IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Kleinhan's Music Hall, Buffalo, NY



Kleinhans Music Hall is the home of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Kleinhans is considered one of the finest concert halls in the country, with remarkable acoustics. The reflecting pool seen here was not present for many years, but was recently restored. The main concert hall is the larger section of the building, the lefthand portion of this picture; the smaller section to the right is the Mary Seaton Room where chamber music concerts are held. The current Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic is JoAnn Faletta; previous Music Directors include Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Semyon Bychkov.

(The picture links to an organization dedicated to beautifying the Buffalo neighborhood in which Kleinhans resides.)

The University at Buffalo hosted former President Bill Clinton yesterday. His speech can be heard here, courtesy WBFO, Buffalo's NPR station.

Poetical Excursion #1:

"Blow, Bugle, Blow"
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.


The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.


(How perfectly Tennyson uses alliterative effects and rhyming to suggest the echoing of a bugle call. More than that, his language implies things passing into memory -- repetitions of the word "dying", reference to "long light" which suggests sunset, and elegant phrasing implying distance: "farther going", "faintly blowing". The effect is masterful. This is a poem that begs to be read aloud. If pressed to name a favorite poet, I will generally name either Whitman or Tennyson -- depending on which I've read more recently.)

A funny article on the unwritten rules of sports conduct can be found here. Funny stuff, precisely because it is so accurate.

It's a good month for film score collectors. Not only will John Williams's score CD for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrive in stores on April 23, but one week earlier two of what have been the most eagerly sought-after scores of recent memory arrive. They are Alan Silvestri's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Bruce Broughton's The Rescuers Down Under. Wonderful news, on all three releases. I have already heard enough positive buzz on the new Star Wars score that I am almost as excited about it as I am the film itself.

Also, there is a new column on film music on AICN, written by Dan Goldwasser (the gent behind Soundtrack.net). This is to be a biweekly feature, although in the past regular features on AICN have turned out to not be so regular.

Finally, I have been listening to Miklos Rozsa's remarkable score to King of Kings for a little more than a week now (since it was delivered two days before Easter, a feat of timing that had me wondering if Divinity was involved). I'm not the biggest fan of those large-scale Biblical epics of the 50s and 60s, but they sported some of the most amazing film music ever created -- witness Ben Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and even The Ten Commandments (far from my favorite film). Rozsa was a towering genius, quite possibly the greatest composer of film music of all time, and King of Kings is first-rate Rozsa.

My intention is to keep my musings on politics and world affairs out of this place as much as humanly possible. That said, I've added a link to another blog -- the USS Clueless -- that is very well written and contains a lot of interesting thought about the current world situation. (This is not a blanket endorsement of all of his content, though. I don't agree with everything he says, but in keeping with my above-stated dictim I shall not explore my differences.)

It is now official: ABC has demonstrated its ongoing commitment to mediocrity and the pursuit of crap by cancelling its finest show, Once and Again. The last episode is next week, which will free up a timeslot for that Supreme Court show with -- gasp -- Sally Field.

And ABC also decided that it wasn't getting good enough ratings off the Bond films on Saturday nights, so they bagged that idea as well. This now means that, aside from NYPDBlue and (for half the year) Monday Night Football, there is no reason to tune into ABC. (Well, I hear good things about Alias, which I haven't watched due to my soon-to-be-completed commitment to The X-Files -- which, by the way, had a really fun and quirky episode last night with Burt Reynolds as....well, this one was so odd that I'm not sure who or what his character was.)

Just finished: Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book PLaces, and Book Culture by Nicholas A. Basbanes. This is the follow-up to Basbanes's earlier book about book collecting, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books which has become something of a classic work about the phenomenon of book collecting and the lengths to which people will go to fuel their passion. In Patience and Fortitude, the focus moves from the "gentle madness" that formed the theme of the earlier volume to a more general overview of the entire culture that has evolved around the book world.


Basbanes first takes us on a tour of some of the oldest libraries in the world, some of which are still functioning in their original locations and serving the same purpose. He gives us a fine sense of what the libraries of the world used to be like, and how the lack of artifical lighting shaped the day led by the monks who worked in those libraries to create the very books that are now the core of the most valuable collections in the world. From there Basbanes gives a few more profiles of book collectors, the most notable being the Italian writer and semiotician Umberto Eco. The portraits of the ancient libraries and the collectors of today are fascinating; Basbanes has a gift for pictorial detail in his writing.


The best part of the book, though, comes when Basbanes delves into the "infrastructure" of the book world: booksellers and the great libraries of today. He profiles a number of prominent booksellers, many of whom have tracked down very rare volumes at the behest of private collectors and bought entire collections en bloc. In so doing, Basbanes also notes with sadness the passing of what was perhaps the Golden Age of bookselling, when the large number of active booksellers active in New York City at midcentury have dwindled down to a precious few. Admirably, Basbanes does not merely blame this phenomenon on the rise of "supergiant" stores like Borders and Barnes&Noble; in fact, to do so would be fallacious since the type of customer served by these kinds of stores are not entirely the same as those served by the legendary booksellers of the past.


The next section of the book deals with the libraries of today. Here Basbanes's theme begins to unfold: the viability of books in a digital age, and the problems faced by libraries as they are confronted with increasing costs for materials, space considerations for storage, how to deal with materials that are seldom (or in some cases never) used, and a sadly increasing view of libraries as luxuries that are not essential to the life of a vibrant community. Most telling is the chapter on the newly-built San Francisco Public Library, opened in 1996 with insufficient room to shelve the entire collection as it existed at that point. Librarians there tell of patrons walking into the new building and asking, "Where are the books?", and stories are circulated -- and later confirmed -- of truckloads of books taken quietly from the collection and put in the landfill. Issues like these are far from resolved, but Basbanes shows how a number of other facilities have attempted to avoid these pitfalls and retain their sense of cultural importance.


"Content" has become a buzzword as the World Wide Web has gained prominence; this book by Nicholas Basbanes reminds us, as his earlier volume did, that the physical artifact of the book is important in itself. Patience and Fortitude is highly recommended.


(The title refers to the unofficial names given to the two marble lions that guard the main entrance of the New York Public Library.)

It's always nice when the mainstream book review outlets decide to take a look at SF and Fantasy, two genres that are usually ignored completely. (It hardly helped when Oprah Winfrey, supposedly a lover of books, announced on her show that SF was not welcome in her Book Club, and it's irritating especially to see writers like Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon regularly reviewed in newspapers, but not Gene Wolfe, Vernor Vinge, or many other SF luminaries.) The Washington Post has done a section on SF and Fantasy this week, with a number of articles and reviews.

Like every other aspiring writer, I own several "how-to" books about writing. Some are good for mechanical advice on the process itself; others are good for inspirational purposes (writing is lonely, and kindred spirits are hard to find except in print); and still others are good for placing writing in one's life. Here are a few of my favorite writing books:



Writer's Market (2001 ed.): This book, published yearly, is basically a catalog of markets for various types of writing. It also contains a large number of articles pertaining to writing, including interviews with prominent writers from different genres. A yearly feature is a selection of query letters, some done well and some done (remarkably) badly. The badly-done ones are amazingly instructive.



The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. This brief book is indispensible. It is part-handbook, part-hymn to clarity in writing, part-instruction manual. Its most famous admonition, "Omit needless words", will be (and should be) a mantra for writers.



How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. This is an excellent and concise introduction to the problems and pitfalls specific to these two genres. Card is one of the biggest names in SF and he brings all of his expertise to bear. The best part of the book is the section on world-building, a concern of particular (some would say paramount) importance to the SF and Fantasy writer.



Advice to Writers compiled and edited by Jon Winokur. Subtitled "A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights", this book is just that: a collection of thoughts on various topics from such people as Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, E. B. White, Tennessee Williams....this is a fun book to dip into, for nuggets such as this by William Styron: "You write because you want to be read."



