Perry Mason vs Law & Order on an emotional level

While preparing for my move, I have added to my Perry Mason repertoire having a Law & Order marathon playing in the background. Obviously, there are a lot of differences between the shows - the main one being that Mason is on the side of the defendants, while L&O shows us the perspective of law enforcement and the prosecution, but the one that stood out to me this time was thematic.

I would laugh when an episode of PM ends on a light note when the subject matter is usually so dire: murder, of course, but also abuse, exploitation, jealousy, family conflict, and all that. L&O also handles these, as well as racism, homophobia, and rape, but it, perhaps more appropriately, usually ends on a dire note, even if the protagonists "win". Emotionally, that takes its toll.

I've found myself missing the light-heartedness of the PM "happy ending". It brings levity to a dour semi-fictional reality. Add to that that we usually see more gruesome dead bodies and other evidence of violent crime, as well as less stylized responses to those, and I feel like maybe my long-term PM marathon has scraped away my defenses - defenses that perhaps I should not have built up in the first place.

True crimes

I just finished reading a collection criminal cases titled The Pinkerton Case Book, by Alan Hynd. Hynd was apparently given significant access to the archive of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the book is a paean to the efficacy of the agency in fighting crime. Missing from the book's foreword and cases are anything to do with the union busting for which the agency is most notorious.

It seems like this book is indicative of one historically popular subgenre of True Crime - ones where the investigators are the heroes, and were able to catch the criminal. The more common subgenre I hear about recently is is more critical of past investigations, or attempts to conduct its own investigation - for example the podcast Serial, or the TV documentary The Jinx. A forbearer of these would be Erle Stanley Gardner's Argosy column, The Court of Last Resort (dramatized in the TV show of the same name), which tried to re-investigate for people who were convicted of a crime and have exhausted their chances at appeal.

It's interesting to look Gardner's Perry Mason, the character and TV series, from this perspective. While the district attorneys and police detectives in the series (whether or not they are the iconic Hamilton Burger and Lt. Arthur Tragg) are shown as ultimately motivated by a sense of justice (more-so than in the novels that I have read so far), they are also repeatedly shown to target the wrong person, in a way that would convince a jury of their peers. It makes you wonder how many people in this fictional universe have been imprisoned and even executed wrongfully, because they didn't happen to have a Perry Mason at their side. 

Prism Pentad and scale

I recently finished The Prism Pentad, the series of novels by Troy Denning, which are a narrative introduction to the Dark Sun D&D setting.

One thing that stood out for me throughout the novels is how little they made me want to play this world in D&D. Every time D&D impinges, as when describing the magic system, or the use of stock D&D races, it seems out of place. Reading the corresponding boxed set, neither the magic nor the psionic elements were represented very well, either.

Instead they made me want to play in a supernatural Mesopotamian setting like that in Blood & Bronze. Although maybe that's also because I finished reading the Torah all the way through last year for the first time, and it describes a very similar setting in many ways.

A recurring theme towards the end of the book which I thought was interesting was distinctive changes of scale. Explaining what I mean will require some significant spoilers.

Perry Mason repeatedly jumped the shark

Early this year I presented early Perry Mason episodes as the epitome of the episodic. Since then I have watched several more seasons of the show. In the following I will be spoiling a few episodes and some diversions from the purely episodic.

Pride and Prejudice and being taken in

Since I discussed it last week, I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I enjoyed the experience tremendously, but following the afterglow, I started having second thoughts about my reactions to it.

Pride and Prejudice and an historical novel as mystery

During the last couple of years, I've played many sessions of Regency Cthulhu, a Call of Cthulhu supplement focusing on running scenarios set in the Regency era. More specifically, the supplement calls out Jane Austen's novels. After playing, and during a break, writing a few Lovecraftian pastiches set in that era using a very different version of the character I created for the campaign, I came to realize that I really was missing out by not having read any of Austen's work. I read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as a kid, and some Dickens, and possibly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, but all of these were obviously not very sharp in my mind. So, in a timely fashion, I decided to start with her classic Pride and Prejudice.

The writing was very good from the start, and the characters fascinating, but the first of three volumes had me terribly confused and unsettled. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take as sensible, what was supposed to be ridiculous as opposed to being read as ridiculous form my modern point of view, and so on. With time I obviously realized that some of the characters are not particularly reliable, but I wasn't sure what kind of acme I could have for making sense of them.

