Hello readers! I’ve got two reviews for you, and the long-awaited return of Ed’s Corner! If you feel this newsletter has not had enough anime content, well… also, thanks to all who voted in the last reading election. If you had fun voting, consider becoming a Citizen! Upgrading to Citizen status is a great way to support the Review and get fun perks like reading election voting and fiction previews. If you really want to vote more, and can’t swing an upgrade, let me know. Anyway… enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Lincoln, Red Victory
Suskind, Confidence Men
Lagniappe
Ed’s Corner: When It’s Too Close To Be Close Enough For Jazz & I Won’t Be Seeing You, Space Cowboy
REVIEWS
W. Bruce Lincoln, “Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War” (1989) - This sucked! I want some good history on the Russian Civil War. You can get tons and tons of stuff on the Revolution- the Civil War that came after, which arguably shaped the Soviet Union much more than the revolution did, is much harder to find books about. This one is supposed to be a standard, so I picked it up when I found it at a used place in Portland.
Listen- I don’t expect, or need, thoroughgoing sympathy with the left, especially from historians tied to the Hoover Institution, as Bruce Lincoln was. But this… it’s less a problem that Lincoln is critical of the Bolsheviks. It’s a civil war, no one is going to “behave well,” if that even has anything like the same meaning in a brutal internecine conflict as it does in an office or a daycare. And it’s not that he’s especially sympathetic towards their White adversaries. If nothing else, this dude is canny enough to get that the likes of Denikin, Kolchak etc do not for heroes make, and the closer you look at them — essentially, any look other than a still photograph, looking stern in fancy dress uniform (which is good enough for many, depressingly enough) — the less impressive they are. They were creepy reactionaries, and above all else, losers. Like Borges said of the Cossacks, who made up much of the White forces, “no one in the history of the universe has been defeated more often” than these “blustering and useless warriors.”
So where do Lincoln’s sympathies lie? With the people of Russia? It’s the people, people trying to live their lives without killing or being killed, that suffer the most in these situations. But no. Lincoln’s sympathies are entirely with anyone who can wring pathos from him, and, typical dumbass Anglo, that means, basically, what there was of a Russian middle class, and the nobility. Objectively, this puts him on the side of the Whites, though again, he gets that their actual forces sucked too bad, morally and militarily, to get behind. And this could be a decent platform for a narrative history! Maybe not one I'd agree with, but potentially one worth reading. But instead, you get comparatively short shrift on the process or politics of the war as Lincoln instead wallows in such indignities as… bourgeois inhabitants of revolutionary St. Petersburg made to do work! And pawn their jewels! There’s bloodier stuff, too, but when Lincoln bothers to discuss it, he only dramatizes what happens to rich people and never bothers with any other kind of human suffering. It’s sickening, but beyond that, it’s just shitty history. Hard pass. *
Ron Suskind, “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President” (2011) - Here’s a weird thing: I distinctly remember not knowing better, with Obama. Maybe I should have! I know a few of you didn’t fall for it, being longtime reds by that time. But I voted for him enthusiastically in 2008, primary and general. I wasn’t completely in the tank, but I hadn’t yet “radicalized,” as they say, and I thought maybe this dude really had something. What’s more, so did a lot of my leading intellectual lights at the time, the sort of people who made careers out of being cynical lefties- Tom Frank, the people at the old Exile. They didn’t go all gaga-eyed over Barack, but they definitely were kinder, more impressed with him, than they were with most.
It’s not so much that it's hard to get back into that headspace. Ignorance isn’t that hard to return to, mentally. Let’s put the challenge of this book — a journalistic account of the disappointment of Obama’s first term in office, by a liberal but not one so starry-eyed as to cover for all of the big man’s failings — this way. Obama has not moved. Obama always was who he was: a neoliberal Vulcan, a smart guy who gives a shit about any of us primarily insofar as he wants us to be quiet and not make messes. The real question is why so many of us projected so much on to him, and the answers to that are depressingly quotidian: Americans are credulous (plenty of them switched to thinking Obama’s cliches were inspirational after years of think Bush was a great leader), people were hungry for hope, the worst people in America made opposing Obama their whole thing.
Depressingly simple though those answers are, at least it’s a question. There was never a reason to think Obama was ever anything other than what he was. We know what his kind of meritocrat, unusual personal story or no, are like. Hell, the Wall Street people Suskind profiles, you’d be surprised- most of them were ethnic kids, Catholics or Jews from distinctly non-wealthy (but, critically, not poor and not black) families, more like the heroes in eighties comedies than the snob villains… and you get the distinct impression a lot of them modeled themselves after said heroes, too. Our meritocracy is like that, and expanding to let more ethnic minorities in isn’t going to change it.
