I am now sufficiently moved-in that I can finally return to writing today. I have not written a word, either in my current short story or in the novel-in-progress, in two weeks. But the desk is unburied and workable, the fountain pens have been re-inked, the printer is fired up, and I’ve finally got the computer set-up the way I want it. (Over the last week I have experimented with four different arrangements for the computer.) It’s time to throw open the doors, clear out the cobwebs, and get back to doing the important stuff.
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In my post yesterday about the new TV season, I forgot to sing the praises of one of my favorite shows: Scrubs. This hybrid of ER and The Wonder Years never fails to get at least five good belly-laughs out of me, and it often does so in unexpected ways.
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A couple more football thoughts, after yesterday’s action:
:: I didn’t get to see the Vikings-Seahawks game last night, but judging by the game’s box score, it appears that the Vikings are a team that is short on talent, especially on defense, and completely devoid of leadership — whether from the front office, the coaching staff, or even amongst the players. It’s kind of sad to see a team that is a year removed from two NFC Championship Game appearances in three years sink to this level, but if you consider the Vikings’ recent luck with the draft and the clubhouse problems that have been metastasizing for two or three years now, it’s not all that surprising. It may be time for them to give up this year, and probably next, by cutting Randy Moss loose, taking the hit on the cap, and moving into a full rebuilding mode. The Vikings are going nowhere mighty fast, so it’s probably time for them to just start over.
:: In three years we’ve had the arrival of Kurt Warner from out of nowhere, the re-emergence of Trent Dilfer (and his immediate, and inexplicable, re-disappearance), and the arrival of Tom Brady. If the theme in the NFL these days is “Great Quarterbacking From Completely Unexpected Places”, then maybe it’s Tommy Maddox’s turn. He was apparently very sharp and impressive in coming in off the bench to spark the Steelers to their first win this year.
:: Apparently the officials in the Oakland-Tennessee game were being fitted for eyepatches and Miracle Ears, judging by the two blatant illegal blocks they missed on an Oakland player’s punt return for a touchdown.
:: Funniest post-game comment yesterday, courtesy of Drew Bledsoe after the Bills QB-Extraordinaire won his second overtime game in three weeks (which was also the third one the Bills have played this year): “I guess I just don’t do enough in regulation. I need to get more done in regulation so I don’t have to keep dealing with this.”
:: The Patriots finally lost. Yippee. (I’ve never liked the Pats much, but nowadays I’m really mad at them because they got Brian Cox, the greatest force for evil in the entire NFL, a Super Bowl ring. Cox has a ring, and Jim Kelly doesn’t. Thanks, Pats. Harumph.)
:: I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the college game, but both Iowa and Iowa State had good weekends. Iowa beat Penn State (despite blowing a big lead, which I’m sure has a certain friend of mine rather angry this week) and ISU knocked off once-mighty Nebraska (which I’m sure puts my old college adviser in a tough spot, as he is a Nebraska fan teaching at ISU). And I’m slowly getting up to speed on the activities of the Syracuse Orangemen, who lost a thriller in three overtimes this week. Living in a town that actually has decent college athletics is something new. Buffalo wasn’t much for college athletics.
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Football stuff:
:: The Bills have played four games. Three of those have gone to overtime. They’ve won two of those, on touchdown passes. They are now 2-2. I’m still of the view that they are too young and raw to really compete this year, and they’re too thin on defense to stand up once they start going on the road to some pretty tough teams later in the year, but maybe I’ll upgrade my original prediction for a 6-10 season. They could go 8-8.
:: I had to watch the Jets today, instead of the Bills. (I don’t know if the Bills sold out today.) Man, are the Jets b-a-d.
:: I can breathe easier about my AFC Super Bowl pick, because the Steelers won today. Of course, they needed overtime to do it. But they’re showing signs of life. (My NFC Super Bowl pick, the Eagles, are doing just fine. They beat up on the Texans today.)
:: Mike Martz can breathe easier now, because his team’s bad luck is beginning to overtake his team’s bad coaching. Kurt Warner got hurt today, in his throwing hand.
:: A holdover thought from last week, when the Bills played the Broncos: I hope Brian Griese wins a Super Bowl soon, not because I like Griese (I have no opinion of him, really) but because I’m sick of hearing the commentators on TV, every time I watch the Broncos, babble on about how Griese still lives in the shadow of John Elway. We get it, already!!
