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I’m sitting here in my writing group. For almost twenty years we’ve met biweekly to create. As well, I write on the inbetween weeks, and post those writings on my blog, and in the Writers’ Croft. And so I’ve created 220 megabytes of writing. And the strange thing is that I really don’t quite know why I keep on doing this. That I don’t know why hasn’t stopped me either from continuing to write, or from updating the four separate backups I keep in various places. It seems quite possible to deeply value things whose purpose one doesn’t understand. That theory explains many of the things I have stored in my basement.

The first writing I did that wasn't either schoolwork or letters was poetry in my late teens and early twenties. I would write when I was particularly depressed, angry self-lacerating poetry filled with a sense of inadequacy that felt unique and powerful at the time. I carefully squirreled away these efforts, and though I wince when I reread many of these nutty rants, I can’t imagine getting ever getting rid of them.

I don’t particularly write for others. While I post my writings online, the internet is so vast that my obscure and dusty corners rarely get visited, and even less often draw comments. I would love to have a following of people who look forward to my weekly writing, who ponder over its hidden depths and gleefully post their discoveries of the cleverly embedded word play in them. (Did you catch the juxtaposition of the “squirreled away” and “nutty efforts”, in his second paragraph?)

But the truth is I don’t. My writing group offers support to its members, but we’ve lost many people who feel, fairly enough, that one oral reading doesn’t allow for any real analysis or deep response. My blog gets few comments, and those tend to be short and along the lines of “nice piece, pete”. It has now been six postings on the croft since I got any feedback from any of the active members, and I use the word “active” in a generous but unjustifiable way.

So why do I write? I think I’m good at it, though Gladwell says that it’s 10,000 hours of practice to reach mastery, and I’m still way short. But I am capable of the occasional insight, of juxtaposing two separate conceits and finding a rare commonality between them. I enjoy playing with words, balancing sound against sense. So I write because I am not without some skill at writing. And I write because I have difficulty thinking about a topic in a focussed way, and writing is a way to do that, to pull together the separate strands of a yarn and weave a whole piece from it. So I learn from my writing, sometimes moving to an understanding of things that I didn’t know, or didn’t know I knew.

I write because writing helps me to become a deeper person. But I don’t take the next step, work to get my writing out into the world. I say that’s something I must do, that I don’t do it because I’m not interested in selling myself. But perhaps it’s also because as long as I write and no one sees it, I don’t risk real failure. I write for two or three hours a week... and if I had a full passion for writing I might write for five or six hours a day. But I don’t, and while I’m too old to believe that makes me a bad person, it does argue that I’m not a writer.

I looked at a Newsweek article tody, a meta-list of the 100 greatest books of all time, compiled by averaging out a dozen or so 10 best lists. I’d read 62 of the 100, and probably 40 of the top 50. I appreciate the quality of such craftsmanship, but don’t feel the drive I would need to create books of that scope. So why do I write? I write to tell my stories, in a good enough way that I will have them to look back on. I write because I lose memory as I age, and I wish I had written more when I was younger, so that I could recall more of my emotions outside of teenage angst. As Eliot says in The Wasteland, “These fragments have I stored against my ruin”. I write to create fragments, to store my own fragments. They are, perhaps, not memorable, not transformative in the way that great art is. But they are authentic records of where I have been. And that has value, at least to me, and therefore is worth continuing.

In my copy of today's Toronto Star, all of the normally black print was faded towards white, in some sections allowing you to still see the ghost of news past, though the business section was nothing but a sheaf of completely white newsprint. I thought it was a powerful meta-tribute to Michael Jackson, and his brave experiments in depigmentation. That's our Star, always cutting edge journalism....

Good Neighbours Make Bad Fences

About thirty years ago I bought the one hundred year old semi-detached brick house I still live in, a short stroll from the Lansdowne subway station on Bloor Street West. I didn’t know much about the neighbourhood in 1979, so I asked a policeman who happened to be walking by if he would buy a house for his family around here. He answered that there was far too much petty crime, drugs and prostitution mostly, for him to consider it. But after he went on to add that this was also true near any subway stop in Toronto, and that he basically didn’t think it was a good idea to live anywhere downtown, I bought the house.

