Why Are People Consuming Less New Music?

Last year Ted Gioia penned an interesting piece about the declining proportion of music sales for which newly created music accounts. In considering the matter I am not so sure that, as he tells us, this is no reflection of the quality of that music. (I defer to the scientific finding that—with less timbral variety and pitch content, louder, more repetitive--it is indeed getting worse, a bombastic yet flat sameness helped along by the degree to which, as Gioia himself has had prior occasion to remark, critics have become claqueurs.)

However, I do think he is right to emphasize the way in which the industry's executives have conducted themselves--sticking with the old and familiar as they mine it for whatever additional profits they can and displaying the rankest laziness and cowardice with regard to the hard work, and risk-taking, involved in discovering and cultivating new talent, and new creations. Admittedly the Suits have always done this--as Balzac makes clear in his portrait of the utterly vile Parisian publishing king Dauriat. Yet the tendency to this behavior seems to have just gone on getting more and more extreme across the entire range of the entertainment-industrial complex, from the movies (where every one of the top ten hits at the North American box office last year was a sequel or remake), to TV (where you can barely tell what decade it is from the line-up), to fiction (where the thriller writers whose names you see on the paperback rack are Patterson, Grisham, Clancy, Cussler--just as was the case back in the twentieth century).

I know the world of music journalism less well than I do those others, but unless it is very different from what prevails in those other areas (where suck-up entertainment reporters write as if they expect every last one of us to grow incontinent with enthusiasm at the announcement of each and every new remake of some classic), I applaud his readiness to criticize the industry. Noteworthy, too, is his sparing a word for what hard times it means for those musicians struggling to "make it," which struggles he acknowledges as meaning something for the culture we live in, and meriting some sympathy--a thing even rarer in our journalism. After all, certainly where print fiction is concerned we almost never see anyone with the standing of Gioia spare a thought for the creatives who have not yet made their names--the default mode instead a sniveling defense of how publishing treats them, and sneers at those who aren't "professionals" yet as worth no one's time, with the "liberal" Guardian and Salon disgracing themselves by publishing particularly nasty pieces of aspiring writer-bashing by the bitter little trolls who had once been slush pile readers. ("The shocking truth about the slush pile" declared the title of the Guardian piece. Rather it was a reminder that we are long past the day when people like Balzac or London could tell the truth about such things in fiction or nonfiction, confirming the not-at-all-shocking truth that their industry, and the media generally, like the society we live in generally, operate by what Carl Sagan called the "Tin Rule": "Suck up to those above you and abuse those below you.") If anything, Gioia's not swimming with this filthy tide merits at least as much applause as his readiness to call out his industry's insiders.

Greg Poehler and Sweden's "Celebrity Culture" (or Lack of One)

Some years ago Amy Poehler's brother Greg offered some "big thinks" about the differences between Sweden and America. They did not strike me as brilliant. But it did strike me as interesting that he thought it worth noting that the Swedes had a different view of celebrities as not "better" than anybody else.

After all, there was a time when Americans were regarded as living in an egalitarian society compared to Old World Europe--when, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, hailing from a France where, if with a king still on the throne and the Old Regime die-hards still pretending they could turn the clock back to the days when "it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever" in their favor, it was becoming ever clearer to most that democracy was getting the upper hand.

By contrast it is now Americans like Greg who are surprised at the egalitarianism of Old World countries (even with their social democratic values in an advanced state of decay) compared to that of the New World U.S., so much so that they spell out, with surprise, that they don't think some people are "better" than everyone else.

This is not an insignificant change--and indeed says a lot about what has happened in an America where since at least the middle of the last century the spectrum of politics has run from a conservative "center" to a hard right, with the whole consistently edging rightwards over time. Indeed, the very words in which he expressed himself are telling, the Swedes (to his apparent surprise) thinking "nobody's better than anybody else." Just like the tendency to say that a person is "worth" the net value of their financial assets, that we so casually refer to people as "better" than others--not "better" at performing some particular task, or a "better" person morally, but all-around "better" by virtue of being higher up in a socioeconomic hierarchy, of how much money they have or who their parents were--bespeaks just how deeply rooted, and how unnoticed is that rooting, is the most traditionally inegalitarian view of the world in contemporary America.

For anyone remotely progressive in their politics, or even simply alert to the ideals of classical liberalism on which the United States was founded, awareness of that fact should prompt some hard thinking.

Notes on the State of Self-Publishing

How are self-published authors of fiction as a whole doing these days? I mean, in a big-picture way?

I have to admit that I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. No one's collecting the relevant data, with even anecdotal data scarcer these days than it used to be--and less accessible, thanks to what the "enshittified" search engines yield when we go looking. All we get are hucksters trying to sell self-publishing services, and elitist bullies punching down at anyone eschewing the traditional publishing route closed to 99.9 percent of us (however much said bullies and their duck-talking colleagues refuse to admit it)--but I would imagine that self-published authors, in spite of the hype, never seem to have actually met with much success as a group, are doing even worse than they were a decade ago for three reasons:

1. I suspect that people are reading less fiction than before--that other media are eating more and more into people's consumption of fiction. The smart phone seems to me a significant development here, making people able to distract them with anything else wherever they are, while actually being more conducive to TV watching or video game-playing than reading--such that it seems to me no coincidence that the Young Adult book boom went bust about the time that smart phone ownership among the young reached the point of saturation. Meanwhile the situation would only seem to have worsened since then--as people's habits changed, and younger persons, indeed, never had the chance to make a habit of reading. I suspect, too, that the pandemic and other associated stresses of recent years have left people looking for "lower hanging fruit" in their entertainment, with activities like gaming winning out over reading. (Reader that I am, I have to admit that even I often find it easier to get into some old video game, especially when tired or distracted.) And where all this is concerned it stands to reason that those writers most marginal within the market--the self-published--will take a particularly hard hit, especially when one remembers that the self-published did best in the light reading, "genre" fiction market, which depends so much on people having the habit of reading and casually consuming books as a matter of course in the way that all those entertainment alternatives make less likely.

