The Mission Impossible series doesn’t break from this tradition: It is also worried about non-state or rogue state actors in the classical non-ideological vein. The newest one also has a non-state actor for a villain, so “check,” but its villainy is framed as its capacity to use misinformation. That makes it sort of reflective of post-2016 American anxieties. That’s interesting, in a way, because the classic ’60s-era spy films went explicitly and pointedly non-ideological, and sometimes even paired heroes with Soviet partners to drive the point home. They didn’t even register as anti-communist allegories.

The new MI movie has a definitionally non-ideological villain, but its post-2016 anxieties about misinformation seem at least political if not ideological, and there’s an explicit tie to Russia that lost me a little, but feels like maybe it’s meant to sketch an association rather than point an explicit finger — at least not one you couldn’t unpoint with a little selective localization when you go to the global market.

Anyhow, it was a very long movie that got pretty tedious and felt weirdly self-satisfied. There was so much “finally, back to the movies! Tom Cruise is our last movie star!” rhapsodizing about Top Gun: Maverick it was impossible to watch this one and not feel like Tom Cruise’s publicist should’ve just hid his clippings, because there’s something insufferable about this movie. I just wanted it to end.

I warned her, going in, “there is going to be some savage nerdery in the audience.”

I saw the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings feature when it came out in … 1978? Someone sitting behind me narrated the entire movie (and its assorted successes and failures) for its duration. That was a formative experience for young me. I will talk your face off about a given adaptation once we are clear of the theater, but sit in stony silence during the viewing.

Before pulling further on that thread, just some thoughts about the movie:

I was first exposed to D&D when I was eight or nine. Dad was in seminary and his friends all played, but it was too adult for the kids, and Dad’s frenemy – the local Dungeon Master for Life – told him it was his observation that I had no imagination and wouldn’t take to the game anyhow.

I first played the game in eighth grade. It was an accidental thing. We moved to Indiana in the middle of the school year, and the only tables in the lunch room with space by the time I got there each day were the two “D&D tables” tucked away to the side. Given the judgment of dad’s frenemy I wasn’t sure I could hang, but the alternative was trying to find a spot in the mostly pre-sorted tables away from the edges of the cafeteria.

Each table had a distinct character.

The crew I fell in with preferred a play style that was broadly rules-oriented but privileged narrative flow over correctness. We did not calculate the weight of our equipment or encumbrance rules. Phil, the dungeon master, was a stickler on appropriate alignment behavior, though, and had a conception of how a Paladin should behave that I swear to god George Lucas stole for the Jedi in the prequels.

The other table was way more rules-oriented and were considered the more rigorous party. Jack, the dungeon master, didn’t ease up on much.

Phil ran a light game. His narration had a broad, slapstick style to it. If you really botched a saving throw or had a catastrophic encounter and somehow managed to get completely mugged by a couple of kobolds, you sort of traded your dignity for your life.

Jack, by contrast, abided by every roll and just straight murdered players. Your favorite 13th level Paladin got iced? Suck it. You could keep playing, but with a low-level character who acted as a boat anchor and liability for the survivors. Jack was known to play with some high school kids who ran an evil campaign, and his stories were dark.

The two crews stuck to their tables during the week. Every few months we’d get together for a sleep-over and a one-night campaign, where it was generally agreed that Phil’s “narrative first” approach worked a little better given the time constraints and general punchiness by the time you got to the end-game around 4 or 5 a.m.

I favored Phil’s approach. When I made my own game system it was built around six-sided dice and was pretty heavily influenced by Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, which was descended from one of his ’70s-era microgames (wrong Steve Jackson, thanks, Ed – mph). It wasn’t about wrapping rules around miniature gaming – Jack had maps, Phil eschewed them – but instead about adding a little entropy to a shared improvisational story-telling exercise.

