"Australia"

No one could possibly conceive what Baz Luhrmann would possibly do with a war movie. Turns out he was making the antipodal version of "Pearl Harbor," complete with a pointless series of mini-plots that fritter away two hours of time before a sudden ruthless attack by phantom-like Japanese airplanes attempts in vain to add a sense of depth and historical sweep to what is actually a one-note soap opera shot like a pop art propaganda poster. "Australia," like "Pearl Harbor," centers on an emotional triangle of people whose mutual love is so heavily remarked upon but so little in evidence that after awhile you begin to suspect everyone onscreen suffered partial lobotomies immediately before the film started.

In "Pearl Harbor," the triangle is romantic, which is lame, but involves Kate Beckinsale, which is nice; in "Australia," the triangle is more familial, and centers on the multicultural cross-strata family dynamic which develops between Nicole Kidman (who acts the shit out of her ridiculous role and is awesome but underutilized), Hugh Jackman (who scarcely seems to act but exhudes enough charisma that you almost believe it when his character regularly shifts from Clint Eastwood to Crocodile Dundee to Cary Grant), and Brandon Walters, who carries the whole dramatic weight of the movie's larger themes - institutional racism and the conflict of civilization against the wild are but two college-level topics that get chatted about once or twice - on his tiny shoulders, playing a young half-Aboriginal, half-white kid who occasionally narrates the film but mostly hangs about waiting to find out if the evil white people or the good white people will decide his fate.

The anti-racist message of the film is handled so obliquely, with such a weird blend of naivete and political correctness, that it actually emerges feeling weirdly colonialist, if not, well, racist. Jackman's character is careful to loudly honor aboriginal culture throughout the movie, but the film's vision of aboriginal culture is basically personified by an elder named King George, who, it pains me to inform you, spends the first hour of the movie standing on a hillside dancing by a fire and singing songs with Yoda lyrics which seem to telepathically speak to characters sleeping miles away. (The other primary black character in the film is Jackman's sidekick, who only speaks when spoken to and might as well walk around with a target on his head.)

We can argue back and forth about Luhrmann's treatment of aboriginal culture - certainly, the film critiques the shallowness of white civilization, and anyone who dares utter a racist remark gets their eventual comeuppance - but the King George character is never allowed to interact with anyone, and seems to float above the fray like a halfway Messiah figure (example: in an eye-popping shot which looks unfortunately like something out of a Michael Bay film, King George stands in the middle of a missile run without being hurt.)

Armchair sociology aside, more than half of "Australia" is much worse than anything you thought Luhrmann was capable of. This is one of those movies, like Wes Anderson's "Life Aquatic" or Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," where a great director's imprint is unmistakable but somehow everything that works so well in their great films works impossibly, terribly, simply not at all. Like those other misfires, this was a film conceived by a director in the throes of passion - Wes Anderson first doodled "Life Aquatic" as sketches in a middle-school notebook, Michael Mann created the original "Miami Vice" and wanted to update and correct its glammy glitz, and Baz Luhrmann seems set on filming THE definitive historical epic of Australia, both the real continent and some fantasyland Oz that exists our dreams, or the dreams of all Australians, or the dreams of Baz Luhrmann.

It took the guy 8 years after "Moulin Rouge!" to make this movie, and in that time, two other films have been made which way stole his thunder. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" was a far more realistic depiction of the Stolen Generation (half-white, half-Aboriginal kids who were taken from their parents and forcibly injected into white society); it was also far more exciting, and its vision of the Outback seemed genuinely frightening, and expansive, and demanding adventure (in "Australia," the Outback plays itself, unconvincingly.) "The Proposition" was a fierce anti-western about order and chaos waging war at the dawn of Australian civilization. It was a totally ludicrous film - like "Australia," it boiled the myriad forces of history down to a few characters prone to speechifying. But unlike "Australia," "The Proposition" seemed to view each of its characters with equal measures of belief and suspicion - there truly was no one in the right.

Here, Kidman and Jackman must represent old-Hollywood romance, contemporary post-feminist love, and politically correct multiculturalist do-goodery. They play nice people falling in nice love, and so the movie is really an epic ode to niceness. Bored my fucking eyes out.

Gasm!

