I recently graduated from the California State University Northridge school of Cinema and Television Arts with an emphasis in film production. Currently I'm working for an online jazz station; McQsJazz.com and it's pretty cool. On the side I'm working on breaking into the industry. One step at a time.
“Even in fragmented times, we can still find new forms of connection,” says mentalist Scott Silven. His new virtual show is called The Journey. Scott Silven
A slender, dark-haired young man walks along the windblown Scottish coast, picking up stones and discovering the ruins of a cottage. The young man is mentalist Scott Silven, and you are about to go on a journey with him.
Silven has toured the world delighting audiences with seemingly impossible illusions. But with the pandemic confining him to his home in Scotland, he hatched a new interactive online show, commissioned by nine arts centers around the world.
The show is calledThe Journey,and the first step is you log in, and give permission to the producers to use your video and audio.
“I invite 30 people from across the world to travel virtually to my childhood home in Scotland,” Silven explains. “And we go on a journey together that explores the power of home and place and connection. And we use their thoughts and memories as the guide on that journey.”
From his house in Glasgow, which has been turned into a studio, with projections and elaborate sound design, Silven talks about his own personal journey as a magician, weaving Scottish myth into the narrative. In a pre-show email, he asks audience members to bring an object that is meaningful to them, and using a custom web interface, he can interact with them, pulling people onscreen to participate in gasp-inducing tricks.
“If you have an object with you today, take it out for me now,” Silven instructs. “Hold it up close to your camera so I can see it, right now.”
Of course, Silven won’t explain how he can, say, take the letters GG, which I wrote down in my apartment in Brooklyn, onto a piece of paper inside a locked box in Scotland. But he does say that part of his craft is to create an environment where people are willing to be open. He’s surprised by how well it works online.
“To create mentalism out of an experience, while people sit in their own home, is something I thought I’d never be able to experience before,” he says.
Silven interacts with audience members — just 30 of them per show — in The Journey. Scott Silven
Rob Bailis is artistic and executive director of The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Calif., one of the co-presenters of The Journey.
“Audiences are reacting to it, especially those who are seeing him for the first time, with absolute amazement,” Bailis says. “And it’s just a wonder. And, you know, it’s all the ways that he’s just kept this from being a Zoom call.”
Silven says most effects involve at least five or 10 audience members. The show is going on a virtual tour, where it’s available on each theaters’ website for a limited time. The first stop was at The Momentary, a new art and performance space in Bentonville, Ark., which had just opened when the pandemic hit.
“I think it’s very important for us to find these new ways of engaging with an audience,” says Lievan Bertels, director of The Momentary. “And we cannot just sit here and wait until the pandemic is over, even more so for a young institution like ours that only existed in the real world for three weeks.”
For Silven, who, given the different time zones of the theaters, is performing his show in the middle of the night, that momentary sense of community is what it’s all about.
“I realize just how lucky I am to connect with people across the world and share something positive from this moment in time,” he says. “To take a moment to step back and reflect and realize that even in fragmented times, we can still find new forms of connection.”
There’s a particular music myth that’s been told and retold so many times, it can’t possibly be true. It probably persists thanks to a combination of musicians’ tendency to romanticize themselves and everyone else’s tendency to romanticize an avocation they don’t understand. The best example of it is the famous story about Robert Johnson meeting Satan at a crossroads, but there are countless other tales implying the same thing: that great talent requires some sort of devil’s bargain, a trade for a crucial aspect of one’s humanity. We’ve seen it everywhere from Kurt Cobain’s suicide note to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.
Myths endure for a reason, and there’s probably a way to write about this one that doesn’t feel hackneyed. It’s unfortunate that Ram V, author of the new graphic novel Blue In Green, hasn’t found it. It’s doubly unfortunate because his artist, Mumbai illustrator Anand RK, and his colorist, John Pearson, pull off some genuinely exciting things in their artwork. There are a lot of ideas in Blue In Green, but the good ones are all implied visually. It’s kind of uncanny to see a book about the power of creativity simultaneously epitomize and betray its theme. Fortunately, though, comics is a visual medium at heart. This is hardly the first time a talented artist has saved a comic from its writer.
Blue In Green‘s protagonist Erikis a sax player who never made it, despite being “some kinda music whiz kid back in high school.” Erik decided long ago that his lack of something “intangible” meant “I would never come close to any kind of excellence,” so he abandoned performing and became a music teacher. Summoned home by the death of his mother, he encounters an unnamed evil spirit (it would be far more satisfying if the author had just gone ahead and made it the Devil himself) who offers him virtuosity in exchange for his sanity and, ultimately, his life. The author thinks he can make this story interesting again by emphasizing how many times we’ve heard it before: As Erik talks to the spirit, Ram reminds us of Charlie Parker and Cobain. Ram quotes the latter’s declaration, in his aforementioned suicide note, that “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” but neglects to mention that Kurt got that line from Neil Young (or maybe Def Leppard). But Ram’s not like the jazz musicians he seeks to evoke: instead of taking this familiar melody in new directions, he simply plays it out as written.
While Ram’s story hardly sings, RK’s artwork is another matter. Inspired by the deceptive looseness of jazz in a way Ram isn’t, RK engages with the comic tradition in all sorts of clever ways. Comics are generally associated with an immediately recognizable “cartoon” style: A few memorable lines will indicate a larger picture, while a character will be summed up with one or two exaggerated features.