2. E-books have done less well than hoped circa 2010. This was partly a matter of genuinely exaggerated expectations, partly a matter of the control publishers have exerted over the pricing of such books (diminishing a key attraction they have had), and partly, again, the smart phone--which very easily defeated the e-reader in the contest to be the one electronic device people carried around (just as, for example, the tablet has suffered). Of course, this can be seen as affecting all of publishing, but it has to be remembered that given the kinds of lighter fare they offered, and the reality that 99 cent e-books and nearly cost-free giveaways were one of the few things that the self-published could do when trying to compete with traditional publishing, they suffered disproportionately, sales of the more costly print editions to which the book buyer is less easily tempted simply not rising to compensate. (And again, that the self-published were doing best in the area of lighter reading was a problem, because people were a lot more likely to do that kind of thing on an e-reader than attempt heavier reading there. Few dare read War and Peace in any format; but I suspect fewer still dare to do it on a Kindle, and fewer of those who make the attempt persist in it up to the end.)

3. The Internet just keeps becoming more completely and securely gatekept than before, diminishing the chances of the self-published to be discovered. Consider, for instance, how the self-published novelist was supposed to give readers a chance to discover their book. They could not remotely begin to compete with the Big Five where marketing budgets were concerned. Very likely they had no "industry connections." The review pages in a place like the New York Times were closed to them. But there was social media. And there were a lot of book bloggers online. Of course, as is generally the case with this kind of thing one would have to work much harder for a much smaller return--and indeed, a great many of the usual idiots promoted one-in-a-million success stories based on such endeavors as if they were some sort of reasonable plan for the many, with the usual cruel result. But it was something. And now with social media and the search engines becoming less friendly to this kind of activity, there is much less of that something--to the particular cost of the self-published author.

In short, the fact of less fiction reading, especially of the habitual, casual kind; the softness of interest in the e-book; and the gatekeeping of the scene; have kept the marginalized, marginalized, if not worsened the situation to such a degree that I suspect fewer and fewer writers are being tempted to take this route.

Of course, as I said previously these are suspicions. And so while everything put up here is presented with an invitation to the reader to comment (if, given the way the game is being reached, this piece indeed manages to reach any reader) I will specifically say here that anyone with knowledge, experience or simply opinions about the matter is invited to offer their two cents in the comments thread below.

The Revenge of "Gentlemen's History?"

Some years ago Michael Parenti coined the term "gentlemen's history" to refer to the generally self-congratulatory historiography produced by, of and for a society's elite, justifying and flattering itself and promulgating its prejudices--while shutting out everything not conducive to that. (Thus are we expected to see in a collection of pleb-hating patricians given to the most unbearably pompous oratory the height of civilization, and in the doings of "Great Men" the sole cause of everything that ever mattered.)

For most of history, gentlemen's history was the norm, and it never vanished. It is still the foundation of what most people get in school; what they are likely to see in the kind of popular history that will be seen plugged on C-SPAN's BookTV and get authors on the bestseller list. Still, it is one of the advances of the past century that historiography has grown beyond this. If the research and publishing of history, like the publishing of anything else, never really became open to all, it is less exclusively aristocratic in its authorship, and its focus. And for all its many flaws (like the hierarchy and orthodoxy that prevail in academic life, giving it at times a clerical atmosphere in the least flattering sense of the term) academic history has had something to do with that, creating opportunities for other kinds of work, of which some have made good use. Thus do we now have images of the life of the past that are not just about the 0.1 percent with the rest reduced to extras whose joys and sufferings are of no account, while also having more than reactionary homily or "patriotic" indoctrination at its worst as explanation of events.

Of course, in a period in which universities are in trouble, and the humanities in particular withering for lack of interest from students, administrators, donors, policymakers--indeed, from hostility in many cases (there's no shortage of those who would like to see the universities and colleges reduced to a purely technical-occupational training system)--this can seem in growing jeopardy. Indeed, looking at the state of hiring in the field certain ideological hacks are gloating over the decline of the humanities, and the death of academic history, among whom the author of one particularly mean-spirited piece gloated over the return of history again being the exclusive purview of aristocratic amateurs as the lower-class folks who had hoped to be historians have to go "get real jobs" as, barring a miraculous stroke of luck that elevates them to the rank of dutiful courtier to a better-born patron, they renounce the life of intellect and culture above their lowly stations, while the field is purified of any of that silly social concern.

I am certainly convinced that American higher education cannot go on as it is now--but it is my hope that the humanities will manage to endure on campus, precisely because society needs them now as much as ever it did.

