Cowboy Bebop Review #3: Honkey Tonk Woman

Warning: There are no honky tonks in this episode. Honky Tonk fans will not be dissapointed long - there is one in the episode 6.

So, this series now officially has no schedule. Being sick for a week made me realize that was gonna happen sooner rather than later. Deal with it.

For the first few episodes of Bebop, it's a much more ordinary show than the legendary series would become. I should say that it didn't seem that way at the time. Each episode seemed to be a revelation in new and different ways. But at first, every episode would have a bounty and Spike would be our unambiguous lead. This is the first episode to chafe at that structure. In addition, it is the first episode not to be hand unit directed/storyboarded by Watanabe himself - which means we're gonna finally see some off-model fun!

I wonder if this character will be important

Okay, so it's no spoiler to say today's bounty of the week is going to join the crew. She's in the damn opening credits! But it is interesting to note a few things about her intro. First off, we re-establish that Mars is the Chinese planet, as a mysterious femme fatale strolls into a traditional Chinese medicine curio. This character is Faye Valentine, today's bounty. Faye is introduced in a series of cuts that shows her body but not her face. The first time we see her face, she's turning around to fire a Heckler & Koch straight at where we were as the camera. Consider this scene from a storytelling/gaze point of view. Who are we? We aren't the Chinese medicine man, as we never have a shot from his perspective (behind the counter). We are always looking at him looking at Faye. We aren't the gangsters, as again we see them being shot at. The answer is that this scene is from Faye's perspective, just as in the last episode the opening was from Abdul Hakim's perspective. We saw in several scene's that Hakim's plans were crashing around him. We're gonna see a lot more of Faye's perspective than Hakim, and she is a much tougher nut to crack.

In the future, we will forget about overpenetration

Okay, after Faye is captured by gangsters, we meet the actual villain of the week, Gordon. Gordon is a phenomenally wealthy casino magnate/gangster/creep and he's got big plans...

Gordon's spaceship has a golden G on it. Like Trump's Ts.

Anyway, Faye is taken to Gordon's spaceship who has a cryptically threatening conversation with her. He calls her 'Poker Alice', after an Elizabeth Taylor movie (you aren't missing anything). Faye dismisses the insinuation, if Poker Alice were real she'd be more than 200 years old. First time viewers will fall for Faye's poker face - they don't know what Gordon does after all. Gordon reminds Fay of her reputation and debts stretching from Mars to Tijuana. Finally, Gordon threatens to take her to the police for her debts if she doesn't cooperate and promises to pay off her debts if she does. He makes these big promises while he gets grabby, and he's a cruel, greedy casino magnate/gangster, so maybe we have reasons to doubt his sincerity.

"Excuse me, but I'm still using that buttock."

Gordon's casino is called the Spiders From Mars, which makes more sense if you don't speak English. Spike and Jet are going to Spiders From Mars casino because Jet had a dream about Charlie Parker. Charlie said to Jet "Only hands can wash hands. If you want to receive you have to give.". Jet and Spike seem to deliberately ignore any idea that Bird thinks they should be more charitable, though I doubt charity toward Gordon or Faye would be a good idea, honestly. Maybe Parker was thinking of Ein.

Gordon is too rich to spell check the elevators.

This episode again establishes that Spike is a master of sleight of hand (or in this case, sleight of tongue) and a troll when bored. Jet doesn't let Spike gamble because ... I think a wise man once said "Spike is a master of slight of hand and a troll when bored.". So Spike wanders around the casino in hopes of finding a plot.

Odd, Jet doesn't seem the one-armed bandit type...

Are you aware that Cowboy Bebop is an amazing show? The sequence that follows is an amazingly packed smorgasbord of unique character designs and detailed backgrounds. This casino is amazingly well thought out, to the point that the slots have fully written instructions. Further, it's packed to the gills with unique characters designed to be from all over the world. It is really obvious that Spiders From Mars is a very successful casino. There are more detailed background characters in this scene than there are characters in most shows. My favorite is the German looking woman with the big nose, but pausing at any random scene here you will find fully realized characters all around you. It's amazing, but what's more astonishing is that this show keeps this up through the whole series. It's this kind of wordless storytelling, the true "show" in "show, don't tell", that keeps us coming back year after year.

