My newest column for McSweeney's is up today, about the moral implications of the recent wave of Art TV. You can read the whole column on McSweeney's. Here's a preview

I finally did something yesterday I had never done before: I intentionally watched a reality television show. The key word in that previous sentence is “intentionally.” I have, of course, seen reality TV before, a lot of it. But it has always been against my will. My wife would turn on an episode of The Biggest Loser every once in a while, or The Bachelor every twice in a while, or Say Yes to the Dress every marathon in a while, and I would sit in the same room and read and pretend not to be distracted but actually secretly watch the show because I like spending time with my wife and because I really, really like it when Randy asks the brides if-they-are-saying-yes-to-the-dress.

I felt like I could have written another 5000 words on this one, hence the footnotes you'll see at the bottom of the column.

Jordan Jeffers is currently rewatching the Cardinals 2011 World Series DVD in an effort to remove the horrible display the Cards put on last night from his memory. It is totally working.

Book review in one tweet

Two humans and two wheeled houseplants race across the galaxy to stop a demonic supercomputer and save 2 kids from a bunch of evil rat-dogs.

Favorite quote

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

Review

I picked up A Fire Upon the Deep from a 2011 NPR list of the 100 best sci-fi and fantasy books of all time. I wanted to get The Mists of Avalon but the library's copy was checked out. A Fire Upon the Deep was a wonderful consolation prize, however, with plenty of action and big ideas to keep me fully engrossed. I also really like Vernor Vinge's name. Well done, Vernor Vinge's parents.

The story begins when a colony of humans accidentally builds a hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence called The Perversion. As you might expect from the name, The Perversion isn't very nice, and it soon kills most of the humans and begins a slow takeover of the rest of the galaxy. A family of four manages to escape however, carrying a weapon that could stop The Perversion from spreading further. The family crash-lands on a planet full of intelligent dog-rats, who kill the adults and take the children captive.

Meanwhile, the spread of The Perversion leads to an attempted rescue mission of the children and the weapon they hold, conducted by a couple of humans and a couple of "Riders," aliens that are sort of like intelligent house plants with wheels and short term memory loss.

The dog-rats are one of the most fascinating species of aliens I've ever encountered in the pages of fiction (or in real life). Each dog-rat "person" is made up of multiple "members," and each member has a distinct body and brain. The dog-rats "think" through specialized sound waves, which travel from member to member, coordinating their movements like fingers on a hand. So where a human sees five different dog-rats working together like a circus act, the other dog-rats simply see one being.

This is sci-fi at its best, raising all sorts of fun questions. How does an individual emerge from a multitude of parts? What is the relationship between soul and body (or bodies, in the case of the dog-rats)? How much does an individual have to change in order to be, effectively, a new person? And what happens when one part of yourself battles the other for control over the soul? A Fire Upon the Deep asks these questions and more.

When a story is as big as this one, expanding to the size of the galaxy, there's a distinct danger that individual human (or super dog-rat, or short-term-memory-loss plant) actions will shrink to insignificance in comparison. This shrinking is a good thing to the extent that it leads to humility, but there's a fine line between humility and despair. At times, Double-V walks both sides of that line, but ultimately A Fire Upon the Deep comes down on the side of hope, the side where love matters, and where the greatest love is shown when a human/dog-rat/plant lays down their life for a friend.

Nerd rating

8 wizard staffs (out of 10)

A Fire Upon the Deep has pretty much everything you would want from a science fiction book: epic scale, weirdly fascinating alien life forms, blaster fights, immanent threat of complete galactic disaster, and real human emotion. I docked it a couple staffs because the middle third of the book is rather slow, keeping half the characters in cold storage in the midst of space. That's a nitpick, though. It's well worth the time.

Non-nerd rating

4 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

Not a book for beginning sci-fi readers. The jargon is heavy, and there's not a ton of hand-holding to get you grounded in the setting. If you can make it through the opening chapter, you might stand a chance.

Jordan Jeffers would like to take this opportunity to promote his new book, The Towers, an epic fantasy novel that will be released November 18. Early reviews on Facebook have been very flattering.