The point is, Obama was already educated to favor the elite, or anyway solutions that would not inconvenience the elite, and that would prioritize their assent, going into the White House. Suskind even shows how leaning in to criticizing Wall Street was a calculated move to fend off Hillary Clinton’s appeals to “blue collar” (read: white) voters in the primary, made possible by Obama’s friendships with CEOs who knew what was coming down with the mortgage crisis. That part, we could be forgiven for not knowing. But really, there’s not much of a story here. Obama’s an elite. If the “professional managerial class” thing some lefties go ga-ga over fits anyone, it’s him, Tim Geithner, and others of their sort. They think elite credentials and a comparative lack of recognizable human motivations — greed, bloodlust, solidarity, etc. — makes them the only people who can make good decisions. Of course, they wind up taking all of their biases (thinking greed is built in but solidarity can be dismissed, for instance) and making numerous mistakes anyway. But none of this should have come as a surprise.
Reading about Obama being “co-opted” by Wall Street now, failing to deliver on anything like relief for the people crushed by the recession, passing card check, even doing things that would bolster his party’s chances of maintaining power… well, it’s not entirely like reading about the rain falling down instead of up. For instance, we could have a bourgeoisie that is slightly braver or more proactive about threats to its own rule, like climate change… or can we? Maybe they literally need to think they are going to be dragged out of their homes and killed, imminently, to make any changes that aren’t directly and solely to their benefit? Who knows. Arguments either way! But this isn’t that. This isn’t a bad book. It’s decently written. Suskind gets “scoops” (a decade old, now, but that’s not his fault). But it takes the most basic part of the story as a mystery, and the mysterious parts — why our bourgeoisie is so feckless, and why we let them get away with it — as non-questions. ***
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: When It’s Too Close To Be Close Enough For Jazz & I Won’t Be Seeing You, Space Cowboy
Hello Melendyites, long time no see. Let’s not linger long as to the reasons for my absence, except to remark on the fact that it was a long time since I’ve last written for this Review. So long ago in fact, that when I first drafted this Ed’s Corner, the topic was actually fairly timely and relevant. Fortunately, some pressing matters came up so that if I waited much longer this article would be less than overdue, but actually entirely obsolete, so now seems like just about the right time to discuss this topic. So, in the closing few months before the unsustainable business model of Netflix’s streaming service finally collapses beneath its own weight, let’s talk about the Netflix live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.
Now, what you’ve heard about the show is true: it is indeed bad. I’m not here to tell you it’s good, or even interesting in and of itself. That’s not to say it’s bad all around, or there’s nothing to enjoy about the adaptation. I enjoyed the acting in the few episodes I watched. John Cho is great as the protagonist space bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir is great as Spike’s gruff criminal-catching partner Jet Black, and Daniella Pineda did a good job capturing the tough, street-smart, dangerous dame Faye Valentine’s habit of just never giving a moment's thought to any potential consequences for her actions. Even the extras and petty thugs that the crew of the Bebop end up clashing with are pretty fun to watch do their thing. I hope to see literally everybody in the cast in other stuff, just not this.
The show is often quite visually impressive. While it’s clear there’s a lot of CG greenscreen work going on, the environments and props are very well detailed, and capture a lot of the feel of the source material. It’s a real feast for the eyes, but it kind of had to be given how much aesthetics played into the original Cowboy Bebop. I’ve heard people complain that the visuals are what ruins the experience for them, that they’re out of step with the aesthetics of the original, but this just isn’t true. The costuming, set dressing, and entire visual feel of the older Cowboy Bebop is captured in impressive, in fact almost slavish detail, which I think is the problem. Or rather it’s part of the problem, besides the problem with the music. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up and establish some basic points of reference.
The original Cowboy Bebop is considered a classic of the animation genre, specifically Japanese animation or anime, that ran from 1997 to 1998. While not quite considered to have matched the technical mastery in the genre of say 1988’s Akira, or the films of Hayao Miyazaki, Cowboy Bebop can’t really be judged by the same metrics, as it’s a serialized TV production consisting of 26 episodes and one feature length movie which served as an extended episode of the show. The show is hard to pin down as far as genre: it’s set in a sci-fi future, and space travel, artificial intelligence, and interplanetary politics often figure into the plots of any given episode, but the show isn’t about space travel. The context might be the sci-fi future, but the characters and plots make more sense when looked at in terms of genres like crime noir, or spaghetti westerns.
Even then, there are elements in each episode that don’t quite fit, like spaceship dogfights that play out like World War II flying ace serials, or car chases from a crime drama, and the action of any given episode is liable to break out into a wild parkour chase or Hong Kong kung fu fight at any given moment. Hell, there’s even one episode that’s essentially a truckersploitation piece like Convoy or Smokey and the Bandit, that’s also about heavy metal music, in space. While humanity might’ve taken to the stars, this isn’t a gee whiz science fantasy universe. Nobody is packing a lightsaber or a ray gun, people still just shoot each other with regular old guns with lead bullets, and quite frequently too, given how much the frontiers of space leave room for criminal elements to move around in them.