A week after my then wife and I moved in, a bleeding man crashed through our front window at two AM, screaming for me to phone the police. Totally unable to come up with any better idea, I did, and they took him away, protecting him from whomever it was who was more terrifying than that alternative. The neighbours, mostly Portuguese, came out to console me while we waited for the police, and taught me about Wally, who ran the local Home Hardware, and who was an absolute treasure. Wally repaired the window the next morning, as he solved every hardware problem I had over the next twenty-five years, disappearing into his basement to emerge with the exact vital part that Home Depot claimed (probably accurately) was no longer made anywhere in the world.

But Wally was the exception. It was a rough neighbourhood, and there were always empty stores along Bloor for rent as the immigrant families who ran the small groceries or ethnic restaurants burned out on working for fourteen hours every day, or made enough money to move on to something better. But I told myself that cheap housing near a subway stop could only increase in value, and surely in a short while the word would get out that Lansdowne was the new cheap area for trends and artists, and once that had happened gentrification lay only a few newspaper articles ahead.

But somehow, it didn’t happen. After about ten years of stasis, crack cocaine and a sharp rise in local prostitution arrived; I still treasure a Toronto Star full page exposé headlined “Parkdale Residents Cower in Fear as Crack Rules the Streets”. My real delight was in the picture that accompanied the article, a frilly seven year old girl riding her bicycle through a laneway past a used syringe lying sharply in the foreground, and my garage blurrily in the background. But my neighbours were solid citizens, and when I had to I managed to communicate to the Chinese family to the north who spoke almost no English that we should share the cost of a locked gate across the two foot wide walkway between our houses. After that we no longer encountered vagrant crack smokers crouching behind our houses.

All the houses on the block are brick, almost all semi-detached, two or three stories tall. They share a common layout, three rooms on the first two stories, perhaps a finished attic or basement. They have postage stamp backyards, sixteen feet wide, bounded by a line of garages that open onto the common alley that we all shovel clear of snow in winter, because once one car gets stuck, no one can drive anywhere. When I moved in, I learned that the garages were the men’s domain, while the houses were women’s, and on hot summer nights groups of men stood around ignoring a car with the hood up, drinking homemade wine, and talking in Portuguese while a small radio blared music.

From our back porch, a four by six concrete slap that held a bar-be-que and space to walk past it, I could look up and down over a dozen neighbourhood yards, mostly with chicken wire fences, or three foot lattice slats. To the north I could see all five back yards between my house and the stores on Bloor Street. Some people had grass and flower beds; the Portuguese couple who owned the other half of my semi-detached had seven fruit trees locked in a savage fight for sun and soil, and chickens for a short but odiferous period; the Chinese grandfather to the north put in hours of work every day and harvested five crops of vegetables a year. Everyone did something different, and visiting friends would admire the range of the choices people made.

Wally was the bellwether, as it turned out. He passed seventy, retired and sold his store, which became the first art gallery in the area, still named “Home Hardware” only now in a postmodern ironic sense. Now there are five art galleries within a two block walk, a film studio opening up four blocks away, the local restaurants are getting raves in Now Magazine, and the renovators have arrived. The Chinese family sold their house and moved up market, up to Markham, and the brother and sister who moved in were people like us, with an interest in art, in food, in Tom Waits. It was great; we’d say hello as we let our dogs in or out, or worked on our gardens.

But in the backyards, the fences were going up. Two to the north, the Bulgarian parents had individual decks built for the refurbished rental units on each floor. We were close friends with Nedo, their son, and when we saw him erecting a tall cedar fence all around the garden, we said sad farewells– in the two years since then we’ve had perhaps three brief conversations with him, rather than the weekly calls across fences that used to happen. Two to the south an new Portuguese family put up a shabbier but equally solid fence and now we never see them. It seems that as the walls come down to create more open space inside the houses, they’re going up outside them.

