Synchronicity or shared worlds or something in art

IdleRich

IdleRich
peripheral, "riders on the storm" america. serial killers, drifters, motels, strip clubs, christian fundamentalist cults, ufos.
Oh this is a good one... I'm thinking of those kinda Barry Gifford things.
Also somewhat related is the similarity between Bukowski, Miller, Dennis Johnson, John Fante and so on... maybe Celine. Some of those guys could certainly wander through each others' stories... I'd need to check the dates properly to see which ones would work but you know what I mean. Basically if you're that kind of person you can find that underworld in any city, it doesn't matter if others don't know it's there. I really like the way that in C by Tom McCarthy (I think it's that one) he writes about heroin in London after the war and how if you're part of it you see kind of magic doors to dealers and squats and so on, little paths to paradise, you recognise like-minded people. Didn't Frankie Bones once say something similar about London during acid house - but with reference to parties instead of drugs - in fact?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
good thread. was just thinking this was probably a major part of why i loved the sandman so much when i read it as a kid. it was the first thing i'd read that embraced this idea of instantly familiar, archetypal worlds that each contain many stories.
I never read Sandman, does it exist in one book that you can buy and read the whole fucking thing without needing to collect loads of stuff?

Ooh another is the LA noir thing - I remember this cos I read a graphic novel recently set around the sleazy edges of the film industry and it could have been by James Ellroy except that it wasn't.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
good thread. was just thinking this was probably a major part of why i loved the sandman so much when i read it as a kid. it was the first thing i'd read that embraced this idea of instantly familiar, archetypal worlds that each contain many stories.

i remember loving that too. we might have read it round a similar age. i think i would have been 12 maybe. the first one i read was brief lives and the bit that really stood out to me was aphrodite being a stripper. to a young barty that was a very cleaver recontextualisation.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i read the invisibles 'counting to none' on the same holiday as brief lives, both were my first reads of each franchise. there was a bit in the invisibles one where the jesus fish sign was actually a diagram of how you create a hologram, which in turn explained some important concept to do with space time or something.

both made a big impression
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I was thinking about what you were saying about computer games Luka. There is a game called The Last of Us which I've never played but my friend is a big fan and I've seen him playing it and it's very impressive, lots of people really like it a lot. The gist of it is that there is some kind of zombie apocalypse (or maybe it's a disease that makes zombies a la 28 Days Later) and you have to negotiate a huge open world type thing to get somewhere with something or someone to meet someone else who will use that thing/person to create a cure or whatever. And it works well, you're in that zombie world, you know straight away what the score is and so on... apparently it's very immersive and so on. A great game by all accounts.
But now there is gonna be a tv series based on it... I dunno, it feels as though the advantage the game gained from being slotted into a borrowed world turns into a disadvantage when it's gonna be telly. The premise sounds utterly tired to me - oh, just what we need another zombie thing, with the exact same plot as The Girl With All The Gifts. Now the fans are going "Yeah but it came before that (as a game)" and "It's better than all those other ones" - which it may well be, but it sounds unbelievably unoriginal and that's a problem isn't it? I can't exactly get excited about it, however amazing it is. Maybe relying too much on created worlds is a problem here...
 
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luka

Well-known member
I agree. I think it works in favour of video games but leads to a sense of redundancy in pretty much any other medium.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Walking around - Walkabout, C3PO & Dusty Bin in Star Wars, the entirety of GoT, nearly every acid &/or mushroom experience as a teenager, computer games/virtual worlds I mean c’mon even COD is mostly just idling around a map. Maps help & hinder, even in the matrix.

The Campfire - Chaucer, Robin Hood & medieval themes, every western including Blood Meridian & Blazing Saddles with beans n gas, GoT’s, again (sorry). Light & illumination, social circles & bonding, boundaries, ritual eating, exclusion & incorporation, domestic vs wild, culture/nature, demarcations of “them vs us”.

Killing big things at the end of key points in a quest - Gilgamesh, film, The Sopranos, every comp game with a boss to smash.

Maybe these are just tropes & I’m not clever enough. The Mirror of the Marvelous is a decent read, even if the last quarter of the 20th century onward is missing due to time of writing. Fords, castles, mountains, labyrinths, gender, loss, sacrifice.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Walking around - Walkabout, C3PO & Dusty Bin in Star Wars, the entirety of GoT, nearly every acid &/or mushroom experience as a teenager, computer games/virtual worlds I mean c’mon even COD is mostly just idling around a map
This is a good one. I remember reading a series of fantasy novels when a child and at some point it suddenly struck me that all they do is wander around on a long journey and repeatedly get attacked by different enemies whom they defeat in various but ultimately boring ways. The other day I started book four of The Wheel of Time series and it struck me (again) that it's the same fucking shit.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Probably attacked by orks or goblins or something (trollocs in Wheel of Time). Maybe the thread has moved on a little towards tropes from shared worlds, I was quite vague when I started it to be honest. I was just intrigued by the way The Recognitions and Shadows were in the same world - the real world obviously(?) but still.
Campfires - maybe a subset of the journey?
Anyway, I feel pretty bad for the orcs and goblins, they really have no choice as to what side they are on (the wrong one) and are constantly being mown down in large numbers by the heroes. I mean you've got to appreciate their bravery, again and again they hopelessly attack this outnumbered but charmed band who have sent so many of their brethren to the great beyond. Probably they have to psych themselves up, tell themselves "Those bastards killed Grunt" or whatever and charge desperately towards certain death. All cos they're green and ugly and thus evil.
See also evil henchmen as parodied in Austin Powers but at least they had a choice.
 

version

Well-known member
The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice all feel as though they're overlapping and occupying the same universe. You can probably toss in Lodge 49 too. Apparently Under the Silver Lake's similar, but I haven't seen that one.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Lodge 49 and Lot 49...
Silver Lake eh? I love that LA noir thing and I would have put that more in with Lynch, I dunno, Too Old To Die Young.... Sunset Boulevard perhaps. James Elroy I don't know.
In simple terms the Pynchon stuff and Lodge 49 happens (in my mind at least) during the day, while Lynch et al is night time. I like that idea; Lebowski is going home after a hard day of getting stoned, bowling and solving weird mysteries that didn't exactly exist, as he does so he unknowingly passes the Mystery Man who is just heading out to a party and Bill Pullman's house - at the same time obviously.
 

version

Well-known member
It's more specific than just LA noir, imo. The stuff I mentioned is a certain kind of LA; a paranoid, stoned, 60s LA (even when it's set outside the actual 60s). Lynch, Ellroy etc are doing something different.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah I agree, Lynch and Ellroy ARE doing something different. I'm just saying that I'd put Silver Lake in that group not the other one. It feels dark and shadowy. Lebowski and so on feel bright - not less threatening for that, just overly bright, that kinda LSD shine in the corner of the eye. Light and airiness always close to tipping over into something else. Which is precisely paranoia I guess.
Lynch and Silver Lake are shadows, dreams, vague shapes, Freud and so on.
Like I say - two sides of LA weird, a night and a day, a dream and a waking nightmare. That's what I meant by a shift-change - when Pynchon's kooks go to bed Lynch's hyperreal hollywood beauties come out to play.
 
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