You were named after the dog!?

"70 percent of all archaeology takes place in a library - research, and reading..."

I'm going to take a moment to talk about the Indiana Jones movies, and maybe not so much the movies themselves as to why I love the whole concept so damn much. One of the reasons I placed so much value into going to University when I was younger was because I loved Indiana Jones (guess who wanted to be an archaeologist/paleontologist when he grew up? C'mon, guess). So many action heroes are just thugs with biceps (especially nowadays) it's refreshing and a depressing rarity to find an action hero that isn't pandering to a big dumb audience - one that, in fact, has a doctorate and teaches at a small-time university. Neither was this small piece of characterization a gimmick (as any characterization so often is). Indiana's higher education lent him a certain worldliness and open-mindedness (alongside masculine heroics) that if there was any Hollywood action-oriented role model you may want your kids to emulate in the slightest, there are much worst out there.

Maybe I'm reaching here. 

Thematically, the movies - the franchise - came out as pulp. It was, however, pulp of a very specific strain. There's tons of pulp; pulp fantasy (see Conan), pulp noire (see Sam Spade), pulp sci-fi (see Attack of the Fifty-Foot... whatever!), and Uma Thurman. Indiana Jones followed suit behind the kind of pulpy goodness shoveled into our faces by Doc Savage and Alan Quartermain and Benton Quest; deconstructed in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and satirized in The Venture Bros. Blending Archaeology with High Adventure and dungeon-crawling by replacing broadswords and shields with whips and revolvers. There was historical fictionalizing, set-pieces done up like real-world castles and ruins, and plots rooted into religion to ground them in our modern age. My principle issue with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (and don't expect a good, in-depth analysis) is that the whole fucking theme is wrong. We have a movie with an old Indiana in the 1950s, post-World War II, and the options of where the story could go are limitless with a little creativity. Sure, the Last Crusade should have (for all intents and purposes) been curtains to the series, what with the good doctor drinking from the Cup of Eternal Youth and riding off into the sunset with his father and friends (I'm sorry - you haven't seen the Indiana Jones movies? What is wrong with you?). But they're just movies, let's make another one and have some fun - that's what speculative fiction is all about, right?

I'm going to avoid analyzing, and I'm also going to avoid slinging more mud on the grave of George Lucas' credibility. Yes, the inclusion of aliens was his idea. Yes, most of his ideas are bad. Yes, the only reason he was thought to have good ideas is because technological limitations and studio interference tempered his creativity to a razor sharpness. 

There was so much un-tapped potential in dealing with the Soviet Union and post-WW2 Indy and wealth of unexplored archaeological plot-devices. The Spear of Loginus, the Terracota warriors of Red China? 

There a CGI fight scene for you, Lucas you fat assh-*

What about sets somewhere in friggin Russia or Instanbul, Islamic religious artefacts? What about Sputnik? That would be leaning dangerously close to the James Bond pulp, but still - what about Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine? 

What I'm getting at here is there's a difference between religion and folklore in the same way James Frazer illustrated there's a difference between magic, religion and science in the evolutionary cycle of human civilization. One is slightly more credible than the other, and religion is second only to science. Aliens and UFOs and friggin Roswell are American folklore, and the whole Mayan thing is too unpopular and bizarre and clumsy to work. This defeats two inherent and formulaic concepts integral to the Indiana franchise; its credibility and its exotic setting. The first seems kind of eye-brow raising, but if the good doctor's adventures can be treated as fiction-fantasy-whatever, they can certainly be treated as hard rather than soft - using actual historical reference material for their plots, actual cities and citing religious mythology as their plot devices. This in addition to Indiana's grit as a character (his non-superhero superheroism); in that he can be hurt, is fallible, makes mistakes, loses his temper; lend the series a benefit-of-the-doubt sort of credibility. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with its lame UFOs and CGI monkeys becomes Yet Another National Treasure Movie. 