This week the brother and sister, after spending a year or two doing beautiful renovations inside their house put a deck and a two metre high wooden fence up between our backyards. It blocks the sun from the flowerbed in which the honeysuckle is blooming, probably for the last time, as well as from the patio where we sit to eat dinner. We won’t see them when they sit on their new deck, and they won’t see us on our patio. And gradually we’ll drift apart, which we’ll all regret.

Perhaps it’s a class thing. In the upper-class North York suburb to which my parents moved 45 years ago, fences separate neighbours who rarely know each other. Perhaps part of what the newcomers in the neighbourhood aspire to and see as a more gentrified lifestyle is increased privacy, and isolation from others. Perhaps it’s the trend of cocooning, shutting yourself off from the world, and fences help to do that. As shopping malls die, and home cinemas become the vogue, there is less and less space left as a shared common. Now I stand on my back porch and I see walls on both sides, so that every time I go out I know almost exactly what I will see, removing a major reason to go out at all. Why should I, when my backyard feels like a cube farm out of Dilbert? Robert Frost once wrote, “Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down.” That something is me, as I sit here and wonder what cheap areas of Toronto remain so undeveloped that the neighbours there still enjoy seeing each other.

At Luminato, the Cirque de Soleil gave a free performance as several tens of thousands of people noticed. And a dogfish picture to round out the show....

At a recent meeting of a men's group to which I belong, we were asked to talk about commitment. As the talking stick made its way around the room towards me I realized how much better I am at keeping commitments I have made to others than I am at keeping commitments I have made to myself. The others can be passive recipients: I put out a weekly newsletter that takes me about 12 hours a week to assemble and send out to the 200+ people on the subscription list. They don’t pay me, and I don’t get any money for doing it. I do it for reasons Judaism would call mitzvah, the Hebrew term for a good deed done as a duty. Similarly I update my blog once a week, because when I started it 6? 7? years ago I made a commitment to do so to my readers, and so I continue, even though I occasionally wonder if I still have any readers out there. The recipient doesn’t even have to be human: Diana and I have walked Rui twice a day every day, as we committed ourselves to do, for the almost three years he’s lived with us.

Everyone is not like this. Reddit tells me that 98% of all blogs in the world have not been updated once in the past six months. I have a folder of blogs of friends I check each week for updates, and at this point only one of them is ever updated. The others have stopped. This is as true in the world as as it is online. Tikkun used to have 15 to 20 people at each meeting, with passionate arguments about what we would do and how it should be done. Now we get three or four people discussing “what is the smallest thing we can do”, and as one of the co-founders said when he left the group, “There just isn’t a lot of juice here any more.”

The writing group in which I write this used to have a dozen members, and now has four or five. My online writing group had seven or eight people, and now has me, and three others who might post once a month, but more likely won’t.

This painting can be viewed as positive space or as negative. I can see myself as heroically pushing on through the blizzards while the weaklings and cowards turn back and fall away, or I can see myself as bullheadedly pushing on, trying to right the sinking ship that everyone else has been smart enough to evacuate and escape. I can see myself as standing by the word I pledged while others abandon what they once said they would do, or I can see myself as having the self-indulgent time to do frivolous things while others struggle to raise families or try to get jobs to feed themselves. Both aspects may have truth to them, and I can oscillate between them probably as fast as my blood sugar goes up and down.

But in any group I tend to be a stayer. In the various failed relationships in my life, it was almost always she who left me, and only once that I left her. (The clever reader may come up with an alternative theory as to why this was so. That may also be true.) So it is interesting why I cannot, or do not, keep the good resolutions I make that only affect me and not others. Resolutions to get in shape and do exercise, to do a pipe more regularly, to not be as self-indulgent in any of a variety of pleasingly indulgent ways are not binding, are postponed till tomorrow, float off my shoulders lightly and easily.