The New World is one of my favorite movies. When it came out, three years ago, I heard rumors of a directors' cut, but figured it was only rumors. Thank You Jesus And All The Angels.

"Heroes": "I Am Become Death"

Let's get one thing straight: "Heroes" clearly has absolutely no idea what to do with itself. It's original, catchy notion - ordinary people discover they have superpowers - has been completely exploded. Now, you get superpowers by injecting yourself full of superhero juice, or by sipping some savant-African potion and putting on earphones, or by fixing a clock. "Now you have my power," said Future-Sylar yesterday, and apropos of nothing, Peter did! We've now seen three separate future-verses, all of them overexposed in "Minority Report" blue monochrome. The Future in the world of "Heroes" functions roughly the same as the Mirror, Mirror universe in "Star Trek" - every time you go there, everything you know gets completely turned on its head. This is nifty, but "Star Trek" had the courtesy to visit that universe once per series; "Heroes" goes there multiple times in a season.

Cause and effect have become irrelevant as a result. So far this season, Future Peter ruined everything by going into the past and Present Peter ruined everything by going into the future. Hiro traveled to the future and saw Ando betray him, which made him distrust Ando in the present, but his distrust is pushing Ando to betray him. Future Claire killed Future Peter, and then Present Peter killed Future Nathan. Meanwhile, in the two subplots which, so far, don't involve time travel, Nathan can't stop seeing Dead Linderman, and Ali Larter, god bless her, is playing a completely brand new character, thanks to a red-alert plot twist which will henceforth be referred to as the Triplets Protocol.

Anyone hoping that the show would bounce back this season has been disappointed even while they've been blown away. The choice to make time travel the central plotline of this season is ruinous, and genius. Any hope of rediscovering the beautiful simplicity of season 1 - "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" - has been thrown out of the window. In its place is a madcap overcomplexity which competes with "The Wire" in sheer amount of characters, shadowy motives, mysterious connections, and overlapping destinies. The difference is that "The Wire" had a good grasp of every single character - I couldn't tell you what that one bald detective's name was, but boy did I love him (especially when he grew that beard in season 5) - whereas on "Heroes," characters radically self-transmogrify every three seconds.

Mohinder was the sober voice of reason and humanity, until he rashly decided to inject himself full of super juice; Maya used to beg endlessly for a superpower cure, until she started grocery shopping and begging boytoy Mohinder to get out of his stuffy lab; Angela Petrelli was a goofy kleptomaniac mom, before she turned, brilliantly, into Angela Lansbury from "The Manchurian Candidate." Sylar, the most evil man on earth, takes just 4 years to become Gabriel, everyman soccer dad with a son named after his worst enemy.

It's not just that motivations shift. Everything that we understand about character origins keeps changing, too. All it took was one guest starring appearance by George Takei to turn Hiro from a lovable worker drone into the scion to one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. In Season 1, the characters were random, everyday people, slowly coming together. In Season 2, we learned that all the characters' parents used to get together on weekends for bridge and conspiratizing.

This is why the show is imploding, but it's also why this relentless Time Travel gambit makes perfect sense. A couple of futures ago, Parkman had a human wife and a baby; now, he's hitched to the speedster and has a different baby. The whole slapdash aesthetic extends to how people use their powers. Hiro can't control his time/space travel, except when he controls it perfectly; Claire knows she can't die, but still gets freaked out when her real ma gives her a fire-power waterboard session. Tracy Strauss never knew she had any powers until some reporter made her angry, and now she can freeze everything all of the time.

This wouldn't be a problem if the show didn't regularly set up a "Stand-off," like this week, where Claire held a gun on Sylar's son. Now, here's Sylar and Peter, two of the most powerful men ever, who could probably choose 10 different powers to defeat the situation, including superspeed, invulnerability, telekinesis, THE ABILITY TO STOP TIME, etc.

This makes it sound like I'm ragging on the show, but this week's episode was one of my favorite ever. For every ridiculous moment, there's a moment that works wonders, precisely because no other show could ever do it, because no other show has ever been this ridiculous. This is probably the first serialized show that's equally impossible to understand if you're watching it for the first time or if you've memorized every episode. Context does the show no justice, because context is ignored until it isn't. Things which used to seem new have by now become strange plot totems regularly around by everyone. Hiro Nakamura does nothing but try and save the world every episode; he's like the Brain in reverse (with Ando his Pinky.) Peter Petrelli also has no interior life besides world-saving. Nathan Petrelli is a power-hungry politico, until he has a change of heart, until he has another change of heart.

