OK, can we have good writing AND continuity now, please?

(West Wing season six spoilers here, for readers in the UK and elsewhere)

Like many people, I found the first couple of West Wing episodes of this season really overwrought, overly downbeat, and dramatically dull. This is, I notice, a general characteristic of John Wells's shows -- ER has always tended toward extreme pathos, and I can't even watch Third Watch because just from watching the NBC promos for that show it seems like they kill off a major character every third episode. ("This week, on a Third Watch you'll never forget, one of these treasured characters will breathe their last breath...join us as we all say goodbye, at ten o'clock, after an all-new Vegas in which lots of people gamble and have sex.")

But the third and fourth episodes of The West Wing got back into something of a groove, approaching the kind of thing Aaron Sorkin used to do: lots of fairly fast storytelling, with complex dialogue, occasional funny lines, and a sense that this "public service" thing doesn't completely suck. There was a pretty funny scene the other night when, as CJ is just starting her first day as White House Chief of Staff (we'll say nothing of the awful "super-dramatic heart attack" Leo McGarry suffered), Toby hands in his letter of resignation. It's early enough in the episode that we think he just might be annoyed over not getting the job himself. And then Josh hands in his letter of resignation, and we still think it might be real. But then President Bartlet enters and tells CJ he's resigning too, and everyone cracks up. It was a nice moment, the kind that Sorkin used to do really well and that's been in short supply since he left. I'd say that the last two episodes have been roughly as good as the average episode in seasons three or four (but still not as good as the first two years, when Sorkin was really at the top of his game on this show).

But now, a geeky continuity complaint. In an episode last year that purported to be a PBS documentary of "A Day in the Life of the White House Press Secretary" made after the Bartlet Administration left office, the narrator says something to the effect that "To this day, CJ Cregg is the only woman to serve as Press Secretary for an entire Administration." That's nice, except that the writers have now made CJ White House Chief of Staff, which directly contradicts what was established in that "pseudo-documentary" episode. I remember thinking, at the time, that making a statement like that might be too limiting for the writers in the future, but they appear to have solved this problem by completely ignoring what they did last year. Oops.

Is there a camphor tree anywhere around here???

It seems that Disney/Miramax/Satan Inc. has set another release date for the next round of Studio Ghibli films on DVD: February 22, 2005. The titles to be released are Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, Porco Rosso, and The Cat Returns. Readers with long memories may note that The Cat Returns was not originally intended for release with these films; My Neighbor Totoro was. Oh well. I'm sure Totoro will get a DVD release at some point, and I've never seen The Cat Returns, so I'll take a movie I haven't seen at all and live with my crappy VHS of Totoro for a while.

But not forever. I'm watching you, Disney. Just cause Eisner's leaving doesn't get you turkeys off the hook.

(Dammit, where's Song of the South, anyway?!)

The sweater-vest, and other abominations against Man.

For some reason I'm seeing some stuff about sweaters around lately. Sweaters are pretty much essential in Buffalo from late October until, say, early March (and often even later), so I own more than a few.

First I saw this page, in which some guy decides to model some of the ugliest sweaters he owns, complete with snarky commentary on said sweaters. It's a pretty funny thing, except for one small detail: I actually like some of these sweaters. A few of them I'd possibly consider buying if I saw them on the clearance rack at JCPenney. Now, I really do think that some of these are horrible -- particularly the red-and-blue number on the third page that looks to me like an extreme closeup of the invaders in "Space Invaders" -- but a few of them I genuinely like. (Although my own preference in sweaters tends toward solid colors, I do like the occasional "pattern".)

I will also note that I don't think this guy looks good in sweaters to begin with. He seems to pull them all down to their maximum length, and they all seem to conform to his body contour a little too readily. The guy isn't fat, by any means -- I'm fat, so I ought to know -- but I believe that sweaters should, well, blouse a bit. Form-fitting sweaters only work if you're a woman, and this guy ain't no woman.

(Oh, and at one point he jokes that one of his sweaters is "Wagner's Ring Cycle on spin cycle". I don't get the joke.)

I don't know what this says about my fashion sense (I'm sure Matt will soon comment), but then, I don't recall ever being known for my fashion sense, at any point in my life. Go figure. (I don't recall where I saw this linked first, so I can't offer credit yet.)

Also, QuirkyChick comments on sweaters, and her inability to find one she likes these days. Ah well. I haven't looked for sweaters in a long time, so I don't know what's out there.

