An ongoing review of politics and culture

Obligatory Pitchfork Metacriticism

Is there a unifying aesthetic driving Pitchfork’s top tracks of 2010 list? If there is, I can’t see it. In the top slot, “Round and Round” by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, supposedly earns its marks “because every chord change and turnaround and melodic leap is in exactly the right place.” The number one pick ought to be the most revealing, but this isn’t. Calling out “Round and Round” for its pacing doesn’t tell you much because there isn’t much else to its competent, workmanlike construction and execution. It’s also a music critic’s crutch; when you can’t figure out why a pop song is great, you can pretty much always say it’s because of the pacing. If anything, I think it’s far more telling that the first half of the remarks on Pink’s track get spent remembering last year’s number one pick, Animal Collective’s “My Girls” — a far stronger pick that anchored a far more coherent list.

At the surface, you might say there’s a refusal to go for the most obvious picks: Kanye West’s guest-epic “Monster,” for example, gets a namecheck but doesn’t actually make the list. This is strange not only because the song’s Nicki Minaj guest-spot was probably the most raved-about verse of the year, but because Pitchfork bestowed a “best new music” tag on the track when it first showed up online. Meanwhile, the only track from Sleigh Bells’ go-for-bonkers Treats to make the list was the comparatively easy-going, sing-songy “Rill Rill” at number 13. Pitchfork’s writers clearly liked the whole album; it nabbed an 8.7 on release and made the number 16 slot on the site’s 2010 best-albums list. But somehow they managed to choose the most unrepresentative track from the record for their top singles list.

Yet the list isn’t entirely built around avoiding the obvious; Janelle Monae’s ebullient “Tightrope” made the top ten, as did Arcade Fire’s “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” and two separate Kanye tracks, including the single “Power.” These are favorites from the indie mainstream to which Pitchfork caters, and the sort of tracks you would expect to be on a list like this. It’s not clear, though, why these tracks deserved top slots and other equally obvious tracks didn’t.

Is it random? Or just the inevitable product of trying to reconcile the likes of a whole slew of critics in a single list? Maybe.

But of course, there are also two LCD Soundsystem tracks in the top 12. This isn’t too surprising given Pitchfork’s history of excessive fawning over the pretty-good band. And hey, I firmly believe that every critical outlet deserves an exception or two for its obsessions. But it just shows that when it comes time for reflection, Pitchfork may not be able to make a coherent statement about what makes a great single, but it remains highly interested in itself.

Why Do Music Critics Love Kanye West?

Slate‘s Jonah Weiner dares to use the B-word — “best” — in declaring that Kanye West’s new record, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is not just the best album of the year, but the best of West’s career. Serious critics tend not to use the word easily, but West’s album seems to be inspiring similar accolades all over; Pitchfork blessed it with a rare 10.0, and its current Metacritic score is an impressive 98. It’s as close as pop records come to a universal critical hit.

I tend to agree with those singing the album’s praises, and if I were still reviewing records regularly, I’d have issued a big fat rave. Fantasy is as rich and grand and satisfying as pop music gets these days, or ever really, and the primal, heart-wrenching melancholy that’s built into its foundation only makes it more compelling. As far as I’m concerned, after a dozen-odd listens, it’s an instant classic and a work of near-perfect pop art.

But I’ve written before about the arbitrariness of pop music criticism, which seems to have far fewer clear and recognizable standards than, say, movie criticism, or lit crit. Thanks in part to the walls between genres, it’s far more subjective. And thanks to a variety of incentives and cultural norms, music criticism tends to issue a lot of “pretty goods” and relatively few ratings of “this completely sucks,” at least in comparison with movies or novels or plays.

When you read pop music criticism, you’re not really seeing a record or a song measured on some roughly understood and agreed upon set of critical criteria. You’re finding out whether or not a certain critic or publication liked it. There’s just nothing like a universal scale, or even a handful of competing aesthetics. Sure, pop songs often rely on formulas. But pop criticism is much less standardized. The closest you get are different schools of criticism based around different publications — Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or Stereogum*. But even those aesthetic schools typically reflect the choices of some founder or editor or other influential figure.