It's all weirdly reminiscent of something "The Daily Show" did with the Iraq war: taking a few clips of Bush talking about Iraq and reversing them chronologically, so that the narratives goes from a confusing Civil War to an ebbing insurgency to victory to bringing the troops home. Characters on "Heroes" who have seen the future are, bizarrely, even more doomed to repeat that future than characters who haven't. On the 5th year anniversary of Iraq, Bush said, "The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency; it is the right decision at this point in my presidency; and it will forever be the right decision." Choices in the contemporary world can now be debated separate from the action that follows from that decision, because the choice is the action. Technically speaking, if you believe in time travel, then you have to believe abortion is wrong. Of course, you also have to believe that a planned pregnancy is equivalent to first-degree murder.

Authors like Pynchon and Delillo and Wallace have tried to capture the sheer overwhelmingness of the modern world, but always through a lens of commentary, even subtle. "Heroes" has no commentary, which is why, watched closely, it seems to mean everything. References to current events are dropped in frequently, and a Buster Keaton movie plays in the background, and the Mona Lisa has been stolen. Read the list of offenses Mark Twain's proto-flame of Fenimore Cooper and ponder how "Heroes" violates every single one, every single episode.

If "The Wire" was the perfect portrayal of the modern American reality, "Heroes" is the perfect portrayal of what Americans think reality is. Sylar is a villain until he's a hero; McCain is a maverick until he starts calling himself one and isn't; Obama supports gay marriage but can't say it out loud, or that's what we liberals tell ourselves; baseball players actually did gain superstrength, and it left them looking almost as bad as future Mohinder. It's impossible to say that this show is good, but it's impossible to think of not watching.

"Heroes" Premiere

Old television was about situations - you're a detective, you're a married couple, you're working woman in Philadelphia, you're a doctor with overly dramatic patients. Old TV had scenes, but not very much atmosphere. The individual situations changed, but the Situation never did. Perry Mason never didn't go to court in an episode. There were exceptions, like "The Fugitive," the first TV show with a genuine beginning and an ending (even if it was mostly a go-nowhere middle.)

Most great new TV is less about situations than about settings, and about how different characters interact within that setting. There aren't any obvious links between "Battlestar Galactica," "Rome," "Deadwood," "Lost," or "Gossip Girl" in one single ongoing plotline, but, viewed as as portraits of contested environments, it becomes clear how similar the shows really are. In every show, there is a clearly defined political and social hierarchy which, as the series begins, has been destroyed or corrupted. As society seeks to rebuild that hierarchy, almost every character jockeys for control. On every show, leadership is hotly contested and often fleeting; Roslin loses an election to Baltar, Julius Caesar begats Octavian Caesar, Jenny replaces Blair in the popular clique, Al Swearengen fights to build and destroy Demoracy in the mining camp of Deadwood, and everyone on the island fights anyone else.

With all of these shows, there is no single basic plot through line. "Rome" is not about any particular set of characters, and the few who do survive the whole series are in drastically different places, both geographically and politically, than they were at the beginning. At the same time, part of what's fun about the shows is that no two episodes are alike. Each show pushes the boundaries of time and space - an episode of "Rome" could take place over the course of an evening, or years; "Lost" can flash back to someone's life before the island, or to their birth, or flash forward to their death. "BSG" uses the same free-floating perspective - it's a bit reminiscent of how Virginia Woolf's prose could adopt different characters' stream of consciousness from one paraph to the next - and does so far more subtly.

These are just examples - you could throw in "24" (which focalizes all of modern-day America into Los Angeles - without fail, the worst plotlines on that show are those which shift focus away from Southern California), or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (where Sunnydale, a pleasant suburban town built over the mouth of Hell, became the farcical fantasy '90s answer to Grover's Corners), or even "Grey's Anatomy" (in the first three seasons, the hospital setting was energized by the ongoing contest of "Who Will be the New Chief"; the show has wandered ever since it abandoned that plotline.) The point is that, no matter how wacky serial TV is, it's always firmly rooted to one single setting.

