A new episode is up, and it’s full of happy things (because we haven’t given you all enough happy, apparently). This week we talk about the new Batman movie, fascinating science news, upcoming movies, and much more (including an interview with Mary Anne Mohanraj of the Speculative Literature Foundation). Tune in and enjoy!
When my friend and I asked Lauren Beukes to describe Zoo City, she understandably remarked that the book is rather difficult to explain. Zoo City isn’t like a lot of books. On the one hand it is a noir murder mystery with a semi-New Weird slant, but on the other it is a novel about refugees, the music industry, South Africa, guilt, revenge, drugs, prejudice, poverty, and so much more. It is a gloriously complicated novel with equally complicated characters. You might even call it a brilliant example of worldbuilding from outside of the traditional modern fantasy genre. Zoo City is concerned with Zinzi December, a former convict who, like many others, must bear the mark of her crime in the form of a semi-intelligent animal — in her case, it’s a sloth. But there’s also the Undertow — a mysterious force that some claim is Hell reaching out for the damned souls of aposymbiots like Zinzi. Aposymbiosis, however, isn’t all bad. Every aposymbiot is gifted with an ability. Some can create protective charms while others can dampen magical fields. Zinzi can see the threads that connect people to their lost things. And that’s how she survives: finding things for people for a modest fee. But when she takes on a job from a music producer to find a missing girl, things get sticky. Her employer isn’t who he seems and the person she’s trying to find might be running for a good reason. Toss in her debts to a shady organization of email scammers, her complicated relationship with her refugee lover, a murder, and the seedy underbelly of a Johannesburg trying to deal with its new “problem” and you have a complex story about South Africa, its people, and its culture. Zoo City is immense in its complexity, despite having the allure of a typical genre romp. Trying to describe the novel will always leave out some salient detail, which will prevent one from conveying a true sense of the novel. It is, in part, a noir crime novel, but it is also a foray into South Africa’s present. What is surprising about Zoo City is that it breaks the fantasy tradition of disconnection from reality — what some might call the escapist nature of the genre. Zoo City roots the reader in the now, altering details as necessary to convey a world that has been changed by its supernatural affliction (aposymbiosis); it is a novel with an intimate relationship to South Africa’s present (and, by extension, its past). For that reason, I think Zoo City would benefit from multiple readings. The novel’s cultural layers are palimpsest-ial in nature, each element bleeding into another so that almost every detail, allusion, and reference becomes integral to the development of the novel’s characters and the narrative itself. I consider this to be a good thing because the novel doesn’t suffer from feeling disconnected from the world its characters are supposed to occupy (an alternate-history near-today) — that is that the characters are so firmly rooted in Beukes’ South African milieu that they don’t read like characters transplanted from elsewhere. Being so rooted, Zoo City is as much about its world as it is about its characters. The first-person-present narrative style allows for Zinzi’s voice to dominate, but that doesn’t prevent Beukes from providing useful insight into the various other characters around her main character. While the focus on Zinzi certainly shows a lopsided view of the world, it doesn’t fail to show the wider context in which Zinzi has become a part. Zinzi’s detective role, in a way, is a duality: she uses it first as a survival mechanism, but then as a way to dig into her own personal reality, discovering the truth about her friends and even herself. It is through this process that the narrative’s cultural strands build on top of one another, providing the reader with a progressively deepening view of the characters and their interaction with the world around them. Zinzi’s refugee lover (Benoit), for example, is a man with his own mysteries, and it is inevitably through Zinzi’s various other doings, some of which she has hidden even from those that know her, that she not only explains the world from which Benoit has come, but also discovers more about who Benoit is/was and how new events in her life will change the dynamics of their relationship and their relationship to the world around them. Throughout all of this, Zinzi’s humor, sarcasm, and cynicism pokes through, coloring her character and her vision of the South Africa of Zoo City (by extension, the reader’s view is also colored by these interjections). It is this attention to detail and character that I loved about Zoo City. Instead of focusing undo attention to its plot, the novel finds a balance between both plot and character. Neither is written at the expense of the other, but the characters also seem to steal the show because they are all incredibly flawed, and deal with those flaws in (sometimes annoyingly) human ways. Perfection is an impossibility in Beukes’ narrative. Zinzi has many advantages — her magical ability and her attitude, which she uses to intimidate her “enemies — but she is also limited, and knows it. Her actions are appropriately influenced by this knowledge; reading her thoughts as she comes to terms with these flaws, particularly in bad situations, is an amusing, if not voyeuristic, experience. Neither plot or character are perfectly in-sync, however. The ending, I would argue, felt somewhat rushed and without full resolution (by this I don’t mean the last pages, which I think were appropriate based on what occurs in the novel); in a sense, I think the ending shies away from the noir crime narrative Zoo City started with and delves into darker themes that might have been better served by stronger foreshadowing in the novel. Zinzi’s voice and her character flaws do, to some extent, overwhelm these minor issues, making the ending suspenseful and (slightly) insane, and I suspect that
The single greatest car commercial ever made. Period. See for yourself: Admit it: this commercial is awesome.