On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. Given the thickness of many of King's novels and his ability to churn them out at the rate of two per year, one might expect On Writing to be a veritable doorstop. Instead, King writes a fairly brief book that partly relates how writing has shaped his life (and, not unimportantly, how his life has shaped his writing) and partly doles out some of the more important advice from the many writing lessons King has absorbed through the years. The advice section contains nothing that you won't find anywhere else, but somehow the old chestnut "Show, don't tell" seems more vivid when illustrated by King. And you'll certainly never look at adverbs the same way again....but what makes the book so good is King's meditations on writing itself and its place in his life, especially as he describes his problems with alcohol and drug addiction. His life's lesson, learned very late, is this: "Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way around." King later describes, in rather harrowing detail, his recent life-threatening accident when he was struck by a van and his return to health and to writing. It's powerful stuff, and what shines through most is not King's love for writing but his love for his wife, whom he considers his "ideal reader".

I've finally figured out what has been bothering me about the Mark Greene storyline on ER: Anthony Edwards simply looks too healthy. I've been around people with terminal cancer before, and they do not look as healthy as Edwards did on last night's episode. Terminal cancer patients lose large amounts of weight very quickly and they generally take on a pallid look as death nears.

I'm also irritated a bit at NBC's rather cynical promotion of the whole thing. They ran ads all week touting Greene's "last night in the ER", clearly trying to imply that last night was his final appearance on the show. I may be proven wrong, but I doubt it: we will see him again during May sweeps, and there will be ads galore imploring us to "say goodbye to Dr. Greene".

Image of the Week

"Viking/Mars Encounter" -- oil by Wilson Hurley.





A lot of fine artists have found inspiration for their work in the discoveries of astronomers. This lovely painting depicts the Viking Lander making its approach to the Red Planet.

(Click on the image to visit the NASA art gallery.)

Something struck me last night when I saw the 20th Anniversary edition of ET: The Extra Terrestrial: how quiet the movie is in its first third. If this movie were to be made today, no doubt there would be a pounding rock soundtrack, especially during the scenes when the teenagers are playing "Dungeons and Dragons". There would be constant (and dull) underscore, and the camerawork itself would be quicker, with more cuts and less time for the actors to use their time in close-ups to actually act. The scene at the family dinner table plays softly, with gentle humor (juvenile insults like "penis-breath" notwithstanding), and then there is sudden tension when the topic of the children's absent father comes up. How easily the pain underneath what seems a perfectly normal scene -- a suburban family sitting down to dinner -- can be brought to the surface, through the matter-of-fact observation by Elliott that he can't call his father to talk about what he saw the night before because "he's in Mexico with Sally". Children don't mess around with the truth; when they state it they do so outright. That single line not only underscores the pain at the heart of this family (that ET will eventually heal), but it also establishes with certainty Elliott's central honesty as a character. What a brilliant piece of writing that is; what brilliant directing to let the silences ebb and flow; and what brilliant acting as young Henry Thomas delivers what might be the best performance by a child in cinematic history.

The 20th Anniversary edition has, of course, been "touched up" digitally; there is a new scene that couldn't be done convincingly before, and in all honesty it's not entirely convincing now. But it goes by very quickly. The rest of the "enhancements" mostly involve digitizing ET's facial expressions and giving a few new nifty lights to the spaceship. The worst decision is the one to remove the shot of the shotgun at the end of the picture; Spielberg has said that he really never wanted guns in his movie at all, which to me seems a bit disingenuous -- are we to believe that Universal Studios ordered him to stick a single shot of a gun into the picture? The original shot worked perfectly, and in the original the gun in question is never even aimed at the children -- it is merely pulled from the seat of a car. Just the sight of the gun heightened the tension to its highest point, and that point in the film seemed flat without it. But that's not much of a flaw in an otherwise nearly-perfect film. And the John Williams score is heard in all its magnificent glory, especially in the remarkable closing sequence where Spielberg edited the film the fit the music.

How amazing it is, really, to see a story that isn't drenched in irony; how refreshing to view a cinematic friendship that is based on mutual need and growing trust; how amazing to see a story of love and friendship that never, not once, involves contrived betrayals or manipulative misunderstandings based on selfish motives. And how depressing to see it in a virtually empty theater, even on a Monday night. Don't people realize that they need movies and stories like this?

Just finished: Christmas in Plains: Memories by Jimmy Carter. This very short book is basically exactly what the title says: a collection of memories of Christmas by former President Carter, mostly (but not exclusively) about his childhood in Plains, Georgia. It's a fairly straightforward and earnest little work, and it has a number of interesting anecdotes about Carter's early life. (My favorite involves the grapefruit truck that accidentally dumps its load on the road, and then the poor people of Plains scrambling to recover the grapefruits which they see as a wonderful bounty -- until, that is, they make their first ever attempts at actually consuming a grapefruit.) The book is unabashedly sentimental, and can be read through in a single evening -- it took me only a couple of hours. Not bad if you go for this sort of family remembrance (it's not a large enough work to be considered a "memoir"); for me it suffered a bit in that I read it outside the Christmas season. I imagine that during the Holidays this book might resonate more than it did. I found it nice and enjoyable.

(Side note, having nothing to do with the content of the book: it is illustrated by Amy Carter, the President's daughter. I found these illustrations -- simple pen-and-ink drawings -- horrid. That's just pure personal taste, though.)

ERRATA:

It turns out that my Image of the Week, which I cited as a wonderful example of Byzantine mosaic, might not even be a mosaic at all. Rather, it could very well be a painting on wood. A misreading on my part led to my error, which I discovered when I encountered the same image on a different site which made clear that the image is a wood painting. That being the case, here's an actual example of Byzantine mosaic. Note, again, the details present in the color gradations of Christ's hair and beard. Note, again, the "glowing" nature of the work. And note Your Narrator covering up a moderately embarrassing goof. Sigh....

Major League Baseball's 2002 season is about to begin. In that spirit I offer this prediction, which will no doubt take its place in the hallowed halls of the most daring predictions of all time:

....wait for it....


....here it comes....


The Pittsburgh Pirates will be lousy.

You read it here first.

In the space of twenty-four hours we lost Dudley Moore, Milton Berle, and now -- to me the cruelest of all -- Billy Wilder. Three that shall be missed most dearly.

Some people really want to build a space elevator. Part of me thrills to this idea; another part of me -- having read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy -- is scared by giving the bin Ladens of the world such a tempting target. But that, I suppose, would be a point in favor of building it.

And what a sight that cable would be! I wonder how far away from the Earthbound-terminal one could be and still see the thing. I wonder how much economic activity would spring up around that terminal, wherever it is. I wonder where that terminal would be, in the first place -- someplace with a high level of geological stability, I would assume. That would leave out California. This looks like a job for Nebraska.

(Thanks to Sean for the link.)

Reviews of John Williams's score to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones are starting to pop up on the Web and Usenet, including this one from Ain't It Cool News. The good news is that so far the buzz on the score is very positive. The bad news is that the thing isn't going to be released until April 23. It's going to be a long four weeks....

(....assuming, of course, that I do not succumb to temptation and track down the MP3's of the thing that are circulating now....must resist the Dark Side....)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK


Icon of Christ Pantokrator, Mount Athos Monastery





I've been somewhat interested in Byzantine mosaic ever since I read Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic duology, in which the protagonist is a mosaicist. There is something fascinating in a wondrous image being constructed from thousands of tiny pieces of glass. Particularly amazing is the detail in Christ's beard -- no uniform brown, but definite contours and light patches. I had never realized that this level of detail is possible in mosaic; the mosaics that I have seen tend to be done with larger tesserae, giving the images a "boxy" look not unlike the graphics on early-1980s home video game systems. Also fascinating is the fact that the images in the mosaics are so dependent on light heightens the religiosity of the image. A well-done mosaic, lit well, seems to glow under its own power. It is no wonder the Byzantines used mosaic so extensively in their religious iconography.

(Click on the image to see the Byzantine Studies page at Fordham University, where I found it.)

I posted a long-winded review of Howard Shore's Oscar-winning score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to the rec.music.movies newsgroup. It can be read, via Google, here.

I keep repeating to myself, like a Zen mantra, "The Oscars are meaningless....the Oscars are meaningless....the Oscars are meaningless...." Or, I borrow from William Goldman: "There is no 'best'....there is no 'best'....there is no 'best'...."

