In the “Well, I suppose that’s progress” department: the error message that Blogger is displaying when publishing now reads, “We’re working on this.” Acknowledgment of a problem is, of course, the first step….
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Late summer is the time for Renaissance Faires and Medieval Festivals throughout the country. Nearly every state seems to have one, and they are almost always an amazing time. Yesterday the family and I attended the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, New York. Between the music and the food, the arts and the crafts, the shows and the activities, I’m not sure what was best about the thing. A cheerful “Huzzah!!!” to everyone involved with this year’s Festival, especially the actors involved in the new and improved joust that has been added this year. (Last year’s joust was mostly a demonstration; this one was a full-fledged act with three knights who hate each other and a storyline that was played out over two separate jousts and ended in an unforseen allusion to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which brought much rejoicing.) The only negative aspect of the day was the weather; it never rained but it was one of the most sweltering days of the year. Next year we are planning to attend in costume.
(And speaking of costumes: you don’t really appreciate how ugly today’s fashions are until you see women at one of these festivals dressed in Renaissance and medieval garb. How beautiful some of them were!)
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— Ron Borges, MSNBC Sports Commentator.
Occasionally someone in the media will say or write something so amazing at odds with reality, so colossally stupid, that I must wonder if they meant it more as satire than as a presentation of a seriously held belief. Generally I find this to be the case of anything from the mouth or pen of Ann Coulter, but this week it’s Ron Borges who appears to have either taken leave of his senses or merely decided to opine about something of which he is completely ignorant.
His article questions whether Lance Armstrong’s fourth consecutive victory in the Tour de France is a feat of athleticism and if Armstrong is an athlete at all. Borges’s argument basically boils down to this: “He rides a bike, which anybody can do. Athletes do things that not everybody can do.” This is sheer, total nonsense. The fact that I can walk down the street to the park and shoot baskets does not imply that Michael Jordan is not an athlete; nor does that fact that I can join a bunch of friends for a pick-up game of basketball mean that Barry Bonds is not an athlete. Borges writes, “Athletes, for my money, must do more with their bodies than pump their legs up and down.” OK, fair enough. Then athletes must also do more with their bodies than swing a piece of wood at a ball, put on a pair of gloves and try to pound someone else into unconsciousness, skate around on some ice after a disc of hardened rubber, or toss a rubber ball through a metal hoop. Borges’s attempt to reduce Tour de France-caliber cycling to “pumping the legs up and down” is completely disingenuous, precisely because I can describe any sport in an unflattering light.
Here is another bit of Borges’s stupidity: How fast is he when they take the bike away? Is he as fast as Marion Jones? Is he as fast as Chipper Jones? Comparing an athlete in one sport to an athlete in another is almost always a ludicrous exercise. Consider Chipper Jones. I suppose that Borges is wondering if Jones or Armstrong would win a 50-meter sprint, or some such thing. Now, I suspect it would be Armstrong, but that’s not relevant just now. What is relevant is this: how valid is any such comparison at all? If Armstrong attempted to play third base on a major league baseball team, he would probably end up looking foolish in the field and he’d almost certainly be a disaster at the plate. Jones would wipe the floor with him. But if you put Chipper Jones on a bicycle at the bottom of one of the French Alps during the Tour de France, I doubt he would even finish the stage, much less manage to keep up with the peloton. This is no indictment of Jones as an athlete, nor would Armstrong’s inability to play baseball at major-league level reflect on him as an athlete. The skill sets demanded by the sports these two men play are completely different, and Borges’s bizarre attempt to compare the two is a non-starter.