In the future, we will use analog displays. Refresh rate for the win!

Okay, I've been playing good cop so far, but now I'm gonna come out and say it. Two major elements of the plot of today's episode are really weak. The plot at this point frankly hinges very heavily on Gordon just not providing a clear picture of the person who Faye is to collect this item from. There really should have been a reason Faye made this mistake beyond "Oops", but unfortunately that would have taken up precious run time. The episode is well-written enough that you might not notice this out of sheer momentum, and the mistaken identity thing doesn't last for more than a scene, but these weak spots make this episode not the series's strongest teleplay.

 Most of the off-model is minor stuff like this, but there is one instance at the end of the episode that's funny

Anyway, based on the scrambled image, Faye assumes Spike is going to hand her the episode's MacGuffin. Spike, obviously, doesn't/can't play along, so he's confused when Faye confronts him. This is strange enough, but when casino security comes in, they clearly have no idea who they're messing with. Needless to say, Spike wipes the floor with the goons and all parties decide it is time to get out of dodge. Spike and Jet run right, Faye runs left. This visual language sets up the twist that

Surprise! Spike actually planned to use Faye's escape to get out clean!

Also, Casino Spiders From Mars has a big spider on it. That's pretty cool.

So, the bad guys are really mad about this deal going south, going as far to beat and murder their courier. And somehow, I don't know how, in the negative space of offscreen time, Spike and Jet managed to talk Faye into taking them to their ship, subdue her and handcuff her to the toilet. This is the other major plot point that the show just tries to slip past you. I really don't know how Spike and Jet managed to do this. Faye may not be the physical powerhouse that Spike is, but she isn't exactly a cream puff. Again, the show relies on the emotional momentum that you believe that the characters will fall into the right place, and because Bebop is so well written in general, the strategy mostly works. I've literally never seen anyone else point this out even in critical reviews. I don't want to be too hard on the episode, which is a lot of fun. These aren't plot holes or contradictions. Obviously a 30 minute with commercials show can't be expected to show every single hoofbeat from every single angle. These are just weak points in the episode's narrative that it would be dishonest to ignore.

In Futurama, Zapp Brannigan uses the laundry room as impromptu brig. Spike & Jet use the toilet. For your next assignment, write about the strengths and weaknesses of each choice.

Faye obviously wants to be let out of the bathroom and is happy to blather anything to see what gets a reaction from Spike & Jet. She spills the beans about the chip being important. Not being born yesterday, they feed her nothing. At one point, Faye even claims to be Roma, and lets out a freedom howl and Ein joins in because that's what dogs do. It's such a real dog moment. Faye's ancestry claims are somewhat contradicted by the slightly more reliable Big Shot, which lists her date and location of birth as unknown. Finding out she has a bounty (placed by Gordon himself) relaxes the crew. Jet recalls his dream "Follow your dreams and you'll find your dream girl, Spike.". Like much of Bebop, this sentence is loaded with many layers of irony.

I will point out every time the Universal Analyzer is used, which is a lot.

Her other claim about the chip proves more reliable, when Jet pulls out the old Universal Analyzer to do the science.

"It's a chip!" he says.
"We know it's a chip." says Spike.

It's little moments like this and Ein's howl that bring humanity to the series. A baby can be loud all the time, it's dynamics that matter. Good writing is similar. Faye manages to get a communique to Gordon. She's slippery. Gordon tracks down the Bebop and crashes into it, which causes Faye to bump her head. This will become a running gag.

 It's almost like she's not familiar with spaceships or something... naaaaah

Jet negotiates a transfer of the chip back to Gordon. Obviously Gordon tries to betray them immediately. The space scenes in Bebop are always great. They convey weightlessness with real grace and use good direction to keep the general 3Dness of space in mind. I don't think I'm giving away much when I say Faye manages to slip her cuffs and escape on her own, or that Spike and Jet don't get the millions they negotiated for.

In my notes, I call this Spike's "Ted Danson Face". I loved Becker.

In the final account, Spike have nothing but the poker chip from earlier and they decide to gamble it away. A fitting in to a good episode.