....and yet I'm still annoyed that Ian McKellan didn't win an Oscar. Oh well, maybe the Academy is waiting to see what he does in The Two Towers, when Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White....or maybe they're just a bunch of dingbats. I'd like to believe the former, but I fear that the "dingbat" theory will have to hold sway for now.

But at least they made up for it by finally giving Randy Newman an Oscar. What a fine, fine songwriter and musician. What belated recognition. (Not so belated as Cary Grant, who was the Ernie Banks of Oscars, but still belated.)

Until today, if asked to name the single worst decision made by a sports figure in the last year (meaning decisions directly related to onfield-happenings, leaving out things like Jeff Kent's apparent motorcycle ride/truck washing), I would have named St. Louis Rams head coach Mike Martz's bizarre decision in the Super Bowl to only give Marshall Faulk seventeen carries, despite the facts that Faulk averaged 4.5 yards per carry in that game and the Patriots played the entire game in a defensive scheme that practically rolled out the red carpet for a power running game. That was a godawful decision, and because of that the Rams are runners-up.

But the worst sports decision has to be Michelle Kwan's dismissal of her longtime coach, Frank Carroll. Kwan lost again to Irina Slutskaya, this time at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano. Her skating since she decided to go it alone has been tentative and sloppy, nothing like what had previously been expected from Kwan. As for Carroll? His current star, American Timothy Goebel, like Kwan took bronze at the Olympics and silver at World's. But Goebel's star is on the rise. Kwan's is supposed to be shining brightly; instead it is on the wane.

One of the better writers of the space opera subgenre in science fiction is Timothy Zahn. His novels set in the Star Wars universe are probably the best available, and I've just finished Conquerors' Heritage, the second volume in his Conquerors trilogy. This is the story of a war between spacefaring humanity and what is at first presented as a ruthless conquering alien race called the Zhirzh. However, the second book of the trilogy is told from the Zhirzh point of view, and the war takes on a new light as it becomes clear that the whole thing is the sad result of a series of unfortunate mistakes, blunders, and failures of understanding. One of these errors is fairly obvious well before it is revealed at the end of Book Two, and the Zhirzh -- despite some interesting cultural habits -- don't seem "alien" enough. Zahn hasn't quite met John Campbell's challenge of showing an alien who thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. Those are really mere quibbles, though. Zahn tells a tight story with interesting subplots that come together in unexpected ways. I'm looking forward to reading the third book in this trilogy.

Congratulations to Timothy Goebel, who just won the silver at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano, Japan. (Of course, had Evgeny Pleshenko competed Goebel probably would have finished bronze.) As for the new World Champion, what can be said? Alexei Yagudin is far and away better than anyone else skating right now.

Just finished: Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventures by Noah Adams. Adams, a commentator for NPR, wrote this book to recount a year he spent attempting to learn how to play the piano. It's a charming book that tells the story of what might be considered a kind of "midlife crisis".

There is always something kind of goofy about the World Championships of Figure Skating during Olympic years. They're always held just a month or so after the Games, and they invariably feel a tad anticlimactic, especially since just about all of the skaters use the exact same programs with which they competed in the Olympics, and some of the newly-crowned Olympic champions or runners-up end up not competing at Worlds. Notable absences this year include America's Sarah Hughes and Russia's Evgeny Pleshenko. (Not that it matters in the latter case; Alexei Yagudin right now is the skating equivalent of the 1990s Chicago Bulls.)

It's funny how we long to visit places that are far away, and yet we so often don't know what's in our own backyards. Years of living in Western New York, and I didn't know anything about this place until today.

The Simpsons delivered its best episode in quite some time last night, a hilarious take on three classic stories: The Odyssey, the tale of Joan of Arc, and Hamlet. As is usually the case in these types of episodes, the Simpsons themselves play the main characters with the regular townsfolk rounding out the supporting cast. Having Mayor Quimby as Zeus and the Old Sea Captain as Poseidon were brilliant touches, as was Moe as Claudius in Hamlet. The show doesn't hit these heights nearly as often or as consistently as it used to, but it's nice to see that they can still pull one out once in a while.

The second installment of NPR's annual survey of Oscar-nominated filmscores is here. This week's discussed scores are Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (John Williams) and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Howard Shore).

I finished Aaron Copland's book What To Listen For In Music today. It is an excellent volume, designed to introduce laypeople to the inner workings and complexities of classical music. Copland's language is never overly technical, and people wishing to start digging beneath the appeals of mere surface beauty to find deeper pleasures in music will be hard-pressed to find a better starting point.

It would be interesting if an edition of this book could be released that includes a CD of some of the works Copland discusses, because as he himself notes many, many times: proper enjoyment of music must involve listening, and listening to music is always preferable to reading a dozen books on music. Books like Copland's make for smarter listeners, which is all to the good. Reading this book I was constantly reminded of something Leonard Bernstein wrote in his wonderful The Infinite Variety of Music: We hear too much music, allowing it to become background filler material for our lives rather than attending to it as art in its own right, something in which to be engaged rather than something allowed to wash over us. A book like this, well-written, will create a keen feeling of curiosity in the reader, a desire to go out and learn more about the subject at hand. What To Listen For In Music absolutely succeeded on that level.

I've added a permanent link to The Berlioz Society, dedicated to the greatest of all French composers. His bicentennary is approaching next year. (Mini-rant: As much as I love the Impressions de France film at Epcot, it annoys me that it purports to include music from France's great composers, and yet includes not a note by Berlioz.)

The Man With the Golden Gun is probably the most problematic of the James Bond films. It has moments when it is very, very good; it also has moments when it is bone-chillingly awful. On balance, I have to say that I like it; its photography is too beautiful, John Barry's score is excellent, Roger Moore settles into the role much more nicely than he did in Live and Let Die, and Christopher Lee makes a wonderful Bond villain. We always talk about "chemistry" as it applies to two romantic leads, but there also has to be a kind of "chemistry" between a hero and the villain. TMWTGG has that chemistry in spades, in the idea that Bond and Scaramanga are the best in the world at what they do, and that in the end only one of them can survive. (Hmmm....give them both swords and this could be a Highlander movie.) This plays out in a gun-duel on Scaramanga's South China Sea island, and that sequence really is filled with tension. There is a genuine sense that Bond has, in fact, met an equal among all the villains with whom he tangles. I like that a lot.

Of course, it's not enough for a Bond film to have the bad guy simply want to do Bond in; there has to be some kind of "world-domination" plot. The one in TMWTGG makes amazingly little sense, and as such I tend to completely ignore it. It's really more of a Macguffin than anything else, designed to fill out the film's running time and provide for the requisite "escape from an exploding fortress" that caps off most Bond films. The film's attempts at scientific-sounding lingo surrounding this plot (something to do with hyper-efficient solar cells) are laughable.

The film continues, to some degree, with the sexism of Live and Let Die, with Bond clearly viewing women as nothing but sex objects. However, it isn't quite as obnoxious as in the previous film. There is even a fairly amusing scene where Bond is actually rejected by the girl as he attempts to wine-and-dine her; he attributes his failure to get her into bed to the Chinese sparkling wine they had with dinner, a brand he has clearly never encountered before.

The action sequences in TMWTGG aren't really anything to write home about, except for the gun duel. A couple of them are almost painful to watch, simply because someone thought it a bright idea to bring back Sheriff JW Pepper, a character stunning in his annoying-ness.

In summation: there is a lot to like in The Man With the Golden Gun, but there is a lot to dislike as well.

SFSite's mid-March update has taken place. The highlight is an interview with author Gene Wolfe, one of SF and Fantasy's finest writers.

Random complaint #489: Can we come up with a new metaphor for a sports team that plays beyond expectations and earns a shot at the title? Today I saw a headline in the sports page: "Wyoming Steals Gonzaga's Slippers". I think it's time to officially retire the "Cinderella" metaphor from sports writing. (And besides, Gonzaga is playing -- or was playing -- in its fourth consecutive NCAA Tournament. At what point is a team no longer a Cinderella team, and just a regular old, garden-variety good team?)

It's a good month for lovers of Miklos Rozsa's film music: new remastered releases of King of Kings and Lust For Life. Rozsa is one of the greatest of all film composers, up there with John Williams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Bernard Herrmann. Any new release of his music is cause for celebration.