If you were to liken traditional cartoons to classical music, RK’s drawings might be analogous to jazz. His fuzzy edges and blotches of ambiguous color are as far as you can get from the simple lines and flat tones associated with traditional comics, and his approach to drawing faces is anti-iconic. His characters all start as unstable, foggy sketches, as if you’re seeing them through the hazy air of a smoky club. RK gives you one or two features to identify characters from panel to panel, but otherwise their faces are usually obscured with crosshatching and melty at the edges. It’s as if he’s saying, “You’re going to peg this person by their glasses/nose/hairstyle, so what’s the point of filling in the rest? How will you decide you’ve really seen them?” Since Erik and many of the other characters are black, RK’s approach can also be read as a rebuke to the racism of classic comics. By refusing to boil his characters down to one or two iconic features, he forces the reader to confront a whole range of assumptions about what people are supposed to look like.
RK references jazz in other ways, too. His compositions, angles and graphical effects echo the work of advertising illustrators in the heyday of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. (The title of this book is taken from a Davis song.) He often leaves faint gridlines on his pages, alluding to the rigid laws that invisibly undergird jazz improvisation. Pearson expands the typical noir palette, lavishly pouring out saturated hues of hot pink, throbbing coral, electric purple and sunshine yellow. The only time the artists stumble is when they depict the evil spirit Erik meets (it looks like something from a Halloween attraction) and Erik’s psychotic break. It’s as if Ram’s plodding story beats are throwing them off their rhythm.
Still, RK and Pearson launch a fascinating, layered, exploratory flight off of Ram’s trite composition. They make Blue In Green worth checking out. Let’s just hope they didn’t have to sell their souls to do it.
Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She tweets at@EtelkaL.
An American actor buys a 200-year-old Italian home for 1 euro. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, as it turns out.
Lorraine Bracco is best known for her roles in The Sopranos and Goodfellas. In her new HGTV show,My Big Italian Adventure, Bracco renovates — really renovates — the abandoned house she bought in Sicily.
The home she purchased was one of a handful of properties in Sambuca di Sicilia offered for a single euro — with the requirement that the new owners would spend a boatload of money fixing up the dilapidated homes.
Many of these homes fell into disrepair after the 1968 Belice earthquake, Bracco explains. “Those 16 houses, from what I understood, were either abandoned in 1968 because of the earthquake and/or … the family just didn’t have any more family to pass it down to.”
She says her children were unfazed: “When I told them that I wanted to do this, they said, ‘Well, it’s not crazier than anything else you’ve ever wanted to do, Mom.’ “
Bracco says she’s a big fan of HGTV and it occurred to her that this project would be a fun renovation show.
“Little did I know that there were 16 houses and there were 100,000 emails [from] people all over the world for these homes,” she says.
But Bracco got her house and became the owner of a little piece of property in Sambuca. The houses, she says candidly, were “s***holes.”
“Nobody in their right mind would have bought this. But, you know, you had to have that adventurous spirit and I sadly have that,” she laughs.
Bracco dreamed of turning her 1-euro wreck into a warm, inviting home. She says she has had many homes in her life, and she considers it a “huge compliment” when visitors tell her: “Oh, it’s so homey here. It’s so warm. … It’s a house I’d like to live in.”
She says this house struck her as one that had potential: In addition to having good bones, it was situated on a corner, which allowed for plenty of light. And she was blown away by the craftsmanship.
“When I went in, I saw these beautiful tiled floors under 3 inches of dust and dirt,” she recalls. “And I was like, oh, this. This is beautiful. … The people who built this house — God bless them — they were incredible artists, they did everything by hand. There was no sheetrock. They did everything with plaster. … It’s amazing.”
Bracco’s paternal grandparents were born in Sicily, so she has a family connection to the place, but she hasn’t had the opportunity to really get to know it.
“I can’t wait to go there and spend two or three months in the house living in Sambuca,” she says. “I’ve not been able to do that because of COVID. I was planning to go there in March.”
In the small town, people were kind to her. “They were very welcoming,” she says. “It was just so sweet when I would wait at the cheese shop or go to the grocery store or the hardware store, they would be like, oh, yeah, you bought that 1-euro house.”
As for whether she’d recommend this sort of adventure to others?
It’s “never too late,” she says. “Never say never.”
She tells her kids: “Think big, dream big — you don’t know what’s out there.”
Sophia Boyd and Melissa Gray produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
The secret weapon of Disney+’s The Mandalorian, is discovery.
It’s pretty much in the DNA of the series — which became a streaming TV phenomenon last year — on the strength of a new character the series calls “The Child” but most of us fans call Baby Yoda.
The goal: to explore all the nooks and crannies of the Star Wars universe that the big movies ignored and build compelling stories around them.
I’m happy to note the first episode of the show’s second season leans hard into it with spectacular results. We see a new side of Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine, learn the aftermath of the second Death Star explosion (seen in 1983’s Return of the Jedi), uncover fresh depths in the Tusken Raiders’ culture and meet a character from the original films whose legacy has shadowed this series since it debuted with the Disney+ service back in November 2019.
(Don’t worry, I’m not dropping that name. But there will be a few smaller spoilers and hints sprinkled through this review, so consider yourself warned.)
For disenchanted Star Wars fans like myself – folks who have grown frustrated and dismissive of the bloated predictability in the franchise’s recent films – The Mandalorian is an impressive, expertly-executed do-over. It revisits and reinvents a fictional world loaded with storytelling promise, too often underutilized on the big screen in the drive to build the next sci fi blockbuster.