The Decline of the Humanities Major on American Campuses

Recently checking on the myth of STEM worker shortages I looked at what areas the American system of higher education is awarding degrees in--and found that the past decade has seen an absolute and relative surge in the degrees awarded in STEM fields, with this going not just for international students in the U.S. simply to study, but U.S. citizens--a change the more striking as there is no evidence of any great expansion of job opportunity in the relevant areas, improvement in the associated pay and conditions, or for that matter, improvement in the preparation of students for these courses of study. At the same time I was struck by the collapse in the number of students majoring in English--whose numbers fell from some 50,000 in the 1990s and 2000s to under 40,000 in 2018-2019, and just 38,000 in 2019-2020, which is to say from over 3 percent of degrees awarded to under 2 percent of them--with this seemingly indicative of a broader collapse of study of the humanities.

Just what is going on?

It seems plausible to imagine that the propaganda for STEM, STEM, STEM!, combined with the endless bashing of the humanities as economically useless, in a context where hard-pressed students are facing rising costs for and falling returns to college degrees (to the point of producing a situation akin to financial bubble), is having its effect on their choices. Distorted as the view is (the economic benefits of STEM degrees are oversold, and so too the image of the English degree as a ticket to working behind the Starbucks counter), students acting in this manner can still be judged as responding reasonably (at least, within the limits of the information available to them).

Still, there may be less reasonable factors in this behavior.

There is how the humanities have, I think, been damaged by postmodernism--by its obscurantism and its reactionary, misanthropic, divisive politics.

There is, too, the fact that people are not going to be tempted by the humanities unless they actually feel some attraction to things like literature, history, culture, the "life of the mind"--and I suspect that all this is withering in today's society. This is partly because of the anti-intellectualism in which American society is awash (turbo-charged by the direction of our politics); partly the debased level of a popular culture that is ever more audio-visual, disposable and frankly "dumbed down" (even the music we listen to, which is simpler, louder and more repetitive); and partly the failures of K-12 education in these areas (which get so much less attention than its failures in STEM).

Additionally, say what you will, the opening up of access to college has not gone along with access to those conditions that permit students to devote themselves to their studies. The majority of today's students are not leading leisurely lives on New England college greens but have their hands full with work and family responsibilities, and in many cases are dealing with genuine hardship. Perhaps one in three college students suffer "food insecurity" during their college careers. One in seven college students is homeless. And others who may be neither are selling their blood for the money with which to buy textbooks. When this is the case, is it any wonder that many have little to spare for the intellectualism that is an essential for an interest in the humanities? Indeed, as the longstanding epidemic of plagiarism of student papers demonstrates, while we are endlessly beaten over the head with "aspirational" stories of "triumph over adversity" (indeed, that such aspirationalism passes for "liberalism" today says about what that liberalism has come to, and in some sense always was) a far more common reality is students in very difficult circumstances trying to brazen their way through the system to that piece of paper they are told is their sole way out of the dead-end life they have already suffered too much from--and we must never forget that for a second if we are serious about discussing the very real problems posed by the state of higher education today.

The Decline of Book Blogging?

Not long ago I discussed here why I thought it was the case that the independent blogger, an individual who is not famous and does not have the benefit of association with a big platform, leaving them with nothing to commend them but their thoughts and words, had a sharply decreasing chance of finding an appreciable audience. The web was getting more crowded, the audiovisual was taking increasing presence over the written word, the dynamics of search engines were favoring past success over newcomers, etc., etc.--and of course, the search engines were being "enshittified," favoring paying advertisers over everyone else.

Certainly this has seemed to me evident in the area of book reviews. Previously searching for reviews of a book took me to . . . actual reviews of that book. Now it takes me to book retailers. These retailers often make a place for customer reviews. But the hodgepodge of customer reviews were rarely a substitute for the reviews I used to see. (There are jewels among them that would do credit to any publication--but most are frankly slight, stupid and often irrelevant to anyone interested in a conventional book review, as with the many, many, many reviews that consist entirely of someone complaining about the physical condition of the particular copy of the book they received and saying nothing of the content. Yes, the physical condition of a retailer's books are a legitimate topic of discussion, but no, this is not what people are usually looking for when they use a search engine to look for reviews of a book.) Moreover, the search engine would take me to the retailers even when those retailers did not actually have a single review for the book I wanted to know more about in the allotted space.

Besides wasting my time this elevation of the retailers in the list of search hits also demoted all the places that actually had book reviews--which of course makes them much less likely to get clicks and, subject as they are to the vicious circle that characterizes search engine algorithm operation over time, shoved down the list of search hits yet again.

All of this is, of course, irksome for people who are interested in books. It is worse than that for those who want to share their thoughts on a book with others--or, like self-published authors lacking big budgets and access to the mainstream publicity channels, depend on book bloggers to give them a chance of coming to wider public attention. And it is just one small example of the destruction of the search engine as a tool for actually . . . searching, with all it means for the connectivity the Internet was supposed to provide its users, as the dreams of the cyber-utopians of old die that little bit much more.

An Anomalous Founding Work: Stephen Coonts' The Flight of the Intruder

Especially in light of its early appearance (1986), massive success (28 weeks on the New York Times' hardcover fiction bestseller list) and Coonts' subsequent long train of sequels continuing the adventures of its protagonist, Jake Grafton, it is so common to treat Stephen Coonts' Flight of the Intruder as a founding work of the techno-thriller genre that few consider how anomalous it is as a work in that category. Typically the techno-thriller is the story of "the next war"; this one was a story of the last, arguably a Vietnam War story that simply happened to be exceptionally heavy on the technological detailing of carrier-based aerial operations during that conflict.