Over the course of my gaming career I pretty much sorted everybody into “Jack” and “Phil” camps, broadly. After starting with D&D, I moved on to Boot Hill, Traveler, Top Secret, Space Opera, Marvel Superheroes, and a heavily narrative-inflected Car Wars. Some crews were meticulous rules people, others not. Some of them loved their rules but kept the story light, others told pretty dark stories but favored the narrative. Some were very welcoming of newcomers, able to be patient with the sorts of things new players do before they sort of get into the flow. Some were very “only the experienced need apply,” and only let you bring high-level characters into their campaigns if you’d brought them up from scratch.

I’m going into all this diversity, because I went into the movie wondering whether it would make any sense. There are definitely some set dressing things that will be familiar to multiple generations of D&D players, but there’s so much variation in how people play that I’d be hard pressed to write down the criteria for “faithful to the game.”

It managed it, though, or at least it recreated a style of play I’ve seen a lot among dungeon masters who are good at keeping the party moving, turning the pot up to a poil, and keeping control of the situation as an increasingly frantic party cooks up increasingly implausible solutions to whatever is coming at them.

The characters all sort of map to their “classes” without “Use your barbarian might, Holga!” meta-dialogue. There’s an NPC. One of the characters pretty much screamed “hey, emo neuro-divergent zoomers, look how much fun you could have pretending to be yourself, but with a backstory that isn’t contradicted by your Twitter history!”

It reminded me of when some new fantasy movie would come out, and we’d take a little time out from our lunch time game to sit around dissecting the characters (what level? what class?) and any spells (“it was definitely a magic missile, but heavier damage”) or weapons (“that’s an ego sword, for sure … I’d say +1/+3.”) Except it also synthesizes the past couple of decades of fantasy movie stuff (you get the Jacksonesque dungeon interiors and boom-shot landscapes, you get the MCU wise-cracking and one late scene that could have just been different CG models wrapped around Loki and the Hulk) and maps them back into D&D.

So … savage nerdery.

Decades of Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, DC, etc. adaptations have conditioned into me a certain cringing wariness. Not about the properties so much as the fans. Or maybe what the fans will do to the properties. I found the Harry Potter movies incredibly tedious, and fans of the franchise suggested to me that it was because they were simply too faithful. I didn’t get too worked up about Lord of the Rings and the way it inflected from a fairly faithful Fellowship to oliphant-trunk-surfing Legolas because the fans were out for blood the second Peter Jackson was announced as the director and he knew it: He had to keep them from denouncing the first one so he could capture the normies and get on with making an LotR that worked more as action-adventure in the later installments.

But I’ve sat in theaters where you can hear and feel people seething. And I have an internet connection. Even if you don’t care that the gatekeepers and pedants are upset, you can’t help but know they are.

In yesterday’s matinee, though, the crowd ate it up. I could hear people comparing notes whenever a new creature appeared or some particular location was mentioned from the established lore. People name-checked spells and relics. Al sat next to two people who were engaged in running commentary the entire time. I couldn’t quite hear them except when something really delighted them and they started cackling and bouncing up and down.

I don’t judge. It was fun. It leveraged the strengths of being of a property – some aesthetic stuff, creatures from Monster Manual, locations, classes, spells – but preserved the strength of D&D (and RPGs generally), which I would argue is its capacity to accommodate all those diverse playing and narrative styles. Where comic book movie properties have harnessed the multiverse hack that comic publishers were forced into, both to permit constant re-creation and renewal of their IP, and to slip out of the unforgiving canon pedantry that makes Star Wars and Star Trek difficult, D&D simply is a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people. It is not hard to imagine an MCU-like multi-format franchise wrapped around D&D.

When we walked out – me as someone who’s been around D&D and RPGs for 42 years, Al as someone who has never played a minute of anything – I was saying “that seemed to capture the spirit and it was a fine light fantasy movie,” and Al was saying “that was fine. I expected some sort of comedy/adventure thing and that’s what it was. Was it like the game, then?”

Sure. Somehow, it was like the game.

Seems like “mission accomplished.”

Well, it took less than 12 hours to go from “I’m not going to even touch that” to “huh, I wonder if it’s cool?”