And this is a genuinely good episode, despite it's flaws. Sure, it might have a bit of a complex plot for its run time, but not so much so that it rips itself to shreds or can't find time to breathe. Faye Valentine is our first bounty to not be tragic  (Katerina) or desperate (Asimov and Abdul Hakim). Whereas Asimov and Abdul Hakim couldn't think of a way out of a situation not involving violence, Faye has an entire arsenal of tricks up her sleeve. Whereas Katerina had to rely on others to make her dreams come true, Faye is self-reliant and seems to have no dreams. Though devilishly clever, she often found herself in situations she couldn't bluff her way out of. Yeah, she has the luck of a Bebop crew member alright. As we will see, the many invisible hints and innuendos in this episode will pay off as we see Ms Valentine and the rest of the Bebop crew more often.

Two Excuse Posts In A Row

Became intensely sick this morning. I can't write complex sentences. I'll be better soon. Watch this instead:

Stopgap Post

I had a difficult and busy week, so I decided to shift out of blogging for a bit. But I'm back and so is this blog. I don't know how successful the decision to do reviews has been. My idea was that they would be good excuses to get words written without doing a lot of research, but I found that the process of watching, taking notes and writing to take almost as much time and is less rewarding.

I won't do too much today. Tomorrow will be a review of an Orson Welles movie, followed by a return to schedule. Until then, take this advice:

Cowboy Bebop Review #2: Stray Dog Strut

 
Can a show start with both a kickass theme and a cold open? The answer is yes, because the "beginning" of a story is often a more fuzzy concept than you might think. Today's episode opens with an enormously tall man taking off bandages in a bathroom. He's ambushed by thugs dressed in scientist smocks, but effortlessly takes them out. Needless to say, this is today's bad guy, Abdul Hakim.

 Melfina from Outlaw Star

Abdul Hakim has a strange metal box with him. This lets us know that the episode is going to play with the Girl In A Box anime cliche/trope. In this episode, the joke is that the girl in the box is, in fact, a dog. That's too weak to string a whole episode on, so it's good that this episode doesn't end with a big punchline, like "Ooops, it's a dog! Wackity Schmakity Doooooo~". But the episode still plays with the usual conventions and expectations, using the basic themes as riffs and jumping go off into more advanced harmonies.

That being said, this episode is a comedy.

Tantei Monogatari

This episode seems more like a tribute to Detective Story, an old Japanese detective show that was a big influence on Bebop. True, both today's episode and the semi-unaired pilot are driven by variations of "Spike fights a space badass", but the first episode played the tune in a unique way by bringing us into the perspective of a woman whose dreams were dependent on that space badass. Also, it was really violent. This episode plays similar themes for laughs. Abdul Hakim is impossibly tough and demands respect by his sheer, but he is a professional dognapper. Throughout the episode he is humiliated and put in absurd situations, but he tries to ignore them. He's even our first caricature, in this case of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

"Notorious Serial Pet Thief"

This episode was written as second first episode, since it was meant to be the first in the proper timeslot. As a result, the writer of this episode was a lot happier in introducing series standards. TV shows, more recurring characters, a new crew member, and even the series main location - Mars. And, going back to the tone, the comedy is a lot more indicative of what the series would be like. Bebop is not a comedy and I don't want you to think that this episode is Bob Clampett wacky. It The first episode played it's bloody brawls straight, and this episode is the first sign that this show is going to mess with us.

The Martian Gate

After Hakim's one-sided fight, the episode proper begins. The Bebop and her crew are returning home to Mars. As you can see above, Mars is the Chinese planet. Martian culture and food is Chinese, people from Mars - such as the series lead - are implied to be Chinese in culture if not necessarily ethnicity. At the moment, Spike is half paying attention to the hilarious plot device that is "Big Shot - The Show For Bounty Hunters".

Shucks Howdy!

Listen, all stories require exposition. The more alien or complex a story is, the more exposition is required. Partly this is just to make the story comprehensible, but there is a deeper reason. Exposition creates expectations, and fulfilling/subverting/playing with expectations is where the flavor of a narrative comes from. Even in sports, which are definitely a form of storytelling, the announcers provide exposition on the evolution of a game. The audience needs to know that Player A failing to complete a pass is not just bad - that is obvious - but out of character. By creating expectations in the audience, announcers heighten the drama of a game.