The main characters of the show are Spike Spiegel, who makes his living as a bounty hunter out among the stars. He has a dark past he doesn’t like to talk about, but other than that is an easy going and affable guy, if a bit goofy. He is a sure shot with a pistol and is surprisingly adept at martial arts. Then there’s Jet Black, a former cop who lost his right arm, along with his badge and gun, during a bust that went south back on Jupiter’s moon Europa; don’t worry though, he’s got a replacement mechanical arm so that he can better steer the old space barge The Bebop around the system in search of bounties for him and Spike to take in. Then there’s Faye Valentine, an amnesiac who can’t remember her past, is too deep in crushing medical debt to have much future, and who eventually decides to throw her lot in with the crew of The Bebop just to get by in the present. And finally the indeterminately gendered Edward, a genius hacker whom the crew comes across while investigating a crime, and just sort of makes themself at home in their ship as the others lack the technical capacity to disentangle Edward’s programming from the ships various computer systems. Oh, there’s also the dog, Ein, who might be some kind of genetic experiment, and has a genius level IQ, but they never really explain what his deal is.
There is a plot: Spike is looking for his lost love Julia, but they’re both on the run from the nefarious criminals of the Martian Syndicate. Jet is trying to build a future for himself on The Bebop, but his past keeps catching up with him. Faye’s trying to figure out who she was before she lost her memory, etc. But little of the action in any given episode has anything to do with the characters pursuing their narrative goals, and it’s more about them living their day to day lives. The crew of The Bebop are constantly broke, and trying desperately to scrape together enough money just to keep the lights on. They track high profile criminals with large bounties on their heads, but they’re quite often screwed out of a payday by episode's end. The overarching plots don’t matter too much, a fact highlighted in the writing by having many episodes hinge on outlandish coincidences and happenstance. In fact, one of the show’s best episodes, Pierrot Le Fou, begins with Spike walking out of a pool hall and accidentally stumbling across a cybernetically enhanced clown assassin killing off an executive from the evil tech company that did horrible human experiments to him. It ends with Jet calling up Spike to finally reveal the terrible secret of the clown’s origins, only for Spike to hang up on him because it didn’t really matter all that much. The show doesn’t so much have a narrative, so much as it has themes and motifs.
The structure of any given episode is meant to evoke the feeling of music, from a wide selection of genres. Blues, folk music, jazz, heavy metal, sambas, operas, waltzes, you name it. One exception is hip hop, and not for lack of appreciation for the genre. In fact, I get the sense that production director Shinichiro Wantanabe was holding onto plots that evoke hip hop for his follow up effort, the chopped and screwed pop samurai period piece Samurai Champloo. That was entirely hip hop themed, and which I’ll touch upon again later. All of the genres are alluded to in the various episode titles, but it goes beyond just having music as a theme. Music was a big component of the entire production, and the entire series is scored to near perfection. Beyond that, the pacing of both the series as a whole, any individual episode, and any given action scene parallel a musical composition more than any traditional narrative structure.
While many different genres of music are represented in the narrative structure of the show, the most prominent is jazz. The light and loose improvisational style of jazz is at least invoked in the narrative structure outlined above, wherein elliptical stories play out not so much in a coherent story told from start to finish, but themes being established, left for awhile, brought back, expanded upon and finally brought to a resolution. You can get a sense of this structural similarity from the shows main theme, Tank! by The Seatbelts, which the live action show uses as its opening as well.
This musical structure is what most separates the animated Cowboy Bebop from its live action update. While the remake copies much of the visuals and attitude of the original, working within the medium of live action forces certain compromises. By being so obsessed with recreating the lavish animated backgrounds of the animated show in full 3D for its actors to interact with, the production necessitates a substantial amount of greenscreened soundstage scenes, with their attendant constraints on space and movement to keep everything in frame.
Now, this isn’t quite so noticeable as it is in many a recent Hollywood blockbuster, the show does do a good job of building a few practical sets, and has some nice location scouting, but to sell the really sci-fi locations like a casino space station orbiting Mars, or the interiors of various spaceships or other structures made from futuristic manufacturing techniques, the action moves to these sound stages which makes the action feel cramped and limited. In the anime, these locations are made to play host to sprawling and fluid fight scenes immaculately choreographed to the music. In the remake, due to the constraints of the live action medium, these scenes instead are rearranged into more quippy character banter scenes, as the characters shoot at goons somewhere off screen. The plot for any given episode is about the same as the plot in the original, but here the action is in service of the plot, instead of the plot being in service to the action. Without the bombastic free-flowing action sequences of the animated show, the jazzy musical cues taken from the original show add nothing to the structure and pace of the show.