So it’s strange, then, to come upon an album like Fantasy that pretty much every critic who writes about pop music regularly agrees is not just pretty good but stand-up-and-cheer great. And that brings me to what I’m really interested in with this post: speculating as to why Fantasy pleases so many music critics and music-critic-types (this is where I note that my first writing gig was reviewing a dozen or so records every quarter for the now-defunct indie-rock journal Skyscraper). Obviously it’s impossible to know for sure — this won’t be a data-driven post — but my guess is that most critics start with a genuine love for the form. Not just for innovation and experimentation, but for pop songcraft, in a strictly formulaic sense.

But of course, over the years, as a critic or music geek, you tend to hear thousands and thousands of variations upon that form. Most of them are pretty unmemorable at best. A lot of them are just okay, no more no less, which makes sense given that there’s a time-tested formula involved. And even the stuff that’s just fine is less exciting given that you hear so much of it, day in and day out. Which is why there’s a good chance that you end up turning to a lot of experimental acts that really push the boundaries of the form, and probably break them pretty frequently. But there’s a limited amount of satisfaction in breaking the form, because, when it comes down to it, what you want is the classic form delivered in some wholly new, artful, and unexpected way. And when it comes to pop music, that’s pretty much what Kanye West specializes in. He’s mixing hip-hop and indie-rock irony and lush pop and any number of other influences into something that’s both highly original and highly accessible. The only other current act that comes to mind that does this as well is Radiohead (though you can see elements of this in acts as varied as Nine Inch Nails, Dismemberment Plan, Jay-Z, and Sufan Stevens). And what both acts end up doing is fulfilling that innate desire of just about every cynical, cranky, jaded critic who’s heard it all — every variation, every innovation, every hook and every production trick and every effort to make something old seem fresh — to somehow fall in love with the form again.

*I thought about adding Spin to the list, but I’m not sure the magazine has ever developed a recognizable musical aesthetic. And no, something-other-than-Rolling-Stone doesn’t count.

Boardwalk Empire vs. Mad Men

Is HBO jealous of Mad Men? The network reportedly turned down the series when pitched. But over the last few years, Mad Men, which went to AMC instead, has largely taken over the culturally designated Best-Show-On-TV role previously filled by The Sopranos and The Wire. Part of the reason why is that, since the end of The Wire, HBO has struggled to offer the kind of accessible, intelligent, culturally relevant series needed to pick up the BSOTV title. True Blood is a little too weird. Big Love is a little too soapy. And much as I love Treme, its intense focus on urban life, and especially the urban realm’s lower income brackets, will almost certainly keep it from really breaking through. It’s the same problem the The Wire had, but worse: The Wire, at least, had a familiar enough cops-and-criminals/police procedural element. Treme is all Dickensian sprawl.

But now the network has come back with what looks like its best shot a consensus BSOTV winner since The Sopranos: Boardwalk Empire. I’m four episodes into the first season, and enjoying it very much. But I wonder if it will have to play second fiddle to Mad Men, in part because of how much it resembles AMC’s series.

Like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire was created by a veteran of The Sopranos. Like Mad Men, it is a lushly shot period tale (although I would guess that Empire, with its giant boardwalk set, is considerably more expensive). And like Mad Men, it is a sober, serious social drama, intent on exploring the emerging social tensions of the era: Women’s suffrage, and their role in society in general; racial equality, both in business and politics; the intersection of local and national governmental corruption. And both shows set these tensions against a backdrop of brazen male bad behavior which they both exploit for entertainment and (usually) disapprove of. And both shows are far more explicit in their disapproval — their moral high-mindedness — than The Sopranos, which, as often as not, worked in black comedy and amoral farce, almost daring its audience to look down on its characters’ dark ways. As Nancy Franklin wrote in her review of Boardwalk for The New Yorker, “Even if its point is to show you the ugly side of fun, Boardwalk Empire should be much more fun to watch.” In my (probably too negative) NR review of Mad Men‘s first season, I made a similar point, comparing it to The Sopranos and arguing that Mad Men “is too timid to let its viewers in on the fun” its bad boy characters are having.

