Pic Profile: Magic Hour By Jon Demartin

A few years ago, Lucas Books released Star Wars: Visions which, unlike the typical "Art Of" books, presents works of "fine" art inspired by Star Wars both in and out of universe.  My favorite piece is the one pictured above, the wonderfully nostalgic Magic Hour by Jon Demartin. Magic Hour depicts a scene from The Empire Strikes Back seen as many people at the time would have seen it: in a drive-in.

I love this painting because it so beautifully captures the socio-economic context of the original Star Wars trilogy, a very different America from the one in which exists now.  One needs only look at some of the other popular movies of the 1970's to see that Star Wars with it's light-hearted tone and optimistic story sticks out like a sore thumb.  One of the reasons the first movie took off the way that it did was that is was fun piece of escapism during dark and gloomy times.  

I grew up in Chicago and the industrial background behind the movie screen is one that could have been the steel mills of the South Side of Chicago or anywhere in the industrial Miswestern Rust Belt with its beautiful and terrible glimmering towers and belching smokestacks.  Part of the nostalgia of the piece is that it pictures a world that is lost. Not only is the drive-in mostly extinct as a phenomenon but with the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. the communities it once supported are mostly gone as well and many of the large-scale facilities have been torn down or stand as ruins.  I like to think the people in their cars are enjoying some time off from their rough but good-paying manufacturing jobs.

The great thing about the drive-in as a subject is that unlike the normal cinematic experience which is purposefully sealed off from the world, the drive-in is open and movie's contents are free to be compared to the surrounding world. Notice the juxtaposition of hardscrabble industrial life and clean cinematic fantasy which speaks to the role of movies as escapism and inspiration in our lives.  The painting's title, Magic Hour, implies that the other hours of the day are less than magical.  

The artist's use of color is a clever nod to Ralph McQuarrie, the concept artist who is largely responsible for the look of the original trilogy and whose painted skies often featured electric blues and rich oranges like the background sky in Magic Hour.  In fact, Demartin's industrial landscape strongly recalls McQuarrie's concept art for Bespin, the floating city in The Empire Strikes Back and the location depicted on the movie screen in the painting.

For all its exotic location and beauty, Cloud City is an industrial "Tibanna" mining station and for all way know, could be the Gary, Indiana of the Galaxy Far Far Away.  

Patrick Garone,

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Westeros Community College: The Adventures of Schrödinger's Crow

Spoiler Warning:  This post contains spoilers for all broadcast seasons of HBO's Game of Thrones, all published volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, references to interviews, set reports, informed by wild speculation, and both fire and greenseer visions.



Aside from the many reasons why Jon Snow can't be permanently dead in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO's Game of Thrones, there has been a mountain of circumstantial evidence that Jon Snow and the actor who portrays him, Kit Harington, will be back for season six of the hit show.  We know this from our little birds abroad and Twitter's Kit Harington Hair Watch.     This is despite the many official denials to the contrary from the actor himself and the producers (even to the President of the United States).  Most importantly, Harington has been spending A LOT of time around the Game of Thrones "Northern" shooting zone in and around Belfast for someone who's character is dead and gone.  Most intriguing is a recent report that has him on set for a giant battle that pits various Stark-loyal Northern armies and Wildlings against the armies of House Bolton, presumably for control of Winterfell.  As far as I know, this is the first actual report of Harington witnessed seen on set.  So, the crow is now out of the bag.

Let's assume for a moment that Jon Snow is coming back and participate in the that time-honored past time of A Song of Ice and Fire fans: speculation.  On a side note, has any other major property been subject to as much fierce theorization and speculation as this one?  The richness of Martin's imagined world, the slow pace of his output, and the advent of the Internet has meant that his books have been picked apart and analyzed in an unprecedented way.  The only twist or surprise in the remaining books would be if they included anything that hasn't already been generated by his collective readers.  After all, there are more of us than there are George R. R. Martins and we've been at it for almost twenty years.  So, let's speculate about Jon Snow's motives and actions once he does come back to us and how that may tie in with some of our other characters who are up North.

Let's check in for a moment with some of our characters at the Wall at the end of last season.  As you may recall, at the end of season five of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow was murdered by his Night's Watch brothers for his Wildling sympathies and for bringing the Free Folk through the Wall.  We also have two important characters who are now free from the Stannis story: Melisandre and Davos. Both are conveniently at the Wall in a position to join the Jon Snow story should there be one.  Moreover, if Snow does not come back, what exactly are these characters doing at the Wall?  If Jon Snow is actually dead, narratively speaking, the Wall is filled with characters with which we have little investment in themselves.  Are we going to spend a season with Dolorous Edd? We've spent a lot of time with Davos and Melisandre but neither one of them are characters that have agency of their own or can anchor a storyline.  Without a Jon Snow resurrection they are both rudderless.

Melisandre is frankly the most likely source of Jon Snow's resurrection given both the fact that followers of the Lord of Light CAN do this as we have seen previously on the show and given her strange fascination with Jon Snow.  This interest in Snow is important because as much as Melisandre is considered the show's sexpot (due to her habit of constantly bringing the girls out), her character is only ever shown to be interested in sex when it is the context of using sorcery to achieve some tactical goal and only ever with someone of "royal blood."

The show makes implicit that she had a late realization that it was not actually Stannis who was her prophesied Azor Azai which is why she so unceremoniously abandoned him and headed for the Wall of all places.  While the books have not made it past this point in the story, they do underscore this idea as Melisandre finds herself unable to see Stannis in her fire visions but instead Jon, or "Snow."  It is important to note that in the show, Winterfell seems to loom large in her visions of the future.  She has foreseen herself walking along it's battlements with the Bolton flag lowered into the dirt.  I'm convinced this will happen by the end of next season.

Davos' role in the Jon Snow story is a little more difficult to predict as his prime motivation has been serving Stannis throughout the series and he would have little reason to team up with a fire-resurrected and Melisandre-aligned Jon Snow.  It is worth noting that in the books, Davos is at a very different point in the story.  He had been dispatched by Stannis on a diplomatic mission to one of the Bolton-opposed Northern Lords and ultimately on a mission to locate Rickon Stark who has been said to be hiding out with the Stark loyalists of House Umber.  The actors playing Rickon and Osha are apparently returning this season and the Umbers are said to be participants in the big Northern battle against the Boltons, so it is possible Davos may embark on this mission in the show possibly on behalf of Jon Snow.  Davos may align himself with the Stark-loyal Northern houses as a way to get revenge on the Boltons for defeating Stannis.  It's the kind of fudge that they do on the show from time to time to get all the pieces in place.

And what about Snow himself?  You've been murdered by your brothers in the Night's Watch and brought back by a red-headed zealot, what are you going to do?  The good news for the character is that "now his watch has ended." His murder and resurrection frees him from his vows and allows him a lot of room to get involved in the larger story.   Narratively, Martin had to kill him to get him out of his vows and set him loose.   So, if Jon Snow can do whatever he wants, what does he do?

Does he go on a rampage, killing his former Night's Watch brothers?  Probably not.  He may be resurrected but he is not immortal, and will still see the value in the organization.  Melisandre would likely spirit him out under the cover of night perhaps to his Wildling allies.

The books offer some clues but the murder of Jon Snow in A Dance of Dragons is motivated a little differently.  Not only is book Snow killed for his Wildling plan, but for the fact that he is willing to abandon his position and waste Watch men and resources on a personal mission to free his sister from Ramsey Bolton's clutches after receiving a raven supposedly from the former Bastard of Bolton.  This is an interesting difference in the two interpretations of the character.  HBO Jon Snow does not have this knowledge but it probably won't be long before he gets it and when he does, he won't have any Night's Watch vows to stop him from rallying the North against the hated Boltons.  As far as most Northerners are concerned, he will be the last adult male Stark. He also has an army of Wildlings who will have grown to like and respect him for his honor and his actions at Hardhome.   Jon Snow will be powerfully motivated to retake Winterfell in his "brother" Rickon's name.  It looks like we may see a little scouring of the Shire next season.  According to the report from Watcher on the Wall, this great Northern battle takes place in episode nine, so Melisandre's Winterfell stroll could be one of the last moments of the season, proving her power and foresight.

