In Which We Complete One Vile Task After Another

Human Events

by ETHAN PETERSON

American Gods
creators Bryan Fuller & Michael Green
Starz

Reading Neil Gaiman's writing has always been more of a drag than it is worth. His extended graphic novel The Sandman is the most overrated work in the medium not created by Alan Moore, and his novels are equally fraught with various gimmicks, iimpotent violence, and a bizarre appropriation of black culture meant to be inclusive, but that really comes across as tone deaf. Gaiman's chief literary technique is overwriting, and his questionable command of various cobbled together mythologies, a subject Gaiman is fascinated by because writing about human beings is beyond his capabilities, emerges onto television in American Gods.

Are you prepared to be alternately excited and tremendously bored for long stretches? American Gods will probably be your favorite show now that Hannibal has been canceled. Bryan Fuller is fresh off completing the abominable achievement of making a Hannibal Lecter series boring. Even a serial killer who eats his victims could not be kept entertaining on that graphic and dreadful show that made real life into some bizarre fantasy whirlwind, just because people were dying. Occasionally in Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen would kill someone. The rest of the time he spent giving extensive lectures on god-knows-what before dramatically not taking someone's life. Fuller's sometimes enthralling aesthetic sense demanded that blood be evoked in nearly every scene, along with a hokey slow-mo used so often it was simply the key signal to fast-forward the show on DVR.

American Gods gives him a larger canvas and possibly a larger budget for the one thing he excels at in this medium: special effects and dream sequences. Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is released from prison three years early on a six year term for assault. He finds out his wife and friend were killed in an automobile crashed while she was giving the fellow oral sex. This is the kind of over-the-top schtick Gaiman loves in lieu of actual characterization and scene work. It is like watching the bullet points in a character sketch read on screen. (American Gods even features more than one different voiceover.) On his way to bury his wife, Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), who is reprising his character from Deadwood in virtually every aspect.

Whittle has about three or four facial expressions of which he is capable. His most recent acting performance in The 100 showed about as much range as a tin can. Watching him try to emote is physically painful, as are the awkward and lame scenes where a Russian god played by Peter Stormare asks him if he is black. There is really no reason Orlando Jones, an actor of considerable talent and range, couldn't have played Shadow much better. Instead he, along with Gillian Anderson, Cloris Leachman, Yetide Badaki and Crispin Glover, are gods who have relocated to America for some reason, I guess to give extended monologues or have sex with mortals, since this is all they really do.

Many British writers have written excellent books about America. Gaiman is not really among them. He has a weird jealousy for this painfully diverse nation, but he also views it as a central hub for the intersections of commercialism and the evil manipulation of various technologies. Stop me if you've heard this dreck before. Mr. Wednesday, along with various other characters, takes predictable shots at low-hanging fruit like gun control, cell phones and the American midwest. These edgy hot takes are somewhat out-of-date, but who cares? Here's a scene where Peter Stormare murders a cow.

The sad thing is that there is a good concept for television buried underneath all these indulgences, but American Gods never brings out any of the considerable pathos involved in viewing how actual deities might react to human events. You see, there are not any human events in American Gods, or at least not any we are driven to care about. Even the historical phenomenon of human enslavement is brought up as if it began only four hundred years ago; apparently Gaiman can only be bothered to think back that long. There is nothing so dull as a worldliness that begins and ends with blaming America.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Contemplate Our Daemons

The Spirit Animal

by KARA VANDERBIJL

At the shelter, they recommend that you sit on the floor and wait for the right animal to approach you. Ideally, you will connect with an animal that best fits your needs, based on any number of inexplicable factors that draw a cautious prowler to the hollow of your lap.

If you have a 9-5, it will be fine home alone during the day. If you like to have loud company, it won’t have to hide under the bed. If you don’t have money, it will never require medical attention. If you are insecure, it won’t look at other humans. This highly anticipated encounter, like going unescorted on a Friday night to any local watering hole, is a game of pheromones that eludes the human subject and thus makes it ridiculous.

neil gaiman by kelli bickman in 1996

Any understanding between man and animal (as with man and man) is nothing but a profound misunderstanding. When claws or fangs draw blood, we expect a beast’s empathy, if not its complete understanding that it deserves death and punishment. Why then, in the subtle lairs of our living rooms, do we endow upon the creature our wildest animal instincts? How can we laugh at the proclivity to chase sunbeams across a wood floor?

elizabeth taylor

The natural state of any living thing, except a Happy Meal, is birth and death. What happens in between those two is the great debate. Before the spirit animal, men and women were driven to hide their essences elsewhere: gaudy containers, pieces of jewelry, bottles rolled away to the safety of the sea. Like what people did before blogging, it is something we may never know for sure. There was nowhere to hide in plain sight.