Boardwalk is somewhat more focused on business and political life while Mad Men is somewhat more focused on community and family. And so far, Boardwalk strikes me as somewhat less focused on targeting the ugly social practices of an older America, though it still attempts to reflect contemporary America on a pretty regular basis. I like both shows, and I’ll probably stick with both of them (though I should admit I’m a couple seasons behind on Mad Men). And in general, I’m pleased to see genuinely smart, high-quality shows like these receive ratings, attention, and accolades. But both Mad Men and Boardwalk seem to have decided that the lesson of The Sopranos was that because both critics and the general public started taking television very seriously, TV creators — at least those competing for the Best Show on TV mantle — should follow their lead and amp up the self-seriousness of their creations.

Really? "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Is Only the Number 13 Song of the 1990s?

In which The Washington Independent‘s Annie Lowrey and I discuss Pitchfork’s Top Tracks of the 90s list:

If there’s a rebuttal to my argument that the list represents proto-Pitchforkism, it’s that The Dismemberment Plan’s “The City” only came in at number 64. Maybe that represents a loss of stature for the plan post-solo-Morrison, but I always got the sense that, along with Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem, The Dismemberment Plan held a place near and dear to the early Pitchfork aesthetic. Of course, I could be biased given that I still count Emergency & I as my favorite album of all time.

Super-Mayor!

Early last year, I wrote a short post here at TAS noting what I argued was a vaguely liberaltarian influence in Brian K. Vaughan’s superb politics-n-superpowers series, Ex Machina. Last week, the series, which I highly recommend, reached its conclusion. And today, I’ve got a piece up at Reason looking at the series and its politics that will probably seem somewhat familiar to some TAS readers.

Post-Apocalypse Now?

On my honeymoon, I read both The Stand and The Road — because what better time to consider life after the apocalypse than the two weeks after you get married?

King’s soapy, genre-serial epic — which is now, unsurprisingly, a comic book (and a rather good one, too) — works on the assumption that, following the total collapse of civilization, the survivors more or less immediately begin working to rebuild a functional society. McCarthy takes the opposite tack: After almost everyone dies, the remaining few quickly descend into a violent, anarchic free-for-all.

The key difference between the two situations presented is that in The Stand, King leaves the remnants of civilization standing. Most people die, but America’s infrastructure, at least, remains. That allows King to more or less ignore the resource problem. Everything that ever existed becomes free, and with so few people left alive, the book’s assumption is that, with a few exceptions (military-grade weapons), there’s plenty for all.

The Road‘s world, on the other hand, is an ashen wasteland — burnt to a crisp by a season of firestorms. Resource collection is not just the first order of business for survivors, it’s the only order of business. There’s no time to reestablish civil society, or any social cooperation, because there’s barely enough time to track down the few remaining scraps of food.

I suppose I have a harder time believing in McCarthy’s vision, mostly for its lack of human innovation and cooperation. It’s not that I think that a world like he describes would be entirely peaceful; on the contrary, I think it’s more than likely that there would be ongoing war, or at least irregular violent squabbling, between various ad-hoc tribes. But it seems to me that there would be tribes of some sort, and cooperative systems, however crude, put in place in order to increase the welfare of the tribe (or at least some of its members). There would be resources to develop and harvest — at Volcano National Park, even the darkest, most barren lavascapes still showed signs of green — and humans would gather together to attempt to gather those resources and put them to use.

The Stand‘s vision of cooperation, on the other hand, is far too easy, consisting mostly of minor squabbling at town meetings. Granted, King’s book is informed by King’s clear to desire to craft a doorstop-sized epic, which in practice means pitting humanity against itself in an age-old battle between mystical forces of good and evil. One gets the sense that the societal structure questions the book raises are mostly interesting to King as diversions on the path to the inevitable apocalyptic showdown. Disappointingly, I think, he never really figures out what form that showdown should take. So when he cannot delay the conclusion any longer, he whiffs, blowing everything away with a nuke-ex-machina.