So give this to "Heroes" - it's a show which breaks every rule. Whereas "BSG" and "Lost" are showlength active verbs ("We need to find earth," "We need to get off this island"), the concept for "Heroes" is essentially passive - "People have superpowers." Whereas other shows present a microcosm of humanity by bringing people from every race and culture and placing them in one claustrophobic arena, "Heroes" is humanity-as-macrocosm - in this season's premiere, we skipped around 4 separate continents. You could argue that the show's center is Manhattan, like LA in "24," but Manhattan, in season 1, was more of an ultimate destination than an overarching setting; after all, every character converged for the first time in Las Vegas, and the events in Odessa, Texas, are still the most compelling in the series.

Simply put, "Heroes" is a show which is purely about events. The events are not directly tied into an ongoing concept - it can be a detective show, an adventure series, a horror flick, a (probably mawkish) romance, a medical thriller, a buddy comedy, or a family melodrama. A show like "Lost" could lose momentum and still be incredibly interesting. You can draw comparisons between season 2 of that fantasy thriller and "Heroes." Both had a first season that was all about breakneck mystery - characters moved so quickly you could hardly breathe. Both had a second season that, by comparison, seems incredibly static. "Lost" settled down to typing numbers; "Heroes" spread its characters across space and time, and didn't bother to come up with any obvious convergence.

You could draw a through line from nearly every action taken by every character in "Heroes" season 1 down to the finale, but in season 2, Claire was testing her powers by cutting off toes, and Nathan Petrelli was a sad lonely drunk, and little Micah was living with his cousins in New Orleans. Some of this stuff was interesting, and, in the hands of someone like Matthew Weiner, who can make great drama out of John Slattery enjoying a stolen cigarette, it might have played well. But there was no center. In "Lost," there's always the island, carrying us through the series with its mystery. When "Heroes" stopped to take a breath, the whole thing seemed to come crashing down.

With that in mind, the 2-hour premiere this week was nothing short of genius - more things happened more interestingly in the first 15 minutes than happened all during season 2. It's unfortunate that the show felt the need for another future apocalypse, but there was an energy in this premiere that hasn't been seen since, well, season 1 of "Heroes." This show stuffs itself full of plotlines. Back when it first debuted, and "Lost" was in the middle of a slow season 3, the sheer quickness and pace of "Heroes" was enough to turn it into a legend.

The show did not have a big debut, not even close. It's got to be a huge failure for NBC; there was a moment, in the summer of 2007, when practically everything on the network seemed to revolve around "Heroes," when it was paired up with "Bionic Woman" and when there was word of a spin-off or three. Those plans failed; "Bionic" flopped, season 2 stunk, and the writers' strike ended the 2008 TV season. I'm guessing the show will be a hit with the Hulu-iTunes demographic, but can such an expensive broadcast show subside off of that? It may be that this is the beginning of the last season of "Heroes," which is not such a bad thing; a show this fast, this fueled, this dynamic deserves to die young.

"Princess Mononoke" and "The Last Unicorn"

It's difficult to believe that for practically the entire 20th century you couldn't mention animation without mentioning Disney. It was the only game in town - sure, the Looney Toons over at Warners were much liked, but there was always something fundamentally unlovable about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. They were never a family - in nearly every Looney Toon, one character is actively trying to kill another one, and sometimes the cross-currents of backstabbing wrap themselves into spirals towards madness. How many times does Daffy betray Bugs, only to be himself betrayed? There's something dark and weird in the Warner Bros cartoons - morality is regularly undercut, laws of physics are betrayed, and characters run off the film strip with shocking regularity, a trick Bergman would borrow for "Persona."

So, if you were to go back and read the vast majority of reviews written about animated movies before this decade, you'll invariably find some reference to Disney - how the movies are different, how they are more violent, how they are less beautiful, how they are decidedly un-Disneylike. Now, of course, animation is practically more common than real-life, and there are so many different legitimately beautiful artistic options - "South Park," "Frisky Dingo," and the magnificent opening of "Kung Fu Panda" are just a few examples of how seemingly stripped down, unbeautiful animation can dazzle just as much as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and with lots of funny, to boot.