Yes, org-roam is cool. It’s a Zettelkasten implementation built atop org-mode. To make it work in Doom Emacs you just add it to the org-mode line in Doom’s init.el:

(org +roam2) 

… and then run doom sync.

You should add a roam subdir to your standard org files location or it will complain when you try to use it.

You can instantiate a new node with spc n r i (’n’otes, ‘r’oam, ‘i’nsert)

That gets you a roam buffer and you can start typing. As with most transient Emacs buffers, C-c will save and exit.

If you want to link to a separate note, you can start typing its name in the body of the current note and get an autocomplete list.

If you link to a note from another note, Roam takes care of adding a backlink at the bottom of the target note.

As with all things Emacs, there are org-roam configs you can go find on the street and stick in your mouth. As with all things Emacs, I didn’t describe it that way because I thought that would make such an approach attractive to you. I want you to be repulsed by that approach because it is unclean. One of the advantages of Doom Emacs (or Spacemacs, or Prelude) is that if they include a package, they probably include some basic configuration, so you can kick the tires then start layering on capabilities.

Anyhow, in its basic Doom Emacs config, org-roam is unremarkable. If you want a zettel and don’t want Emacs, go get Obsidian or one of its competitors. I’m going to stick with it for a while. As I mentioned yesterday, I like org-mode’s intertwingling of tasks/actions/todos and prose, so it suits me.

The pleasures of a straight razor competently wielded

A brief history of me and professional grooming:

• My grandmother paid for my first stylist haircut when I was in 7th grade. I had no idea how to maintain it.
• I spent a few years just telling barbers to take it all off.
• The army taught me the pleasures of walking in, paying your $5, and getting a high-and-tight. Once I’d been in a few years, I’d modify the request to say “leave a little up top.”
• Over the past 20 years I developed an appreciation for Great Clips because they store your preferences and last cut in the computer under your phone number.

Then last year I walked into a barber shop near the office because things were dire and I had a few minutes. The barber handled the basic cut, then offered to do some detail work with a straight razor since he had time. That part was amazing, and it made my day.

I started going back, partially because it was a great first experience and partly because the barber was utterly disinterested in small talk. Just enough to establish we spoke a common tongue, then nothing except the occasional request for a decision. We did enter into an extended dialog about my beard made up of very sharp exchanges in the ensuing months. He was in favor of taking more of it off, and I would say “no, I’m not there yet, please just do what you can with it.” He’d mutter and then cluck when he got to the part where it began to curl at the bottom. “I can’t do anything with this … you’re sure you’re okay?”

Then last week I had a video conference and was wearing a shirt with a collar and a jacket and I realized I couldn’t see my collar under my beard. I couldn’t really see my mouth, either.

I recently read about a study that suggested people with beards will ultimately be perceived as more trustworthy and accessible once they are given an opportunity to smile. Until that point, the unbearded have all the social advantages. So I decided it might be best to make my mouth observable. COVID and masking did reveal me to be a proficient eyebrow flasher, but I don’t think you can completely rely on that.

So I booked time with my barber and left out the haircut (I’m good for a few more weeks) but did add the razor true-up.

When I sat down he resignedly asked “the usual, just fix the scruff?” and I said “no, I’d like to get some of that length and volume out of there.” He started to nod vigorously, and we entered into an extended negotiation measured in finger widths (“okay, but top of finger or bottom?”) and ultimately settled on something that would both reveal my mouth and also let you see my neck and/or collar.

Then it was just closing my eyes and enjoying the hot towel, thick lather, and precision work of a sharp straight razor, including temples and neck.

Restorative.

I go all the way across town – the barber moved from near the office to even further west – but it’s worth the train ride once a month to have a good barber.

Movie: Decline of Western Civilization

I rewatched Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization for the umpteenth time. X is one of my top 5 favorite bands of all time, so I love everything with them in it, even if John Doe’s trolling over “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” makes me cringer harde with every viewing. The people around the periphery are great, too, including Club 88’s owner, who is determined to greet the whole freak show playing out in his venue with a certain patient equanimity I hope I can equal as the world moves on around me. And I’m grimly fascinated with Fear, and Lee Ving in particular, and his theatrical hate.