For a better balance between the two visions, you can turn to Robert Kirkman’s too-good-to-be-a-comic-book* zombie serial, The Walking Dead. You’ll hear a lot more about this series in the neat future, as Frank Darabont is producing a TV adaptation for AMC this fall. Volume 12, in which the characters finally reach Washington, D.C., just hit stores this week, and, as always, it’s thoroughly gripping. The thing about the series is that it’s not really about zombies. Sure, there are hordes of undead running around Kirkman’s East Coast, but they’re fixtures in the apocalyptic landscape rather than the story’s focus. Instead, Kirkman’s series is about surviving after the apocalypse, about how the bonds of family and friendship hold up under the greatest possible strain, and about how small societies form and breakdown in the absence of civilization.

As in The Stand, you see some cooperation between individuals, some attempts to permanently settle and improve their collective lot. But it’s never as easy, stable, or binary as in King’s book. Tiny tribes and outpost form and fall, some successful, others less so. Usually, those societies must face the unintended consequences of their decisions — to stay in a particular location, to rely on a particular set of resources for food or energy. The question that the characters always seem to be responding to is that one that drives most societies: Given the limited knowledge, time, and physical resources we have, what do we do now? When there are disagreements over the answer, you see fissures in the social framework; friends fight, shift allegiances, become enemies. Moments of hope become moments of terror, and vice-versa.

As drama, it’s as smart, inventive, and addictive as any genre serial I can recall. But even more than that, it’s a surprisingly subtle exercise in imagining how societies composed of contemporary Americans might form, fail, and succeed in the absence of national authorities. For King, civilization was about taking a stand against a looming, certain evil. For McCarthy, it was about whether the existence of progeny is enough to maintain the self-will to survive. But Kirkman’s obsession is with something less grandiose — yet, for most of us, far closer to home: the day-to-day struggle for comfort and stability. It’s both the reason we build societies and the reason we leave them, hoping to find something better. It’s also a large part of the reason why we get married, buy homes, and settle down. And I for one am just be glad not to have to do it while being attacked by zombies.

*I should note that I don’t actually mean this as an insult to comics. I’m a pretty huge comic book geek! It’s just that Walking Dead strikes me as a really superior example of the form, and one that ought to appeal to folks who don’t typically like comics as a medium.

The Big Hunt

I saw Predators so that you don’t have to.

Summer Treats

The early rap on Sleigh Bells’ debut, Treats, is that it sounds like nothing else. I’d put it another way: It sounds like everything. I hear the bleacher-pounding thunder of arena rock, the snarky wit of punk, the rhythmic groove of hardcore, the club-thud of dance and hip-hop, the messy energy of L.A. noise, the quirky experimentation of Chicago art rock, and even a buried (if intermittent) top-40 pop sensibility. Which is maybe why the record frequently makes me think of another high-fun mash-up master: Girl Talk. That’s not to say both are working in the same genre, exactly, or that they’re of equal quality — I think Girl Talk’s pop collages are ultimately a lot less satisfying — just that they share a similarly kinetic let’s-shake-our-asses-and-pump-our-fists-and-let-it-all-hang-out vibe.

In other words, it’s a lot of very immediate fun. But can it last? In part, the question is how long the band will be able to keep up the pace; just about every track on Treats aims to definitively blow you away. It’s an album full set-openers and set-closers. A string of home-run swings is always good for a cheap thrill (especially if they’re mostly successful), but it’s not easily sustainable.

But even if Treats turns out to be an amusing throwaway, it’s one of the best I’ve heard in a while. And pop music doesn’t always have to be lasting to be great; done right, disposability can be a virtue. In a better musical world, “A/B Machines,” or maybe “Riot Rhythm,” would be the universal song of the summer, and that would be enough.