Again, I can’t really fault the show for trying. I think the show runners thought that the ship interior of the Bebop was always shown to be a cramped and confined space, and they could easily reproduce it in these special effects mock-up shots where they can have these actors hang around an iconic set and have snappy dialogue to remind you of the characters of the animated original. The problem, again, is that the live action remake consistently over-emphasizes the pure visuals while neglecting the visual language of the original. The cramped and confined quarters of the animated Bebop are supposed to convey the emotional motivations of the characters. Nearly every character is oppressed by the financial realities of trying to scratch out a living in this space-faring future. They are all burdened, in one way or another, by the pressures of modern, to them at least, life, of having to earn a living, of being frustrated by governments and mega-corps that don’t really care about the people who depend on them.
Structurally the confined corridors of The Bebop are the counterpoint to the open and flowing environments where the characters chase, fight, or shoot their prospective bounties. In the anime, all the characters ever do aboard The Bebop is needle each other and complain about their lot in life. They only really come into their own when they’re living fast and loose out on the mean streets of Mars, facing down death so they can live another day. The Netflix original understands the set of The Bebop visually, but not what the scenes set aboard it mean within the structure of the narrative.
The live action adaptation also puts much more of an emphasis on the story of its characters, rather than relying on motifs, like the anime. The main antagonist in both shows is Spike’s former brother-in-arms and Syndicate lieutenant, Vicious. Quite the name, huh? You might think it’s a bit overdone, but in the anime it hits just right because the name does most of the heavy lifting, as we very rarely see him. He appears in all of five or six episodes, and only exchanges words with Spike in three. We know very little about him, besides that he’ll kill you with his katana if you cross the Syndicate, that he has a weird evil bird, that he knew Spike during their Syndicate days, and that he’s perhaps a romantic rival for the affections of Julia, as well as a literally blood rival of Spike’s. Vicious is convinced that he and Spike are destined to face each other in a fight to the death. He says very little, but you understand that he’s a dangerous man, more dangerous than the bounties Spike usually hunts. After he first makes an appearance in episode 5 and very nearly kills Spike at the end of a two-parter, he disappears for awhile, shows up for a nonspecific drug deal on the frozen moon of Io midway through the series, which Spike luckily misses, and then shows up in the finale, looking to settle the score with Spike once and for all.
That’s all we get from him throughout the entire series, every time he shows up, we know things have gotten serious. He’s a living personification of Spike’s inescapable past and unavoidable future all wrapped into one. He’s what has driven Spike to slum it as a lowly bounty hunter, and most of the series is made up of Spike putting off the inevitable confrontation he and Vicious both feel they’re destined to have with one another. This contrasts sharply with the live action adaptation, where we check in on Vicious and his schemes several times an episode, and we see far too much of him to be scared whenever he appears. Vicious should be the recurring french horn motif of the wolf from Peter and the Wolf, not a narrative throughline.
Look, it’s not that I don’t think you can adapt a visually and structurally complex narrative to a live action performance. The Wachowskis’ SpeedRacer managed to capture the visual style and structure of an animated show with similar artistic styling to Cowboy Bebop, but the specific structural and musical inspirations clash with the medium in which they are trying to reproduce the original Cowboy Bebop. The very nature of the project is antithetical to the style and philosophy of the original. If the animated Cowboy Bebop is jazz translated into visual storytelling, what is the live action adaptation? It certainly isn’t jazz, it never could be. Jazz is improvisation, it’s about finding a rhythm and exploring where the themes might take you. As a remake, we already know where this Cowboy Bebop is going. If you transcribe the notes played during a jazz performance into sheet music, and then play it back exactly afterward, the result is a performance of jazz, but not a jazz performance. The creative, chaotic potential of a true jazz performance is found in the discovery of the music, there’s a certain energy provided by being unsure of where the whole thing is going to end up that propelled the original animated version of the show, but we know where the live action reboot of Cowboy Bebop is going to end up, and thus it lacks that spark.
Ironically, you might’ve been able to get away with nearly exactly this sort of adaptation with Shinichiro Wantanabe’s follow up series Samurai Champloo which I alluded to earlier. Being hip hop inspired, the material is much more open to being remixed and reinterpreted from its musical foundations, and while not as famous, I would say Samurai Champloo can hold up in terms of quality with Cowboy Bebop. So yeah, that was a lot of words to say the live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop is bad. But it was bad in an interesting way that highlighted the offbeat structure and style of the source material… but it was not so interesting that I felt guilty for quitting after four episodes.
Wow! What a return for Ed’s Corner. Mithra is impressed!