From its start, The Mandalorian had simple goals and a direct style. Built around a bounty hunter presumed to be a member of a legendary warrior race, the first season turned on his discovery of The Child during a job and his decision to become its defender.
Fans knew immediately this kid was a pint-sized specimen from the same race as one of the most famous Star Wars characters, Jedi Master Yoda. Over the course of the first season, “Mando” — a nickname from the show which sounds so close to a slur I resist deploying it – discovers he must find other members of this race and bring The Child to them, pursued by remnants of the evil, authoritarian Empire who realize the youngling is a powerful resource.
For all those who complained about the series’ slow start in 2019, this year’s model kicks off with a swirl of intensity. Our Hero survives a fight, only to learn he must head to Tatooine to find another Mandalorian who might know where The Child’s people live.
Once there, he stumbles on Mandalorian armor any Star Wars fan would instantly recognize, worn by a local marshal played by the best actor to ever embody a sharp-shooting lawman, Justified alum Timothy Olyphant (told you there would be a few spoilers). The moment Olyphant lets fly with one of his smart-alecky quips, you know these two are teaming up for something.
If the mothership Star Wars movies are space operas built around reimagined fragments of samurai films and the legends of medieval knights, then The Mandalorian finds its tone in a slightly different genre: it’s a straight up Western.
And there is no greater Western trope than the story of a scrappy, dusty frontier town threatened by a grand danger, depending on a stalwart sheriff and mysterious, gunslinging stranger to help save the day.
The great challenge of The Mandalorian is to keep us entertained, even as it references familiar storytelling most fans know so well, they can predict the end of the tale even as it begins.
Because we know how Westerns work, we know Our Hero and Olyphant’s character will form an uneasy alliance, after a tense initial moment. We know they’ll eventually find success. We know that success will cement an uneasy, culture-bridging alliance between the townspeople and the Tusken Raiders, marauding pirates who attack Luke Skywalker in the very first Star Wars film.
But the brilliance of The Mandalorian’s new installment is how it deploys revelations about the Star Wars universe to keep us guessing and engaged, topped by the episode-ending reveal of a character that will make fans squeal with anticipation and delight (How do I know this? Guess who squealed loud enough to wake my neighbors when the final scene appeared?)
Creator Jon Favreau — who wrote and directed this first episode of the new season – seems to have learned from critical snipes about the first season. The storytelling pace here is quicker, with more reveals that spark deeper questions; just as scenes lapse into the gobbledygooky space jargon needed to build the plot, we get a little action to break things up and remind us we’re watching a gritty, occasionally grand adventure. And the new episode is 55 minutes long, compared to last season’s installments, which averaged about 40 minutes each.
Best of all, I left this new episode eager to see what comes next, and a little annoyed with Disney+ that they don’t follow Netflix’s binge model and drop an entire season at once.
This new episode of The Mandalorian proves the first season wasn’t a fluke. They have revitalized one of sci-fi’s biggest franchises, boosted one of media biggest streaming services and marked a bold new chapter for one of TV’s most ambitious and well-crafted series.
Not a bad day’s work — even for the coolest Mandalorian in a galaxy far, far away.
Cixin Liu’s To Hold Up The Sky is a 1974 Chevy van with icy moons and swirling nebulae painted on the side that you saw for sale by the side of the road in a snowstorm. It is a copy of Heavy Metal you found stuck in the back of the rack at Empire Comics when you were looking for old Savage Sword of Conan issues to read on a long road trip with your parents. It is the torn cover of a faded sci-fi paperback you found at the thrift store and spent the afternoon reading in the car while you waited for a girl to get off work and let you into her apartment for which you didn’t yet have a key.
Tor Books
It is magic, this collection of short stories Liu wrote and published ten, 20, 30 years ago. It is a time machine; a split-vision tunnel that lets you go back in time while staring forward, to see what 2003’s or 1985’s version of 2010 or 2020 or 3000 looked like from China, in the pages of the Beijing edition of Esquire or Chengdu’s Science Fiction World and Novoland Fantasy.
“At that time, sci-fi was still a very marginal pursuit in China,” Liu writes in his foreword. “Science fiction is seen as something foreign.”
And you can see it (smell it, taste it) in every page — a sense of artistic isolation and loneliness, sure, but also the compounding joy of exploration. Of discovering new territories and imagining other frontiers. “For my part, I have never consciously or deliberately tried to make my sci-fi more Chinese,” he writes. Because science fiction, when done well, when done thoughtfully, engages ideas of humanness beyond nationality or ethnicity. It is a language more concerned with humanity in general than the specific sub-categories thereof. Because the aliens don’t care about our addresses, of course. To them, we all taste the same.
Still, that’s a lot about what Liu’s writing here isn’t (mainstream, local, modern, deliberately Chinese), but what matters is what it is. What matters is what it does. What matters more than both of those put together is how it feels to see tomorrow through his eyes — to experience a science fiction that comes largely innocent of 21st century concerns and wholly absent its modern sins.