(BTW, QuirkyChick's blog has this really cool thing where you can completely change the skin of the blog. Check that out -- it's neat.)

Must....clap....now!

Alex Ross has a nifty post about good timing on the part of folks applauding a classical music performance. Alex's post puts me in mind of a radio recording I once had, taped from a live performance, of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust. After a bone-rattlingly electric performance of the "Racoczy March", one lone soul in the audience suddenly gave a single, exuberant clap of his hands. (If you wonder how a single clap could sound exuberant, this one did.) Of course, the rest of the audience was well aware that the Racoczy March doesn't come anywhere near a point when you'd applaud, but that didn't bother this guy. I imagine his cheeks reddened nicely, though.

And I also am reminded of one of the most endearing traditions in classical music: at the Vienna Philharmonic's annual New Year's Day concert, the second of the three encore numbers is always that most famous of Strauss waltzes, On the Beautiful Blue Danube. The work opens with a tremolo in the violins, played pianissimo, and the audience at that concert always erupts in applause at the first hearing of that tremolo. At this, the conductor turns and gives the audience his wishes for a happy New Year, and then he and the VPO return to the work of performing On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

Movies? Those soundtracks have movies too? Wow!

In comments to this post, Matt asks how many film scores I own that are to films that I have never seen. The answer is...

...[runs off to count the CDs]...

Forty-two. That's out of around 200 or so film music CDs. This doesn't include compilation discs that also include music from films I haven't seen, however.

I have never believed that one must see the film in order to appreciate a filmscore, although clearly if one wants to judge the composer's dramatic choices, then one must see the film. But my cardinal rule has always been this: Good film music must be good music first, and good music, by definition, can stand alone.

A lot of classical music lovers hold that film music is inferior because of certain formal limitations inherent in composing music that is intended for a medium other than concert performance, but this strikes me as one of those "It's a feature, not a bug" kinds of things. Since I know that I cannot have any reasonable expectation of a sonata-allegro type of movement in a filmscore, I don't bother looking for it. (And besides, I've never held that form was the defining characteristic of great music, in the first place.)

An Yglesias Two-fer

Matthew Yglesias has a couple of interesting things to say:

On the new Attorney General:

That there's a war on doesn't mean the game suddenly has no rules and the president can just do whatever. A man with no respect for the law has no business as Attorney-General.

On Yasser Arafat:

He didn't single-handedly transform the cause of Palestinian nationalism from a minor element of a regional struggle between Israel and its neighbors into a movement of massive global significance, but he came a lot closer to doing it single-handedly than one would think possible. At the same time, it's become clear to me and many other observers over the past several years that after Oslo, Arafat ill-served the movement he had done so much to create. He brought his people neither good government, liberation from occupation, nor peace. Instead, he himself and his taste for power and corruption became a major obstacle to Palestinian aspirations.

I have never, for the life of me, been able to figure out where I stand on the whole Israel vs. Palestine thing. This whole issue, with all of its corollary points of contention and violence, seems to me to be as canonical example of the old adage "A pox on both their houses" as I can think of.

As for Arafat, I think he was a bad man who came pretty close to getting something very good done...and then screwed it up completely, which is probably even worse than just being a consistently very bad man.

Veterans

"The Green Fields of France" by Eric Bogle

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile 'neath the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can't help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

From this grateful American, thanks to all the men and women who have served this country in wartime and in peacetime.

Webby stuff....

Hmmmm. It's often bugged me since I switched to Mozilla that it doesn't show the text for my images I encode using the ALT tag when I mouse over the pictures, but in the course of reading this MeFi thread, I learn that it's not supposed to, because that's not what ALT tags are for. I should have been using TITLE tags. Which means that this blog is not compliant with standards. I feel like shooting myself -- or getting a beer. I'm leaning toward the beer.

BTW, can anyone tell me what the difference is between Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox? Am I using the wrong thing, in using the former? Especially since there's a new version of the latter out right now?