Perhaps it goes back to childhood, when I did things out of fear of punishment if I didn’t do them? Perhaps early on I developed a sense that it was the others for whom I had to do things? Maybe I feel that people wouldn’t like me as much if I stopped coming to meetings, sending out Tikkunista!, posting online? Or that I ascribe an unreasonable importance to whether they would like me or not. There are a few folks who occasionally post responses online that I don’t hear from otherwise. Why do I care if I don’t hear from them again rather than fooling myself that I’m staying in touch by getting a “Nice post, Pete” comment once every six months?

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir says to Estragon, “We have kept our appointment. How many others can say that much?” Estragon responds, “Millions.” And I guess I am one of them. In a book exiled to our basement bathroom, “100 Dogs Who Changed the World” there are a number of stories about dogs whose masters died in which the dog methodically continues to go to the station where the master used to arrive every day at 4 pm just as he had done when the master was alive. Is my aspiration to be another stupid dog who doesn’t understand that life has changed? And how exactly did that change the world anyway?

In the end is this review’s beginning. After nine hours of watching Robert Lepage’s play, Lypsynch, five of us sat down over a few pitchers of Creemore’s at the Flatiron and Firkin to talk about what we’d just seen. There were Gord and Steve, friends with whom I’d taught literature and media in the past, and there were Andrew and Jesse, who had seats in the row in front of us. We’d become friends over the four intermissions and dinner break, and when Jesse (who’d flown up from New York just to see the play) suggested going out to continue our talk we all leapt at the idea.

All five of us felt we wanted to see the play a second time. Not that we needed to in order to understand it, or ought to so as to fairly evaluate it, or should to catch the secondary aspects of the miracle of its staging and acting: no, we wanted to, to savour the richness of the experience. And there’s the nutgraph: after nine hours of watching Lypsynch, and an hour of arguing about theme and plot, there was nothing we wanted to do more than to see it again.

Why? Part of it is plot, part is acting, a lot of it is staging, some is theme, and the whole is more than all of that. The play has nine acts, each introduced by the name of the central character in it. Act One starts with Ada, an opera singer who adopts Jeremy, the baby of an unknown woman who dies on a plane flying from Hamburg to Montreal, and Act Nine ends, much much later with the story of Lupe, now no longer unknown.

Or, Act One starts in a series of three framed plane sections in which passengers are silhouetted as one falls unconscious and is covered by a blanket when she cannot be revived. Another takes her baby as the plane segments revolve, slide into themselves, and become a train. Ada puts the baby down, and he jumps up – now a twelve year old – who runs around and crouches behind a seat from which he emerges as the adult Jeremy.

Or we have Ada singing two passages to Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs framing the act, within which Jeremy (who as a teen has a wonderful tenor voice for classical music) has his voice crack and change and starts singing heavy metal. What is his real voice? The theme of lip synching, substituting one voice for another comes up in act one for the first time, and every act to come will look at it differently.

One of the play’s themes is about voices, and their authenticity or inauthenticity. We meet Sebastien, who makes his living as a sound engineer dubbing voices, who is the partner of Tony, who abandoned his Manchester accent for the plummy BBC accent with which he broadcasts news, and British Rail announcements. There is Marie, a jazz singer who loses her voice after a brain operation and tries hiring a lip reader and an impressionist to recreate it. There is Michelle, Marie’s sister, who fights mental illness and hears voices that are not real, and there’s Jeremy who makes a film for which all sounds are later dubbed, as he tries to recover the lost voice of his mother. Sometimes the voices are in French or Spanish, and we follow them through surtitles. Sometimes they are multi-tracked and we don’t follow them.