And then, the second volume had a large, clear exposition that made me reassess my entire experience. The exposition added facts that were known neither to me nor to the character to whom it was aimed - and then the character made note of some facts that were familiar to us both, but which we had missed the significance of at the time, but now were shown in a new light with the new evidence.

The facts and what they suggested were not really culturally-dependent - they pointed to an explicit contradiction between someone's behavior and statements and their actions. If I hadn't been so busy second-guessing myself as to my interpretation of the many events and discussions surrounding this contradiction, perhaps I would have noticed it. I felt like in a detective novel, where there's a revelation of what really happened, or who did the crime, and the reader feels like they should have been able to figure it out themselves.

With this in mind, I no longer feel as I did during the first volume, that I wish that I were reading an annotated version of the novel. Instead, I would like, going forward, to try and appreciate novels like this, historical novels that do not begin with an exposition or clarifications to the reader as to the cultural and social significance of what is happening before them, as a challenge, to see if, despite not being familiar with the setting because of its distance in time, space, and/or social and cultural situation, I can nevertheless figure out when something is being hidden in plain sight like this.

I am looking forward to finishing the third volume, and then moving on to other works of this nature. Not just historical novels - fantasy and science fiction often suffer from too much exposition, but some works do gamble that throwing the reader at the deep end will not dissuade them from continuing on, and getting more and more invested in the world, perhaps exactly because they have to work so much themselves to make sense of it.

Console cowboys and arcade aces

On several occasions, William Gibson has noted that his inspiration for console cowboys in Neuromancer wasn't necessarily contemporary hacker culture, but instead the kids he saw in video arcades who became experts at the games, so immersed they mastered these new pieces of technology.

Before video games became a home phenomenon, their greatest popularization was through arcade machines. I, myself, remember spending far too much time and my parents` money on these machines in the 90s, but at least overseas the first wave started in the late 70s, and author Martin Amis wrote a very illuminating contemporary account published in 1982, Invasion of the Space Invaders. It is interesting to see how much closer to the grimy entertainment culture of dive bars, drug dens, and porn theaters. He describes his relationship to them as addictive, and interprets their design in the context of getting as many quarters from players as possible. He then also describes the people who have mastered some of these games, the aces, how they exchanged tips with each other, and in fact spends a third of the book describing tips and strategies for the most popular games. Another third is dedicated to home and hand-held consoles, comparing them with the arcade experience.

Sol Yurick's 1965 novel The Warriors obviously predates the video game arcade phenomenon, but one of the Warriors encounters an arcade full of mechanical games in the same Times Square station in which he earlier has an experience at a brothel, and feels quite at home in that milieu.

This kind of social, ubiquitous but subcultural view of gaming seems very distant now that "Gamer" has been so heavily molded by ads and marketing. Ironic that the "barcade" is in fact a lot closer to the origin of video games as a cultural phenomenon, although it's obviously quite gentrified.

Modern design is not comfortable to live with

During my visit to Chicago, I again spent time in a museum, this time the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of what I looked at was not modern art or design, but there was some of that. And it reminded me of a second issue I wanted to discuss after my visit at MoMA: how uncomfortable it is to actually live in a world designed in a modern fashion. I experienced that less when exploring the museum exhibits, and more when I made use of their bathrooms, or those of the mostly modern hotels I've stayed in. Basic elements such as sinks and doors look nice and simple, but basic aspects of them just don't seem to take into account that people would be using them, or how they will do so.

Lets start with sinks. The fact of the matter is that people will be using sinks to wash their hands. For that you need to be able to comfortably get your hands under the sink, have room to wash and rub those hands together, ideally without touching the sink while doing so, and be capable of draining the water, suds, and so forth. It is surprising how many bathroom sinks I've seen recently fail to do any or all of these effectively. One hotel bathroom had a sink that was just a shallow rectangular basin, with the faucet too low over it. As for the draining, since it was rectangular, it only halfheartedly drained, meaning any suds or detritus of shaving had to be actively cleaned off. I've also seen several recent bathrooms where the water, soap, and air drying implements are part of one contraption. Aside from the fact that this does not allow for proper pipelining, as someone washing their hands will presumably be taking up the sink until they are done drying their hands, everything is so close together that it is easy to touch a bunch of surfaces where it would be better to avoid doing so.

As for doors, I can enjoy the aesthetics of a sliding glass door, but when one is used for a shower, it needs to be set up to block off the water from spraying outside - often, that was not the case. And I was in more than one hotel room where a sliding door was used to close off the bathroom itself, sometimes set up so that it would bounce back if simply pushed closed, never really good at keeping sound in, which is recommended if sharing the lodging with anyone.

