It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Snoopy as a Surrogate Child in the World of 'Peanuts'

By Galen Buttitta

Yesterday was National Puppy Day, which is pretty much the best holiday because dogs. What better time to commemorate one of the--if not the absolute most--famous dogs in history?

(Source)

Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip ran for just under half a century. Arguably, Snoopy's popularity eclipsed even that of the ostensible star of the strip, Charlie Brown. (This likely wasn't helped by the decision foisted upon Schulz by the powers-that-be to call the strip "Peanuts" as opposed to "Good Ol' Charlie Brown," but that's a topic for another day). Snoopy, the perennially precocious beagle, retains his popularity even to this day. He has inspired a dedicated locale at Cedar Point, several singles by the Royal Guardsmen, the psychedelic-rock band Sopwith Camel, and even a spacecraft that flew to the Moon.

Even though he beat everyone there with just A DOGHOUSE! AND A BOX OF SCRAPS! (Source)

Most people are surely familiar with Snoopy's wisecracks, concealed as they were in-universe from the children around him. It wasn't always this way, believe it or not--Snoopy was originally mute, someone who made himself known by his actions as opposed to his thoughts. One of his first gags came from a strip with no dialogue whatsoever: he had a flower in his collar, and an errant spray from a watering can weighted it down and made it droop. His first words were nonetheless soon to appear, even within the strip's first decade: an incredulous "Can this be true?" when being offered some food. Schulz still took a bit of time before settling on the stereotypical thought-bubble format, but that really didn't matter. Like the rescue dog brought home for the first time, Snoopy had found where he belonged.

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Snoopy is, in some ways, a walking paradox with paws. The strip shows him being both selfish and selfless, spiteful yet sensitive at alternating times. A recurrent gag was written around him not remembering Charlie Brown's name, and his love of supper, if represented in physical form, would give the Burj Khalifa a run for its money in terms of size. Snoopy, though, was not always so self-centered: on at least one occasion, he forewent his dinner because Sally Brown, then a baby, was sleeping on him; his friendship with Woodstock the Unintelligible is well-documented, and the former helped the latter try to find his mother more than once.

Snoopy adopted many personas: Joe Cool, Joe Lawyer, the World War I Flying Ace, the world's worst vulture, the local shortstop, the tortured wordsmith. He had a penchant for fine art (even if writing it wasn't his forte), once having owned a Van Gogh, and replacing it with an Andrew Wyeth when the former was lost in a blaze. He also appears to have been an accomplished dancer, not only giving performances in the actual strip itself but also going through mental recitations of routines represented as footprints and arrows. He could sleep on performed sheet music and physically cross out barks he had uttered--Schulz was no stranger to meta gags.

(Source)

All this goes to show that, ironically, Snoopy may be the most fleshed-out character in the strip. This is not a dig at Schulz or the characterization of his players. While it would be oversimplifying things to pin down the children of Peanuts in one line, there were repeatedly-punctuated notes in their melodies: Charlie Brown was a perennially unlucky everyman; Linus, a pint-sized Socrates; Lucy, the benchwarming fussbudget; Schroeder, High Priest of the Church of Beethoven; Sally, everyone's younger sister; Peppermint Patty and Marcie, the red-oni-blue-oni set of best friends. But while Snoopy was a dog, he wasn't *just* a dog. In a world where children faced the cold reality of life like adults, Snoopy had unfettered, childlike wonder and imagination. He was anything he wanted to be.

Even if he wasn't the best at it. (Source)

What do you think? Was I on target or was this post a dark and stormy night? Let me know in the comments!

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Time Is Our Kingdom: The Sluggish Morss Headspace

A preview of the future, apparently (source).

Jake Clover and Jack King-Spooner, using Game Maker, created four video games—if they can be called that—relating to a single storyline. The Sluggish Morss series blurs the lines between game and visual novel: there's ostensibly an objective to reach, but it doesn't matter much.

There are currently four games in the series:

1. Sluggish Morss
2. Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History
3. Sluggish Morss: Ad Infinitum
4. Sluggish Morss: Days of the Purple Sun

Days of the Purple Sun is a straight-up PvP combat game and is quite different from the preceding three games, so it will not be considered here. Instead, the first three-quarters of the series will be examined.

A lot of this is extrapolation and conjecture. King-Spooner's series is notoriously dense and heady, and a lot of this stuff has to be gleaned and chewed on (you might call King-Spooner the Shane Carruth of video games). What follows is an interpretation of the series as I've come to see it.

Content warning for violence, epilepsy/seizure warning for the visuals, sanity warning for everything else.

Penny for your thoughts?

Something's telling me I shouldn't take these… (source)

The MacGuffin for the first three games would have to be the coins. One character informs the player that "hopefully the coins are familiar," and obtaining them is required in the first game in order to advance, but there's no real explicit purpose for them. They decrease in apparent importance as the series goes on, not being paid so much as lip service in Ad Infinitum, where their one big appearance is during the landing of the spacecraft, and the player need not even try to collect all of them. Generally speaking, there's no real reward in most circumstances, aside from triggering the story to move forward in one or two places. So why bother with the coins in the first place?

There is an answer to this, I believe. My takeaway is that the first game is the dying dream of the player character (PC), who was murdered over a debt. Given the nature of the game, it's likely this was related to a drug deal.

"I can see your halo"

It's kind of hard to miss (source).

Where does this idea come from? There's one scene where the PC stands in front of another character who cycles through an animation of pointing a gun at him, and in several instances gunshots (and in one case, a Wilhelm scream) can be heard. Death and altered or lost consciousness are prominent motifs in the game as well. You get dialogue like this, from one of the headbanging aliens (q.v.):

The thought that keeps coming back to your head—our last encounter with someone you know of. It runs through your mind during the nanosecond before your death.

A Delicate Time in History actually provides some more supporting evidence for this. There's a sort of incidental dialogue in one scene where a character looks at a monitor displaying a situation from the first game and remarks on the supposed barbarity of the crew in G Quarters. The skipper of the Morss is then shocked to learn there's been an outbreak of violence the likes of which hasn't been seen in nine thousand years.

