Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones -- An Exercise in Structure, Part I.

"A word here about movie dialogue: It is among the least important parts of a screenplay. Sure, intelligent talk is always better than dumb stuff. And sure, dialogue matters more in some kinds of movies -- wit comedies, such as As Good As It Gets, or intelligent dramas -- than in others. But for the most part, the public and critics have come to believe that screenplays are dialogue.

Wrong. If movies are story, and they are, then screenplays are structure."

-William Goldman, "Rocking the Boat", The Big Picture: "Who Killed Hollywood?" and Other Essays.

::

I saw Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones twice on opening day, and once more this afternoon. Now that I've seen it three times, I am wondering if I saw the same film that a lot of the critics saw -- because I love this movie.

I kept trying to spot the horrible dialogue, only to find occasionally clunky lines (Obi Wan does affix phrases like "my very young apprentice" to his sentences way too much when addressing Anakin Skywalker, for example) amidst some genuinely memorable lines (Jango Fett's "I'm just a simple man trying to make my way in the Universe" being a prime example). I kept on the lookout for wooden acting by Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen, but I kept discovering that while their line deliveries tend to the muted side, they emote fully with their eyes and body language. I searched in vain for the soul-less special effects, and kept running instead into stunning visuals that were amazing in their detail, the immense amounts of thought that went into the creation of this world being writ large on the screen for all to see. I keep wondering: why on Earth is this movie getting so much bad press? Is it because of lingering feelings from The Phantom Menace (which I do not share, having actually liked that film)? Is it a more jaded populace, now very accustomed to fantasy on the silver screen but still unacquainted for the most part with the history of fantasy and the tropes that drive it? (For how many people was Peter Jackson's film their first encounter with The Lord of the Rings?) Or is it that we've come to expect films to tell their story entirely through dialogue? I suspect the latter is at work here: dialogue is expected these days to carry the story, but George Lucas's movies have always been about structure. The William Goldman quote above holds the key.

Consider structure from the standpoint of a couple of classic films. Casablanca is filled to the brim with great dialogue; in fact, anyone who wants to learn about writing dialogue had damned well better know Casablanca. But structure is at its core. Note that we don't know at the film's beginning just why Rick Blaine is so bitter and cynical, and we still don't even when Ilsa Lund comes into his cafe. We only know that she is a part of it, a suspicion which is later borne out via flashback. Then the film returns to its present day and plays out straightforwardly. Simple construction, but it has the effect that Casablanca is a much better film after you've already seen it once. Only when we already know what Rick and Ilsa shared in pre-war Paris can we know just what a visceral blow it is to him when he sees her in the cafe; only then can we understand his anger at hearing "As Time Goes By" played on Sam's piano. The film practically demands a second viewing, and by then we are forever under its spell. We can never forget Casablanca, and it's all because of structure.

Or, take a more recent example, noted by Goldman in the quoted essay: Titanic. Here is a film that was also excoriated by critics for lousy dialogue, especially in its "love story" scenes (much like Attack of the Clones). But how does structure fit in? First, there is the story's framing device: it's not just a tale about two lovers on a doomed ship, but there is also the mystery of just what happened to the diamond -- a device that justifies the story's being told through flashback, and connects the long-ago story with the one playing out now. But secondly, there is James Cameron's masterstroke: early in the film he has a secondary character explain in some detail just what happened as the Titanic went down -- what physically happens to the ship from the moment it hits the iceberg. At the time, it appears to be just an excuse to show off some nifty digital animation of the ship's sinking -- but when that point is actually reached in the film and as the characters make their harrowing escape from the bowls of the liner, we know exactly what is going on and what the next threat to their lives will be, before they know it. Cameron has already done the heavy lifting of exposition, so there is never a moment where, say, Jack turns to Rose and says something like "Oh my God, the ship's hull can't withstand the pressure being put on it! The ship will break in two any minute now!" We already know this, so Cameron is able to keep the cords of tension humming. That's structure, and it is great storytelling, and it has nothing at all to do with dialogue.

By far the biggest knock on Attack of the Clones from the critics is its dialogue. Roger Ebert, for example, says that the film doesn't contain a single memorable line. (In this I think he's wrong. There is Jango Fett's line quoted above; the charming bit where Obi Wan turns aside a would-be drug pusher; Anakin's chilling "They're animals, and I slaughtered them like animals"; Obi Wan's sarcastic "Good job" after Anakin's failed rescue attempt. And there are more.) Of course, Star Wars films have never been known for their dialogue. It's worth noting that what is probably the best single line in the entire Star Wars saga, Han Solo's reply of "I know" to Princess Leia after she's professed her love for him just before he's carbon-frozen in The Empire Strikes Back, was actually an ad-lib by Harrison Ford because the line in the script -- "Remember that, 'cause I'll be back" -- just wasn't working. (And for those who point to The Empire Strikes Back with longing as an example of the Good Old Days when there was "great dialogue" in these films, I defy you to watch the scene in Luke's hospital room without cringing.) The Star Wars films work because of structure, and it is on that basis that we should judge Attack of the Clones.

(To be concluded tomorrow....)

Tonight while watching the series finale of The X-Files, I checked my e-mail during a commercial break and found the most amusing piece of Spam that I've ever seen. This thing is just priceless, and I've decided to reproduce it below. The fact that it showed up while I was watching TXF is kind of eerie....

--------------------

If you are a time traveler or alien and or in procession of alien
or government technology I need your help! My case is truly
genuine! I seek to work with someone who is of a kind nature,
someone I can call my savior as well as a friend.

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed by evil beings!!
I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age back to 4.
I am in great danger and need this immediately!
I want to work with you in any way possible.

I am aware of two types of time travel one in physical form and
the other in energy form where a snapshot of your brain is taken using
either the dimensional warp or the brain snapshot device and then sends your
consciousness back through time to part with your younger self. I'm almost
certain the dimensional warp would be the safest and best
solution. Please explain how safe and what your method involves.

I have a time machine now, but it has limited abilities and is
useless without a vortex. If you can provide information on how to create vortex generator or where I can get some of the blue or red glowing moon crystals this would also be helpful. I am however concerned with the high level of
radiation these crystals give off, if you could provide a shielding this would be
helpful. I believe the vortex would have to be east-west polarized,
North-south polarized vortexes are used for cross-dimensional time
travel only. Also, I know about the three dimension 4 bit (CODE) our universe is written in. If you are one of the very few beings who can edit this code, or know the passwords which can be spoken over a vortex, please reply!

--------------------

(WARNING: If you think you have the information that this person so desperately needs, please DO NOT send it to me!!!)

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later: George Lucas has been accused of employing racial stereotypes in Attack of the Clones. I didn't read the linked article all the way through (it's from The Detroit News), but I was struck by a couple of incredibly idiotic statements, both from the same person. First, that Jango Fett is obviously Latino. That's interesting, considering that the actor who plays him is a New Zealander -- which is unsurprising, given that Lucas made the movie in Australia. The casting of Temuera Morrison as Jango Fett is simply an example of using local talent. (The Empire Strikes Back was filmed in England, so take a wild guess as to what nationality was tapped when the character of Boba Fett was originally cast in 1980. And by the way, another person quoted in the article sees the Fetts as surrogate Arabs. I'm confused here. Are Arabs and Latinos the same thing?) The film's anti-Latino sentiments are apparently further revealed by one of the planet names used: Kamino, which is similar in sound to an actual Spanish word (camino, meaning "road" or "I walk"). Ummmmm....OK. The word also sounds like Tamino, which is the name of the hero in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. Maybe Lucas is spreading anti-Mozartean propaganda. This charge is reminiscent of the flap a few years back when some people were offended by a Washington, DC government official who dared use the word "niggardly" in a sentence, despite the fact that the word does not mean anything remotely similar to the ugly epithet to which it sounds similar.