Remember that stunning photograph of the Afghan refugee from National Geographic Magazine in the mid-1980s? It has arguably become National Geographic's most famous photograph, being featured in many retrospectives of the magazine since then. Well, the woman -- who was anonymous at the time -- has been found again, alive in Afghanistan. She is older now, and a mother, but her eyes are still that same piercing green. Read the MSN article here.

Read this week: "The Crowd", a short story by Ray Bradbury, from his classic collection The October Country. Bradbury is typically considered a science-fiction author, but his work in the horror field is extensive; he, Harlan Ellison, and Richard Matheson probably constitute some kind of Trinity of short-story horror writers. The October Country is a seminal collection of Bradbury's work, and "The Crowd" is a brilliant and disturbing work that asks the question: just how does that crowd that always gathers around a horrible accident always form so quickly? Good stuff, this. Bradbury is an essential writer of horror.

(Note: This is a story that I wrote shortly after the events of 11 September 2001. Its genesis was in a simple image that haunted me for quite a while afterward. I originally thought to write it as a poem, but I am not a good poet. This story was rejected by one market, and I have never submitted it anyplace else as I am quite ambivalent about the results I achieved. Nevertheless, I offer it here as some kind of offering in memory of those lost.)


The City of Dead Works

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. "Come aboard," I say. "I will take your coin for passage." One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

"Please," a young man says as he turns to me, "I have to go home to my daughters."

"You are going home now," I reply. "To the home where all eventually return." Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

"This can’t be," a woman cries out. "My mother needs me."

"She will be with you soon enough."

"When?" Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

"I cannot say," I reply. "The Ferryman has no hand in Fate."

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

"Where will you take us?" someone asks.

"To the place you are promised," I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. "What is that?" he asks.

"It is the City of Dead Works," I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

"I don’t understand," someone else says. "The City of Dead Works?"

"Aye," I reply. "Behold!"

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

"That one looks Egyptian," a woman says.

"The Great Library of Alexandria," I tell her. "Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead."

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

"The Temple of Solomon," I say.

"There are ships in the harbor," says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

"I don’t understand," a young man says. "Why this City? Why here?"

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

"Who lives in that city?" It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

"No one lives there," I tell him. "The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires."

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

"We will be there soon," I say. "Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold." No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

--finis

Six months.

I'm amazed that it has been that long. I was getting in my car and on my way to work when I heard the news on the radio: an airplane had struck the World Trade Center; details were still sketchy and more would be said as they became available. I was envisioning a Piper Cub or some such thing, not a jetliner. And certainly not both buildings being hit. I switched to NPR, and they hadn't broken the story yet either; Morning Edition's Bob Edwards finally said something about both buildings being hit while I was sitting in a drive-thru, waiting for a bagel. It is that incongruity which strikes me to this day: learning of what is perhaps the pivotal historical event of our time in so mundane a setting. Of course, there is nothing unique in that; in fact, it's just one more thing that ties the generations together. My mother learned of JFK's death while she was upstairs folding the sheets.

It's always impossible to judge a film by its trailer, but the trailer that aired last night on FOX for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was a pretty amazing thing to watch. So far Lucas has given us a trailer that highlights the love story and Anakin's movement to the Dark Side; now he gives us a trailer that highlights the story's epic scope and the galactic-scale events that will transpire in the new film. Is it May yet???? (Actually, I'd settle for April 23, when the film's score is to be released on CD.)

NPR's program Weekend Edition Sunday has begun its yearly examination of the five Oscar-nominated film scores. Check it out here.

ABC's Bond movie of the week last night was Live and Let Die, which is without possible question the worst of all the Bond films. Yep, I said worst. The film that I see most often cited as the worst, A View to a Kill, is nowhere near as bad as this film. Let me count the ways that Live and Let Die is horrible:

1. It's the most sexist Bond film ever. Now, the Bond films will never be listed in Great Cinematic Hallmarks of Women's Equality, but a nadir was reached with this one. Here we have women more blatantly manipulated as sex objects than in any other Bond flick, with Bond stacking the deck of Tarot cards for no other reason than he wants to get it on with Solitaire. The other women are portrayed as stupid and incompetent.

2. It's the most racist Bond film ever. Yes, it was made in 1972, but so what? Casablanca was made thirty years before that, and it managed to give us a black character that wasn't a complete caricature. This film's blacks are either stupid or evil, and in a few cases are stupid and evil. Yaphet Kotto actually played a halfway decent villain, but every other black in the film reeks with the air of stereotype and disdain.

3. The film isn't content to paint its women and black characters with a stereotypical brush. We also get some Southerners, the type who would later be seen in The Dukes of Hazzard. There is a writer out there, somewhere, who thought that the character of Sheriff JW Pepper was a good idea.

4. This criticism probably isn't fair, but the film's automobiles are all those ugly, gigantic 1970s gas-guzzlers that you now see populating junk lots. Cars in a Bond film should never be ugly.

5. Q does not appear at all in this film.

6. The film's action sequences are dull, dull, dull. The only moment of any excitement at all is the moment when Bond escapes the alligator farm, but then we head into a speedboat chase that goes nowhere.

7. The theme song to Live and Let Die, by Paul McCartney and Wings, would actually be one of the better Bond songs if not for the ridiculous middle "funk" section ("When you got a job to do you gotta do it well....") that sticks out like a sore thumb. The film's music isn't horrible, but John Barry is certainly missed.

Live and Let Die is not the film that started the trend in Bond films toward self-parody (that would be Diamonds Are Forever, Connery's last official Bond film), but this film picked that ball up and ran with it. Roger Moore is typically blamed for this, but I've always wondered: to what extent is the actor to blame for deficiencies in the material to begin with? Once the self-parody trend wore off in For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore was able to demonstrate that he could bring just as much gravity and lethal cunning to the Bond part as Connery.

Next up (I think): The Man With the Golden Gun.

I've added a link to the left to a place I had totally forgotten about, though I used to frequent the place quite often: Odin's Castle. This is a site designed to be a clearing house on the Web for other sites devoted to history, mythology, and literature. There are a lot of excellent resources here. Check it out.

The most underrated, ignored, and generally shafted show on network television, Once and Again, again appears to have its neck on the chopping block. ABC has moved the show around its schedule for three years, and still it has a dedicated audience; however, when a show moves that much it doesn't get a chance to develop much more than that devoted audience. It is now on Mondays, and this appears to be its last chance to generate sufficient ratings to be renewed. A website devoted to saving the show, with a link to an online petition, can be found here.

Standard operating procedure here is for us to watch Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Thursday nights, after Friends. However, our ABC affiliate decided to air the current incarnation of Billy Graham, so for some unknown reason I watched the second half of last night's Survivor episode. Why on earth are people still watching this stuff? To me it all looks the same: a bunch of narcissistic TV-star wannabes wandering around some godforsaken place, scrounging for water, complaining about one another, babbling into the camera about how "[Person X] isn't doing squat to help the team/tribe/group". They then gather for some kind of inane contest -- last night's involved eating fish that was allowed to go rancid, making me wonder if the contestants had to sign a waiver pledging not to sue CBS if they ended up with food poisoning -- after which the losers head to an equally inane ritual with torches, a bonfire, and that Wonder-Bread host quizzing them about how things have gone wrong for them, how they'll get back together as a team, et cetera. Then we get the montage of people writing names on fake parchment while dramatic music plays, and then Mr. Wonder-Bread reads the votes in an order preselected to heighten the drama, and then the ceremonial extinguishing of the torch, blah blah blah blah....I never cared for Survivor in its first incarnation, with its celebration of sneakiness and smarm in the name of "playing the game", but at least it was something I hadn't seen before. Now, having watched exactly one episode of the Australian version, not a single minute of the African version, and only thirty minutes of this incarnation, I can honestly say: It's time for Survivor to go. Would the last one to leave the island please turn out the lights?

Ah, spring in Buffalo: when fifty-five degree sunny days are followed by thirty-three degree snowy ones. But at least our summers have never, not once since they started keeping the stats, hit one hundred degrees.