Indeed, the story was in its specific theme particularly connected with post-Vietnam "angst" over the war's ghosts and demons of the sort that helped make Rambo: First Blood Part II the action hit of the decade just the year before, and more generally saturated popular culture at the time. Just as in the film version of Rambo (a very different thing from the book), Vietnam is presented as a war that American servicepersons were not allowed to win—undermined by the lack of will on the part of the very government that sent them, with Grafton and his comrades condemned to flying what he sees as one meaningless sortie after another rather than doing what it would take to achieve a righteous victory over the Red Menace. Following the death of his bombardier/navigator and best friend in one such seemingly pointless run (the A-6 Intruder is a two-person aircraft) Jake decides to personally undertake an action which he believes will redeem the wretched conflict by hitting those truly responsible for the war's misery, during a raid breaking off to mount an unauthorized, rogue strike on Communist Party headquarters in Hanoi (the titular flight).

Clearly expressing and speaking to the same sentiments the Rambo film did, the book goes in quite a different direction, unavoidably given the kind of work that it is. Rambo, after all, was set in the present day, and so involved events by no means settled. This afforded him the latitude to fight and win as an underdog against superior Communist forces, upholding the honor of American arms in the process, while recovering the prisoners of war betrayed by a government that not only did not "let them win" but afterward denied their existence and left them to languish, redeeming both the defeat, and the betrayal. By contrast Coonts' book, being a historical novel and not alternate history, cannot change what happened--at least, not very much. Grafton flies his strike, and then, as he should have from the start given the physical limits of what one Intruder crew could achieve with conventional weapons, proves utterly inconsequential--the bomb causing trivial physical damage to the headquarters and the public condemnation of the attack by the North Vietnamese government brushed off. The result is that Grafton did all that Grafton could do--which in the end amounted to very little. The ultimate meaninglessness of Grafton's strike on Hanoi thus ends up a rejoinder to the fantasies of singlehanded redemption of that war, the would-be aerial Rambo ended up an anti-Rambo, and what some might have hoped would be a wish-fulfillment was instead an occasion for cathartic confrontation with a hard truth.

Described in such terms the story was hardly a natural for continuation in the form of a regular series, especially in the techno-thriller form. Flight arguably derived its effect from having been written about a real historical event by "one who was there," an actual A-6 Intruder pilot during the conflict, and however one regards the novel's politics, the emotional charge of its perception of the war and what it did, or did not, mean. By contrast, not only would continuing the series likely mean a jump of many years into the present, but a shift to far more thoroughly invented scenarios, which could not have the same ring of verisimilitude, the same emotional charge--the more in as the techno-thriller tends so much toward "military procedural" of a less focused and more impersonal type. Of course, Coonts went exactly that route, and scored many more bestsellers in the process--but in retrospect it seems understandable that, certainly to go by their sales and their pop cultural impact, none quite matched the impact of that different and particularly charged first book.

The Post-Cold War International Relations Student's Reading List

I remember how back after the end of the Cold War a certain number of books about what would follow after it—about what would be the defining features of the post-Cold War international scene--were quite fashionable. They were the books that "everyone was talking about," that every academic was expected to cite or otherwise address in their work, that every student of the subject was supposed to read. There was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. There were the books by Benjamin Barber and Thomas Friedman. There was Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. There was Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy. Other books could and did come up, but these were the main "big picture" ones, with the fact underlined by the syntheses produced of these works, like Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map of the World.

Looking back I'm not sure the conversation has been so tightly focused since.

Equally looking back I'm struck by how pathetically limited it all was in origin and content. The "national" conversation consisted of a mere handful of longtime senior policy insiders setting forth the possibilities as seen from a very limited portion of the intellectual and political spectrum (overwhelmingly dominated by the right, Barber the only figure here that I would not unhesitatingly class as in the neoliberal-neoconservative orbit, though it is relevant that Thomas Friedman's book is readable as a variation on his own book, with, in line with his simple-minded cheerleading amid the illusions of the late '90s, down to the title, the implicitly critical "McWorld" replaced with the admiring "Lexus," etc). Unsurprisingly, it is easy enough to produce from their collective work a consensus along the lines of:

The ideological disputation that characterized history since the Enlightenment is over--thankfully--with liberal capitalism the last man standing, now and for all time. Indeed, the specifically globalizing neoliberal version is now carrying all before it, and likely to go on doing so, especially in the American-led world we have every reason to expect for a long time to come. Still, the world is an unequal place, with some not keeping up, and others seeing their societies fall apart altogether. Failure will feed a tribalism that the principal challenge to the international order with which American foreign policy must contend, taking forms ranging from terrorism to rogue states to failed states. The policy meeting those challenges may be more or less unilateral, more or less activist, more or less attentive to this or that peril, but that is the essential framework.