Dear Mother,

I'm writing this on a Thursday morning, about ten or so hours removed from last night's Cardinals victory in Game 5 of the NLDS. We don't have cable anymore, so I watched the game on an iPad, drinking Bud Light out of a commemorative Cardinals beer stein. This was the most St. Louis-y thing I could think of.

Game 5 joins a long list of Cardinals memories now, slotted in beside Carpenter's Game 5 in Philly, and Yadi's home run in New York, and three dozen diving catches by Jim Edmonds. They're all stored up in my head, these memories, like books on a crowded shelf. And every once in a while I'll pull one down and dust it off, read it a little, and think about the moment it happened, the people I shared it with, an unbroken line of nostalgia from the moment that I could remember anything at all.

But memory is an odd thing. I recall very little of the games I went to when I was a boy. (By the way, am I too young to start using phrases like "when I was a boy?" I defer to your judgment on this.) At least, I recall almost nothing of the actual games, what happened and who made what plays and who won. It's the other stuff I remember, the atmosphere, the environment, the people.

I remember the parking garage on 8th street and the aerial walkway that ran between it and the stadium, the crowds of fans we would weave through on the way to our seats, my hand in yours. I remember old black guys and young black guys and old white guys playing saxophones on the street corners, dressed in Cardinal red, and me always a little afraid of them, of their puffing cheeks and skillful fingers and open cases, lined with the scatterings of crumpled bills and bright silver coins, resting on blue felt. I remember the long, endless ramps that we walked up to our seats, the way I would always get distracted with counting the bars on the railing, or watching the cars on the Interstate outside, then run to catch up to you when I saw you had gotten ahead, like I was a dog in a park, and you my owner.

I remember tiny red plastic helmets filled with vanilla ice cream, and over-sized Cokes in souvenir cups, and paper boxes of popcorn, striped in red and white, boxes that always had the word "Popcorn" on them in bright red letters, so you always knew what you were getting into. I remember standing on the field in Busch Stadium 1, the grass perfect and green underfoot, the bases looking so much farther away from each other than they looked from above. I remember Ozzie Smith doing back flips, and Willie McGee getting standing ovations, and Brian Jordan smashing into the walls in the outfield to rob extra base hits. And I remember that every time Jordan would do this, someone nearby would make a comment about how he used to play football. Guaranteed.

I remember when Dad would pick me up from my own football practice in '98, and the first thing I would do when I saw him was demand to know whether McGuire had hit any home runs that day, and if so how many, and if not, how many Sosa had hit. The list goes on. I haven't come close to exhausting it (the organ and the kiss cam and the hat dance and the wave and the nachos and the beer vendors and...)

And every year, I add a few more memories to the list, home runs and double plays, wicked curve balls and screaming line drives, Yadi throwing laser beams to second, and the big "CS" flashed up on the video board. Paul going to a game on his 21st birthday and sharing his first (legal) beer at the ballpark with Dad, probably the first time I ever saw alcohol in Dad's hand. Photos of my new nephew at Spring Training, decked out in a complete designer line of Cardinals clothing, because of course he was. Dad taking me to Game 1 of the '11 World Series and buying me a stocking cap, like I was twelve years old again instead of a married man of twenty-four. And me feeling about as loved and happy as I could get when he did. Running around my apartment with Madelyn during Game 6, screaming at the top of my lungs after watching Freese go deep.

It's silly, in a way, to be that invested in a team, to care that much about the various adventures of a little white ball. But, really, it's not so much the game that I care about. And I think it's something I'm just realizing now, as I write this, why I love baseball so much. Because baseball is about family. And every time I say I love baseball, I'm really saying that I love my family. I love you, and Dad, and Paul and Katie and Grami and Grandpa and everybody who ever put on that "lovely shade of cardinal" with me, and stood in the stands or watched the TV or listened to the radio and cheered and thought, "This is just about as happy as I can get." I love thinking about baseball, because I love thinking about you. And so it will go with my family, if God blesses me more than I deserve. As he always has.

I hope that makes sense.

Remaining always, your loving son and Cardinals fan,

Jordan

Jordan Jeffers writes letters to his mother in the Internet because stamps are a form of witchcraft.