Many "organic" modern buildings essentially create a lot of dead space at corners while making for a nice-looking façade. There seem to be many of those on the Chicago riverfront, although I have not looked inside to see if my experience with others of the genre repeated here.

I feel like a lot of these problems would go away if designers and architects were forced to live with the products of their designs for at least a week.

Films I watched in 2023 - Part 4

Concluding the series of short reviews of films from 2023 (see Part 3).

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

Very good. Cosmic horror on a mass scale, navigated using one character desperately clinging to a sense of normalcy in the face of much evidence to the contrary.

Devil's Rain (1975)

A dull attempt at horror. The title credits with backgrounds taken from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights accompanied with dissonant music was the highlight.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

I was really hyped up for this film based on the trailers, and then COVID happened and the release kept getting delayed, and I never ended up watching it. I was afraid that it would disappoint me, but instead it absolutely lived up to and surpassed my expectations. Brilliant throughout. Least supernatural and most thrilling and unsettling film I've watched in years.

Renfield (2023)

Fun action-horror with nice callbacks to past Draculas, and plenty of opportunities for Nicolas Cage to chew the scenery.

And that's that for 2023!

The Two Cases of the Sun Bather's Diary

As a follow-up to my general discussion of the various forms of Perry Mason and his colleagues and foes in various forms of media, I've recently finished Erle Stanley Gardner's the 1955 novel The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary, which got me to rewatching Season 1, Episode 17 of the 1957 Perry Mason series, which adapts this same novel, and a direct comparison could be illuminating. Obviously this post will have spoilers for both.

A few Perries Mason

WARNING: The following post contains some general outline and character spoilers for the Perry Mason television series, specifically the first two seasons of the 1957 CBS series, and all of the 2020 HBO series, as well as serious spoilers for the first, 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (see bibliography). I also refer to an important scene in the 2002 film Minority Report.

Films I watched in 2023 - Part 3

Continuing the series of short reviews of films from 2023 (see Part 2).

Horror Express (1972)

Okay as a schlocky Hammer Horror-esque vehicle for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, but unlike the statement in Reddit which enticed me to give this a try, in no way comparable to The Thing (1982), although the premise is similar.

Signal Dark (2020)

A short film available on Youtube. A fun bit of Lovecraftian horror, effective use of 15 minutes.

The Graduate (1967)

Made me think of Luis Buñuel, possibly because of the psycho-sexual content and surrealism. Also a reminder of popular films who weren't afraid of using film as a medium, whether it is expressive camera use, stylized editing, or specific choices of sound or lack thereof to provide weight to a scene.

The Stuff (1985)

A very 80s film. A lot more honest about right-wing militias than what you see today.

The Endless (2017)

Works on several layers. The supernatural reality-bending used as a tool to investigate memory and the sense of belongings. Very powerful.

Resolution (2012)

Aside from the obvious shared universe, one can see the seeds for The Endless here, albeit far more focused. Not sure whether I regret not watching this one first.

Commando (1985)

As ridiculous and quotable as I remembered. Very self-aware.

Dark August (1976)

Very effective supernatural psychological horror, with some attention to detail when it comes to occult practices.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

I have a certain sympathy to werewolf films that are not taken up by the World of Darknessification of their mythology - see, for example, the to me very effective An American Werewolf in London (1981). Includes an example of how ubiquitous surveillance might make you more paranoid while not really protecting you when it counts, a timely critique.

Curve (2017)

Another short available on Youtube. Very unsettling.

Night of the Demons (1988)

An Evil Dead knockoff with even more obnoxious teenagers.

Modern art and computer graphics

Last weekend I spent a long time at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, most of it covering their 5th floor galleries, holding their "Collection 1880s-1940s". Now that I've been in computer graphics for a while, I feel like I get a bit more of an appreciation for what many of the artists were doing, particularly the abstract ones.

Piet Mondrian's works (like this, this, or this), which used to look like a bunch of rectangles, now seem like representations of spatial hierarchies that you would see in computer graphics, like quadtrees or bounding volume hierarchies. Joaquín Torres-García's work here is a bit like a three-dimensional version of this concept, and Irene Rice Pereira's work here is like the visualization of a more elaborate one.

I've always enjoyed Vasily Kandinsky's work, but now pieces like this, this, and this, forming complicated pictures out of simple elements, have me thinking of how real graphical scenes are composed for rendering.