The aliens do a lot of talking about ill events befalling someone in this game, actually. There's a lot of symbolism relating to that among everything else, too, from the line "I can see your halo" in the concert lyrics in A Delicate Time in History, to throwaway lines about how "a weapon reflects the soul of its maker," to the infamous "lullaby and good night" scene where the PC is locked into paralysis while the aliens basically recite a lullaby to him, to the atomic bomb imagery that shows up in the first two games. There's also the explicit line from the PC's brother in the first game:

You know how I shot you in the head. I take it back. Please come back.

The life-death juxtaposition

Can you open your mouth a little wider? I'm losing the signal for the station (source).

On the other hand, there's also the recurrent motif of new life that contrasts this. The Super Babies (no relation, thank God) seem to be genetically-modified children who run humanity. There's one part in the second game where you basically give consciousness to one, who then informs you that he is "now aware."

There's also the new-life motif in the sense of a new lease on life. The aliens do … something … to the PC of the first game; it's not clear whether they're trying to save his life after he's been shot or if they make him ascend to a higher plane of existence. But the idea is still there. Widok, from A Delicate Time in History, is basically sent to a new post where she is confronted with the fragments of future events.

Headbanging aliens

They may look vaporwave, but they're all metal (source).

The aliens appear in each game, decreasing in prominence each time. In the first game, they feature in about half the scenes. In the second, they appear in one particularly beautiful scene asking philosophical questions in an almost Gregorian call-and-response. In the third … they show up at the end and basically tell humanity that they're disappointed in their failure to colonize outer space.

The aliens sort of seem to become more real as the games pass. In the first game, they're a Technicolor fever dream of cyclic animation. In the second, they appear to the player character on an elevator, incorporeal but more composed. Come Ad Infinitum, they have a 3D gravitas about them and helium speech. (Hey, can't have your cake and eat it too, I guess.)

So what do the aliens represent? In the first game they appear to try to save the soul of the player character—it's unclear if they succeed or if the PC just ascends to a higher plane of existence. In the third game, they primarily show up to remark to humanity that they're disappointed in them. In the second, there's that call-and-response wherein the alien asks the following six questions:

Where do dreams go, when you awaken?
Where do prayers go, when left unanswered?
Where do flames go, when they're extinguished?
Where do souls go, when they're not living?
Where do wishes go?
Where does love go, when it is gone? 

To McDonald's, where else? (source)

I have a thought that the aliens represent a contrast to humanity tantamount to an inherent one. I'll get to that shortly.

Numbers, numbers everywhere

The Super Baby asks the question that's on most people's minds about halfway through any given game (source).

In the second game, it's mentioned that humanity has developed to the point where basically history, in all senses—past, present, and future—has been reduced to the cold equations of statistics and probability. There's real-world subtext to this, e.g. Asimov's idea of psychohistory (which has actually sort of become a thing) or the nascent field of cliometrics. In the Sluggish Morss universe, however, it's become the guiding and driving force behind societal operation.

Widok, the PC from the second game, is basically a glorified accountant who audits future events. That Widok basically defies everyone's number-crunching is a big deal in A Delicate Time in History. Numbers and hard, unfeeling data are part and parcel behind the conflict in that game, with the captain of the ship mentioning how many years it's been since the last violent episode and mentions of scans and probabilities.

The iron butterfly of perception

Cuphead this isn't, but it's still a unique idea (source).

That the franchise could be considered psychedelic is putting it mildly. The first game is basically a bad trip in interactive form: the protagonist is constantly seen puffing on some sort of pipe, and there's explicit reference to Bob Marley and marijuana culture at several points throughout the game. A lot of the incidental events are also seemingly nonsensical and/or slightly shifted out of what you would expect from reality, with Technicolor visuals, palette-swapped animals that talk, and … reggae music.

The second game de-emphasizes this, but the whole psychedelic, seventies-sci-fi atmosphere is still very much present. There's one point where Widok is basically on a space elevator and gets a vision of two guys with headphones, headbanging (sort of like the aliens from earlier). It seems random but illustrates how Widok is sort of starting to transcend reality. In the third game, the visuals get a lot goofier and trippier, even when compared to the first game, and the PC is seen at one point explicitly hitting a joint. There's also a dual art shift: in the style of the game, there manages to be both a more cartoony, fluid aesthetic and a more concrete, 3D idea, to the point that certain parts of the game are handled using claymation.

Bounding to the carrier Morss

Here goes nothing… (source)

So what is the gist of Sluggish Morss in toto?

A reasonable takeaway would probably be that humans are violent. You have the aliens representing the Freudian superego, trying to guide us and getting frustrated when we fail. Humankind is trying to adhere to the superego ideal but, after nine thousand years, falls back on the id in G Quarters thanks to the PC's drug habit. He borrows money from his brother, who shoots him when he can't pay up. This wrecks the nice, neat simulations and calculations of the Super Babies (whether this was Widok's fault, directly and intentionally or otherwise, is not really spoken to) and mankind is thrown into chaos. This disappoints the aliens, and is basically the payoff of the story.

Where do comments go, when they're no longer in draft? Is this too sluggish with not enough Morss? Let me know below!

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Thinking You're Paranoid or Knowing You Should Be: The Mystifying Oeuvre of Shane Carruth

"Huh? What?" (source)

One of my favorite directors is a guy named Shane Carruth. You shouldn't be faulted if you haven't heard of him—he has so far only produced two films, Primer (2004) and Upstream Color (2013), begun work on one more (The Modern Ocean), and abandoned one (A Topiary). That being said, his films are the intellectual equivalent of Pringles, in that once you pop, you just can't stop. (Trying to make sense of them, that is.) So this post is an overview of the directorial portfolio of this former engineer.

There's spoilers downstream, and not the kind that Jeremy and the boys used to decry so often on Top Gear. Content warning for violence.