Thus, I suspect it's much easier for Americans to appreciate a movie like "The Last Unicorn" (from the very early 80s) and "Princess Mononoke" (from the late 90s) for what they are, as opposed to what they are not. Because both films are many things, but one thing they decidedly are not is even remotely Disneylike.

"Princess Mononoke" is an epic masterwork, and "The Last Unicorn" is a bizarro curiosity. Both films come from creators with a genuine house style that's completely singular. Miyazaki is an unqualified genius, and his 2-D animation breathes with life - in some group shots, you can actually see people in the background inhaling and exhaling, so precise is the master's attention to detail. It's hard to describe this, maybe because it's difficult to describe what breathing looks like - your body doesn't move at all, and yet everything about it moves; your grow around the midsection, but shrink in the shoulders.

"The Last Unicorn" couldn't be more different - it comes out of the Rankin/Bass animation studio. All but forgotten now, Rankin/Bass produced practically every Christmas animation special two generations of kids grew up watching - "The Year Without A Santa Claus," "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July," and of course, the stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer." Still, they're probably best known now in very hermetic circles of reformed nerdlingers as the company that produced "The Hobbit," the animated adaption of Tolkein's first book.

Funnily enough, though, the two films share a common DNA: "Unicorn" was animated by a studio called Topcraft, which also worked on Miyazaki's "Nausicaa" before mostly reforming into Studio Ghibli, responsible for all of his later works - "Mononoke" among them. Thus, although the two films could not look more different, there is something weirdly similar about how people move - not quite as smooth as in early Disney (say, "Snow White"), but nor as plastic as in late-period 2-D animation, with computer cels and weirdly stolid waxwork people.

It's difficult to describe the magic of watching "The Hobbit" as a child, even more difficult to describe it having watched it again as an adult. The 2-D animation in the Rankin/Bass fantasy catalogue - besides "Hobbit," they produced a version of "Return of the King," a forgotten tale called "The Flight of the Dragons," and "The Last Unicorn" - is clunky in a way that most 2-D animation hasn't been clunky in years. In old Disney cartoons, people seem to breathe; in old Warner Brother cartoons, nobody breathes because they don't have time to, because they're on the move constantly in zip-zap-zoop motions; in the Rankin/Bass films, you can see the blips between cels.

When people talk, they almost always make the same strange movement, which is hard to describe but noticeable in all their fantasy films - their eyes stay wide open, but their bodies seem to pivot back and forth, as their shoulders lean in and then lean out. You get the overall impression that they're leaning in for an important secret, but then leaning out to make a pronouncement. Nearly every line of dialogue in these films is exposition - characters are constantly explaining who they are and what their quest is, sometimes immediately before their quest ends. The echo-tunnel quality of the dialogue isn't helped by the fact that voices tend to run in three directions - annoyingly goofy (for the underdog hero), stoutly athletic (for the knight in shining armor), or high-pitched prom queen (for the inevitably angelic female characters.) One character will inevitably be voiced by one of the three most baritoned actors ever - in "Dragons," it's James Earl Jones; in "The Hobbit," it's John Huston; and here, in "Unicorn," it's Christopher Lee.

What's aged the worst, though, are the musical interludes. "South Park" parodied this strange stylistic quirk in the classic Lemmiwinks episode. It's difficult to describe the genre of music these songs fall under - they sound a bit like songs you might find in a nightmare jukebox musical about the period of history between Led Zeppelin and The Outfield. The lyrics are painfully sincere - they tend to describe the plot of the movie, but take the curious tactic of often seeming to speak directly to the characters. The fact that they're inevitably sung by performers who sound a little bit like Bob Ross only adds to the weird vagueness. This opening credits sequence captures everything awkward yet perversely wonderful about the Rankin/Bass musical interlude - immensely hummable, painfully sincere, ridiculously hokey yet eventually mythic.

The Rankin/Bass films DO hold up, viewed again for adults, largely because they go so far beyond strange into the outright surreal. Dream logic pervades everything about "The Last Unicorn," giving the episodic plot the quality of a Bunuel film that thinks it's a Ray Harryhausen fantasy shocker. At the beginning of the story, two men are on horseback inside of a forest. One man says, "This is a unicorn's forest." The other man says, "Really?" The first man points out how green and wonderful the forest looks, and then says, apropos of nothing but the movie's title, "Surely, she is the last unicorn." The men ride away.