Then what does Snow do once he has reclaimed Winterfell for his brother?  Perhaps he sets his sights south toward the other house that betrayed the Starks: the Freys.  Now, in the books, another character is exacting a campaign of vengeance on the Freys: Lady Stoneheart.  For those who don't know, Lady Stoneheart is Catelyn Stark, who was resurrected by another Lord of Light follower, Thoros of Myr.  She takes over the band of outlaws known as the Brothers Without Borders and uses them to terrorize the Freys.  She's been often rumored for the show but has never appeared and frankly, resurrecting two major characters in the same manner in the same season seems unlikely.  I doubt we will get her if we get Jon Snow back.  But perhaps Snow can fulfill some of her role in the larger story.

Let's not forget that Sansa and Theon are also in the outskirts of Winterfell at the end of last season. We know from set photos that Theon ends up in the Iron Islands but Sansa's location is a mystery. Does she end up back at the Eyrie like book Sansa?  That journey would be a major plot to add and unlikely unless somehow she connects with Brienne and Pod, who would seem to be heading south to reconnect with their book stories.  Is it too much to hope that Sansa reconnects with Jon and Rikkon and gets to return to Winterfell?  If we do have a big Stark Reunion, will something horrifying happen immediately after?  Either way, I'm excited as Game of Thrones moves into an exciting phase of the story and it looks like the Starks are on their way back up after years and years of suffering and torment.  I think we, as the audience, have earned something heartwarming, at least until the White Walkers come and destroy everything.


Patrick Garone
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Ranking Marvel

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, is there anything else like it out there?  Never before has a studio attempted such an ambitious series of interconnected shared universe movies (and TV shows). What's more, most of them are actually  pretty good and all of them are at least fun and enjoyable.  Marvel imbues its movies with a true sense of fun, a love for the material, and a definite sense of humor. As I write this, Marvel is twelve movies in with no signs of slowing down.

Once we got to double digits, people began ranking them because, Internet.  Here's my take on how they stack up to one another.  You may find it a little different than most.

Iron Man 2

Widely considered to be "the worst" of Marvel's movies, Iron Man 2 is not really that bad and the worst Marvel movie is still better than most of the other popcorn movies out there.  I mean, it's certainly miles better than any of the Transformers movies.  While it suffers from being a little overstuffed (a sin shared by some of the later Marvel movies) Iron Man 2  still features some great action sequences like the Grand Prix showdown with Whiplash and the debuts of Black Widow and War Machine.  In the overall narrative of the MCU, Iron Man 2 does a lot of heavy lifting that pays off in later movies.  It not only develops a lot of backstory for the Starks, SHIELD, and the Avengers Initiative, vibranium,  but it also establishes an evolution and lineage of the Iron Man tech, for example Vanko's drones are clear predecessors to the Iron Legion from Age of Ultron.

The Incredible Hulk

The Incredible Hulk is treated like the red-headed stepchild of the MCU.  It was overshadowed by Iron Man  when it was first released and Edward Norton was quickly replaced by Mark Ruffalo in subsequent movies. Since there has not been another solo Hulk movie, most of the characters introduced have not reappeared, such as the Hulk villain the Leader, who was introduced in this movie never to be seen again.  The Incredible Hulk almost feels a little disconnected from the rest of the series because of this but the movie is a lot of fun and definitely has an important place in the franchise.  I mean, it's about as good as you can expect a movie based on the Hulk to be.  It also features Tim Roth as a mercenary who is given a bootleg version of the Captain America super soldier serum and who later becomes The Abomination. Unfortunately, this character has not been seen in any other Marvel projects which is a pity because he's one of the better MCU villains.

Thor

Thor  was a risky proposition for Marvel.  The Asgardian alien/god and his world was always going to be a tricky proposition on screen but director Kenneth Branaugh does a great job bringing the Asgardian world and its relationships to life.  Thor has a satisfying arc from warrior bro to worthy wielder of Mjolnir.  Nathalie Portman, Idris Elba, and Anthony Hopkins round out the fantastic cast. Tom Hiddleston makes his debut as Loki, Marvel's most compelling villain to-date.

Iron Man 3

While Iron Man 3  is wildly overrated, it does feature a great performance from Robert Downey, Jr and although its idiosyncratic take on the genre grows a little thin, you have to admire the fact that it is so different from its predecessors and from superhero movies in general. Iron Man 3 takes the series into a definite buddy action movie territory with some interesting noire elements.  However the movie seems a bit enchanted with its own stylistic wanderings and is bit too long as a result. It also badly fumbles its villains.  Not only is the Mandarin squandered in an admittedly ballsy fake-out but the Extremis "fire people" are pretty silly. Also, in terms of the whole MCU, it feels like all of the resolutions and conclusions of this movie end up being forgotten by the time we see Tony Stark again.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.  Age of Ultron  is overstuffed with characters and goings-on to be a really satisfying movie which is really too bad because it has a lot of good stuff happening in it.  Ultron is a genuinely interesting and compelling villain (although one with a truly stupid plot) and the movie crackles with that trademark Whedon dialogue.  But instead of really developing characters and relationships, the movie introduces characters and doesn't give them their proper space to breathe.  We never really get to know Scarlett Witch, Quicksilver or Vision and one of the primary Avengers, Thor, is MIA throughout much of the movie while Hawkeye-the least interesting Avenger-gets an extended amount of screentime.

Thor: The Dark World

While Thor: The Dark World suffers from perhaps the MCU's least developed villain (which is saying something) the sequel to Thor is kind of an underrated movie that went a long way to broaden the scope of the MCU.    Before Guardians of the Galaxy  Thor: The Dark World, took the Marvel movies into a distinctly space opera direction, much of this movie feels more Star Wars than superhero.  What's more, this movie features a truly fun and clever action sequence at the end involving wormholes and multiple planets and a compelling performance from Tom Hiddleston that keeps you guessing until the end and elevates the whole movie.

Ant-Man

Especially coming right after Ultron,  Ant-Man is a refreshingly focused superhero movie about an unlikely hero who can shrink in size and control ants.  It has a small cast and few connections to the larger MCU, which is a nice change.  It actually reminds me quite a bit of the original Iron Man movie in that it is a redemption story about a flawed hero and his relationship to a mentor character. It also features a nice pair of father/daughter story lines that feel fresh in the context of a MCU movie and it is anchored by a nice performance from Michael Douglas and the best digital de-aging I have ever seen.  Visually, Ant-Man has a lot of fun with its hero's shrinking ability and it has some really memorable small-scale action sequences.  It's not every adventure movie that features its climactic battle on a toy Thomas the Train set.

Captain America: The First Avenger

In their welcome attempts to mix up genres, Marvel envisioned their first Captain America movie as a legit Golden Age comic book movie set during World War II and it's a lot of fun.  Thankfully, a lot of time is spent developing Cap's as a skinny, bullied New York kid and you get a good sense of his character and point of view as opposed to him just being a lab experiment or jingoistic superman. Hugo Weaving is great as Red Skull, a villain many of us would like to see return to the MCU.  This movie also introduces Peggy Carter, who would go on to be a mainstay of the MCU movies and TV shows.


The Avengers

In my mind, The Avengers is Marvel's most impressive (although not necessarily best) movie.   Given the difficulty of doing a movie like this and all of the potential pitfalls, how did this movie end up being so damn good?  Writer/Director Joss Whedon deftly manages a large group of characters in a movie that never feels overstuffed.  He manages a large urban alien invasion sequence at the film's climax that avoids becoming the dreary disaster porn that you see in contemporary movies like Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  Importantly, this team of superhero misfits actually manages to save people  unlike the impression left from Man of Steel.  Perhaps best of all, The Avengers never really looses its focus on the fact that despite the special effects and action, the most interesting thing are these characters and their relationships and interactions with one another.


