There are no greater television shows than "The Prisoner". Not ever. Perhaps shows such as "MASH" or "Twin Peaks" rise high enough to catch a glimpse of Patrick McGoohan's Big Idea racing off into the distance but they will never catch up. "The Prisoner" is one of the few works of art in the twentieth century that actually deserve to be called revolutionary. But, Patrick McGoohan, the show's creator and star, has no time whatsoever to rebel against things that lesser figures and would-be rebels wish to rebel against -stoking up the fires of their tiny egos. McGoohan means business and his series, "The Prisoner" rushes up to all of the Big Questions and grabs them by the neck. "The Prisoner" is a declared war against tyranny in all of its forms: sexual attraction, the lure of comfort, the facade of democratic politics, science, fundamentalist anti-science, conservatism, cheap liberal progressivism, group-think in any form at all including "individualism" (which is just another form of group-think),the ultimate prison which is one's self, and more. Number Six, played by Patrick McGoohan himself, is absolutely relentless on his assault upon the Village which would keep him there against his will. And he desires to leave no matter what wholesome blandishments are offered to him. In that way, Number Six is a greater human being than most of us. He is more than a common human individual living out his life. He is an archetype. He can never quite escape but the octopoidal snares of the Village can never quite hold him. In that way, his story resembles the myth of Sisyphus. And yet Number Six is more than Sisyphus. I will not give the end of the series away but I will say that at the end Number Six comes to a true understanding of himself. The only good true understanding of one's self is if that understanding destroys the cycles. The strangest idea at the base of "The Prisoner" is the idea that morality itself, at its most secret heart, is the ultimate form of rebellion. Number Six has a devotion to pure justice, profound freedom, actual compassion ( as opposed to its sentimental counterfeits), and rigorous truth telling that is so extreme - more extreme even than the great Jewish prophets in the Bible - that he actually is an archetype, and not merely a single human being. Number One is the secret Archon that rules the Village. The Village is, of course, demon possessed, though the demons mostly reveal themselves as Angels of Light. Under Number One is paraded a grand series of Number Two's. They come and they go. Each one of them is yet one more attempt to seduce or brutalize Number Six into giving up his freedom. One of the strangest things about this series is that Patrick McGoohan's idea of freedom rejects both the dionysian and the apollonian as categories of human thought and endeavour. McGoohan believes there is a third way that carves its own path, disdainful of the sharp and controlled, fascist geometries of the apollonian and compassionately rejectfull of the oblivion and disintegration offered by the dionysian. No better show exists. I don't think the fifth grade schoolboy bullies who dominate Hollywood or the television studios could allow such a great work to be made or shown on television today. But that is both their fault and their impotence. The Number Two's come and go but the Archetype prevails.

This movie is one big dull bunny of a tale. Neo has nothing going in him at all and as the series developed he got worse. He is as flatsouled and as empty as a house abandoned even by the demons and the ghosts. His fall for Morpheus demonstrates the gullibility and even narcisitic death urges that lurk in his puerile soul. Only a death urge and an extreme infatuation with himself, covertly needin g massive doses of ego-stroking could possibly explain how he fell for that equally shallow, utterly pretentious snake-oil salesman Morpheus. I feel terribly bad for Lawrence Fishburn who is a tremendous actor, capable of roles more complex and interesting that the mono-maniacal con-man strait jacket he allowed himself to get pressed into. Neo is the Messiah? I prefer the scruffy, complicated, firey man from Nazareth. This movie has been praised as innovative by people who are ignorant of the fact that all of its best ideas were stolen and mutilated from more competent science fiction writers. How about the spirituality of the Matrix? Millions of other-wize decent people have almost worshipped this film - as if it were a Revelation from the spiritual world. I find the "spirituality" of this film to be cheap. It lacks all of the complexity, difficulty, and traumas of real spirituality. Spirituality is a world of tiny deeds unnoticed, momentary ecstasys, deep sadness, joys that cannot be comphrehended, momentary brawls with the spirits, midnight fist fights with God, beauty, and service. The spirituality of this film is pure, self-congratulatory violence. It is yet another Rambo-as-Frankenstein's monster film that seems to gratify American audiences who cannot get enough of killing in the name of God. Don't buy it. Don't waste the money. You'll regret it. Go out and do something good for yourself and the people you love.