Borges’s worst sentence, though — in which he clearly demonstrates his monumental ignorance of cycling — is this lovely chestnut: For my money, being the greatest athlete in the world involves strength, speed, agility, hand-eye coordination, mental toughness and the ability to make your body do things that defy description. Chief among them is not pumping your legs up and down while your feet are strapped to bicycle pedals. Is Borges suggesting that Lance Armstrong — or any Tour de France rider at all — lacks strength? A bicycle is not a mo-ped. It requires muscle power to go anywhere at all, even on a flat road. To ride up a mountain is so obviously a matter of strength that I have to wonder if Borges has ever even climbed onto a bicycle. The question of speed is frankly bizarre. I suppose that Borges wants to know how fast Armstrong can run the fifty yards or whatever. But I would be willing to bet that I can outrun some of the offensive linemen in the National Football League; does that imply that I am a greater athlete than they? Not for one minute. I certainly couldn’t block a Bruce Smith, probably not for a single play, and absolutely not for an entire game. Speed is valuable in some sports, less so in others. By Borges’s reasoning, Greg Maddux is not an athlete because his “speed” is almost never on display. (Anyway, the fact that Miles per Hour is a constant measurement of Tour de France coverage, from just what basis is Borges questioning Armstrong’s speed?) As for agility, well — I can’t think of any other word besides “agility” to describe the ability these riders have to control their bikes as they descend a mountain, at very high rate of speed, on narrow and winding roads or the ability to ride in the peloton in the first place. Riding a bicycle also involves hand-eye coordination, especially when riding at the higher rates of speed where small stones can be threatening road-obstacles to as great a degree as potholes. And a bicycle is not a self-steering mechanism; tremendous hand-eye coordination is required just to keep from going off the road. (Another note on hand-eye coordination: it isn’t all the same. Michael Jordan clearly has tremendous hand-eye coordination; his almost instinctive ability to move the ball in such a way to evade defenders and make the shot is legendary. But his hand-eye coordination did not prove very handy at all when he spent two years playing minor-league baseball; he was barely able to stay above the Mendoza line at AA ball. If he’d played AAA ball, his average would have been a train wreck, and I doubt he’d have even gotten a hit off any decent major-league pitcher.) As for the last two “habits of highly effective athletes” that Borges names, I can’t think of a sporting event that demands more mental toughness than the Tour de France. And just completing the Tour — pedaling over 1500 miles in three weeks, through some of the most mountainous country in the world — certainly defies description to me. But then, I suppose Borges does this kind of thing himself every week — that’s what it would take for it to be the commonplace thing he thinks it is.
Lastly, Borges meditates on the fact that cycling is not one of the most popular sports in the US. Well, so what? Popularity of a thing means nothing. Heaven’s Gate may have been the biggest flop of a movie of all time, but it’s still a movie. Cycling most definitely is a sport, unless of course one is applying George Carlin’s definitions of Sport (one of which being that it has to involve a ball). By Borges’s reasoning, short-track speed skating is not a sport, and therefore Apolo Anton Ohno is not an athlete. Sorry, Ron. That dog won’t hunt, and you know it.
All that said, I have to again wonder if Borges meant this at all, or if he is sitting back right now enjoying a laugh at the reaction to what he wrote. If he didn’t mean it, then he’s a lousy satirist. If he did mean it, then he’s an idiot. So which is it?
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Still from Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Hayao Miyazaki, director. English title: Spirited Away. (Image links to the Spirited Away page on Nausicaa.net, a site devoted to the films of Studio Ghibli.)
Hayao Miyazaki is known as Japan’s answer to Walt Disney. He is responsible for some of that country’s most amazing films in the anime style: titles like My Neighbor Totoro, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and his greatest work (thus far), Princess Mononoke. That last title was actually Japan’s highest-grossing film until it was superseded by Titanic. However, Titanic‘s record fell last year with Miyazaki’s most recent work, Spirited Away. The film is set to be released in the United States on September 20 by Disney, which owns the US distribution rights to all of Studio Ghibli’s films. (Studio Ghibli is Miyazaki’s studio.) Disney’s last release of a Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke in 1999, was pretty much of a failure — Disney’s response to the problem of marketing a foreign film in a genre that is generally not very well known was to not market the film at all. (It didn’t even play in the town I lived in at the time.) I hope that Spirited Away is more successful, but I’m wondering if Disney isn’t making the same mistakes. No trailers have been shown theatrically that I know of. Lilo and Stitch was a presence six months before the film opened, with posters in theaters and trailers showing at the Disney Store constantly. Even the current Disney abomination, the flick based on the “Country Bear Jamboree”, had some advertising behind it. Now Disney is opening Spirited Away after Labor Day, when filmgoing drops like a rock. The film’s poster — which I have only seen on AICN — is beautiful and simple, but it also conveys little of any sense of the film’s story and suggests that it’s only a picture for girls. Disney can pretty much sell deep-freeze units to Eskimos when it wants to, so why won’t it pull out the stops for this?