Captain America: The Winter Soldier

While the first Cap movie was a period war movie, its sequel is in the style of a 1970's conspiracy thriller and has Captain America teaming up with Black Widow to take on a SHIELD agency that has long been infiltrated by Hydra.  Needless to say, this a monumentally consequential story for the MCU.  Despite the big scope, Winter Soldier is sharply focused and features some great action such as Cap's elevator encounter with a group of would-be assassins.


Iron Man

The movie that started it.  Prior to the release of Iron Man in 2008 it was far certain the movie would even be a hit let alone spawn a monster franchise of eleven other movies and (so far) three TV shows but thanks to a career defining performance from Robert Downey, Jr, a cool and fun tone, and surprisingly photogenic armor suit, Iron Man  was a big hit and the foundation on which the entire MCU rests.  You can't really overestimate how much of RDJ's performance contributed to the success of the movie as he really turned Tony Stark into a funny and unforgettable character and I think the success of Iron Man helped Marvel learn what their live action brand would be: interestingly flawed characters and a sharp sense of humor.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Fun, delightfully idiosyncratic, warm, and weird, Guardians of the Galaxy was Marvel's biggest gamble and became a runaway success, considered by many to be the best MCU movie to date. It might be a lesson to Marvel that one its best-loved and most successful movies was one with only a tangential connection to rest of the Earth-bound movies.   Free to be its own spacey, weird thing and largely unencumbered by connectivity to other movies, Guardians has a genuinely different feel from the rest of the MCU movies.  Although, despite a movie full of vivid and interesting characters, it has one of the dullest villains to date.

The First Republican Debate

Last night was the first debate of the 2016 election.  In fact, there are so many Republicans running that there were actually two debates.  The prime time debate featured the top ten candidates a mix of former and current governors, iconoclastic senators, and Donald Trump.  So, let's look at it through a Trumpian lens of Winnahs and Loosahs.

WINNERS

Donald Trump.  The Donald went into this the race's improbable front-runner and, much to the Republican establishment's chagrin, he didn't do anything to endanger his position.  I'm sure they were hoping for a meltdown or a storm-off but Trump delivered more of his trademark dickishness that is so popular with a chunk of Republican primary voters.

The most remarkable thing was his casual revelation that he buys and sells politicians in exchange for personal "favors" regardless of their party essentially admitting that he is corrupt and that his allegiance is more to his own interests than to conservative values.  Amazingly, no one called him out on it.  He also bragged about using legal loopholes to his advantage in his business dealings.  Again, no one followed up on this.  Normally, these would be candidate-ruining revelations but Trump's unconventional campaign seems immune to the normal political rules.

John Kasich.  Ohio Governor Kasich went into the debate with a fairly low national profile and toward the bottom of the top tier of candidates polling but he gave a remarkably good debate performance.  He came off positive, compassionate, and touted a solid record of achievements in his two terms as Governor and he is clearly popular in his state which is critical to win in the election. What's more, Kasich seemed the most electable out of the bunch.  He came off as man more practical than ideological as evidenced by his logical decision to implement the Affordable Care Act in Ohio which he correctly saw as benefiting his state.  He is also the only candidate from a swing state who would be able to pull off an easy victory in his state.  That said, he may be perceived as too soft and moderate to make it through the primaries.  If he were to become the nominee, though, the Democrats would be very very afraid.

MEH

Scott Walker.    The union-busting Conservative superstar from Wisconsin turned in an okay debate performance but never really hit it out of the park.

Mike Huckabee.  Huckabee is a skilled politician who was essentially the runner up in 2008 but probably missed his calling in 2012.  He didn't do much to justify his space on the stage last night.

Rand Paul.  Rand Paul would be a stronger candidate if he weren't trying to be so conventional.  He can't seem to make up his mind whether or not he wants to embrace his Libertarian leanings or temper them for the election for fear of being too far out of synch with the Republican party.  This compromises his whole political identity.

Ted Cruz.  Cruz seems thrown off by being only the second craziest person in the room.

LOSERS

Jeb Bush.  Bush is widely considered to be the true front-runner and likely eventual nominee and he had a lot to lose and, unfortunately, he turned in a debate performance that was dull and uninspiring. Combined with his family baggage it may cause some of his supporters to take another look at some of his competitors.  He also may be perceived as another centrist candidate that is forced to tie himself in knots to win the nomination to the point where he is fatally compromised in the general election.  After McCain and Romney there is a real desire to have the nominee be a "real" Conservative.

Ben Carson.  Dr. Carson is another leading candidate for the nomination but turned in a debate performance that was strangely low-key.

Chris Christie. While some will say that Christie missed the boat last election, I maintain that his brand of belligerent East Coast conservatism has always had limited geographic appeal.  He did score some good points on Rand Paul but he also came off as kind of a jerk.  And, while invoking 911 in a political context may have played better right after the attacks, it now seems tasteless and opportunistic.

Marco Rubio.  Rubio seemed waaay out of his league at the debate.  He comes off as far too young and green to be on the stage.  Not only did he not seem presidential but he didn't even seem vice-presidential.  

Westeros Community College: Why Jon Snow Can't Be Dead

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ALL BROADCAST SEASONS OF GAME OF THRONES AND ALL PUBLISHED BOOKS IN THE A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE SERIES AS WELL AS FAN THEORIES AND SPECULATION.


The finale of season five of HBO's Game of Thrones featured an onslaught of cliffhangers but none more shocking and upsetting than the murder of Jon Snow by his Night's Watch brothers.  This brings this particular story line up  to where it is at the end of George R. R. Martin's most recent A Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Dance of Dragons.  Given the story's penchant for brutally killing "main characters" we've been conditioned to accept that anyone can be killed off at anytime.  But Jon Snow (along with a couple of other characters) are in a different category from the others. Also, I would argue that Jon Snow can't die yet because he simply has too much left to do narratively.

A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are both heading into the story's endgame with two books and two seasons left respectively and it feels like Jon Snow still has a lot of unresolved business.  Some might say, "Patrick, life is full of unresolved business.  That's the beauty of Game of Thrones.  It messes with your expectations."  That's fine but fiction is not life and as much as Martin likes to defy the genre's expectations he still is primarily concerned with telling a good story and teasing questions and killing off the character associated with those questions would be poor storytelling.

Of course, the main unresolved question with Jon Snow is that of his true parentage.  Ostensibly the bastard son of Ned Stark, the question of Snow's parentage is endlessly speculated on by both the characters within the novels and fans who have been working on this particular puzzle for years.  The most widely accepted theory is that Jon Snow is actually the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Ned's sister Lyanna Stark, to whom Ned made a deathbed promise to raise Jon and hide his true parentage lest he fall victim to Robert Baratheon's Targaryen vendetta.  Indeed, Jon would be in particular danger as he would represent the union of Robert's beloved Lyanna and his Targaryen rival, Rhaegar. This fan theory is known as R+L=J and it is explored in great detail online.  There's a lot of textual evidence for it in the books and even the Game of Thrones series has hinted at it, particularly in season 5.  It's telling that with so many characters and plots lost in the adaptation, the show would make time to repeatedly call out two long-dead characters like Rhaegar and Lyanna.  

The issue of Snow's parents is so important to the story that Martin quizzed the prospective show runners on this topic before he allowed them to move forward with the project.  Presumably he was satisfied with their answer. Martin has also indicated that this mystery will be revealed in a future book, which would be rather odd and anticlimactic if Jon Snow is dead at the time.

Another bit of unfinished narrative business is Jon Snow's relation to a series of overlapping prophesies in the world of the story.  In the world of A Song of Ice and Fire there is an ancient messianic prophecy of The Prince That Was Promised,  a savior meant to save the world from "darkness."  This darkness is possibly related to the onset of winter and the White Walkers and Jon possibly meets some of the criteria for this figure.  Interestingly, Rhaegar Targaryen believed in this theory and that it was specifically tied to the Targaryen bloodline.  Initially, he believed that he was the Prince That Was Promised but at some point he believed it would be his children.  He came to believe that "The Dragon will have three heads," which he seemed to interpret to mean that he needed to have three offspring. Officially, he only had two from his wife Elia Martell.  If you subscribe to the R+L=J theory, then Jon Snow would be the third and likely only surviving child.