This same person, a woman named Martina Guzman who is apparently some kind of political operative in Michigan, isn't content to stop with an imagined slur against Latinos: "Jimmy Smits had all of two lines in the whole movie, and Samuel Jackson had like five. Then there's the bad guy." In the first place, Jimmy Smits played Senator Bail Organa, a character who is only introduced in this film and will have a larger role to play in Episode III when he becomes the adoptive father to Anakin and Amidala's daughter Leia. (And interestingly, Senator Organa was actually played by a white actor in The Phantom Menace, but those scenes were cut entirely and the role recast for Attack of the Clones.) As for Guzman's second statement, "Samuel Jackson had like five", this statement makes me wonder if she even saw the film at all. Jackson's character, Mace Windu, probably has the most screen time in the film after the leads (Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, and Natalie Portman). He's a high-profile character, and Guzman's utterance here is simply stupid and ignorant. And finally, she says "Then there's the bad guy". I wonder just what she is talking about here. Is she still referring to Jango Fett? He's not even the film's main villain; that honor belongs to Count Dooku, played by Christopher Lee -- a white man.

I'm amazed that the people quoted in this article actually view the world this way, and I'm further amazed that in a city the size of Detroit, the local newspaper couldn't come up with anything more newsworthy than this. A pox on the houses of all involved.

A couple of Star Wars related shortcuts: Sunday's Entertainment section in The Buffalo News featured an article on George Lucas and one on Hayden Christensen.

Here is a transcript of the conversation about Star Wars Episode II from the Ebert&Roeper TV show. Nothing against Roeper, but it's times like this that I really miss Gene Siskel.

Harry Knowles of AICN stunned a lot of people a few months back when he posted a review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, based on a secret screening of a work print that he managed to attend. Now he has written a full review of the finished film, which can be found here. It is a highly positive review, and it says a lot of things that I agree with. Knowles's analysis of the film in terms of the classic structure of the James Bond films is particularly interesting. Check it out.

(My own thoughts on the film will be appearing in this space sometime this weekend. Be warned, as I plan to indulge all of my instincts toward long-windedness.)

(UPDATE: AICN seems to be having server troubles the last day or two, making access to the site and its contents spotty. Keep trying.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





'Nuff said.

The mid-May update of SFSite is up, with new reviews and columns.

On the recommendation of a friend, I read The Descent by Jeff Long. This novel concerns the discovery that the Earth is somewhat hollow, and living down there is an entire race of beings whose bodily features are frighteningly similar to those we assign to the classical image of demons. Many myths have some basis in some kind of historical fact; what Long has done here is to try to envision the historical fact that would have given rise to our religious ideas of Hell and its minions.

I found this novel to be one of the more amazing reads I've had in a while, but it took me all the way to the end to make that decision. Along the way, the book moves in a lot of different directions, and the resulting lack of focus is somewhat maddening. Examining the religious implications of such a discovery alone could make for an entire thick novel; so, too, could the story of the intrepid explorers who are sent to explore it. Ditto the war that breaks out briefly between the surface-dwellers and the hadals (the name given to the subterranean race, homo hadalis). Also throw in linguistic theory -- the book's main character is a nun who has spent her life searching for the lost "mother language" -- and Jules Verne homages and the standard not-all-that-benevolent-billionaire who drives most stories like this, and you have one of the densest books, in terms of things that are happening, that I've ever encountered.

All this plot, though, means that characterization takes a back seat. Of all the characters in the book, only two -- maybe three -- are really sharply drawn. The remainder are ciphers, basically filling in obligatory parts that must be played for the plot to work. This overdensity of plot combined with the broad-line characterization combines to make the book hard to really sink one's teeth into.

The book's ending, though, is nothing short of amazing. All of the various plotlines come together in the space of about one hundred twenty pages. This is one of those books where nothing makes sense until the reader is done with the entire work and able to sit back and see how it all fits together. This may be a book that improves on successive readings, when the events in the front portion of the work take on a different light given knowledge of what is to come.

The Descent is by turns horror, adventure novel, love story, philosophical novel, religious novel, and science fiction. It doesn't start out being a page-turner, but it becomes one.

It is occasionally desirable to be able to non-verbally convey jaded boredom, such as that one might feel in one of those utterly useless, Dilbert-style staff meetings. What is needed in these cases is a way of saying, short of sleeping or notepad-doodling, "I'm here because I'm required to be, but I am well aware that nothing of great importance is being discussed." For those craving such a skill, check out this site, devoted to the fine art of pen-spinning. (Thanks to Sean, himself a noted pen-spinner, for this one.)

There are times when one must eschew poetic descriptors, and go instead straight for the onomatopoeia. That said:

EEEWWWWWWWW!!!!!

I believe this to be the worst teaser for a film that I have ever seen. It's for the new Bond film, Die Another Day, and it does absolutely nothing to make me look forward to the movie. And I'm a longtime James Bond fan. It doesn't help that the thing is presented in a window that is roughly the size of a large postage stamp, but a Bond trailer should look like a BOND trailer, not just a generic espionage-thriller.

In his review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Roger Ebert noted that he found many of the film's visual effects to be hazy and ill-defined, as he was seeing a film print taken from a digital master. Now he has seen the film in an actual digital projection, and he writes this article about the difference.

Many Star Wars fans were surprised by Ebert's lukewarm review of the new film, given his until-now unflagging support of the franchise -- he is the by far the most prominent film critic to give The Phantom Menace a positive review, for example. But to experienced readers of Ebert, his opinions now don't come as much of a surprise. Ebert has been fairly skeptical of digital cinema for several years now; he has written numerous articles detailing his belief that film is still preferable because the image is more organic. (The argument is reminiscent of the audiophiles who steadfastedly maintain that a pristine vinyl LP sounds better than a compact disc.) He has also been giving films that are not quite up to par passing marks for inventive visuals; it was on this basis that he gave probably the only positive review that Speed 2: Cruise Control received. It was on the basis of visuals that he recommended The Phantom Menace, saying: "As for the bad rap about the characters--hey, I've seen space operas that put their emphasis on human personalities and relationships. They're called Star Trek movies. Give me transparent underwater cities and vast hollow senatorial spheres any day." If he was truly disappointed by the look of Attack of the Clones, how could he give it any other review than the one he did?

(And he panned Spiderman for the EXACT same reason.)

Donn Esmonde, a regular columnist for The Buffalo New, wrote this article on today's vote by the Seneca Nation of Indians on whether to pursue casinos in downtown Buffalo and Niagara Falls. His article is a bit alarmist, but that's fine by me. I'd love to see the city figure out a plan for economic development that doesn't include gambling venues.