That Barnett (and others) so easily produced such syntheses underlines the limited range of the thinking. Limited, and in the wake of time's test, pathetically inadequate. Even where the neoliberal-neoconservative framework was concerned it left out much that was important--as with the realities of realpolitik too much taken for granted, as others were left to deal with them, usually in the most unrealistic fashion, imagining that Russia and China would one way or another conveniently cease to be complicating factors, perhaps collapsing, perhaps breaking up, perhaps simply "falling into line." (As you can see from the headlines, this did not quite happen.) Globalization, far from being quite the unstoppable force of nature so many made it out to be, proved quite fragile, while the turning point in its unraveling was decidedly not opposition by some anti-liberal regime, but rather the tendency to stagnation, speculation and crisis that increasingly defined it as this came to a head in 2007-2008, after which global integration began to stall out, with international conflict escalating after the miserable failure of policymakers to deal with the problem, not before. (In remembering how Friedman thought globalization a great and glorious and unstoppable thing it is worth remembering that in The Lexus and the Olive Tree he breathlessly declared the same about Enron.) The vision of tribalism and clashes of civilization was simplistic and crude--and in cases, plainly and simply racist. (Indeed, one remembers that Samuel Huntington spent the '80s personally doing his bit to help South Africa's government in its attempt to preserve the apartheid system, while his last book was, in the view of critics, a nativist anti-immigrant screed--while in rigor, and insight, his "clash of civilizations" compares poorly indeed with Emmanuel Todd's examination of the "convergence of civilizations."*) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

As with so much else in the late twentieth century it bespoke the intellectual impoverishment of an elite discourse that even in its best days had been far from what it ought to have been, and had long since narrowed in the most suffocating fashion. The result not only left us unprepared for the hard realities of the twenty-first century, but could seem almost a conditioning to respond to those realities in the worst possible ways--even before the commentariat confused things further with their tossing about the names of books they did not read, let alone understand, in a manner reminding us (as if we needed reminding) that the Ivy League educations and high academic and government office by which meritocracy-singing elitists set such great store are no proofs of expertise, scholarly capacity, intelligence or even basic literacy in their native and first (and if we are to be honest, usually only) language.** Indeed, while I reject Idiocracy's sneer at the American public, it does not seem unfair to say that the elite the country had then, and has now, is exactly the one I would expect to see in such a dystopia, where one could believe that a character played by Luke Wilson really is the smartest man in the country. Still, just as stupidity tends toward the simplistic, one ought not to be simplistic in treating of stupidity. There is nothing like power to make people stupid, and the manner in which the conversation was gatekept, giving us the ideas of a groupthinking little club whose membership is all but required to pander to the prejudices--the assumptions, the hopes, the inclinations--of an elite is an excellent guarantee of that outcome.

* While Todd raised the matter in After the Empire he gave the issue a book-length treatment when he coauthored 2011's A Convergence of Civilizations.
** I am ever less an admirer of Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis--but it always struck me as profoundly unfair that so many seem to have thought that the "end of history" meant "no more bad or dramatic stuff will happen."

Remembering the Police Academy Movies

When catching up with Bobcat Goldthwait recently (he's doing stand-up these days) the Guardian made reference to the legacy of the Police Academy films--which, seen now, appear very much of another age. This is not least because of how very, very lightly they take the subject of policing. The makers of the movies certainly laughed at the cops--but took the most conventional view of their function, seeing no social question, no moral ambiguity, in what the police do as an institution or individually out on the street, with corruption unheard of, if not inconceivable in any organization that had kindly old Eric Lassard as its academy's commandant. (Indeed, I remember the final act of the original film saw the cadets called out to quell a riot that breaks out over a tossed apple--because apparently that's how riots happen.)

The franchise, which after the original 1984 hit cranked out a sequel a year from 1985 to 1989, was already well along the path of diminishing returns commercially as well as "artistically" by the '90s. (According to Box Office Mojo the first Police Academy movie, which grossed $81 million domestically, was the sixth-biggest earner of 1984, after only Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and The Karate Kid; the sixth movie, with not quite $12 million grossed in 1989, was only #78 on that year's list.*) Yet I suspect that even if that had not been the case it would not have been so easy to keep the franchise going in the wake of the Rodney King affair and the subsequent real-life riot (in every detail of causes and consequences, not like the one in the movie), the more in as (in line with the general L.A.-ness of American movie production then) the force in question was the Los Angeles Police Department. Unsurprisingly there was just one more movie, far removed from L.A. and its troubles, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow (ironically, as Moscow had its own troubles--the political side of which was the 1993 constitutional crisis that saw Boris Yeltsin let slip the tanks of war against the Russian parliament forcing a halt to production, and the damaged Duma building seen in the actual movie, the camera lingering on it for a moment after the action passed it by, if memory serves).

That film got a mere token release (which brought in about 1 percent of what the badly flopping Police Academy 6 did in the box office) and was not followed by another.* And if anything the Police Academy films' tone grew only more implausible still. Even in so light a comedy as 1998's Rush Hour Chris Tucker's character still offered some acknowledgment of the reality, quipping that he "is LAPD, the most hated cops in the free world." ("Own mama ashamed of me. She tell everybody I'm a drug dealer," he added for good measure.) In its own small way it was a reminder that neither supporters nor critics of the police could take the matter as lightly as they had just a few years earlier--and in the decades since the polarization and its implications (Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, etc.) have gone far, far beyond that.

* Looking at the list it is striking that only one of the six movies was a sequel or a remake (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). By contrast every one of the top ten movies of 2023 was a sequel or remake or sequel to a remake (like Jurassic World: Dominion).
** The franchise's sole post-Police Academy 7 issue was a syndicated sitcom that lasted one season (1997-1998), with an original cast though with appearances by the actors from the films in their familiar roles (as with Leslie Easterbrook's cameo as Debbie Callahan, who was no longer a police officer but now District Attorney).

Bowdlerizing Bond?

Apparently there are plans to reissue the Ian Fleming Bond novels later this year to mark the series' (and thus the franchise's) seventieth anniversary. (The first Bond novel, Casino Royale, hit print in 1953.)