Friday Tuesday Ten

I've seen this "Friday Ten" thing around a bit, in which you shuffle the tracks in your iPod or your music player on the computer and then list the first ten, for some reason. I've tried it a couple of times, but when you listen to a lot of classical and film music, it doesn't really have the desired effect. Here's my latest attempt at the thing:

1. "Klingon Battle" from Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Jerry Goldsmith)
2. "The Council of Elrond" from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by Howard Shore
3. "Funeral Dance" from Brigadoon
4. "The Lightsaber/The Ewok Battle" from Return of the Jedi (John Williams -- 1997 Special Edition)
5. "Levon" (Elton John)
6. "One For My Baby (and One More for the Road)" (Frank Sinatra)
7. "The Armour" from Legend (Jerry Goldsmith)
8. "Journey to Blofeld's Hideaway" from On Her Majesty's Secret Service (John Barry)
9. "Susan and Doug" from The Towering Inferno (John Williams)
10. "Den and the Queen" from Heavy Metal (Elmer Bernstein)

The effect kind of suffers, I think.

Dean for DNC! YEEAARRRGHHH!

Howard Dean wasn't my horse for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he did a damned lot of good in terms of organizing and just plain showing people that it's OK to act like, you know, a Democrat once in a while. Now there's a possibility he may become Chair of the Democratic National Committee.

I endorse this idea, whole-heartedly.

Morat and Ezra at Pandagon outline why this would be a good thing. It's a cool idea, a sort of "shot in the arm" that the Democrats need right now. The political equivalent of smelling salts, if you will.

There's no anger like British anger!

I have nothing to post today (and besides, I have some other writing to do), but I saw this on Dave Thomas's LiveJournal and I figured I'd quote it in its entirety, since it (a) is only one sentence long and (b) expresses perfectly the way I feel nearly each and every day, right around 6:00 am:

Some days I wish the morning was a tangible living thing, so I could hack it to bloody, twitching death with an axe and go back to bed.

How true that is!

I wish George R. R. Martin was a Republican.

This is why.

Even I don't think it's the end of the world, George. Pick up that pen!

Palpatine for Senate in 2006!

Wow, I seem to be in danger of becoming an actual political blogger. This scares me, because what I have in determination to help Democrats win in the future is balanced by my lack of policy knowledge and insight into such matters. So I suspect that like anything else, I'll wax and wane on the politics, and right now I'm waxing.

So anyway, time for a bit of Star Wars stuff. Back in 2000, Space.com hosted a series of articles called "The Phantom Heresies" that delved first into The Phantom Menace and later into Star Wars in a more general manner. I just discovered the other day that these articles are still available, and they still make for interesting reading, even if some plot conjectures have since turned out to not be the case. The most interesting article, to me, is Star Wars as Ritual Theater.

Open Letter to people who write Open Letters

There's an Open Letter to the Democratic Party that's proving pretty popular in right-leaning Blogistan; purporting to be a stern rebuke of everywhere the Democrats went wrong, it's actually more of the same we've seen many times before. One imagines a political Henry Higgins singing in frustration, "Why can't a Democrat be more like a Republican?"

Anyway, a pretty good response to the bullet points of this "Open Letter" can be found in the comments to this DPS post. I find particularly interesting that every linking of this piece I've seen thus far congratulates the writer on point #6 (a variant on "the Left hates Bush too much"), without any attention at all to the vast brownfields of hateful rhetoric that the Right has been firing at the Left for years. "How dare you hate our guy!" coming from folks who have hated our guys for a very long time seems less like insight to me, and more like chutzpah.

Despite what the writer says, I very much doubt that there's any way that a Democrat could have had her vote.

I also found interesting the fact that the "Open Letter" is in the form of a blog post, but it's apparently the only post that exists on that blog. So someone has used Blogger to get a single essay out there, for free. Interesting use of the idea, I must admit.

It can be done....

For any Democrats wondering if the party can possibly come back to majority status in the next four years, it's clear that it will be an uphill battle. But consider the state of affairs for the Republicans in 1976:

Carter: 297 electoral votes
Ford: 240 electoral votes
Senate: 61 Democrats, 38 Republicans, 1 Independent
House of Representatives: 292 Democrats, 143 Republicans

The Republicans lost a very close Presidential election, but in Congress they faced withering minority status including a cloture-proof minority in the Senate. Four years later they won a Presidential election in a landslide, made substantial gains in the House, and took the Senate outright.

Obviously this isn't to imply a historical analogy which can reasonably be expected to repeat itself at this point, but it does illustrate that stranger things have happened, and will happen again.

(Data via InfoPlease.