To speak to the latter; crucial to the Jones story is an exotic setting in which it must take place. North America is boring. The world is so much more interesting. It's a childish message, sure, but it consistently got its point across in the old trilogy as the time spent on North American shores was more often than not limited to a few expository scenes. Bringing North American folklore into the plot deviates from the formula which is a crucial component of the franchise. Bringing politics to the mix also denigrates that flawless wordly character Indiana embodies. I loved Temple of Doom. I've been to the Third-World and I appreciated the depiction of the small village in fictional India (I emphasize the fictional country of India which exists for no other purposes than to have an adventure and is loosely based off the actual country of India**). I love the eyball soup scene - I love how Indiana so casually eats his meal and discusses politics with the Maharajah while Willie loses her mind in the culture shock and acts grossed out and immature; it adds to that intelligent worldliness I keep going on about. It's an exotic location! 

Enough of Indiana Jones has seeped into, say, Dungeons & Dragons and the entire dungeon-crawling industry, too. The traps, the temples, the mine-cart rides... 

I think the whole point of this article was so I could write about how much I love Indiana Jones. Seriously, read the quotes page at imdb and tell me that's not good writing. 

*Lucas' original ideas for the Indiana Jones movies involved subterranean dinosaur Lost World and were so far removed from what clearly worked in Raiders it becomes questionable as to what point executives continued trusting him with script ideas

**The word "racist" is thrown around so much about shlock like Temple of Doom it gets on my nerves. Who is taking these movies so seriously? It's pulp fiction! If you find yourself under the impression that this is an accurate depiction of the Hindu people and that they eat monkey brains in India it's because you don't know any better, and you should. 

Swiftly goes the sword-play

"I will succeed to your throne — but what good is that? What good is anything?"

— Valgard

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is a rarity in popular speculative fiction in that it is one of the few works not influenced by Tolkien. Published in 1954, it hit the market around the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring and offers a very alternate lens through-which to view its genre.

While Tolkien dealt heavily in establishing an English mythology fashioned after its Norse counter-parts, Anderson deals heavily in Norse mythology; grimly so. The Broken Sword is soaked with blood and loss and tragedy and all the while lays under the shadow of the great doom which so perpetually hangs over the Norse cosmos.

I'll admit I wasn't exactly bucking at the fence to read this book; my perception of Tolkien and pre-Tolkien fantasy is of that rather Victorian, academic prose which stutters across the page with an almost audible clattering of type-keys. It's an unfair generalization; Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet both came out of that era, but hey, Tolkien's prose doesn't exactly leap off the page - at least not to me. The novel opens with a weighty nod to the great Scandinavian Eddas - "There was a man called Orm the Strong, a son of Ketil Asmundsson who was a great landsman in the north of Jutland. The folk of Ketil had dwelt in Himmerland as long as men remembered, and were mighty landowners. The wife of Ketil was Asgerd, who was a leman child of Ragnar Hairybreeks. Thus Orm came of good stock, but as he was the fifth living son of his father there could be no large inheritance for him..." And from there it quickly blisters the page and finger as the plot picks up.

Poul Anderson writes with that same frantic energy that Robert E. Howard and Jack London and Fritz Lieber and the pulp authors seem to embody. The Broken Sword is stripped of superfluous materials, energetic and economic. Clocking in and just around 300 pages it takes the reader from the iron-aired coasts of Jutland to deep, English forests, to the wintry wastes of Trollheim and the fae beauty of Alfheim and faery and finally on a doomed quest deep into the icy hell of Jotunheim, Giant Land at the end of the world, and back. Anderson strikes from this sorcerous tapestry larger-than-life heroes and villains and damsels and everything in between. The two pivotal characters are Skafloc Elf-Foster and Valgard Berserker. The former is the son of Orm the Strong, stolen from home at birth by Imric, earl of England's elfs to be fostered and raised as a weapon; the latter the hybrid changeling left in his wake. Both characters develop deeply over the course of the narrative and both are suitably deformed by Fate and forces far greater than the mortal and immortal powers operating on earth.