The Bills signed linebacker London Fletcher from the St. Louis Rams yesterday. He replaces Sam Cowart, who went to the New York Jets. Cowart is an outstanding athlete, but he has had problems with injuries and missed all of last season after getting hurt in the first game. Ah well, take heart, Jets fans: if Cowart stays healthy, your team just picked up a hell of a linebacker.

ER was actually decent last night, although the effort to create a kind-of Breakfast Club story using the romantically-entangled Carter, Luca, Susan and Abby was rather forced. Still, it was nice to see a different kind of storytelling on the show, one which didn't rely on wild and gory medical traumas and the impending demise of Dr. Greene. Of course, they made clear in the preview for next week that the Greene death-watch begins in earnest next week, with the sepulchral voice over intoning "From now on....every minute matters....every patient he sees...." while Dr. Greene walks in slow-motion toward the camera. Ick.

CSI, on the other hand, was as entertaining as always with a story involving the murder of four Buddhist monks, shot in the head at point blank range while they were praying. The "third-eye" imagery of the bulletholes was a nice detail. What an excellent show -- all the better because it actually shows science being done right, instead of resorting to lame pseudoscientific rubbish.

Continuing my fascination with All Things Presidential, I am almost finished reading Front Row at the White House: My Life and Times by Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps. The book is a fascinating look into the life of a White House reporter, a life which is a delicate balance of long hours, wearying travel, occasionally lousy food, coffee by the gallon, arrogant press secretaries, presidents suspicious of the press, and a front-row seat for historical events. Thomas tells her story engagingly, arranging the book around themes rather than simply delivering a sequential account of her life, which is a wise choice. It enables her to concentrate on her larger theme, the way the relationship between President and Press has changed since she arrived in the White House press corps in 1961, beginning a career which would include every administration since John F. Kennedy.

It is clear, pretty much from the outset, that she does not think that that relationship has changed for the better. She describes how she enjoyed personal, and fairly frequent, interviews with Lyndon Johnson; but as time has gone by the various press secretaries have become more involved in public relations than in the dissemination of information to the public. She relates one incident when she and Sam Donaldson attempted posing a question to President Reagan during a photo op, only to have the president glance at his top aides before replying, "I can't answer that. They won't let me." Thomas and Donaldson protested that Reagan was the president, to no avail. She also takes President Clinton to task for his own cynical use of the media.

It is always fascinating to read these first-hand accounts of events in our government, and Thomas's book is welcome in that regard.

The West Wing had an excellent episode last night, although it was slightly marred by NBC's ludicrous advertising leading up to it -- "The First Lady drops a bombshell! Don't miss the last five minutes!!!" Well, it wasn't really a bombshell -- just a fine character moment as the First Lady resolves a personal issue arising from her secret medication of the President, something contrary to medical ethics. The way NBC was promoting the show, I half-expected Mrs. Bartlett to reveal her secret lover or something. (Well, not really; Aaron Sorkin is a far, far better writer than that.) Anyway, it was great to see a return to what made me love the show in the first place: a character-driven show laden with intricate dialogue, self-referential jokes, and multiple storylines that demonstrated that politics can be as personal as public.

Now, if they'd just show the Emily Procter character more....say, every episode....

It really pays to check out the "bargain" table at Borders. While shopping there a few weeks ago, I took a passing glance at the bargain table and saw several copies of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, marked down to $9.99. That's a hell of a bargain, given that the book's original price is $40.00, and the normal markdown at Amazon is still $28.00. The book is a lavish volume that details a large number of mythical realms from literary works. Entries include Middle Earth, Narnia, Never-Never Land, Fionavar, Flatland, the various places to which Gulliver travels, and more. Any lover of fantasy should have this book, and having it for one-fourth the publisher's price is even better.

Ever a sucker for fantastic stories involving baseball, I enjoyed a new story by Gardner Dozois that appears in the current issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction, entitled "The Hanging Curve". In the story, the scene is set with the ultimate baseball situation: the top of the ninth in the World Series, Game Seven, and the home team (in this case the Phillies) are one strike away from winning it all (against the Yankees, who are only down by a single run and have a man on base). The pitcher winds up, throws, and then the ball stops midway to the plate. It simply stops in midair, and all efforts to move it are met with complete failure. The ball becomes, literally, a hanging curve -- hanging there, in the air, for years as the players and then the game itself pass on. This striking image becomes the obsession of the home-plate umpire, who returns more than fifty years later to witness the ball's sudden conclusion of its original journey. Analyzing the angle the ball takes as it flies through the spot where a catcher's mitt once would have been, the umpire reveals what has been on his mind all these years: whether that pitch was a strike or a ball. The story is a nifty allegory about how, in the face of events of such unbelievable strangeness, we can still focus to exclusion of all else on those things that matter most to us.

The story also includes a few other neat details, such as Game Seven of a World Series only drawing ten thousand or so fans. Who knows how far in the future Dozois has envisioned this tale taking place, but to anyone alarmed by the recent refusal of baseball to clean up its act, such an image is very cautionary indeed.

(Gardner Dozois, by the way, is the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction and of the yearly anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, as well as an impressive number of other anthologies in SF. He is also, by the evidence presented in this story, a fine writer.)

Scully's baby is in mortal danger, Mulder is in hiding, and The X-Files is wallowing in disarray. It's a shame to see the show sinking slowly, but I can at least take heart in that Chris Carter has decided to pull the plug rather than keep flogging it any longer. Two years ago (or thereabouts) the show lost that feeling that it was actually building toward something, that there was a "truth" that really was "out there". I will grant that the mytharc involving Baby William has to a small extent restored that feeling, but so many plot threads have been left behind that I really don't think any satisfying resolution is now possible. Oh well, just a few more episodes to go and then the whole thing is history. (And next week's bonus: the new Star Wars Episode II trailer will air on FOX, just before The X-Files. Can't wait for that.)

NPR's Morning Edition featured an interview with film composer John Williams yesterday. Listen to it here.

Just when I thought that ER was returning to something similar to its former glory, it showed some signs that all is still not well the other night. First, we get a cameo by Eriq La Salle. Nothing wrong there, as he is a fine actor and his character was central to the show for many years, but earlier this season we were given a Very Special Episode in which we were supposed to "say goodbye to Dr. Benton". But, it turns out that La Salle's contract wasn't actually up; he still owed them some episodes -- which I guess now they're using up in strange fashion. It's kind of like if the Denver Broncos called up John Elway next year and said, "You know, your last contract still had five games on it, so we'd appreciate it if you'd play those and then call it quits again." Weird.

But worse, of course, is the fact that the show's writers are obviously going to treat us to watching Dr. Greene's downward spiral into death by brain tumor. In all honesty, I've seen enough drawn-out terminal-illness storylines on various TV shows that all I can do right now is yawn for this one. The best such storyline I've ever seen was a few years back on NYPDBlue, when Det. Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) died of complications following a heart transplant. That storyline played out over just five episodes, the last of which was probably the best single death of a beloved character I've ever seen on TV -- it was by turns harrowing, touching, and in the end heartbreaking as we watched Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) try to deal with his friend and partner's impending passing. The five-episode story arc was just long enough to be involving and just short enough to be jolting as all such unexpected deaths should be; and the even better stroke of genius was that it was executed at the beginning of the TV season whereas many lesser shows would draw it out so that the death could occur during May sweeps, probably even the season finale, as ER seems to be doing. I have grave doubts (no pun intended) that the writers of ER are in the same league as David Milch, the great writer responsible for the NYPDBlue story.

This week's listening: The Music of COSMOS. Carl Sagan's amazing PBS series Cosmos is a landmark in science television (and probably television in general). The show's production values were remarkable, and the series holds up fairly well today, even though more than twenty years have passed since its making and the shifts in scientific knowledge that are inevitable. One of the show's most successful facets was its use of music. The show drew from a very wide array of musical sources, from the classical repertoire to New Age electronica to ethnic folk music and so on. A soundtrack album was produced when the show originally aired in 1980, but as with so many soundtrack albums of that era it was incomplete. A 2-CD set of the soundtrack has now been released, and it is a wonderful listen. One would not necessarily expect something like this -- basically a compilation recording -- to work so well as a whole, but the musical selections are so well chosen that they seem to blend together organically into a compelling work of its own. The selections are occasionally bracketed by sounds of Planet Earth -- thunderstorms, oceans, a rocket launch countdown, et cetera -- which adds to the overall effect. What has been produced is a sort-of amalgam to the famous Voyager Record, whose creation was spurred by Carl Sagan in the first place.