If there is one thing that turns people off SF, it is clumsy exposition. Chapters of space elves telling underdwarves their dark history does not heighten the drama of the story. But exposition needs to be there all the same. "Big Shot" is Cowboy Bebop's answer to this problem. The show's stars Judy and Punch (yeah, yeah) tell the audience what is publicly known about the bounty of the week. Obviously, the writers of "Big Shot" are not well informed about their subjects, or else the exposition would 1) go on too long and 2) not be funny. "Big Shot" is a perfect way of saying what needs to be said fast and with a smile. In this episode it is used for that purpose.

And don't worry. As Bebop evolves, their relationship with "Big Shot" changes too.

Abdul Hakim looks for a buyer

Once in the city, Abdul Hakim is dealt his first humiliation of the episode. A pair of thieves distract him and steal his case. As he tries to track down the thief, Spike buys a bit of choice information on Abdul Hakim from a doctor he thrashed. Basic detective story stuff, nothing that would be out of place on The Martian Rockford Files.

But hey, Spike has a doctor friend on Mars. I wonder if that will come up again?

Spike tracks down the thief, thinking that he's caught Abdul Hakim himself. He refers to Abdul Hakim as just "Hakim", which to my memory is not proper Arabic, but the thief doesn't know that. The thief apparently knows Abdul Hakim by reputation, because he brought the mysterious briefcase to an old Korean lady who buys rare animals.

This lady is, without a doubt, the best

The lady identifies the "rare animal" as a Welsh Corgi, a typical dog. Her acting in this scene is great. Her suspicious eyes as she opens up the case and joy at seeing a cute little dog are great comedy. This episode was storyboarded by Watanabe himself, and it has his characteristic range. The comic stoicism of Abdul Hakim and the silliness of these characters embody different approaches to comic acting without becoming hacky or unrealistic.

 Ein

Let's talk about the cute little dog. This is the first time a character joins the cast, and yes Ein is a permanent addition to the Bebop crew. Metafictionally, I like to think of Ein as a self-imposed challenge on the part of Watanabe - the answer to the question "How intelligent can you make an animated animal without humanizing it at all?". It's a challenge that the storyboarders and animators of Bebop live up to wonderfully. A running gag is that Ein is consistently right about everything, but few pay attention because she's a dog. It's never stated anywhere in the series, but Ein barks once for yes and twice for no. This is the closest that the animators allowed themselves to a cheat. For an example of this idea done wrong and cliche, you can look up the terrible Bebop manga. But still, in the show, it's an impressively creative idea and brings a welcome light heartedness to the proceedings.

But Ein does more than be smart, cute and funny. Ein is an important indication that the show is more than ultraviolence and drama. Cowboy Bebop is all about complexity and the unexpected. But as the disappointed readers of Funky Winkerbean know, complexity is not the same as darkness. Cowboy Bebop has a far more rounded and realistic take on life than that.

Trivia time: Ein's voice is a real dog, one of the producers owned a Welsh Corgi. Ein was originally designed with a splotch of white fur on her back, but it was decided that would be difficult to animate. Her designer, Kawamoto, loved the dog so much that he's owned Welsh Corgis ever since.

Seems That Way

So, Abdul Hakim kidnapped a mysterious data dog and its creators (the goons seen above) are trying to get him back. When they use their secret weapon to get it, it even starts a chase sequence set to Yoko Kanno's "Want It All Back". There are two chases in this episode, and the second is set to "Bad Dog, No Biscuits", one of my favorite songs from The Seatbelts. It's a ska/jazz song that is built out of Kanno's radical rearrangement of Tom Waits's instrumental "Rain Dogs" (thus the title). Waits's version emphasizes the raggedness and darkness, Kanno's big band version brings out an an uncontrollable liveliness. Again, Kanno evokes Charles Mingus in the way she develops a call and response structure by going crazier and freer (in the sense of "free jazz") with every round. Kanno also goes Sun Ra crazy with that synth. This one threatens to turn into a Fishbone song after a particularly wild blast, but don't worry, the melody comes back.