Lepage is a master of staging (which is why Peter Gabriel once hired him to choreograph his “Secret World” tour). Lypsynch has more miracles of staging than you could possibly be interested in reading about, but a few stand out. In Act Two, Thomas, we are in a bar and we see Marie singing as Thomas watches. What we are seeing is doubled: we see it on stage, and also projected onto a screen behind the stage by a remotely controlled camera that moves around the stage changing angles and focal length. Suddenly Thomas stands and stumbles through the table, and the camera reveals how everything that was so solid: the table, the piano, are spread apart, and are in fact separate fragments that only appeared real from particular angles. In Act Nine, Lupe’s story is told, on a TV program that “gives voice to the voiceless”, another form of lip-synching. She is in the studio talking about how she was kidnapped from Nicaragua, drugged and raped. We see this, stage left, as we see a man stage right fondling his chest and genitals while the camera films him and projects his hands onto Lupe, so that as she talks ghost hands molest her. The staging communicates the masturbatory nature of exploitation, stunningly.

Lypsynch is not an easy play to understand. Th reviews in both The Globe and Mail and The Star failed to grasp one of the key plot revelations in it, the identity of Jeremy’s father. (Though even without that, they gave the play 3.5 or 3 stars out of four, respectively.) Four of the five of us sitting around the table missed it too, but Andrew hadn’t. Jesse argued for the inclusion of a North-South exploitation theme, Steve identified the theme of authentic and inauthentic voices, Gord caught subtleties in the music selection that the rest of us missed, and I saw how the lip-synching was present in each scene. If we had been able to share our exegesis with a few more people, we’d probably have reached deeper insights yet.

When Marie has lost her memory of her father’s voice, she hires a lip reader to look at her old family films and decipher what he is saying. They watch a scene where he leans over Marie at age six, and whispers something to her. The adult Marie eagerly asks what he is saying, which turns out to be, “Look at the camera, Marie.” Disappointed, she says to the lip reader, “It’s so banal,” to which the response is, “It’s life.” Lypsynch is at times banal, and at times melodramatic. But both are part of its overall sweep, which strains to encompass nothing less than all of life. As the Player says of his own melodramatic plays in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead “Occasionally from out of this matter there escapes a beam of light that seen at the right angle can crack the shell of mortality.” Lypsynch is aiming that high, and it succeeds often enough that with only two full performances left in this coming weekend I am sorely tempted to go see it again. It already is one of the most rewarding plays I have seen, and I know there are aspects to it that I haven’t yet caught.

Generally, I like fusion, the joining of styles from different parts of the world. Fusion food can be a joy, where flavours of one country play against the foods of another. When it works, it’s cooking that combines the thrill of discovery with the joy of the known and loved. But when it doesn’t work, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I look at my the mac and cheese, crusted with a wasabi ginger coulis, and all I can do is wonder, “Gee why didn’t I just go out for sushi?”

If you combine colours carelessly, you probably wind up with a muddy brown. And fusion music, to which I am drawn and which I often love, runs that danger. Sometimes you can hear the separate sources, but the klezmer and the blues don’t add to more than they might have been separately. Sometimes Ry Cooder plays with a musician from elsewhere, and he fits in so smoothly that while I enjoy the music, I don’t know how it differs from what it started as. I have a Polish album of polka versions of classic blues songs, and while I suppose its very well done, it doesn’t leave me feeling that I ever need to hear it again. There’s a certain energy to the blues, as well as to polka, and nothing on that album leaves me feeling that this marriage was made in heaven. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t go anywhere, as that I wasn’t enjoying myself while it didn’t.

But sometimes the pieces do fit, and it’s pure magic. I was recently gifted with the album “Tell No Lies”, by Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara. The Guardian called Justin “the UK’s Ry Cooder” for his work at crossing musical borders. He’s a guitarist, and has played with Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, and that crew. But he grew up in the Middle East and North Africa, with a father who was a British diplomat, so he developed a love for that music along with his love for traditional blues, the Clash, and loud rocky riffs. Juldeh is the son of a griot, a traveller who keeps alive the oral traditions of poetry, music, and truth-telling in Western Africa. In time Juldeg became a griot himself. He plays the ritti, a one-stringed African fiddle, and the kologo, a two stringed banjo. He heard one of Justin’s albums, phoned him up, and said, “I heard your stuff. The style you play is very very connected with my spirit.” And then he played his ritti to him over the phone. As Justin tells it, he “went crazy” and they’ve been jamming together ever since. Their previous album, their first together, won the BBC World Music award.