This movie will make you laugh the first time you see it. The second time you see it you will curse it for its sentimentality. But the sentimentality is purely superficial. The third time you see it you will come to know and mourn its sad tragic core. There are a million improbable rescues in this movie. Our heroes confront a million deadly dangers and by sheer fate, chance, or the perverse will of the script writer our heroes always get off the hook. I do not feel I am giving anything away when I say that. The movie demands to be treated like a sublime, beautiful, and humorous joke. But underneathe all of those escapes and rescues, underneathe the jokes and one-liners, underneathe the sight gags and grand visual frivolity is a darker story. There is a scene ( I won't give it away) where that bold swashbuckler Inigo cofronts Count Rugen - the man who murdered his father. They have a duel and in the last instant Inigo finally tells Count Rugen what he really wants. It is, actually, the one thing Inigo ever wanted in his entire life. That mere sentence, what Inigo says to Count Rugen, is one of the greatest lines in movie history. It is, in itself, the true tragic and spiritual center of the film. All of those escapes and rescues and jokes are totally false. They make us feel good but they lie. The movie itself admits openly that the film is merely a fantasy - a fantasy in the good sense that it ignores the grotesquely limited constraints of realism; but also a fantasy in the sense that it is what wounded children ( all of us) had wished had happened. No one who sees this film will have any regrets.

A hundred thousand years could go by until the human race finally wakes up the fact that Gilbert Keith Chesterton is one of the great est writers of the sad and bad twentieth century along side of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, Mervyn Peake, and, of course, Franz Kafka. His psychedelic quest-romance "The Man Who Was Thursday" will shock you - if you have nerves left to be shocked. If you don't have nerves Chesterton will wave his aesthete's magic wand and create you a new pair of nerves. The book is not a roller coaster ride through phantasmgoric visions of evil and beauty. It is a quest of one man to get to that most dreadful of topics - The Bottom Of Things. The "anarchists" are everywhere, and like blasphemous termites from a world beyond they are attempting to eat away at the roots of human civilization until it crumbles in flames. I am often reminded of the sublime fictions of Thomas Pynchon while I contemplate "The Man Who Was Thursday". Chesterton, out of magic bag, throws out plenty of paranoia and devilry and fine poetical prose to keep us feeling like we are living in a grade-b version of film noir crossed with a Monty Python movie where all of the actors have sipped their daily quanta of holy water and have sworn comical oaths to the Divinity. I often wonder if Mr. Chesterton's little psychedelic surprize played any role in influencing Patrick McGoohan ( the world's most under utilized actor) when he created the monstrous television series "The Prisoner". There is the same unconventional idea that morality is a form of rebellion in both works. And Chesterton prizes human freedom at least as much as Mr. McGoohan does, though Mr. McGoohan is grim and even savage while Mr. Chesterton is almost always "gay" and humorous even at his darkest. Speaking of gay I am reminded of Franz Kafka for a number of reasons. Franz Kafka, apparently, loved the writings of Mr. Chesterton. Kafka once remarked that Chesterton was so "gay" it was almost as if he had discovered God. "The Man Who Was Thursday" should be regarded as Kafka's Rescue. Mr. Chesterton sees all of the things Mr. Kafka does but he sees both more and less. Mr. Chesterton was, of course, an aesthete. That is to say he was a man who subscribed to Theophile Gautier's idea : art for art's sake. This was a stance that Mr. Chesterton carefully concealed from himself but we can see it in his endless poetical discriptions of landscape, the physical features of characters, the psychological revelation ( "analysis" is a cold word) of characters. The Great King Chesterton was a complicated man and he gave us a subtly complicated tale. Five Stars. I would prefer seven