Abdul Hakim is trying to coordinate selling it to a buyer, but the buyer isn't being flexible. Every humiliation he receives also pushes him towards missing the buyer, which would mean all the work was for nothing. The increasing stress drives him to make increasingly erratic decisions, . In these first two episodes, Bebop tried to show that the bounties were human beings by showing how they were trapped by more than just Spike's pursuit. It was more successful in the first episode because of the interesting perspective of Katerina's character, but it still works to push Abdul Hakim and the plot forward here.

The dog runs off, shakes of Abdul Hakim and ends up in the possession of Spike and Jet. Spike is tasked with walking the dog, with the duo hoping to get Abdul Hakim to act foolishly. Spike is less than enthused by this. Spike claims to not like dogs and kids - a hint at the future.

In fact, Abdul Hakim is distracted by a fortune teller. This soothsayer uses a bird that draws cards to see the future. This is actually authentic, in that you can find these guys in a lot of big Asian cities. When Peeoko pulls the card that says that what Hakim seeks is near, all the loose dogs in the city run past him. An easy bit, but funny.

This begins the episode's second big chase, which is even bigger and funnier than the first. This chase exposes this episodes biggest weakness: we never see a big duel between Spike and Abdul Hakim. Still, the big Blues Brothers finish is worth it. Like the last episode, this one ends with failure. Abdul Hakim is caught by the police independently and the crooked scientists are arrested. In the end, Ein joins the crew, who are unaware of her special nature.

This episode is much more oriented on introducing concepts than the first and has a lot less music. This is why it is less iconic and this review is not as deep. But it's a much better indication of what the show would become than the brutality of the first episode. In the next episode, we meet another new member of the crew, and this one can talk! See you then, space cowboys!

Unexamined Life: What Have I Learned From Philosophy?

I have read a lot of philosophy, perhaps more than the subject deserves and perhaps less. Philosophy is odd, everything is obvious to a philosopher but nothing between philosophers. Philosophy has been prepped for the trash pit many times, by religious fundamentalists, by over-reaching scientists, by mad governments, by great philosophers and - most fatally - by many bored readers.

Albert Einstein

The Pythia said "No one is wiser than Socrates.". In his day, he could walk up to what we would call a scientist and defeat them - clearly, nobody knew more than him. Much of the disrepute of modern philosophy is rooted in this no longer being true. No matter who you think the greatest living philosopher is (and I doubt that is a definite description), you probably wouldn't go on to say that they are the smartest person in the world. You'd probably admit Terence Tao is at least a little better at math.

But I didn't put Einstein up there because I think he was smarter than Husserl. The disrepute of philosophy comes from another, related source: philosophers aren't our deepest thinkers any more. Einstein has had more influence on us how we think about time than Carnap or Heidegger, more on how we think about space than Bergson or Whitehead. Nietzsche's philosophers of the future don't call themselves philosophers.

I do think philosophy has an important place. What makes humans unique is that they can understand what they do (this, of course, is a philosophical opinion!). In many instances, philosophy is just thinking about what we do. When you read a paper like (Alchian, 1950) or (Krugman, 1996), you are seeing philosophical argument. In this case, there is complete agreement, but I would say - another economist, another philosopher might disagree.

Daniel Dennett

So, what have I learned from philosophy? What philosophers - and "philosophers" - have influenced me? The answer is simple: Daniel C Dennett III. I'm going to leave him to another post as being too important. I will admit I have been more influenced by the technical/logical philosophers of the so-called "analytical" school. It isn't that I think they are smarter, just as a mathematician their work is often more directly relevant to my daily life. They are almost all black & white, dead men. I should include female philosophers such as Susan Haack & Deborah Mayo. In fact, the only reason I didn't include Mayo because I left her book in America. I'm leaving continental philosophers for another post.

