Harlan Ellison: 1934 - 2018

The morbid truth is I started this piece many times in the past several years. I dug deep, burning battery life staring at an empty Word document, thinking hard about what Harlan Ellison meant to me, how he inspired me as a writer and a person, and how best to remember him when that terrible day came when he left us. But I'd get no more than a page in and my heart would leave me and what words I could manage rang hollow and weak. Then I would slowly delete what I had written, watching my cursor backwards-gobble every painfully extracted word until the document was as blank as the hour I'd started. I trashed every version, I saved no drafts. Call it superstition or wishful thinking or some atavistic fear of tempting old gods, but I simply could not bring myself to write a death notice for a man who was still alive. Thinking on it later only made me infuriated with myself. Why was I hellbent on eulogizing a man who still walked among us?  So I'd be 'ready' for the awful day, as if such a thing were possible? Dash off my pre-fabbed remembrance and be at the cigar lounge in time for Jeopardy!? Maybe the piece would improve with time and a periodic turning like fine Bordeaux; I could revisit it every six months or so for a quick polish (after checking, of course, to make sure the old geezer was still kickin'). What the hell was I getting at, acting like Ellison was dead when he was clearly very not dead?? What endgame, this slavish exercise in contingencies and timeliness? None. None! And I knew it. I was being a compulsive ninny, a tire-kicking boob desperate to write something else, anything else, as long as it wasn't yet another draft of my novel's prologue. But Ellison's obituary? No, I would not – I could not – do such a thing. I would cease to dwell on the future and remain, as I had every day for the last thirty-six years, in a world where Harlan Ellison was still alive.

Harlan Jay Ellison died on June 28^h, 2018. He went to sleep beside his wife Susan in his home in Los Angeles and never woke up. He was eighty-four years old. He survived coronary bypass surgery in the late nineties, a stroke in 2007, and a crippling bout of depression in the first half of this decade. In his last interactions with the public some ten years ago he was as spry, as ornery, as irascible as ever – snow-haired, pale, and cavernously wrinkled, bent a bit at the waist and about as slow as you'd expect an octogenarian to be, but...still Harlan. Always Harlan to the end. Now the terrible day has come and gone. Now I can finally write that piece I tried so many times to write. And now I understand why those old pieces died in the womb, all tin-eared, and pointless: because I had written them in a world where Harlan Ellison was alive, before the universe became the smaller, colder, less interesting place it is now that he is gone...before his departure broke my heart in two and left me nothing but words – his, artifacts of bygone brilliance, and mine, clunky and inadequate, squeezed out in a vain attempt to staunch the wound left in his absence. Words were always enough for Harlan. For me they seem woefully inadequate. But I'm in front of the computer, which for Harlan was always nine-tenths of the battle: get your butt in the chair and do the work. So for him, I will.

So...Harlan and me.

My first experience was in grade school. My library had a still-picture paperback of the Star Trek episode 'City on the Edge of Forever' – literally a collection of glossy screenshots taken directly from the episode, arrayed in sequence with dialogue boxes superimposed over the pictures like a live-action comic book. I was a budding nerd and my library had precious little in the way of sci-fi, so that smudged and crinkled little volume was my constant companion between lunch and dreaded gym class. I didn't know at the time I was reading Harlan Ellison's work, wouldn't know until many years later he was the author of the most universally acclaimed Star Trek episode of all time. It would be years more before I would learn the full story behind that episode, how Ellison's original version was much darker and subject to heavy censor by the studio. In my twenties I had the joy of reading the unaltered script, when I could actually appreciate the brilliance of the initial vision and the frustration he felt at having his work be so criminally defanged by skittish executives. At the time I only knew that torn and greasy paperback seemed pretty damn cool (and gee, it had to be the only episode of original Trek where McCoy went bonkers from a drug overdose, right?!). It was the first of countless times Ellison's imagination would succor me.

I could not say when it was that I read my first Ellison short story, but I do recall when I began pursuing his stories because they were his. See, I'd heard his name bandied about by the comic book and sci-fi communities, often spoken with a mixture of hushed reverence and a kind of bloviating envy/scorn by other writers who knew him by reputation. I knew him to be one of the giants of speculative fiction's “between” period (as Neil Gaiman refers to it), after the golden age of legends like Asimov and Bester but before the so-called “modern” age that gave us William Gibson, Gaiman, a slew of others. I told myself I'd try him one day, but I was too into my Star Wars novels and my first tentative steps into High Fantasy to think much on it. Then my cousin began lending me a steady supply of VHS tapes full of Babylon 5. And there in the credits, week after week, was 'Conceptual Consultant: Harlan Ellison'. That tented an eyebrow. Him again. Here was a guy without a hard science background (hell, without a college degree!) consulting on a space-drama that prided itself on realism, the anti-Star Trek, there simply to serve as a narrative oracle advising on matters of plot, pacing, character, and arc. I would later learn that creator J. Michael Straczynski, himself no slouch in the plotting department, deferred to him regularly during his unprecedented (and still unmatched) marathon penning of nearly 100 episodes of his series. He wanted wisdom from the best; in Ellison he got the best of the best. Babylon 5 remains the greatest long-form science fiction TV show ever created, and Straczynski would tell you in a heartbeat (or a tweet) that Ellison had a great deal to do with it (even if the crew found him to be a prickly, excitable bastard most of the time). That “him again” moment is what tipped the scales for me. I knew I loved Babylon 5, so it jolly well stood to reason the sage whispering sweet story advice into JMS's ears would be worth a real read. I pursued Ellison from there on, and I was never the same.

Over the years I seasoned my other reading with collections of Ellison stories. I devoured Over the Edge, Angry Candy, and Slippage, each of which contained one or two of his 'classic' works, including “Repent, Harlequin Said The Ticktock Man”, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, and “Demon With a Glass Hand”. A friend lent me the long-shuddered original I, Robot screenplay, penned by Ellison in the late '70s, shelved by the studio, and never produced (the Will Smith abomination released years later was a different, infinitely inferior, animal). That was my first foray into Ellison the scene-designer. As a short story writer he was brazen and aggressive, the literary equivalent of a clump of dirt in your eyes followed by a shot to the crotch. Imagine my surprise, then, when Ellison the screenplay writer proved a meticulous fuss-budget, describing his scenes in exacting, almost painful detail, including beat counts, pan angles, lens effects, and even lighting suggestions. I, Robot was deemed un-filmable at the time in part because Ellison's descriptions called for effects that would have been impossible at the time, both a testament to his imagination and his gave-no-shits attitude toward the storytelling limits of cinema in the pre-CGI era. It was also the impetus for one of Ellison's most famous dust-ups with a studio executive: upon realizing the stuffed shirt slated to produce the picture had never read the screenplay, Ellison reportedly dove across the table and throttled the man, telling him he “had the intellectual and cranial capacity of an artichoke.” Alas, studios high on Star Wars' success wanted their sci-fi to have 'cute' robots and swashbuckling, of which Ellison's piece had not a wit. It was, however, a masterpiece of science fiction, a layered, profound, deeply moving rumination on the nature of consciousness, humanity's place in the distant future, and Asimov's sacred Three Rules of Robotics.