This piece of music either creeps up on you out of nowhere - like a tarantula imitating a meteor streaking out of outerspace - or it "conveys" itself to you like a waiter extending to you a glass of dark wine - or a film that seeks to shock you with an unexpected silence and a pagan cry. You must be the judge. But if you are faint hearted - quick to flee sexuality in all of its forms - you should go nowhere near this piece. And and if you are bold and brazen and hot for simplistic outrages you should probably bury your head in the sand. This work is for mature listeners only. By "mature" I mean a listener who is willing to cast to the side - as if she or he is flinging to the wind cherry blossoms in autumn - all grotesque fundamentalisms of ANY KIND. The music begins with a luminous voice slowly moving out of darkness. The voice wanders around in the dark over a deep abyss but I do not sense that the abyss is strong enough to terrify that wondrous voice. And the full piece, as it develops, may be best called "The Complicated Tales Of Incandescent Bliss". This piece of music is hideously subversive. I say that with a tongue in my cheek and a fart in my belly. The mere "subversive" is hideously dull. For a century now we have lived with a million, billion artists who wished - desperately wishing to canonize their egos - to "subvert" things. "Bitter Love" is horribly subversive. It is horribly subversive because it does not aim to be "subversive". Its power comes from a source that is not easily described. I am not a witch, but I would like to pretend that I am a witch gazing with my dark-gold eyes into a blasphemously kitsch crystal ball. I would say, gazing into profound fires, that I see a century of struggling, sick, twisted artists striving to catch up to "Bitter Love". It is dark without that pretentious quality that defines the run-of-the-mill Goth. It is bright without protestatiing itself before the blasphemously sentimetality of movies like "The Sound of Music". It plays havoc with our senses without toadying up to the most stupid features of the avant-guard. "Bitter Love" will shock you even while it consoles you.

Mr. Giger did the cover for Emerson, Lake and Palmer's great albumn "Brain Salad Surgery" and that central image of a kind of "Lilith of the future" is both an emblem and a counter-emblem of his whole work. One also thinks of the great creature from the movie "Alien" blasphemously beautiful in all of its dehumanized phallic grandeur. "H.R. Giger's Necronomicon" could be regarded as his Sistine Chapel, the focus of all his work, its origin and its summation. For many years now I have felt that Mr. Giger's work is full of both mediocrity and genius. In some odd way it is an exact fusion of the two. (...)I look at all of those devils and distances of depravity and I am filled with a kind of calm. His work comforts me - actually - in the way that the work of Norman Rockwell comforts and assures so many others. Why not? Edgar Allan Poe was also an absurd blend of mediocrity and genius. As a technician Mr. Giger is merely competent. But the skulls the heads and the industry add up to a world mildly beautiful, mildly ugly but stimulating as a kind of Picasso's less significant rebellious cousin. Definitely worth the look.

The story goes like this. Olivier Messiaen - mystic, troubadour, lover - was minding his business one day, during World War 2, when the Nazis suddenly picked him up and threw him in a concentration camp. The world about Olivier was beset with darkness. Jews were being murdered, land was being stolen, lives were being cut to ribbons and blown to the wind and a great many decent, intelligent people were seriously worried that all of the good things in humanity and earth were going to be permanently destroyed. In this situation utter despair, imbecilic rage, or cold apathy were understandable responses. But not for that great frenchman Olivier Messiaen. Right in the middle of the citadel of darkness, using only a few instruments that came to hand, he composed the Quartet For The End of Time. And by doing so he destroyed the spirit of Naziism, vindicated humanity, and spoke a strange deep word to his God. The music is full of an alien loveliness. Its beauty is not burgeois. It is free and even terrifying. It wrestles with the powers of murder and despair and overcomes them in a way that is hard to describe. On one level the music almost ignores evil. It floats free from it and like a shaft of emerald fire it burns through cruel time into the heart of a calm but taut eternity. On another level the music could very well be called "The Transmutation of Unease". Pure distress is not abolished but siezed by a calm but powerful hand and pulled into a realm where it becomes something aureate. All of Olivier's music is a heroic endeavour but in a certain sense it begins with the Quartet. Stravinsky called Olivier's music "the slag heap of art" but Stravinsky did have his limits. Messiaen permanently takes us in all of his music to a place where the voices of birds are as terrifying as angels in a light that destroys evil by it transmutation.