Primer (2004)

From a meta standpoint, Primer is all the more impressive for its journey from thought to screen. Shot on a budget of just $7,000—no zeroes have been omitted there, that's seven kilodollars—Carruth ended up doing a lot of the grunt work on this himself. Sound editing, music, actual direction (a lot of which was made sotto voce and some of which can be caught in the film if you pay close attention)…oh, and playing the lead role. This was actually not born so much out of egotism as it was the fact that Carruth was an indie filmmaker who had rehearsed scenes so many times while casting other characters that he figured it'd simplify things if he took on the part.

Special mention should go to the sound design. In the commentary, it is related how about half of the original recorded dialogue was unusable for technical reasons and had to be dubbed. This is not obvious, even when it's been pointed out. There's one scene in particular where the actor on the screen is not the voice you hear—that belongs to Carruth's brother. It says something pathetic about the entertainment industry at large when a guy with a $7,000 budget and a MacBook can do a better job syncing up dialogue to lip flaps than corporations worth billions of dollars.

A story of time travel and how the ego is the enemy of small business (source).

But enough about the real-life underpinnings of the film. There's a quote, rightly or wrongly ascribed to Isaac Asimov, that goes, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny…'". The story of Primer is basically this quote injected with interpersonal drama and character development.

Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan, whom you may know as Chet from Deidra & Laney Rob a Train) are half of a small business, Emiba Technologies, based in Texas, and they have a problem. They've been making JTAG cards in Aaron's garage, but it's not making them the dollars they desire; they need something new. So their little company's latest idea is magnetic levitation using superconductors.

How about we plug it in and then try turning it on? (source)

However, there is a method to their madness, and this method ends up having an unintended side effect. Put a watch in the box, run it for a minute, take it out. It gives you the wrong time. Put in a kid's toy, it comes out covered in slime from a common household mold. Abe realizes what's up. He interrupts Aaron's March Madness session on a bench outside their workplace, runs him on a bunch of seemingly useless errands, and then reveals that he's built a time machine out of it by showing Aaron his past self in real time. Naturally, Abe and Aaron figure that the best way to use this device is what amounts to undetectable insider trading. Then things go haywire.

Aaron can't sleep, there's some bothersome pest up in his attic, and his ear starts bleeding. Abe starts running the box outside of their planned hours. The guys "can't write like normal people". Abe's ex-girlfriend's dad shows up with zero warning and almost dies whenever Abe gets close to him. Eventually, Abe decides to take the nuclear option and undo everything using his "fail-safe machine".

Still neater than a lot of "normal people" (source).

The narrative device throughout the film is Aaron making a phone call, the implication being that Aaron is narrating everything he knows and how it all fits together. He can do this because the conversations he's had have been recorded. Abe realizes this when Aaron starts saying everything he said the first time, unprompted, even when Abe tries to derail the conversation and avoid this whole mess.

To keep the boxes safe during excursions, Abe rented a storage unit. He actually rented two, the second for the fail-safe, and Aaron realized this when going over the manifest, so he went back in the box and was consistently one cycle ahead of Abe the entire time. Aaron wants to edit time; there's an upcoming party where Abe's ex's ex comes into the party "waving a shotgun", and he gets to be the hero and save everybody. Abe doesn't much like this, but there isn't a whole lot he can do to stop them.

Except turn this thing off (that is not a typo), get inside it, wait a few days, and try to avoid static electricity on the way out (source).

It's a short film, clocking in at less than an hour and a half…but what an hour and a half that is. Repeated viewings turn up new observations, double meanings in what felt like meaningless things. True, you may need to make a chart—or several, if you don't use pencils—in order to figure everything out, but in my opinion this is the single best time-travel movie ever made.

Upstream Color (2013)

If Primer was a question, a riddle, then Upstream Color is more of a declarative statement. That doesn't make it any less of a piece of cerebral cud for the chewing, it just tastes a little different.

One of the main characters, the Sampler, who is so ready for Burning Man (source).

In the interim between Primer and this film, Carruth was in negotiations to create another motion picture, more massive in scale; this was A Topiary, and the talks fell through. The main character can be seen running test footage from the intended VFX on her screen at one point, though, so in some small way at least a part of that vision made it to film.

Our story begins with your average scumbag lowlife rifling through a potted plant to get at some insect larvae. He then puts it in a capsule, abducts a successful young adult woman, and forces her to swallow it. The parasite has some sort of extreme effect on its host that makes him or her almost totally susceptible to suggestion. Our thief, whose face is, for some reason, obscured by an auto mechanic's trouble light the sun, basically commands poor Kris (Amy Seimetz) into willingly giving him everything of value that she has.

Also, the dude has zero idea of how to throw a decent party (source).

He then sets her free, whereupon she goes on a massive food binge. Subsequently she is drawn to a rural farm where a guy is playing the world's worst minimal EDM into the ground. This helps to draw out the parasite from Kris' body; the worms are then transferred to the pigs the guy raises.

"That'll do, Pig. That'll do." (source)

Kris' nightmare doesn't end here. Her life has been utterly ruined, at her own choice by all appearances. Destitute, she is approached on the bus by Jeff (Carruth again), a smooth-talking…something-or-other businessman who had a similar experience happen to him—worms, pigs, and all. Kris and Jeff fall for each other so hard they start remembering each other's memories as their own.

You may think that this is fizzling out into a cliché romance story at this point. I can understand how you'd come to that conclusion. The important detail, however, is that the pigs on the pig farm have also bonded. They have even mated and are expecting a litter soon. Kris, too, finds herself pregnant.

Except that's impossible, as she is physically unable to have children.

If you've only ever heard about this movie tangentially, this is probably the picture you've seen (source).

The pigs give birth, and our farmer is none too pleased, so he, shall we say, disposes of the piglets. This sends the pigs into a rage. Kris and Jeff also completely flip out because it feels like someone has seized and murdered their children. It doesn't matter that the children don't exist, at least not their children. It's their pigs' children. This makes so much more sense and is so much less ridiculous if you actually watch the movie.

