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.