The third edition of John Brady’s This & That. zine reached my mailbox this week. As I read through it, I thought about the slower pace of communication from the past. In the book Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, the residents of a small British town at the turn of the 20th century share a newspaper, each taking shifts throughout the day.

Soon after breakfast Mary Ann brought in the Times. Mr. Carey shared it with two neighbours. He had it from ten till one, when the gardener took it over to Mr. Ellis at the Limes, with whom it remained till seven; then it was taken to Miss Brooks at the Manor House, who, since she got it late, had the advantage of keeping it.

There’s something quaint and romantic about having such little and proscribed access to information. It’s almost the exact opposite of what we have today, with the glut of news and entertainment that we can barely hold off.

I came across Of Human Bondage by way of the original film adaption of the novel (which is in the public domain). It looked interesting when I was browsing through Tubi. Tubi autoplays movies when you click on the title, even if you only intended to get more details. Once the film started, I was quickly drawn in. I like Leslie Howard and this was the film this is widely regarded as having made Bette Davis a star. You get a sense as to why in the infamous scene in which Davis chews through the scenery like only she can after Howard’s character, Philip, tells her she disgusts him.

Of Human Bondage - “Wipe my mouth” (YouTube)

My wife was distracted by Davis’ intermittent cockney accent in the scene, but as The Radio Times Guide To Film puts it, “Bette Davis proves her credentials in this latter role, offering a nuanced portrayal that rises above her cockney accent.”¹

It’s now mockably trite to say the book is better than the movie, but in this case, you could argue that is objectively the case. The events depicted in the movie don’t even begin until a full 40% of the book is complete. The emotions that are either unexplored or inexplicable on the screen come through more fully realized on the page.

W. David Marx writes on his blog Culture about 10,000 Maniacs and the earnest progressivism of the early alternative music culture.

Certainly 10,000 Maniacs were a bit over-the-top, but they fit seamlessly in the general aesthetic of “alternative” culture. Progressivism was cool in the 1980s. Merchant worked at a health food store, and before joining the band, considered a career in special-needs education. She was the one who pushed REM’s Michael Stipe to lurch towards more political content. These were the Reagan-Bush years, and artists resisted by drawing attention to the social ills that conservatives didn’t care about.

He contrasts that sort of authentic hope for change with today’s music, which has a very cynical live for the moment ethos. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Despite society still considering child abuse, adult illiteracy, and alcoholism to be bad things, the 10,000 Maniacs' songs now feel quite incongruent with the last three decades of pop music. In an age of “Turn Down for What” and “California Gurls [sic],” 10,000 Maniacs’ lyrics are definitely not “fun,” which has become the singular criteria for valuing culture.

Of course, the 10,000 Maniacs were successful for what they were and the niche they occupied, but they shouldn’t be compared with mass market music, which was certainly present in the late 80s and early nineties. Still, even among the mainstream artists of that period, it was an insult to your craft to be called out for the single-minded pursuit of money or market success. That has changed in the last couple of decades (and is particularly correlated with the rise in hip hop and poptimism).

Capital accumulation is somehow the most transgressive act possible. “I just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making,” proclaims Beyoncé in her political anthem “Formation.”

We’ve reached a point where even the snobbiest of music critics won’t chastise an artist for crass commercialism. Have you ever read a negative review of a Beyoncé record in a mainstream publication?

Back when our local newspaper, The News & Observer, was more of a going concern, I used to dig following the columns from Craig D. Lindsey. Lindsey, AKA Uncle Crizzle, had a keen eye for culture and finding overlooked treasures. When the paper let him go as part of broader cutbacks, I considered it a real setback to their coverage of the arts.¹

I remember reading on Lindsey’s Tumblr around the time of this dismissal from the newspaper that he was going through a time of real struggle. This was right around the time that the nation was facing a particularly strong sense of outrage about the treatment of minorites by the authorities. He felt a lack of self-worth. The demand for those in his profession was abating (at least in the sense that they could find paying work). Frankly, I was worried about the guy.

About a month ago, I did some searches to see if Lindsey was actively publishing in some capacity. I wasn’t able to turn up much and I wondered where he ended up. Then, yesterday, when I was going through items I had starred in my feed reader, I came across a post in Paste Magazine from Lindsey about cult classic film The Last Dragon. I hadn’t previously heard of the film, but the piece was able to draw in my interest. Coming on the heels of the golden age of blaxploitation and the popularity of kung-fu and shameless in its use of an 80s pop tune from DeBarge, its hard not to appreciate its over-the-top celebration of now faded fascinations.²

The Last Dragon - Official Trailer (YouTube)

I’ve added The Last Dragon to my movie queue and I’m pleased to see Uncle Crizzle back in action.

One of my all-time favorite films is John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. I was first introduced to the movie adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling short story from 1888 by my English teacher in my senior year of high school. Kipling’s novel encapsulates some of the folly and hubris of the British adventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century by infusing its characters with the attitudes of empire. In the film, Michael Caine and Sean Connery play British ex-military who dream much and doubt their abilities little. They set their sites on bringing the martial prowess learned in their earlier days to a remote area of Afghanistan known as Kafiristan to form their own kingdom.

After crossing treacherous and unforgiving mountains, the film’s two main characters do, little by little, one tribe at a time, find themselves ruling over the natives of the area. Their success owes itself to the guns the men bring with them and their tactical skill in using them to subdue their enemies. They also bring knowledge of governance borrowed broadly from the British Empire, particularly the Dutch East India Trading Company. As their success grows, Connery’s character succumbs to the force of his own internal narrative that he is, as the natives proclaim him to be, the descendent of Alexander the Great. This gives him a god-like status that he comes to embrace, against the protestations of Caine’s character.

Inevitably, the illusion is dispelled and the British adventurers are discovered to be mortal. Their downfall is as swift as it is brutal as the Kafiris drive them out. Their hasty departure mirrors the initial British exit under pressure in Kabul in 1842, which saw only one British soldier survive to reach their destination in Jalalabad. His compatriots at the base there asked him where the army was, to which he famously replied, I am the army.

Only a few short years after the story was published by Kipling, Kafiristan was conquered by Abdur Rahman Khan, who converted the pagan Kafiris to Islam. The area was renamed Nuristan (“land of light”). Nuristan continued to be fairly autonomous, even after the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in the 1990s. 

Azam Ahmed tells the tale of how the Americans came to Nuristan after 9/11 and turned an area that was suspicious of the Taliban into a stronghold for the group (NYT gift article). The Americans brought their tactical superiority and advanced weaponry to the area and, over a few years, managed to turn even their initial allies against them by virtually indiscriminate killings and misunderstanding the culture of the area. Even after the American military was essentially driven out by Taliban-backed local militias, they returned simply to bomb the area, murdering civilians and ensuring the populace would never forgive them.  

I will be pondering Ahmed’s article for a long time, and I can’t help but think of the parallels to the Kipling story. The analogy isn’t perfect, of course, but it maintains the thread of a more advanced civilization underestimating the power of a more primitive one. Kipling isn’t the only creator to have explored this concept. Even George Lucas mined the idea for his third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi. Lucas has spoken specifically about the desire to show a simple culture (the Ewoks) defeating a technologically modern military. Many fans have debated the wisdom of making the Ewoks so childish, but the point was made. 

The Man Who Would Be King is currently available to stream for free on Tubi.