Valgard is born with Skafloc's likeness, but bereft of empathic reflex and human sensibilities. He is cast adrift from his heritage; soulless and doomed to a death without afterlife. His descent into villainy is merely a reflex action, vengeance in accordance with Norse conceptualizations of honour upon the forces which brought him into the world so twisted. Skafloc seems at first blessed but quickly is cast in a similar light. Both are manipulated by witches, elfs, trolls, Aesir and Jotun. Like the mythic heroic figures of the actual Sagas they struggle fruitlessly against their destinies, often their principles sink them even deeper to their doom.

I absolutely devoured this book - occasionally without chewing, as I am wont to do - I will have to re-read at some point and savour some of Anderson's spectacular prose a little more deliberately. There are so many brilliantly pioneered concepts here it's difficult for me to begin talking about them. The concept of faery - that it co-exists almost inter-dimensionally with Earth, invisible save to those with witch-sight - that the bluffs and knolls, mountain faces, or crag-ridden fells of the European countryside could reveal themselves to be prismatic Aelfheim kingdoms in just the right light... the elves, similar and yet drastically different from Tolkien's, more like their mythological counter-parts, lithe and alien - trolls are here splendidly horrific.

I'm going to digress momentarily here by stating that the female characters are handled with excellence unexpected from a work written in the 1950s, and when love is introduced into the narrative it is as believable and tragic as can be expected. The Broken Sword can be seen as a kind of fractured bildungsroman in its own way, with its human characters becoming adult and less vulnerable than their childhood selves through layered tragedies and missteps until they are barely recognizable from those to which we were introduced in the early chapters.

Great heroes perform great deeds, exalt in victories and suffer defeat; there is a frantic war between all beings of faerie, from Chinese demons who can only move in straight lines to more Euro-familiar dryads and Greco-Roman fauns. Neil Gaiman's American Gods must have picked up aspects of this, and Moorcock's doomed hero Elric seems far less unique and interesting in the shadow of the novel which influenced him. There is also high adventure of a thrilling sort - I don't want this appraisal of the book to come as a doomy, gloomy, ponderous shamble into unearthly tombs. When Skafloc sets out in a long-boat alongside the Irish sea-god Mananan to seek out the frozen bluffs of Jotunheim beyond world's end and find the blinded Giant who can re-forge the broken blade with spells and fire, my hair was standing on end. Poul Anderson is at his best when he's writing no holds barred Heroic fantasy and this is probably one of the better examples I've picked up and put down.

It takes a certain amount of skill to write such dismal subject matter but move the plot along so fantastically as to have your reader grin broadly the whole way. It's a testament to the fact that stories need not be morally uplifting to be uplifting at all. Stories need to be true to their characters. If things don't or do work out in the end, it should be because the characters' flaws are taken into account. It's what allows a reader to sympathize and emotionally invest in the narrative.

I now interrupt this review to explain to you how the ending of Predators (2010) is a perfect example of how to fail in this regard.

Spoiler alert.

As the movie (which wasn't at all that bad) came to a close, I expected it  (contentedly) to end like so: Adrian Brody's asshole character takes off on his own in an attempt to escape the planet, while leaving the more noble IDF-chick to defend the wounded Topher Grace. Brody's character has been an amoral, selfish mercenary throughout, and in terms of his character arc this really should have been the last straw pushing him past the moral event horizon. At this point, Brody should have been killed horribly (either shot out of the sky while taking off, or caught, or eaten by some loose plot thread; or whatever). The IDF-chick should either have then died defending Topher Grace, or survived and as the credits rolled looked up at the falling parachutes signifying another hunting season and another trial.

Why?