Ellison's short fiction was a revelation. He was as articulate, as careful, and as brilliant with his words as any of the greats of the medium, but he narrated with such a a singular energy, such punchy, cocksure drive and poise regardless of subject matter. Every clause was a one-two attack, every sentence a parry-riposte of crackling linguistic know-how. Here was a man who wrote as much for love of the words themselves as the stories the words told, and wrote them without pretense or any sense of having grasped for it. I always imagined he rarely if ever used a thesaurus (though I'm sure he probably did), because his modus operandi was to spin adjectives out of slang and artful, off-kilter sayings, hyphening compound nonsense terms together into gorgeous descriptors that said things in ways that said it all but in a way you were never likely to hear again. Yet he did it while weaving together some of the most inspired speculative concepts ever conceived. Look at the Hugo-nominated “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore”, told as a series of daily log entries in the life of a divine being who cavorts through time and space performing acts of mischief and compassion in equal measure (including the titular rowing act, and a heartwarming interlude in which he saves a young prostitute in the 1880s by tasering a man with a stun gun). In that, and so many others, Ellison showed me the power of voice, that elusive quality of a narrator who speaks with a life and a character all his – or her – own, engaging the reader through sheer force of personality. One did not have to be a constipated word-slave to write well; the layout of the words, the delivery method of storytelling was every bit as important as the story itself. Every story, regardless of topic, read like an Ellison story, and every narrator was a shade of the man himself. He wrote with a deliberate insistence, a haughty, prideful imposition that forced you into uncomfortable corners, tripped you up, challenged you, and goaded you to keep going.

I met Harlan in the fall of 2000. It was New York City at the Fifth Avenue Barnes and Noble, and the man was on hand to sign the newly-released and expanded edition of the seminal sci-fi anthology Dangerous Visions, of which he had been the longtime editor. I was a sophomore at Marist College and could hardly think of a better use of a dull Saturday and my meager funds than to grab a train south to meet the man who had become my writing idol (Metro North, of course – no Amtrak for me; I wasn't made of money!). I remember it was a cold, wet, lousy day in the city. The steel-lined streets acted like wind tunnels, compressing the bitter air into a semisolid freight train that cut through my layers and smattered my glasses with grungy city-spray. And B&N, in their infinite wisdom, decided to queue us up outside. It wasn't bad. In fact, it was joyous – every single person, more than a hundred in total, was there for the same reason, after all. We passed the time merrily, talking all things Harlan with complete strangers. Passersby on the street stopped to ask us who we were waiting for, perhaps wondering if it was a celebrity of sorts, someone famous. When we said “Harlan Ellison!” most people simply crooked an eyebrow, muttered a terse “Oh” and moved on. We didn't care. We loved it. They would never understand. And Harlan wasn't here for them. He was here for us.

Harlan arrived, and I was instantly struck by how unbelievably ordinary he looked. Just a white-haired old man in a plain, fire-engine red sweatshirt, all five feet and five inches of him, cutting a swath through the PR folks and the handlers like a literary alpha dog. God, how my heart jumped! When he saw that his adoring public had been corralled outside he pitched a fit, berating the staff for leaving his fans out in the cold. Then he gave the crowd the thrill of their lives by walking out of the building and down the entire line, first person to the last, all the while lambasting the staff for a pack of whoreson miscreants for abusing his readers like that. The star-dazzle that had briefly left us all mute dissipated quickly as we all began to hoot with laughter. Hey, it had only been ten seconds, but here already was Harlan being Harlan, exactly what we expected and still more than we could have ever hoped for. Already it was the best signing ever.

I can't remember the entirety of what I said to him. It was probably something stupid. I do remember I said “Hello” and something asinine about how great it was to meet him and blah blah. I wasn't there to leave an impression; I knew it was folly to try. But as he signed the book I did have the presence of mind to tell him that I had just finished reading An Edge in My Voice, the collected edition of columns he wrote in the early eighties on a litany of topics from Reaganomics to slasher films. I'll never forget the pause in his pen-stroke when I told him that, how he had to stop and actually think about which one that was. “Oh, yeah,” he said, musing. “Yeah, boy that was a while ago.” I was floored. Here was the man who'd penned one of the most thought-provoking and inspiring selections of non-fiction I'd ever read and he had to try to remember having written them! I told him I loved it. “Well, good!” he said, finishing his signature. My companion took our picture. I was smiling a lot bigger than Harlan, but I think he smiled, too. A little bit. After I shook his hand – warm, firm, dry – I stood back and watched my friend make an appropriate ass of himself. My companion, see, was an Ellison neophyte at the time (he's since done his penance and become a true believer), but he knew of Ellison the Legend and was eager to begin his journey with a bang by meeting the man himself. I cautioned him about not 'saying something stupid', that Ellison was no shrinking violet and would happily seize upon anything he saw as low hanging fruit to skewer him, a perfect stranger, because that was what he did. My friend, predictably, did the opposite. And Ellison obliged.

“I have to say,” my friend began, “I haven't really read you yet, but after today, I'm going to start.”

Ellison responded as only he could. He gaped incredulously at my friend and said, “Well, you lying sack of shit! What the hell do I care if you've never read my stuff?! Think that matters to me?!” Everyone in the room laughed, my companion included. What a treat – not merely to meet the Man but to see a live demonstration of his famous fuck-you disposition on full display! I giggled for twenty blocks, and have thanked Harlan every day for the extra little treat he gave me free of charge. Dangerous Visions, signed by Harlan, remains on my shelf in a place of honor. I don't think I've ever read it – not that edition, anyway.

In recent years I have partaken of The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat, the series of columns Ellison wrote in the late '60s-early '70s for the Los Angeles Free Press. I recommend this to anyone even if you have no interest in Nixon-era TV (ostensibly to focus of the columns) for everything else Harlan rapped about during those impossibly turbulent times, including news suppression, censorship, government propaganda, the entertainment industry's slavish kowtowing to middle America (the 'vast plains of scuttlefish', as he called the folks in the fly-over states), endless lies about Vietnam, race conflicts, and the youth movement. Turbulent also was Harlan's own life back then, finding himself at the epicenter of campus demonstrations, student riots, and a proactive campaign by Spiro Agnew to quash his work (in brief, Ellison questioned the size of Agnew's manhood; later the second Teat volume's release was delayed years due to an Agnew-driven intimidation campaign against book sellers and Ellison's distributors). That the then-Vice President of the United States would resort to strong-arming a publisher who had profited mightily selling Harlan's books into reneging on a contract speaks volumes of Ellison's power as a writer, the reach he enjoyed during those heady, bile-filled days, and the weight the printed word carried back then. Ellison, after all, never tweeted a word in his life, had no social media platforms or YouTube channel to puff up his profile. He had 2000 words a week in the L.A. Freep, a suitably quaint soapbox by today's standards. Back then? It was as grand a pulpit as he needed (though surely smaller than he wanted) to speak his mind and piss off a lot of people in the process. Indeed, during his run with Teat Harlan's columns cost him several prominent writing jobs, most of his allies in the industry and more than one friend (his chronicling of the single episode he wrote of The Young Lawyers is a slow-motion train wreck of dashed hopes, missed chances, and a hundred awful pitfalls of writing in Hollywood). Yes, he was a prick to most people who knew him and a bastard prick to those unlucky enough to be counted among his (many) enemies...but everyone read him, dammit, and no one who did put his stuff down who wasn't left feeling engaged, motivated, angry, and, yes, inspired.