A related messianic figure in A Song of Ice and Fire is that of Azor Ahai, a legendary figure prophesied to be reborn to defend the world from the Others.  Azor Azai is specifically opposed to the White Walkers and, indeed, defeated them during their last incursion thousands of years ago.   There are a few likely candidates and Jon Snow is near the top of most people's lists.  Notably, the TV show included a scene not in the books in which Jon Snow duels and defeats a White Walker and captures the attention of their leader, the Night's King who gives him a long and meaningful stare as Jon Snow escapes on a boat, perhaps marking him as an enemy. For most of the series, the fire priestess Melisandre believed Stannis Baratheon to be the reincarnation of Azor Ahai and her thoughts and actions in both the books and TV series are very telling.  In both cases,  as soon as she reaches The Wall she starts showing a lot of interest in Jon Snow.  If you buy Snow being a Targaryen, this makes a lot of sense since he would be full of the royal blood on which she is so fixated.

In the books, Jon Snow begins showing up in her fire visions.  When she attempts to focus her visions on Azor Ahai and Stannis she sees only Jon or "snow."  While the books start to plant doubts about her faith in Stannis, the show goes further into this particular storyline.  She assures Stannis that she has seen visions of the Bolton banners falling at Winterfell and she has seen herself walking on the castle walls  but she tells him it will only happen with a sacrifice of royal blood.  After she convinces Stannis to sacrifice his daughter in order for the Fire God to aid their siege, she soon witnesses the complete breakdown of Stannis' forces.  For the first time, we see her shaken and she seems to realize that she has made some great mistake and that she has been backing the wrong man.  She heads back to The Wall of all places (incidentally where he book counterpart remains).  

So book and TV Melsiandre are at The Wall and she may have finally come to the conclusion that Jon Snow is Azor Ahai, correctly or incorrectly.  We also know that the Red Priests have the ability to bring people back from the dead.  We've seen it before with the priest Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion.  In the TV series, Melisandre has even seen evidence of this resurrection and seemed slightly scandalized that it had been done so many times.  So, she is our best bet for a Jon Snow (or will he be Jon Blackfyre?) resurrection.

It's important to note that Melisandre's visions are actually credible but she doesn't seem to be able to always interpret them correctly.  In the book, she correctly predicts that a girl will ride to the wall on horseback.  She describes the girl accurately but is incorrect about her identity.  She sees things clearly but doesn't always have context for them.  However, I do think that her Winterfell visions will come to pass.  We will see her there next season but who knows how it happens.

Perhaps more important than the in-story and theoretical reasons for bringing Jon back is the fact that he's one of the three primary protagonists of A Song of Ice and Fire and for strictly storytelling reasons you can't kill Jon, Tyrion, or Daenarys.  I mean,  you can but why would you?  I mean you can kill everyone but that doesn't leave you with a story.  People point to Ned and Robb Stark as evidence that Martin is willing to kill any of his characters in service of creating an expectation-defying dangerous world but Ned and Robb were never really protagonists.  In killing those characters he was commenting on the use of Fantasy genre tropes (the noble Lord, the brave and golden son with a righteous cause)  and making his world dangerous and nasty.  He was cluing readers into the kinds of characters that would be his true protagonists: cripples, bastards, and broken things.

The heroes of this story were never going to be the traditional High Lords and Knights but broken and abused people who are forced to fight for every inch of their power and agency.  Martin's heroes are misfits and malcontents who have all been screwed over by the system such as Brienne, Arya, Bran, and Varys.  While it is accurate to say that a lot of the deaths of the "hero" characters early on in the series were meant to set the story apart from traditional fantasy storytelling, it had more to do with determining what kinds of heroes A Song of Ice and Fire was going to feature than to tell us that the story's heroes could die at any moment.  Ned and Robb were merely decoys to throw us off the trail of the books' unlikely heroic triumvirate.

Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and Tyrion Lannister are the true heroic protagonists of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.  According to some fan theories they are even Rhaegar's prophesied "three heads of the dragon."  Not only are they the three main protagonists by virtue of the amount of chapters and screen time devoted to them but they are also thematically the perfect representation of Martin's affection for disaffected broken protagonists who are underdogs in their world.

These three also have much personal history in common.  For example each was born to a mother who died in childbirth (accepting the R+L=J theory).  Although each is highborn each struggles with their station in life.  Tyrion, while clearly clever and talented, is a dwarf and suffers constant disrespect and disdain.  Dany is a young girl in a misogynistic society and her only role in life is to be married off to seal an alliance.  Jon Snow, is seemingly a bastard boy  with no true place in the world. They have all suffered abuse in their home relationships.  Tyrion's father and family despise him on account of his dwarfism and the fact that he "killed" his mother.  Dany's only family member is her brother, an unhappy temperamental bully.  Jon is raised in a home with a woman who is hostile to him because she thinks he is a reminder of her husband's infidelity.  In the book, she is genuinely nasty to him.

So, the real heroes of A Song of Ice and Firei  are a dwarf, a girl, and a bastard.  While I don't guarantee that they will make it out of the last book alive, my money is on all of them making it to the last book as they all have important protagonist-y things to do.  That said, I wouldn't put a Hamlet-style bloodbath past Martin for the last scene of the last book. George R. R. Martin may be "bloody-minded" and out to subvert the fantasy genre but he's not going to undermine it to the point where he's killed off his main characters.  Jon Snow will be back.

Patrick Garone
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Westeros Community College: Lyanna Stark and Consent

Game of Thrones and the book series on which it is based, A Song of Ice and Fire, have a complicated relationship with its women characters and the larger question of sexual consent which has been been moving to the forefront of American society in recent years.  In its depiction of a realistic quasi-medieval society, Game of Thrones has often presented some troubling images and plots, whether it is the disproportional amount of female nudity or the constant threat of sexual assault to many of its female characters (and the occasional male).  This came to head last season with a depiction of ambiguously consensual sex between incestuous lovers Jamie and Cercei Lannister, and this season with the rape of Sansa Stark.  In a show known for shocking incidents of violence and sadism, many have publicly wondered if the series had gone too far in depicting sexual violence against women and what, if anything useful the show has to say about this theme.

The main conceit of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is that it takes the trappings of fantasy literature and grounds them into a realistic setting, twisting your expectations of the genre.  Popular fantasy literature has a strong bent towards wish fulfillment, steeped in imagined worlds of chivalry, castles, dragons, and damsels in distress.  Ironically, this sort of fantasy literature is even present in the world of the books and show.  In his books, Martin has created a rich fantasy setting that is informed by the forces active in our own reality and history.  His imagined continent of Westeros has been forged by cross-cultural conflict, feudal economics, sexism, exploitation, and class warfare. It is a fully realized fantasy setting in which you wouldn't necessarily want to live. It has value in that it reflects and comments on our history and present, no matter how disturbing or ugly.

Largely, women in fantasy have either been absent or have been rescue-bait as in the prototypical fantasy novels of J. R. R. Tolkien.  For example, when adapting The Hobbit  into a movie trilogy Peter Jackson actually had to create a character so that his story could feature a female role. To his credit, George R. R. Martin has created many compelling female protagonists who are central to his story.  This is even more true of the TV series, which has further developed ancillary parts like Margaery and Brienne.  Unfortunately, these female characters are living in the same brutal world as the males and are in almost constant danger of sexual violence.  While unpleasant, this true to the brutal world that he has created, one which is informed by our own.  To somehow protect the female characters or to push the ugliness "offscreen" or to somehow grant them a protection that the others do not have would be doing them a disservice and ruin the integrity of this created world, who's whole reason to be is that it provides a gritty alternative to conventional fantasy.

Many people were outraged this season about the rape of Sansa Stark, which, while genuinely upsetting was (thankfully) not actually shown.  The rape of Sansa Stark by Ramsey Bolton was horrible but, let's be honest, it was not even the worst thing that Ramsey has done on the show.  This is a typically brutal and upsetting scene but given Sansa's storyline this season was almost inevitable.  Bringing Sansa back to Winterfell is a change from the books but one that potentially offers a more rewarding storyline for her than the one in the books, which has had her idling endlessly in the Eyrie.  Hopefully, that awful scene will be worth it.