No reader of fantasy literature should be unfamiliar with the work of Lloyd Alexander, author of the classic Prydain Chronicles (based on Welsh mythology, particularly The Mabinogion) and other works based on the mythologies of other cultures. His books are children's literature, but anyone who sees in that distinction some indication of "lesser quality" is a person who is not really interested in fine storytelling, but rather in intellectual pomposity. Harsh words, but there it is. Anyway, a happy occasion is the reissue this month of Alexander's novel Westmark, the opening book in a trilogy set in a country called Westmark that is full of political intrigue and revolutionary fervor. The trilogy is only fantasy in that the story takes place in a make-believe locale, but there is no magic, no wizards, and no giant beasts; it's more of a historical novel set in a place that never was. Westmark has been out of print for a number of years, and now it can be had again. Read it.


(Addendum: The WESTMARK reissue is part of the launch of Firebird, a new imprint by Penguin Books that is geared toward "excellence in fantasy and science fiction". They are to be commended and supported in this endeavor. Godspeed, Firebird!!!)

One of the most memorable books I've read is A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, a wonderful volume about book collectors and book collecting. This book is full of amazing stories about book collectors and the lengths to which they will go to acquire the objects of their passion (the most memorable of whom, especially to anyone from Iowa, is surely the infamous Stephen Blumberg). Well, apparently A Gentle Madness was the first in a projected trilogy about books, and the second volume -- Patience and Fortitude -- is out. I've already bought it and it has shot to the top of my "To Read" list.

After September 11, I kept wondering why Osama Bin Laden selected the targets that he did, and why he seems to have been particularly fascinated with the World Trade Center. As horrific as that day was, it seems to me that he had far more in mind than mere body count; had that been his goal and nothing else, he could have scheduled his attacks for September 9 -- a Sunday -- and targetted NFL stadiums that were full to capacity.

While searching the archives at Slate Magazine, I happened upon this article that suggests just such a reason for Bin Laden's apparent obsession with the WTC. It might not be that the buildings were to him symbolic of a decadent culture at odds with his own warped interpretation of Islamic tenets; the buildings themselves -- as physical artifacts -- may have been offensive to him because of a family connection to the WTC's main architect and the WTC's implementation of Islamic architectural styles. Scary stuff.

You Only Live Twice was on last night on ABC. I still find it a far more enjoyable film than its successor, Thunderball, but this one is still not without its faults. It is one of the most blatantly sexist Bond films, with one male character informing Bond that "In Japan, men always come first and women come second" and Bond enthusiastically approving. It also has a plot that is highly improbable even by James Bond standards: would the world's superpowers stand down from nuclear alert after Bond has thwarted SPECTRE's plan with only seconds to spare? would a space launch from Japan really be completely undetectable by everybody? The sets are all very well-done, but some of the film's photographic effects are just-plain lazy. For a Russian spaceshot we are shown stock footage of a NASA rocket launch, complete with swaying palm trees in the foreground, ignoring the fact that the Russians launch their rockets from a vast plain in the middle of the country which is about as likely to have palm trees as the middle of Nebraska. Late in the film, when Blofeld's mountain base is blowing up, we are shown footage of an actual volcanic eruption complete with lava. I suppose it's not really fair to bust on a 1967 film for such things, but I'm doing it anyway. Another flaw is the film's two main women: one of them, named Aki, is the Bond film "sacrificial lamb"; after she dies another Japanese girl shows up whose name I don't think we ever even learn.

But the film is still a whole lot of fun; the producers seem to have learned from their pacing errors in Thunderball and constructed a Bond film that actually moves. The sense of fun is restored, and the score by John Barry -- with its nifty Asian influences -- is a gem.

An added bonus during last night's telecast was a Top Ten list, of the best Bond theme songs. This was hosted by Brandi, a person of whose existence I was almost completely unaware until last night. Ah well. Apparently the list was collated from the results of an ABC online pole, and it shows. That's the only way I can think that one of the worst songs I've ever heard in any setting was actually listed (Tina Turner's song for Goldeneye). I would have appreciated that ancillary feature more if Brandi had taken time to explain just what the hell the lyrics to Duran Duran's A View To A Kill song are about, but you can't have everything, I suppose.

Next week brings us Diamonds Are Forever, which began the trend of increasing goofiness in Bond films during the 1970s. For those who blame Roger Moore for taking Bond in a farcical direction, tune in next week for Connery's last Bond film. You might notice that Moore isn't so much to blame for that.

Final thoughts on Figure Skating at the 2002 Olympics: I am really looking forward to seeing Timothy Goebel and Sasha Cohen grow and mature over the next four years. I wonder if Yagudin will stick around for amateur eligibility or go pro; I rather hope the latter because -- quite selfishly -- if he goes pro I might be able to go see him perform when one of those touring shows hits Buffalo. I'm still thrilled to have at last seen a Russian skater who wasn't, well, boring. And seeing the two Gold Medalist pairs on the ice at the Exhibition last night was great. I was hoping they would do something nifty like switch partners or something; and indeed, they offered a combined death-spiral that was amazing. And the most heartbreaking moment of the Olympics was not Michelle Kwan's slip on her triple in the long program; it was Todd Eldredge's in his short program, when you knew at that moment that his Olympic dream was over. He's one of those people who is simply active at the wrong time: had he been in his prime at, say, Albertville or Lillehammer he might be an Olympic champion. That's not a bad thing, though: Kurt Browning never won an Olympic medal either, and -- if I may mix my sports metaphors -- Jim Kelly is in the Hall of Fame.

Listening this week: a grab-bag of film music. First up is Deutsche Grammophon's new recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Andre Previn, London Symphony Orchestra). This includes suites from The Sea Hawk, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Captain Blood, and The Prince and the Pauper. I heard about this on the rec.music.movies newsgroup, and being something of a Korngold nut I had to get it, even though I've always found Previn's results to be of mixed quality. At times he tends to choose tempi that restrict the emotive power of whatever music he happens to be conducting (his Symphony #2 by Rachmaninov, on Telarc, leaps to mind), but when he gets the tempi right he can be as expressive a conductor as anyone (his wonderful recording of Gershwin's Piano Concerto and Rhapsody in Blue on Philips, with the Pittsburgh Symphony, are a testament here). Unfortunately, the new Korngold recording is an example of the former. The Sea Hawk is one of the most thrilling of film scores, with brazen fanfares, a muscular main theme, and a love theme that sweeps and soars in the grandest Romantic fashion. In Previn's hands on the present recording, though, the music seems to almost be chained in place, never really being able to engage the emotions because of the slowness of the proceedings. The disappointment is compounded by the fact that the men's chorus in the famous "Strike for the Shores of Dover" cue is omitted entirely. This is the emotional high point of the entire score, and this omission is inexplicable. The music, sans the chorus, simply sounds wrong. It is wonderful to see film music getting more respect from the classical world, instead of being viewed with suspicion as some kind of odd bastard-child genre. It's too bad the recording itself can't be more successful. For a better Korngold experience, seek out Charles Gerhard's amazing recordings with the National Philharmonic, which are still the best of this repertoire despite their having been recorded almost thirty years ago.

I've also listened several times to Howard Shore's increasingly amazing score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. What an amazing work this is. In a recent interview in Film Score Monthly Shore talked at length about the operatic nature of his work, and it really is true. He uses the leitmotif style of composition to amazing effect, weaving motifs together in a tapestry that is thrilling, moving, and cohesive. My only quibble is that the CD, by necessity, omits much of the score. This work needs a release similar to the "Ultimate Edition" of Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace that came out a few years back: every note, in film order. (A particularly nice touch is that on the CD, the track titles are -- for the most part -- the names of Tolkien's actual chapters. I like that kind of attention to detail.)

What a night of skating that was!! Congratulations to the new Gold Medalist, Sarah Hughes, whose free skate last night was absolutely perfect -- and what is more, it was completely electrifying in a way that I haven't seen anyone skate since Brian Boitano's unforgettable performance in Calgary in 1988. She owned the ice in a way that no other skater last night did -- and I have to think that she and Sasha Cohen will be strong favorites for 2006.