Ellison wrote with a courage I don't have, and may never acquire. He mocked the rules of the trade by inventing his own and showing up his contemporaries on a regular basis. He gave exactly zero shits, tackling the hardest of contemporary issues while simultaneously launching himself at the most whimsical of dalliances and turning them into astounding, thrilling, life-affirming stories. His mind was an overclocked idea factory, ceaselessly creating, musing, speculating. I loved that about him because I want more than anything to be like that, and I fear with each passing day that I'm losing that magic he managed to cling to his entire life. I watch old interviews with him, I read his words, I see the brains and the fury in equal measure, the mischief he made and the honestly with which he presented it all and I just stand in awe. How...how did he stay so damn good for so long? He was brash but he was true, he was smart but he was grounded, angry but hopeful, all armor and thorns on the outside but (and this is true) mush on the inside, the classic shattered idealist-turned-reluctant cynic. I flatter myself when I say I saw much of myself in him; perhaps only the palest of shades, a glimpse of what I could be if only I had the guts, the grit, the sheer cajones he had when he put his butt in front of that typewriter every SINGLE FREAKIN' DAY. As a man he was far from perfect. But as a writer he was, and will remain, my Ideal.

For more than a decade now I have pecked away at The Essential Ellison, the 50-year retrospective mega-anthology that is a marvelous cross-section – though still only a sampling – of Ellison's entire career. To date I still have, I think, just three or four more pieces to read until I am finished. I know I held off reading those last pieces as part of the same superstitious ritual that kept me from writing this reminiscence. The thought of completing that mighty tome just had such an air of finality to it, like I'd seen the best and all the would left for me was...the rest (though with 1700 stories and non-fiction pieces to his name, I doubt I shall ever truly finish 'the rest'). Yes, my reticence stemmed from a reluctance to let go, an unwillingness to accept that Harlan Ellison could ever 'end'. Vainly, childishly, I suppose I felt that if there was at least something left I hadn't read, he'd simply have to keep on living, keep writing, keep being Harlan...hopefully forever.

I learned of his passing at work. I checked the Ellison Facebook page and there on the banner was the simple announcement. I silently thanked the Universe that I had decided to stay late that night, then I leaned forward in my chair and, with an utter absence of pretense or shame, put my head gently down on my desk and cried for ten minutes, letting the sadness and shock and the guilt of feeling relief – yes, relief – wash over me in slowly diminishing waves, tears flowing freely, my heart in a vise but, weirdly, a smile on my face, too. Here now was that thing I'd been dreading for so long, but...Jesus, some part of it actually felt good. I wrestled for a long time with how that could be. I think it was because I was finally able to admit that Harlan had done everything he was ever going to do on this Earth and by dammit, he had earned his rest. No amount of wishing or ritual or superstition was going to keep him here...and that was okay. He gave us an entire universe. We could ask no more of him, and it was fitting that he should leave before he overstayed his welcome. Acknowledging that, and the onrush of unfiltered feelings that came immediately after – sorrow, joy, gratitude, finality, mortality – amidst the boring beige walls of my office at the end of a dull week was like being knocked down by a cold wave while wading in shallows: surprising and unnerving for a moment, but invigorating, too.

Harlan is gone now, a reality that I'm sure would bemuse and tickle him to no end (once, reflecting on the decline of integrity in America, he said "I tell ya, thank God I'm gonna die soon."). He left behind a lexicon of work few will ever surpass, not in quantity or quality and certainly not in both. He was not the man who inspired me to become a writer. He was the man who inspired me to keep trying, who showed me what a writer could do with just a stab of wit, a love of language, a gut full of bile, and a willingness to do the damn work. I quit a hundred times. I wanted to quit a hundred more. I want to quit still. Then the tome comes out, and for a few minutes or a few hours I read the words and I remember...it is possible. It is still possible. A simple lesson, inelegant and understated, two things he was not. But it was the lesson Harlan Ellison gave me, and I will cherish that forever.

I remember now one last thing I said to him when he passed his signed book back to me and I shook his hand. It wasn't “thank you” as I often recall; it was “thank you for everything”.

And he said to me, “You got it, kid.”

The Author and the author (of this piece) in Autumn, 2000.

George Carlin: A Ten-Year Reminiscence

Doin' It Again - the one that started it for me

George Carlin was prophet hiding in plain sight. He assumed the guise of an entertainer because, like most soothsayers in their own time, he preached a doctrine that was feared and misunderstood. In classical theater it was not the brave hero, wise matriarch, or revered elder but the Fool, the jester, the harmless comedian who illuminated the audience with moral instruction and disseminated Truth, carefully disguising his lessons behind cantrips and motley and bombastic lingo. Humor made the medicine go down easier, and meditations on the human experience were best swallowed with a merry song and a bit of capering. Or in Carlin's case, some fart jokes.

Carlin, of course, never pretended he wasn't preaching. He would have balked at the word – or any similar one so nearly associated with organized religion – but nightly on stage, in city after city, show after show for over 40 years, that is indeed what he did: he preached. Ethics. Morals. Values. Lies. Theology. Hypocrisy. Baseball versus football. His was a vast palette, a hundred-fold dabs of smudgy rhetorical paint mixed into a acid-tongued slurry of sacred and profane. He left behind not a single canvas but a tapestry of original comedy that changed the way we think, how we talk, and, yes, what we can and can't say on TV.

Carlin made an impression on me from the beginning. I was 11, I think, as bookish then as I am now, already a lover of words and a burgeoning cynic. I'd heard my share of stand-up, mostly from borrowed cassettes or scratchy VHS tapes on loan from relatives. Though I was too young to appreciate Delirious in time for its 1983 debut, when I chanced upon it a handful of years later I reveled in its hedonistic energy and the flood of forbidden profanity booming from Eddie Murphy like mortar rounds of raw sewage. Though my sister and cousins did their teenage best to keep my virgin ears pure (they were in for it, should I deign to repeat anything I heard that night), the damage had been done. Foulness was funny. But it wasn't until I happened upon a bootleg copy of Carlin's Doin' It Again that the other half of the equation became clear: foulness is funny, but alone it was flat, one-note, and ultimately forgettable. But combined with wit, straight talk, and a keen eye for human behavior, foulness could also be brilliant, insightful, and, most importantly, a window into uncomfortable truths. The nascent philosopher in me awoke. Truth wasn't merely foul; it was icky...but even as a pre-teen I knew Truth was real and it felt wrong that it should ever be ignored. By sandwiching it between rants about airline safety announcements and bad drivers, this scowling ex-hippie in the black t-shirt and ponytail presented Truth in a way that simply could NOT be ignored. Here was a man who could split your sides with a joke about laminating your own testicles one minute then ruminate for the next ten about Little Things We All Share, a hilarious bit that highlighted the beautiful sameness of the human experience irrespective of race, gender, or social status. In less than two hours I was a Carlin convert; I have remained so my entire life.

