strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
« October 2003 | Main | December 2003 »
Nov 27 03: thanks
We’re at Tom and Genevieve’s house in Ithaca today. We drove up early early this morning in a borrowed truck, with 10 boxes of comic books (9 long and 1 short, which means somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 issues) to store in the basement. When the rest of them—the ones that have been living in a garage in California—arrive, I’ll census the lot of them and then give them to Cornell. More on that some other time.
Today’s feasting was divine. T&G are lovely company and superlative cooks. The streets are quiet. There are happy dogs. I adore this town.
Wherever you are, I hope you are able to count your blessings with someone you love.
Nov 20 03: frell me dead.
Okay, for those of you who need one—and you know who you are—here’s another supremely dorky reason to be happy.
The show’s producers (The Jim Henson Company, et al.) are doing a miniseries which will (a) finally resolve the unspeakable cliffhanger with which the final episode ended, plus a few other unquiet plotlines; and (b) serve as a showcase for the show with which they can make a renewed play for a new home.
It’s unbelievable, but true. We mounted the biggest, loudest, most shamelessly down-and-dirty-desperate-for-attention bring-back-the-show campaign in the history of fandom, and it seems to have paid off. We took a show beloved by critics and fans, a show cruelly cancelled by its primary network, and brought it back. We sent letters. We raised money to buy television time to air home-made commercials. We phoned, faxed, and wrote to every potential new home we could think of. We thanked sponsors. We sent crackers. We put DVD box sets in Navy Liberty Centers all over the planet. We showed up en masse at Jay Leno tapings. We sent brassieres. (Yes, really. Long story.) We found allies in the media. We organized conventions. I personally did the geekiest thing I have ever done—right, go on, get it out of your systems, I’ll wait—and stood in a picket line out in front of the SciFi Channel offices for a couple of hours many months back.
And what do you know? It worked. Truth be told, I was well on the periphery of the activity described above. I actually gave up hope a good while ago. But more indomitable (or ‘obsessive,’ take your pick) spirits than I kept up the pressure.
My hats are off to those who did so much of the work. We—and by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you’—made some history. Thanks, gang. Even if these last four episodes are the last ones they make, it’s still a pretty damn cool thing to have pulled off.
Nov 19 03: clinging to joy
I’m not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one. It seems clear that queers-are-a-threat-to-American-values is going to be used as a wedge issue by the President’s campaign—a distraction which, they hope, will drive people to vote for him despite his administration’s appalling pattern of abuses of the public trust. I’m worried that it’s going to work, and that as a result of the ‘mandate’ they’ll claim from its success I’ll get to spend the next several years seeing my rights as a citizen of this nation assaulted and my worth as a human questioned.
Nonetheless, I’m having trouble sustaining my sense of outrage today, because last night I got the LOTR:TTT extended edition and it makes my geeky little heart so happy. I guess I should be ashamed, but I can’t help it.
for your consideration
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
November 18, 2003
President Defends Sanctity of Marriage
Statement by the President
November 18, 2003
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT
Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today’s decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Nov 16 03: mea culpa
I have now seen The Matrix Revolutions twice. And while it’s not as bad as some of the reactions to it had led me to expect…well, it’s still not good enough to see a second time. They made me go.
If you go see it with zero expectations, it’s worth seeing, especially if you’re a narrative junkie like myself and just need to know how the damn story ends. But it’s still not good. Why? It takes forever to get moving, and then it still finds ways to lose its momentum even while it’s dishing out a whole lot of Kung-Fu Fighting And Stuff Blowing Up. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. It has the insufferable Merovingian in it, but gives his vastly more interesting wife Persephone exactly one line. It puts a couple of interesting ideas on the table and fails utterly to capitalize on them. (For instance: Sati, not Neo, is Smith’s opposite number. Where Smith’s purposeless existence fills him with existential horror—and the desire to fill the universe with himself to escape its loneliness—Sati is content to explore her world and discover what it has to offer. Discuss.) (And why the hell did they introduce Sati with such fanfare if they weren’t going to do anything with her? Pointless. Sheesh.) Morpheus still gets one god-awful portentious soliloquy, although we should be glad there was only the one. Too many minor characters, many of them either annoying or stolen from other movies (I’m looking at you, Vasquez) or both. One-dimensional leads. Keanu. Yet another dance-hall sequence. The Lobby Shootout redux.
Oy. I’m stopping right there. You get the idea. Positives include Mary Alice bravely jumping into the Oracle’s shoes—still the warmest character in the series—and Hugo Weaving, whose scene-chewing performance includes the Evil Laugh to end all evil laughs. Shout-out also to Ian Bliss, who spends his entire screen-time doing a spookily good Hugo Weaving impression.