South Africa is on the literary attack. This week we talk to Lauren Beukes about her novel, Zoo City, which was recently released in the United States. Tune in and enjoy! No question of the week this time around, but do feel free to shoot us an email at skiffyandfanty [at] gmail [dot] com! You can also leave a comment on our website or follow us on Twitter. Note: I’m going to post a review of Zoo City pretty quick. It’s a damn good book, though. Read it.
Plenty of big name folks have come out in defense of libraries lately. For example, the wonderful Wil Wheaton has talked briefly about his love of libraries here and author Philip Pullman has written an extensive defense and political rebuttal here. They’re certainly no the only ones talking about the problem libraries are facing in the U.S. and the U.K. Massive budget cuts in the U.S. have left many libraries struggling to keep doors open or services available; the same seems to be true of U.K. libraries (though I willingly profess my ignorance of the U.K. library system and will refrain from speaking directly about their services in this post). The one thing I don’t see people talking about, however, is the socio-economic problem that library closures and cuts represent. Most defenses have given a nod to the value of libraries to middle class and poor families, but few have actually dug into why libraries are essential, if not indispensable, to those with the greatest need. You see, libraries are an immense access point for information and crucial social services. In the U.S., a great deal of libraries (though not all, sadly) offer Internet services, job search and resume help, daycare in the form of storytime and book clubs, research aid, and many other things that I can’t think of at this moment. We can pretend all we want that everyone has Internet at home, but the reality is that many don’t, even people who have big fancy college degrees. Why? Because some of those fancy people are unemployed. Some of those people might have been scraping by before the recession, and are now cutting back on the luxuries they once had so they can keep feeding themselves. Libraries make it possible for these people to look for jobs, to research, and even to get access to materials that they once bought from a bookstore (i.e., books). But here’s the kicker. Because libraries are access points for all kinds of information (including “regular” knowledge), the removal of libraries from public access (i.e., closing them through budget cuts) means denying people without financial power from access to the knowledge that would liberate them from ignorance. Ignorance is, as such, a powerful political tool. The longer you keep the people blind to reality (either by destroying public education by making it impossible to teach critical thinking skills or simply denying them access to national news sources and so on), the longer you can maintain power. Closing libraries is never about cutting down on government spending. It is always about power. Why? Because the only people who will be affected by library closures (with rare exception) are those without a great deal of disposable income. They are the ones who suddenly lose access to the services and knowledge that libraries provide. Those with disposable income won’t be affected in a negative way unless they are of the crowd who uses libraries or understands their value (but such understanding folks are not the people who are the problem, since they too are defending libraries, like Pullman, who is far from being Mr. Poor). In fact, those with disposable income will see nothing but benefits as their taxes (theoretically) go down or remain the same. The rest of us will be left with a gap. That gap will damage generations to come. If we allow libraries to be closed, then we are allowing the power dynamic to shift ever more unfavorably against us. That balance is already tipped at a disturbing angle towards those who already have financial power. The wealthy have all the money and the rest of us are scrounging for scraps. Libraries are just one more assault by those with power (and financial security) on the ability of everyone else to keep themselves from the peasantry. They are the lords on high, basking in their green glow while the executioner hangs our libraries. We can’t stand by in the crowd and watch that happen. That’s our future being hung from the rafters. It’s even worse for those who can’t afford to buy the Internet for themselves and use the slightly-crazed Google to search through our literary history, because they are already losing hope that the future will hold anything good for them. If we let people take away libraries, what kind of hopeful, American dream-y future are we proposing to give our children or the children of others or the people who most need those places of informational worship? Libraries are a part of the American Dream, even if it’s all a mythic fantasy we tell our children when they are young. What we really need is a Ten Million People March for libraries. The U.K. has it right. There are people protesting there, and more power to them to use their voices to tell the government to screw itself. More power to Philip Pullman for laying straight that nasty bag of snakes that is politics. More power to Wil Wheaton and all the librarians and bloggers, here and elsewhere, whose posts I haven’t read yet, all of whom have written about why we need libraries — because the children need them to have those wonderful experiences of discovery or to learn or to become lovers of books… We need a march in the U.S. Lots of them. All at once. With celebrities and authors and politicians and poor people and middle class people and those few powerful people who believe that libraries are the gateway from peasantry to something slightly better. Maybe I missed those marches. If so, we need to have them again. Because if I ever have children, I want to be able to take them to my local library and look up at the big sign over the door and say, “This place is going to change your life.”