Jaako Hintikka

Despite my fascination with intuitionist/constructive approaches, their philosophical views I find less interesting. The math is neat, but the philosophy is weak. The philosopher that has influenced my view of mathematics the most is Jaako Hinitikka. Unfortunately, he was not as cool as the above picture makes it seem. Hintikka developed what are called "Game Semantics" for quantifiers. This is the best explanation for why classical analysis has the structure it does. The reason is that classical analysis is based on non-refutable arguments. It's best explained with an example.

Let's say that I claim a given function, perhaps the angle of a shower knob and the equilibrium temperature of the water coming out of the shower head, perhaps the solution to a DE, is continuous. What does this mean? One might say that it takes on the value of the limit on that point. But this is not the point of view of classical analysis. In classical analysis, the important thing about my claim is that you can't disprove it. Let's say we know the function takes on a value at a certain point - we know by, say, measuring the heat of the water when the knob is at a certain angle. When I say it is continuous, that means you can't truthfully say it doesn't get close to that value when the angle is close. If it could, you could say it's getting near some over value. We can call the difference between the measured value and the "error". But any given amount of error is too much, I can always just sneak by it. You can't prove that there is a jump, therefore the function is continuous.

Hintikka gave formal rules for interpreting any sentence from classical mathematics like this. That is by itself a huge deal.

Wittgenstein

The first philosopher to genuinely fascinate me was Wittgenstein. I spent a month reading and re-reading his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trying to find the meat hidden on its austere bones. On the technical side, Wittgenstein co-invented the truth table within it. On the more philosophical side, it pointed to a metaphysical semantics of the new logics and set theory. On a deeper level, it pointed to a world beneath language and made sense of the idea that there was more on Heaven and Earth than in our philosophies. In his later work, Wittgenstein would attack the metaphysical parts of the Tractatus, on the grounds that even if the metaphysics was true they had nothing to do with why we believed that they were the case. This attack, laid out in Philosophical Investigations, naturalized language in a way nobody had seen since Hume. Only after this book could we go back and see how wise Hume was. I don't think that the attack affects the value of the Tractatus metaphysics as a semantics of set theory, but certainly no one will take them without a grain of salt anymore...

Thomas Schelling

Thomas Schelling's Micromotives And Macrobehaviors is one of the greatest books on social philosophy I ever read. Along with the Tractatus, it took me apart and put me back together a smarter and wiser person. It is hard for me to summarize, but I don't feel bad - it is hard for him to summarize too. Often we associate game theory with rigorous mathematical analysis - on the grounds that if Von Neumann was doing, so must everyone else. Schelling was given a Nobel Memorial Prize for contributions to game theory, but he never used math in any deep way in his work (contrast with the other winner, Robert Aumann). The important thing for Schelling was that game theory forced the user to consider the effects of his actions on others, and theirs on himself. What mattered to Schelling, in other words, is the notion of an "equilibrium". Game theory then is as much Hume & Kant as Luce & Raiffia. There is no formal "game theory" in Micromotives and Macrobehaviors, but there are hundreds of examples of equilibrium arising from social interactions giving results paradoxical and straightforward.

It was perhaps Hegel who was the first to recognize the importance of self-negating equilibria. Every society comes with it a set of norms & expectations. But every society so far has had some norms that force in conflict with the expectations. Eventually society adjusts its norms to remove this contradiction. Each society is out of equilibrium and therefore history matters to it. Unfortunately, in Hegel, these notions are tied to a history that is, in most matters of fact, false. I will give the Marxist version: In perfect competition, the wages to labor will be subsistence wages (this assumption was common to all classical economists) and technical change will tend to deepen capital (this is a norm). Capitalists expect capital deepening to profit them (this is an expectation), but will find in the long run they can't all deepen against each other (this is called fallacy of composition). Instead, capitalists will be paradoxically trapped underneath a mountain of less profitable goods. This is a Hegelian contradiction, a self-negating equilibrium. Marx's proof used the labor theory of value instead of the fallacy of composition, but it amounts to a different gloss on the same thing. Marx might have been smart enough to make that argument by himself, but I needed Schelling.