Even Pablo Picasso, that I've always struggled with, has made more sense to me, and I could finally internalize an interpretation I read somewhere, that he was trying to capture a single scene or moving person from multiple perspectives or at multiple times.

I wonder what other art is out there for which I can find a new understanding.

Films I watched in 2023 - Part 2

Continuing the series of short reviews of films from 2023 started here.

Nobody (2021)

Not much for me to say other than it living somewhere in the simplex between Taken, John Wick, and parody.

The Stepford Wives (2004, 1975)

I wish I had not watched the 2004 remake before the 1975 original. Lacking in any force, hateful of it protagonists, too afraid to make any real statement or let any horror linger.

The original, meanwhile, was subtle, focused, and horrific. Highly recommended.

Blade (1998)

A fun little action flick. Like with John Wick, I probably would have enjoyed it more when I was younger, and had I watched it in the cinema. A lot of tropes seen in later vampire media.

Network (1976)

Weird. Surreal. Absurd. Brilliant. A classic even though the kind of absurd, cynical, exploitative television it presaged has become standard.

Event Horizon (1997)

An effective mix of Solaris and Hellraiser.

Barbarian (2022)

Tried to be several horror movies at once, and managed it well.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

A fun thriller. Lets us follow the path of two different protagonists at the same time.

Life After Beth (2014)

A very Jewish-American zombie film, which makes it both close and far for me.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

People definitely had faces! First silent film I've watched in many years. Unpolished in some ways, but definitely pulls you in as you wonder, with the characters, who really is the ripper?

Lady Snowblood (1973)

Dark, slow-paced and contemplative. Watched this with ads, which were quite jarring.

Films I watched in 2023 - Part 1

I watched several films in 2023, but have not really shared my views of them outside of the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord server. Might as well do it here. This will be the first of several.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

I grew up with the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and moreover, this film was referenced as an inspiration for a sample character in Ron Edwards` Sorcerer, so I was eager to watch this. Or, rather, rewatch it, since I'm pretty sure I did try to watch it once many years ago.

Alas, my past instincts were right. Definitely rougher than the show. Decent cast, poorly used. Writing was not terribly vibrant. I'd also watched the Whedon-written Alien: Resurrection a few months prior to that, so I felt I could safely congratulate the Buffy series writing room for the overall quality of the show. Although maybe it's motivated reasoning due to what came out about his treatment of others, especially on the shows I liked so much.

John Wick (2014)

Felt much more like spectacle than anything with underlying content. Probably would have enjoyed it had I watched it as a teenager on the big screen.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

A childhood favorite, still stands up after all these years. I had also recently rewatched The Terminator, and it was interesting to contrast them. Not many directors can be said to have caught lightning in a bottle more than once like James Cameron did with this and Aliens. The movement from horror towards more action and some levity is similar in both.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

This used to be the Film that Shouldn't Be Named Lest It Be Spoiled By Context in certain online circles I was in. Let me just say that after a strong, unnerving start with abhorrent protagonists who really got me in the mood to watch some psychological splatterpunk, the rest of the film truly disappointed me. A complete disconnect that left me cold and bored.

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

A mixture of tropes and content from H. P. Lovecraft's work, with a protagonist called Harry Lovecraft. The premise of an alternate universe late 40s LA with magic being widespread but dangerous and corrupting was interesting, and built into a compelling world. There were some aspects that really bugged me, which I guess is also in line with the source material.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

This I wanted to watch as thematic background for Apocalypse World. I ended up going in a different direction, but this was a very good film. The 2005 Disney redub had very convincing voice-acting, and I was weeping towards the end. Nausicaä herself was a very interesting protagonist, insisting on fighting for the right ends only with the right means.

Spirited Away (2001)

I thought to continue with Miyazaki works I hadn't watched by choosing this. I wasn't as taken in by it as by Nausicaä, but I did relate to Chihiro, as I used to be this obnoxious, anxious kid who kept thinking his parents and others were doing things that will get everyone In Trouble.

Strange Days (1995)

It's always interesting to look back to the 90s and remember how apocalyptic the transition to the 21st Century was thought to be. In terms of content, it takes a concept that featured in Neuromancer and a lot of cyberpunk media since - of being able to record someone's sense perceptions and then experience them yourself later - into very disturbing territory.