Because it is not enough to make moral choices under the pretext that everything will turn out alright; moral choices are made because they are morally right. By refusing to abandon Topher Grace, the IDF-chick deviates from the course of self-preservation and becomes heroic. Brody cements himself as a irredeemable coward and his future ceases to matter. What kind of guidance do young audiences get out of a plot-line like this? That you can be as much of a selfish scumbag as you want your whole life so long as you perform one good act at its curtain call? In the theatric ending, Topher Grace is revealed to be a serial killer and in true soppy, pedantic Hollywood fashion Adrian Brody comes back guns-blazing in a fit of out-of-character guilt directed by a moral compass that never existed to save her. I'm not going to delve much deeper into my discomfort with Christian notions of redemption and morality. After Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 he began studying the psychological roots of 'evil' and heroism and concluded true heroism as a deviation, the moral equivalent of swimming against the current, sort of echoing the old 'men who do nothing' adage. The video can be found here. In Greek mythology heroes are punished for their crimes - Heracles must seek penance for the murder of his wife and son; he is not redeemed on any other account. I think it is a far nobler concept.

But what matters here is characterization, I'll stop digressing. In any case, I really should be writing a paper right now. Ta!

80s Film Noire

"You give me a time, and a place; I give you a five minute window."

The Man With No Name concept pioneered by Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa has been emulated, paid homage too, brought to strange new places and ripped off so frequently it has become a rarity to see the concept done right. I watched Drive fueled by heavy recommendation from friends and peers and in all honesty came pretty late to the show. 2011 was set a-rave by reviews of the movie and I can't quite remember what stopped me from checking it out earlier. If you're a fan of Michael Mann and the reserved, intense, drawn out fashion in which he infuses his work then Drive is a movie you shouldn't miss.

There isn't a single lackluster performance throughout and all of them revolve around the sobering gravity in which Ryan Gosling plays the driver. He is reserved and soft-spoken enough to give the impression of emotional handicap - any hint of joy breaks through his face like the sun through an overcast sky, such is the rarity. He exhibits none of the invincible characteristics of most action heroes; actually his success can be accredited to a ruthless professional attitude synchronized with vast emotional detachment. This is a movie that will only allow you to smile when it's the kind of smile that hurts. The plot unrolls with the unstoppable weight of a Greek tragedy - like the original cut of Mel Gibson's Payback - wherein every character could potentially save themselves but their natures and principles and circumstance only ensnare them deeper. Gosling is exceptionally skilled behind the wheel - the film opens with him coolly driving the escape vehicle for a heist, and evading the police not so much through a quick-cut high-intensity action sequence but by a maintenance of calm under pressure, great ingenuity, and the ruthless adherence to a sort of code or principle his profession demands. Very much like the samurai of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. The opening sequence establishes the mood and then the plot elements are introduced. The emotional triangle (I don't want to say "love" triangle because it seems to coarse a term) is established between Gosling, a young single mother and her child, and the estranged father soon-to-be released from prison.

Nicolas Winding Refn (director) is a master of showing and not telling. An intelligent audience will draw their own conclusions as to why a professional such as Gosling's character would allow themselves to be drawn into the complications of other people's lives. This is what makes Drive so god-damn compelling. The relationship with Irene (Carey Mulligan) which nevers gets off the ground, the implied guilt which compels him to unselfishly help her husband... you could say that the film almost languishes on these details but it draws you in so deep the next time violence and action occurs it seems almost an intrusion by comparison.

I'm going to take a minute here to minutely digress from Drive and speak on the presentation of violence in cinema. I mentioned before in my other blog that I often find myself obsessing over the realistic portrayal of violence in media; this is most likely because of my intimate exposure to actual violence across the pond. Stylistic liberties notwithstanding (and even then, there is a line between stylistic violence done right - 300 - and done wrong - Kick Ass) I often despise the way in which violence is thrown in our faces. There is nothing cool about it, and I'm a professional in terms of its application. There are dark, biological compulsions within us that drive us towards the violent resolution of conflict and as a First World Nation it should be our prerogative to seek alternate resolutions or use the controlled application of violence (military intervention) as a last resort. When violence does break out it's often short, nasty, unexpected, brutal, and traumatic. Anyone who's ever witnessed a street fight would do well to analyse the reactions of bystanders - stunned, mortified, shaken - if you're not too entranced by the spectacle itself. Alluring and toxic, like most dangerous things in our world. When Martin Scorsese presents violence, he often does so within two precedents; that violence is an inevitable part of everyday human experience, and that is shocking and traumatic. Take the department store fight scene from The Departed; Di Caprio's character brutally assaults two Italian gangsters with unapologetic brutality. The scene ends with Di Caprio gouging one of the men with a coat-rack while pop music plays in the background. Just another day in Boston, the music suggests. 