(UPDATE: The vote by the Seneca Nation approved the gambling pact with the State of New York, by approximately one hundred votes. Casinos, here we come....)

Newsweek has an interesting article online about the future of high-rise skyscrapers.

And thus did the Bash Brothers pass into baseball memory, there to dwell forever with the likes of the Gashouse Gang and "Tinker to Evers to Chance". Jose Canseco has retired. I always rather liked Canseco, with his "Yeah, I'm a big-time sports star and I'm just going to have fun with it". You have to like any ballplayer who, while playing outfield, goes to run down a deep fly ball at the warning track and has the ball bounce off his head and over the fence for a home run.

Canseco is one of those borderline players who will appear on many Hall of Fame ballots before he's eventually admitted, if at all. I suspect he'll eventually get in, but it may take him years into his "Veterans Committee" eligibility. Anyway, best of luck to him.

I supported the recording industry's legal fights against Napster and other such services, not so much for the good of the record companies but for the artists. No one will claim that the artists have been fairly treated by the record companies; in fact, their track record in that regard is two steps removed from indentured servitude. But I failed to see the logic, argued heatedly by Napster proponents, that since record companies so often treated the artists unfairly viz. the compensation they paid the artists for their efforts, it was therefore an improvement to switch to a system whereby there was no compensation whatsoever for the artists, whose work was distributed without their consent. I called this the "Robin Hood argument", and I never bought it; instead, I suspected ulterior motives on the part of the pro-Napsterites -- and my suspicions were in part born out by the tone many of them took in their argumentation. They usually ended up sounding like nothing so much as pale imitators of the Veruca Salt character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: "Daddy, I want my free music now!!!"

But now, just a year and a half later, the recording industry has shot itself in the foot with their clumsy attempts at copy-protecting CDs. They are terrified of piracy, which is made absurdly easy by the prevalence of CD-R drives. The problem, though, is that their copy-protection schemes frequently render CDs unplayable in some players, and in any event are easily circumvented. The whole enterprise is glaringly disrespectful of the idea of fair use, and is in all likelihood ridiculously futile anyway. The record companies need desperately to get on the bandwagon of new technology, or they will soon be extinct.

A good article on the quandaries facing the recording industry appears in the current issue of Time, and also appears online here. (ASIDE: for some unintentional hilarity, check out the article's accompanying photograph of Morpheus founder Steve Griffin. His picture is taken sitting down, and behind him is a wall-hanging hung in such a way that the picture makes it appear as if Griffin is wearing some kind of gonzo Ancient Egyptian headdress.) A sidebar article features a guy who created a site to let music consumers pay artists directly for the music they download, eliminating the record company as middle man entirely. That article is here.

(WARNING: RANT AHEAD!)

George Lucas has been blamed for a lot of things. The most common charge against him, mainly by film critics, is that he paved the way for Hollywood's ever-increasing obsession with huge blockbusters at the expense of quality films. The road leading to Armageddon, Godzilla, and The Scorpion King begins, they say, with Star Wars. This may be partly true, but to blame Lucas for that seems harsh. After all, Lucas had absolutely no idea how Star Wars would be received when it opened, and in any event the first real huge blockbuster came two years earlier, with Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Additionally, one need only watch AMC for a week to see that the idea that cinema used to produce films the caliber of Casablanca on a regular basis is false. There have always been bad movies; we merely remember the hits and forget the misses. So George Lucas isn't totally to blame for the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood these days. But there is one thing that I will blame on George Lucas: the evolution of the lunatic fanboy. Witness this AICN review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

I have not yet seen the movie. I will be seeing it on opening day, three days from now. Thus, I do not challenge this person's view of the film, and even if after seeing it I disagree entirely, I still won't challenge it. Opinions are tricky things, not usually governed by reason (although reason can and should be brought to bear). A cut of meat one man wouldn't use to make shoe leather is another man's beef brisket, and we all would do well to remember that. This reviewer was decidedly unimpressed with Attack of the Clones. Fair enough.

But not fair enough is the vitriol with which he attacks the film and, both implicity and explicitly, George Lucas. It is no secret that many (if not most) filmgoers were disappointed with The Phantom Menace (I am one of the few who liked it; we are sufficiently low in number that we have petitioned EPA Administrator Christie Whitman for "Endangered Species" status). But the sheer hatred that film seems to engender is utterly mystifying to me. Consider the third paragraph of the review in question, and try while reading it to not hear in your innermost ear, as I did, the voice of William Shatner intoning "Get a life....it's just a movie....". I find it somewhat disturbing that some people would form such angry hatred for a Star Wars movie, and I would be bothered enough by this review if that paragraph stopped just after the first sentence. But then the reviewer goes on to intone the single most repugnant phrase I've ever heard from any sector of fandom:

"George Lucas raped my childhood."

I barely know where to start. First, I am baffled by the idea of one's childhood as something that can be harmed retroactively, as if we didn't learn until we were thirty that Christopher Reeve was buoyed by wires in Superman. When I learned that Errol Flynn, star of many films that I watched and loved when I was a kid, was a drunk and a rascal to such a degree that he basically drank himself to death, did learning that somehow harm the experiences I had enjoyed years before? If a heretofore unknown JRR Tolkien manuscript, detailing the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, comes to light and turns out to be a complete dud, has Tolkien somehow done injury to my original experience of reading The Lord of the Rings? The reviewer says, "Something died in me -- and George Lucas killed it. Bastard." No, he didn't. He did nothing except fail to live up to one person's expectations, and to call Lucas a "bastard" on that basis makes me wonder what we would say if George Lucas eventually was revealed to be the Zodiac Killer. (And of course, encountering such name-calling just three paragraphs into a lengthy review doesn't bode well for what one would hope to be a piece of rational criticism.)

But in any event, the truly disgusting thing about the whole thing is the idea that one's childhood could be "raped" by something so trivial as a movie. Sorry, folks. If you don't like this Star Wars movie, the last one, or any of them, fine. But let's reserve the overwrought hyperbole for people who really have a right to use it -- the children of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, or Bosnia, for example. Or how about all those children who lost one or both parents on 11 September 2001. Their childhoods were raped. Anyone who wishes to claim that their childhood was raped by a Star Wars movie should be aware: they are still in their childhood, and really should grow up.

I am not certain if this is a joke or not. Either way, I find it rather depressing.

After my rant the other day on the City of Buffalo and its haphazard pursuit of casino gambling, there comes a bit of good news in the form of possible economic development that is real and not just one more example of a reeling metropolis grasping at whatever it can graze with its bony, weak fingers. Buffalo is trying to get in on what is supposed to be the Next Big High-Tech Thing: bioinformatics. (I'm not entirely sure what "bioinformatics" is, but I know it involves advanced biological research and supercomputing.) In their pursuit of this endeavor, city and state officials have come up with a lot of money to jumpstart the project, beginning a research center and, according to this article from The Buffalo News, getting the right guy to head the whole project. I'm still a bit wary that this will be the next "silver bullet"; Buffalo leaders tend to focus exclusively on one large-scale project at a time, ignoring nearly everything else (an attitude which, just for one example, very nearly led to the demolition of a Buffalo house that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). The Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics may be the first step on a long and properous road that could give Buffalo some much-needed credibility in the high-tech world, but there are so many other things that need to happen for this city to finally move out of the doldrums. Anyway, here's hoping.