You Should Be Reading More Brian K. Vaughan

Possible liberaltarian Brian K. Vaughan’s superb politics-n-superheroes series, Ex-Machina, is scheduled to end later this summer, which means that now is definitely the time to catch up (or get started) if you’re behind. I’ll probably have more to say on the series later, but for now I just want to offer a recommendation: Vaughan, who was a staff writer on Lost for several seasons, writes impressively tight dialog and really knows how to build compelling mysteries out of fragmented timelines — but he’s a lot more interested in payoffs than Lost‘s creators were, and Ex-Machina looks headed for one of the all-time great extended serial finishes.

If you’re already caught up and need a Vaughan fix to tide you over, it’s worth going back and checking out his kid-superhero series, Runaways. In theory, it’s a kiddie book. But while it stays PG-rated, it also works well enough to hold the attention of older readers. It was smart enough, in fact, to earn the admiration of Joss Whedon, who, after Vaughan’s initial run ended, picked up the series for a short arc. My impression is that there are a number of Whedon fans who read (and write for) TAS, and Runaways, like most of Vaughan’s work, hits a lot of the Whedon-fan buttons: well-defined characters, smart dialog, zippy pacing that never feels rushed, and a steady stream of expertly crafted reversals. It’s not groundbreaking, for-the-ages stuff, exactly, but it never feels lazy, and unlike so much of the crud that populates the world of genre fiction these days, it’s almost always genuinely satisfying.

Lost

Well, that’s six years of my life I’ll never get back.

Was it as bad as that? No, not exactly. But it wasn’t much good either. On the subject of the Lost finale — and the final season in general — I think Ross Douthat has the right idea (although, as usual, he’s more generous than the show deserves). It was mostly successful in the ways that the series was usually successful — as a vehicle for a syrupy but frequently gripping mix of pulp and soap set against a spooky island background. But even by that standard, it wasn’t a knockout.

So was I disappointed? Yes. But not too disappointed, because I was fairly sure that this was where the series was headed all along.

By the middle of the first season, it was fairly clear (at least to me) that the writers never intended to answer any of the major questions about the island and its mysteries that they raised. I scratched my head at the end of every season finale when I heard people talk about payoffs, about what we learned. What payoffs? The big “reveals” were almost always to questions we never knew we had (What physical mechanism caused the plane to crash? Where were the Others keeping the polar bears?). Only the interpersonal storylines were ever resolved in anything close to a satisfying manner. The only difference between Lost‘s banal storylines and the ones on numerous other forgettable network dramas featuring generically pretty faces was that Lost‘s took place on an intriguingly mysterious island. The show’s implicit promise, in other words, was of an epic, interconnected narrative. But what it delivered was small-time sentimentality.

This was especially true in the final season, which discarded most of the existing mythology in exchange for generic spiritualism and cheap emotional uplift. Even as a longtime skeptic, I was shocked by the degree to which the writers shrugged off the mythological elements they’d introduced in previous seasons. I was expecting minimal, vague, and unsatisfying answers to questions about the island’s origin, nature, and properties; about the Dharma Initiative and its goals, experiments, and technology; about time travel, the nature of the smoke monster, the various characters with supernatural abilities, or any of the many, many other mysteries. What I wasn’t expecting was that the writers would more or less decline to answer these questions entirely.

But in the end, it turns out Lost‘s writers had exactly one shtick: pile up the big mysteries to keep people hooked, but only ever resolve the banal, domestic conflicts. The series wasn’t a story. It was a gimmick, repeated over and over for six increasingly frustrating years.

So why did I keep watching? Curiosity, for one thing. A tough-to-suppress desire to “keep up” with pop culture for another. And because, for all its faults, the show could be remarkably gripping in its shallow, teasing way. It’s hard to string millions of people along for as long and as intensely as Lost did, a challenge to keep audiences coming back for answers while steadfastly refusing to deliver them. But it did, and if there was a way in which the show “worked,” it was that, on a scene-by-scene basis, it was textbook dramatic screenwriting. Each scene focused intensely on the immediate conflict at hand, gave the characters solid, playable goals, and never failed to raise the stakes and erect new obstacles whenever possible. So even when the show was at its most ludicrous and incoherent, it was almost impossible to look away.