In Drive I don't think there was a single violent act that wasn't discomforting or shocking; and this is largely due to Refn's masterful use of pacing. The long pauses in between action sequences and the emotional depth and complexity these sequences have draw us so deep into the moods and interactions and motivations and curiosities and dramas of the characters that we are shaken out of our stupor when someone is say, stabbed viciously in the eye with a fork and then repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. Gosling gets out of fights and kills the way an animal escapes and fights in the wild. He rarely pulls a punch because his life and the lives of others are at stakes. That being said, when he staggers away covered in blood we aren't pumping our fists or laughing; we are thrilled and sobered by the intensity of the scene. 

Drive is a fantastic movie, but don't expect to leave the theater or your couch with particularly uplifted spirits afterwards. The film is 80s homage and film-noire at its best and most unexpected; everything from the lighting, costumes, and To Live and Die in L. A-style credits font screams style. With its sparse dialogue and lack of exposition, the narrative is largely told through the shadows of its characters and their actions rather than directly and is stronger because of it. In the blog I write with Cam I recently explored the various ways in which villainy is outright perceived in fiction. I failed to touch upon another way, in that there is no villain, merely antagonists; in Drive there is not a single unsympathetic character, only characters whose nature may upset our sensibilities. The villains are only villains in that they act against our protagonists and their successes and failures only provoke sadness at the circumstantial nihilism that sets the stage. 

Before I step out I will mention that the movie also has a brilliant soundtrack and if we're going to talk about the mood Drive establishes, what more do I really need to say?

  

Oh, Crooked Warden

"Thieves prosper. The rich remember."

I'm not enthusiastic enough to say that the Gentlemen Bastard novels are great works in the genre of fantasy literature, but they are certainly a blast to read. The prose is very neat and descriptive and immediately accessible. I picked up The Lies of Locke Lamora on a bit of a whim (a small grain of sand had been planted by either hearsay or a glanced-at review), and found myself reticent to begin the first book. The story takes a little bit of a kick to get moving in the case of both novels, and likewise both novels hit a sort of phase line whereby the gravitas of the plots become inescapable. Though I inched through the first hundred pages or so, I ferociously gorged myself on the meat of it through til the end.

Both books are worth a sit down and a read. Red Seas takes a while to get going, but when it does - when the book takes to the high-seas, reading it occupied my every waking moment. The finales tend to, in a logical tradition, come down like stacks of cards around our protagonists' heads.

I'm worried that the series is going to grow to big for its skin. I like this whimsical tale about thieves and rogues and pirates, not as well put together a bildungsroman as Rothfuss' Kingkiller but endearing nonetheless. There enormous morale and ethical conundrums as to the motivations of the characters, conflicting largely with the period - but hey, it's fantasy, and that can be fun enough. If Lynch is to be commended for anything, it is the elaborate world he is creating - one city at a time, blending together artifice and alchemy so damn near anything is possible. The city of Camorr, specifically, still looms like a monolith in my imagination - with its crystalline cat-walks and glass bridges and canals. Part of me wants to suggest that, aesthetically, some of the Bastard books may borrow from Final Fantasy. Who's to say.

Resurrection

"It always makes me feel a bit melancholy. Grand old war ship. being ignominiously haunted away to scrap... The inevitability of time, don't you think?"

Few things feel so good as stepping out of a movie theater with the same sort of satisfaction you might feel after a great steak dinner. The official apology for Quantum of Solace has finally arrived. Skyfall is thrilling where it is required to be thrilling, twists where you don't expect it to twist (or bends in another direction), and draws out a hearty laugh or two in the process. It is the Dark Knight of Bond films - both hard-hitting, and graceful. When the audience laughs it is not at the expense of the script's dignity - it is because the script has shone us wit deserved of a Bond picture, without slapstick or pandering. The action boils and moves forward, kinetic and relentless, without becoming obtuse. The dialogue is sharp and to the point - when the movie threads on 007's back-story, it threads delicately so as not to turn up anything unnecessary. Even the facts surrounding our enigmatic protagonist's past are handled with the utilitarian caution as might an actual Intelligence Agency.