A couple of book notes:

:: Neil Gaiman's American Gods is now available in mass-market paperback.

:: A few weeks ago I reviewed longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas's book Front Row at the White House. She has a new book out: Thanks For the Memories, Mr. President. This is a "wit-and-wisdom" book, with a chapter devoted to each President that Thomas has covered in her long tenure at the White House. It mostly presents presidential humor, but there are some sober moments as well. This book is a very quick read, being basically a collection of anecdotes -- I polished it off in a single evening. Nevertheless, it's quite entertaining.

Is there anything wrong with getting misty-eyed over the death of a fictional character? I think not.


Godspeed, Dr. Greene.

The West Wing is ramping up toward the season finale, and is doing so very effectively. Last season's end-of-year build-up was dominated by a single storyline, President Bartlett's disclosure of the multiple sclerosis which he had carefully concealed during his first campaign. This year, though, Aaron Sorkin is weaving together a number of plots. The President's reelection campaign is heating up, there is increasing tension regarding a possible terrorist threat, and someone is stalking CJ Cregg. Sorkin is an amazing writer, and I'm sure he'll have this pot boiling quite nicely by the time the season finale airs.

My other favorite NBC show is on Wednesday nights. It's not Law and Order. It's Ed, a consistently smart and literate show about a former big-city lawyer who has returned to the small Ohio town where he grew up. With its quirky cast, Ed is reminiscent of Northern Exposure, without that show's flights of fantasy. The season finale of Ed is next week, and I'm a bit apprehensive. The show has been developing a love triangle of sorts between Ed, his dream-woman Carol Vescey, and high school principal Dennis Martino. The problem with this triangle is that Dennis, who should be the odd man out, is actually a very likable character, and his romance with Carol has been handled with aplomb by the show's writers. This should lead to a bittersweet ending, which is precisely the type of ending that can be really screwed up. Stay tuned.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Olmec Stone Head, Mexico. (Photograph by Santha Faiia)

One of my guilty pleasures (actually, sometimes I wonder if all of my pleasures are guilty, but that's for another post) is gonzo theories of human origins, the kind of theories that might be breathlessly expounded by Agent Mulder on The X-Files. Some of the most enjoyable such theories are currently found in the books of Graham Hancock, a British writer who has hypothesized that a great human civilization, technological in nature, flourished more than fifteen thousand years ago before the most recent Ice Age. This, needless to say, flies in the face of all established anthropological and archaeological theory. The Olmec stone head pictured above is one of many that can be found throughout Central America. What interests Hancock in this case is the stone head's Negroid features, when there is no evidence at all of any Negroid dispersion from Africa to the Americas (before they were helped along by Caucasian slave-traders). This is just one piece of "evidence" for Hancock's theories, which can be found in such books as Fingerprints of the Gods, The Message of the Sphinx, and Heaven's Mirror. An earlier book by Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, proposed an intriguing theory of where the Ark of the Covenant currently rests. The photograph links to Hancock's official website.

(I am actually very skeptical of theories such as Hancock's; my recommendation of his books should not be taken as an endorsement of his hypotheses. I will recommend some good books on skepticism in a future post.)

In possible violation of my "No Politics" policy, I'm going to rant a minute or two about my city of Buffalo, which has reached what I perceive to be a crossroads.

An upcoming vote by the Seneca Nation of Indians will decide if casinos are built in the downtown areas of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, NY, as well as a third in some as-yet undetermined location in Western New York outside of those two cities. The idea, of course, is that the new casinos will rejuvenate the moribund downtown sections of these two cities by drawing large numbers of people from the surrounding regions to spend (and lose) money. This will be just the latest in a long line of silver-bullet-style projects at which local politicians have grasped, each time promising that this is the one that will lift Buffalo out of the doldrums (the boom of the 90s completely bypassed Buffalo, a city that is still reeling from the losses of thousands of manufacturing jobs twenty years ago), each time lining up for state aid to get the job done (whilst teachers and school aides -- and never administrators -- are laid off and fire department precincts are closed), and each time chanting that wonderful mantra, "If we build it, they will come" (note to people who insist on using this cliche: It was a MOVIE, and the line is "If YOU build it, HE will come", and the "he" refers to the main character's father, not an unending flock of deep-pocketed tourists who theoretically could find nothing better to do than gamble). Casinos are a bad bet for any number of reasons. Of course there is the fear that gambling addiction will jump in this city, as well as prostitution; but what galls me are the claims that casinos will generate spinoff economic development as restaurants are opened nearby, shops move in, et cetera. Clearly people who say these kinds of things have never been in a real casino, where shops and restaurants and entertainment are all there under the same roof as the gambling machinery. The entire premise behind a casino operation is, "Get them in the door and then keep them here". The benefit to other local businesses is negligible, if not downright nonexistent.

In the last fifteen years, Buffalo has built new sports venues, each time insisting that they will stimulate downtown business development. The ballpark is lovely and I really am glad they built it, but how a minor-league baseball stadium that is only open at most ninety times a year is supposed to jumpstart local business investment is beyond me. Buffalo has also built a light rail system which did, in fact, seem like a good idea -- until they only built it along one street, and they stopped it virtually on the border of Amherst, Buffalo's richest suburb. There was a big ceremony last year announcing the construction of a big new office building in downtown Buffalo, but that project's other shoe dropped recently when the company behind that project -- Adelphia Cable -- suffered a calamitous drop in its stock value. And while cities like Cleveland, Baltimore, and Milwaukee have in the last ten years or so rebuilt their historical waterfront districts into exciting hubs of small business, entertainment, and residential activity, Buffalo's waterfront development is still mostly on the drawing board. One other weird thing about Buffalo that I have noticed: our tourist literature always seems to point out, as a "selling point", our proximity to places like Toronto, Montreal, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and NYC. You really have to wonder about a city that sells itself on the basis of how short a drive it is to someplace else.

There are hopeful signs on the horizon for Buffalo. The state has committed large amounts of money to help launch a state-of-the-art Center for Bioinformatics, which should -- if the cards are played right, which is by no means a lock -- help Buffalo get involved in what many say will be the next boom-sector in the high tech economy. Also, developers are currently renovating a number of buildings in downtown Buffalo into residential buildings, which seems to imply that the powers-that-be are at least starting to recognize that a city's vitality lies not in how many people come there for a few hours at a time, but in how vibrant a community actually lives there. The County Legislature, usually quite willing to let the City of Buffalo twist in the wind, is actually scrambling to find some money to at least partially restore the city's arts funding, which was cut off after the latest round of deficits. (Deficits are actually par for the course, but the State of New York is usually good to cover the difference -- at least in years when the State Government isn't preoccupied with other financial demands, such as rebuilding the state's other large city which was the unfortunate victim of a terrorist attack last September.) Buffalo has an arts community that is larger and more vibrant than one would expect in a city this size. It seems to me that if a "silver bullet" exists, it is far more likely to involve the arts than sports or casinos. One striking statistic that I recently read in Artvoice is that while the HSBC Arena, the home of the Buffalo Sabres of the NHL, is open perhaps 120 nights a year for various events, the Shea's Buffalo Theatre (the city's largest theatre, where the largest traveling Broadway productions are mounted) is open over 220 nights a year. And whereas the Arena is ringed by parking lots, Shea's is surrounded by restaurants and is within walking distance of Chippewa Street, downtown Buffalo's "party area". Any politician -- indeed, any person at all -- who can claim that the arts are a luxury to be dispensed with in times of fiscal hardship is simply unaware of reality.