Because Liu is at play here, alone with a toy box full of rocketships, circuit boards, plastic tanks and army men. “The Time Migration” (translated by Joel Martinsen) has a Harlan Ellison quality (something in the exclamation points, the righteous surprise at every turn) and compresses 10,000 years of human evolution into a few thousand words, using cryogenic freezing to allow his witnesses to whistlestop through the centuries, periodically dropping in on humanity to see it move beyond war, beyond beauty, beyond individual consciousness and, finally, beyond life. “Contraction” (translated by John Chu) feels like something lifted whole from Asimov’s Science Fiction — its brevity and compactness attractive, its whole existence hanging on one complex scientific hook. “Mirror” (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan) is a kind of sci-fi whodunit that ropes in complex algorithmic discussions, superstring computing, simulation technology, IT stack overflow limitations and a long explanation of the Big Bang in order to tell the tale of a Chinese government official screwed over by politics. And the following story, “Ode To Joy” (Martinsen again) is, ironically, about a giant mirror that plays stars like musical instruments.
“The Village Teacher” (translated by Adam Lanphier) seemed too simple and too pat (a rural teacher, dying of cancer, teaching his students about Newton’s laws of motion just before a massive alien battlefleet arrives to test our species’ intelligence by … asking it about Newton’s laws of motion), but as the first story in the collection, it sets up a dichotomy that plays out over and over again. In “2018-04-01” (Chu), Liu envisions a new gene therapy that allows people to live 300 years, and possibly forever. The story, though, is about a single man contemplating embezzlement in order to pay for the treatment, and what a couple hundred extra years of life would be worth to him in exchange. In “Fire In The Earth” (Martinsen), a new mining technology goes terribly wrong, but leads to a future breakthrough that allows for the safe extraction of gassified coal. Liu tells it as a tender story about the son of a miner trying to make life better for all the fathers and all the sons who go down into the mines, and how failure breaks you.
‘To Hold Up The Sky’ gives us a window that looks out over a different sci-fi landscape than we’ve seen in decades. Because science fiction was like this once upon a time: strange and alien, liberated, trope-less, exuberant, young.
There is an earnestness here. A human-centered vision of advancement that makes for complicated reading because Liu can bounce so quickly (so oddly, so sharply on occasion) back and forth between emotionless recitation of scientific facts and pure living drama that his stories tie the two things together in ways that few other writers can manage. His stories offer you a shiny new thing (a mining technology, eternal life, a complicated treatise on modern electronic warfare) and then ask you to consider who created it, and how, and why, and what it cost. He offers a father and a son and asks what hardship, what love, must’ve existed before the shiny new thing came to be? In half the stories in this new collection, he centers humans among the whirring, blinking gizmos of sci-fi and questions what price his humans are willing to pay. In the other half, he gives us aliens, unknowable and strange, playing stars and offering poetry, and asks us how humanity might react.
And in this balance — in its studied lack of irony, its simplicity, its lack of stepped-back post-modernism — To Hold Up The Sky gives us a window that looks out over a different sci-fi landscape than we’ve seen in decades. Because science fiction was like this once upon a time: strange and alien, liberated, trope-less, exuberant, young. It operated without maps or guiding principles, got lost, found its way, moved on. Before genre factionalism and the days of grim-dark apocalyptica, before Federations and Empires, before the calcification of semiotics, there was the simplest of questions: What would happen if…?
To Hold Up The Sky reminds me of those days. Of science fiction without guile, without snark, without ironic disaffection and all its exhausting modern baggage. It just asks what would happen? Waits for someone to answer. And then it asks again.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphiamagazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
Grace (Nicole Kidman) and Jonathan (Hugh Grant) come undone in The Undoing. Niko Tavernese /HBO
The most gripping moment in the HBO miniseries The Undoing involves the most natural of things. It happens in the first episode, between a bunch of wealthy Manhattan moms planning a fundraising event for their hoity-toity private school, and Elena (Matilda De Angelis), the noticeably younger and conventionally hot new mom whose fourth-grade son got in on a scholarship.
As the women prattle on about the sorts of things 1-percenters prattle on about at their meeting, Elena is quiet but eerie, casting intense glares at the others while trying to calm her restless infant daughter. She casually lifts up her top, pulls down her bra and begins breastfeeding; the editing cuts between the disapproving glances of the other women at the table, underscored by the soft rumbling of an ominous orchestral score. And then: A close-up of the baby latched onto Elena dissolves into an even closer shot of that same image, followed by an overhead shot of the women sitting silently at the table, all looking in Elena’s direction.
It’s a deliciously crafted scene, overtly positioning Elena as the outsider to this gilded cohort and edging into the realm of parody, perhaps unintentionally. Is it an homage to ’70s thrillers like The Stepford Wives, which found ways to draw out horror and paranoia from socioeconomic anxieties? I’m not sure, but I do know the rest of David E. Kelley’s latest sudsy drama about the bougiest of the bougie doesn’t come close to being this exciting again. (Five of six episodes were made available to critics in advance; all episodes were directed by Susanne Bier.)
In The Undoing Kelley reunites with Nicole Kidman, along with many of the same themes they explored together in Big Little Lies. (Lies big and little abound here, too, albeit among elites of a different coast.) As Grace Fraser, one of those wealthy Manhattan moms, Kidman plays yet another woman trying to keep it together while falling apart under the weight of family secrets. She’s a respected therapist who excels at helping her clients recognize their self-destructive habits and untangle their messy personal lives, but – surprise! – everything at home is not as it seems.