David K Lewis

I feel kind of odd putting David K Lewis on this list. He's too important to me to ignore, but my disagreements with him are part of what made me keep reading philosophy. He was the first academic philosopher that I liked, not just the philosophical aspects of a scientist or economist. Lewis made permanent contributions to mathematics, but I have to say - I basically am completely uninfluenced by them. I've never once started a proof with megethology in mind. Lewis is most famous for his adapting Wittgenstein's "The world is everything that is the case" classical logic semantics for modal logic - the so-called "possible world" semantics. They nearly single handedly brought metaphysics back into academia. Lewis (and, to a greater extent, his ally Daniel Dennett and, to the optimum extent, linguist/mathmatician Noam Chomsky) helped bring analytic philosophy out of behaviorism. But Lewis's solution was Bayesianism, which is not to my own taste (though it is important and I'm glad someone was working on it).

Of his ideas, his concept of a coordination game has been the most important and influential. He claimed to have been inspired by Thomas Schelling above. I first read about it in his book Convention, which is also where it was invented. I've gone over this before. His definition of value as what we "desire to desire" is something I've been thinking about recently. I like the way that it reduces the theory to preference theory (for the classic reference on preference theory, see Debreu's Theory of Value - Debreu's "Value" is value in another sense) without impoverishing the value part of the apparatus. The words of Kant are very comprehensible: what we should desire to desire is those desires that are coherent for the population. The words of Bentham too: what we should desire to desire is the satisfaction of the most individual desires. Hegel (and Marx) pointed out: our desires generally conflict, society is out of equilibrium. You could, if you want, do all social philosophy this way.

In fact, one reason I like Lewis is his congenial approach to formalization. Formalizing philosophical concept of value by putting it in terms of (in some sense "reducing" it to) the preference theory of economics allows us to sharpen and clarify the philosophical differences of old - but shouldn't try to artificially "solve" them. This seems to me to be a right way to go about things.

Robert Nozick

Okay, so if I felt odd about David K Lewis, I have to say this about Nozick: I've never read his big book on political philosophy. I've read an article attacking Ayn Rand and another one attacking "Austrian" Economics, but hey, easy targets. I'll come out and say it: Nozick tried to make a philosophical explanation of what we call "libertarianism" or "classical liberalism". I won't address whether his argument fails since, again, I haven't read it. I kind of doubt that reason/philosophy alone can make a political argument look good - logic shorn of evidence tells you nothing about reality.

What I find most interesting about Nozick is his last book, Invariances. In this book, Nozick develops a novel explanation of what is "objective". The usual philosophical gloss is that something is "objective" iff we could conceive of a completely physical description. This does not match what we usually mean by the word. When someone is pointing a gun at me, I would say they are objectively being a menace. I do not mean that there is some physical description of him being a menace. What I mean - according to Nozick - is that their being a menace is invariant over the variations relevant to the conversation. This ties down the notion of objectivity to Wittgenstein/Lewis idea of language games.

Nozick is interested in the implications for ethics - Could there be "objective ethics"? This is less interesting to me, but I'll go through it nonetheless. Nozick tries to build up from a libertarian state to a democratic state using the idea that some values (desired desires) can be better served by democracy/market mixture than a "pure" market. Rawls, another ethical/political philosopher, proposes his "veil of ignorance" argument as basically Nozickian objective ethics. I think that shows that there are, in fact, too many Nozickian objective ethical systems. These examples can be multiplied until and beyond one reaches the count of ethical philosophers. Nothing says that one definition of relevant variations is the right one.

My plan now is to do three more posts like this. One on Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who influenced me the most. Then a third post on classical and continental philosophers, who are important and deserve mentioning even if they haven't struck my fancy.

First color picture of the post

Also, you may or may not see a review today. I've been having internet troubles and am having a hard time watching videos.

Bureaucracy Bites

No review today. I have to be at the immigration office ASAP to turn in proof of insurance. If I go at 5 AM I can get a good spot and have time to take a nap. In the meantime we can dream of a world without bureaucracy:

Steven Universe Segments 7 and 8: All New, All Similar Steven Universe

Influence mongering is a weakness of critics. You see, if a show is a sum of influences, then criticism of those influences is sufficient to criticize the new show. After all, original thought is difficult enough that it should always be avoided by a critic. Plus, claims of influence are a dangerous speculation onto the innards of a strange human's mind. I recall writing a story once, a story about a man who turned off all the lights in his house. When I looked back on it, I could see through the poorly worded garbage the influence of Edgar Allen Poe, Nicolai Gogol and Joseph Conrad. I had read all those works, but when I wrote I didn't think of them once. Are they an "influence"? What does that even mean?