From my perspective, the next five to ten years will make or break the City of Buffalo. At the end of that time it will either be a bustling community and a destination in its own right, or it will be a mere waystation on the way from Boston to Chicago on I-90.

POETICAL EXCURSION #2

Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

----------

This poem has stuck in my mind for years, ever since a high school English teacher forced it on us. I suppose the most memorable thing about the poem, especially to a young reader, is the visceral image with which the poem closes. But what makes it more remarkable, upon rereading it, is the juxtaposition of fetal imagery ("From my mother's sleep I fell", "I hunched in its belly") with that of war ("I woke to black flak and nightmare fighters"). The poem's first line is the most interesting, with its implication that the narrator -- still a child, really -- exists for no other reason than to die in the belly of an airplane. "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State", Jarrell writes -- implying that we exist for the State, to live or die by its whims. The poem contrasts maternal instincts with cold, impersonal duty to Our Nation, and does so with a shocking image that is hard to dislodge. And all that in five lines.

While channel-surfing I happened on that Seventy-Five Years of NBC special, only tuning in long enough to hear a comedy bit by Mr. T, of all people. And to my amazement, it was hilarious. He presented a list of "Fools I've Pitied", in keeping with his trademark line "I pity the fool". He mentioned how he pitied the guy who cancelled Baywatch; he mentioned Jennifer Aniston who -- like Mr. T -- had her talent overlooked in favor of her haircut; and he pitied Screech from Saved By The Bell, because "We all pitied Screech". The line that got the biggest laugh from me, though, was "I pity the East Wing. I mean, does anybody know what they do in the East Wing?"

I've been watching The X-Files the last few weeks out of some sense of obligation. I've loved the show since I got hooked, midway through the third season, but this year has been one dull and boring episode after another. The feeling that the show was definitely moving toward some specific plot resolution, that The Truth really was Out There, seemed to dissipate entirely after the birth of Scully's child and Mulder's exit. The mytharc just seemed to grind on in lifeless fashion, and the Monster-Of-The-Week episodes were dull primarily because of the show's new dynamic. The X-Files didn't necessarily fall apart merely because David Duchovny left, but the resulting lack of chemistry between Agents Doggett and Reyes coupled with the lack of a clearly defined new role for Scully only made the dificiencies in the increasingly-lukewarm scripts all the more glaring. Had the show been announced for a tenth season, I likely would have abandoned ship entirely. But since the series is ending, I'm watching all of the remaining episodes (two left, as of this writing). And even still, with the clear knowledge that the show will soon be over, the recent episodes have not been very good. There was a wrap-up episode to the cancelled Lone Gunmen spinoff, which contrived an amazingly unbelievable scenario in which the paranoid trio give their lives for the world, or some such thing. Then there was an episode revolving around Scully's baby and its supernatural powers which ended with the child's powers being neutralized forever -- but then Scully, realizing that her child will always be a target, gives the child up for adoption. This was so stunningly out of character for Scully that when it was over I stared at the end credits in disbelief, made doubly strong by the fact that the episode was written by Chris Carter, the one person who should know Scully better than this. My expectations for the show have fallen incredibly low, so imagine my surprise when tonight's episode proved to be one of the best the series has done in the last few years.

The episode involved the nine-year-old murder of Agent Doggett's son, a crime which has (until now) gone unsolved. A young FBI cadet who apparently has some kind of ability to see things in case files (and autopsies) that are missed provides Doggett with some uncannily accurate information on another case, the success of which prompts Doggett to show his case information on his son's murder to the seemingly clairvoyant cadet. But the cadet already knows of the Doggett case -- he wallpapers his apartment with photographs of unsolved crimes, Doggett's son being one of the ones on the wall -- and in a fairly spooky moment he tells Doggett that the two cases are not unrelated.

This episode was remarkably well crafted, with nicely building suspense and a final resolution that is moving and sad. The story kept me guessing -- is the cadet what he claims to be? is there more to the mobster who keeps avoiding prosecution? is the Assistant Director on the take? -- and the story's supernatural element is very muted, much more so than usual for an X-Files episode. The unbelievable plot developments that have been the mainstay of X-Files scripts for this entire season were nowhere in evidence. It's nice to see that the folks at Ten Thirteen have not completely forgotten how to construct a story.

The episode is carried, though, on the strength of Robert Patrick's acting. John Doggett's cynicism, the way he can't allow himself to believe in anything, is well established by Patrick, so as the episode progresses and Doggett goes more and more out on that limb we can strongly sense his strong emotions and his powerful desire to keep them in check. Patrick gets a lot in this episode to really sink his teeth into, and he does so beautifully. I wonder if it was frustrating for Patrick to get this script, read it, and realize that only now that there are a handful of episodes left before he's back on the Hollywood unemployment line does he get some material that he can really use to delve into his character. I never disliked the John Doggett character; he was sufficiently different from Mulder and the chemistry was sufficiently different between him and Scully that I was always fine with him. But there was still a sense that Doggett wasn't entirely thought out, as if he were thrown together by Chris Carter and the Ten Thirteen writers after it became clear that Duchovny was really leaving the show. This episode dispelled all that, and as such it should have been done last year.

So, as The X-Files prepares to end at last, a little hope is renewed. Maybe, just maybe, The Truth really is Out There. We'll know for sure in two weeks.

I've added a permanent link at left to ScoreLand, a film music review site maintained by a man whose thoughts I enjoy greatly. (Just don't stare for too long at those spinning CDs that are at the bottom of each review. Trust me on this point.)

Good news for anyone who loves (or is at least interested in) the Golden Age of Science Fiction: the third volume of The SFWA Grand Masters is out in paperback. The SFWA began awarding its Grand Master award in the 1970s as a "lifetime achievement" award for the greatest of SF writers. (Additional stipulations were that the award could be given no more than six times in any decade, and it could only be given to writers who were alive at the time of the award.)

Each of these books collects a representative handful of stories by five of the Grand Masters. Those presented in the new volume are Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl (Pohl is also the series editor), Damon Knight (who sadly passed away just last month), A. E. Van Vogt, and Jack Vance. This is a terriffic series of books, well-conceived and lovingly assembled by editor Pohl.

Evaluating a new John Williams filmscore is always fairly difficult, even for one where there is so much familiarity as there is with his already-extant Star Wars scores. Even with four previous films and filmscores to go on, it's still somewhat hard to judge Williams's score to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This is not purely due to the film having not been released yet; my strongly held belief (which is only getting stronger as the years go by) is that one should not hesitate to listen to film music even for films one has not seen. Good film music must be good music first, and good music by definition can stand alone.