Without spoiling: The Undoing contains lust, murder, a missing person and cheeky, extremely self-aware lines like “I thought that was the whole essence of modern parenting, isn’t it? Keeping them protected from reality for as long as possible so that when they finally emerge they can’t cope and end up self-harming.” A handsomely craggy Hugh Grant co-stars as Jonathan, Grace’s husband and a children’s oncologist; Noah Jupe plays Henry, their young son. I have not read the novel from which the show is adapted – You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz – but anyone who’s digested enough Lifetime movies and glossy melodramas chronicling the disintegration of idyllic upper-class families is likely to figure out where most of the various twists are heading, a few steps ahead.
This isn’t an inherently bad thing; part of the pleasure of watching erotic mystery thrillers such as this is the adherence to a formula and familiar beats like furtive glances and dramatic courtroom revelations. But even with this cast (Donald Sutherland and Édgar Ramírez also star) and this subject matter, The Undoing somehow manages to be a slog, neither titillating nor particularly suspenseful. Whereas Big Little Lies Season 1 struck the right balance between self-awareness and intrigue, with A-list actresses chewing scenery in the most delectable of ways, the meta cracks about the Frasers’ insular bubble feel forced, and Kidman, Grant and the rest of the adult cast are unable to make the material crackle.
And there are undercooked efforts to provide some level of commentary, but they barely scratch the surface; they wind up seeming like lip service or totally missed opportunities. The camera will occasionally linger on the mostly black and brown extras in the background of the prison scenes, perhaps to serve as some kind of acknowledgment of the prison industrial complex? It’s a choice indicating a fear of truly addressing the fact of the gigantic wealth and racial gap that hangs so prominently over this family’s circumstances.
It can be perhaps unfair to critique a work based on what it’s not – the creators made a choice to focus on what they wanted to focus on. But I couldn’t help but want more of Elena and her family’s perspectives in opposition to the Frasers, for a more insightful study of class and privilege that the show teases but doesn’t deliver upon. Instead, she is a frustratingly enigmatic pawn in the plot’s boilerplate execution, and The Undoing unfolds sleepily on all fronts: as suspense, as excess and as an engrossing character study.
A lot is going on with Benson and Mike. They have explosive sex, but are not quite sure they get along, or where they’re going.
Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant in Houston. Benson is a Black daycare employee who doesn’t really care much for children.
Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, has just arrived from Japan to visit. But Mike’s about to fly off to Osaka to hold the hand of his father as he dies. So Mitsuko will bunk with her son’s boyfriend. What could go wrong?
What could go right?
Memorial is a story about old and new loves and secrets — and it’s the highly-awaited debut novel from Bryan Washington, following his acclaimed 2019 short story collection, Lot.
“When I started the project, three things that I knew from the outset were that Benson, Mike and Mitsuko would be the three constants,” Washington says. “I knew that their relationships would be the centerpiece of the narrative, and I knew the emotional pocket that I wanted the narrative to end up in. So they were always there from the outset.”
Interview Highlights
On the character of Mitsuko
Yeah, what was really important to me with her character, and what I kind of knew from the outset was that if the novel worked, it would be because her character worked. And if it didn’t work, it would be because her character didn’t work on the page. And because so many of the other characters really aren’t in the same place at the same time for very much of the novel, she’s the constant in a lot of ways. She’s the most emotional constant. She’s the constant as far as a physical presence is concerned. So really seeing the ways that she touched each of these men in their lives was pivotal as far as trying to figure out how to make the narrative come together.
On whether he was timid about writing a middle aged Japanese woman
I think I’m pretty timid when it comes to writing in general, because I think that when you set out to write a narrative, what you’re really doing is putting people on the page, and people are made up of so many different multiplicities. So from my end, if I’m doing my job correctly, I’m trying to take heed of their hopes and dreams, their loves, their fears, the things that make them laugh and the things that they might shy away from. And that’s going to be particularly difficult with any character. But when you’re writing outside of yourself and as I wrote outside of myself for this text, there was just so much research that went into writing each and every last character.
On his research
I ended up actually editing the second to last draft of the text in Osaka. And I’m there honestly, probably once or twice a year. And I’ve been there once or twice a year for the past five or six years. So the research involved a lot of just being there, but also talking to friends, talking to strangers, trying to get a sense of a very singular iteration of the city, because you’re never really going to get a city right on the page, regardless of whether it’s Houston, whether it’s Osaka or whether it’s a place you came up or a place you visited once or twice, because it’s so many different things to so many different people. So trying to figure out what the city meant to the characters and the context in which they existed was the goal for me on this front.
On how much of the book is based on observation and experience, and how much is imagination
I think that what I wanted to do with this particular book was write first and foremost something that I wanted to read, but also to write about the relationships that I’ve had, the relationships that my friends have had that we haven’t really seen in narrative form in the way that I wanted to see them. So really reaching toward the kind of book that I thought that I would enjoy, and that would make me laugh or make me sad. And to try to write something that would elicit those emotions from my friends is really important to me.
On Mitsuko saying there are no wastes
Yeah, what was really important to me for the book was really trying to write a book in which there aren’t really any clear antagonists and when which there really isn’t a massive conflict. And so far as like life itself is, the conflict was a goal for me. I just wanted to see what that would look like. So trying to put each character in a position where they’re operating from a place of love for one another, as opposed to disdain or hatred or apprehensiveness, was something that I wanted to try to do.
This story was edited for radio by Samantha Balaban and Martha Ann Overland, and adapted for the Web by Petra Mayer.