Rosemary Haughton's profound gaze into the incredibly strange world of Catholicism is utterly beautiful. There are no wiser or more interesting books on this particular religion written in the twentieth century. Its supreme power comes from a radical negation on her part and a radical acceptance. What does she negate? What does she reject? A world of trash piety and sentimentality that twists the soul, corrupts cognition, constricts the emotions, tames art, and straightjackets our vital powers. She does not adore the plaster saints. She is immaculate. She is no handmaiden of power with all of its seductions, no servant of Christianity as an ideology with all of its blasphemous mediocrity. But what does she accept? In a word - the whole human and non-human cosmos. There is not only nothing human that is alien to Ms. Haughton there is nothing non-human as well. She is truly Catholic in all senses of the word "Catholic" in her attempt to "love everything until everything is transformed into the kingdom of God" as she describes the true Catholic enterprise. Ms. Haughton is a true psychologist in the best sense of the term - she is a student of the human soul which ultimately means she is a student of the dangerous but necessary art of getting to know people. She has gotten to know a grand and slight crazy cast of characters stretching from the problematical dawn of Christian history through centuries of divine folly and human madness up to the near present. That sublime ego-ist Augustine is lavished more understanding than any other writer has ever achieved along side of figures such as Baron Von Hugel- the last sane man on earth; Heloise and Abelard - bruised in their tragic and tender glory; the real Maria Von Trapp (not the sentimental beauty from the movie "The Sound Of Music"); and a host of political and artistic rebels who cut through doors of iron, shattered chains, and took the kingdom of heaven by force. For Ms. Haughton, divine love is no pale thing - impotent, strict, and unearthly. For her it is a cosmic adventure with all of the perils and hardships implied. It is the pact and the tension between mortals and immortals, humans and real elves, humans and goblins, earth and sky, and all of reality with its own difficult self. Ms. Haughton stresses that Catholicism itself in its own dark vitals is an arduous quest for supreme wholeness, balance, and all of the dark consequences of both the quest and the wholeness achieved. Love, for Ms. Haughton, has definitely pitched His tent in excrement. Ms. Haughton firmly believes that Catholicism is not restricted to Catholicism or even Christianity. It is a completely human and divine enterprise that official Christianity - particularly in its Roman form - often subverts, corrupts, or destroys. Her fine book is especially important for people who may be interested in religion (Catholicism particularly) but utterly reject fundamentalism and are also discontent with the banalities, cheap sentiment, and the sheer theological stupidity of at least some forms of liberal religion. Ms. Haughton believes in the reality of faery tales but they are not the debased and safe faery tales so popularized by Disney. She tells us the truth - that we are all, like it or not, on a quest for the Holy Grail. No better book then "The Catholic Thing" by Rosemary Haughton could serve us on our way.