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Another note on Star Wars comics: I haven’t read them, but there is a series out there called Star Wars: Infinities, which deals with “What if?” scenarios. The first series speculates on what would have transpired had Luke aimed his torpedoes at the Death Star reactor shaft and missed; the second series — in progress now, apparently — tells what would have happened if Han Solo had been just a bit too late to save Luke from freezing to death on Hoth. Now, if that’s not an interesting idea, I don’t know what is.
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Star Wars has generated a lot of ancillary creative efforts beyond the films; starting in 1991 with Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire the saga has been explored at length in full-length books and also in comics, telling stories not only of the adventures of Luke, Han, Leia et al after Return of the Jedi but also delving into the deep past to tell stories of the Sith and the Jedi. Some of this stuff is quite good. Zahn’s novels are a high point, even functioning as well-written space operas in their own right as well as serving as Star Wars stories, and I’ve heard some good things about Ann Crispin’s and Michael Stackpole’s works. Some of it, though, is downright bad: Kevin J. Anderson’s Jedi Academy trilogy starts out promising but fizzles out, and those who found the love story in Attack of the Clones disappointing would do well to have a look at Dave Wolverton’s The Courtship of Princess Leia, which is an utter disaster. (Not only does that novel reduce everybody’s favorite brash space pirate, Han Solo, to a lovesick stalker and kidnapper, but it also gives us such amazing things as….wait for it….C-3PO singing.)
It did not all start in 1991 with Zahn’s first book, however. There were other attempts at “Expanded Universe” books during the original trilogy. Brian Daley wrote a trilogy of novels about Han Solo’s adventures prior to his meeting Luke and Ben in A New Hope; Alan Dean Foster wrote a book called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye which takes place after ANH but before The Empire Strikes Back; and I seem to recall a couple of books about Lando Calrissian. Most notable, though, was the comic book series published by Marvel Comics between 1977 and 1987. This series began with a six-issue adaption of A New Hope, and then proceeded to run for 101 more issues after that. (The adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back came in issues 39-44, and the adaptation of Return of the Jedi actually did not appear in the series itself but was a separate, limited series of four issues.) Starting with Issue #7, the Marvel series struck out on its own, telling stories that were “Beyond the Movie! Beyond the Galaxy!”. The first story told after the ANH adaptation centered on Han Solo and Chewbacca, who took off from Yavin to go pay off Jabba the Hutt. They are almost immediately waylaid by space pirates, who steal all of their money — leaving Han with nothing to pay Jabba. So, he and Chewie go to some planet whose name I don’t recall and end up getting recruited by some locals to fight off the local bad guy (whose impressive name is “Serji-X Arrogantus”). Han and Chewie in turn recruit a rag-tag bunch of people to fight Arrogantus in Magnificent Seven style. Among others, there are a crazy old Jedi named “Don Wan Kihotay” and a six-foot-tall rabbit named Jaxxon. (I swear I am not making this up.)
As goofy as that story sounds — and it really is as goofy as it sounds — the Marvel Star Wars series was actually not that bad. Occasionally it was lousy, but some interesting stories were told and it’s fun to realize that these tales were spun at a time when all the particulars of the Star Wars universe were still unknown. This got the series’s writers into occasional trouble: Jabba figures in the comic from the second issue, but of course Jabba’s looks weren’t settled by George Lucas until ROTJ, so the Marvel Jabba is completely wrong; worse than that, at one point the Marvel series actually had Han Solo pay off Jabba, which they then had to hastilly backtrack when they learned that in TESB the price is still very much on Han’s head. One of the special “Annual” issues (do comics still do the “Annuals”?) was a flashback story told by a guy who once helped Obi Wan and “Luke’s father” escape Darth Vader. And so on. Lucasfilm pretty much ignored the Marvel series, which made for some bizarre twists and turns as the comic’s writers tried to accomodate the details in the movies; and after ROTJ, the writers were pretty much told that they couldn’t really do anything at all — at that point, Star Wars was totally on the back burner and the Powers-That-Be didn’t want anything to mess it up, so the comic kicked off an “alien invasion” plotline that actually started fairly well but was resolved in hackneyed fashion when the book was abruptly axed as of issue #107. (And now I see that the “Expanded Universe” novels are in the midst of, well, an “alien invasion” plotline.)