Things I've Never Seen Before

I didn't watch much of yesterday's football contest between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Shitty Bills, but I did catch the last four minutes and quite a few highlights on the teevee. I saw something I swear has never happened before: Drew Bledsoe, whose mobility has in the past been compared unfavorably to that of Michelangelo's David, actually spun to avoid a pass-rusher and then took off with the ball, picking up something like 18 yards.

Musta been something in the water.

The ShiBills won the game, 22-17, and from what I've heard, it wasn't even that close. The ShiBills gave Willis McGahee thirty-seven carries, which was supremely refreshing to me after all those close games they lost over the last few years in which they'd run the ball, maybe, twenty or twenty-five times, tops. Bledsoe completed over fifty percent of his passes, he threw zero interceptions, and he wasn't sacked. Let me say that again: Bledsoe wasn't sacked, and he wasn't sacked for the second consecutive game. Wow.

Of course, this was a home game, but it was still against a good team, and the team's two wins in a row means that they are halfway to no longer being dubbed the Shitty Bills, or ShiBills for short, in this space. All they have to do is beat the New England Stupid Patriots on Sunday night, at Foxboro...yeah, that will happen. Right.

And like any good Bills fan I am able to find a dark lining to the silver cloud of yesterday. All through the late 1990s, the Bills organization would enter the year with an inadequate offensive line; but the line would start to produce fairly competently sometime in the middle or the latter part of the year, and the Bills would take this to mean that the O-line was doing fine, and thus bring in no one to upgrade the personnel in the off-season. I'm afraid the Bills may fall into this trap again. The team really really really needs to bring in at least one quality O-lineman for next year.

And finally, there was the incredibly stupid call to blitz the Jets near the end of the game on third-and-eight. Why you blitz in that situation is beyond me, especially since Jets QB Quincy Carter threw a 51-yard touchdown pass to Santana Moss. That made the game closer than it should have been. Ick. The blitz is the most over-used weapon in the football arsenal.

That's all for this week. I didn't pay much attention to football yesterday, except that I did watch a bit of the StuPats visiting the Rams. Man, is Mike Martz a bad coach. Wow.

Bartlet-Picard in 2008!

Two quotes from TV shows are on my mind today, signaling what's next for America's hopeless downtrodden Democratic party. The first is from The West Wing, in which President Bartlet tends to signify that an issue is done with, settled, and it's time to move on with a curt "What's next!" And the second comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation: in the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint", with things looking kind-of-dire since an omnipotent space alien named Q is threatening to destroy humanity or some such thing, Captain Picard says that he will do what he would have done if Q didn't even exist. Then he adds this: "If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are."

So first, Democrats need to look at what happened this year, and then say, "What's next!". And that means, among other things, that we need to stop the kvetching about why John Kerry lost, because there is no single reason. Terrorism is a part of it; so are "moral values"; so was the economy; so was the weird "comfort factor" that has always baffled me. (More than a few people I've actually spoken to at work and elsewhere admit to being more simpatico with Kerry than with Bush on the issues, but voted for Bush anyway because there was just something about Kerry they didn't like. Well, you can't really fight that, at least, not at first.) The fact is that he simply lost.

I might quote another Star Trek TNG episode here. In one episode, Data loses a game of intellectual skill to an opponent he most definitely should have wiped the floor with, and Data then goes into a tailspin as he tries to analyze just why his amazing positronic brain failed him. This goes on until Picard, clearly impatient with Data's sudden indecision, snaps at him thusly: "It is possible to do everything correctly and still lose. That is life."

Now, yes, there are mistakes that Kerry made here and there, and there are things he might have done differently, but I genuinely don't think any of them add up to a concrete reason why he lost. It still boils down to more people deciding they wanted the other guy at the helm, and it's over. Kerry ran, and he lost. What's next!

Well, to figure that out, we need to look closer at the results. Not at who won and who lost, and not at the polling data as to why, but at the actual results. Democrat after Democrat after Democrat lost this year, but interestingly, few of them lost in blowouts. This was an election of many, many close elections; it was not any kind of "massive repudiation of Liberalism", no matter how the Republicans might want to wish it was. Last time out, George W. Bush won the Presidency with one more electoral vote than he needed to do so; this time, he did it with sixteen more. This was no Reagan-crushing-Carter or Bush-demolishing-Dukakis election. The Democrats came close, a whole lot of times. Yeah, being close is still being the loser, but I'd rather be the 1990 Buffalo Bills and lose the Super Bowl by a single point than be the 1989 Denver Broncos and lose the Super Bowl by 45 points.