The more I think about it, the idea of female sexual and marital consent is a central theme in Game of Thrones.  The show and the novels constantly come back to this idea and I would go as far as to say that it is the secret force that propels the story forward.  In a world in which daughters are used by powerful feudal lords as a commodity in which to build alliances, almost all of the female characters have been shaped by their experiences with this patriarchal trade system.  Cercei Lannister was forced by her father to marry the boorish King Robert and she spent years in a miserable marriage that helped turn her into a twisted bitter creature.  Her anger and resentment at being forced into that relationship has fueled many of the events in the book series.  Queen Margaery, on the other hand, has embraced this system and seems determined to use it to her advantage having survived (so far) three incompatible husbands in her quest to be queen.  Early on, Sansa Stark was willingly betrothed to the awful King Joffrey, then married off to his uncle against her will, and now (on the TV series, at least) is married to the psychotic Ramsey Bolton (although she married him as part of some vague plan for revenge).  Daenerys Targaryen is literally married off to a barbarian warlord as part of a scheme for her brother to gain an army.

When these marriage deals have gone bad, they have had bloody consequences.  Robb Stark's backing out of his marriage commitment to the Freys led to his own death and that of his bride, mother, and the decimation of his military forces.  Olenna Tyrell's disgust at the prospect of her granddaughter Margery's marriage to the monstrous Joffrey resulted in a king's murder.  As we all know, weddings on Game of Thrones are a violent business.

Even the series' most functional and loving relationship, that between Ned Stark and Catelyn Tully started out as an arranged marriage between Catelyn and Ned's brother, Brandon.  When Brandon was killed, their parents simply swapped in the next brother.  Catelyn didn't love him but it wasn't her choice to make.  Other characters like Arya and Brienne have managed to escape this system.

There is another woman who was willing to defy this system and who's choices actually shaped the entire landscape of Westeros: Lyanna Stark. Lyanna is the deceased sister of Ned Stark.  Ned thinks about her constantly in the first book.  Her importance is such, that she has even made the cut to be repeatedly mentioned on the TV show while other major characters and plots have been excised entirely.

Lyanna was betrothed to Robert Baratheon in one of those arranged marriages but was loved by the Targaryen heir, Rhaegar (Daenerys' eldest brother).  It is commonly believed in Westeros that she was abducted and raped by Rhaegar.  This is certainly the point-of-view that King Robert expresses in both the show and books.  However, sprinkled throughout the books and even the show are other clues.  For example, Daenarys describes her brother has having died for "the woman he loved."  Others describe Rhaegar's gentleness and nobility and generally hold him in very high esteem.

Although Robert was deeply in love with Lyanna, she (correctly) held doubts about his character and his ability to be a good husband.  Reading the clues in the first A Song of Ice and Fire book, it seems as though Lyanna had made up her mind and rejected him.  As far as I can tell, this is quite unprecedented among nobles in Westeros.  It certainly speaks to Lyanna being a strong and willful character, maybe a bit like her niece Arya (whom she is often said to resemble). If this is the case, she apparently never communicated her choice to Robert, who fourteen years later is still under the impression that they were in love and that she was abducted. Robert even grumbles about her having been buried in the Winterfell crypt instead of where he thought she should be buried.  But would there have been any point in telling Robert?  Would he have honored her choice?  It is also indicated that her father was insistent on the match.  Short of running off, there would have been no way for Lyanna's choice to have been honored.

Lyanna's relationship with Rhaegar had massive consequences for Westeros.  It was her "abduction" (as well as the killing of Rickard and Brandon Stark) which finally spurred the forces of the North to move against the Targaryens.  Remember, this conflict is remembered as Robert's Rebellion and Robert Baratheon was personally motivated to destroy the Targaryens (a project which still consumed him 14 years later, in fact this is the only matter of state which he is seen personally working on in either the show or book).  Robert met and killed Rhaegar on the battlefield.  Later, Ned tracked his sister to the Tower of Joy in Dorne where she was being defended by members of the Kingsguard.  When he finally made his way to her she was dying in a "bed of blood" and she elicited an unknown promise from him.

So, Lyanna Stark's revolutionary choice shaped the world of Westeros.  Ironically, Westerosi society is so sexist that most people cannot even conceive that this is what happened, instead choosing to believe, like Robert, that Lyanna Stark was simply a thing to be stolen, an object with no agency of her own instead of a woman with her own choices to make.  Unfortunately, Lyanna Stark's courage and defiance of Westeros' patriarchal system is a secret and her only legacy is a woman-shaped tomb in the Winterfell crypts.

THE FLASH SEASON 1 - IS IT FALL YET?

SEASON ONE SPOILERS FOR THE FLASH FOLLOW


Prior to last year, I had only a vague knowledge of the DC superhero called The Flash.  I'm sure I saw him on cartoons when I was a kid and I did watch the 1990 live-action TV series when it was on.  So, I went into the CW TV show with a fresh perspective, having never even seen Arrow, the show from which it is spun off.  I starting watching with the premiere last fall and it has quick become one of my must-watch shows.

Despite the veneer of CW-ness (a lot of blandly attractive young people in the cast) and occasional lapses into stupidity, the Flash has been a consistently solid show and just concluded its first season with a jaw-dropping finale.  That is quite a feat considering how long it takes most shows to find their footing (I'm looking at you Agents of SHIELD).  In it's first season The Flash has been apologetically fun, warm, and has embraced it bonkers comic book source material enthusiastically.  I like to describe it as having some of the feel of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies with it's young dorky hero and its not-too-serious tone.

Perhaps what has really elevated the show has been its gradually pulling the curtain back on a deep mythology both with its overarching season one antagonist, the temporally-displaced Reverse Flash and its hints at a larger universe of "Speed Force" using heroes and villains and the promise of a larger multiverse with potentially interesting spins on existing characters.  What I never knew about the Flash as a hero was his penchant for time-travel universe hopping which gives the show a really fun sci-fi angle that other superhero shows don't have.  Time travel and superheroes?  Yes, please.

The whole Reverse Flash storyline has been masterfully plotted and teased from the pilot on.  Even the handful of mediocre episodes have been saved by some tantalizing beat of this larger story. Kudos to Tom Cavanagh for his excellent portrayal of Dr. Harrison Wells/Eobard Thawne who is at once nurturing and malicious.  Despite his apparent villainy and his hatred of future Barry, Wells has a clear affection and pride for his team.  The show has done something really interesting with this character and made him much more than the one-dimensional villain he could have been.

In the second half of the season and the finale, time travel and alternate realities have played a big part of The Flash and the first season has ended on kind of an uncertain cliffhanger with a couple of main characters apparently dead, Central City about to be destroyed by a wormhole possibly due to a nasty temporal paradox.  Barry Allen seems to be on his way into this wormhole and who knows where he will end up?

The good thing is that The Flash seems to be hinting at a bigger multiverse with alternate versions of existing characters. In the finale Barry uses the speed force to travel back in time and sees some intriguing visions of familiar characters in unfamiliar circumstances.  Perhaps most interesting is that a costume piece from another version of The Flash-the original Jay Garrick 1940's incarnation of the character-comes flying out of the initial wormhole which indicates that there are other versions of The Flash out there.

Another interesting thing is the show's relationship to the 1990 Flash show.  This modern series has gone out of its way to refer back to its predecessor despite the fact that the original show was only on for a season and has largely been forgotten. This is primarily done by casting the actor who played the 1990 flash as Barry Allen's imprisoned father, Henry Allen.  More interestingly both Amanda Pays and Mark Hamil reprise their same roles from the previous show, making that show almost an alternate universe to the new show.  The show even utilized photos and costumes from Mark Hamil's Trickster character directly from the 1990 show.  It would be very interesting to see this explored in a future episode.

There's another major character to have assumed the role of The Flash and his name is Wally West. Many people noted that in the new show Barry's foster father and foster sister have the surname West in the new show.  It makes me wonder if we will see an alternate timeline where maybe Joe West is the one imprisoned and his child-in this continuity a boy named Wally-becomes the Flash.