Carlin deepened my appreciation of the English language in ways no style guide or college professor ever could. Words were a hobby of his, and language and its reflections of human foibles a hallmark of his act for decades. Even his most recognizable routine of all time, 'A Place for Your Stuff', deconstructed the trappings of modern life using just one repeated word – “stuff” – as a lever. But for me the game-changer was his inspired bit about euphemisms and dishonest language. Using a slick set of blistering (and frighteningly commonplace) examples, Carlin exposed the weakening of English through the pervasion of soft, cowardly, and conniving words and phrases that manipulate ugly truths and turn them into sugary falsehoods; language that “takes the life out of life.” 'Fired' was now 'management curtailed redundancies in the human resource sector' . 'Homeless people' used to live in 'slums'; now the 'economically disadvantaged occupied sub-standard housing in the inner cities'. Governments used to be called out for lying but now they merely engage in disinformation. Meteorologists loved to talk about shower activity because it sounded more important than showers. And his most potent example by far: shellshock was enervated war after war for a hundred years, first to battle fatigue, then operational exhaustion, and finally post-traumatic stress disorder. People, Carlin knew, were bullshitting themselves into believing that if you changed the name of something you somehow changed the thing itself, and always in a manner that made life less scary but also altogether less true. And it wasn't getting better. He foresaw church shootings before the first recorded one occurred, and posited that the perpetrator would be called a 'disgruntled worshipper'. He knew then, and saw where we were going. In an age when Brian Williams justified blatant lies about his own battlefield experiences by claiming he “mis-remembered” them, the bit rings truer now than ever before. That our current president daily engages in falsehoods that would cow Loki himself makes the case for Carlin as a true seer plainer than I ever could.

As one who writes for a living, not a day passes I don't rail against double-speak and weak, duplicitous vernacular in a manner I hope would make George proud. I don't try to copy him. I'd never presume. But his influence has fundamentally affected the way I approach my job. I face my corporate-speaking colleagues like a rock in a storm, weathering their suit-and-tie lingo with a Carlin-esque smirk, then riposte the way he taught me: by advocating simple, honest, direct language. It has made me a more assertive contributor in meetings and more fearless in my work in general, and I like to think I've carved out a niche all my own as 'that guy', the guy who speaks and writes in a straight line. My co-workers don't know what to make of me half the time, and every sidelong glance or clueless gawp I earn from them makes me think that George is smiling somewhere.

I say “somewhere” because he assuredly did not believe in Heaven, though he used it as a set piece in many, many of his routines, and Hell, too, naturally. He resented the idea that our dead relatives are 'smiling down on us' and answering our prayers (“I'm sorry, but I have to believe we have better things to do after we die than run the Heavenly branch of the Make a Wish Foundation”). Many people cited Carlin as the man who turned them away from organized religion. I tend to think of it more like he managed to put to words many of the thoughts I'd bandied about for years but could never quite articulate, and so gave my angst re: theology a voice. I related to George as the classic 'recovering Catholic', having had The Doctrine drilled into me at a young age (though admittedly nothing close to the severity he experienced in an Irish-American enclave of Manhattan circa 1945) before jettisoning much of it at an older age. Like him, I observed how the history of human bloodletting and savagery seemed indelibly intertwined with the rise of institutionalized faiths and that more people had been murdered in the name of God than for any other cause. It never made sense to me, nor did so many so-called 'Christians' regularly engaging in bigotry and exclusion, to say nothing of their cognitive dissonance pledging themselves to mortal godheads miles removed from anything Christ-like (looking at you, Joel Osteen). The sex abuse stories racking through the news like shark's teeth didn't help, and infinitely, infinitely worse the follow-up stories about Church leaders covering up the crimes. Then came Religion is Bullshit, when I realized my frustrations stemmed largely from an inability or unwillingness – including my own – to talk straight, not about “Bible-thumpers” or pedophiles or born-agains, but about the fundamentally absurd tenets of faith itself. Those things that simply have to be taken on faith, because if you take so much as three minutes to think rationally about it...well, you start laughing. Exactly what Carlin intended.

“Think about it: religion has actually convinced people...that there's an invisible man living in the sky! And He has a list of exactly ten things He does not want you to do! And if you do any of these things, He has a special place full of fire and torment and smoke and torture and suffering that He is going to send you to burn and scream and choke and suffer and cry forever and ever for all eternity until the end of time!

…

But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money! He's all knowing, all loving, all seeing, and all-powerful but he just can't figure out money! He always seems to need a little more.”

I suppose some of my more arch-Catholic friends would accuse me of letting Carlin needlessly carry a chip on my shoulder, but in the 20+ years since I first heard him put to words those scattered thoughts of mine, I still haven't been able to say it better than he did. George captured that underlying vileness I had always felt around orthodoxy and the terrible unease I felt whenever I found myself in a room where large groups chanted in unison. I suppose it's the same reason I didn't last an hour at my first ever Boy Scouts meeting. Carlin didn't make me a free thinker, but he surely made me realize I wasn't wrong for being that way.

I caught a rerun of It's Bad For Ya on some hotel HBO one night on a week-long excursion to Oregon wine country. I'd seen George here and there in movies and TV appearances since his crotchety golden age of the mid-90s – his brief appearance in Kevin Smith's Dogma as a Catholic cardinal unveiling the grinning 'Buddy Christ' statue was a gut-busting career highlight (“Christ didn't come to Earth to give us the willies!”) and his cameo in Scary Movie 2 savaging the incomprehensible 'Architect' character from The Matrix was also hilarious. But Bad For Ya was the first time Carlin had ever seemed old to me. He'd done some time in rehab, having relapsed into substance abuse after a long period of sobriety. Clean again, he was slow in his movements, eschewing his comfortable cross-stage stride for a slower, more static pose, he used index cards to keep his place, and the hour-plus onstage seemed to tire him. His bits were more curmudgeonly, his japes a bit more cutting...or perhaps it was us who had changed in his absence and we had fallen victim to that softening against which he had railed so powerfully. But oh Lord, the fire in his belly hadn't dimmed in the slightest. His extended polemic about fat Americans remains one of his most viewed routines on YouTube, and many were the points he made that I had pondered myself (on seeing an enormously overweight couple, “Jesus, do these two people fuck? It does not seem structurally possible that those two could achieve penetration. Maybe they're in the Circe du Solei thing.”)

I mourned when Carlin died, quietly thanked the Universe for taking him before he had become completely infirm, and, yes, felt a little guilty for thinking it. He had the rather rare distinction among prophets of living to a ripe age and going out on a high note.  But like those who came before him, his words have lingered and endured and evolved to accrue new meaning in this age, an even more cynical age that has already shifted under our feet so much since he left us. There will never be another like him, and I thank the Universe for sharing him with us for seventy-one years.

“Take care of yourselves, and take care of someone else.”

