Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Where I talk about books, movies, television, art, pro-wrestling and other forms of culture and pop-culture

RECENT READING: Do Anything by Warren Ellis

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Warren Ellis takes a look at the history of comics using the metaphor of Jack Kirby’s Robot Head as the central metaphor and anchor for his free-associating path through the topic.

That doesn’t do the book justice, though. I don’t think any description ever will. Because one of the things that unifies Ellis’ disparate project tends to be his interesting in breaking down a form to its components and rebuilding it into something new.

Ten years, when this book was just a column on Bleeding Cool, he took that approach to a weekly essay on comics books. The days, you can see him deploy the same approach over on his website, courtesy of the way he’s thinking out loud about comic book publishing and developing his vision for a weekly newsletter in an ongoing web series.

I discovered this book by a circuitous route. I’d been a fan of Ellis for years, courtesy of his work on Transmetropolitan and his Authority comics for Image, and gradually followed him into fiction writing (go read Normal) and writing for screen (Go watch Castelvania on Netflix). Mostly, though, I became a fan of watching Ellis think out loud on his blog and in his newsletter, watching him interrogate ideas and chart his interests for readers who may be curious.

Do Anything was an old project by the time I latched onto his social media, but it would occasionally get referenced because it was written in a very particular way: an ongoing serial essay that was drafted in a reporters notebook, one long essay with the breaks inserted later, during the second draft as Ellis went back and coaxed a little more out of the seeds he planted.

I’m a sucker for anything notebook related, especially when it’s based upon changing up a process, so I went and sought the book out. It’s not available online, but the book is slim and cheap–essentially, it’s a 48-page comic format that just happens to be full of words instead of pictures.

There are books that leave their fingerprints on you, when you read them as a writer. Books that break open the way you’d thought about something and showed you whole possibilities you hadn’t seen. This is definitely one of them.

DO ANYTHING: THOUGHTS ON COMICS AND THINGS, WARREN ELLIS: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA)

Movies That Surprised Me: Office Christmas Party

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I remember when Office Christmas Party hit cinemas, and I’d planned to go see it. The film looked awful, a little slice of seasonal narrative that was going to be equal parts debauchery and twee, but every time the trailer’s played I kept noticing actors whose work I dug in the supporting cast: Kate McKinnon, Olivia Munn, Courtney B. Vance, Randall Park, Jennifer Aniston.

“It will be terrible,” I told myself, “but it could have some great moments.”

Then life got busy, ’cause it was the holidays, and it’s time in cinemas was incredibly short. There was always a movie slightly more appeal playing at the same time, and I went to see that instead.

Fast forward to last week, when my partner and I settled in for a trashy movie night and scrolled through the new releases on Netflix. Office Christmas Party flashed up, and the graphics were basically Kate McKinnon in a terrible holiday sweater, and my partner was sold on that basis.

“This will be terrible,” she said, “but Holtzman will be great.”

So we loaded up on junk food and put the movie on, and lo….it was almost entirely the movie you expected it to be after watching the trailer.

But–and I’m going to stress this–it’s only almost entirely the film you’re expecting: Yes, it’s about a bunch of plucky office misfits trying to save their company with a massive party; Yes, it’s reliant on familiar jokes about sex, drugs, alcohol, and inappropriate behaviour; and, yes, it’s a film about the evil, soulless corporations being measurably worse than the small, this-is-a-family firm. It’s an underdog-misfit story that has been played out constantly, and problematically, since Porkys and Revenge of the Nerds.

Which is why the film would occasionally catch us off-guard when it would throw in references like the white-straight-male-trust-fund-kid-CEO being aware enough to recognise that he’s basically easing through life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, or pulling off a moment of insight around consent, or race, as they progressed through the usual beats you associate with this kind of film.

These insights weren’t nuanced–in some cases, they were largely hanging a lampshade on things before going for the problematic joke regardless–but it’s interesting to see the way in which conversations around equality are filtering down from high-end think films to the cheap-and-easy holiday filler.

And it also meant that when the film pulled off a really nice bait-and-switch at the midpoint, delivering the climax we expected at the end and veering off in a new direction, we were inclined to follow along with it. By the time Jennifer Aniston’s cold, corporate antagonist busted out some sweet Krav Maga, we were largely onboard with this film being one of the best usages of Aniston in years.

For a film we largely picked to watch Kate McKinnon being cooky and weird between the dross, it caught us off-guard enough to beat our expectations.

At the same time, it delivered exactly the right among of McKinnon being cooky and weird to satisfy.

RECENT READING: Clementine, Cherie Priest

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I started describing this book to my partner as I was approaching the midpoint, running through the key details: steampunk western; Escaped slaves turned dirigible pirates; a female spy forced to become a Pinkerton because she’s too famous for the South to want her anymore; MAD SCIENCE SUPER-WEAPONS!

My partner basically asked me to stop and put it on her to-read pile before I’d finished the list.

Clementine is part of Priest’s Clockwork Century series, which started with 2009’s Steampunk Zombie Western Boneshaker and rolled through another 5 novels and two novellas. This is one of the latter, originally released as a special edition by Subterranean press and now out in paperback for everyone who wants to catch up.

As a novella, it’s not going to be for everyone. It’s definitely a long novella–I’d estimate that it runs close to 40,000 words–but it packs a lot of story, action beats, and two POV characters into that count. The result is a story that rattles along at an incredible pace, but it’s definitely one for the people who like moving fast and know the world from the prior novels.

It is, in fact, the kind of book that makes for a really interesting case study for my PhD, although I’m not entirely sure that I have the time to do it justice before the thesis is due.

Anyway, I loved this book. I’ll be going back to it and studying its techniques closer, to get a feel for how it moves at the pace it moves at, and it’s served as a good reminder of why I loved the series. It turns out that I’d completely missed the last two books in the sequence as well, so I’ve got some more to look forward to.

CLEMENTINE, CHERIE PRIEST: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | BOOKTOPIA