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The new TV season has started at last! Here are some random thoughts on the season premiers of shows that I watch.
:: Frasier. This was rather a let-down. I think that Niles and Daphne deserved more of a wedding episode than this. I expected a grand farce dealing with Daphne’s goofy English family, but there was little of that. The feeling was, “OK, we’ve taken eight years or however long it’s been to get them together. They’re together. That’s that. Back to Frasier.”
:: That 70s Show. OK, Eric and Donna are back together, and now apparently Hyde and Jackie are a couple. According to the opening credits, Tommy Chong isn’t around anymore, so I guess his riotous stoner Leo is history, which is a shame (although admittedly the character didn’t have much growth-potential). I still like this show a great deal, but I wonder how much longer these actors can play high-schoolers convincingly. I don’t know how much more mileage this show has.
:: NYPDBlue. This show is underappreciated, given the level of quality it has maintained despite the revolving-door cast it’s had through the years. (Only two actors, Dennis Franz and Gordon Clapp, remain from Year One.) That’s about all I have to say there.
:: Everybody Loves Raymond. Brad Garrett won an Emmy for playing Robert, which is a fine thing. And now that Gillian Anderson and Sela Ward are both off regular television, I guess that makes Patricia Heaton one of my top-three beautiful women on television right now. (The other two are ER‘s Maura Tierney and The West Wing‘s Stockard Channing.) Nothing really new on Raymond; just solid, funny storytelling with a cast that probably has better comic timing than any other cast on TV right now.
:: Ed. I’m a bit disappointed, on the basis of the first episode this year. What made the Ed-Dennis-Carol triangle so interesting to me was the fact that all three characters were good people, although flawed. The solution now, though, seems to be to make Dennis into a jerk. I had higher hopes for the writers of Ed than this. But, maybe I’m wrong.
:: The West Wing. This was a terrific episode. I loved all the stuff with Josh, Toby and Donna being stranded in Indiana and the troubles that arose from their complete inability to relate to anyone outside the Beltway. The business with the assassination last year of the terrorist chief continues to be interesting; I expect this to be the first big scandal of President Bartlet’s second term. Lily Tomlin has been one of my favorite actresses for years (ever since I watched a comedy special of hers on HBO when I was seven years old, even though I didn’t get very many of the jokes), so I’m excited to see her on the cast. I’m hoping for The West Wing to make a return to the form of its first two seasons; last year, while high-quality, was nevertheless not as good as the first two years. They’re off to a good start.
:: Friends. Yes, I still love Friends. But I also hope that this is the last year for the show, not because the quality has fallen off but because with the arrival of children on the scene, it’s about to become a completely different show. Apparently they are talking about another season, which to me would be a bit pointless. At this point, I’m ready to see this season bring Ross and Rachel back together, have Chandler and Monica conceive by season’s end, maybe find love (or maybe not) for Joey and Phoebe, and call it a series.
:: ER. This series has always tended to pack its episodes full, but this one was dense even by ER‘s standards. Parts of the story took place on three continents; we had a contagion-story, some romance, some culture-clash, a doctor alone and desperate to save a crashing patient, a blood-soaked trauma, a doctor facing a huge new challenge (Romano’s recovery from the severing and reattachment of his left arm), and more. All that, in a single hour. I found this episode hard to follow, containing as it did so much plot. Nevertheless, I’m still hooked. John Carter and Abby Lockhart have the most chemistry of any couple on the show since Doug Ross and Carol Hathaway, and I’m interested to see how Dr. Romano responds to what may be the loss of his surgical skills. I just hope the show’s producers remember that sometimes one can achieve more tension with less plot. Witness that harrowing first-season episode that focused entirely on Dr. Greene’s efforts to deliver a baby to a woman suffering complications, or the second-season episode in which Dr. Ross rescued a child trapped in a drainage pipe during a flood. Those were sparse episodes, plotwise — and utterly absorbing. (I do have to report a bit of gallows-humor that occurred to me during this episode. When the docs were trying to stabilize Romano after his arm was chopped off, at one point Dr. Chen says, “I can’t find his pulse.” I wondered: is she checking the wrist that’s still attached to his body? I know, I know….)
:: CSI. They’ve got a formula, and they’re sticking with it. Fine by me.