Outrunning the Future: Blade Runner 2049

True story: when I heard the long-rumored Blade Runner sequel had been greenlit for a 2017 release, I created a new Word document I titled 'Tears in the Lame' where I jotted down notes, questions, and half-formed screeds in anticipation of destroying this movie. For 2 years it sat in the corner of my Macbook's desktop while I amassed rumors and progress reports like so much diseased offal, ammunition soon to be hurled from my trebuchet of fanboy hate. I had an entire sub-set of bullets listing the insurmountable problems caused solely by the gulf of time since the original film. I cited Harrison Ford's advancing age, Ryan Gosling's too-pretty mug, Ridley Scott's see-sawing track record...the works. Most of all, I had the beginnings of what (might) have been a valid point about exegesis (as Harlan Ellison defines it) and how the world Blade Runner wrought is an infinitely more cynical place thanks to its influence; a world, ironically, where a film like Blade Runner is no longer sustainable. Audiences fueling the present glut of fantasy and sci-fi would hate and fear another foray into that seminal dystopia, for all the things it was (too brainy, too subtle, too gray, too slow) and for the things it lacked (slo-mo explosions; cutesy, bespectacled hackers, kung fu-inspired gunplay, an SNL-alum sidekick for witty banter). And what it lacked most of all was enough refried, sequel-ready plot scrapings to turn it into a billion-dollar franchise, the only kind of franchise worth having these days.

My point, ultimately, was this: why desecrate the graves of well-spoken dead? Blade Runner was as good as it was (it only took 5 versions to get there!) and, more importantly, it had influenced and guided the genre inestimably in the three-and-a-half decades since its theatrical release. That world – my world – was better because of it. Why, oh why, would you sully it with a damn sequel?

As the expression goes: I don't mind being wrong as long as I can correct my mistakes.

This piece is my penance, the review that IS instead of the half-cocked rant that might have been. Because Blade Runner 2049 is that rarest of rare gems, a Sasquatch high-fiving the Loch Ness monster while riding a unicorn: it is a truly spectacular sequel. It eschews the easy path of revisiting old stories in favor of a wholly new one, one that stays true to the core questions raised by the original while daring to go farther. It cares not a wit for the audience's comfort level and doesn't sugar-coat or soft-boil anything, and in so doing tells a meaningful tale that never panders, never demeans, but provokes an inspired discomfort that leaves you hot, squirming, aching for answers, and riveted. It elaborates, it explores, it probes at the black edges of this murky universe without ever revealing its magician's tricks, and it deepens the Blade Runner mythology in a way that feels utterly right.

And I was utterly wrong to doubt that it could be done.

Thirty years have passed since that fateful night in November, 2019 when burned-out Blade Runner Rick Deckard was forcibly un-retired to seek and destroy four escaped replicants, the bio-engineered dopplegangers who had evolved to become 'more human than human', now a danger to mere mortals. He survived with his limbs intact but his soul forever scarred, vanishing the following day with Rachael, a prototype model with whom he had fallen in love. Thanks to Ridley Scott's periodic tinkering with the film's cut, Deckard's sunshine-and-lollipops happy ending (forced on Scott by a skittish studio) never actually happened; we know only that he fled under cover of night with Rachael in tow, their future uncertain. Now in 2049 the replicant's creator, the Tyrell Corporation, has gone bankrupt, Los Angeles is being crushed between of its own surging population and the implacable advance of the Pacific Ocean, and a massive data blackout has wiped three decades of computer records from existence. In the midst of it all, the Blade Runners still ply their trade.

Things have changed; things have stayed the same. The original film opened on an Edward Gorey-meets-H.R.Geiger vista of an oppressively dark, starless sky lit by acres of neon and industrial blow-off pipes belching flames above a thicket of grim skyscrapers – a darkling conjecture of what our world might be extrapolated from what it already was in 1982. 2049 opens with the same shot tweaked for our times: an oppressively white, bright, sun-bleached desert covered end-to-end with solar panels, the gauzy, pearlescent sky stabbed through with soulless gray regulator towers. Heat, once a waste product to be spewed into the uncaring night, has become a precious commodity, every joule of power a treasure. And just beyond that, a new scene, jarring, disquieting, and bizarre but somehow completely appropriate: an earth-ocean of automated protein farms, thousands of antiseptic acres laid out like a patchwork puzzle, a few of them bearing a tantalizing hint of green. Green? Are we sure this is a Blade Runner movie?

But oh yes, any doubts you harbor at the onset are quickly dispelled by the stunning art direction, at once a homage to Syd Mead's techno-future stylings that inspired the original and intuitive, organic forays into uncharted territories. The forests of glittering steel obelisks remain, as do the 10-story electronic billboards (sporting Atari and Pan-Am logos among other defunct companies, a simple but brilliant means of keeping the world internally consistent). Police cruisers – those flying cars we were promised would be here by now – still swoop and dive between the glass canyons like gunmetal herons and the hookers still man their corners in transparent plastic overcoats. As then, so now, you feel the oppressive weight of the city on your shoulders and taste the salt tang of sweat-stink in the corners of your mouth as the smog-tinted sky presses down on you. When it rains you feel no relief, only chagrin that you'll now be as sodden as you feel. You yearn to tug Gosling's fashionable fur collar over your face to horde just a whiff or two of breathable air. Then the scene shifts and you're someplace you've never been before, a place that looks different but feels somehow the same: the farms, the minimalist art-deco offices of the Wallace Corporation – walls forever bathed in scintillating reflections from water you never see – or yes, even the Las Vegas strip, depopulated courtesy of a dirty bomb attack, crusted in unnatural, heavy desert soot, quietly horrifying in its emptiness. Roger Ebert once remarked that one of the hallmarks of a well-made movie is when a scene is more beautiful than it needs to be to accomplish its purpose. 2049 does this in virtually every scene. It requires patience as a viewer, and a willingness to enjoy the moment rather than lick one's chops for the next provocative segue, but it is worth it.

Out of a genuine desire not to spoil this film for anyone who plans to see it, I will spare my usual ruminations on the plot save a few tidbits. This constitutes a sacrifice for me, because I make a game out of summarizing complex plots, one which I enjoy wholeheartedly. But the surprises – as few as the Internet can leave alive – are worth the price of my silence.

Suffice to say, the torch has been passed to Gosling, who does a frankly terrific job carrying the bulk of the film as a Blade Runner named simply “K”, who chances upon a box of apparently human remains buried beneath a remote farm (after an encounter with a surprisingly good Dave Bautista). His discovery sets him on a case 30 years cold about a vanished detective named Deckard and the events of that fateful night that ended with the murder of Eldon Tyrell, the 'father' of all replicants. Tyrell's creations have not gone extinct as we might assume, but rather evolved and flourished under the stewardship of uber-genuis Niander Wallace (Jared Leto in a strong, short performance that proves acting that burns twice as bright should burn half as long), who has vastly improved the designs of the glitchy Nexus 6 models and mass-produced more pliant versions without the failsafe 4-year lifespan. Looking vaguely like both David Koresh and Jesus, Wallace offers some of the most profound ruminations of the nature of humanity, slavery, the abstract definition of life, and the function – or lack thereof – of a soul. But he is no loving god. He wants a world in which replicants can create life all their own, making him the progenitor of an entirely new species. His vision puts him on a collision course with K, who, despite orders from his superior (the always great, under-used Robin Wright) exceeds his mandate to bury the dead case and continues his manhunt. In the process he unwittingly leads Wallace and his femme fatale enforcer Luv straight to the heart of the enigma: Deckard himself.