The first time the player is given control of Wander, the young and androgynous-looking protagonist of Shadow of the Colossus, they are confronted with a vast and unfamiliar landscape bathed in a cold yellow sun. Towering cliffs lie in the distance, while a rocky ridge cuts through the scrubby middle-ground. New players won’t know it yet, but this place, referred to as the Forbidden Lands, is empty — except for 16 towering giants and a smattering of wildlife. Over the course of the next ten hours, they will empty it further, slowly felling each of the colossi as part of a mystical pact to revive a lifeless young woman. Death becomes life, but the world here is left a little quieter.
Shadow of the Colossus is the second of three melancholic video games directed by acclaimed Japanese game maker Fumito Ueda. It’s rare to find such quiet sadness in a video game, even rarer in a trio. Ueda’s first, 2001’s Ico, told the story of a young boy trying to help a child princess called Yorda escape from a magical ruinous castle. His third, 2016’s The Last Guardian, focused on the relationship between another pre-pubescent protagonist and a giant creature called Trico. Sandwiched between these two games is the notably darker Shadow of the Colossus, what Ueda described as his “own take on cruelty,” a rumination on the violent actions many games ask players to perpetuate.
In the 15 years since Shadow of the Colossus was released to near-unanimous praise, its reputation has only grown. At the time, Gamespot described it as a “high-concept adventure unlike any other.” When an entirely remade version of the game featuring modern high-definition graphics arrived in 2018, The Guardian affirmed that it was still a “work of extraordinary beauty and quiet profundity.” There’s a mythic quality to the stark game world, one with enough latitude for players to project their own meaning. During this weird pandemic-inflected time, I’ve noticed new and uncanny resonances of the virtual within the real from my home in Scotland. It isn’t just that the game’s rolling vistas share a similarity with the Hebridean islands a few hours to my West; it’s that Shadow of the Colossus is a game in which time appears to have stood still, architecture is filled not with people but an eerie, absent atmosphere, and a sense of dread rolls through the world like the in-game mist.
At its heart, Shadow of the Colossus is a third-person action adventure — the player controls an avatar which sits in the center of the screen and the 3D space. Navigation is key, and as the player ventures deeper into the Forbidden Lands — through deserts, lakes, and forests — well-worn tropes of the genre are notably missing. For a start, the only enemies in the game are the 16 colossi. In other games, smaller enemies and challenges would present themselves, but there is nothing else here, save for the mammoth boss fights. Each time the player sets out to find a colossus, they must contend not only with orientation but the deafening quietness of their surroundings; often, the only thing they’ll hear is the whistling wind as thoughts rattle through their brain.
“So many parts of nature are recreated in what feels like a very intentional way to give you these evocative feelings that fill the space between fighting the colossi,” says Nick Suttner, author of a 2015 monograph on the game. “Any other designer would have been tempted to fill that space with things to do.” Suttner describes Ueda as an “intuitive designer,” one who follows their own instincts and preferences. One example is the Japanese game maker’s dislike of games featuring “too many stats and numbers.” Acutely observed ecological phenomena and deft character animations tell the player everything they need to know; there is no numerical feedback except for one gauge indicating the player’s stamina. This results in a work players feel their way through rather than game — in 2005, this was radical.
Each time the player sets out to find a colossus, they must contend not only with orientation but the deafening quietness of their surroundings; often, the only thing they’ll hear is the whistling wind as thoughts rattle through their brain.
When Shadow of the Colossus came out,most players would have sat alone, hunched in front of bulky television sets, their eyes filled with the flickering artificial light of its beautiful naturalistic world. In the middle of the noughties, that was me, marvelling at the game on a Friday night when my more outgoing school friends were sitting in a park drinking beer. I, like millions of others, was probably more isolated than I knew, a condition likely exacerbated by this mostly solo hobby. Loneliness, of the kind which has become common in the digital age, wasn’t really discussed in the West at the time — but in Japan, there was a term for hermit-like teenagers and twenty-somethings who had swapped the real world for the internet and video games: They were called hikikomori, roughly translating as “one who shuts himself away and becomes socially withdrawn.”
Various factors contributed to the rise of the hikikomori. The 1990s, known as the “lost decade” (later revised to encompass the 2000s — referred to collectively as the “lost score”), were a period of economic stagnation, falling wages, and dwindling job opportunities in Japan. At the same time, rapidly advancing consumer technology such as Sony’s PlayStation consoles and home computers offered an escape and respite from such realities. Parallels exist elsewhere in the world — including the U..S, a nation experiencing its own loneliness epidemic, which coronavirus has arguably intensified. People are spending more time indoors, limiting their social contact, and funneling their cultural experiences through home entertainment technology. Shadow of the Colossus appears in tune with these processes, an ode to feeling both out of place and out of time, and a metaphor for what it means to be unmoored.
It’s this aspect of the game that Robin Hunicke, professor of game design at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and producer for the wistful, Ueda-indebted 2012 adventure Journey, encourages her students to consider, even though many of them would have been too young to play the game when it was first released. Compared to popular Gen Z multiplayer titles such as Roblox and Fortnite, Ueda’s game notably lacks a social dynamic, at least with other players. “There are themes not just of connection but a loneliness which stems from not belonging — the feeling of not being part of society,” she says. “There’s a sense of being cast away from the tribe and the sense of a tribe moving in a different direction from you.”
Now, at a moment when distance has cropped up between all of us … these games are even more poignant — virtual expressions of a loneliness which grips so many lives in the modern world.
Robin Hunicke
For players detached from the actual world, Shadow of the Colossus presents the perfect avatar — a small, literally overwhelmed character attempting to grapple with looming, seemingly insurmountable forces they cannot fully understand.