What does that mean, then? Well, to me it means that a lot of the country is at least receptive to Democratic ideas. None of it is a "done deal". And that means that it's time for Democrats to move on...to 2006, and the mid-term elections. And while Democratic eyes will be on winning back seats in the House and Senate, I think that the 2006 midterms need to be viewed in terms of Democratic infrastructure, and that means upping the efforts at the state level: Governorships and state legislatures.

Kevin Drum had a good post about this the other day. The "next generation" of Democratic candidates at the national level are going to come from the state level, just as the Republicans started their road to their current dominance at the state level two and three decades ago. Consider: newly elected US Senator Barack Obama rose from the Illinois legislature, as did newly elected Congressman from Buffalo Brian Higgins (at least, apparently elected -- the race is sitll in dispute). I believe this needs to be a major focus of Democratic effort. Increased comfort with Democrats in charge at the state level will eventually translate to increased comfort with Democrats in charge at national levels, and increased numbers of Democratic officeholders at the state level will yield more Democratic candidates for national office. Maybe not in 2006, maybe not even in 2008, but sometime. The Democrats need to be patient here, but a real road through the current morass exists.

Another reason to concentrate on state legislatures is sheer self-preservation: if Democrats want to avoid being gerrymandered out of yet more Congressional seats after the 2010 census, they have to start the work of taking state legislatures now, so that Democrats and not Republicans are in control of as many redistricting processes after 2010. (Full disclosure here: if I had my way, every state would use a bipartisan, or nonpartisan, commission to handle post-census redistricting. I don't think that Democrats or Republicans can really be trusted to not gerrymander the other. But until that happens, I believe that the Democrats should operate in the world that exists, not the world we wished existed.)

We tried to slay that dragon that is George W. Bush, and we failed. That doesn't mean that there aren't lots of little dragons waiting to be taken on in the next set of elections.

"A troupe of strolling players are we...."

Normally I don't post after the Image of the Week, but I've just learned that one of my favorite stars from the great era of Hollywood musicals, Howard Keel, has died.



Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is one of my very favorite movies to this day, and it's in large part due to Keel's gravitas and strength in the lead role as Adam Pontipee. I also loved him in Kiss Me, Kate and other films. But believe it or not, my first exposure to Keel was when he played Clayton Farlow on Dallas. (I was quite the Dallas fan when I was young.)

When you're in love, when you're in love
There is no way on earth to hide it;
When you're in love, really in love
You simply let your heart decide it.

How can you tell, what's in its spell
How can you tell, until you've tried it?
Wait for that kiss you're certain of
And let your heart decide when you're in love.

Farewell, Howard Keel.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The scene of the assassination of President William McKinley, September 6, 1901 in Buffalo, NY.

I read somewhere recently that Bush political adviser Karl Rove views the current Administration as a political analogue of the McKinley Administration. I don't know how accurate this is (either that Rove thinks this way or, if he does, the viability of the historical analogy), but it gives me occasion to point out one of the darkest moments in Buffalo's history. President McKinley was in Buffalo, visiting the Pan American Exposition of 1901, when he was shot by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. McKinley died eight days later, and his young Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, assumed the office of President.

What's interesting is that in Buffalo, the PanAm Expo of 1901 is still held as one of the city's greatest historical moments, even in spite of the fact that a President of the United States was assassinated there. Buffalo actually has a pretty interesting Presidential history: two Presidents (Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland) came from here, and another (McKinley) came here and never left alive. I find Cleveland's example particularly interesting, given our focus on "qualifications" whenever we have an election these days. I recall the skepticism that George W. Bush could possibly be qualified for the Presidency after just six years as Governor of Texas. But after serving as Sheriff of Erie County for a number of years, Cleveland was elected Mayor of Buffalo in 1882; just a year later he was elected Governor of New York; and just two years after that he was elected to the first of his two (non-consecutive) terms as President of the United States. Wow. Talk about the "fast track".

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

A Google search of "Cthulhu Salad" turned up this rant: Emeril vs. Cthulhu.

OK then. I always liked Emeril's show, back when I had the Food Network, and I generally had good luck when I'd try one of his recipes. But then, I'm pretty much of an "amateur" foodie only, so I'm probably not one whose word is terribly credible here.