The difficulty with a Williams score comes in its presentation. Williams has always tended to rearrange his score albums, taking cues apart and pairing them with other cues to form single tracks that (theoretically) are more listenable than the cues as originally written. Williams has continued to do this, even as the trend in filmscore releases in recent years has trended very strongly toward presenting the music purely in film order. Williams even did it with his initial score CD to The Phantom Menace -- for example, the track entitled "Qui Gon's Noble End" starts with the "dark fanfare" when the landing bay doors part, revealing Darth Maul; then the track presents the action music that accompanied the escape from Naboo, about an hour earlier in the film, before finally returning to the music that accompanies, well, Qui Gon's noble end. Good listening? Yes, but not exactly conducive to really judging Williams's effort. That CD was then supplanted a year and a half later by the release of a 2-CD set of the same score, which was labeled "The Ultimate Edition" and did present the entire score in film order. (Actually, it presented the score exactly in film order, which caused some consternation amongst filmscore afficionados because George Lucas had re-edited the film's final act after Williams had completed scoring, resulting in a few odd-sounding edits in the music.) Further, the Phantom Menace album -- while a delight -- also omitted a number of the score's best cues, including the entirety of the delicate music from the scene where young Anakin gains his freedom and says goodbye to his mother. Assuming that Attack of the Clones has roughly as much music as The Phantom Menace did (just about every scene in the earlier film was scored), and assuming that reports of the new film's running time -- roughly 130-140 minutes -- are accurate, then the new CD has probably omitted at least 45 minutes of score. It will be interesting to see what, exactly, has been left out.

What to make, then, of what we have been presented of Williams's Attack of the Clones score? I have read a number of reviews of it, some positive and some not. The dividing line seems to be how the reviewer in question responds to the score's "Love Theme", since it is by far the most dominant theme on the CD -- we hear it, either in part or in whole, on nearly every track. Critics who find the "Love Theme" gorgeous tend to give the score high marks; those who find it lacking (especially in comparison to the great "Love Themes" from the classic Episodes IV, V and VI) tend to rank this score lower. And me? I fall, quite solidly, in the former camp.

The "Love Theme from Attack of the Clones" is, to my ears, absolutely and utterly gorgeous. It is passionate, lyrical, and sad. It is perhaps the darkest Love Theme that Williams has ever created, which is certainly fitting given what we know of how the romance of Anakin and Amidala eventually plays out. The earlier Love Themes in the series -- most notably, that from The Empire Strikes Back -- are made to sound at times sweet and romantic (Han and Leia's first kiss, for example) or sweeping and desperate (the carbon-freezing scene, frex). By contrast, the Clones theme is almost unremittingly desperate, even when it is played in fairly innocent fashion. Williams seems to be pointing the way to the story's inevitable turn toward ever darker events. Particularly notable is how, in the concert version of the Love Theme, Williams incorporates a central section where the theme is interpolated with more rhythmic and darkly martial-sounding music. This treatment seems to note how, even as Anakin pursues his love, he is moving toward becoming what Obi Wan will later call "more machine than man". I find this treatment fascinating. The Love Theme, as noted earlier, crops up very often throughout this CD, never more remarkably than in the final track, when Williams segues from a full-bore statement of his famous "Imperial March" to the Love Theme before going to the End Credits music. It's impossible to ignore the dramatic implications of juxtaposing Vader's Theme (even though Vader doesn't really exist yet) and Anakin's Love Theme. And Williams does it once more, at the very end of the End Credits, when as the Love Theme fades away he quotes his theme for Anakin from The Phantom Menace before giving a very haunting last statement of the Imperial March.

After the Love Theme, the music that will likely make or break a person's opinion of this score is the third track, "Zam the Assassin and the Chase Through Coruscant". This is a pure action track, eleven minutes long, and it is almost entirely a study in rhythm with just about no melodic material whatsoever. It's a fascinating sound, especially a central portion that contains nothing but percussion (which sounds like some of the more frenetic percussion stuff one would encounter at a Drum and Bugle Corps competition). It is in this track that Williams employs an electric guitar, which riffs on a very brief motif two or three times for about twenty seconds altogether. This use of guitar -- an instrument that almost no one would expect in a Star Wars score -- has been the basis of a large amount of the discussion of this score around the Web, but hate it or love it the guitar isn't very loud (in fact, it's almost a background instrument) and it's only heard for a total of twenty seconds or so, out of an eleven-minute cue. What interests me more about "Zam the Assassin" is that it marks a point that Williams has reached that is about as far away from the action writing that he used to do, action writing that -- while always incredibly exciting -- was always melodically based. My heart still races when I listen to his "Battle of Yavin" track from A New Hope, especially the part toward the end when Luke's Theme is heard over steadily thumbing timpani and ever rising chords (as Luke is all alone in the Death Star trench, with Vader closing in on him). Williams also wrote melodically-based action cues for The Phantom Menace, so perhaps this is experimental on his part given that the chase in question is in a very urban setting, something which we haven't seen in a Star Wars film yet. I'm undecided as to whether or not I like "Zam the Assassin and the Chase Through Coruscant". But I'm certainly getting to know it well as I consider it.

Of course, a Star Wars score should contain a number of the earlier themes from the series, and Attack of the Clones doesn't disappoint. The "Force Theme" is quite prominent, and we also hear "Yoda's Theme" (mostly in a beautiful track called "Yoda and the Younglings"). There is also a big quote from "Duel of the Fates" (from The Phantom Menace), and in the final track we hear -- as noted above -- a big statement of the Imperial March, probably to signal that the Republic has irrevocably turned the corner toward becoming the Empire. The score opens with the Star Wars Main Title, in the same incarnation in which it has been heard in the other four films. Some commentators have complained about this; some think that the instrumentation should be changed to reflect the darker tone of Episode II (and Episode III to come); and some have even suggested that the Main Title be eliminated from the CD entirely to make room for another "new" track or two. Personally, I can't fathom a Star Wars score CD not starting with that theme, but that's only my opinion.

So, here we have a score that is in my estimation worthy of the tradition in which it stands. Time will tell if it will become as classic a work as its forebears. But then, that's the case with everything, isn't it?

(A couple of extra points: First, the versions of the Attack of the Clones score CD that are being sold at Target stores contain a bonus hidden track, an action cue apparently called "The Conveyor Belt". Secondly, the documentation annoyingly does not include track times. Finally -- and this is a piddling complaint, but it's my blog -- the picture on the CD itself is terrible. It's a muddy shot of Slave One flying through an asteroid field, firing its blasters. If I hadn't seen the film's previews, though, I would have absolutely no idea just what the picture is. I liked the picture of Naboo from the Phantom Menace CD a lot more than this one.)

Ugh. Due to a posting mishap that I haven't yet figured out how to correct, my attribution on the Image of the Week was snipped. Anyway, I found the image on the Daily Bleat at lileks.com. Click on the image to read the well-written article.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





I found this picture on the Daily Bleat at No comments:

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The May update at SFSite is up. Check it out. (This is one of the finest general-SF websites in existence.)

The PBS show American Masters just did a documentary on one of my personal heroes, dancer-actor-director-choreographer Gene Kelly. Any discussion of American dance in the 20th century must include Gene Kelly, whose athletic style formed a perfect counterpoint to the graceful moves of the other giant of his time, Fred Astaire. Kelly was involved in many fine, fine films, and Singin' In The Rain is generally considered to be the greatest of all American musicals. Gene Kelly is one of the few celebrities whose passing I truly mourned.