Anyway, Scumbag Steve from earlier kept his marks in line by having them write out Walden longhand. Turns out, Kris and Jeff are no dummies, and realizing that Walden is a thing sends them on a hunt for clues. They find a number of other victims and get led to a musician who lives a simple life out in the country: He records ambient and experimental music, farms pigs, and has a habit of dropping the bass hard enough to annoy worms. Kris commits what must be, at the least, second-degree murder on the guy, and the Walden-torture brigade takes over the farms and raise pigs.

So, uh, how are we going to get the deed to the property transferred? You kind of killed the owner (source).

Remember the piglets from earlier? When they died, the parasite flukes that were in them were released into a stream. The river in turn waters a stand of rare plants that a certain parasite from earlier likes to prey on, and a local horticulturalist likes to find and sell these plants. The plant-seller has a certain regular customer. See how this all ties in? It's not quite as subtle about it as Primer was, but again, once you hit the third act, everything before it starts making more sense, and it still has the gravitas of a film that gets better if you let it marinate in your head for a while.

OK, he snooped on your memories and used them as a basis for his new mixtape, but Kris, isn't this a bit harsh? (source)

Coda: One of the things that intrigues me the most about this movie is that the wrong guy gets punished. All the farmer guy ever did was make some really crappy dubstep and de-worm people. Sure, he could probably be charged with animal cruelty for the whole piglet situation, but it's not like he was aware that Kris and Jeff had such a connection to them. For all Kris knew, however, he was the guy who had ruined everything for her—and for all we know, he wasn't.

Do you like bizarro films like these, or is this article a defense of terrible practice in cinema? Let us know in the comments!

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Back Fo(u)r the Future: the Four Rationales of Time Travel

Great Scott! If my calculations are correct, it's Back to the Future Day! And you know what that means: when we get this baby up to eighty-eight miles per hour, you're going to see some serious … discussion about the different types of time travel?!

That line isn't in the script … (source)

More to the point, depictions of time travel in fiction can be classified into four types. These classifications are based on the purpose and volition of the traveler and/or their associates. More broadly, instances of time travel could be classified into "intentional" vs. "unintentional," but what's the fun in that? (Also, you run the risk of painting with too broad a brush—there is some utility in digging one layer deeper.) The four categories are as follows:

1. Influence
2. Surveillance
3. Concomitance
4. Coincidence

It's important to note that these four types aren't necessarily mutually exclusive within the same work, or even the same time-traveler's motives—for example, in Superhero Black Hole, the main character at one point travels to the ancient Roman era in an attempt to save his skin (Concomitance) so he can survive long enough to stop the antagonist in the future (Influence).

Let's take a look at each one, with examples from media you may (or may not) be familiar with. For the purposes of this article, "time travel" encompasses only those instances where someone or something is actually displaced from its origin in time. Simply flinging a message into the future or past doesn't count unless it's on a physical medium.

Also, beware of unmarked spoilers.

Influence

This is probably the most common motive in fiction, and it even has some near-examples in reality—preventing his father's death was the impetus sparking Ron Mallett's research into the physics of time travel. "Influence" here refers to time travel intentionally undertaken by the traveler with the goal of affecting or effecting history. This can include anything from making sure history unfolds as it should to desiring to live out one's life in peace in another century to bringing about world domination.

Back to the Future

Judging by the green graph behind him, that DeLorean either has one tricked-out subwoofer or one seriously leaky plutonium reservoir (source).

It qualifies, but not how you might think: the Influence factor isn't in Marty ending up in 1955—that's Concomitance—but in him getting back to 1985. Marty wants to return the flow of events to how it was, in the sense that he belongs in the '80s. (For why he ended up thirty years in the past, see below.)

Star Trek

Your greenhouse gas emissions are without honor! (source)

Oh, boy. So, so much time travel happens in Star Trek. The crew of the original series went back to the '70s in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home to teach us, in a roundabout way, proper wildlife conservation practices. The Next Generation had "Firstborn" (S7E21), where future!Alexander basically tries to turn past!Alexander into John McClane. Deep Space Nine had "Trials and Tribble-ations" (S5E6), in which a Klingon with a bat'leth to grind hijacks the Orb of Time and tries to blow up Captain Kirk. Voyager had "Relativity" (S5E23), in which Temporal Investigations tries to stop someone from blowing up Voyager (interestingly, the culprit had also traveled through time in order to plant the thing, and basically manages to stop himself).

The Terminator

He isn't Todd the T-1000, but he still scares me (source).

We see both the "affect" and "effect" senses in James Cameron's franchise-igniting sci-fi flick. John CENA!!!! Connor is the leader of the Resistance, fighting against Skynet and its robotic army. Skynet has managed to figure out how to make a time machine work and has hit upon the simple idea of killing Connor's mother and preventing his birth in the first place. (Who cares about the Butterfly Effect, anyway? Not Skynet, apparently.) That's how Ahnold finds himself in '80s-era Los Angeles. Kyle Reese, meanwhile, is sent back to stop the T-800 and keep the timeline intact—in more ways than one.

Continuum

Liber8 aw8s their f8 (source).

The plot of this Canadian sci-fi series is set in motion when a terrorist cell, "Liber8," escapes a legal sentence to go back in time sixty-five years or so. Their plans involve blowing up a building and radicalizing a newborn. Not only do they succeed, but interestingly enough, they also end up killing off one major character's ancestor. Despite the fact that he's from the future, he still apparently survives.

Surveillance

"Surveillance" refers to an agent instigating time travel for purposes of observation. The agent can intend either to document events at the desired point in time as they happen, or they can simply test whether their methods for time travel actually work in the first place. Like Influence, the agent intends to make the trip; unlike it, they don't want to disturb. It's like window-shopping through the ages.

Back to the Future

One less minute to wait for the season premiere of Game of Thrones (source).

Doc Brown had to test the DeLorean somehow, after all. Einstein, being a dog, can't himself choose to run the DeLorean, but he's under the auspices of the good Doctor, and that counts for our purposes.

The Time Machine (2002)

No Whammies, no Whammies… (source)

In a nice example of the mutual compatibility of time travel types, Dr. Hartdegen's initial reasons for traveling into the future are to conduct research—he wants to see if humanity ever learned if changing the past is even possible, but can't wait like everybody else. He wasn't intending to actually alter the course of the future because of his travels there. All he wanted to do was learn if he could save his fiancée's life. (That would be Influence, but would have involved travel to the past to actively prevent her death.)