Ueda’s epic could almost be interpreted as a nerdish fantasy in its romanticization of loneliness, appearing to gesture towards the grace and virtue of solitary pursuits. But this doesn’t tell the whole story; there is a bigger tragedy at the heart of the game. Despite its desolate environment, Shadow of the Colossus is about connection — between Wander and his horse, the lifeless girl, and even the colossi. Connection, however, remains just out of reach. Despite their clear bond, Wander can never truly communicate with his steed, nor will he ultimately experience the presence of the girl he is trying to resuscitate. The colossi, too, are unknowable. Now, at a moment when distance has cropped up between all of us, not just between families and friends but societally, these games are even more poignant — virtual expressions of a loneliness which grips so many lives in the modern world.
Despite its acclaim, few mainstream video games in the following years built upon the minimalist foundations laid by Shadow of the Colossus. Open worlds got bigger but also busier, featuring an endless checklist of objectives, waypoints, and collectibles — cluttered environments which recall the noisiness of modern social media. 2019’s Death Stranding is arguably the truest inheritor, relaying a story of physical distance in a beautiful albeit bruised post-apocalyptic world. What it lacks is the moral ambiguity which drives home the isolation of Ueda’s game. As players uncover and kill each of the colossi in the Forbidden Lands, what Suttner describes as a “murderous goose chase,” they will likely reckon with the consequences of their actions — I know I did — the series of masochistic acts eventually turning inwards on the player.
Perhaps this is what elevates Shadow of the Colossus 15 years on; many play video games because they offer a break from the injustices of the real world — these works run on mathematical code with promises of fairness and order. But the rules, structure, and narrative of Shadow of the Colossus conspire against the player from the start; the game is rigged, and it’s within these circumstances they must find their own meaning and, perhaps, even peace. Ultimately, this feels like the challenge many of us now face as our own behavior is shaped by forces outside of our control. We navigate this new and unfamiliar world alone in front of a computer screen, our eyes filled with its cold blue light.
Lewis Gordon is a journalist and writer based in Glasgow. He writes about culture, technology, and the environment, and has previously written for Vice, The Verge, The Nation, and others.
In the Hulu horror-comedy Bad Hair, a black woman’s weave is more than just a weave. It’s a status symbol. It’s the key to a promotion. It’s … possessed by an evil spirit intent on sowing chaos?
Likewise, Bad Hair itself is more than a social satire. It’s a visual and thematic pastiche of movies like The Fly and Rosemary’s Baby. It’s a loving sendup of black American pop music in the 1980s. It’s a workplace comedy.
It’s … a lot, though (mostly) enjoyably so. As a general rule, writer-director Justin Simien is a bold and ambitious filmmaker whose works practically scream “Go big or go home!” There is never one single perspective, cultural reference, or homage; there are many. In his 2014 feature debut Dear White People, a colorful satire about black millennial anxieties on a predominantly white college campus, he channeled Spike Lee, Wes Anderson and Robert Townsend while tackling colorism, racism, sexuality and microaggressions, for starters. The result was a film that was admirably big on ideas and a vision, but failed to connect all the various dots and stick the landing. (Given more time and space to expand on character development, his Netflix series adaptation of Dear White People fared much better on this front.)
Bad Hair similarly brims with an assortment of concepts, but Simien has graduated to even grander aspirations, and, evidently, a grander budget. The opening scene speaks a language many black women, myself included, will be familiar with: a traumatic childhood experience derived from an attempt to remove the natural kinks and curls of one’s mane. I felt this visual and audible fright viscerally while watching it play out, reminded of the years I spent relaxing my own hair with chemicals as a kid and into young adulthood. Simien’s treatment of this introduction, which features a young girl named Anna (Zaria Kelley), is effective, and sets the tone for the movie’s more intense explorations of body horror.
Fast forward to 1989 Los Angeles, and an adult Anna (Elle Lorraine) works for Culture, a TV network targeted at “urban” (read: black) audiences, a la BET. Anna dreams of becoming the host of her own music countdown show, but the combination of a timid personality, hair that doesn’t conform to white corporate sensibilities, and outright sexism has kept her sidelined in an assistant role. When a new boss, Zora (Vanessa Williams), arrives on the scene to revamp the network, Anna is advised to do something about her hair, or risk being stuck for the rest of her career.
Anna goes to the most sought-after stylist in the city to get her first weave. (The installation of the weave is chilling and expertly edited by Phillip J. Bartell and Kelly Matsumoto. Warning: This is not a film for the squeamish.) But while the new hair ‘do brings her welcome attention at work, it soon becomes clear that the strands have a mind of their own.
Here is where Simien’s skills as a visual stylist are again at odds with his limitations when it comes to the text. Some of the details that connote Anna’s relationship to her new style are inventive and fun; in one scene, for instance, the hair flip is deployed as a tactic in the middle of a professional power grab between Anna and Zora. Cinematographer Topher Osborn mimics a grainy ’70s cinema look that successfully exudes a creeping paranoia. And the details, from the spot-on nods to Control-era Janet Jackson (Kelly Rowland plays a Janet-esque pop star named Sandra) to the intricate corporate dynamics, are astutely rendered.