And beneath all that, the newest addition to the Bond legacy manages to be charming. Where Casino Royale de-constructed and broke apart conventions that had been staples of the Bond franchise for so long it was hard to remember an MI6 without them, Skyfall manages to embrace those conventions while simultaneously re-inventing them. Even the opening sequence (though, in this small detail, overshadowed by Casino Royale's) caters back to Bond tradition - that blur of action offering a sample of what's to come, and not so clumsily as Quantum's shakily edited and quickly forgotten car-chase-shootout. The stakes are set immediately, the audience is engaged, and when Bond falls into the water and the film breaks into a new anthem for the agent, the tone has been set.

Part of me wants to nit-pick at something - my nature demands it - but I left that theater smiling 

and all I can do is encourage everyone to pay for a ticket-stub, cram popcorn into your face, and watch the bloody movie. The action is high-octane, dictated by both character and environment while still being grounded in reality; the plot is gripping with a marvelous villain, physically deformed (as a good Bond villain should be) and mentally unstable; and there are just enough light-hearted moments so as to not weigh the audience down. Not to mention a few clever, tongue-in-cheek jibes as the franchise itself, which will warm the heart of any fan.


"James Bond will return!", the credits roll. We can only hope he does with as much eloquence.

You'll find your late husband is not unknown in these woods...

"No longer can be conduct ourselves as rats. We know too much."

I had to take a step forward here and state for the record that this movie, and this probably isn't news, is awesome. Everything from the aesthetic - that gnarled, deformed perspective on everyday surroundings - to the characters, all spectacularly articulate. For instance, there is no "comic-relief" character to Secret of NIMH, only Jeremy the magpie. But he is not "comic-relief" as contemporary children's schlock has come to understand it - he is amusing through virtue of his personality. He doesn't spout off one-liners. Aunty Shrew comes a close second.

I think Mrs. Brisby is the most definite example of bravery in an animated protagonist. The film at no point shirks from showing that she is afraid - dead afraid - of her surroundings (a hostile universe which makes little time for little mice and their mice families), and yet for her children she creeps forward into the Great Owl's hollow - nudges further into the rose-bush amidst a kaleidoscope of strange anomalies - volunteers to drug Dragon the cat, if only to uphold the example set by her late husband.

And visually, the film is astounding. What other example can you give me of something so common-place as an Owl being twisted into something so terrifying? His nest is like something out of Dungeons & Dragons, but not out of the ordinary, it is a matter of perspective and scale. Where a moth can cause such a racket and distress as a bat would to a human being, a spider the equivalent of a wolf. Cobwebs, and the clattering of small rodent bones to mark this great beast for its predatory nature. What a reserved, detached god it seems - taking the time to consult with this little mouse, whom he does not eat only because it isn't dark. 

There is something else to be said for the unsung stories of Johnathan and Aegis, as well. The latter being a cantakerous old one-legged geezer, we would never assume that he was the rodent equivalent of an Arthurian knight before Mrs. Brisby knew them. The way Nicodemus speaks of them reminds me of the way Obi-Wan Kenobi spoke of his relationship with and the fate of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, where the mystery itself is more engaging than the actual story.

I won't bother talking about the animation - because no amount of 3-D or CG I think can stand up against the colours, atmosphere, and magic of Secret of NIMH and come out the winner. The movie is a monument of its time. 