A Sound of Thunder

The description text for this image in Google Images read "An error occurred." This is an accurate summation of just about everything about this movie (source).

I almost don't want to dignify this film with discussion, but it was one of the first examples that came to mind. The upshot is that there's a company that basically offers prehistoric safaris. You're not supposed to do anything except watch—there's even a pathway that gets generated so that you don't step on anything. Naturally, some idiot messes this up it doesn't go according to plan.

Primer

Randall Munroe comes about as close as anybody ever has to accurately summarizing the plot (source).

Oh, boy. Shane Carruth's Primer is a real rat king of a movie, and some hold it to be the best time-travel movie of all time. The film ends up as a multi-car pileup of gambits and agendas, but the core reason for Abe and Aaron traveling through time in the first place is Surveillance—they want to see if the box actually works. The two Abes at the self-storage place pretty much confirmed that for Aaron … the first time around.

Concomitance

As Baron Mordu said, "The bill comes due." A concomitant event occurs as a consequence of some other action. Here, the actual act of traveling through time is not usually considered a "consequence" for our purposes (otherwise every instance would qualify); instead, "concomitance" refers to the motivation behind the time travel. Someone who researches and participates in time travel because he wants to does not travel because of concomitance, but a criminal forced by his captors to serve as a guinea pig for a new time-travel method does. It's kind of surprising how rare this motive is.

Back to the Future

Am I the only one who doesn't think the future as presented in Back to the Future Part II was all that great aside from hoverboards and self-velcroing Nikes? (source)

A bit of an odd example because it takes place due to actions Marty McFly hasn't performed yet, but the reason that Doc Brown takes Marty to 2015 at the end of the film (and in the first part of Back to the Future, Part II) is ultimately because Marty stupidly gets involved in a street race, breaks his hand, can't play the guitar anymore, and turns into a worn-out, underachieving shell of a man who isn't there to help his kid stay out of trouble. Perhaps stretching it a bit, but hey, I've got to tie this into the franchise somehow.

Star Trek

Overall, the double-Picard shots in this episode were extremely well-done (source).

Probably the clearest example of Concomitance for the Trek franchise is The Next Generation S2E13, "Time Squared." The Enterprise runs across a shuttlecraft tumbling in space. It turns out to be one of theirs, and Captain Picard is in it. Except, Captain Picard is on the bridge, and the El-Baz is sitting right next to itself in the shuttle bay. It turns out that this is future!Picard, who tried to escape the Negative Space Wedgie of the week, only for it to destroy the future!Enterprise and fling him back six hours so he could try again. Present!Picard shoots him with a phaser, the dead body and shuttlecraft vanish, the Negative Space Wedgie is satisfied, and Picard is left to grapple with whether he just committed suicide or murder. (Incidentally, per Deep Space Nine, you could probably charge him with the latter.)

Samurai Jack

Aku's not staring so much in fear of Jack's attack as he is in awe of his hair (source).

From Jack's perspective, at least, the raison d'être for the series is due to Concomitance. His initial temporal displacement is a direct consequence of his challenging Aku. Jack himself didn't want to end up in the future. Note that, on the flipside, Aku's motivation was Influence—getting rid of Jack let him move forward with his plans.

Looper

"My name is ASAC Schrader, and—wait, wrong franchise" (source).

The gist of Looper is that really bad dudes from the future send people back in time for really bad dudes in the present to kill. (Hard to prove a murder if there's no body, right?) Why these victims are sent back in time isn't always known, but part of the contract with these hitmen involves having themselves sent back. Basically, past!guy kills future!guy in the past—a result of his prior actions.

Coincidence

Stuff happens in general. Sometimes, stuff happens to people. With respect to time travel, "coincidence" considers both accidents and happenstance, and is basically an umbrella term for any time travel where the traveler did not initiate the travel of his own volition and where said travel did not result directly from his actions. "Coincidence" may not be the best name, but it rhymes and doesn't imply that the traveler had anything to do with it.

Back to the Future

I'd be remiss if I didn't find a way to work this in (source).

Marty didn't ask for the Libyans. It's not his fault that he got shot at. When he was getting shot at, his only thought was getting out of dodge. Unfortunately, in order to get out of dodge, he had to get into a heavily-modded DMC, and he ended up stranded in the '50s.

The Twilight Zone

Peter valiantly tries to change history (source).

In "Back There" (S2E13), Peter Corrigan ends up in 1865 following a discussion about whether one can influence events via time travel. He doesn't intend to get transported to the past, and while he does try to change it—and sort of does, if only in a way that ends up with one guy getting rich—he didn't set out to do any of that initially.

Heroes

Up high! Down low! Too slow—what the heck?! (source)

"Dual" (S3E13—what is it with all the episode thirteens in this post?) provides an instance of Coincidence for Hiro Nakamura, of all people. Hiro has been stranded in the past following his forcible depowering (how he got there is irrelevant for now). His brother Ando and their teammate Daphne manage to save the day for him thanks to some quick thinking. Hiro is returned and the status quo more-or-less restored when Ando augments Daphne's super-speed abilities so that she can travel faster than light.

Continuum

In the future, legibility will be sacrificed in favor of looking stereotypically futuristic (source).

Liber8's voyage into the past was discussed above, but Kiera Cameron ends up in 2012 by accident. Liber8 was supposed to Influence history; Cameron joining them wasn't intended by anyone involved. She just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

Were my calculations correct? Is this too heavy? Let me know in the DeLoreans!

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Hypersleep Monologues: a Retrospective on Between the Buried and Me

If you like heavy metal and haven't been living under a rock for the past ten years, you know two things: one, that Dave Mustaine and Metallica have made peace, and two, that there's this really off-the-wall band from North Carolina called "Between the Buried and Me."