Of the first cat I remember, auspiciously named Plato, we saw only snatches of dark fur, a paw flung carelessly over the edge of an armchair. When unprovoked, he remained indifferent, although ornery for such a handsome and well-fed specimen. Provoked (easily), he appeared twice his usual size, producing unearthly growls that eventually got him banished to a curtained back bedroom. On one occasion he stalked angrily around the coffee table while my brother and I trembled on all fours behind the sofa. He suddenly appeared in front of us only to leap, claws extended, and we screamed. Only his mistress, my aunt, and sometimes my uncle, could coax him into their arms – a privilege no doubt acquired by the blood sacrifice of many small and unfortunate creatures. Left to his own devices, we felt sure that he would murder us in cold blood.

Did philosophy or religion exist without this animal? At the incline of its head nations tumbled, empires fell to dust. Nepalese peaks rose in imitation of its clever ears. At the very least, corners proved darker for its playful ambush of passing feet, windows larger to frame its wise face. The arts owe more to the feline than to any other creature, save perhaps the horse. Somewhere in the desert, an ancient Sphinx rests on time and mankind’s imperfect worship.

Unlike its feral counterparts, the housecat is a follower of Epicurus, its basest passions restrained by a constant striving after pleasure. Survival is less important than aesthetics, a subject explored by the animal in great detail as it reclines fluidly on the rug. Its ennui humanizes it, as it progressively forgets (intentionally, unintentionally) why it was placed on earth.

grace kelly

We inherited our first family cat in California, when my parents managed an apartment building. An elderly tenant moved or passed away, and according to standard apartment procedure the managers ended up with whatever was left beneath sinks or in the back of the closet.

Mikey was an ancient orange and white tabby and I think we saw him a grand total of five times while we were in his possession. He spent most of his time wedged underneath my parents’ bed, although we made sure he was still alive by shaking his box of dry food and calling his name, a clever ruse that got him to frolic like a kitten down the hallway. In the mornings he mewled outside shut bedroom doors, awake only when nobody else was. Shortly thereafter we moved, and another tenant took him. In all likelihood he still lives in the San Fernando Valley surrounded by Koreans.

The survival of a species depends entirely on the ability of its hunters, on the secrecy of its cache. Infamous tiger-slaughterer Jim Corbett shared pleasantries with many a man-eating feline at dusk over bait. If they lunged, he fired his gun. An otherwise grandfatherly-looking man, he mostly hunted alone with his small dog Robin. In tales about the Chowgarh tigress it is unclear whether he was hunting or wooing her. Concrete slabs mark the spots in India and Nepal where he finished them; we can imagine him tenderly composing pet epitaphs at night to the howl of nearby monkeys. He devoted his later years to the preservation of endangered species, no doubt fearful of karma.

Dad kept a freshwater aquarium for a few years, and Mom indulged in parakeets and a couple of yellow canaries. My parents provided us with a cat every few years, despite their general reserve towards the animal kingdom. It showed a remarkable ability on their part to see our potential for compassion. Still they were the first to pick up the slack when it proved once again (as it always did) that we were still very young, and that we could not yet grasp how another living thing might need us. They allowed disquiet at the foot of their bed and shoveled through litter boxes and patiently satisfied another hungry stomach.

aldous huxley

To identify with or as is the siren song of this generation, an ongoing game of association in which the subject pinpoints behaviors, fashions, morals, or ideologies and appropriates them to himself. (e.g. I must be Liz Lemon because I think and act and speak like Liz Lemon. Ryan Gosling must be my boyfriend because Ryan Gosling speaks and looks and thinks and acts like I want my boyfriend to act.) The spirit, it would seem, has become as much of a consumer as the body. This is vanity.

For a long time the most desirable relationship was such a one as existed between Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, or between Lucy and Aslan, a bond in which similitude transcends any differences of kind or quality. In any case, this relationship seemed highly preferable to any story in which animals only talk amongst themselves, which is believable only inasmuch as reality television is believable.

In the early 00s, my parents somehow became acquainted with farmers in the Haute Savoie, a portion of France irreversibly wrinkled by that majestic mountain range known as the Alps. From them we received goat’s cheese, lessons in vocabulary, and a chaton – a tiny ball of brown and white fur we unorginally named Simba. We brought him home in a cardboard box. He peed on a towel. From the very beginning, we strove to teach him the difference between right and wrong using a squirt gun. He chased our ankles and climbed papered walls. When he took to running in wild circles around the apartment day and night and howling at the moon, we released him in a meadow near a friendly-looking barn and stacks of warm, plush hay. He did not look back.

Otherwise, it was our constant hopping from one location to another that prohibited a long-term relationship with a pet. It was also our own inability to remain constant, our chameleonesque capability to blend into language and space, adopting the same awkward ease with which an academic handles reality: drawing on a vast well of knowledge, but with very little practice.

Domesticating an animal, like educating a child, rationalizes its wilderness of instincts, robs it of the power quivering on its whiskers.  An oblong box filled with sand might just as well be a place to shit as a place to rest in peace. If eternity is man’s natural habitat, he cannot be blamed for chasing it by dividing his soul into parts.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Jeffrey Eugenides‘ The Marriage Plot.

ava gardner

"Lúppulagið" - Sigur Ros (mp3)

"Popplagið" - Sigur Ros (mp3)

"Flijotavik" - Sigur Ros (mp3)

george plimpton