Now that I think of it, this movie would probably benefit from the IMAX effect in the same way that its predecessor did. If you must see it—and you know who you are—then try to see it on the really big screen. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.
turkey dancing
Happy virtual Thanksgiving to one and all. Paul and I spent the afternoon out on Long Island with my sister and her husband and their delicious child, my fabulous niece, that delightful sugar pumpkin, the one and onliest Avery. We won’t be able to spend the holiday together this year, so we had a family dinner today instead, with turkey and all the trimmings. Everyone in the room either had The Cold or was freshly over it, so we did not fear the microbe.
At right: Avery in her Hallowe’en costume, age precisely six months. It’s ever so slightly out of date, but what the hell. It’s just too damn cute not to share with the world.
I fully intend to write books with which to entertain this child. I humbly and publicly ask the muses to help me out. She deserves good stuff, because she’s my niece.
Nov 13 03: à la mode
Well, yes, that “I’m finally coming down with the cold that has been ravaging New York for weeks” feeling is awful, especially when one has been deluding oneself that one’s combination of regular exercise and positive thinking has kept one safe. That particular delusion has this smug little frisson that can be such a comfort. On the other hand, the cold is terribly fashionable. And what am I if not fashionable?
Ugh. Phlegmy, that’s what. Phlegmy, sore-throated, and tired. Again I say unto thee: ugh.
Nov 11 03: Elevenses
Armistice Day is here and already approaching its end. There was a parade here in the city, which I didn’t see. For my part, my most profound grasp of WWI came from reading Mark Helprin’s achingly beautiful A Soldier of the Great War, which if you haven’t read then by all means you should. The life of a single man, and an examination of the deformities imposed upon our world by that first great spasm of continent-spanning violence that in the end was not the War to End All Wars we hoped it would be.
We remember, and we learn; but we remember too dimly, and we learn too slowly. You who have paid the price, forgive us; and then from your beds of cold wisdom, from your graves marked or un-, tucked away singly or in heaps, smack some sense into our feeble heads.
(Links aplenty to timely sources of beauty and horror, and the usual insight by many more wise and eloquent than myself, to be found at Making Light.)
[crickets]
Wow, that’s embarassing. Okay, note to self: more frequent blogging. I don’t think I’ve ever been so derelict in my ramblings that the page has gone totally blank before.
Jeez. If I wasn’t desperately in need of some sleep I’d fill y’all in right now. For instance—Bob got married this weekend, in front of 400 people and everything. The moon turned the color of blood. Nobody was surprised.
More soon.
Nov 2 03: Hello, Dalí
So Paul and I had an extra rehearsal this evening with the JCU. We’re bearing down on our performance of Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony a week from tomorrow. It’s a monster of a piece, technically quite demanding. Bernstein wrote it in the 60s, apparently wrestling with a burning desire to be accepted by “serious” musical types, which at the time meant that he had to compose twelve-tone stuff. You can hear his enthusiasm for twelve-tone composition wax and wane throughout the piece—sometimes we’re hip-deep in chaotic atonality and other times we’re whanging out these crazy syncopated jazzy things that suggest West Side Story and the Chichester Psalms. Oh, and it’s in Hebrew and Aramaic, and it has a really overblown poetic narrator shouting at God (or rather G-d) in English, and it goes at about mach seven. It took us (the chorus) ages to even start to appreciate the thing, so I can’t imagine what it’s like to sit in an audience and hear it for the first time. I think you’d need to be an afficionado of either Bernstein or of late-20th-century musicology to really get much out of it. If you’re neither of these things you’d do better to start with the Chichester Psalms.
At the end of the Kaddish this evening we did some work on the music we’ll be doing in December. It’s at Lincoln Center again, this time as the backup chorus to übersoprano Deborah Voigt. Where the Kaddish is high-concept and difficult, this stuff is…well, the word ‘camp’ springs to mind. Big sweeping Hollywoody show-choir arrangements of all your holiday favorites. Many of them fused into an extended medley that uses “Carol of the Bells” as its thematic backbone. It has the obligatory “ding! dong! ding! dong!” passages plus these fabulous sweeping glissandi, up and down ooooOOOOOOoooooOOOOOOoooo…whoa. It is proving rather difficult to take the rehearsals seriously, which is bad because this is, you know, Deborah Voigt already and we can’t really allow ourselves to screw it up.
Of course, it would be easier if this little gem weren’t buried in our score:
from We Need a Little ChristmasFor we need a little Christmas
Right this very minute,
Candles in the window,
Carol’s at the spinnet…
…Carol?
We in the tenor section find this rather amusing. While Mrs. Brady was raised as a contender, we agreed that really it could only be talking about Miss Channing. Every time it goes by the tenor section kind of goes to pieces, visions of big blond wigs and sequined dresses dancing in our heads. And who knew she could play? (Furthermore, they misspelled ‘spinet,’ but not everybody finds that sort of thing as noteworthy as I do.)
Anyway, that’s the news from New York. If I didn’t have rehearsals and things to break the craziness down into manageable bites I’d be completely freaked out by how quickly the year is passing. Wherever you are, I hope you’re doing fine.