Spoilers Ahead

My kids are incredibly spoiled. I don’t mean “spoiled” in the traditional child-rearing sense; they aren’t brats (at least not that often), nor do they expect to get something for nothing (at least not that often). But they are spoiled in a pop culture sense. Last fall, I started reading the Harry Potter books with my older son, who is just about to turn nine. After we finished the first book, he went over to the shelf, picked out the seventh book and immediately read the Epilogue, thereby defusing the suspense that gives the series much of its allure. It didn’t bother him in the least to know (spoilers ahead, if you’ve been living under a rock since 1997) that Harry defeats Voldemort and Ron marries Hermione and Professor Snape is a good guy after all. What’s more, he regularly asks me to spoil things for him. “Daddy, who kills Sirius Black? Does Hedwig die? Does Snape become headmaster in book 6 or 7?”

Certainly these are not the most awkward questions a parent gets asked, but the reader in me balks, and my answers are invariably shifty. “Ohh… we don’t know yet. We’ll have to see.” Invariably this produces an irritated response. “Just tell me!” he wheedles. I want to say: “Be patient. Savor the surprises and you’ll enjoy the experience more.” But I know I’ll sound like Andy Rooney (“Remember carbon paper? It was so much easier than this new-fangled Xerox thingamajig.”)

My son doesn’t want to wait for a story’s plot to unfold in the way the author intended.  He wants all the answers now. Not only is he immune to the charms of an unexpected plot twist, he actively hates surprises. My own attitude is exactly the reverse. I expend a great deal of time and way too much energy trying to avoid spoilers. Up until about five months ago, for instance, I had ignored Breaking Bad (“What’s that? Oh, like Weeds, but with meth? Pass.”). When I finally gave it a chance, I couldn’t stop watching, and I devoured the first three seasons on Netflix. Now I’m frantically trying to avoid any information about the fourth season, which finished airing in the fall. My success has been limited: the show’s getting a lot of attention lately. I now know the shock image from the season finale, if none of the narrative context that surrounds it.

Spoilage can leap across genres and formats. I decided to delay watching HBO’s Game of Thrones until I read the George R.R. Martin fantasy novels on which the series is based. Later, while idly skimming an IO9.com post called “The Most Undignified Deaths In Sci-Fi and Fantasy,” I stumbled across a paragraph that covered the HBO show and spoiled the end of the first book (and a good deal of the second book as well.)

Perhaps my son has the right idea. His disregard for—even distrust of—the traditional narrative structure fits well with the hyper-linked, everything-all-at-once philosophy of the current information age. Maybe one day soon it will be impossible to remain unspoiled—not only impossible, but beside the point.

(Image from BadtvBlog, via Sick Chirpse.)

The Awesome Insult

There's something extremely satisfying in reading a well-worded put down, even when you don't know much about the person being destroyed. The late Christopher Hitchens was a master of this particular art form. Among the numerous examples re-quoted in the week following his death: On George Bush:

“[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

On Michael Moore:

“The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities,”

In Hitchens' honor, I wanted to highlight this almost zen-like insult from one of his heroes, George Orwell, who in "The Lion and the Unicorn" surveyed Britain's pre-World War II leadership and found it wanting:

"...somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air."

Pipe-smoking Stanley, you've been zinged!

Kubrick in New York

A recent tweet from @the99percent led, through a series of links, to this collection of photos taken by the young Stanley Kubrick in the late 1940s. As in the example above (kudos to the subject for wearing a shirt and tie to clean the windows, by the way), Kubrick's aesthetic is already evident. I wish I had enough disposable income to actually purchase one of these prints.

Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

When Liam Gallagher released Beady Eye’s debut Different Gear, Still Speeding earlier this year, he seemed to reclaim the cocky rock star energy of the first few Oasis albums. If Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds is any indication, all the older Gallagher got in the divorce was the meandering weariness of the last few Oasis albums. Anyone looking for a whip smart comeback to Beady Eye will be disappointed: Noel doesn’t get into a musical pissing match with his brother, despite the presence of such song titles as “The Death of You and Me” and “If I Had A Gun” (this last not—alas—a bitchy put-down directed at Liam, but a “Wonderwall”-style love song).

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds self-titled debut album is not a statement of artistic rebirth. It’s business as usual, hewing closely to the texture of late Oasis albums like Dig Out Your Soul and Don’t Believe The Truth. Perhaps that’s to be expected: Oasis was Noel’s baby, and as main songwriter and producer, he pretty much set the tone. The upshot is that most of the songs on High Flying Birds sound like they were written for Liam to sing. Liam has always been a better interpreter of Noel’s songs than Noel himself, able to convey the emotion behind even the laziest of his brother’s lyrics. Liam could deliver lines like “If I had a gun, I’d shoot a hole into the sun/and love would burn this city down for you” and make it sound kind of touching—as if a football hooligan were mangling clichés in an effort to express his feelings to his girlfriend. But Noel can’t quite pull it off. His voice is fine for backup singing, or the occasional ballad, but it lacks the inherent drama a lead singer needs to be effective. In his hands, the above lyrics sound awkward and tossed off, as if he couldn’t be bothered to write better ones.

Noel still has a gift for melody, and High Flying Birds offers its share of catchy pop hooks. But there’s nothing urgent here: this is music by a craftsman who mastered his formula years ago. Unfortunately, that formula requires the participation of his kid brother. If he wants to fly solo, Noel Gallagher needs to come up with something new.

(This review originally appeared at vivoscene.com)