First Blood (1982)

A very somber film. Obviously not as much an action film as the sequels. I might have read too much into it, but I felt like it was built to give a sense that Rambo was bringing the Vietnam War to the people who were trying to suppress him, and through him, US involvement there and its consequences, down to having what I usually associate with jungle sounds in the very non-jungle-like forests of the Rockies.

Weird Circle 31 - Wuthering Heights

"The Weird Circle. In this cave by the restless sea we are met to call out of the past stories strange and weird. Bell-keeper - toll the bell, so that all may know that we are gathered again in The Weird Circle." "Out of the past phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale: Wuthering Heights."

This episode, first broadcast on March 26, 1944, is an adaptation of Emily Brontë's famous novel of the same name, first published in 1847. The adaptation took great liberties with the original, condensing the significant elements of the plot involving Heathcliff and Catherine, and framing it as a gothic tragedy with supernatural elements. Heathcliff's treatment is undersold, so he seems far more of an outright villain. On the whole, though, it was a very compelling adaptation, and makes me want to finally go ahead and read this classic, and see if I can find the horror elements that have been extracted here.

And so ends my spooky project for October 2022. It has been a very different experience than last year's. I'm not sure if The Weird Circle was the best choice of series for this project, but it did introduce me to a variety of authors and their works, and it was interesting to see a breadth of quality, and to try and think of how this speaks to radio as a medium. I might have a bigger summary post later in the week.

Weird Circle 30 - The Strange Judgment

"Out of the past phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale: The Strange Judgment."

This episode, first broadcast on March 19, 1944, might be an original - although as I was looking for its origin, I found that a previous episode, The 4:15 Express, was actually based on a short story with the same name by Amelia B. Edwards, which can be found in this collection with other authors on Project Gutenberg, or in this scan of Monsieur Maurice and Other Tales, which is where the story was first published in 1873 on the Internet Archive. I should have consulted resources like this more often.

Back to today's story: our protagonist is isolated at the top of a hill overlooking his former home village, barred from speaking to anyone. The tale is of why: of his success at fishing sardines, at him and his wife welcoming a child, and that child's promise and frustration, culminating in a horrifying conclusion which led him to this penance. Moving, although sometimes inexplicable.

Weird Circle 29 - The Spectre of Tappington

"The Weird Circle. In this cave by the restless sea we are met to call from out of the past stories strange and weird. Bell-keeper - toll bell, so that all may know we are gathered again in The Weird Circle." "Out of the past phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale: The Spectre of Tappington."

This episode, first broadcast on March 12, 1944, is an adaptation of the short story with the same name in the collection The Ingoldsby Legends, penned by Richard Harris Barnham under the pen-name "Thomas Ingoldsby", and first published in 1840. The adaptation spreads aspects of the third-person narration of the original more evenly among the active characters while reducing their overall number somewhat, making it much more lively for radio, but the legend of the Spectre, the romance, and the mystery of the stolen pants, as well as its conclusion, remain.

Weird Circle 28 - The Murder of the Little Pig

"The Weird Circle. In this cave by the restless sea we are met to call from out of the past stories strange and weird. Bell-keeper - toll bell, so that all may know we are gathered again in The Weird Circle." "We are met in this cave by the restless sea to reveal the horror in Man's mind. Listen to The Weird Circle!" "Out of the past phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale: The Murder of the Little Pig."

This episode, first broadcast on March 5, 1944, is an adaptation of a story starring M. Lecoq, a character created by French author Émile Gaboriau. I was not able to find out where the original was published.

The story is compelling detective story, starting with the crime all but solved, except for some lingering suspicions by our protagonist, Lecoq, who by wit and guile manages to dig down into the truth. Still, a mystery lingers.

A fun story well executed, although a bit didactic at parts. The inspiration for Sherlock Holmes is quite apparent, although this might be the result of a post-Holmes adaptation.

Weird Circle 27 - The Feast of Redgauntlet

"The Weird Circle. In this cave by the restless sea we are met to call out of the past stories strange and weird. Bell-keeper - toll bell, so that all may know we are gathered again in The Weird Circle." "Out of the past phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale: The Feast of Redgauntlet."

This episode, first broadcast on February 27, 1944, is an adaptation of the Steenie Steenson story from Letter XI - Same to the Same, in Redgauntlet, by Sir Walter Scott, first published in 1824. The adaptation is pretty much one-to-one, with the Scots replaced with English in a Scottish accent, presumably to make it more accessible to the American listeners.

Being composed as or adapted from a folktale, it makes a great transition to radio.