Last year was by far one of the best years for movie soundtracks, not just in terms of “good music,” but also in terms of experimentation on the part of composers (as some of my choices below will show). The year prior, of course, was a good year too, but 2010 really grabbed me, with some composers playing a greater role in the merger of source material with musical material. I don’t know if this is a “new” thing, but it sure is something I haven’t noticed in past years from major pictures (the experimentation on the part of composers seems to have been centered on “blockbusters” in 2010; whether that means anything is up to the music critics to figure out). Here are my top five picks for 2010 (in no particular order)(after the fold): Inception (Hans Zimmer) One of the best science fiction films ever made has the luxury of having one of the most important and (I hope) influential soundtracks ever written. Hans Zimmer certainly has a lot of detractors, but his use of layers, his manipulation of audio to produce a variety of effects (then replicated in various ways for the body of the musical narrative), and his unflinching willingness to experiment to the extreme (see the behind the scenes stuff for The Dark Knight) are prime examples of why he his one of the best composers living today. I’ve written plenty about the soundtrack here and here, in case you’re interested. My other posts about Inception are here and here. Tron: Legacy (Daft Punk) One of the biggest surprises for me was the announcement that Daft Punk would be scoring the soundtrack for Legacy. I was apprehensive about the duo, because as much as I love their music, I had a hard time imagining it forming the background of a film like Legacy. The result, however, blew me away. Legacy‘s soundtrack is a clever mix of heavy electronic rhythms and traditional orchestral scoring (some of which is then manipulated by the duo–who are, of course, known for their audio manipulations). The soundtrack is actually quite clever, since it mirrors the intersection and conflict between two worlds (the real world vs. the Grid). Hopefully we’ll see more soundtracks from Daft Punk in the future; they’ve clearly got a knack for it. My reviews of Legacy can be found here and here. How to Train Your Dragon (John Powell) Light. Bubbly. Fun. Despite the film’s flaws, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, and the soundtrack is no exception. It brings out the spirit of adventure that made How to Train Your Dragon such an enjoyable film. Then there’s “Sticks and Stones” by Jonsi (the end title piece), which is one of the happiest songs I’ve heard in a long time (which might explain my love for it in times of annoyance or sadness: it has a way of lifting one’s spirits (sort of like the movie, right?)). I recommend the soundtrack if you want something uplifting. It might even make for good walking music! Here’s my review of How to Train Your Dragon. The Last Airbender (James Newton Howard) First things first: the movie was bloody awful; so awful, in fact, that it might very well be the end of M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s career. A good thing? Maybe. But the music for the soundtrack, while somewhat simple for a Howard score, sets up the epic scenario better than the actual film. It is suspenseful, fun, and (sometimes) quite beautiful. There are a number of great little themes at work here, and if a second movie is made, perhaps we’ll hear these develop (if we’re lucky, maybe someone will tell Shamalamadingdong he can’t write or direct the next in the series). I think Howard could have been more ambitious with his use of themes/instruments from non-European cultures, but considering the near-gutting of practically all of the representations of non-European cultures from the original series for the movie, I suppose it’s unfair to blame Howard for the oversight. In any case, the soundtrack is a good mood-setter and well worth listening to. (Note: Loopdilou and I will be reviewing The Last Airbender as part of our Torture Cinema feature at The Skiffy and Fanty Show next month.) Skyline (Matthew Margeson) I didn’t see the movie and have no intention of doing so. The soundtrack, however, is dark and suspenseful. It’s like listening to David Arnold (Independence Day) one moment and Graeme Revell (The Chronicles of Riddick) the next. There is plenty of beauty here, too. The melodies shift from chaotic to idyllic (as would be expected of an action-oriented science fiction film) and the overall feeling is a mixture of excitement and wonder. I suspect we’ll see much more of Margeson in the future, particularly for genre films. Book of Eli (Atticus Ross) One of the more experimental works of 2010 (along with Inception), The Book of Eli is a mixture of dissonance and ambient chill. It’s like John Murphy’s Sunshine merged with Jerry Goldsmith’s The 13th Warrior. It’s not easy to listen to, just as Schoenberg’s 12-tonal melodies aren’t for most audiences, but Ross has done a fine job creating the necessary atmosphere the post-apocalyptic film needed, with just the right amount of beauty to seep in through the cracks. Not for the faint of heart, sure, but still worth a listen. ——————————————————– Those are my selections. So, what am I missing? What are you favorites for last year?