Harrison Ford has always been hard to read as actors go. His charisma and everyman charm counterbalances his lack of classic thespian flair. Even as a young man he always seemed like that gives-no-shits neighbor who trades a six-pack to help you with your movie rather than a constipated stage jockey pining for an Oscar. It is difficult to tell whether he consciously injects shades and subtleties, little mannerisms, and minor tics to distinguish his many, admittedly similar characters or whether he just recites the lines he's given and, like Han Solo, trusts his innate charm to win the day. In the last decade we've seen Ford resurrect no fewer than three of his classic roles: Solo, Indiana Jones, and now Deckard, and I can say for my own part the greatest joy of each (minus everything else about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) has been the distinct sense that nothing's changed save for some grayer hairs. It is especially prevalent in 2049; that feeling he has once again shrugged into an old character like a favorite shirt warm from the hamper – not so clean as it once was, but sentimental, broken-in and snug. Perhaps Ford's greatest contribution in his acting golden years is his ability to project that impression of the comfortable familiar out to his audience. By the second act we've been subjected to so much high-caliber emotional whiplash that Deckard's haggard face feels like a hot toddy and a warm blanket. Scoring another big payday to bark dialogue and toss some stage punches might be enough for an actor. But Ford outdoes himself here, reaching deeper than I can recall since Witness to mine Deckard's ravaged emotional state and produce some truly profound moments. An early scene with Gosling has Agent K asking Deckard a seemingly simple question – the name of the replicant with whom he fell in love. Ford takes a lifetime to answer, appearing to hold back an ocean of pain, and when he finally utters a terse “Rachael” it truly feels as though he hasn't said the name said aloud in 30 years and the the effort is physically draining.

Love doesn't get the credit it deserves as one of the anchoring themes of Blade Runner. In a film – now a film series – that finds so many ways to ask 'What is human?', we sometimes forget that it posits another rhetorical query that serves as both a second question and an answer: 'What does it matter?' For when one has loved, what matters the details? Again, 2049 finds a new way to explore an old motif, mirroring Deckard's doomed romance with K's relationship with Joi, a virtual companion who appears as an intangible hologram, albeit a stunningly beautiful, thoroughly life-like one. Relative newcomer Ana de Aramas is a quiet, joyous revelation as a K's better half, a computer program who laughs when she's happy, sulks when she's sad, and cries unabashedly when she sees rain falling from open sky for the first time. 35 years hence and Roy Batty's 'tears in the rain' have been made manifest; it's crazy to think I almost missed that during my first viewing. While Joi naturally serves as a grounding agent and sounding board for K, she is awarded many small moments to thrive on her own. This only serves to upend us, and poor K, all the more powerfully when Joi's face is seen plastered on billboards and neon pink holo-projections for the Wallace Corporation, a jarring reminder she is merely a digital fake, a logo no more alive than the Starbucks mermaid.

Ultimately 2049 circles back to the grand thesis that has always been the heart of Blade Runner – not, perhaps, a wholly original one, but one explored by any sci-fi with guts: who we are and where we come from is insignificant compared to the choices we make with the time that is left to us. That choice could be as simple as offering a kind word to a grieving stranger or as impossible as falling in love, but they are our choices to make with consequences we rightly own. “No choice?” Deckard asks Bryant, his commanding officer in the original. “No choice, pal,” is the answer, but we know in our hearts that wasn't true. Deckard could have told Bryant to shove it. That he didn't speaks volumes to his character. Trite observation? Maybe. But it's funny how often we miss things like that in the dearth of glitzy exploda-fests cramming our theaters these days. 2049 cares enough to let us see the hero unfold in due time. K is inundated with easy choices and happy paths, but elects time and again to take the harder route, unconvinced of success but virtually certain heartache and scorn awaits him at the finish line. We see a dozen stark opportunities for him to turn back and when he doesn't, we root for him all the more. That this film takes the time to let us arrive at that catharsis at our own pace is a testament to its quality. Happily, this film makes no attempt to order our thoughts or provide easy answers, though it does wrap up the mystery in a way that is extremely satisfying and provides something close to closure, which is the only real concession to 2049 as a proper sequel. It won't spawn another billion-dollar franchise and thank all the gods above and below for that. But it is a riveting experience, a rare cinematic odyssey, and a thoroughly worthy conclusion to one of the greatest stories in science fiction.

And with that, I claim absolution.  

Don't Cross the Streams -- PlayStation NOW

I couldn't quite ignore this one.

My PS4 had been screaming at me for days: “FREE TRIAL – PLAYSTATION NOW!” Seven days to try Sony's new streaming game service, no strings attached. Now I generally have a hobbit-like disposition toward glitzy ads promising good things for free: keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you. Still, the fine print could not be denied – a trial was a trial, plain and simple. So I signed up. Five minutes later I had laid before me a treasure trove – nay, a veritable reliquary – of selectable games. Not just demos and trailers, mind you; I'm talking full titles, start to finish. The mind boggled. Where to start? Yeegads, almost as much time could be consumed browsing lists as playing! A system was needed; some means of organizing and prioritizing this overwhelming roll of digital distractions. I felt in-over-my-head. What followed was several days of feints and probing assaults at a variety of games that fell into two general categories: games I'd always meant to play but never did and games I'd never heard of but which looked fun. Along the way I learned a thing or two about streaming services, about Sony, and especially about the power of time and nostalgia to soften and blur one's memories of gaming experiences of yesteryear. Some thoughts:

• Selection runs the gamut, but the gamut ain't always great: Here find some shooters, some sports, a few racers, a decent selection of off-brand RPGs (no Final Fantasys, no BioWare titles, no Bethesdas), numerous indies, and bundles of platform-action titles. But so many of them are merely okay, the sort that earned tepid 6s and 7s from IGN and other industry sites. Where are the Far Crys? The GTAs? Dishonored didn't get a spot? To be fair, some cornerstone franchises are there, namely the Uncharted series, the Batman Arkham series (minus Arkham Knight), the Borderlands collection including the TellTale Games Tales from the Borderlands, and all three BioShocks. There is also a healthy selection of the enjoyable LEGO games, including many (most?) of the Star Wars series and other Disney properties. But the no-shows to the party are more obvious than those who did show up, especially when faced with some of the truly pablum junk that made the cut (Dark Void, anyone, and what were you thinking, Nolan North??)
• Better Late Than Never: PS Now is, I suppose, a timely and competitive service in an age when more and more media outlets are ditching hardware altogether and going full-stream. With Xbox breathing down their neck with their silky-smooth Xbox Live, they could hardly be expected to answer the challenge in any other way. But this is also Sony's long-delayed punt on another feature absent from their tech that has been a bone of contention for years: backwards compatibility. While Xbox-ers could play all their old games on current-gen hardware, Sony hard-coded their new systems to only play fresh titles. If you wanted to keep playing your old PS3 classics, you had to keep an old machine hitched to your TV for good. It was a deal-killer for a lot of former PlayStation loyalists two years ago when the new systems made their debut, and Microsoft garnered a whole lot of new patrons as a result. PS Now redresses the backwards compatibility issue by offering a huge catalog of PS3 games, now playable via the PS4. Indeed, this almost seems to be the service's primary function: the vast majority of games offered on PS Now are actually PlayStation 3. The selection of PS4 titles, meanwhile, is much leaner, and most are not what you'd consider hot releases. God of War III Remastered seemed to be the headliner when I first started, and that's been around for a spell already. Sony promises more titles will be coming out in the months to come, but for now the choices are limited to a scant handful of aging titles, not all of them especially stellar.
• The Return of the Killer Menus: oh Sony, why oh WHY can't you make a decent menu system? Alas, if you're delighted by the prospect of revisiting your PS3 faves, your joy will be tempered with the return of another (cringe-inducing) feature of the last-gen system: hideous, god-awful navigation. Like the much-maligned X-Cross system that was the bane of PS3 users, PS Now's main menu interface is a series of long, horizontal icons arranged in dizzying, Sisyphean loops that require constant scrolling to browse. If you find a title you're interested in you have to remember where you saw it or else you'll likely lose track of where it was and have to begin your search anew minutes later. Meanwhile, transitioning to a new category requires scrolling vertically through a plethora of lists not organized in any logical way UNTIL you reach the very end where – finally – you can search alphabetically. Your thumb will have some heat on it before you play your first game thanks to all the forward, backward, up, down, back again and where-was-that-one-thing? you have to do before you finally land on your choice. On top of that, the icons are distractingly huge and consume too much of the interface to allow comfortable searching. You can only see four or five icons at once, which doesn't sound like an inconvenience until you're running through your tenth or twelfth loop of the same list hunting for the right title. Would it have killed them to have used a stacking system, perhaps with folders and sub-folders that break the library into a tree structure so you can narrow your options as you look (e.g. PS4 > RPGs > Fantasy, or PS3 > Shooters)? Yes, genres like RPGs and Shooters do have their own categories, but they are simplistic lists bunched up with two dozen other lists that look exactly the same crammed into the same cluttered screen. Plus, tons of cross-genre titles repeat in multiple lists, adding to the confusion. Ugh.
• Clear (?) as a stream: Streaming is amazing tech. When you consider that you're essentially feeding a 40GB game through your cable and straight into your system without a disc, an install, or a single bit of hard memory being consumed, it's astonishing. Netflix for games – whoa. But there's a price to be paid in graphical fidelity. I won't pretend to know all the science behind it, but it's obvious the staggering volume of data transferred causes the visuals to skew toward lower-res reproduction. Nothing is as crisp and clean as you expect it would be. It's never horrid but it's also never unnoticeable: draw distances are compromised, angles and lines are softened into waxy paste, finer details like water sprays and more elaborate lighting effects are muddled and blunted. BioShock, for example, looks considerably worse streamed than it ever did on PS3, and that's saying something for a game that uses shadows as much as it does light. It's more noticeable on PS4 games like Killzone:Shadowfall, an expansive, open shooter that never quite gets its visuals up to presentation quality. Which leads to a separate-but-related issue...
• Let's (try to) make a connection: Imagine you're in a large room filled with gaming consoles. You walk into the room, select the console with the game you'd like to play, and approach. But there's someone ahead of you in line who also wants to play the same game. And in fact, there are ten or eleven other dudes ahead of him. Might be a while. Maybe try another game? Another line, as long or longer. Plus it's a Friday, late afternoon, everyone's off work, ready to kick back with some gameage...just like you. Now almost every console's got a line queued up halfway out the door. And that room is starting to get crowded. And hot. And maybe you're connection isn't as super as some of the other dudes already in line, the virtual equivalent of needing to pee bad enough you're risking your spot in line. Maybe you end up missing your turn altogether and you'll have no choice but to get in the back of the line and try again. This was my experience with PS Now, minus the miasma of body heat and Dr. Pepper farts. There's only so much bandwidth the servers can handle, more players means more bandwidth, more strain on the 1s and 0s. Often – let's say 33% of the time because I'm feeling magnanimous – I simply could not access the game I wanted. My system would clock and spin and buffer and after several agonizing minutes I'd receive a disconcerting bloop sound and a message telling me my game was unavailable due to traffic. That was when they were kind enough to tell me what happened. As often the app would simply time-out and soft-crash back to the PS menu. Re-upping the same game resulted in a message telling me I was already engaged in a session – imagine my surprise! – and that I'd have to terminate my current session and log in again. To be fair, this happened largely during traditionally high-volume times – nights and weekends – and rarely cropped up during my early Saturday sessions. Lag increased noticeably as play-time elapsed, however, and many times I was treated to the nerve-wracking “CONNECTION” indicator (superimposed directly over the action, nonetheless), warning me I was in imminent danger of being dropped like a bad prom date. Saving frequently is a must, as any stretch of inactivity results in an automatic disconnect to ensure room on the servers for those of us not inclined to take a bathroom break (true story, by the way: pausing a game to take a brief porcelain repast, I returned to find my connection lost and my screen blacked out. This wouldn't have been half so aggravating if I hadn't been playing Bioshock 2 at the time, a game which many of you may recall only saves at the beginning of each stage...those stages which can famously take 2+ hours to finish).
• Everything old is...still old: Ah, nostalgia, that great whitewasher of games. How is it we only remember the good parts of those old titles and forget those things that made us rage-quit at 3am, howling in impotent silence at the TV lest we wake our parents? And have the next-gen systems truly ruined our awe factor at the aging graphics, the smaller sandboxes, the blocky, deformed character models? Yeah, they kinda have. It pains me to admit it, but try as I might, most of these games simply did not – could not – pull me in the way they did when I was younger, poorer, and un-besmirched by the near photo-realism we get from today's top-flight console titles. The original Infamous, such a great time-passer just a few years ago, now seems quaint. The first God of War? It will forever hold a place as one of the greatest action-platformers of all time, but it has aged. And the dearth of titles at your fingertips precludes your having to devote any real time to fighting those old fights again anyway – when it was the only new disc in your collection, you had no choice but to keep working at the one impossible spot until you got past it. Now you can simply throw up your hands and say, “Meh, I've played this before; what else is there?”
  
  
  Case in point: I took a trip down memory lane playing Shadow of the Colossus, a stellar title, revolutionary at the time, epic in scope, and utterly original. But I'd forgotten – oh, LORD, how I'd forgotten – about this one spot early in the game on the way to the third colossus, where you must climb a perilous column and wall-jump onto a platform over a vast lake below. Err even slightly and you plummet into the drink and there begin a painfully slow and deliberate swim back up to the pinnacle of this column for another try. Specifically I'd forgotten that spot was conceived and designed by the Devil himself during one of his especially depressed periods and that it is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to make that jump. How my 23 year-old self ever had the patience to overcome that obstacle I'll never know, but my 35 year-old self was having none of it. I gave it two dozen tries before resigning Shadow to the dustbin of my memories, where it will remain, beaten and conquered at a point and place in my life when time clearly weighed less heavily on me.