It seems to me that this is more gesture toward the idea of the brand name "James Bond" attaching to an essentially coherent and thriving franchise than anything else given the lack of evidence for any audience for the novels themselves. Bond continuation novel author Raymond Benson himself acknowledged that the literary prose style of the Fleming originals (Fleming's writing the adventures of James Bond as if he were writing Madame Bovary) by itself suffices to make the books unsalable today, while even when Benson and his colleagues produced more accessible, brisker, more action-packed books they did not exactly set the bestseller lists on fire. (Indeed, so far as I am aware John Gardner's Win, Lose or Die was the last Bond novel to grace the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, way back in 1989, since which time there have been no fewer than eighteen more novels, none of which seem to have managed the feat.) And if anything the odds against a comeback only decline with time, as the public shifts away from print toward audiovisual media for its entertainment generally, and its dose of action-adventure especially.

It has also come to my attention that the books are being bowdlerized. Specifically there is an effort to edit out the more overtly racist material.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, in the hierarchy of concern among the status politics-minded sensitivity in matters of genders comes ahead of sensitivity in matters of race, and even were that not the case I would imagine that there is more offense taken at how he handled gender than race. (Indeed, while our culture warriors love to think of the '50s as right-wing heaven the ultra-Establishment Edwardian Tory Fleming was already being called out as a reactionary by the feminists of his day, and Fleming's reaction to them such that I suspect that Fleming sometimes played the troll--as in Goldfinger.) Certainly it would seem to say something that, to cite one of those more recent continuation writers, Anthony Horowitz went to extreme, in fact wildly anachronistic, lengths to make the gender politics of Trigger Mortis conform to the expectations of what we now call the "woke" (to the point of undoing Bond's "conversion" of Pussy Galore to heterosexuality, and subjecting Bond to a speech on gay liberation), but kept Bond's casual racism. (This was not least in his remarks about Slavs as a race into which "cold-bloodedness and contempt . . . seemed to be built"--which, no matter what Whoopi Goldberg thinks "racism" means, most certainly are racist, as we especially should not forget when discussing a book that hit print in a moment in which the Brexit-loving right whipped up hatred against Poles, and the most dangerous conflict of the post-Cold War era was brewing on the shores of the Black Sea along lines that make just how Westerners see Russia a matter not to be taken lightly.)

However, there is also the matter of—again--the way in which the books are written. The more inarguable racism in Fleming tends to consist of offhand remarks on the part of the characters or the narration, which can be easily cut out without affecting the larger narrative. By contrast what would appear offensive in the treatment of gender from the standpoint of entertainment-industrial complex standards in 2023 is deeply rooted in the stuff of the novel. A story like Casino Royale (and certainly Goldfinger) would be reduced to shreds if one tried to "fix" it, such that it would not be a matter of excising a little material here and there, but of a full-blown rewrite--after which pretending Fleming is the author of the result would be an empty piety by even the debased standard of these times. And so those are the adjustments they have elected to make.

Of course, to say that they can more easily make those adjustments is not the same as saying that they should do so--and I have to admit that I disapprove. While I certainly don't endorse Fleming's social attitudes (Bond's sneering attitude toward young people and the working class in the first pages of Thunderball, if not what causes controversy these days, were already an unpleasant surprise, and proved no anomaly) the fact remains that the books were written long ago by an author in no position to make decisions regarding his work. To me that in itself seems enough reason to leave things as they are. At the same time that the books have in their way become artifacts of cultural history--with the alteration not merely disrespect for an artist's creation (however we may judge the art), but an attack on the memory and understanding of the past, a thing even less forgivable.

The New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller List- One Year into the War in Ukraine

I pretty much always find a look at the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list a nauseating experience.

My look at the list of February 26, 2023 was no exception.

Of the fifteen books, at least a dozen may be counted as giving the byline to celebrities or other public figures who did not "make their names" as authors of any type, whether as popular writers, scholars, scientists or anything else of the kind who have managed to reach a wider public through the salience of their work. Rather they were, and owe the salability of their names to, their having been the subject of the news.

Indeed, no fewer than seven of the fifteen are officially "by," if one counts "reality" stars and the British royalty who perform much the same function in their home country, Hollywood celebrity-type folks--while the figure would be nine if we add in Hollywood-loving Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

As one might guess, most of what appears to be on offer here, from the Hollywood types and others, is gossip, narcissism, self-justification--some of it mixed with self-help. The theme continues to some extent through the other books, as with Gabor and Daniel Matè's study of The Myth of Normal (concerned as it is with health). In other cases the self-justification is mixed with current affairs (as with the memoir of Mike Pompeo).

This leaves two books about anything and everything else approached in any and all other ways in all the great wide world. These might be classed as "history." One is a book by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch about a supposed Nazi plot to assassinate the heads of the "Big Three" allies. The "Meltzer" name by itself set off my crypto-history alarm (one of the riders of the post-Dan Brown wave of crypto-historical thrillers, he used to host a show on what people have come to joke about as the Used-to-Be-About-History Channel), and what I have seen of the reviews confirms to me that it was not a false alarm. The other book is The 1619 Project--which in the view of several prominent Civil War historians (who seem to me to actually know their subject area, unlike innumerable other experts), has no more foundation in history than Meltzer's attempt to offer up Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed as history rather than fiction.