Punk was the first real subgenre I embraced. I was up at 2 in the morning in 10th grade, working on a paper for my journalism class, when the college radio station I’d been listening to jazz on hours earlier suddenly crackled back to life from its post-midnight-signoff hiss because someone had snuck into the studio and announced the first (and possibly last) installment of “Goshen College’s Guts Radio.”

Then they peeled my skull back with Fear, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and stuff I never heard again.

I mentioned it to the stoner who sat in front of me in American History and he came back the next day with the Dead Boys’ Young, Loud and Snotty on one side of a cassette tape, and a hastily assembled tour of more vintage punk on the other.

Anyhow, Decline: X are the odd ones out there. A punk act, yes, but with the seeds of their eventual trajectory present if you look for them. The case has been made that they were a case of tragic mistiming and I think it might be true: There they were at the height of their energy in 1980, but the sensibility they anticipated was years away from the eventual saturation it achieved with vintage scavengers and billy boys. My affection for X is undying: They were my bridge from a sullen, resentful anger toward all the normal people to a belief that maybe I was one of the decent people, too.

Rocky

I love the look and texture of the first one. Closing in on 50 years old, it’s all low light and film grain.

There’s some cultural stuff going on that seems alien now: Mass culture still treated Italians as a separate ethnicity. If you were consuming the mass media of your grandparents’ prime years, you had a sense there was some still some bigotry attached not too many years before, but the ’70s were much more celebratory: Lots of Italian protagonists in t.v. and movies that played with the tensions of those past stereotypes, and I guess I remember that being Italian was sort of short-hand for working class, too. It was a very soft version of the idea that “race is the modality in which class is lived” in the final moments of a particular identity before it was subsumed into “whiteness” by American media.

This time around I also found myself thinking about how much the camera is just with Stallone the entire time. In his ‘76 review, Roger Ebert says:

“Its story, about a punk club fighter from the back streets of Philly who gets a crack at the world championship, has been told a hundred times before. A description of it would sound like a cliche from beginning to end. But Rocky isn’t about a story, it’s about a hero. And it’s inhabited with supreme confidence by a star.”

Rocky II

Harder to watch because the setup involves Rocky screwing up his newfound fame, and Stallone plays him … dumber? Al wondered if he was trying to portray the effects of Dementia Pugilistica. I thought it was a reasonable depiction of what someone like Rocky might do, even if the performance was grating.

On the whole, it’s just darker, slower, and more difficult to watch; and also more jerky in its progression.

Awesome media artifact: Roger Ebert writing about watching Rocky II with Muhammed Ali:

“‘For the black man to come out superior,’ Ali said, ‘would be against America’s teachings. I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky.’”

Rocky III

The 99-minute-long Mr. T installment of the series. Yikes. I’m committed to getting to Rocky IV so this was a necessary stop. The most gobsmacking part of it is the way Mr. T’s “Clubber Lang” is portrayed as a snarling animal who sexually menaces Adrien, but Rocky’s brother-in-law Pauly is there to say some racist stuff, and since we’re to read Pauly as a racist boob, then we’re to believe the movie’s heart is in the right place. Jesus. See Muhammed Ali in the previous section.

Yeah. No. Not a lot of time for this one.

I read recently that Stallone wasn’t in Creed III because he disagreed with the direction the script went (“too dark”), and because he’s got a long-standing beef with Irwin Winkler, the franchise’s producer all these years. I read a theory that the script he rejected called for Rocky to die of the illness they set him up with in the first Creed movie and he wasn’t having it. Personally, I thought he got sent off fine in Creed II, quietly, after turning in a pretty good performance as an aging Rocky in Creed I and II that actually convinced me going back to the originals was a good idea at all.