BTBAM are known primarily for two things: mixing disparate musical genres like a flooded palette of watercolors and working with time signatures that are impossible to count and switch between unless you're a supercomputer. This latter bit is what initially piqued my interest in them—generally, when they include odd time signatures, it's done quite well considering the guys have been brought up in the West, the domain of 4/4 music.

What I've aimed to do in this article is provide a retrospective on BTBAM's original album releases. I've excluded live albums, compilations, and The Anatomy Of (because it's a cover album).

Between the Buried and Me (2002)

I never noticed until just now that there's a leafy branch behind the "between." (source)

BTBAM's self-titled effort was released before I started junior high. I am officially an old man.

As I listened to this album so I could write this article, I immediately noticed that the production sounds a little unpolished. Not necessarily complaining, mind, but it almost sounds like they recorded the guitars directly onto the master right out of the line-in without applying any effects or equalization to them. Perhaps a better way to describe it is "lo-fi," particularly the ending of "Shevanel Cut a Flip." (Also, about 4:32 into "Use of a Weapon," there's what sounds like an error on part of the drummer, like he was trying to play a variation on the ride cymbal pattern and didn't quite get it. Initially I was a bit surprised they'd keep that take, but then again this was their first album and who knows what kind of financial constraints they were under that might have made rerecording infeasible. They weren't yet the progressive-metal powerhouse they would become.)

The second thing I noticed was the lack of the odd time signature work that BTBAM would become famous for. There are a few hints of it, mostly on the second half of the album. For example, you can hear a polyrhythm about halfway through "Use of a Weapon," with one of the guitars playing a pattern in three where everybody else, notably the drums, is in four, and the intro to "Fire for a Dry Mouth" seems to alternate between measures of 4/4 and 9/8 (or a similar just-over-four time signature). In addition, the opening of "Shevanel Cut a Flip" seems to dip into 5/4. But overall, it's 4/4 or 6/8 all the way.

One thing that did not change was the stylistic variation. "Shevanel Cut a Flip" is the major example of this, with most of the song being a chorus-drenched, non-distorted ballad in triple time. The beginning of the song is what you'd expect from a metal band, and then there's a weird section where it sounds like people are ordering food at a café—which, particularly if you're familiar with Colors, really shouldn't be surprising—and then a bunch of ostinatos that fade into deliberate clipping while the song plays out.

The Silent Circus (2003, re-issued 2006)

Incidentally, "Lost Perfection" describes what happened when they released Coma Ecliptic. (source)

Where Between the Buried and Me felt lo-fi, The Silent Circus opens with the audio equivalent of finding yourself in a dreary, foggy morning before sunrise, wandering around a bit because you're ignoring every movie you've seen where something bad happens in a situation like this, and then getting bashed over the head. In other words, for its sophomore offering, BTBAM improved noticeably over their self-titled release.

With Between the Buried and Me, only a few bits of odd-time material made it onto the album. On The Silent Circus, it's easier to name the songs that don't include odd time signatures ("Shevanel Take 2"; maybe "Reaction," if "Reaction" even has a time signature at all). BTBAM's material from here on out is liberally sprinkled with bizarro meters like 5/4, 7/4, 13/8, and 15/16. It works better in some places than others—"Camilla Rhodes" is about as subtle as a brick through a windshield about its 5/4 work early in the song; conversely, "Mordecai" has so many tempo and meter changes it's hard to determine which way is up (in a good way, I feel).

Again, BTBAM jumps in and out of genre. This is neatly exemplified if one listens to all of the tracks from "Mordecai" to "Ad a Dglgmut" in order. "Mordecai" is about half-and-half prog metal and anthemic grunge/soft rock. Immediately following this (unless you're watching the official music video, which switches the order around for some reason), "Reaction" is almost straight-up ambient music comprised of some synth chords, sotto voce lyrics, and unintelligible background whispers that fade into "Shevanel Take 2," an acoustic song that wouldn't feel out of place on a Lukas Graham album. And once that fades out, "Ad a Dglgmut," whose title is apparently the result of someone along the line having a seizure at the keyboard, is a medium-hardness rock song if you ignore the thrash-metal bookends.

As far as the metal aesthetic itself, it's alive and well. Both sections of "Lost Perfection" feature some truly merciless shredding. "Camilla Rhodes," which I mentioned above, is, for all its flaws, definitely on the harder side of its genre. "Aesthetic" features sections of persistent power chording, blast beating, and breakdowns. "The Need for Repetition" starts with an almost sludge-metal section that could almost have been performed by Sleep, if Sleep had formed several decades later instead of releasing Jerusalem.

BTBAM started experimenting with synthesizers on this album (or, at least, this is the first time it's easily noticeable). "Destructo Spin" opens with some high-pitched stabbing at sine waves, and as mentioned above, "Reaction" is almost entirely synth-driven. Synthesizers become more prominent as BTBAM matured.

Perhaps the percussionist in me is a bit more inclined to pick up on things like this, but the drums in this mix have more presence, at least in my estimation. Perhaps they upped the bass in the mix. The double-pedal work in particular has more "oomph."

Roger Ebert, in reviewing Psycho, wondered "why Hitchcock marred the ending of a masterpiece." I find myself asking a similar question about the hidden track at the end of "The Need for Repetition." It's … quite puerile. Not quite as bad as Waking the Cadaver releasing a recording of themselves using drugs on their debut album, but still, it doesn't do them any favors.

Alaska (2005)

What exactly are "croakies" and "boatshoes", anyway? (source)

Maybe I'm in the minority here. Maybe I'm not. But this is my favorite BTBAM album. It was how I was introduced to them, and it's the album I'm most inclined to listen to when the mood strikes.

Again, there's a very strong opening statement in "All Bodies." There are four counts of lead-in before the band starts chugging away full-force. Then there's an almost piratical "heave-ho"-type section, which is followed by a truly inspiring 5/4 component.

The track "Alaska" was my first BTBAM experience. I remember being astounded at all the time signature changes, and for me, it has held up in all the years since. Then there's the ending. Some may find the ending of "Alaska" too drawn-out for their taste, but I think it's like a train going full-bore and letting its momentum carry it as far as it can before it finally ends.

