960s. Some fans thought that the Aztecs were covered up because prudes at the BBC demanded that the Aztecs wear more clothing - but apparently, it can get cold in Mexico and the Aztecs did not dress like Tarzan when not wearing their elaborate headdresses and ceremonial gear.

It's not merely noteworthy that, "oh, they spent more per episode on Doctor Who in its first season". The scripts of Season One were high quality, and "The Aztecs" is no exception. Doctor Who has been on television in one form or another for at least 30 years, but no one really thinks about why the show has lasted so long. A lot of Doctor Who from the 1980s and beyond is negligible, and even some of the Tenth Doctor episodes are a little ridiculous. Clearly, in order for the show to have lasted for so long it had to have a solid foundation. Episodes like "The Aztecs" show that the present writers of Doctor Who clearly stand on the shoulders of giants.

Think about Star Trek, the very example of a successful series. (*) Most of Star Trek's tropes are now laugh-worthy, but you have to remember exactly how ground breaking that Star Trek really was, a dramatic science-fiction series that at least tried (not always successfully) to ground their episodes in hard science. The original series was only on television for three years, and yet the quality of the writing over those three years was generally good enough to spark four sequels, several full-fledged movies and a reboot attempt. I suspect that most of Doctor Who's success depends on its first season. The Daleks - even though they're very different from what a modern Who fan would think of as Daleks - were so popular as bad guys that they created a sort of Dalekmania in the UK. And "The Daleks", in my opinion, is one of their weaker serials!

All of the other serials in Season One have been great so far. Even "The Keys of Marinus" and "Inside the Spaceship" - pretty much written as throwaways - are exciting, interesting, and well-acted. William Hartnell is great as the grouchy and mysterious First Doctor. I'm surprised at how great Carole Ann Ford, Jacqueline Hill and William Russell were. During Season One, the acting is clearly that of an ensemble cast - with the slight exception of Carole Ann Ford, each actor is given interesting things to do and an interesting piece of the script. (As opposed to later incarnations, where they was one Doctor - clearly the star - and one second banana whose only job was to get tied up or end up in peril.) The same was true in Star Trek, with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and (to a lesser degree) DeForest Kelley carrying significant shares of the load.

I've got about twelve episodes more to go. I've always felt a little inferior to Doctor Who fans who have seen more episodes than I have, even if they episodes they've seen are all "New Who" episodes that are the 21st-century incarnation of the Snogging Doctor. But now, I can smile and say, "Oh really? Well, I was there when it all began...."

____

(*) Before 1980, "successful series" mean "one whose acting or writing quality stands the test of time". After 1980 it means "one where we can make a shitload of merchandising money". Star Trek has been very successful in both cases.

Turn off your TVs

There are some huge advantages and disadvantages to writing a blog without comments.

The biggest advantage is that even though you shut out all the interesting voices, you shut out all the uninteresting voices as well. I'm one of the few people who doesn't have a cell phone, and one of the reasons is that I didn't feel that I should be at the beck and call of every person who might have my number. You wouldn't let anyone in your house who decided to knock on the door, so why should you let anyone wander on to your blog?

The biggest disadvantage is that in hearing no voices at all, you've consigned yourself to an echo chamber, where blogging becomes much like writing a diary. My mother keeps a diary, or at least kept one, and I have no idea what's going to happen to that book on the inevitable day when she can resume her peaceful nonexistence. (Life was once called by someone an inconvenient interruption to an otherwise peaceful nonexistence.) As I have no children and have no plans of having them, there's no one to whom this book could be passed. I feel that reading such a book would be a violation of my mother's privacy, even after her (hopefully far off in the future) death. In the same way, a blog can become self-contained. I've blogged private matters and have come to regret it, because really, what kind of person posts his private thoughts and deepest secrets all the hell over the web?

It's unlikely that I'll be doing further television reviews. Not only has the writer's strike dried up material, but as you can tell, the bulk of television shows deliver nothing in the way of entertainment. "Everybody Hates Chris" has become unwatchable, "Kid Nation" had a final episode which was an abortion, "The Simpsons" is still in its "painfully unfunny" period. Many of these shows weren't "funny bad" like Manos: The Hands of Fate, but bad bad, like rectal surgery. And trust me, there are so many people out there doing television reviews that I doubt my voice will be missed.

So what's next? Probably...baseball. Or hockey. I've always loved sports, and particularly sports history and statistics. Baseball and hockey are at two ends of a continuum, where it seems every gonad scratch in baseball is recorded and put into a database, whereas the only stats recorded in hockey seem to be goals and assists. Maybe there will be something worthwhile to write about that.

But will I be deleting the older blog entries? No, I won't. Might as well keep them here.

So does this mean the end of CINCGREEN's sojourn in Daria fandom? Most likely, yes. Now that I'm past forty, some sort of middle-aged gene has kicked in saying, "You know, you really shouldn't be wasting such time and effort on a cartoon about a bunch of teenage schoolgirls". When life gets shorter, one tends to look at things on a cost-effective basis, a basis which can be overridden if the activity tends to bring you great pleasure. Daria fandom got to the point where the amount of joy it was bringing me was no longer commesurate with the amount of time I put in, and like a middle-aged accountant, I cut it from my list of expenses.

I'll borrow some thoughts from Kevin Holden in Montreal and restate them as my own. Most of the fan fiction no longer interests me, except maybe for "Legion of Lawndale Heroes", and the only reason that interests me is that it was my creation and Brother Grimace is running with it. I've pretty much seen most of the fan fiction permutations out there. Furthermore, as the amount of fan fiction has dropped (show not on the air, y'know), the other chit-a-chat doesn't grab my interest.

More and more of the newer fans come off as sociopaths, undoubtedly drawn to the fandom because they sympathise with the rejected Daria, as the newer fans are real social rejects themselves --cutters, bulimics, bipolars, slackers who really really need the help of a good psychiatrist rather than a coffee klatch. (God knows *I* needed a good psychatrist; thank the stars I found one.) The current mentally ill members of the message boards can always find a sucker to listen to them, and to forgive the most egregious lapses in basic decorum or decency. (What's the old saying? "A sucker is born every minute, and two to take him?" It's a good gig, as some of those people remain coddled for years on end.) It begins to look like an episode of Jerry Springer, "Abusive Fans, and Their Enablers Who Just Can't Say No!"

The only real solution to that problem would have been to form a spin-off group of older, more mature fans -- more emotionally mature, anyway. But I concluded that it was too much time and energy to make a truly concerted effort, with no guaranteed payoff, and there would be another split of a fandom that's seen too much splitting anyway. Better to just let it go.

As Bob Dylan said, "Nostalgia is death." Time to move on to the next big thing, whatever that is.