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I’m always happy to watch a fun swashbuckler of a film, and I watched a pretty good one last night: The Count of Monte Cristo, released earlier this year and now out on video. I don’t know how accurate the film is with respect to the original novel by Alexandre Dumas, but it’s a highly enjoyable film nonetheless, with impostors to French aristocracy, Napoleonic conspiracies, swordfights, grand celebrations at a beautiful chalet complete with the mysterious host’s entrance via balloon, a treasure map, a naive hero imprisoned by people who know his innocence, the hero’s imprisonment and subsequent escape from a horrible French jail, a never-forgotten love who has married the hero’s best friend in the hero’s absence, and so on.
The story opens as a group of sailors land on a Mediterranean island at night, seeking immediate medical aid for their captain, who has taken sick. Unfortunately, the island is Elba, originally intended to be the final resting place for Napoleon Bonaparte in his exile. Napoleon gives one of the sailors, Edmond Dontes (James Caviezel), a letter which he is to give to one of Napoleon’s friends, and Dontes — somewhat stupidly — agrees. He is discovered before he can deliver the letter, and he cannot even read it, being illiterate; however, this is enough for a shady police officer to have him taken to a prison island where he spends a number of years, despairing of ever having his freedom again — until another prisoner, a priest played by Richard Harris, tunnels up into his cell. “I knew the outer wall would be in one of two directions,” the priest says. “I sadly chose the wrong one.” Harris and Dontes dig anew, and during the months that they dig Harris teaches Dontes how to read, how to think, and how to fight. It will come as absolutely no surprise that Dontes does finally escape, at which point he seeks revenge against those who wronged him. Along the way he picks up some unexpected allies, wheedles his way into French aristocracy, and uncovers more plots that were the real reason for his betrayal. All of this leads up to the final confrontation with his main adversary, who — of course — had once been his best friend.
Very little that happens in The Count of Monte Cristo is a surprise. The film is solidly traditional, with candlelit studies and cavernous French baths and those typical prisons with long, winding staircases punctuated by heavy oaken doors with equally heavy iron locks. Watching this film, one expects Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power to walk onto the screen to do lethal duel against Claude Rains or Basil Rathbone. This is not an indictment. Sometimes one wants the solidly familiar, and this film delivers it with good acting, witty dialogue, excellent photography, solid production design, and brisk pacing. The film is never boring, avoiding the danger of delving too deeply into political machinations.
There are only two real flaws in the film. First is the score by Edward Shearmur. It is decent music, big and orchestral, but it’s not terribly distinctive. There is no central theme to unify the score — at least none that I could detect, or remember after the film was over. The other flaw is in the film’s climax, which doesn’t so much build as arrive — and then the obligatory last fight between hero and villain is a bit disappointing. This is the type of film that screams out for one of those wonderful Errol Flynn swordfights in a dark castle, moving from room to room, into and out of complete darkness, at one point with the combatants fighting offscreen while their gigantic shadows duel against the wall. Here, the fight takes place outdoors, with some flashy camera movement that is distracting, and then it is over rather quickly. But those are really the only flaws, and they don’t detract from the film’s otherwise high level of entertainment.
Now that we’ve seen that a good swashbuckler can still be made, maybe my favorite old, dead genre — the pirate film — can be resurrected (Cutthroat Island notwithstanding).
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Watkins Glen State Park, Watkins Glen, NY.
Having moved from Western New York to Central New York, I have to get used to a whole new bit of geological features. I no longer live on the shores of Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes; now I’m about thirty miles inland from Lake Ontario, which is much deeper and colder. I am also much nearer to the Finger Lakes region, home to a series of long, narrow and deep lakes that run north-south. These lakes were formed when the glaciers receded after the last ice age, carving out great valleys and gorges many of which then filled with water. The Finger Lakes are the dominant feature of Central New York, but there are also other gorges, smaller and more spectacular, that are the home to frequent waterfalls, pools, and streams. The most spectacular of these is that found in Watkins Glen State Park, where footpaths follow a small stream through the deep gorge that it has carved as it spills over nineteen waterfalls and is surrounded by 300-foot cliffs of limestone. At one point, the footpath even goes behind one particularly large waterfall, for an enchanting effect.
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In the long history of rock-and-roll song covers, the only time I can recall ever liking a cover more than the original is the Phil Collins version of “You Can’t Hurry Love”. (The Supremes did it well, but Phil’s version just…well, it “bounces” better.) And some covers are just-plain-ill-advised: Michael Bolton’s “When A Man Loves A Woman” and the Guns-n-Roses “Live and Let Die” leap to mind.
