Culture – Page 5 – Ash Clifton, Writer

Check Out My Dossier on TheDossier!!!

Big shout-out and many thanks to Jeff Circle for making one of his famous dossiers on me. I had a blast. He’s one of the smartest and funniest guys I’ve met in a long time.

Check it out…

“I’m Probably Wrong About Everything” Podcast Interview

Many thanks to Gerry Fialka for interviewing me on his great podcast. I have no idea why he thought of me, but I’m glad he did. It was fun.

Yes, my lighting sucks. I’m working on it. Check it out anyway, pls…

Friday Night Rock-Out: Bryan Ferry

Yeah, I know. Calling this song “rock” is a bit of a stretch. Like all of Bryan Ferry’s solo work, as well as all his hits with Roxy Music, “Don’t Stop the Dance” is a brilliant and elegant pop song. Emphasis on brilliant. What William Faulkner is to literature, Bryan Ferry is to pop music. Who else could create a song like this, one that is both eminently danceable and yet edgy and so, so cool?

I also love the music video, in which French model Laurence Treil features prominently. Ferry and Roxy Music were famous for using the faces and bodies of beautiful women as part of their branding, and Treil was the most beautiful of all. With her glamorous features and impossibly arched eye-brows, she looked like a Patrick Nagel painting that had come to life.

Anyway, enjoy…

Friday Night Rock-Out

In some ways, Missing Persons was the ultimate west coast 80s band. With their heavy synth sound and propulsive drum beats, they were a band that could make you think and make you dance. Plus, I simply loved Dale Bozzio. Not just your average bottle-blonde space-age sex-kitten with a plexiglass bustier, Bozzio could really sing. And her baby-doll, hiccuping style was tempered with just enough knowing irony to make you realize how cool she was. In fact, she presaged another super-smart front-girl from a decade later, Shirley Manson of Garbage.

My favorite Missing Persons song is “Destination Unknown”. Ah, how true.

Enjoy!

What I’m Reading: “George Lucas – A Life”

One of my favorite novels is William Makepeace Thackery’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon. I first got interested in it after seeing Stanley Kubrick’s amazing film adaptation, Barry Lyndon, which I didn’t really understand but which blew me away anyway. Like the movie, the book is a tragedy, the story of an honorable young man who slowly transforms into a selfish adventurer and scoundrel.

It’s a beautiful and rollicking novel, but the main reason I like it has to do with Thackery’s unusual take on the tragic hero. We were all taught in school that the reason a hero falls in a classic tragedy is because of some fatal flaw—some negative quality. But in Thackery’s vision, it is not Barry’s flaws that bring about his downfall, but rather his strengths. That is, the very qualities that bring him riches and fame in the short run—his intelligence, courage, and ambition—are the very qualities which lead to his eventual destruction.

It might seem melodramatic, but I was reminded of this idea as I read Brian J. Jones’s excellent biography, George Lucas: A Life. Although Jones never actually uses the term tragic hero in the book—to do so would be ludicrous in the case of an actual, living man, especially one as laid-back and funny as George Lucas—he nonetheless gives a sense of a person whose determination and genius have sometimes led him dangerously close to self-destruction.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Stupid Girl”

When I first heard the band Garbage, I was struck by lead singer Shirley Manson and her fabulously expressive voice—at times monotonal, at other times growling. This pale goth girl from Scotland had somehow tailored her vocals to exactly fit the manic-depressive zeitgeist of the 90s.

Indeed, I would argue that the band’s premier song, “Stupid Girl,” is the definitive song of the period (yes, even more so than Nirvana’s brilliant “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). In the song’s now-famous lyric, the narrator accuses an unnamed girl of being…well…stupid. In fact, the aspects of her stupidity are those evidenced by practically every person under 40 in modern urban America: vanity, self-absorption, consumerism, nihilism.

And fakery. Especially fakery. “[I] can’t believe you fake it…” as Manson sings portentously to the stupid girl in question. What is she faking? Being human.

Why Do I Love Concrete Architecture?

I have a confession to make: I love concrete architecture. I know, I know. Concrete Architecture (CA, for short) is not fashionable. It’s not renewable (not yet, anyway). It’s not touchy-feely. It’s not cool.

Part of the bad-rap CA has is due to its association with brutalism, the quasi-Soviet style that was popular in the 1970s, especially in England. Brutalism is cold. Windowless. Dystopian. Think 1984. A Clockwork Orange. Total Recall. Et cetera.

Obviously, that’s not the type of CA that I’m talking about. Rather, when I think of great concrete architecture, I think of buildings that mix smooth, rectilinear slabs of stone (that’s all concrete is, after all—artificial stone) with glass and other construction elements. When built to a more human scale, and combined with greenery and organic decoration, CA can be soothing. Symmetrical. Ordered. Neat. Human.

I keep thinking of that scene in Lawrence of Arabia when a reporter asks Lawrence, an Englishman, why he loves the desert so much. “Because it’s clean,” he says. His answer resonates on many levels: literal, moral, political, and philosophical. That’s sort of why I like CA. It’s clean. It’s calming.

