Connor Coyne

Read my article on the Uptown book and music store Shake Rattle and Read at Bookish Us: Shake Rattle and Read and the Uptown Story.

This article has also been promoted on the Uptown Update blog.

Gothic Funk Nation
Party XIX: NO LUCK IN LOVE
In collaboration with Black Automatic and Front 312.

Launch of the
Paramanu Pentaquark:
A GOTHIC FUNK Journal

Afterparty of:
AWP Writer’s Conference

Artists:
Reinhardt Suarez
Elisabeth Blair
Jacob Saenz
Pierre Abelard

$5 Donation from 8 – 10:30
Includes a Copy of the Journal

$5 LeTourment Absinthe
$3 Domestics
$3 Well Drinks
$2.50 PBR

Friday, February 13
8 PM, 2nd Story Loft, 1931 N Milwaukee
Above Lucky Number Grill

The Gothic Funk Nation: http://www.GOTHICFUNK.org
Flier Design: http://www.forge22.com.

This event has been a long time in the coming, which is why I’m spending this much time gushing about it. We tried to create a journal starting in November 2007, and it’s finally coming to fruition. That this launch coincides with the AWP Conference (when all sorts of writers from all over the country are in Chicago), and Front 312′s monthly event, and Friday the 13th, and Valentines Day is like a grand conjunction of the stars.

Check out the Front 312 poster:

The launch is going to be hot, but if you can’t make it, the Journal will be available online from www.gothicfunk.org as of Friday the 13th.

In case you’re wondering, Gothic Funk Parties look like this:

and this:

It is popular among educated and upper middle-class people to inveigh against television. The same people who boast about the quality and quantity of books they own are also proud that they don’t have a TV set. “Watching television,” they say, “that’s so passive.” I don’t buy it.

First, reading a book is a necessarily sedentary activity. I know; sometimes I have read while walking and it’s difficult. The amount of concentration it takes to process what is put on a page is equivalent to what it takes to process on a screen. Which isn’t to say that reading is more physically passive than watching TV. They’re both fundamentally passive activities.

Second, the whole attention-span argument. I don’t think that this is true for television and it’s certainly not true for culture in general. We are often exposed to the sound-bite MTV argument that modern audiences have no patience for extended concentration. Why then aren’t we offended by haikus? Why don’t we accuse Shakespeare of being a commercialist when his sonnets are like tiny specks compared to manifestoes like Howl or Prufrock? Or, on the other side of the argument, how do we explain increased markets for extended works in all media. How many people romped through 3,000 pages of Harry Potter, ten hours of the Lord of the Rings films, or going-on five seasons of Lost?

Third, isn’t it a convenient coincidence that the book, the medium with the presige of a heritage, and one which readers can collect as a tesimony to their taste is concidered the reciptacle of worthwhile thought? Meanwhile, television, a public medium accessed by billions that has been around for less than a century, is described as an agent of passivity.

Books make an ongoing contribution to society; in some form or another, we will always be reading. But the elevation of books at the expense of television is just one more permutation of the “high art” vs. “low art” debate, in which the vocabulary changes but never the premise. We are living, in fact, through a golden age of television today. Perennial dramas such as Deadwood and Lost are challenging viewers with complex characters, storylines, and visual language, while American Idol today fills the shoes that The Ed Sullivan Show filled in the early sixties. Online outlets such as hulu and YouTube are making television more accessible and versatile, while DVDs as a mode of storage make television more collectible, and can, in fact, be works of art in their own right.

If you claim to be open minded and a populist, it is a very, very bad time to deplore television as a medium.

Some people like the musical Les Misèrables and others execrate it. I loved it in ninth grade, appreciated it in college, and now am somewhat disappointed in it. We could debate the fact that a three hour musical contains about six tunes, or the fact that the novels most memorable characters, such as Montparnasse and Grandfather Gillenormand have been cut from the cast, but the very best argument is both simple and easy:

In Les Misèrables the musical, Fantine is broke so she sells her locket and then her hair. This corresponds to a section in the book in which Fantine is broke so she sells her hair, and then her incisors.

What do you think is the more trenchant comment on poverty?

This is a case of art subverting its subject not in order to access, but to placate its audience.

Who would in many cases be unfamiliar with poverty, given the typical cost of theater tickets.

For my birthday my parents got me Dune, and it was the first time I’d seen this film in about eight years. I watched this film constantly in 7th grade, and it became one of my favorites of all time. In 8th grade I picked up the book by Frank Herbert, and wasn’t as impressed by the book as by the film. Many friends told me that the series went downhill from there, but I am still intrigued by the rumors that have reached me about what happened to Paul Atreides.

Now I realize that I am in the minority here in two ways: that Dune is a good movie and that the movie Dune is better than the book. I won’t make the claims that I have about Dead Man’s Chest… that this film is underrated because it is supremely crafted in an uncommon medium. But I think it may be underrated nonetheless because we have a bias toward, for example, good acting and plot coherence over lavish setpieces and effective imagery. These things are each neutral on their own… in the case of Dune the latter grant relief to the former. The script might be neither as tight nor as accessible as we would like, but for me, the spectacle of the blue-eyed Fremen, a sand-worm on the attack, or Baron Harkonnen indulging his blood fetish (not present in the book) is enough to make a very dense and difficult experience into something quite enjoyable.

Which brings me to another point. I also like the shorter cut of Dune more than the extended edition and this ties into why I like the film more than the book. In Herbert’s novel, Paul Atreides sojourn into the bad trip that is melange gradually dominates more and more of the book, until he is completely overcome with a messianic grandeur so saturated as to seem inhuman. The extended film cut attempts to preserve this plot arc. The shorter cut (while hardly economical) jettisons much of this in favor of the political arc of the story. Which is marginally more human and certainly more accessible.

It might be fairly observed that this is a bit of an artistic cop-out. On the one hand, I don’t think that an adaptation can exist independent of its source material; otherwise it wouldn’t be an adaptation. That being said, the transposition of an object from one medium to another, and all of the attendant issues, makes it self-evident that these should be considered different works of art. For that reason, it is fair if the film emphasizes what the novel does not. One might say that political themes can be more thoroughly and deeply engaged in a three hour film than an abstract philosophical construct (if you want to pose Star Wars as a counterexample, I have an answer to that). One might argue, though I would disagree, that films being a popular medium (as opposed to books) have a greater obligation to ease and accessibility. However, I definitely believe that this film mitigated the story in a way that was beneficial. It took a novel that had struck me as coldly intellectual and through flesh-and-blood and abridgment brought the story some distance toward the opportunity to access through sense and emotion. Far from depleting its mystical ruminations, it has provided the audience with a point of entry to them.

Dune is a flawed film, but its atmosphere and viscerality continue to inspire me. It is, much like Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho a work whose conspicuous flaws render equally conspicuous the risks it takes and its successful efforts to innovate and engage.