But for the life of me, I never ever thought I would live to see Dolly Parton do a cover of “Stairway To Heaven”…but guess what? She has, in fact, done just that. No, it’s not as good as the original. But no, it’s not a disaster. The sound is actually intriguing. She’s emphasized the song’s elegiac qualities and given it a folk-style treatment. Parton has actually put some thought into this. Listen to it here.
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Assuming that we humans are still around five hundred or a thousand years from now, I suspect that this era will be remembered as when we began the process of leaving our planet for other worlds, and for the stars. The exploration and colonization of space has always seemed to me to be absolutely essential, not only to our survival as a species but also as a fulfillment to some part of us, deep deep down, that yearns to wander into the sky. This view of mine, that leaving Earth is our destiny and that we’d best be on with it, is no doubt a large part of why I enjoy what I call “exploratory science fiction” so much. I take this term, which I have just coined this minute, to refer to those SF stories which outline the possible “future histories” of the human race as we begin our journeys to other worlds. Kim Stanley Robinson’s magnificent Mars trilogy (along with its companion volume of short fiction, The Martians) is a classic in this SF subgenre. Carl Sagan’s novel Contact and the resulting film are also examples. Star Trek can also be seen in this way, at least in some of its stories such as First Contact. And so is the book I have just finished, Michael Flynn’s Firestar.
This book deeply thrilled me. It is a very near-future history that centers on a very rich woman, Mariesa van Huyten, who owns a gigantic industrial conglomerate whose resources she employs in creating her very own space program. She is convinced that space is the destiny of humanity, and she is also keenly disappointed in our society’s failure to live up to the early promise of its space program, to the point where she condemns the Apollo moonshots as a mistake because we eschewed the establishment of a permanent human presence in space in favor of sensational landings on the Moon which were never repeated. Everything Mariesa does, her entire life, is geared toward her ultimate goal of permanence in space. “Always the Goal”, she is constantly saying when it appears that her subordinates are becoming sidetracked. Mariesa van Huyten is a visionary character, whose vision is so grandiose that we are never quite given all the reasons for why she has this particular vision in the first place, although we can make certain guesses (she is inordinately concerned with asteroids, for example). And her vision is so grandiose that the larger portion of it still lies ahead at the novel’s conclusion. I assume more will become clear later on; this 850-page novel is only the first in a series of four volumes.
Mariesa’s project, in Firestar, centers on the testing and development of reusable Earth-to-low-orbit vehicles which are called “Planks”. (I wish Flynn had chosen a more appealing name for the ships, but oh well.) To this end, a good chunk of the novel focuses on the trials and tribulations of the test pilots her organization has recruited. This program, a sort of “Next Generation” of The Right Stuff, could make for a fascinating novel on its own, but Flynn isn’t content to stop there. He also delves into the political background of Mariesa van Huyten’s project. Flynn is absolutely aware that a private space program would have its detractors, and he shows us plenty of them: the government is against it (Mariesa is encroaching on the government’s territory), a prominent environmentalist group is against it (for a number of reasons — Flynn does a good job at depicting the conflicting motivations at the heart of the environmental movement, even if I am more sympathetic to the environmentalists than Flynn seems to be), and there are also shadowy competitors who are willing to stoop to very low levels to dissuade Mariesa.
But the book’s complexity doesn’t even stop there, with the test pilots and the political background. Mariesa is also interested in creating the first generation of the true “space age”, and to this end one of her subsidiary companies is a school-management company that takes over troubled public schools. In this way Mariesa is able to shepherd future generations to her liking, although we aren’t entirely sure why. This seems to be the plotline that will wind its way through Flynn’s entire tetralogy.
All this is fascinating enough, but Flynn also knows that there is a dark side to Mariesa van Huyten’s visionary status. Her family life is barely more than functional (and sometimes less than that), and she is frequently an unrepentant manipulator of the people around her. Flynn gives us a keen sense of Mariesa’s loneliness, but he also shows us that in large part her loneliness is of her own creation, with results that are both expected and unexpected. Flynn knows that it is lonely at the top, and to his credit he depicts it as such. (He also is well aware that loneliness is not exclusive to those at the top, however. In fact, nearly every character in the book is suffering from some kind of loneliness.)