That's it, that's what the country is supposed to be reading, and it gets only more appalling on closer examination. I, for one, am disgusted by "Prince Harry's" public wallowing in self-pity (in this case, the word is entirely deserved), and more absurd and obscene behavior (like publicly bragging about the body count he thinks he personally racked up in a manner more like that of an XBox player than a soldier who has actually been to war). I am astonished that the story of a young woman known to the world mainly for playing a character on a pair of Nickelodeon children's sitcoms that ended almost a decade ago has been on the list for 27 weeks (and still at #2 after all that time!), and that other people are not as weary as I am of hearing from and about Viola Davis (whose book has been on the list for the same length of time).* That anyone still cares about the guy who played Chandler on Friends also astonishes me, and that the book by and about Dazed and Confused actor Matthew McConaughey has been on the list for 86 weeks is positively mind-boggling.

A few of the books seem to merit the benefit of the doubt. The book by the Matès at least sounds as if it offers something more than the usual claptrap, and--even if I admit to generally finding it harder to be annoyed with her than many of the others discussed here, it does genuinely seem to me to be the case that Pamela Anderson may have something more, and more challenging, to say than people may expect given that she has taken her activism beyond the usual "safe" topics (veganism, etc.), and stood her ground in the face of shameless, thuggish bullying on national television. But on the whole the picture is pretty bleak.

Considering this situation it seems only fair to acknowledge that it did not "just happen." We all know that in spite of the ubiquity of the lame cop-out that the consumer is king and the purveyors of trash are merely "giving people what they want," in publishing as elsewhere it is the oligopolistic producer who is king and the consumer who takes from what they are prepared to offer them--while the consumer did not always take it, exactly. As if the crass and politicized gatekeeping and the advertising dollars were not enough, it is now common practice to buy a book's way onto the bestseller list--with Forbes reporting that Mr. Pompeo's Political Action Committee spent $42,000 on books the day his memoir came out.

Still, even allowing for all that I find very little hopeful here--certainly from the standpoint of testimony to the intelligence of the general public, or its being mentally equipped to confront the issues of our era of polyrcisis. Indeed, never have I had more reason to hope that the bestseller list, which has ever been a highly imperfect measure of the public's book-buying, is wide off the mark in regard to what it is actually reading, let alone thinking.

* I remember some time ago citing a couple of episodes of Sam & Cat in a blog post about the techno-hype of the mid-'10s and wondering if it wasn't too obscure to have been worthwhile. I suppose I need not have worried.

Remembering Unhappily Ever After

Not very long ago the Guardian caught up with Bobcat Goldthwait, and discussed with him what he's been up to lately. Apparently he's back doing stand-up, with the fan base coming out for his shows significantly a carry-over from earlier, and his part as Zed in the Police Academy films (seen in movies two through four) apparently important here.

I noticed that unmentioned was the sitcom Unhappily Ever After, in which Mr. Goldthwait voiced "Mr. Floppy," the stuffed bunny that the show's protagonist, now living in the basement of the house out of which his wife kicked him out, believes talks to him and with whom he has conversations.

The show in question would seem to have a number of claims to a place in pop cultural history (apart from its odd premise, of course, of which Mr. Floppy was just a part). Created by Married . . . With Children (MWC) co-creator Ron Leavitt with fellow MWC veteran Arthur Silver (who wrote and produced for the show over a long stretch of its run) it was an obvious variant on the theme and complement to the original pop cultural phenomenon. It was (like The Wayans Bros.) part of the "starting line-up" of Wednesday night sitcoms with which Warner Brothers launched its broadcast network, "The WB," in 1994 (now defunct, but not going before it made its mark on pop culture). It was also a significant early credit for a number of its cast members, who went on to other, bigger things--like Kevin Connolly (Entourage), Justin Berfield (Malcolm in the Middle) and Nikki Cox (Las Vegas), while the same might be said of Kristanna Loken (who appeared in nine episodes as the nemesis of Nikki Cox's character). And it lasted the hundred episodes that were then the target for show-runners, because that was the magic number that opened up the possibility of syndication, where the really big money was.

I found the show worth a watch, and stuck with it down to the finale. Of course, few others did so, the show never acquiring the cachet of the original. (The story goes that when John Milius cast Ed O'Neill as a Navy JAG in the film version of The Flight of the Intruder test audiences laughed so much just seeing O'Neill that they decided to cut out the bit and reshoot it with Fred Thompson--a problem that Unhappily's Geoff Pierson does not seem to have had.)

One may chalk up the show's weaker impression to MWC's having got there first, and more easily shocked audiences in the more staid '80s than the "extreme" '90s. Alternatively one can attribute to the show having got too extreme, been a little too dark and weird to really find a strong echo with a wide audience. If one is inclined to think the failing had nothing to do with the premise or other content and everything to do with its promotion by the network. (The WB definitely made its mark with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other young adult-oriented contemporary fantasy, as well as young adult soap operas like Dawson's Creek--but I cannot think of a single WB sitcom that achieved much popular recognition.) And afterward there was not much of a chance for Unhappily to find, for example, a "cult" audience or anything else of the sort after finishing its original run. (Wikipedia reports that due to poor ratings in its mere two years in syndication the show has not been on the air in North America since 2001, was never released "on physical media," and is unavailable from any streaming service in the U.S., though it seems to have done better abroad, perhaps particularly in Germany.)

In any event, it's all but forgotten now--another show of yesteryear dropped down the memory hole, living on nowhere but in the memories of those of us old enough to personally recollect its first crack at the airwaves.