Late Night Blog Post

Walking an old beat here - having spent an embarrassingly prolonged portion of my day procrastinating, I find myself in a fit of stubbornness working out in a park near my Sandy Hill apartment at an ungodly hour of the night (caught an old couple making out under a streetlight on the way back - they were adorably bashful about the incident) and now find myself unable to sleep. Part of this stems from one of those creative epiphanies which often strike me as I meander through those creative low-points when considering my fantasy world. I was sitting on the porcelain throne and cracked open David Day's A-Z of Tolkien, a deliciously antiquated old Middle-Earth compendium grotesquely illustrated in bold, black ink. The sketches are the stuff of nightmares and fantastic, Scandinavian dreams. In any case, from now until my limbs realize how weary they are I'm furiously going to type out a ramblings' worth of considerations.

When I think of Middle-Earth, there are two worlds which come to mind. The Hobbit was one of the first books I read as a pre-teen, before Peter Jackson's re-imagining and before contemporary popular culture had slapped a new coat of paint on an old series of cultural icons. The edition of The Hobbit I read was a gold-bound Bible of a tome cob-webbed with emerald-colored Elvish script and whose yellowed pages were lined with gold-paint the way those old King James' are in the drawers of hotel bedside tables (hence the reference). The book itself slipped out of a kind of stiff sheath. It was a marvelous thing - it looked and felt like a spell-book in my hand, so weathered and ancient (it was given to me by my grandparents and was probably one of the earliest published editions) that it read - to my juvenile mind - like an authentic history of ancient Britain. It seems bizarre and almost self-serving to say I believed Hobbits existed (or had once existed) when I read that book, but then again I also waited up all night for an owl to cordially invite me to attend Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on my eleventh birthday despite better judgement. Kids are impressionable. I have been accused of being a very practical man but in hindsight my household growing up was... well, pretty magical. My mom and dad went out of their way to make us believe in Santa Claus and my dad terrorized us into our beds on Christmas morning with a misshapen magical Christmas potato which he claimed would turned into some kind of Troll if we crept downstairs before my parents got out of bed.

Yeah that last one seems really fucked up, but I am shitting you not.

In Pitchfork's Chrono Trigger Retrospective he claims that 16-bit pixel art acted as a kind of visual poetry in the medium - that the constraints of the graphics gave the worlds we were interpreting almost more depth and realism than the gorgeous vistas and landscapes of, say, The Witcher 2. Part of this probably owes more to the impressionable nature of youth, but the same way the horror genre works best when there is no monster behind the door (and no zipper to give it away) I think the fantasy genre works best when its aesthetics are skewed through a lens of bizarre surrealism.

I know it seems like I'm digressing here but when I speak of Middle-Earth existing as two worlds I am differentiating between the artwork of its earliest inception and, say, the Hollywood franchise in which it exists now. Disclaimer - I am in no way criticizing Jackson's portrayal of Tolkien's universe, the man had his own vision. I am merely making an observation. Look at the weirdness of The Neverending Story and and note the similarities between its and the super deformed early Hobbit-artwork. Flipping through A-Z of Tolkien I am amazed at the violently stark contrast between earlier interpretations of Tolkien staples and their nowaday mainstream.

But there something to be said for that - something rustic and authentic about the deformity of Tolkien's personal cartography and marginal doodling. The same way Goblinoid's Labyrinth Lord sings an ode to Gygax's flimsy Creature Compendium.

When Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos he drew sketches of the new animal life he discovered there. When the Great Explorers plundered the fertile depths of the Americas, they drew their own maps. And when Tolkien drew his first map of the Shire, there wasn't a doubt in your mind that it was somewhere between Sussex and Brighton (or had been, long ago). 

Above are some of Ian Miller's interpretations of Tolkien creations, from Ents to a dragon that looks more at home in Brian Lumley's nightmares. I picked up a book once, never read it, a bad case of judging one by its cover, which had a grotesque menagerie of orcish monsters - all with deformed, oversized heads that were equal parts bird and equal parts Komodo dragon, adorned with Mordorian armour and weaponry storming the gates of some Medieval castle - that blew my mind with the horrible notion of how terrifying these abberations would be in real-life - mouths large enough to gobble a man like a leg of chicken. Like the Wild Things. Crazy, alien creatures.