That being said, the obvious biggest influence on Steven Universe is The Simpsons. Steven Universe is too original (uh oh) to just be The Simpsons, but with more action, but the point remains. In this episode, we meet the young woman who seems to be in the Lisa Simpson mode, Steven's first love interest Connie. I say all this hoping that long time fans are laughing.

Connie

Okay, even if The Simpsons is the biggest influence on Steven Universe, and it is, Connie could be just as influenced by Khannie from King of the Hill. I don't know. She's obviously going to be Important (TM), because she is given such prominence in the opening credits. I suppose of I'm gonna be a hack reviewer, I might as well go full hack and give an overview. In this episode, Steven inconveniences his love interest Connie briefly but is so sweet about it that she forgives him.

 
Simple descriptions don't imply simple writing. This episode had to jump through so many hoops its amazing they could fit it in 11 minutes. This episode had to: advance the metaplot (meeting Connie, establishing that yes all the monsters have a gem, introducing Steven's bubble), have a coherent internal plot ("Steven inconveniences his love interest Connie briefly but is so sweet about it that she forgives him"), have a straightforward emotional thrust (Connie learning to trust Steven) and maybe even some comedy ("funky flow"). If Steven Universe has a weakness, then it is that in stretching out to do so much, comedy is often sacrifice. This episode should have been full of physical humor and I was in a mental state likely to appreciate physical humor. Yet this episode fell flat. Connie seems like a nice girl, but she isn't quick with a quip and this episode isn't any quicker with laughs. This isn't a murder mystery, we are meant to laugh at Steven's ineptness. But there just ... isn't that much to it. The episode looked good, the music was alright... But why? Did these people really have to work so hard to make this?

Serious Steven

Segment 2 was "Serious Steven", a Steven and Garnet episode. Steven and the other Gems find an dungeon they have to defeat in a strawberry field. Yeah Beatles. Garnet is usually a font of hilarity, what could be funnier than someone who takes our absurd world seriously? This episode suggests "Anything" as an answer to that, it is as funny as buggery.

Of course, buggery is pretty funny and this episode provides a couple laughs. The characters in this episode claim that this is Steven's first mission. Apparently the superior episode "Cheeseburger Backpack" just doesn't count. My guess is that these were written out of order and "Serious Steven" was supposed to be a precursor to "Cheeseburger Backpack". The lesson here is identical: Steven's unorthodox POV is actually helpful on a mission in small doses. One could argue this episode makes that lesson sticks better by giving Steven and the other Gems a straight ending, if you liked to be wrong. The ending of "Cheeseburger Backpack" cut through the treacle, "Serious Steven" lies at the bottom of the Dormouse's treacle well.

Albert Einstein

Also, why couldn't the other Gems notice they were in a non-inertial frame of reference? Are they just supposed to be so tough they don't notice the forces around them? And the strawberry fields were very over-the-top, but Pearl implies this is part of Earth. Do strawberries just grow as big as watermelons in the SU Earth?

Princess Zelda, Navi the fairy and commoner adventurer Link

I did like the set piece in "Serious Steven". It was an inverted pyramid that worked according to Legend Of Zelda logic, but with puzzles that aren't quite so creative. Is Steven like The Hero Of Time? Probably not, I couldn't imagine Steven going around stabbing folks as is the main occupation of our man Link. Steven and Garnet solve these puzzles non-conventionally, but not so non-conventionally as to be independently interesting. I guess it is nice to know that Garnet is over-leveled for these missions.

The reviews for these segments are overly negative. They were the first segments to just be kind of okay, which makes them look bad in comparison to - for instance - "Cheeseburger Backpack". Really, I shouldn't intervene in SU's funky flow. As the number of constraints on these episodes goes down, the episodes themselves will likely improve. Though I'm not giving numerical ratings, I think you can tell I didn't like these as much as the last ones. What can I say but "strawberry fields forever~"