With a show like the Flash, the possibilities are endless.  I mean, this show literally has a psychic gorilla in it.  I'm looking forward to seeing where things go in the new season.

A Star Wars Retrospective: Revenge of the Sith

There's a lot of excitement in the air about the upcoming Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.  Hopefully the movie can live up to the insane expectations and nerd rage in a way that the prequel movies did not.  Although seeing early reactions to the trailer does not not give me hope  ("What's up with that lightsaber?  It's DIFFERENT?!") Ten years ago this month, the final George Lucas Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, was released and while it is widely considered the best of the prequels, I would make the unpopular argument that it is in fact the best of all six original Star Wars movies.

People often say that director George Lucas is a genius at visual storytelling.  Usually this is stated in the context of his pioneering use of visual effects but he doesn't always get the credit he deserves for his wider use of visual film language-his composition, his use of intricate repeating visual motifs, his masterful pairing of imagery and music to evoke mood and story.  As a writer, he is also great at telling a macro story.  In their broad strokes, the movies in the prequel trilogy tell a complex and compelling tragedy of personal and organizational corruption that is far beyond anything in the original trilogy.  However, in some of the specifics of cinematic storytelling-writing dialogue and directing actors-Lucas' flaws as a director and storyteller are well documented.

Honestly, I think Lucas' mind is so visually-oriented that he really doesn't give much consideration to the finer points of acting and dialogue.  He probably considers them a necessary evil of narrative film making.  I think that if he could have gotten away with making his movies as purely visual and musical experiences he would have.

By the time George Lucas turned his attention to Revenge of the Sith, he had already delivered the first two movies of his trilogy.  People like to forget that The Phantom Menace was critically acclaimed and enjoyed upon its release but "fans" quickly turned on it (Again, "DIFFERENT!")  It is a movie that despite it's frequent childish detours is complex and plot-driven.  Attack of the Clones is a wildly uneven movie, featuring some of the best and very worst Star Wars sequences and burdened with the weight of a misdirected and badly-written love story. 

I imagine after the mixed reception to the prior two movies, the fact that this would likely be his last Star Wars movie, and the fact that Sith would contain some of the most dramatic and important story elements of the whole saga-the fall of the Republic, Anakin's turn to the dark side and subsequent duel with Obi-Wan, the destruction of the Jedi Order, the birth of Luke and Leia, etc-Lucas felt a responsibility to deliver the what would literally be his ultimate Star Wars movie.  And he largely succeeds.  Not only does Revenge of the Sith contain some of the saga's best sequences but it also among the least flawed and most satisfying movies of the series-along with the universally beloved The Empire Strikes Back. In Sith, there is evidence that Lucas actually listened to some of the complaints people had about the prior two movies.  You find less painful dialogue, almost no Jar-Jar, fewer distractingly-accented aliens,  and only one Anakin and Padme "romance" scene.

Where I think that Revenge of the Sith beats out everyone's favorite Star Wars movie is in the fact that it not only is the culmination of an epic and deeply tragic story but also in the fact that it exceeded and expanded the parameters of what a Star Wars movie could be.  Certainly it expanded the tonal and emotional palette of the Star Wars series.  There are a number of sequences in the movie that are emotionally powerful and resonant, which are not qualities normally associated with Star Wars or George Lucas..

Consider the beautiful scene in which Anakin and Padme gaze out in each other's direction over the Coruscant cityscape as Anakin wrestles with whether or not to follow the Jedi to Palapaine's office. At this point Anakin has discovered that one of his mentors and closest friends is the Sith Lord that for whom the Jedi have been searching for ten years.  And also the man who claims to have the power to save his wife whom Anakin fears will die in childbirth.  Meanwhile Padme stares out at the Jedi Temple worried about her secret husband who has been acting edgy fearful under the stress of his responsibilities and difficult position that the Jedi have put him in. The two are looking in each other's direction but are disconnected as haunting vocal music plays in the background.  This short dialogue-free scene says more about their relationship than all of their other "romantic" scenes put together.  Can you imagine anything this sophisticated in any of the original trilogy movies?

Later on in the movie is a scene of Leia and Luke's birth brilliantly intercut with Anakin's tortuous transformation in Darth Vader.  The Anakin sequence is powerfully composed with some unforgettable shots like the final partial glimpse of his terrified and scarred face as he is encased in the iconic mask or the chilling shot of Vader's first breath.  There's nothing as powerful as this in any of the other Star Wars movies.

There are many other amazing scenes like this such as the tragic Order 66 sequence-which I believe is the first and only montage in a Star Wars movie.  There's also the long-awaited battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan on the Hellish world of Mustafar which is tragic and thrilling (although marred by some dumb dialogue in typical Lucas fashion).  Who can forget Palpatine's chilling speech on the Senate floor marking the foundation of the Galactic Empire.

Despite many people's dislike of the prequels, most will agree that Ian McDiarmid was amazing as Palpatine and in Sith he really gets to move to the forefront of the movie.  From his Return of the Jedi-esque goading of Anakin to kill Dooku, to his mesmerizing scene telling the tale of Darth Plagueis, McDiarmid makes Palapatine a dangerous and slippery villain.  I especially enjoyed his duel with Yoda in the Senate Dome, which amounts to an epic political battle for the fate of the Galaxy.

McDiarmid is good that he even makes the problematic Anakin character work better.  I don't think Hayden Christiansen is a bad actor at all.  I think that the writing and direction of this character really hurt his performance in Attack of the Clones, especially because so much of that movie was mired in some truly awful scenes with Natalie Portman.  Anakin works a lot better in Sith because he is paired with McDiarmid for so much of the movie.  While Anakin's arc is missing a few beats in my opinion, it is dramatically sound and it works if you accept that he is kind of a dumb, arrogant, psychologically damaged twenty-year old who has fallen under the spell of a master manipulator.  I mean, we've all been there, right?

Where I think people really misunderstand these movies is the fact that they are essentially a three part tragedy with science fiction window dressing.  Tragedy is a genre that had never really caught on in the movies but one which has a strong theatrical and literary tradition. Oedipus, MacBeth, Faust-these are all men of noble character who are betrayed by fatal character flaw often exploited by a scheming antagonist.  The consequences of these heroes falls are always big and lead to some great emotional catharsis for the audience.  The Star Wars prequels are clearly part of that tradition with Anakin Skywalker being an almost prototypical tragic protagonist down to his being brought down by an insurmountable character flaw.  Part of the criticism of the prequels being melodramatic and overblown are due to an unfamiliarity with tragedy genre.  Today's audiences are used to smaller characters making mundane discoveries in a domestic setting.

The Empire Strikes Back was the first Star Wars movie I ever saw and it is a big part of my childhood.  To this day I love it and think that it is a great movie but I believe that after the dust has settled and we movie farther away from people's knee-jerk reactions to the prequel trilogy,  Revenge of the Sith will be remembered as the greatest of the original six Star Wars movies.  It has an epic scope, an almost Shakespearean level of tragedy, and an emotional richness that is not only rare in the series but in the sci-fi genre as a whole.  Hopefully future directors of Star Wars movies will take note of how Revenge of the Sith took Star Wars on its first steps into a larger world.


Patrick Garone
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My First Trip Out

NOTE:  This blog entry was actually written many many years ago.

When I was twenty-four, I got this idea in my head that I would leave the country. I was working in the call center at Apple Vacations at the time and I was very unhappy with my life. I spent thirty-five hours a week sitting in a cubicle like a veal calf, I was making very little money, I had left school the year before, I was in a relationship for which I was not emotionally prepared.  Also, I wasn’t doing theater at the time, which prior to that had been a big part of my life and identity. Also, the year 2000 was approaching and there was a weird mood in the air. People were seriously talking about all of the computers crashing due to the Y2K glitch. Our high-tech existence was looking decidedly unglamorous, even dangerous. I was genuinely worried about it. The idea of going somewhere less developed was appealing.