The sad thing is that the show’s writers had the opportunity to deliver a far better resolution than they did. In particular, by negotiating a set end date three years out, they could have built towards a more satisfying, deservingly complex conclusion rather than the simplistic (and entirely beside the point) spiritual mumbo-jumbo they went with. During the show’s run, there was a lot of talk about the show’s depth and complexity, but it turns out this was mostly just a pose; the series served up an dizzying array of tantalizing plot points, implicitly promising to eventually connect them. But it never did.

If there was real complexity to be found, it was on the fan-run analysis sites and Internet forums where dedicated obsessives with philosophy books and screen grabs tried, in vain, to put together all the pieces. These folks were ready (and, in many cases, desperate) for a twisted, complicated, even difficult-to-follow answer — something, anything that would make all their effort and anxiety worth it. But the writers opted for easy sentimentality instead. Given the demands of network TV drama, that may be all anyone ever should or could have expected. But after six years of watching and waiting, even skeptically, I suspect I’m not the only one who is pretty sure it wasn’t worth it.

Our Long National "Nightmare"

The new remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street is depressingly un-fun.

I Liked Kick-Ass. A Lot.

Update: I seem to have totally forgotten to link to my longer post on the film. It’s here!

It’s not for everybody, but it’s delightfully crazy and violent and smarter than you might expect. If you didn’t like Mark Millar’s ultraviolent comic, there’s a good chance you won’t like the similarly ultraviolent movie. But if anything, Vaughn’s adaptation actually draws out the story’s weird, fascinating emotional textures better than the comic.

Joss Whedon, Philip Roth, and Ed Brubaker: What I've Been Reading and Watching

Dollhouse: The trick to watching doomed shows that you’re likely to love is to wait until their doom is complete. That way, you know what you’re getting into, and you can savor it, or binge on it, or take whatever approach you please. But when it ends early, it’s not a surprise. I’m only a couple of episodes into the first season, and it hasn’t entirely grabbed me yet — it’s still too episodic, too procedural, too disguise-of-the-week for my taste — but it’s clearly going somewhere interesting. Also clear is that the network’s decision-makers were under the impression that they’d bought Hot Girl Wears Sexy Costumes: On TV — a sort of sci-fi Charlie’s Angels — and what they got was something very, very different.

The Human Stain: It’s an interesting partner and (for me) follow-up to Ravelstein, another 2001 novel about a classics professor told from the perspective of his friend. It’s a very different book, of course: Roth’s novel inhabits a variety of characters in a way that Bellow’s does not, and he is concerned as much with studying the particular period, and its tormented culture and politics, as with revealing the central character. There’s also the matter of sex. Bellow touches upon it as a part of human existence; Roth is obsessed with it, seeming to view it as life’s central facet. I don’t think I care for it as much as American Pastoral, which is probably my favorite novel of the last twenty years, but it’s certainly worth reading. Like nearly all the best novels, its primary virtue is the creation of a fully-realized fictional world — populated with characters who seem as real as the people you know — that is easy to imagine existing long before the events of the book start and well after they end.

Incognito: Though it doesn’t quite live up to its supervillain-gone-good concept, Ed Brubaker’s stylish superhero noir at least takes a stab at answering one of the comic world’s most frequently overlooked — or at least unsatisfyingly answered — questions: Why do superheroes choose to do good? And not just to do good, but to do it for free, at the cost of sleep, relationships, etc. In Brubaker’s story, sometimes they don’t, and when they do it’s not always because that’s what they really want, but because that’s the option they have. I’d still like to see a comic book take a psychologically complex look at the genre’s usual device, which is that “good” people acquire powers and end up with a moral compulsion to freely give of themselves in service of what they believe to be (and in the world of comic books, usually is) the greater good. Spider-Man and Batman offer reasonable but entirely too simplistic explanations for why a hero might choose that path, but I’m not aware of any comic that actually spends a lot of time examining the hero’s choice — perhaps allowing him or her to choose otherwise — and how hard it would presumably be to maintain with any consistency. Watchmen did a great job of taking the superhero genre’s greater-good shtick to its logical authoritarian endpoint, but no work that I’m aware of really dives into the gray area of why one would do good, or not, and all the non-hero, non-villain options a superpowered individual might actually have in terms of using his or her abilities. Or, to put it another way: In the real world, if people started to develop superpowers, I suspect few of them would run around in tights fighting other superpowered people in tights. Instead, they’d probably put their powers to some sort of productive and/or selfish use that wouldn’t always be easy to classify as “good” or “bad.”