Cut to stage right: there's our unicorn, looking uncomfortably feminine, and suddenly, we hear her brain voice, and it sounds just like Mia Farrow: "The Last? Me? Really?" The whole engine of the plot is set in motion, as she decides to find the rest of her race. However, there's a long interlude - it feels like almost half the movie - where she's captured by a witch, voiced by Angela Lansbury. The witch has a zoo filled with mythic creatures - manticore, dragon, Midgard serpent. They're all fakes, except the unicorn, and a particularly grotesque Harpy, which is half-vulture and half-breasts. After escaping the zoo, the Unicorn runs into a group of Robin Hood-like thieves, who are adamant about their non-Robin-Hood-ness. After escaping the thieves, the Unicorn, now with two friends in tow - a woman named Molly and a wizard named Schmendrick, whose attempt to prove himself a real magician forms the only significant ongoing subplot in the whole movie - finds herself in a castle with a potentially crazy old King, a handsome young prince voiced (and painfully sung) by Jeff Bridges, and, somewhere in the depths, a gigantic, massively evil thing which is and is called The Red Bull.

I should mention that, at this point, the Unicorn has been turned into a human lady. There's some talk about how, if she stays human for too long, she won't be able to turn back into a unicorn. I hope that none of this is making sense, because it shouldn't - the plot contortions are freaky beyond belief. One second, you think you're watching a movie about eco-consciousness; the next, about spirituality; the next, about libertarianism. Like a great B-Movie, "The Last Unicorn" draws a strange amount of power from its own imperfection. It sticks with you. And it helps that it gets better as it goes along - or perhaps you're just more drawn into the world.

"Princess Mononoke" exemplifies what "The Last Unicorn" barely grasps at - the ability to build an entire sense of a fantasy world out of just a few, relatively tiny settings. Middle-Earth in "Lord of the Rings" feels very believable, but only because, by the end, you've seen practically all of it - at more than 10 hours, and with an incredible amount of location photography and settings whose whole ecosystems were transformed for making the trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" feels like the pastoral counterpoint to "The Wire," so completely are its various levels mapped out. (We even get the sense for the different ethnic traits - the Horse-Lords are Aryan viking blonde, the men of Gondor are dark-haired and pale, the hobbits are small and curly-haired, and all the bad guys are black and cockney.)

In "Mononoke," after an opening scene in a tiny village, practically the whole movie divides its time between just a couple of recognizable settings - an enchanted pond in the forest, and a burgeoning city of industry at the base of a hill. "Unicorn" begins in the Unicorn's forest, and then departs through the plains, but there's no real sense of particularity - the zoo is mobile, and seems to just stop along the road; so, too, the band of thieves, who hide out in the darkness; and finally, there is the castle perched on a coastline, suggesting a bird of prey on its roosts, a suicidal feat of fascist architectural engineering, and Castle Elsinore:

It's in this castle where the movie spends its final and most strange, and most disturbing, scenes. "Mononoke" is a much better movie - almost perfect, certainly more consistent, and far more openly ambiguous - but then, you have to watch this scene, and let Christopher Lee's voice wash over you:




I admit that I'm presenting the video out of context, but context doesn't really explain anything about this scene. At this point in the movie, it's not very clear whether the Unicorn is suffering from amnesia, if she's too busy falling in love with the prince to worry about her original goal, or if her original goal - to discover what happened to her fellow unicorns - was just not very important to begin with. This scene reveals that the King is the film's villain, but nothing really follows directly from it - he receives his just desserts at the end of the film, but there's never a sense of genuine reckoning (His last words in the movie are victorious - "I knew! I knew you were the last!")

This scene reminds me, for vague reasons, of a scene from Orson Welles' last film, "F for Fake," where he meditates on Chartres cathedral, on notions of authorship, on humanity, space, time, and existence. Both films are openly episodic, the plot less a series of events than a barely linear series of riffs. Neither film makes a lick of sense. Yet both stick in your head, and both contain scenes which, when surgically removed from the movie around them, seem to contain some hidden equation for understanding something deeper.

Perhaps it's just proof of the incredible allure of baritone-voiced soliloquies. You could listen to Orson Welles in "F for Fake," Christopher Lee in "Unicorn," and Keith David in the english dub of "Mononoke," and almost imagine that this is what it must have been like for Abraham or Muhammad or Heracles to hear some higher power speaking just to him.

