NPR’s Morning Edition featured an interview with film composer John Williams yesterday. Listen to it here.
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Just when I thought that ER was returning to something similar to its former glory, it showed some signs that all is still not well the other night. First, we get a cameo by Eriq La Salle. Nothing wrong there, as he is a fine actor and his character was central to the show for many years, but earlier this season we were given a Very Special Episode in which we were supposed to “say goodbye to Dr. Benton”. But, it turns out that La Salle’s contract wasn’t actually up; he still owed them some episodes — which I guess now they’re using up in strange fashion. It’s kind of like if the Denver Broncos called up John Elway next year and said, “You know, your last contract still had five games on it, so we’d appreciate it if you’d play those and then call it quits again.” Weird.
But worse, of course, is the fact that the show’s writers are obviously going to treat us to watching Dr. Greene’s downward spiral into death by brain tumor. In all honesty, I’ve seen enough drawn-out terminal-illness storylines on various TV shows that all I can do right now is yawn for this one. The best such storyline I’ve ever seen was a few years back on NYPDBlue, when Det. Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits) died of complications following a heart transplant. That storyline played out over just five episodes, the last of which was probably the best single death of a beloved character I’ve ever seen on TV — it was by turns harrowing, touching, and in the end heartbreaking as we watched Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) try to deal with his friend and partner’s impending passing. The five-episode story arc was just long enough to be involving and just short enough to be jolting as all such unexpected deaths should be; and the even better stroke of genius was that it was executed at the beginning of the TV season whereas many lesser shows would draw it out so that the death could occur during May sweeps, probably even the season finale, as ER seems to be doing. I have grave doubts (no pun intended) that the writers of ER are in the same league as David Milch, the great writer responsible for the NYPDBlue story.
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This week’s listening: The Music of COSMOS. Carl Sagan’s amazing PBS series Cosmos is a landmark in science television (and probably television in general). The show’s production values were remarkable, and the series holds up fairly well today, even though more than twenty years have passed since its making and the shifts in scientific knowledge that are inevitable. One of the show’s most successful facets was its use of music. The show drew from a very wide array of musical sources, from the classical repertoire to New Age electronica to ethnic folk music and so on. A soundtrack album was produced when the show originally aired in 1980, but as with so many soundtrack albums of that era it was incomplete. A 2-CD set of the soundtrack has now been released, and it is a wonderful listen. One would not necessarily expect something like this — basically a compilation recording — to work so well as a whole, but the musical selections are so well chosen that they seem to blend together organically into a compelling work of its own. The selections are occasionally bracketed by sounds of Planet Earth — thunderstorms, oceans, a rocket launch countdown, et cetera — which adds to the overall effect. What has been produced is a sort-of amalgam to the famous Voyager Record, whose creation was spurred by Carl Sagan in the first place.
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No reader of fantasy literature should be unfamiliar with the work of Lloyd Alexander, author of the classic Prydain Chronicles (based on Welsh mythology, particularly The Mabinogion) and other works based on the mythologies of other cultures. His books are children’s literature, but anyone who sees in that distinction some indication of “lesser quality” is a person who is not really interested in fine storytelling, but rather in intellectual pomposity. Harsh words, but there it is. Anyway, a happy occasion is the reissue this month of Alexander’s novel Westmark, the opening book in a trilogy set in a country called Westmark that is full of political intrigue and revolutionary fervor. The trilogy is only fantasy in that the story takes place in a make-believe locale, but there is no magic, no wizards, and no giant beasts; it’s more of a historical novel set in a place that never was. Westmark has been out of print for a number of years, and now it can be had again. Read it.
(Addendum: The WESTMARK reissue is part of the launch of Firebird, a new imprint by Penguin Books that is geared toward “excellence in fantasy and science fiction”. They are to be commended and supported in this endeavor. Godspeed, Firebird!!!)