Because I have a longstanding interest in how video games deal with narrative, I picked up Heavy Rain — a game purported to take game storytelling to new levels — last week. Still haven’t played it yet, but I’ll report back once I do.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

I had high hopes for lowbrow fun from Clash of the Titans. Liam Neeson as Zeus? Noted man-crusher Louis Letterier — whose previous films I quite enjoyed — overseeing the mayhem? And 3-D! How could you go wrong? Here’s how.

What I've Been Enjoying

The Walking Dead: A brutal, terrifying, funny, heartfelt, heartbreaking, and surprisingly gripping post-apocalyptic zombie serial set in the South, it’s easily the best long-running genre serial in any medium I’ve come across in any medium since Battlestar Galactica. Indeed, although the obvious touchstones — Romero’s zombie films, 28 Days Later, Y: The Last Man — can certainly be felt, BSG seems like closest parallel. Like Ron Moore’s grim space serial, it’s about a small group of people who attempt to rebuild some semblance of a comfortable life in the aftermath of total societal destruction. So it’s a mix of large scale zombie action (frequent attacks are a way of life) with smaller, character-driven moments — pair-ups and break-ups, the pleasure of finding good food, the frustrations and follies of building new communities from the group up. As with BSG, it’s the sort of thing you might not think is going to be any good. I mean, zombie comics? Really? But writer Robert Kirkman and artist Charlie Adler (whose panel layouts are hugely important to the series’ success) have such a great grip on character and pacing — the series is incredibly intense at times — that I found, to my surprise, that I both actually cared for the people in the story and could not tear myself away. I blew through the 1100 page compendium, which collects the first 48 issues, in two days, and I’ve got the final three collections sitting on my desk ready to read.

Ravelstein: Sure, it’s old news to you lit nerds, so I probably don’t need to tell you how good, how warm, how almost indescribably human it is. I don’t get too much chance to sit down with ordinary, reflective fiction anymore — it takes a sort of stress-free mental quiet that I often have a hard time mustering these days — but Bellow is an inviting enough author that I can read him in small chunks, over the course of, say, a week, and always feel totally engaged.

Borderlands: One of the under-appreciated qualities of video games, I think, is how funny some of them are. Fallout 3 and Fable II were both smart RPGs, and recognized as such. But what was often overlooked was that they were surprisingly quirky and funny — not classic works of comedy, maybe, but delightfully screwy and absurd at times. Borderlands is another action-RPG (this one much more focused on action than most), and it, too, manages to be funny — in its own crude, bizarre way — a lot more often than you might expect. It’s also a thoroughly — perhaps dangerously — addicting RPG/shooter combo, made even more addicting by the fact that, thanks to the stream of downloadable add-ons, you can keep going pretty much forever.

Astonishing X-Men: Joss Whedon’s two-year run on this flagship X-book is everything you’d want from both a Joss Whedon series and an X-Men comic, and it really makes me sad that his X-Men movie script — which, as I recall, was supposed to feature a final showdown inside a Walmart — was never produced. And yeah, I know it’s old news for those who follow these sorts of things more closely, but since I basically didn’t read comics from about 1995 until 2008, I have a lot of catching up to do!

Repo Men is Really, Really Bad

Honestly, there’s no other way to put it. There’s a scene at the end that’s so ill-conceived, over-the-top, bizarre, and repulsive that it sort of begs to be seen, if only to illustrate the incredible — and incredibly expensive — creative follies to which Hollywood can succumb. But by and large, it’s just an atrocious, stupid, shallow, and thoroughly uninteresting film.