Anyway, moving on - the Foreword to Day's A-Z is really what got me going earlier. I was not unaware of this fact, but it lit my brain like a halogen lantern either way. When Tolkien created Middle-Earth, he was driven by a need to create a mythology that he felt Britain sorely lacked. This may even contribute to why The Hobbit felt so damn authentic at first read. I have a book, The Stoneholding, written by a pair of Canadian authors who sought to do a similar thing with our nations geography (and I believe J. V. Jones, and hell, every fantasy author has attempted to do - think of Stephen King's Dark Tower series and why The Good, The Bad & The Ugly had such a stormy influence). So why not me? Instead of attempting to establish a moppish series of European provinces battling for political supremacy... why not establish a fantasy period-piece set to replicate the Colonization of the Americas? Why not have my Black & Green Jackets act as a mercenary rogues gallery of hunter-trackers in a largely unexplored land? Why not have elves - only draw strongly from Native American and Scandinavian Poetic Edda to morph a kind of unique elemental progenitor race of my own? Dwarves? Ents? When I dabbled (a while ago) into Inuit mythology the notion that an entire ethnic sub-culture lived in fear of the ghosts (or anima) of living things seeking horrible vengeance against them for mistreatment romanced me insensible. Why not have a race of elfish aborigines worship a god that is essentially the entire arctic circle? No, not worship. Fear. The "white", an elemental Zeus or Gaia of their own pantheon, as indifferent and ruthless as Howard's Crom of the cruel god of Afghan religion. I could likewise turn East, in select tales, and flesh out Kaja-Rang and his armour of dragon's teeth, and of the colonist Europeans and their own pantheons...

Getting a little big for my britches here, but I think I'll be cooling the embers into something workable in due time. The language of magic will still be pre-eminent, and the Fae, although now I have a whole other series of perspective which would warp its surreal landscape - the way Alan Moore's Immateria is warped by the collective consciousness of the human race in his Promethea series (if you haven't read it, fucking read it).

A whimsical blend of sword and sorcery, and flintlock rifles - of the Metis-like Tenes and the war between nations fought in overseas theatres... it makes for a rather tasty concept, no?

Melkor/Morgoth of Middle-Earth, mind you, is cemented in badassness as the Father of Monsters in Tolkien's mythos. he is to faux-British mythology what Typhon and the Titans were to Ancient Greece. Reading this nifty little encyclopedia I am learning just how bad a mother he is, and how many terrible monsters he wrought into creation from flame and shadow. There is something primordial about the concept of a spider-god as terrible as Ungoliant living in the dark of the American jungles in this new, unplundered territory that I think i may put into use. A kind of horrid goliath, as much as a spider as a dragon, a monster, so guttonous it would eat itself. I seethe with possibility!

I owe in no small fashion my overarching motivation to do this to my current employment as a Researcher for the War of 1812 by the Ottawa Arts Commission. I genuinely do enjoy trolling journal archives for primary-source evidence of older time periods, and the early 19th and latter 18th Centuries are just of seriousness coolness to me. My Modern Brit Lit class has me studying the proverbial works on Empire by Kipling, Orwell and Conrad, and fucking seafaring tales of Victorian derring-do and ivory poaching have given me a boner for Alan Quatermain and his imperialist ilk. Ho, boy!

Anyways, as predicted my eyes are getting heavy and my full-body cardio routine has taken its enormous toll on my constitution. I'm going to leave on an administrative note and state that I plan on segregating my blog-writing into multiple blogs; one I think I will dedicate to fitness, in that I plan to at some point within the next few months, attempt to cycle through every WOD in the crossfit WOD-book by category and chart the results; another, I will dedicate to my fantasy; another, I will dedicate to the creation of my Camerons-in-Afghanistan collection of narratives; and finally, this one as a kind of reviews and ramblings pertaining to writing and possibly schoolwork in general. I think blogging has become a pre-eminent medium in the literary world and overlooking it as an instrument of notoriety... may be unwise. 

I leave you with a sexy, sexy, heavy groove by Tame Impala from their new album Lonerism. For some reason I imagine chicks shakin-ass to that beat and it boils my blood with lust.