But layered on top of all of those smart takes is a muddled, confusing attempt at bringing in folklore that is haphazardly sprinkled in, particularly in the third act. Bad Hair gets weighted down by too many loose ends left unsatisfyingly dangling in the wind: The weave brings the terror, but what, exactly, are we supposed to take away from Simien’s depiction of this fraught subject of black women’s hair? It’s never quite clear, and there’s a missed opportunity to really unpack the psychological impact of beauty ideals within black communities and professional spaces.
Still, the movie moves briskly enough and the performances work. Lena Waithe, Laverne Cox and Blair Underwood find moments of spark in smaller roles as Anna’s colleague, witchy stylist and mythology-loving uncle, respectively. And as Zora, Williams is deliciously catty and calculating, channeling mean lady vibes similar to the ones she used as Wilhelmina on Ugly Betty. She works wonders with insults and shade, striking exactly the the right notes when the movie hits its campy, B-horror movie stride.
Simien seems even more assured as a filmmaker here than he did in his debut, and the promise shown in Dear White People feels closer to being fulfilled; the specificity with which he depicts workplace culture and black music are a treat to watch. If Bad Hair feels overstuffed and ultimately slight when it comes to its central conceit around hair, at the very least it’s still a fun ride.
“You have breast cancer,” my doctor announced, faceless behind her mask. Silence. In the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic. Her eyes locked on mine and beamed as much compassion and kindness as she could muster.
“I’m so sorry,” she said as we faced each other 6 feet apart in her office.
That was it.
The COVID-19 virtual hug: cold and sterile. Punishing, despite the best intents.
As friends came to my home to visit, the weight of this emotional disconnect became increasingly difficult to bear. At a moment when I so desperately needed spontaneous physical connection and warmth — simple human love – there was none. Just sad faces at a safe distance.
“I’m so sorry,” they would all say.
That was it.
Distressed, my mind took me back to West Africa’s devastating Ebola outbreak of 2014, resurrecting images I had desperately tried to suppress. In an instant I was in Port Loko, Sierra Leone, where I managed a Partners in Health Ebola Treatment Unit, listening to the agonizing wails of our patients, alone in their beds with no one next to them to provide reassurance or comfort. Back to the sick children, scared and alone, with whom I would spend time, uncomfortably crouched in my Ebola suit, carefully hugging them and singing muffled songs through my masks. Back to the midnight palliative care rounds for the gravely ill, where I would just hold a hand, provide words of encouragement, give pain medication or stay with our sickest patients as they approached the door of the otherworld. Just so they wouldn’t be alone.
And my mind took me to Detroit’s nursing homes and their vulnerable population, disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. This summer we at Doctors Without Borders provided much needed support. With the outbreak not under control and facilities off limits to all visitors, residents faced an endless, harmful, solitary existence. Grandparents died alone, with good-byes bid over Zoom. Social distancing at all costs became a thing.
I’ve worked for Doctors Without Borders for six years and had my share of difficult and heartbreaking experiences. I don’t work in easy places. I work in war zones and countries with little to no health-care system to speak of. I respond to refugee crises, natural disasters and disease outbreaks. I have gotten used to danger. I’ve gotten used to falling asleep with worries of being infected with Ebola or being attacked by an armed group.
But what I never have gotten used to — and never accepted — was the loneliness. The loneliness of those crowded Ebola treatment units in West Africa and then again in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018. The sorrow of families and friends who undoubtedly felt they were abandoning their loved ones. The loneliness of dying alone. The absurdity of dying on Zoomin an overcrowded New York city hospital – nurses would hold their iPad and people would say their goodbyes.
Not even in war do people have to face hardships alone. The contagious nature of COVID-19 and Ebola managed to instill enough fear to make us — in the name of safety — less human. At moments when we needed each other most, vital social connections were brutally banned. In Sierra Leone, our clinical team remedied this by starting what may have been the first supportive care rounds, specifically for those patients who would clearly not recover, ensuring that these individuals always had someone with them at their most fragile moments.
Over time, organizations involved in the care of Ebola patients improved the design of Ebola treatment units so patients could be closer visually – but also physically — to their loved ones. Family visiting areas were installed at a safe distance right across patient rooms, where large plexiglass windows were installed. The CUBE, a self-contained isolation room with transparent walls allows families to be right next to their sick loved ones.
We found a way to do it, and we knew it made a huge difference.
So how did we go so wrong that the COVID-19 response of the world’s richest country collapsed to the level of not being able to provide to the most basic human need – that of not being alone in moments of sickness?
It didn’t have to be this way with COVID-19. With lessons of past outbreaks to guide us, with strong institutional and individual national expertise to lead us, with the experience of countries who fell to COVID-19 before us, we knew what could have been done to protect ourselves, prevent the spread of disease and the overload of our hospitals.
We knew what kind of preparations and precautions it would have taken to give that hug and hold that hand safely. To be together safely.
Today I am home in Seattle, halfway around the world from Africa. I now have become the patient, the one anxiously waiting alone on a gurney that will take me to the operating room. I grieve the lack of physical connection. It’s not words I need, it’s proximity. It’s touch. Back to that hug, that holding of the hand. That reassurance of being next to one another. It speaks a thousand words. It goes a million miles.
So please, mask up. Wash hands. Practice safe distancing. Do your part so that we will be able to reach the point where we can again get that human bond that makes patients stronger and able to weather the storms.
Do your part so we can finally get back to normal. It is long overdue.
Karin Huster was a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders on its COVID-19 response in Hong Kong and in Detroit. She is now back home in Seattle, working with USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance as a public health adviser and focusing on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s ongoing Ebola outbreak.