Documentary review in one tweet

French guy who looks like General Ambrose Burnsides obsessively films street artists. Then he becomes a street artist? Maybe. Wait...what?

Favorite Quote

"I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art. I used to think everyone should do it.... I don't really do that anymore." - Banksy

Review

So I first heard about this doc a couple years ago from one of my former college professors, and I have been meaning to see it ever since. The premise sounded like something that I should have an opinion on, especially among all the intellectual arty people that I know. Which is four. I know four intellectual arty people. I figured they would want to know what I thought about it.

The film follows the story of a French immigrant named Thierry Guetta, a guy who has the full beard/sideburns/mustache/bare chin look that was so popular during the Civil War. Guetta has this weird habit of obsessively filming almost everything that goes on in his life. He never actually watches these tapes or does anything with them. When a tape fills up, he sticks it in a box and forgets about it.

At one point, we're told that this habit comes from an early childhood trauma, in which Guetta missed the death of his sick mother, leading to a compulsive need to record everything permanently. I'm not sure I believe that, but it's as good an explanation as any, I suppose, and it sounds more reasonable than "he's crazy."

At any rate, when Guetta goes back to France for a vacation, he finds out that his cousin is the street artist Invader, so named because he puts pictures of characters from the Space Invaders video game on public signs and walls. This leads Thierry to a whole bunch of other street artists with wonderful names like Seizer, Neckface, Sweet Toof, Cyclops, Ron English, Dot Masters, Barf, and Buffmaster. This, in turn, led me to spend about twenty minutes after the film trying to come up with a street artist name for myself, briefly considering "Gandalf the Pale" and "Onomatopoeia" before finally settling on "St. Penguin." I would probably paint a lot of serious looking penguins in mitres. (A mitre is a big pointy hat that bishops wear, for those of you who aren't Catholic scholars.)

Anyway, Guetta eventually meets Banksy, the most famous street artist in the world and the maker of this film. At this point in Banksy's career, he's just starting to become super famous, and his works of art are being sold for thousands and thousands of dollars, or "pounds" as the British like to call them. There's this vague sense of wrongness associated with this commodification of street art, a suspicion that somehow Banksy's art loses its creative power the moment you put a price tag on it. Banksy's response to this is to ask Thierry to put together a documentary about street art, to show people that its not about the money, money, money; we don't need your money, money, money; we're just trying to make the world dance, and spraypaint cartoons on walls.

So Guetta does so, putting together a little film called Life Remote Control, which is pretty horrible, even worse than What the #$*! Do We Know!?. Banksy kindly tells Thierry to go home to L.A. and "do a little art" while he's waiting for the documentary to be finished. But this is Thierry Guetta we're talking about here, and he doesn't do anything unless he can do it obsessively. So instead of just putting a few stencils up here and there, Guetta decides to put on a massive art show instead, renting out an abandoned warehouse and filling it with the street art of his new alter ego Brainwash.

And this art looks...um...let's say that it looks like a slightly more horrible version of the art Banksy does, like Guetta essentially just copied Banksy's whole style and repackaged it as his own.

Oh yeah, and he made like millions of dollars doing this. That left me with two questions:

Question 1: Guetta almost never creates any of this art himself. He pays a number of graphic designers and production specialists to do it for him. He gives them a vision and they execute that vision. So who is the artist? Isn't it the people actually putting paint to canvas (or clicking the mouse in Photoshop, or nailing the TVs together to make a giant robot)? So why is Thierry getting all the credit and money?

Question 2: Doesn't all of his stuff kind of look the same? (the answer to this one is yes, yes it does.)

By the end of the movie, I couldn't tell if I was supposed to be happy for Guetta, sad for the world, or whether I was supposed to just laugh at the whole thing. He's either crazy or he's serious or he's joking. And so is the rest of the world.

Final Rating

8 cold, frosty beers (out of 10)

There's enough pretty stuff to look at here that even if you aren't into complicated questions about the place of art in modern capitalism you'll probably enjoy it. The crazy story involving Disney police and Guantanamo Bay is worth watching by itself.

St. Penguin would like everyone to know that you can buy his paperclip sculptures for $2.99 each. Though he'll take a million if you've got it.