Salk Institute – Louis I. Kahn, Architect

I think my first exposure to CA was from movies. Specifically, James Bond movies. There’s Willard Whyte’s desert mansion in Diamonds Are Forever (actually the Elrod House in Palm Springs by John Lautner). Then, in The Man with the Golden Gun, there’s Scaramanga’s secret lair, carved into the rock of a volcanic island. Almost every male nerd has a secret fantasy of being a Bond villain (or, at least, of having a Bond villain’s lair). What could be cooler for a bookish, introverted, probably asthmatic kid than to have his own secret, clean (pollen-free) hideout where no one, not even MI6, can find you?

Which brings me to my main point. Introverts of both sexes have a fondness for CA because we associate it with solitude, in a good way. After all, the only real experience with CA that most of us have is from public spaces—libraries, museums, research centers, etc.—whose sense of empty space is soothing to introverts (who tend to have too much internal stimulation).

So it’s no surprise that the ultimate fictional incarnation of CA would be owned by the ultimate fictional nerd, Tony Stark. His mansion in the Marvel MCU is a Lautner-esque swirl of concrete perched on a California cliff over the Pacific. The mansion is the epitome of the Bond-villain/mad scientist aesthetic. Stark, who seems to be a selfish lout but is actually psychologically damaged by the remembered death of his parents, is free to be alone in the mansion’s cavernous rooms, jammed with post-modern decorations and transhuman technology. Stark doesn’t need a human heart; he has a mechanical one, powered by cold fusion. It can’t be broken.

So, what does it say about me that I like CA so much? Basically, it says that I am an unreconstructed nerd, who likes things clean and controlled. Oh, well.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

The only time I ever got in trouble with my parents over a book was when I was thirteen. The book was Nova by Samuel R. Delany, and was reading while nested in the back of the family car on a long trip. My stepmom read the back-jacket copy, which made the book sound a lot racier than it really was, and freaked out. However, she was (and is) a great reader herself, and she and my dad knew better than to try to keep me from reading the book. (You can’t keep kids from reading what they want, not even back then, in the pre-Internet days.)

So, yeah, I read the book, and I loved it. And not for the prurient reasons my parents might have expected. Rather, Nova is classic Delany—literary science fiction that somehow feels gritty and realistic despite being set in a far future environment. I had never read Delany before, and I was blown away by his ability to write a “hard” sci-fi novel, full of fresh ideas and plausible technologies, that also kept my interest as a work of fiction. That is, it’s about believable characters with believable agendas and distinct personalities. It felt more like Stephen Crane than Isaac Asimov.

I probably picked up the book because I was drawn to the great cover art, one of a fine series of Delany works that Ballantine published in the 1970s. Its cover, which is still my favorite of any Delany novel, was done by fan-artist-turned-pro Eddie Jones. It might seem dated, but for me it still captures the surreal, distant-future vibe that Delany managed to bring to his best books.

I still have it on my bookshelf, lo these many years later…

Why I am Nostalgic for Big-Brained Aliens

All this spring, my son Connor and I have been watching of the original Star Trek on Netflix. Connor likes the original shows almost as much as The Next Generation, and even I find myself getting caught up in some of the more classic episodes like Space Seed (the one with Khan). I also really like the pilot, The Cage. That’s the episode where Jeffrey Hunter is Captain Pike, trapped on a planet run by bubble-headed alien telepaths who throw him in a zoo with the luscious Susan Oliver. (Poor bastard.)

As we watched this particular episode—Connor for the first time, me for the bazillionth—it occurred to me that the Big-Brained Alien is one science fiction trope that has pretty much disappeared. As far as I can tell, it has gone the way of the jet-pack and the glass-tube elevator. This dearth of chrome-domed alien baddies is just another indication, I suppose, of how much things have changed. Back when I was a kid, every extra-terrestrial was guaranteed to have a skull like a beach ball. Even the wise, Christ-like alien Klatuu from Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still had a big head (although this was probably no one’s fault—Michael Rennie just had a big damned head!).

Remember those aliens who want to invite all of humanity over for dinner in the classic Twilight episode, To Serve Man? Huge heads. Or the killer vegetable alien in The Thing. Huge freaking head.

As to how this visual cliché came about in the first place, I can only assume it was because of Anthropology class. Specifically, all those anthropology classes that educated, middle-class kids started taking in college during the Cold War. For the first time, ordinary people began to learn about human evolution, and how the human brain has tripled in size during the last two million years. The implication was obvious. Bigger brains means bigger intellect. To extrapolate this trend into the future led to the obvious conclusion: beings of the future will have enormous brains.

In other words, the original Big Brained Alien is…us.

Friday Night Rock Out

This Thursday will mark the six-year anniversary of Chris Cornell’s death, and I am still pretty messed up about it.

Apparently, his friend Alice Cooper referred to him as “The Voice,” a moniker that, as some students of pop culture might recall, was also given to Frank Sinatra, back in his day. It makes sense. Cornell was my generation’s Sinatra.

Actually, with his four-octave range, Cornell was my generation’s Freddie Mercury. Whoever you compare him to, he was a genius, not just for his voice but for his ability to make you feel something, to strike deeply at some hidden spot in the soul. Like the other two titans of the grunge era, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, Cornell’s singing made you feel unhinged, as if he was doing the hard work of going mad so that you didn’t have to. Only more so.

Anyway, here’s one of my favorites from Soundgarden…