Some researchers are casting more doubt upon the Big Bang theory, in favor of a kind of cyclical universe not unlike that envisioned by some Eastern cosmologies. Read the MSN article here.

I have added a new permanent link to lileks.com, a fun site that is an interesting grab-bag of pop culture musings. The Daily Bleats there are particularly fun reading.

Blogger has been temperamental lately, hence the lack of fresh material. I'd complain, but then the service is free....

I finished Dean Koontz's novel Watchers yesterday. This is the first Koontz novel I've read, and he seems to have a definite grasp on how to manipulate emotions in the reader so as to heighten the suspense. His characters are well-drawn; the central two -- Travis and Nora -- are people we care about, and thus as they move into situations of increasing danger our involvement in the story grows.

The plot could be described, very loosely, as "ET: The Extra-Terrestrial meets The X-Files". It is not purely a horror novel, nor is it science fiction; it is really an interstitial work that contains elements of both. While hiking in the woods, Travis encounters a golden retriever that seems to be fleeing....something. Travis helps the dog (and the dog helps Travis, a reciprocity that really fuels the novel) and the two escape whatever is in the woods. The book is really a series of escapes and pursuits, with Travis and the dog rescuing Nora from a sexual assailant, all three fleeing the something in the woods, the something in the woods fleeing the NSA agents assigned to find it, and everyone being unaware of the psychotic hit-man who is tracking everyone. Add to all this government labs that are dabbling in things they shouldn't, peripheral Mafia involvement, and even a dash of Soviet intrigue (apparently the book is set pre-1989), and you have quite the potboiler.

The book's main flaws are that the love story between Travis and Nora take over, relegating a lot of the interesting side action to secondary importance. Also, the book's ending comes as a bit of a let-down; the confrontation that one expects between all of the story's participants is over surprisingly quickly (and, quite frankly, I expected matters to be settled rather differently -- one shouldn't put down a book like this and immediately say to oneself, "It should have ended this way...."). These faults aside, Watchers is an impressive page-turner.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Noblemen and their servants playing chess -- Miniature, Al Andalus, 13th century.





I don't have any information about this image other than the title. I selected it because it reminded me of one of my favorite books, The Lions of Al-Rassan by the brilliant Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay. (See the permanent link at left for more on Kay.) The book is set in a fantasy realm based on medieval Espana during the period when the Moors were pushed out of their main European stronghold, and it is a magnificent and heartbreaking novel.

When the Lion at his pleasure comes
To the watering place to drink, ah see!
See the lesser beasts of Al-Rassan
Scatter like blown leaves in autumn,
Like air-borne seedlings in the spring,
Like grey clouds that part to let the first star
Of the god shine down upon the earth.

-Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

(The picture links to a site of historical artworks.)

Political books II: Jeff Greenfield's Oh Waiter! One Order of Crow! is a highly entertaining read about a political event that seems so incredibly distant now: the disputed election of 2000. I actually read this book last fall, immediately after the attacks -- a bit of timing that made the book's subject matter seem shallower, less consequential, than perhaps it should. Greenfield's book is a description of how all of our election day systems came crashing to a halt on November 7, 2000 -- the media included. I remember sitting up until three o'clock that morning, watching Tim Russert scrawling electoral scenarios on a greaseboard; I remember all the machinations in Florida with all the hypocrisy on both sides; and most of all I remember a dull fall campaign that year between (as Greenfield puts it) "a candidate who spoke English to us as if it were our second language and a candidate who spoke English as if it were his second language." Political junkies should definitely read this one.

I just finished reading Joe Klein's book The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. The book is billed as an important work of political history, being the primary chronicle of Clinton's eight years in the White House, but in reality it is neither. It is a slight volume -- barely 220 pages of primary material -- and many topics are glossed over. The book is really an expansion of several magazine articles Klein wrote (primarily for The New Yorker) about the Clinton Administration, and it reads as such -- not a whole lot of corroboration, little rigorous journalism, a lot of breezy narrative. Still, the book serves a purpose well: it at least provides the outlines, in broad strokes, of the 42nd President. Klein's take is that Clinton is a man of extraordinary gifts and talents who, while accomplishing a great deal, never was able to really mold his achievements into greatness and who allowed his own personal failings to nearly derail him completely. Klein tells us a lot about the President, but ultimately the book still leaves Clinton as a somewhat foggy figure. A criticism that dogged Clinton from the time he entered the 1992 Presidential campaign is that one never could be sure just what he really believed, and after reading Klein's book that charge still stands as fairly accurate. (Particularly frightening is the fact Klein cites that the Clinton Administration spent more on polling than every previous administration combined. Many conservatives used to complain that Clinton governed by the public opinion poll, a charge that was not entirely without merit.) Those interested in the political history of the 1990s will find a good starting point here; but the truly definitive work on that decade is still in the offing.

The Buffalo Bills had a superb draft this year, grabbing a likely superstar for their long-underachieving offensive line in Mike Williams as their headliner. They also helped themselves in a number of other positions, but the biggest splash was their trade for former Patriots star quarterback Drew Bledsoe. When I heard of the trade rumors last week, I was ambivalent; for all the movement the Bills have made this offseason (they will go into the 2002 season much improved, on paper, over the 2001 edition), they are still in my estimation a year or two away from being truly competitive at a high level. It seemed odd to me for them to try to land a star quarterback who is in the final three years of a long-term contract -- precisely the years which are the most expensive, because that is how NFL teams structure their contracts these days. (The idea being, of course, to unload the player or get him to renegotiate before the team actually finds itself in the position of having to pay those huge dollars on the back end of the contracts.) Also, Bledsoe comes to the team having suffered a fairly serious injury last year (delivered by Jets mercenary-LB Mo Lewis, of course), making his acquisition at least slightly nerve-wracking. But the Bledsoe deal is done, and he's the quarterback, so of course I will now root strongly for his success here. (For the record, my take on the mercifully-completed Rob Johnson-Doug Flutie saga is this: They both stunk.)

(The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me -- my inner Oliver Stone, if you will -- wonders just how much connection exists between the Bills' desire to get the Bledsoe trade done and the fact that the initial five-year leases of the four-year old "club seats" at Ralph Wilson Stadium are due to expire at the end of next year. News of the Bledsoe deal brought about the spike in Bills season-ticket orders that the team brass were no doubt praying for.)

Gregg Easterbrook, the former writer of Slate's "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" column, has apparently gone to ESPN. He has written a typically excellent article about the recently-completed NFL Draft. Read it here.

Anyone who thinks that comics are a lightweight medium, best left to adolescent tales of absurdly-muscular heroes battling mutants or giant robots bent on destroying Earth or bald archvillains, need only look to Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned by Judd Winick to have that belief shattered. Winick, of course, first entered the public eye as a cast member on the third season of MTV's The Real World. This was the season set in San Francisco, and while it is mostly remembered for the fireworks involving that horrid roommate Puck, this book instead focuses on the friendship that developed between Winick and roommate Pedro Zamora, who already had AIDS during the show's filming and died from that disease's complications a short time after filming.