The Marvel Star Wars comics offer an intriguing “alternate universe” take on the whole thing which is almost always interesting and quite often highly entertaining (six-foot rabbits more than two decades prior to Jar Jar Binks aside). What’s more, the series is now being issued as a series of trade-paperbacks by Dark Horse Comics. The image below is the cover to the first book (which is also the cover to Marvel’s Star Wars #1), and links to the Amazon info.
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I’m glad to report (or sorry to report, as the case may be) that Gordon Van Gelder’s operation at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is still the Quickest Draw In The West, when it comes to getting the rejection slips out. From the time I dropped the thing in the corner mailbox to the time my SASE appeared in my home mailbox, six days elapsed. Wow. Time to print the thing out and send it someplace else. (On a related writing note, another short story of mine that’s been stalled-in-progress may have cleared up this morning with the realization that I bungled the story’s beginning. Hopefully that will turn out to be the answer; I’ve been nursing this particular idea for a while but it’s proven stubbornly difficult to get onto paper.)
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It’s probably a sign of something — good or bad, I don’t know — if one can buy a new bookshelf unit (62″ tall, 9″ deep, 27″ wide), fill it completely (including one shelf of nothing but mass-market paperbacks placed two-deep), and still have several stacks of books on the floor. Wow. (Although I haven’t finished the whole project yet; there is still another shelf to relocate to the bedroom and fill and another to rearrange and condense, so everything should be off the floor soon. I think.)
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The Bartlett Administration will soon be looking for a new Deputy Communications Director. Rob Lowe has decided to leave The West Wing, in a dispute over money. Here’s hoping that the departure of Sam Seaborn is handled well (not a drawn-out death, like Dr. Greene on ER) and at least explained on the show itself (the exit of Moira Kelly’s incredibly annoying character after the first season of TWW was never explained at all).
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I’ve been listening quite a bit lately to a rather astonishing piece of music: the Violin Concerto (“To the Memory of an Angel”) by Alban Berg. This is the first time in years that I’ve really delved into twelve-tone music. In the past, I have almost always found twelve-tone music to be cold and sterile-sounding, as if the mechanics of twelve-tone composition completely ruled out what, for me, has always been of primary concern in music: the creation and conveyance of emotion. So much twelve-tone music strikes me as academically interesting but artistically barren. Not so with this concerto. Despite its atonal structure, this is as emotional a work as one is ever likely to hear. The emotion is harder to get at; it’s not conveyed with lush melodies and traditional harmonies, but it most definitely is there.
The Concerto was written as a Requiem of sorts for a person Berg knew, and it ended up serving as Berg’s own Requiem in a way: he died before the work was premiered, so he never heard it. Upon listening to it, I was struck by the fact that it is not really a virtuoso showpiece, the way many concertos are (although I doubt any violinist would consider it an easy work). The focus is not on the technique, but rather on the dialogue that takes place between the soloist and the orchestra. Where many young violinists can display their skills in performances of, say, the Brahms Concerto, I can’t imagine any young violinist being able to really play this work convincingly; it requires musicianship — in the expressive sense — that most young virtuosi simply do not as yet possess. This is particularly true toward the work’s conclusion, when the twelve-tone music gives way to a more tonal texture surrounding a chorale that Bach himself had harmonized two hundred years before. (In fact, the Chorale is directly foreshadowed in the work’s tone-row itself, something which I did not realize until I read an analysis of the work in Grout’s History.) The depth of feeling in the concerto’s closing moments is amazingly tragic and heartbreaking. Death seems to inspire the best in so many composers — Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten all wrote amazing Requiems, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 is a Requiem by any other name. Berg’s amazing Violin Concerto certainly belongs in that class.