If you like your listening experience to go up to 11 on the Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness, try "Croakies and Boatshoes" and "Roboturner"; these two are the frontrunners for being the single most intense song in all of BTBAM's discography. I mean, sure, "Disease, Injury, Madness" off of The Great Misdirect (q.v.) has that epic first two minutes or so, and "White Walls" off of Colors plays out with almost Dragonforce-like speed work, but "Roboturner" and "Croakies" are consistent throughout. Even the eight-measure phrase with no distortion in "Roboturner" sounds like a black hole is wandering by and tugging at the lead guitar.

I mentioned above how the band began to experiment with synthesizers on The Silent Circus. Probably the representative specimen of BTBAM synth usage would be "Selkies: the Endless Obsession," which opens with a 7/8 ostinato played on a synthesizer. Other than that, there are also "Medicine Wheel," which functions as a sort of musical breather episode, and the 5/4 section of "All Bodies" mentioned above, which manages to sound hollow, electronic, and orchestral all at once. (I'm unsure if the opening of "The Primer" uses a synth or just fed-back distorted guitars.)

There's a resurgence of the freight-train, harshly-vocalic feeling in "The Primer," followed by a truly improbable ending in "Laser Speed."

Colors (2007)

"By your powers combined…" (source)

This album is probably regarded by most as peak BTBAM. I don't think it's their absolute best album, but it has considerable clout. I was in high school when this came out and it was pretty earth-shattering.

We start with a soft piano intro in "Foam Born (A) the Backtrack." This eventually builds up into a more hardcore metal-esque ending leading into "Foam Born (B) the Decade of Statues." Then we segue into a … I'm not sure what you'd call it, really, that comprises "Informal Gluttony." Seriously. It's a mix of stereotypical "tribal"-type beats, Afro-Cuban influence, and Arabesque guitar riffs when it's not chugging guitars and palm-muting. But it's not without cause that this is the song they made the T-shirt out of.

"Sun of Nothing" is where my beef with post-Colors (actually, probably post-Alaska, but the post-Colors era exemplifies this) BTBAM starts to crop up. The genre-shifting, in my opinion, starts becoming a little too self-indulgent. It's not nearly as bad as what happens two albums down the line, but still, the non-metal components start grating on me here. Thankfully, at about 9:35 into this track, we get some nice riffs back into a more conventional ending that also serves to preview "White Walls" a bit. "Ants of the Sky" similarly has cleaner, less-harsh sections, but I think there it works better with the song as a whole thematically (plus there's less de-emphasis of the harsher pieces). At least until the very end, of which a large portion is a straight-up bluegrass jam with audio of a saloon or a bar playing over it. Yeah.

"Prequel to the Sequel" feels more like the Alaska era, albeit a (very) slightly counterfeit one. Again, there's a cheesy interlude that's straight out of the repertoire of an accordion player on the Champs-Élysées, if that accordion player spoke English and formerly played for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I liked that part a lot more in past years; maybe I'm getting old and elitist.

"Viridian" is a beautiful instrumental piece. Again, I liked it a lot when it came out, but I also like it now because it actually has relevance to the overall feel of the piece. There's some clean guitar work reminiscent of the intro to "Naked by the Computer" from the self-titled album. This leads into "White Walls."

I wouldn't dispute anyone who says that "White Walls" is BTBAM's magnum opus. The song is about fifteen minutes long and manages to cover so many decades of heavy metal successfully that there are people who have grown old and died between the eras they hearken back to—not to mention the blistering clip the guitars play at towards the outro. The final notes belong to the piano from the start again.

At this point, I wonder if BTBAM didn't start trying to do too much. As I mentioned earlier, I prefer Alaska over Colors. I don't mind listening to (most of) Colors, but it seems like they started doing things just for novelty as opposed to experimentation faithful to the overall tone of both the album and them as a group. But, still … "White Walls."

The Great Misdirect (2009)

Or, as many fans of the band might describe it, "The Great Misfire" (source).

The opening to The Great Misdirect, "Mirrors," strikes me almost as a bait-and-switch. There's a tantalizing preview of a musical chainsaw to the gut, but then they launch into a ditty akin to the work of, say, Pat Metheny or Jaco Pastorius. It's not terrible—actually, it isn't even bad—but it's not what I was expecting. "Obfuscation" is where the beat drops, so to speak, and it's actually a rather nice throwback. The two tracks seem like an attempt to repeat the experience of the first two songs on Colors, except the payoff doesn't happen at the end of track one. It's also a more harmonious beginning—again, not a bad thing, just a bit unexpected.

"Disease, Injury, Madness" has a fantastic first minute forty-five or so. It's the musical equivalent of punching a bear into submission, especially that riff at 1:26. But then, if I can borrow a quote from someone who reviewed James Cameron's The Abyss, there's a huge left turn. The musical atmosphere becomes quite rarefied and a bit corny (the sferic-like synthesizer drops don't help) and it's very hard to get back into the song once it picks up again. On top of that, once it does, there's another musical left-turn into a fast-forwarded Pink Floyd paraphrasing that ends up back in Jaco territory before ending with the musical equivalent of Dracula as performed by Howdy Doody.

"Fossil Genera (a Feed from Cloud Mountain)" is, upon a relisten, much better than I remember it being. Again, it feels like a somewhat-lighter Alaska-session jam that got saved for later. There's one part in the middle I don't care for, but even then it still resembles "Autodidact" from Alaska. Towards the end, we get a similar vampiric vibe, except I think they pull it off more successfully than in "Disease, Injury, Madness." I think the particular chords, or rather the variance between the notes comprising them, has more than a little to do with this.

"Desert of Song" just irks me. In this case, I place part of the blame on the time signature, because it's like a six-eight shuffle throughout a large part of it.

"Swim to the Moon" is kind of uneven to listen to. There's some absolutely fantastic passages reminiscent of Mastodon in the first third of the song, and the remainder of the song has its moments of "classic"-type material, but overall it's kind of like a plate of mashed potatoes that you put in the microwave, and when you bite into it, half of the bite is scalding and the other half is still frozen.