Winick writes about how, being a "bed-wetting liberal", he tried to put a brave face on the fact that he would be living with a person who was HIV-positive; and yet, when the time came he was still fearful of the prospect: "When I thought of living with someone who had HIV, I envisioned living with the AIDS virus walking around on two legs." This frank admission contains the theme of Winick's book: how he confronted those fears, dealt with those all-too-common stereotypes, and at the same time formed a deep and rewarding friendship. The book is not a collection of Real World anecdotes (although there are some of those), so those looking for an extension of the show's voyeuristic qualities will be disappointed. Winick's story begins before the show (and, he wisely informs us, so does Pedro's) and the story of their friendship goes on after the show was over -- and even well after Pedro Zamora's death. Pedro and Me is funny, sad, and moving. It is a testament to the potential of comics as a medium.

(Judd Winick is currently a writer and artist for DC Comics.)

At long, long last the Buffalo Bills have addressed the one area that has been their glaring weakness ever since the Super Bowl years ended: their offensive line. In today's NFL Draft, the Bills selected the gigantic Mike Williams (OT, University of Texas, 21 yrs old, 6' 5", 375 lbs) with the fourth pick overall. Williams should step right in and finally give the Bills someone who can block consistently, ending a frustrating pattern of rotating inadequate 4th-through-7th rounders that have been the mainstay of the Bills' line since Wil Wolford and Howard Ballard left. The Bills have made no effort to seriously upgrade their offensive line since 1994, when they selected Ruben Brown, despite their consistently disappointing running game and the alarming number of sacks given up each year (although this number dropped during Doug Flutie's two years as the starting QB, mainly because of his elusiveness and willingness to scramble). Of course, any draft pick can go belly up (Ryan Leaf, anyone?) but for now the Bills have done what they've needed to do. Now, hopefully they'll stop trying to get Drew Bledsoe and instead pick up a decent QB prospect in the second or third round; they also need to address a thin defensive line.

I have added two new permanent links: Alibris (a site for buying all those wonderful rare and out-of-print books that can't be found on Amazon), and Ralan.com (a very impressive site that lists just about every current market for SF, Fantasy, and Horror writing, along with rates and submission guidelines).

Click here to hear a remembrance of recently-deceased SF author (and Grand Master) Damon Knight, broadcast yesterday on NPR's show All Things Considered.

Just in time for the demise of Oprah's Book Club, author Robert James Waller has penned A Thousand Country Roads, a sequel-of-sorts to his blockbuster The Bridges of Madison County.

(As a still-unpublished writer, I am occasionally tortured by the thought that the closest I will ever come to literary success will be the fact that I attended college twenty miles away from where Waller lived, while he was writing Bridges....)

Spring in Buffalo: temperatures in the 70s this week have inspired the flowering trees in the region to blossom -- just in time for this weekend's 40 degree forecasted highs. (Oh well, at least we'll still be able to laugh at the rest of the country in July when everyone else is in the high 90s and we're still only in the 80s. 'Tis small consolation, but....)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

"Forest", by Alan Lee.



Alan Lee is one of the foremost fantasy artists of today. His most famous works are the paintings he did for the 60th Anniversary Edition of The Lord of the Rings. Lee's work formed the basis of some of the visual stylings used by director Peter Jackson in the current LOTR film trilogy. Lee has also done a lot of fine work that is not related to Tolkien; this is one example.

(Click on the picture for a biography of Lee, courtesy Terri Windling's Endicott Studio.)

An in-depth review of John Williams's score to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones has appeared on Filmtracks, one of the better film music sites (and one of the oldest). They give the review high marks, although they do say that it isn't quite as good as Williams's scores for the original trilogy, which are now classics of film scoring. Read the review here.

I don't often agree with Jeff Simon, media critic with The Buffalo News, but in his regular Tuesday column this week he pretty much nailed the impending closing of the Oprah Book Club on the head:

A real book lover, that woman, don't you think?
No? Well, you're not alone.

Read the rest of Simon's comments here.

It is a sad day for science fiction: the great writer (and founder of the SFWA) Damon Knight has died. Details are available at LOCUS.

"The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve."
-Damon Knight

Finished two books this weekend.

First was The Queen's Man: A Medieval Mystery by Sharon Kay Penman. I wanted to like this one more than I did. Penman is a noted writer of historical fiction, most (if not all) of which is set in the late Middle Ages during the time of the Plantagenets in England. Most of her books are quite long, which makes The Queen's Man something of a departure: it is actually quite brief, being a murder mystery set in and around London. Our hero, Justin de Quincy, witnesses the murder of a silversmith who just happens to be carrying a letter to the Queen (Eleanor of Aquitaine) about the whereabouts of King Richard, who has gone missing whilst on Crusade. Justin delivers the letter to the Queen, and she presses him into her service, charging him with identifying the silversmith's murderer and learning if he was killed for the contents of the letter.

This is an interesting set-up, and one expects a book filled with court politics and intrigue where people are never what they seem, and where the murder of a silversmith is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. We get some of that, but for the most part the book is more pedestrian. It is as if Penman couldn't quite decide which direction in which to go: was she telling that story of intrigue within House Plantagenet, or was she merely telling a traditional Agatha Christie-style murder mystery that happened to be set in medieval times? The book pulls in both directions, even at the end when the murderers and their motives are revealed. A resolution to a mystery like this should satisfy, and this one doesn't. Making matters slightly worse is that some of the intrigues uncovered are left unresolved, making clear that the book is intended to be the first in a series of Justin de Quincy's adventures (and, in fact, one sequel is already out: Cruel As The Grave).

Other plot threads are present for no apparent reason at all: at one point Justin acquires a stray dog as a companion, but the dog doesn't figure in the story at all, despite the pages Penman spends describing the episode. The silversmith's family, full of intrigues of its own, is delved into early in the novel but then left behind completely. And then there are certain aspects of the book that ring totally false: Penman is careful to use terms that were the vernacular of the time: phrases like "for certes" and words like "gaol" (instead of "jail"), but then she does things like have one character exclaim "That will be the day!" Maybe they really did use that phrase eight hundred years ago, but once a saying is used as a title for a Buddy Holly song, it probably shouldn't be employed in a historical novel. Also, I found it hard to believe that a baseborn commoner like Justin de Quincy could so easily gain audience with the Queen of England as he does early in the book. (I could be quite wrong on that point, however.) Reading The Queen's Man gave me a disjointed feeling; Penman's characters are well-drawn (especially Luke de Marston, an earthy undersheriff), but the details of the plot never come together into a cohesive whole.


The other book finished this week is Michael Moore's Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American. Moore, an author and filmmaker best known for the documentary Roger and Me, presents here a hodge-podge of angry liberalism. I expect that one's enjoyment of this will be largely dependent on the degree of sympathy to his viewpoints. I found it entertaining, although my main impression was in how odd it is to read political humor from six years ago. This was pre-Monica Lewinsky America, when Newt Gingrich was still a dominant figure in American politics, when George W. Bush was only a freshman governor less than halfway into his first term of office, and when Oklahoma City was still a fresh wound. There is even a chapter on the OJ Simpson trial, which had ended less than a year before the book came out. I did find a lot in Moore's book to agree with, but as per my avoidance-of-politics policy for this site, I will leave it at that.

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?