Before they collaborated on “Tell No Lies”, Justin put together a collection of western and African music he liked including tracks from Led Zepplin, The Clash, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley. And on the album you can hear those influences. There’s a punk like energy to “Kele Kele (No Passport, No Visa)” a song about African refugees who try to flee to Europe. Justin plays a fuzzed guitar, and Juldeh answers on ritti, which sounds like a harmonica sometimes. Remember the interplay between Muddy Waters and James Cotton, when they were inventing the Chicago blues? There’s an echo of that running through the song. And there’s a lot of call and response, a guitar line answered on ritti, or vocals.

Juldeh sings almost all of the album, in Fulani. There’s a booklet with translations, which are very bizarre. On the album you can hear what certainly sounds like rhythmic rhyming phrases, repeated in a chorus, the same language structure that we know from western music. But the translations are very flat prose, without repetition or rhyme. From “Kele Kele (No Passport, No Visa)” comes this: “You may be going through a hard time, but Africa, our motherland has a lot to offer, so be patient in your search for treasures. Visa authorities, allow me to bring the plight of my people in sweet melody, although you cannot grant everyone a visa, there must be a way to ease the pain, suffering and loss.”. It seems the translation too failed to successfully cross the border. But the rhythm dances around a Bo Diddley beat, the song has hooks you could you could do chin-ups from, so this may not be the album to spend time analyzing lyrics. But dancing? Definitely.

The next song, “Fulani Coochie Man” has a deep and powerful blues line from Justin, that gets answered on Juldeh’s ritti and it reminds me of an old line from Willie Dixon, “If it ain’t the truth, it ain’t the blues”. Perhaps that’s why the album is titled, “Tell no Lies”. This music feels real, at a deep and visceral level that goes beyond language, in a way that polka blues does not. It feels real because the elements that come from the western rock music, a music whose traditions I know is not adulterated or watered down. But the African music I don’t know has a power to it as well that is given equal space. It’s neither Vampire Weekend playing afropop, nor Youssou N’Dour, who sometimes plays Western style pop music in a way that wipes out the enormous power he can authentically generate on an album like “Egypt”.

This is what fusion can really be, when the disparate elements combine and become stronger because of the distance between them. This is an album that I love for way the familiar is paired and shadowed against the unfamiliar. “Tell No Lies” is released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, this year celebrating their twentieth anniversary, and that’s appropriate for an album that I suspect many of us will be playing for a long, long time.

Q: What are you going to do when you grow up?
A: Find some people, dress like them and follow them around.
--Firesign Theater

I wonder if comets get more tired as they approach the sun. They’re dragging these long tails behind them, and as the closer they get, the longer the tails get. I feel that way about popular culture. As a kid, it was simply the medium through which I swum, and I picked up new bands and new music because it was there and what was happening. But these days, it’s not just that I’m not hanging out with anyone who’s listening to what’s in, it’s that tail of a half-century of popular culture that I’m dragging behind me. Longer really: as I’ve learned to appreciate older music, from doo-wop to Mozart, all of which lengthens the tail.

And as well, there are starting to be books in my library which I remember pretty vaguely. There isn’t much point to keeping all that old vinyl and getting my record player repaired, as I did this week, if I’m not going to play them. So maintaining my awareness of old culture cuts into time that might otherwise be spent acquiring new culture. Sometimes even with all the running you can do, it’s hard to stay caught up, let alone get ahead.

So when I was in HMV last week, looking at their video racks, I was pleased to see Blade Runner, the director’s cut. I’d hated Blade Runner when it came out, but I knew that people considered it to be a classic science fiction film. My problem with it was that I was a Phillip K. Dick fan, and the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, from whose womb Blade Runner was untimely ripped was so much better that I had only pity for those who valued the film. I would quote them Spyder Robinson’s definition of a writer in SF films (“What they hire when the special effects budget runs out.”) and carry on in this vein till I was the only one left in the conversation, which generally didn’t take long. But I had only seen it once, 25 years ago, and this was the director’s cut (I didn’t realize that there’s also a final cut, and a later special DVD edition, as Blade Runner fans suffer the economic death of a thousand cuts.)