Michael Swanwick asserts forcefully that Gene Wolfe is the greatest living writer in the English language. I agree - and who could not after reading Wolfe's major work of the 1980's, the four volume "Book of the New Sun". That work contained an almost oriental richness of the imagination that enchanted and disturbed all of the way to the enigmatic conclusion. With the publication of "The Knight" the grand master turns his gentle, intelligent and always formiddable powers to the field of epic fantasy - a form created by William Morris and continuing with such major practitioners as J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Patricia A. McKillip. I find this work to be one of the most pale and un-exciting in Wolfe's illustrious career, and I say that as a long devotee of both Gene Wolfe and epic fantasy. The world Mister Wolfe summons up is not only less real, less sensuous, less immediate than the worlds of Tolkien, Donaldson, and McKillip, it is, to be frank, less real than the many worlds made popular (often in best sellers)in the "trash fantasys" today. Able of the High Heart - a fine character - moves through landscapes that evaporate constantly, leaving no taste, or excitement in the reader's mind. Able's interactions with other characters can contain interest and even pathos such as in his strange and marvellous relationship with Bold Berthold. But no character stands forth as emblematic of the fantasy in a way that is unforgettable. The book simply has little mystique and mystique is vital for all great art. This is surprizing considering Mister Wolfe's not inconsiderable talents at pure magic. His take on the elves is laudable in terms of effort but I find the creatures to be largely dull. Rarely do they enchant. Hardly ever as I read the book did I feel I was in contact with an alien personality - something truly other to humanity, frightening in its otherness and obsessively fascinating. I give the book four stars because it is still an important work of fiction. Mister Wolfe remains one of the most subtle writers not only in fantasy or science fiction, but, also in literature at large. His fine psychological acuity is at play in Able's resolute but vulnerable quest for manhood, occasional amorality in the presence of inferiors, and strange almost boyish faithfulness to Disiri, the Queen of the Moss Aelf. Disiri herself is a complicated critter whose dominion over Able is utterly unbenign - as nature itself is unbenign. In a sense she has raped his soul and his response to her is at least vaguely familiar to the Stockholm syndrome. But, he was a boy. I look forward to the conclusion of "The Wizard Knight" with "The Wizard". And I wish Mister Wolfe all the best. His importance to literature and to readers personally is like that of wind that blows from a realm of wisdom where long thoughts are taken, counsels spoken, and deeds resolved.

This fine little dagger of a book should be feared even at the mere mention of its name. Lesser writers throw out hints that horrors are lurking but often fail to deliver - like those many movie trailers that are better than the movie. Veteran readers possess this cynical knowledge. But Mr. VanderMeer is all Bosch with no bosh. The character of Shadrach is like a highland scot and the ruin he seeks to inflict on the Gnostic demiurge-like Quinn shows real psychological insight on Mr. VanderMeer's part. Despair at the harm inflicted on his beloved fills Shadrach with a real moral fury somewhat similar to what the biblical Samson went through before he tore down the temple of the Philistines. The archons who rule the underworld show a demonically boyish good pleasure at collecting people's body parts (I will say no more)that ultimately has no rational basis. The whole apparatus of "collection" in all of its complexity is ultimately founded on absolutely nothing. That also shows Mr. VanderMeer's psychological acuity and does good credit to his interest in surrealism - that wilted stinky rose that enchants as it even repels. I am reminded that in "Castle of Days" Gene Wolfe says that science fiction is really just "chrome-plated" fantasy. I would argue that Mr. VanderMeer is essentially a religious writer but is there any other God presiding over his moral universe other that a demi-urgic Quinn? I must agree with others that Mr. VanderMeer's language is not great. It has a definite power of enchantment in it but he has yet to say something as good or sweeping as "A rose is a rose by any other name" or "Juliet is the sun." I cannot agree with others who feel that the characters are two-dimensional but I would strongly advise Mr. VanderMeer to re-read the great dramatists like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Moliere, and others; and to attend as many plays as possible. Mr. VanderMeer's characters have yet to stand up off the page and stride about as gods or devils breathing fire and scraping the stars. But, of course, Venniss itself is a character, and in it, VanderMeer develops a tradition in fantasy and science fiction in all of its strength. I give the book four stars and lay odds that Mr. VanderMeer is one to watch. He is one of America's most important writers along side of Gene Wolfe, Stephen R. Donaldson, Patricia A. McKillip, and Cormac MacArthy. We will see where he goes in the future. Buy "Venniss Underground"read it, take many cigarette breaks (you'll need them!) and then sip a fine wine after-wards while the wild world of phantasmgoria fills your soul with dread, awe, and laughter at the greatness of a human imagination.