As for Michelle Kwan, she was lucky to even get the bronze in a performance shocking in its tightness. I had a feeling all week that she wouldn't end up taking Gold, but I didn't think it would be because she slipped on one jump entirely, two-footed the landings on others, and generally looked stiff. I figured she would simply be beaten by Irina Slutskaya, her athletic better, and in a way she was -- but Slutskaya's program, while slightly better executed than Kwan's (no outright slips), was still stiff and bloodless. Only one skater last night really took flight and glided across the ice with the same kind of charisma and skill that put one in mind of greats like Yamaguchi, Witt, Hamill and Fleming. That skater was Sarah Hughes.

(And ptoooooie!!! on the Russians for lodging a formal protest about the finish, apparently a sour-grapes bit of sniveling along the lines of "You gave two medals in Pairs, so we want one for the Ladies". This was simply not a case like the Pairs, where the lesser performance was awarded the Gold. And lest anyone think I'm simply a North American-biased observer, the Men's Gold was rightly awarded to Yagudin, who in my eyes was almost as electrifying as Hughes.)

Spring training has begun, and with every year that goes by without a plan put in place for revenue sharing and a salary cap I care less and less. Major League Baseball is a complete and utter mess. (My team, the Pirates, opened a new stadium last year and then proceeded to lose 100 games.) This is the worst time of year for sports: football is over, baseball isn't going yet, the NBA and hockey are not interesting until the playoffs (if even then), and I've never liked March Madness. Thank God for the Winter Olympics.

Things that make me feel old, #453: Watching the Olympic athletes, in interviews, say things like "I decided I wanted to be a skater/skier/bobsledder/whatever when I was a little kid watching the Games in Albertville." I was 21 and in college during the Games in Albertville.....

Parents: If you're looking for a movie to watch with the kids, and you're tired of Disney and the assorted non-Disney Disney clones that clog the video store shelves, here's a movie to find: My Neighbor Totoro. I watched this last night with my own daughter (she's two-and-a-half) and it met with her sign of approval: she demanded to watch it again today. This anime production is just wonderful. The story of a father and his two young daughters who move to a country house near some woods (the mother is in the hospital with an illness that is never disclosed) is told in wonderful, real touches. The film treats its characters with respect, children and adult alike; no one ever acts mean or stupid merely to advance the plot -- in fact, no one in the film is ever really mean or stupid at all. It is also loaded with wonderful touches. At one point, the girls are waiting out a rainstorm by huddling under a Shinto shrine when the boy next door -- whose only expression seems to be the faces he makes at the older of the two sisters -- comes by. He gives the girls his umbrella, allowing them to get home dry, and walks off through the rain back to his own house. Moments later we see him being yelled at by his mother for losing another umbrella, but like any boy his age he can't take the easy way out and tell his mother what he did with it, so he tells her he lost it and accepts the punishment. Ten-year-old boys really do act like that.

Of course, the film involves magical beings who live in the nearby woods; these beings are presented matter-of-factly, as another part of the landscape; they are neither horrors or mysteries that become the entire focus of the film. The Totoro is a wonderfully realized being, and the cat-bus has to be seen to be believed. The animation may seem rough to people accustomed to Disney smoothness, but the details of each frame are perfect and true. The music, by Joe Hisaishi, is by turns movingly beautiful and delightfully childlike. This is a movie that finds wonder in the sound made by rain dropping on an umbrella. If you know anyone who doesn't love My Neighbor Totoro, take their pulse or turn them toward the light.

I'm a bit concerned about Michelle Kwan's chances of winning the Gold in the long program. Yes, she is the best female skater in the world right now, but what's got me concerned is the degree to which skating has become jump-focused, which will play into Irina Slutskaya's strengths. She's the athletic jumper, whereas Kwan is the graceful skater with impeccable lines, flawless spins, and wonderful artistry. Here's hoping, though. Go Michelle!!!

(BTW, I would almost be willing to bet money that by the 2010 Winter Games some male skater will attempt a Quintuple jump in competition. That seems to be the natural evolution.)

Read this week: Harlan Ellison's classic SF story, "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (reprinted in Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century). Orson Scott Card's introductory note calls the story "a Kafkaesque parable about the dangers of individuality in a conformist society". I didn't read it that way; I saw the story as a cautionary tale about the futility of attempting to create a society where everything is controlled and where nothing is left to any kind of chance. The story's ending suggests to me that although the society's apparent cause for concern has been eliminated, a seed of sorts has been planted. A crack has been formed in the edifice of the story's world; now all that remains to happen is for water to get in there, freeze, and melt; water, freeze and melt; water, freeze and melt....

What to do with the gaping hole left in lower Manhattan following the 9-11 attacks has been a vigorous discussion since the initial shock wore off. Some have suggested rebuilding the towers, only this time adding height so they are again the tallest buildings in the world; some have suggested shorter towers; Roger Ebert suggested turning the whole site into green space with trees and grass and places for quiet contemplation. Just about everyone agrees that there needs to be some kind of monument to those lost on that horrible day. One particularly unique suggestion for a monument can be found here. It is two long piers that would be built out into New York Harbor; each would be the exact length of one of the towers, separated into sections demarking the corresponding floors, and the whole thing would bear the names of those who died. What I want to know is: would this design somehow inhibit boat traffic in New York Harbor? Sixteen hundred feet is a lot of pier.

Why I hate The Practice, reason number 342: Did the denouement of last night's episode, the so-called "shocking moment" at the end, really come as a surprise to anybody? This is the kind of plot twist that David E. Kelley has been spinning for years. I only watched the last ten minutes or so of the episode (since I can't stand the show and normally avoid it like the plague, but at that moment whatever was on the Olympics was boring so I channel-flipped a bit) and I saw the surprise event coming a mile away. I won't spoil it here, but in a Kelley series a disgraced person putting his/her briefcase on the conference table can mean only one thing....

Both King of the Hill and The Simpsons last night had gags that involved the Olympic Torch being accidentally extinguished, and both depicted the five Olympic rings upside down, probably for trademark reasons. I wonder if this was planned. Anyway, if the Futurama writers end up being let go as seems might very well happen (FOX doesn't like the series, for some reason, and insists on giving it shabby treatment) maybe they can just be brought over to The Simpsons, which could use some writing help. The show is still good, but nowhere near the pinacles it once hit (and it came perilously close to jumping the shark when Maud Flanders was bumped off). FOX's treatment of Futurama puts me in mind of something Jon Lovitz said on Letterman when his FOX show, The Critic, was canceled: "FOX. They should spell it with a 'u'."

Why one should never go to Borders without extra pennies in one's pocket: Christopher Moore's new book, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, is out. And I didn't have enough on me to pick it up. Ah well....there is always next week.

Last week I saw Disney's Beauty and the Beast in its new IMAX version. I was a bit apprehensive, because I've read that IMAX films have to be edited differently because the images are so huge; compositions that are fine on a normal-sized screen become disorienting when expanded to occupy the entire visual range. Happily, this did not seem to be the case except in the action sequences at the end of the film. The final fight between the Beast and Gaston is a bit hard on the eyes with its quick cuts and jolts (it doesn't help that the sequence takes place outside in the middle of a violent thunderstorm). But other than that, the film is still wonderful and still loaded with the magic that made it the only animated feature ever nominated for Best Picture. I don't think that Disney has told a love story that was more tender or heartfelt before or since; the supporting characters are wonderfully realized; and the IMAX presentation makes the musical numbers -- already one of the film's towering strengths -- all the greater. Most notable are the "Be Our Guest" sequence with its Busby Berkley staging and the film's title number, sung movingly by Angela Lansbury and animated with romantic wonder. And there is a new number, apparently recorded for the original film but never animated until now: an ensemble piece called "Human Again", in which all of the castle-servants-turned-household-objects dream of that wonderful day when the castle's curse will finally be ended.

The most remarkable thing about the IMAX presentation of Beauty and the Beast, to me, was that the larger image allows the Monet-like construction of the backgrounds to be seen in all their glory, with landscapes dappled with color in the finest Impressionistic manner. This can even be seen in a comedic scene where Gaston falls into a mud puddle, the water of which turns out on closer examination to be delicately colored where lesser animators might have gone with uniform brown.