A Hastily Compiled, Non-Definitive List of Books That Have Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen has posted a list of books which influenced him the most, and, on Twitter, Mr. Gobry has asked for similar lists from TAS contributors. Happy to oblige! I’m not sure if the books below are truly the absolute most influential in my life, but they’re certainly the ones that immediately stick out in my mind as having stuck with me over time.

Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury: I’ve always been a little perplexed by the book’s reputation as a defense of free speech. It is, of course, but that’s not its most important point by far. Instead, it’s a novel about mental debilitation and loss of empathy induced by media overload — in particular, overload on shallow, visual, electronic media. It’s also a novel about the love of stories, and the way written stories in particular can provide humans with meaning, purpose, and escape; by the book’s end, the hero joins an outcast community in which individuals devote themselves not only to learning works of literature, but to immersing themselves in them, fusing their identities with these works and, in a sense, becoming them. For reasons that should be obvious, I’ve long found this wonderful and tremendously appealing.

Videohound’s Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics: Before the Internet, and thus before easy access to IMDB and the rest of the digital cinemaverse, cinephiles had to rely on incomplete reference books in order to familiarize themselves with back catalog films. For years, I poured over Videohounds’ cult film guide almost daily, and its sensibility — a quirky mix of giddy, passionate, erudite, snarky, and critical — helped shape my appreciation of and attitude toward pulp ever since.

The Caves of Steel — Isaac Asimov: As an eight year old first reading the book, I loved Asimov’s cleverly constructed murder mystery story, and as an already-devoted sci-fi geek (Star Trek was a staple in my household), I loved the intricate future world Asimov designed even more. But what stuck with me most was the slightly detached, slightly cranky, cerebral-but-not-stuck-up quality of both the detective protagonist, Elijah Baley, and the storytelling itself. As with most of Asimov’s characters (and, as I understand, Asimov himself), Baley was a hyper self-aware invert somewhat vexed by people and social situations, but who solved problems by thinking them through as thoroughly as possible and accepting whatever results, often imperfect, came of this method. Perhaps to my detriment, I related to this quite a bit and found it a useful model for understanding human relations.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns — Frank Miller: I got my first copy of this at nine or ten years old, and I literally read and reread it until it fell apart (for a while I held it together with duct tape, but eventually I lost so many pages that it was no longer worth saving). Miller’s fusion of gruff noir sentiment and comic book action helped define the way I think about pop art and genre storytelling; sure, it’s low culture — frequently crude and base — but it’s executed with such verve that it somehow makes it into the upper middlebrow (or near enough) anyway.

Ender’s Game — Orson Scott Card: Speaking of hyper-cerebral! Scott Card’s later books descend into a near-parody of the Asimovian worldview, with protagonists who presume (and act upon) an absurdly concrete and knowable understanding of human behavior. But while you can find hints of this in Ender’s Game, it works anyway, in large part because of the young age of its heroes. These days, I prefer the first two sequels, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, both of which are more mature in their outlook. But the original is the one I’ve read most often, and the one I think of most.

The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger: Yes, another novel about a social outcast who spends too much time in his head. But it’s a classic for a reason, and an enduring portrait of adolescent questioning.

American Pastoral — Philip Roth: Probably the finest work of prose in the bunch, and arguably also the most mature, it’s one of those novels that’s both impressive and gripping — not only do you admire it, but you can’t stop flipping pages as you do.

You may have noticed that except for the Videohound guide, it’s all fiction. For a reason! While I read a lot of magazine-length nonfiction, I read very little in the way of nonfiction books. And what I have read came later: In my formative, pre-college years, I probably read fewer than a dozen non-fiction books (not counting school text books, although I suppose I didn’t actually read most of those either). It’s not that nonfiction books haven’t influenced me — think of obvious libertarian touchstones: The Road to Serfdom, The Law, Capitalism and Freedom, The Calculus of Consent — but I read them most of them post-college and, as a result, I suppose I don’t feel like they’re really, well… as much a part of me in the Fahrenheit 451 sense.