It seemed such a good idea. I’d watch the film the way the director intended it to be seen, without Deckard’s (Harrison Ford’s) tedious narration explaining everything that might challenge any viewer. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 98% rating; the “elite” critics gave it 100%. I settled down, cranked up the stereo, and watched.

It was terrible. I can’t say it was worse than the original, (the dropped narration was a huge improvement), but it was tedious, superficial and absurd. The hero is a bounty hunter who goes after five or six robots, who are almost indistinguishable from humans. (They lack empathy. Perhaps they had watched this film?) As they are faster and smarter (perhaps they didn’t watch the film?) they should be able to kill Deckard. But when the last and most dangerous robot has Deckard trapped, just as he’s about to kill Deckard, his batteries run out, and in hilariously stupid mors ex machina ending, he dies. Should have paid the extra for the Duracells...maybe the robots weren’t so smart?

Deckard has survived attacks from the other replicants that clearly should have killed him so there’s a theory floating around that maybe Deckard is himself one of the replicants, which is makes as much sense as trying to cling to creationism by saying maybe God put the fossils there to fool us. Maybe Ridley Scott deliberately made an inconsistent and illogical film and Deckard is a replicant. Maybe Scott is a replicant, and the fact that replicants have no empathy with human life forms explains why this film is so awful. I could believe that theory pretty easily.

And I know that the praise is for the SF/film noir style, a precursor to cyberpunk, and the setting and effects. They’re ok. If you can’t read, and have never explored worlds like Winter (Le Guin), Dune (Herbert), Underground Topeka (Ellison, in A Boy and his Dog) or Bellona (Delaney) it might be impressive. But really, they aren’t that imaginative, and while the digital effects were very well done for their time, we’re past that now. Ford plods through the film, with no appealing qualities other than endurance, which might create empathy in the human viewer who must exhibit a similar endurance, but in fact merely made me root for the replicants to kill him and end this early. It didn’t happen, alas. Maybe I’m a replicant, and that’s why I hated the film....

I was depressed. Not only was it as bad as I remembered, but I couldn’t count on Rotten Tomatoes, that bastion of “vox existimator, vox dei” wisdom. Maybe I had outgrown SF altogether, for certainly I didn’t seem to be any part of this group of people who claimed that this was the best science fiction film ever. I could think of a half dozen that were better, without even straining. Clearly, the next step was to reread the book, and see how I reacted to it. I hadn’t read it since the sixties...how would it hold up now under my dyspeptic gaze?

It was wonderful. Complex and fascinating themes about the pull between human life and the simulation thereof. Interesting ideas about the meaning of religion, Dick’s perennial focus. Characters who are all a mixture of good and bad, strong and weak. More ideas of note in the first three paragraphs than we get in the entire film, which sound like an absurd assertion, but is true. We get the Penfield mood organ, on which you can dial emotions such as, “two hours of paralyzing guilt and hopelessness, followed by the desire to watch TV, regardless of what is on.” And we get the tension between owning a real animal in a world where they are almost all extinct, as opposed to an electric animal, which is indistinguishable, except for your knowledge that it is fake. And in that context, replicants with programmed memories who don’t know they’re not human, and can’t be told apart from humans, become a lot more interesting.

I went to look up “The 100 greatest books of Science Fiction”, which is the kind of website you know exists, even before you fire up Google. It did, and there was “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, nestled in at number 11. I quickly ran through the list...I had read all of the top fifty, and liked 48 of them. (Michael Crichton was the author of the other two: really, don’t get me started on him.) Philip Dick was the second most cited author, with six books, two less than Heinlein, one more than Asimov, two more than Card. These were my people! I still belonged somewhere...with friends who dragged the same tail around that I did. It felt good.