The film was preceded by a preview of next year's Disney IMAX release, The Lion King. (Actually, it wasn't a preview per se but rather that film's opening "Circle of Life" sequence in its entirety.) I will be interested to see how that film's African landscapes translate to the new format.

Roger Ebert's latest addition to his biweekly series, "The Great Movies", is a very good one indeed: "Say Anything", which is probably the greatest adolescent love story ever filmed. And now I remember that it's been years since I saw it....read what Ebert has to say about the film here.

As a longtime James Bond devotee, I've been enjoying ABC's broadcasts of the Bond films on Saturday nights lately. Tonight's entry was "Thunderball", a film about which I've always had mixed feelings. The opening act takes too long to develop, with Bond happening upon intrigue at some British health spa. Of course, the intrigue has to do with the eventual scheme being run by SPECTRE, and Bond is sent to the Bahamas to follow up on a lead (which happens to involve a beautiful woman, of course) and the plot finally gets moving. But even then the story takes its own sweet time in developing; for a plot that involves a countdown until two stolen nuclear bombs will be detonated in a major city, the film unfolds at an uncertain pace, and the sense of urgency never really takes hold. And then, we get to the third act where the thing finally grinds to a stop. We are then treated to thirty or forty minutes of Bond swimming around underwater, a big battle between the good guys and the SPECTRE forces, and finally a fight to the death with the villain on the bridge of a yacht that is speeding out of control through a series of reefs. All that sounds like it should move along at a brisk, tense pace -- but sadly it doesn't. The climax of a Bond film should never be boring, and this one is. John Barry's music can't even get things going, which is really saying something. Barry's music singlehandedly saved "Goldfinger", during the interminable sequence where Pussy Galore's pilots take to the air to disperse poison gas over Fort Knox. Sadly, in "Thunderball", the pace of the film was beyond Barry's considerable powers.

Interestingly, for legal reasons an associate of Ian Fleming's actually owned the rights to the plot of "Thunderball", and it was thus that "Never Say Never Again" -- which tells the same story -- was made in 1983. The interesting part is that the later film tells the same story much better than the original, which might make "Never Say Never Again" the only remake in history actually superior to its original.

Next week's ABC Bond film is "You Only Live Twice", which I'm looking forward to because I haven't seen it in years. I remember it being a pretty fun film, despite the fact that Donald Pleasance is by far the worst of the three Blofelds. We'll see.

Current reading: A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing. This is a play that I saw performed way back when I was a freshman in college (1989, to be precise). The story involves two men, a Russian and an American, who are both arms negotiators in Geneva, Switzerland during the Cold War. When I saw the play performed, it was just a month or two before the Berlin Wall came down and the German Reunification began; at that time the Soviet Union still existed. I wondered, when I found a copy of the play in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, if the work would still seem relevant given the decade that has passed since the Cold War ended. Now that I've read it, I realize that while the specific issues referenced in the play no longer exist, the greater issues -- war and our sick fascination with it -- are still as present as ever, especially now that we are apparently at war with not even a nation but with a concept (terrorism).

In the play, the Russian (Botvinnik) is a glib man who seems to take nothing seriously, constantly ribbing his American counterpart (Honeyman) for his inability to talk about anything other than arms agreements and weapons levels and verification schemes and the like. The two men walk into the woods during a break one day and sit on a bench, whereupon Botvinnik launches one of many attempts to get Honeyman to talk about something frivolous. Honeyman (and, by extension, the audience) initially sees Botvinnik as unfocused, but as the play progresses it becomes clear that Botvinnik is actually deeply cynical about the degree to which either of the superpowers wants peace at all. Both countries, he says, claim to want peace but put pathetically little effort into the pursuit of peace -- because, "Without nuclear weapons our empires would no longer be empires. They would simply be countries among other countries....a rich, powerful Canada and an enormous, distended Poland." Honeyman, of course, is deeply idealistic and protests: "Mankind truly does hate war." Botvinnik's response to this statement is the single line from this play that has stuck with me in all the thirteen years since I saw it, and the line that most made me want to read it when I found it on those library stacks:

"If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us and only two soldiers."

Powerful stuff, that. It's a fine, fine play. Seek it out if you can. I'm fairly certain it is out of print, but then, that's what libraries are for.

As much as I love Buffalo, a major failing of the city is the lack of a Chinatown and a good dim sum restaurant. Dim sum, for those who haven't discovered it yet, is a kind of Chinese brunch where servers push carts around the dining room, stopping at each table to offer diners their choice of various delights -- steamed dumplings filled with all manner of things, small shrimp dishes, wonderful soups, and -- if you are brave -- chicken feet. (They're rather like a chicken wing with much smaller bones.) You sit at your table, drinking tea, awaiting the arrival of the next cart. When it arrives, you select an item or two -- or three or four -- and then your server marks your check accordingly, per item served. It's a beautiful way to try things you might normally be unwilling to tackle in the form of a larger entree at the local Chinese takeout (assuming they offer these delicacies at all), and -- even better -- dim sum tends to be cheap. Each time I've had dim sum (in Boston and Toronto), I've eaten until I was positively stuffed and at none of those meals did I spend more than twenty dollars. If you're the type of person who is unafraid to sample new things, then give dim sum a try. If, however, you're one of those people who eats four or five different things and only those, week in and week out, then dim sum probably isn't for you.

So, the Canadians have their gold medals. The sharing of the gold, between them and the Russians who were originally awarded it, seems to me to be the only tenable outcome of this whole affair -- at least as far as these participants go. It will be much more interesting to see what changes are made in the future regarding the judging of figure skating, which has for years been dominated by croneyism, log-rolling, and mutual-back-scratching. As for the actual skaters involved in this dispute, the Russians should not be stripped of their medals as they had nothing at all to do with the backroom-dealing that evidently resulted in their being awarded in the first place. It is bad enough that, for all time, when one looks up the results of the 2002 Winter Olympics competition in Pairs Figure Skating in some almanac, one will find two asterisked pairs. An accomplishment accompanied by an asterisk is somehow tainted, requiring as it does the inevitable explanation of the abnormal circumstances that give rise to the imposition of the asterisk in the first place. Sale and Pelletier are happy now, and they always will be, but I can't help but wonder if they won't always feel that on some level their medal experience isn't as special as it should be. They didn't get to hear "O Canada" whilst standing on the top level of the podium; instead they got five days of grueling interviews, statements, and finally a press conference. As for the Russians, they will forever endure the widespread belief that their medals weren't really earned. The asterisk next to the 2002 entry in the future World Almanacs will loom large. An asterisk is not an insignificant punctuation mark. Just ask Roger Maris.

Why "Byzantium's Shores"? Well, for one thing it just sounds exotic to my ear, five syllables which strike me as fairly melodious.

But more importantly, Byzantium was a place where east and west met along with new and old; it was a city which looked backward to the fallen glories of Rome and forward to the eventual rebirth of the continent that lay to its west. It seems a good fit, then, to cite such a place to name this space where I shall explore my own tastes -- tastes which range wildly from the techno music of Tangerine Dream to the symphonies of Mozart, from the abstracts of Jackson Pollack to the English pastorals of John Constable, from the magnificent verse of Shakespeare to the punching comedic prose of Christopher Moore. And then, of course, there is that wonderful poem by Yeats, as well as the wondrous fictional Byzantium that appears in Guy Gavriel Kay's The Sarantine Mosaic.

And then, the final word: "Shores". A journey can both begin and end at a shore, from either the land or the sea. No matter which direction one is traveling, a shore marks some kind of terminus.

(It helps, of course, that whilst grappling for a title for this place I glanced over at my bookshelf and spotted Stephen R. Lawhead's book Byzantium. Serendipity, as ever, plays such a crucial role in design.)

A screaming comes across the sky....

Somewhere, in strange light, a mind conceives....

In a hole in a ground, there lived a hobbit....

Call me Ishmael....

(....as I cannot think up my own wonderful starting sentence for this experiment in Net babble, the least I can do is pilfer some from the best. Let the wine flow and the words fly!)