I will say that one of the Creed series’ achievements is selling the viewer on the iconic, mythic weight of a franchise that stopped working after the first sequel. It’s an amazing rehab job.

I would have to think for a while to name a better American crime drama. The mind goes to Goodfellas, The Departed, The Godfather Parts I & II, L.A. Confidential and on and on, but there is something about Heat. There’s so much going on in nearly three hours. Michael Mann takes so much time to draw out characters he could have chosen to leave out or give less time to, so it feels luxurious and full.

I think history will be kinder to Robert DeNiro’s performance than it has been to Pacino’s, but Pacino reigned it in when it was important. In 1995 he was getting rewarded a lot for a certain kind of explosiveness.

It was a great audience, too. Appreciative, but with a good sense of humor about it when a few of the lines don’t work so well. I wonder how many of the few clunkers there are is about the style of the time and how much is just “that wasn’t written so good.”

And it was great to just see it on the big screen. I’ve never seen it on anything bigger than a 42" screen. I loved Mann’s LA landscapes having room to stretch, and for some of his action camera work to become overwhelming.

Every time I go to a movie at the Hollywood I wonder why I’m not going to more. Enter the Dragon is coming soon and I think I have go to.

Al and I went to see a 35mm screening of 1999’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. I noted a few days ago that I often forget it was part of the “class of ‘99” – a great year for movies that included:

• Fight Club
• The Matrix
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Office Space
• Magnolia
• But I’m a Cheerleader
• The Virgin Suicides
• Being John Malkovich
• The 13th Warrior
• Boys Don’t Cry
• Election
• Mystery Men
• Three Kings
• The Limey
• Ravenous
• Summer of Sam

1998 hadn’t been a slouch, either:

• The Big Lebowski
• The Thin Red Line
• Buffalo ‘66
• Ronin
• A Simple Plan
• Run Lola Run
• The Opposite of Sex
• Smoke Signals

… and 2000 kept did okay:

• American Psycho
• Memento
• Almost Famous
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• Boiler Room
• Battle Royale
• Amores Perros
• The Way of the Gun

I picked some of the ones I did because we reaped something wonderful from the popularization of the indy sensibility. Reservoir Dogs had played twice in my town in 1992, first in its art house run and then in the cineplexes when it got a wider distribution deal. It took a few years for that sensibility to thoroughly saturate mass culture and then begin to attract big studio money, but it eventually got there. Maybe my own tastes broadened, but my sense is that something raw and vital found expression over the course of the ’90s.

Ghost Dog is of a piece with a number of the fascinations of the era, and with its postmodern “toss the genres in a blender” sensibilities. Roger Ebert picked up on it in his own review:

“The whole story is so strange, indeed, that I’ve read some of the other reviews in disbelief. Are movie critics so hammered by absurd plots that they can’t see how truly, profoundly weird ‘Ghost Dog’ is?”

… and the Charlie Kaufman Epoch had just begun.

Ebert picked up on something else:

“His profound sadness, which permeates the touching Whitaker performance, comes from his alienation from human society, his loneliness, his attempt to justify inhuman behavior (murder) with a belief system (the samurai code) that has no connection with his life or his world. Despite the years he’s spent studying The Way of the Samurai, he doesn’t even reflect that since his master doesn’t subscribe to it, their relationship is meaningless.”

That’s the thing that I took away from my first viewing, over 20 years ago, and found again with last night’s viewing.

There are flickers, in a few scenes between Ghost Dog and people on the street perhaps most especially with RZA’s brief walk-on, of a hidden world. And Ghost Dog is undeniably competent – more competent than I remembered before re-watching – but at the center of it all is whatever brokenness led to him making himself whole with his adopted code. It makes the movie a wonderful opportunity to reflect on our own codes and our own sense of purpose, however we’ve found it.

I think that was perhaps one of the best parts of those few years in Hollywood: There was this Tarantino-inspired eclecticism of style, “weird” was pretty normal compared to the ’80s, and the best movies of that time were also trying to find some sort of raw, emotive truth in the middle of their weirdness.