Now, I get a lot of weird impulses but this one was sticking. Between calls at work, I was reading Gary Jennings novel Aztec, a novel steeped in wanderlust. I read Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat in much the same spirit. I read Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, which detailed the young revolutionary’s trip around South America. They made me burn to get away. After all, the most exotic place I had visited was San Diego, where I got my picture taken in a sombrero. My boyfriend at the time was from Peru. He would always tell me about his country: Machu Picchu, The Nazca Lines, Lake Titicaca, The Amazon, and The Andes. All in one country. Peru was exotic, far-away, and affordable. The more I read about it the more I wanted to go.

So one day I decided I would go to Peru. I don’t know exactly how it happened but it was though a switch had been flipped. I would start my South American Grand Tour in Peru. I had these very ambitious plans to go to Brazil and Argentina, and up north. So I sold what little I owned and bought my ticket to Lima. On $500, I was going to see South America.

My ticket came in an exciting flat FedEx envelope. I had never received anything in an envelope like this before. It made me feel important. I opened it and pulled out my ticket. Holding it in my hand was exiting and scary. Understand, I talk about a lot of stuff that I don’t actually do. There was the robot I was going to build; the theater company I was going to start; the novel I was going to write. I’m a very ambitious person who also happens to be very lazy. But now, I had this ticket and I actually had to go through with it. I felt like I was holding the end of a giant rubber band that was going to snap me over the equator.

BE CAREFUL IN LIMA

Because I was going to Lima, my boyfriend's family here in Chicago wanted to use me as a courier to bring some stuff to the family members in Peru, so, they sent with me a huge suitcase full of clothes and other items. My boyfriend's father even dropped me off at the airport. And he felt the need to apologize in advance for all the bad things that would happen to me:

"Lima," he paused thinking of the best was to put it, "Lima is a very poor city. People are very poor there. Just be careful."

At the airport, I wrote my father a long letter that explained that I was leaving the country for an indefinite amount of time because I was fundamentally unhappy with my life. He kept the letter for many years, referring to it as a “suicide note,” the final and incontrovertible proof that I am in fact mentally unstable. I wrote that I would call him when I got settled and for him not to worry too much about me.

I arrived in Lima late at night. I showed the officials my virginal passport and walked out into the night, into Peru. There was an absolutely huge crowd of people behind a series of metal and concrete partitions. There was a riot of noise. It actually reminded me of old footage of the Beatles when they came to America in 64. I was to meet my then-boyfriend’s uncle and cousins. But I couldn’t pick them out of the crowd. All I had to identify them with was an old picture. I waited and waited. I finally saw someone holding a sign that said Gennaro. I walked up to them and tried to communicate in my broken Spanish. We managed to work out that I was in fact Gennaro, although technically I am not Gennaro. The family consisted of a married couple and their two unmarried young adult children, male and female.

We drove to their home in a rickety van. The area surrounding the airport was scary and depressing at night. Was the whole city like this? We arrived at the family’s home and they served me crackers and Gatorade in a hasty late night reception. Why do people in foreign countries like crackers so much?

When I woke up the first morning after my late night arrival I felt what I can only describe as glorious dislocation. It’s the intoxicating feeling of being far from your home and everything you know. It was the opposite of homesickness. I seriously couldn’t believe I had gone through with it.

I spent a lot of time in Lima. About two months, actually. During the first month I stayed with my host family, who took very good care of me. In the second month, I rented a room at a nearby boarding house filled with strange characters. The building was owned by an old couple who lived in the shadowy and baroque first floor filled with mahogany furniture and fine china. In the afternoons they would take tea. I felt like I was trapped in an Isabelle Allende novel.

I took my time exploring the city. Or just talking to people for hours after meals. That’s how I learned Spanish: From talking to people. I was fascinated by things that were both extraordinary and totally mundane. I would spend an enormous amount of time just walking around the grocery store. I was fascinated by all the little ways it was different from a grocery store in the U.S. Or the fact that nowhere in Lima was there a laundromat in the sense that I am used to. They have places where you can drop your clothes off to be washed but nowhere where you can wash your own clothes. It’s the little differences that fascinated me. I call it the Royale with Cheese Effect.

It wasn’t all so mundane. Around the city are ancient step pyramids, or huacas, just sitting there in the middle of high-rise hotels and residential towers. The modern and the ancient side-by-side. In the city are archeological sites that are often little more than extensive fields of rubble, reminding me of the opening sequence of The Exorcist and it’s blasted Mesopotamian landscape.

Lima is also known for the glory of its colonial architecture as it was once the capital of all of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. There are many building in the Arab-inspired mudejar style. And also some lovely gothic touches like the system of creepy catacombs under the cathedral of San Francisco filled with rows of skulls and bones. Apparently there is a whole system of colonial era tunnels running beneath El Centro.

I got pretty good at navigating the city by way of buses and combis. For those of you who may not be familiar with Latin American city life a combi is a very old bus, possibly a decommissioned school bus that races around the city at breakneck speeds usually with a guy hanging off the side barking out the stops. Although the combis and microbuses have their routes, it is not an official service. Again, theres no bus system in the sense that we are used to. And a taxi is any car with a sign in the window that says Taxi. Crossing the street was like an extreme adventure sport.

Foods and services are cheap. Haircuts, meals, lodging, taxis, are all available for ridiculously cheap prices. Electronics and high end products are actually more expensive than their counterparts in the U.S. Internet access was readily available and very cheap. While there is much poverty in Lima parts of the city are chic and well off, city blocks seemingly airlifted from Miami. And, of course, well-tended suburbs which are about the same all over the world.

One day I took a bus too far. I was trying to reach the ruins of Pachacamac outside of the city (It struck me later that this is Lima’s analogue to Mexico City’s Teotihuacan ruins.) I was supposed to transfer but I ended up taking the Arequipa bus to the end of the line, or in this case, the end of civilization. We left the city behind and were soon winding through the hilly dunes that surround Lima, at times coming dangerously close to going over the edge. The surprising thing was that there were people living here. Not just people but a whole community. I say community because this was no shantytown. This was the embryo of a village. People were living in this dusty, dry, inhospitable place. A place where water had to be imported in huge trucks. They might as well have been living on Mars. This place, and I don’t even know the name of it, has stayed with me for years. The dust, the skanky dogs, the homemade intruder deterrents by way of shards of broken bottles and glass cemented on top of walls. I have never seen people have to struggle so much just for the basic necessities of survival. I am forever regretful that I did not have a camera with me. But then again I don’t know how photography would have gone over there. I think my very alien presence was pushing it enough.

VENTURING OUT

By this time I had already been in Lima for about two months and was getting comfortable in a way that made me feel embarrassed as a backpacker so I decided I had better get busy seeing some more of the country so I left, by myself for Cusco via bus. This was incredibly stupid for several reasons. Primarily, in order to get to Cusco from Lima by way of land you have to go halfway down the Pacific coast and go back inland through the Andes and back up north. This was a long trip and I was probably the loneliest I have ever been in my life.

I took a bus to Pisco where I thought I would hook up with some fellow travelers. I didn’t meet anybody there. It was mostly locals with a hawkish attitude towards tourists.

“Hey, buddy, Senor Americano You want a tour? We take you to Paracas reserve. C’mon?”

“Wanna buy some Pisco?”

“You looking for a room, joven?”

“You looking for a girl, meester?”

Mass tourism is prostitution of the land and culture. This dusty little town was nothing more than a place for people setting off from Lima down the coast. It was a place to arrange tours to the nearby nature reserve or to the famous Nasca Lines. It was a desperate low rent tourist town. I immediately missed Lima which has a bad enough reputation to scare away all the tourists and consequently you can spend time there and have a real cultural experience. You can talk to people who are not trying to hustle you at every turn. You can make friends in Lima.

I went and got the cheapest room I could find in Pisco. Actually to call it a room gives it too much credit. It was more of a cell with a mattress. Because it was in Latin America it was painted in a bold primary color yet it put its own depressing spin on it as it was a dark dingy red, the color of an old scab. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had to walk through the continuously leaky washrooms to get to this room.