The Vancouver Sun on Susan Niemann's Latest

On Thursday the Vancouver Sun newspaper ran a piece by Douglas Todd regarding philosopher Susan Niemann and her latest book, Why Being Woke is Not Left Wing.

Going by the article Ms. Niemann's case regarding the difference between being left and being "woke" (the Enlightenment-based left stands for universalism, justice and progress; the "postmodernized" and therefore anti-Enlightenment woke for a tribalism and pessimism that easily leads rightward) will be familiar to many. Certainly leftists have been making this case for as long as the identity politics now traveling under the "woke" label have been around, with an obvious example the World Socialist Web Site. Their distinguishing between practitioners of identity politics has been a significant part of their criticism of what they call not the left but the "pseudoleft," and their stance toward it reflected in their attitude toward the #MeToo campaign and the New York Times' 1619 Project).

Still, the center's tendency to take an "any publicity is good publicity" attitude toward the left and accordingly deny them any (in contrast with their attitude toward the right, constantly lavishing right-wing figures, opinions, publications and organizations with publicity, often respectful and usually at least civil publicity, even where they claim to not endorse them) means that the criticism of identity politics, "wokeness," etc. from the left is virtually unseen in the mainstream. Indeed, it is the kind of thing that "fake news" alarmists endlessly call on search engines and social media sites to censor (with the WSWS, for its part, claiming that along with their website generally their criticisms of the 1619 Project specifically has been subject to such censorship). Of course, one should not have to be a leftist to come to the conclusion that wokeness is not a left ideology--only conversant with the most basic ideas of modern political philosophy--but to go by all the evidence that is something that those who have access to major media platforms most definitely are not. Accordingly, rather than any shocking originality of the fundamental conception, Ms. Niemann's stating the obvious and indisputable before people who do not often get to hear it is what makes Douglas Todd's discussion of her views in the Sun of interest. However, whether her book will make any more difference than the other attempts to correct the profound misapprehension about postmodernist identity politics somehow being a left ideology (rather than the Counter-Enlightenment ultra-right ideology it actually is) remains to be seen.

Remembering Predator 2

Like Robocop 2, Predator 2 is a 1990 sequel to a classic 1987 sci-fi action film depicting a cop fighting crime in a major urban area in a near-future America descending into chaotic cyberpunk nightmare--and which was less successful with critics and audiences than the original. Like Robocop 2, I also enjoyed it, and now looking back find it an interesting time capsule--reminding us of where people thought the world was going, starting with the opener here, which in a combination of tabloid "trash TV" with a city collapsing into failed state levels of violence with Morton Downey Jr. (as "journalist" Tony Pope, but really we're supposed to recognize Downey Jr. here) reporting from a gang battle in Los Angeles being fought with grenade launchers.

Of course, in contrast with Robocop's social satire (it was, after all, a movie about the privatization of the public sphere, corporate power, and the links between big business and the equally business-like business of crime), Predator 2 had little to offer, merely wallowing in the image of breakdown--such that Downey Jr.'s inclusion in the film plays like endorsement of the figure, his politics and the mean-spirited idiot sensationalism of which he was then the face than criticism of the cultural direction he represented. Indeed, the commonplace that the city/country/world is "going to hell in a handbasket" was here merely taken for granted--the idea that the "urban" jungle of 1997 Los Angeles would be just as much a war zone as the original Predator's civil war-torn Central American setting simply a jumping-off point for another round of the aliens at their gruesome sport.

Why are the New York Times and Fortune Writing About Clarkesworld?

Ordinarily science fiction magazines are far below the radar of the general press. Indeed, even within the world of print science fiction--a far smaller world than most people realize, quite at odds with how big science fiction has become in the audiovisual media--they are far from their peak of significance to the field. As with publishing generally the center of the action shifted from periodicals to books, and the magazines have increasingly struggled to stay relevant since, more often than not failing.

Yet Clarkesworld has been much in the news lately, discussed even in places like the New York Times and Fortune--because they are pretty much all that remains of paying opportunities to publish short-form fiction. The fact has put them on the "front-line" with regard to the use--and abuse--of chatbots, as seen in Clarkesworld being inundated with chatbot-generated short story submissions, and as a result ended its open submissions policy.

As it happened, much of the content the Clarkesworld staff received was of very poor quality, and frequently visibly plagiarized--the would-be authors apparently thinking they could have a chatbot whip up anything old thing and then send it along without even giving it a decent going-over. But all the same, the people who did this tried it.

Perhaps in this age of digital submissions we will see editors get a hold of of algorithms designed to spot at least the crummier submissions. However, it is also the case that many expect that chatbots will get better. This may be yet another of those expectations that comes to nothing, as so much of the hype about artificial intelligence-based technologies has. Still, it is worth noting that artificial intelligence developers have as yet had their hardest struggle getting to the point at which AI-powered devices could perform everyday tasks requiring the ability to navigate complex physical environments, eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity, from driving through urban environments to flipping burgers. They seem to have been more successful with tasks not making those demands--such that I can picture them replacing coders before they replace truck drivers, or even restaurant workers. And so it does not seem a great stretch to think that what Clarkesworld has seen may be merely the beginning of that shift that long ago already seemed to me underway, where in a publishing market dominated by long series', tie-ins, "co-authored" books and the rest, rather than just requiring writers to produce a standardized product like machines publishers will simply let the machines churn out the product for the dwindling audience there seems to be for anything that actually has to be read.