Confession time: I lost track of the days for my free trial and ended up being charged for the following month. As such, I had not one week but FIVE to experience PS Now, and my wallet is $20 lighter for the gaffe. In the end, I never finished a single game. Mostly I tried a handful of titles that looked interesting and ultimately decided the best part about most of them was the box art. Other players of a more fickle temperament might find this a plus rather than a minus – flitting here and there moth-like from one title to the next would appeal to the curious, the nibblers and the ADD types, after all – but for a semi-serious completionist like myself, I found I was more interested in finding one or two games that were actually good and working on them exclusively. Alas, I could and would not compromise my iron-clad rules of living a Mature Adult Life, namely I don't game during the week, and a few hours on the weekend is hardly enough to justify the cost of admission to this arena, this theater with a thousand doors. I summed it up best describing it to a friend who also had PS Now for a few months and ended up cancelling his subscription: it's like going to Blockbuster and renting $20 worth of random games (so, like, four or five), playing them all long enough to find the ones that don't suck, then half-assing the rest until it's time to turn them back in. He agreed.

Forever-Bloodied Hands: Castlevania - Season One

I remember countless summer days and first Fridays (dismissal at 12:00, followed by Mass, then freedom!) at my cousin Dan's house playing Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES. It was a more primitive – and yes, more innocent – age, but after naught but Mario Brothers and other tame fare, the shambling mummies, creeping spiders, and gyrating Medusa heads menacing the fog-shrouded town of Wallichia were indeed grim and glorious to behold...even in 8-bit. Turns out it wasn't a very good game, and most critics agree it is one of the more busted and forgettable of the series. There was a spot we could never get past, and in the days before the Internet one had only hearsay and conjecture (or a pricey, time-consuming hunt for the right issue of Nintendo Power) to overcome gaming obstacles. Sadly, by the time the solution presented itself, Dan and I had moved on, and for my part – except for a couple of 2-day rentals of one or two equally forgettable sequels – I never thought much of Castlevania again. Had I known then of the surfeit of vampire/monster/monster-hunter games, shows, and movies looming over the pop culture horizon – and the inevitable defanging (yes, that's a pun) of the horror genre that would result – I might have taken a longer, closer look at Castlevania and perhaps better appreciated its fairly original take on the Dracula mythos.

Once again Netflix, as it has many times in the last few years, swooped in to save me from a lifetime of regret. Castlevania debuted earlier this month as a new animated series, sneaking in the 'Originals' line-up between the live-action allegory Okja and the 80's wrestling satire GLOW. I'll admit I paid it little heed at first – the animation had a distinctly Eastern flair, which itself doesn't bother me, but it was enough to elicit concern it would be too much like the obtuse, labyrinthine anime series that I tried (and tried, and tried, Lord Jesus, how I tried) to like but couldn't. But then I saw four words that changed my mind in an eye-blink: “Written by Warren Ellis”.

Ellis, the mad Scotsman. Author of groundbreaking original comics series like The Authority and Transmetropolitan (still one of my favorites of all time) as well as two deliciously entertaining crime novels Crooked Little Vein and Gun Machine. And only four episodes at 25 minutes a piece? How bad could it be?

Turns out, not bad. Not bad at all. Traditionalists who know only the Bram Stoker story will find it a poor frame of reference for navigating this show, it's true, and only cursory lip service is paid to the pseudo-historic 'character' of Vlad Tepes – the legendary impaler. But complete strangers to the video game series should nonetheless find it watchable, thanks largely to stellar voice acting and seamless, Swiss-watch pacing that neither glosses over the good stuff nor tarries needlessly. Perhaps the most jarring thing is that it is a Dracula story with almost no Dracula in it. After a chilling, tragic prologue that explains the origin of Dracula's enmity toward mortals, the action shifts entirely to human characters dealing with his black rage. The once-thriving city of Wallichia has been transformed into a walled plague town, heaped with corpses and carrion flies and beset nightly by winged demons that eat babies out of their cribs and flee only with the coming of morning. The God-fearing peasants stay because...well, because they are indeed God-fearing, and the Church has maintained an iron grip on the populace by convincing them their lack of piety that is the real cause of the vampire's wrath. 

 Alas, Dracula's ire actually stems from an incident one year before, when his mortal wife – a scientist and healer – was burned at the stake for practicing advanced medicine which the local bishop deemed witchcraft. Thus ol' Vlad, who ironically had no quarrel with the short-lived sheep down the hill from his spooky castle, decides the only good human is a dead one and dedicates the remainder of his eternal life to ensuring we all die screaming. Not losing a wink of sleep in all this is the Bishop (played by Max Headroom's Matt Frewer), who, like Dracula himself, utterly believes in the righteousness of his cause, believes he occupies the moral high ground, and cares not a wit for the innocents lost along the way. Staunch Catholics beware: this series is not kind to the faith, or rather it very effectively employs the motif of religious extremism as anathema to common sense (especially in the Dark Ages) and absolute power enjoyed by the bejeweled 'leaders' at the top, tyrants in everything but name.

Castlevania, of course, is only tangentially about Dracula. The series has always really been about the Belmonts, the ancient clan of monster-hunters who have served as the protagonists of (nearly) every Castlevania game since the series' inception in 1987. The show starts at the beginning of the timeline with Trevor Belmont (Simon would come generations later), here a wandering drunk who doesn't exactly shun his family name but doesn't advertise it, either. Despite drifting from ale stein to hangover and back again in true anti-hero fashion, the blood of the ancient crusaders still thunders through his veins and he has the fighting skills to prove it. Armed with his handy short sword and consecrated whip – the game's signature weapon – he brawls with Church thugs and slavering bat-demons with equal aplomb and looks damn cool doing it. He's also, under his unshaven exterior, a decent person who doesn't want to see ordinary folk get hurt. Thus, for showing kindness toward the nomadic Seekers – a kind of medieval Doctors Without Borders – he is rewarded with a dangerous quest that pits him against a savage cyclops and almost drawn and quartered by a zealous mob. Along the way he meets two more characters from Castlevania III: Sypha, a Seeker priestess with magic powers, and Alucard, Dracula's half-breed son who possesses much of his father's darkling powers but remains pleasantly neutral toward mortals. The latter finds common ground with Belmont in a his singular desire to kill Dracula “because it's what my mother would have wanted.” A trio for the ages is born.

And that's it. Four episodes and we're off...but not before what promises to be a lengthy interlude whilst more episodes are produced (at the time of this writing, Netflix has already confirmed 8 more are on their way). But the groundwork has been laid for a delightfully gothy romp through all manner of game-inspired environs, and unless I've read it wrong (or don't know Ellis as well as I think) a more multi-dimensional take on Dracula, one that looks to be morally gray and provocative rather than one-sided and simplistic. Here, amazingly, is a Dracula who really isn't wrong per se, and in many ways is more sympathetic than the fleshy humans who fear him. I don't doubt that before the final stake is driven, Trevor and Company will find themselves wondering if their single-minded quest isn't a wee bit tunnel-visioned and whether peace in this violent age can really be bought at the business end of a crucifix. Still, I'm game...and waiting for more.