Really Real

Human existence strikes you two ways: you're just one among many millions, or you're the only one that counts. You walk between those two roads your whole life, and where those two roads intersect, you've got synchronity, coincidence, fate - the grasping sensation that everything is connected. When I was traveling in Eastern Europe, I read a copy of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" that I borrowed from my brother. One day on a train, I put aside the book, picked up a magazine, turned a few pages, and found a reference to Bulgakov nestled into a sidebar. (It was "The Economist," natch.) Five days later, drunk and wandering for my life in Unpronounceable Ljubljana, I snapped a picture of the poster for a new opera that was just about to hit town:

This kind of thing happens all the time when you get older. Two weeks ago, I signed up for a free trial membership to World of Warcraft. The following week, I started reading Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a book which roughly invented the term "avatar" and certainly was a seminal work in the conception of a digital playspace that would be only slightly more hyperrealistic than our own overcrazy reality. Like most near-futures, the book is cagey about dates, but since the 35-year-old protagonist claims a birthday in the 70s, you could frankly conclude that the book takes place in 2008 - and, barring a few turns of the crazy wheel, you could equally argue that Stephenson's vision has more or less come true.

One of the many sidelong tangents which "Snow Crash" throws at the world of tomorrow involves the creation of genuine digital faces - how it took the invention of genuine, as opposed to plastic, digital emotion in order to make the digital world as palpable as the real one. The same week I read "Snow Crash," this video hit the internet.

Books that you like have a strange quality of seeming wholly necessary to the specific time of life in which you read them. Let me rephrase. It's impossible for me to imagine reading "Snow Crash" at any other time - it's focus on digital reality, its vision of a world happily ruled by corporations rather than governments, feels directly linked to my own concerns of the moment. But I first picked up "Snow Crash" three years ago, off of a friend's recommendation; read the first two chapters and then stopped right away, not because they were bad, but because the first two chapters of "Snow Crash" are so breakneck that the third chapter hits you like an instant comedown (a good friend once argued that the whole book never lives up to its opening, although sometimes I think you could arguet that about everything besides "The Great Gatsby.")

Similarly, right now I'm powering through a graphic novel series called "Transmetropolitan," a vaguely dystopic urban future which follows the travails of journalist Spider Jerusalem, a slightly britified Hunter S. Thompson. In Book 3 of "Transmetropolitan," Spider begins following the Presidential Election, which is pitting a fat shifty capitalist incumbent stooge against a bright shiny younger contender, who's nickname and general political platform are the same: "The Smiler." Spider despises the incumbent President, a thuggish cigar chomper out of the Warren G. Harding school. Yet he comes to despise his opponent even more, because, despite his call for change, he essentially offers the same gruesome money politics as before.

Meanwhile, in present-day reality, Matt Taibbi, often compared to Hunter S. Thompson though more like a modern-day H. L. Menken, just wrote a column in which he unblinkingly and unhappily points out how achingly similar Obama's fundraising tactics are to those who've come before - people named Clinton, but also people named Bush.

The real world is endlessly complicated. In the World of Warcraft, I created a new character, an Elf named Mcarthur. That puts me on both sides of the ongoing Horde/Alliance war. This strikes me as a wholly sane method for living two lives, although now I can't help but wonder if, when I'm not playing, my characters are dreaming of each other.

"Yacht Rock" at the Rickshaw Stop

A live event honoring a youtube series ("web TV" is naive and faintly rude, like calling a comic book a "Graphic Novel" or referring to a beatnik as a "white negro") gives the strangest kind of evening. The overall emotion is somewhere between seeing a Night Ranger reunion concert and witnessing the arrival of Dennis Quaid's palooka has-been baseball coach finally getting to play in the major leagues at the end of "The Rookie." Notice that neither event is particularly glorious - Quaid's playing for the Devil Rays, and unless they play "Sister Christian" on repeat for two hours the concert's 99 percent filler - but both have the low-rent appearance of actual glory. Layer in a dollop of considerable retro-post-irony - the double-back ability to appreciate a thing for its awfulness while loving it for its awesomeness - and you've got the special Yacht Rock screening at the Rickshaw Stop.