Overall, I'd have to say this album, for all its faults, has grown on me. The vision of BTBAM's musical evolution may have exceeded its grasp at times, but there are still plenty of worthwhile moments on this one.

The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues (2011)

Or, if the cover's anything to go by, "The Parallax: Migraine Auras" (source).

The first track is "Specular Reflection," and the opening statement is unexpected. Thankfully, I mean "unexpected" in the way that I'd grown accustomed to BTBAM being. It's very Steve Reich-esque, even in the instrumentation, and wouldn't have felt too out of place in Music for 18 Musicians, and then it's back to full-speed-ahead very quickly. Overall, the first track was like a happy medium between the pre-Colors and post-Colors eras.

"Augment of Rebirth" and "Lunar Wilderness" have this gritty, stripped-down feel to them (yeah, multiple guitars and an ersatz Farfisa organ is "stripped down," right?), and I feel much the same about these as the opening track. I found it a very pleasant listen.

There's really not much to say about this one because it was just a three-track release. This EP struck me as a return to form. The release was intended as one half of a concept project. Could the second half complement this successfully?

The Parallax II: Future Sequence (2012)

Well…no, not really (source).

The first track, "Goodbye to Everything," already starts off on a troublingly lackadaisical note, and is basically the minor prelude that exemplifies the post-Colors norm. Then we launch into "Astral Body," which … honestly, the thought struck me that it was almost like newscast bumper music for about a third of its run, with the rest of the song coming off like the soundtrack to a direct-to-video CGI movie, except with metal screams over it. "Lay Your Ghosts to Rest" begins on a promising note but devolves into overly self-indulgent jazz.

"Autumn" is a sort of harsh ambient-noise track for the inside of a spaceship. Because I like that sort of thing (ask me about my thoughts on Tim Hecker or Merzbow sometime), I enjoyed it. The intro to "Extremophile Elite," however, unpleasantly crashes your interplanetary joyride, both in aural tone and in its triple-time shuffle feel. It manages to recover somewhat by about forty seconds in, but then launches back into the same jaunty melody from earlier for a few seconds. If suspension of disbelief is a thing for albums, that track just destroyed it.

"Parallax" is similar to "Autumn" in that it's an interlude, a breather of sorts, and that I like it. It differs by actually having a melody driven by slow, longing, chorus-drenched guitars and a spoken-word segment, delivered by a narrator who bears a striking vocal resemblance to Liam Neeson, overlaid. "The Black Box" might as well be a jack-in-the-box.

"Telos" is another warmed-over helping of mashed potatoes. What's more frustrating is that the good parts are good in and of themselves, but they just don't go together. It's like finding bits of lobster in your mac and cheese. This then leads into "Bloom," which is just over-the-top and ridiculously corny (there's an obviously-blatting tuba). BTBAM were always ones to bend genres, but I think that they snapped it on this one.

I don't care for most of "Melting City." Most of the last third of the song, however, is very good. Hits a nice medium between frenetic and melancholy, up until they start kicking it into high gear again. Again, very jarring, and not the understandable jarring of their earlier albums.

"Silent Flight Parliament" is yet another grab bag full of the rocks and candy corn of music—there's too much being done, and it seems like concepts got shoehorned in. The final track, "Goodbye to Everything Reprise," is almost an afterthought—a coda, if you will.

This album comes off to me almost as a parody of BTBAM. Sure, in their classic era they would do ridiculous stuff with genre-shifting, but in the days of yore, their experimentation felt like it had purpose. On this album, it's incredibly blunt and feels as if it was done just to do it. Again, there are some enjoyable bits, but in my opinion, the negatives outweigh the positives—all the more disappointing given how good Hypersleep Dialogues was.

Coma Ecliptic (2015)

"No, you did not fool us" (source).

This album is easily the lightest release in the BTBAM catalogue. There are still hints of the metallic signature from which the band originated, but it's largely been shed.

Again, we have a now-typical opening statement in "Node," which flows pretty seamlessly into "The Coma Machine." The trouble, from my perspective anyway, is that it feels more like a pop album with a salting of distortion. There are a ton more synthesizers, largely cheesy ones at that, and the album is very unsubtle about them; the exemplar from this release is "Dim Ignition."

"Famine Wolf" is probably one of only two songs on this album I'd voluntarily listen to on even a semi-regular basis, as it at least partially captures the feel of the original band. I can even forgive the bizarre ending that leaves me somewhat "out in the cold." "King Redeem / Queen Serene" is also rather enjoyable after the first two minutes and twenty seconds for much the same reasons.

"Turn on the Darkness" reminds me of a certain ill-fated Spider-Man musical in more ways than just the title. While there are more classic hardcore-metal elements, this gets destroyed by the '80s power-ballad-type vocals and power chords that are also present. This is followed by "The Ectopic Stroll," which I found not very interesting in general, and "Rapid Calm," which reminds me of Alaska's "Laser Speed" in many respects. Again, I actually quite like the third quarter of it, but it isn't very BTBAM-y—it's another synthesizer run. Also, the ending has a cowbell and sounds more like Kansas with rough singing than the masters of odd-time death metal.

From the standpoint of instrumentation, "Memory Palace" is very good for most of its duration. The vocals, however, cut the heart out of the piece for me. The following track, "Option Oblivion," has the exact same strengths and weaknesses. "Life in Velvet," the outro, is saved from this fate by an overflow error from the use of the piano; it has this very late-1800s vibe to it that manages to keep the song from imploding before the guitars kick in at the end.

In my opinion, Coma Ecliptic was a logical progression given the band's trends; the perceived recovery of Hypersleep Dialogues was an aberration. Their original self-titled release was almost entirely within one genre, and subsequently the group started including elements from other, some might say contradictory, influences. I suppose from my subjective standpoint, it did largely seem that the softer elements became more and more prominent as time went on, with Hypersleep Dialogues being the exception. I wouldn't say it's the end of the world, but it certainly isn't to my taste.

What do you think? Am I old and elitist or am I on the right track? Let me know in the comments!

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