I moved on by bus through a series of coastal towns. Going south on the Pan American highway, through Ica and Nasca and the vast coastal desert that runs the length of Peru and actually the whole continent. During the day, it resembles the coast of California. By night, the landscape is eerie and lunar.

I arrived in the large city of Arequipa early in the morning. Arequipa is called the white city because it is made from the local white colored volcanic rock. The city lies at the foot of Misti, a giant dormant volcano. Here we leave the flat desert behind and get into the dry foothills of the Andes mountain range. I spent my afternoon exploring the city’s most famous attraction, the town-sized monastery of Santa Catalina with its beautiful European styled cobblestone streets and vividly colored walls. Most of the monastery is now open to the public but about of quarter of it is still closed and houses its nuns.

I met some people further down past Arequipa, around Juliaca but made no real connections with them. I merely tagged along, a nervous not entirely accepted herd animal. I wasn’t able to insinuate myself into the teeming backpacker culture the way I had hoped. My traveling companions and I-I no longer remember their names or anything about them-rented a microbus and made our way through the Andes to Cusco. We drove through the storybook landscape of mountains and terraced hills and grazing Llamas and Alpacas. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of the British highlands. Later when I saw the Lord of the Rings movies I immediately thought of Peru. 

We arrived in Cusco during the Easter week and the city (which I later learned to love) was overcrowded and filthy. I became ill from the high altitude and the hilly cobblestone streets. Cusco is very hilly and going anywhere involves lost of climbing and descending its winding streets. I was getting sick of traveling but I had come this far and had to see the sights of the Sacred Valley of the Incas, at the end of which was the great prize of Machu Picchu. I broke with my companions and made for Pisac, the first town on the way to Machu Picchu. Alone, I hitched a ride up to the ruins that overlook the town. This was the highlight of my trip. The ruins are vast and spread out through a path that cuts through the mountains and looks down on the small valley town below. I felt like Indiana Jones for about an hour.

I stopped at a down father down the valley where one of my books staid that there were ruins high up in the mountains along a hidden path. Getting there involved constant hiking and consultation of my map and compass. I tried to scale the gravelly mountain side but only succeeded in getting myself lost. I gave up after a couple of hours and made my way back down the mountain and back to the main drag.

I caught a bus to Ollantaytambo, the last town before heading to Machu Picchu. This was the most alien place that I had ever been. The town is one of the few that kept the original pre-Spanish layout and many of the buildings date back to Inca times. A series of Inca viaducts still bring water down from the snowy mountain tops, so there are many little stone channels running mountain water throughout the town. Ollantaytambo was cold and gloomy but attractive in its own strange way. Looming above the town are the ruins of a colossal fort but I was too tired to explore them and my feet were killing me from my ill-fitting hiking boots (they at least looked good.)

The next morning I made my way to the entrance to the Machu Picchu trail and I basically gave up. I couldn’t go on. My feet hurt and most of all I couldn’t face doing the three day hike on my own. I was terribly lonely and homesick. I headed back to Cusco, humbled. I hung out there for a few days to recuperate and bought my ticket to Lima.

This time the grueling overland trip was made worse by an earthquake outside of Arequipa. My bus was stranded for fifteen hours on the side of the road waiting for boulders to be removed so that we could proceed. By the time I arrived back in Lima, I was filthy and smelled worse than I think I ever had in my life.

I called and got my ticket changed so that I could leave early. Again, it arrived in a flat envelope. Again, I would be slung shot out over the equator. This time, back to my home, where I could reset my life. So, that’s the story of my first trip to Peru, during which I spent a lot of time in Lima and did not see Machu Picchu.

I guess I’m thinking about this because of some of the books I have been reading lately. Most recently read a book called Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer that detailed the short and idealistic life of a young man named Chris McCandless who ventured out on an epic trip across the country and ended up starving to death in an old school bus in the Alaskan taiga. I read The Beach about Gen X Western backpackers who go to Thailand and set up a community on a hidden beach. I also read The Mosquito Coast about a man who takes his whole family to the jungles of Belize because of his disgust of what America has become.

They are all, one way or the other about malcontents who seek to escape the developed world and its problems and I see a little of myself in all three protagonists. The fact is that if I didn’t have my theatrical work here to anchor me, I probably wouldn’t be living here in the States. One day I may decide that I would rather spend my time writing and the nice thing about that is that I can do THAT anywhere.

I often imagine what it would be like to be an expatriate. Living in some village or another, being El Yanqui. But I wonder if those people really fit in anywhere. Can you ever really be accepted into another country, especially if you carry all of the baggage that comes with being from the United States? One of the reasons I have so much respect for immigrants is that it takes real courage to leave your country and live somewhere else. I don’t know if I have that kind of strength. So for the time being I stay in the land of Freedom and Cheeseburgers.

The High Cost of Righteousness

This blog post is based on a Lay Speaker talk given at The Buddhist Temple of Chicago in March 2015.


Recently, I was working on a comedy project that featured a Buddhist character.  When I write comedy, I’m always very interested in exploring flaws in my characters as a way to make them interesting and realistic. So this project got me to thinking: what are the flaws associated with Buddhists?  Because there are a lot of stereotypes floating out there about other religions but not so many about us.  We have, I think, a pretty good rep in the world.  

Thinking about this question, it reminded me of that topic that always comes up in a job interview where the interviewer invites the candidate to describe their weaknesses.  Usually people say stuff like “Well, sometimes I care too much” or “Maybe I work too hard.”  Those are the kinds of nonanswers that I was thinking for Buddhists:  Maybe we're too serene?  Too nice?  After a while of pondering this question I realized that there is a perception out there that we think we are very enlightened and have it all figured out.  Obviously, that’s untrue.  If we were all enlightened we probably wouldn’t need to be Buddhists.

I think a good personal example of this flaw in action is that sometimes my partner-who is not a Buddhist-will be bothered by something, maybe he has spent a long time on the phone fighting with Comcast about our cable bill.  He’ll be there visibly aggravated and I will breeze into the room calmly and say something like, “You know, you really shouldn’t let it bother you so much.  It’s really not that important in the grand scheme of things. Just breathe.” This usually earns me at least a dirty look.  While I was technically right, the last thing you want when you are all worked up about something is some smug bastard coming along and telling you what you should be feeling.  Or when I feel like we are heading into an argument I’ll say things like, “You know, I really don’t like pointless conflict.” Again, while correct, not a super welcome statement in that context. It’s a fine line that we walk between Right Living and being really annoying and insufferable

Prior to settling at the Buddhist Temple of Chicago in my explorations of Buddhism, I’ve met what to me were a shocking number of Buddhists who were arrogant know-it-alls.  To an extent this is understandable when you have a population with so many converts.  I’m a convert myself and I know that impulse to want to impress with a lot of facts and scriptural familiarity.  As someone who is not practicing his legacy religion, often times I feel like I have to defend myself from people’s skepticism.  It’s understandable that people would sometimes feel the need to overcompensate.

That need to be the smartest person in the room has to be recognized for what it is.  And I know that that impulse comes from a deep insecurity because, while I have tried to maintain a healthy ignorance about Buddhism, I have years of experience being a know-it-all about many many other subjects. Sometimes, I will listen to myself and I will be like, “Why are you talking?”

I know from personal experience that being a know-it-all is a very selfish proposition although it’s easy to convince yourself that that is not the case when you are in the middle of it. It may seem like you are focused on something external but really it’s all about the Self because it feels gratifying to acquire and master information.  Especially now, it is customary to greedily consume knowledge.  And we often use that knowledge to bolster our Selves.  The Self will arm itself information in order to fight and argue to prove that it is right.  Because being right is a justification for the Self's very existence.    But being right all the time is a very expensive proposition in what it costs to our interpersonal relationships.

As I said, when I write comedy, I love to explore character flaws and I think this exploration is in line with what Buddhist practice requires.  We are just as flawed as anyone else but our practice requires honest, self-reflection and mindfulness.  I'm working on that first big step to enlightenment when you realize when you are being a smug know-it-all and you are able to take a step back and say, "Dude, what's wrong with you?"