Firestar is not without its flaws. Coincidence plays too large a role, as the lives of a fairly large cast of characters keep intersecting over the ten years that the novel spans. I found Flynn’s apparent belief that all we need is a benevolent capitalist to overcome the barriers erected by a sometimes evil but mostly hegemonic government somewhat cloying. The conflicts sometimes come off as forced, as if Flynn needed a conflict at that particular point; one character’s deep resentment of Mariesa stems from her overhearing a conversation not meant for her ears, which is something of a soap-opera cliche.
The book also suffers from the same flaw that most near-future stories suffer: once the years of their events come and go, a certain sense of plausibility is lost. Of course, there is nothing that Flynn can do to avoid this; it’s simply the way things are in telling future stories. (According to Star Trek, for example, by now we should have launched at least four more Voyager probes and killed a huge portion of the human population in a war over genetic engineering.) The school-privatization movement has lost a bit of the steam that it had when Flynn wrote this book (1996); the Russian space station Mir is used as a setting, years after its destruction; and so forth. I suppose this isn’t exactly a flaw; it’s just the “nature of the beast”. At least Flynn gives us fictional US Presidents, instead of the Robert Zemeckis approach of digitally shoehorning Bill Clinton into the film version of Contact.
At 850 pages, I still found Firestar a very fast read. It’s full of thrilling ideas, interesting characters, and a sense that it really could play out this way. Part of why I read science fiction is to assure myself that our destiny as a species really, truly does lie amongst the stars. Firestar appealed to that part of me, and I’ve already bought Rogue Star, the second book in the series.
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During the last three seasons, the Buffalo Bills have posted a regular season record of 22-26 and appeared in the playoffs once (1999, when their season ended in a wildcard game at Tennessee). In that same period, the St. Louis Rams have posted a regular season record of 36-12 and made the playoffs each year, twice going to the Super Bowl and once winning it (also 1999). So how weird is it that three games into this season, the Bills have a better record (1-2) than the Rams (0-3)? The Bills have looked very tough in their three games thus far, and if not for the horrible special teams play in the opener against the Jets they’d be 2-1. Their offense has played with some fire (although the running game is still too inconsistent and Drew Bledsoe is taking way too many hits, both faults clearly indicative of the offensive line’s youth and inexperience), and the defense — while giving up a lot of yards — has been a lot tougher than I expected. The Bills are a pleasant surprise, but I still think they’re rebuilding and a 6-10 finish is likely. But look out next year, especially if Tom Donahoe (the Bills’ GM) has another offseason like the last one, in which he drastically upgraded the team’s talent.
So what about the Rams? I didn’t pick them to go to the Super Bowl this year — so far I’m sticking with Philly as my pick for NFC Champion — but I certainly didn’t expect 0-3. I think we’re seeing a combination of bad luck and bad coaching. During last night’s game, in which the Rams lost to the Bucs, two observations were made by Al Michaels and John Madden that illustrate the Rams’ problems. First is something Madden said: Rams quarterback Kurt Warner is a rhythm quarterback. When he gets in a rhythm, he will cut your defense apart, make your defensive backs look foolish, and humiliate you as he passes for 300 yards and four touchdowns. But when he’s not in a rhythm, he looks shockingly ordinary — forcing passes into triple coverage, throwing too early on timing patterns, missing open receivers. Thus one key to beating the Rams is to upset Warner’s rhythm, which is exactly what the Patriots did to perfection in last year’s Super Bowl. Warner never got on track in that game, except for the drive late in the fourth quarter when he tied the game (only to lose when the Pats got back into field-goal range). Some of this is bad luck: the Rams are having big problems at right tackle on their offensive line, so Warner is seeing a lot more pressure than he is accustomed to. But a lot of it is simply bad coaching, which also goes back to that Super Bowl: if the opposing defense is having so much success at disrupting Kurt Warner’s rhythm, then why on earth does Mike Martz insist on staying with the pass when he could simply switch to a running game that would tilt things back in his team’s favor? Why would Martz not have taken one look at the defensive-back heavy scheme that New England showed him in the Super Bowl and then, licking his chops, directed Warner to hand off the Marshall Faulk on each and every down? Who knows….but that’s what the Rams have done. And then, last night when Mike Martz finally shows a sign that he’s realized the error of his ways and uses Faulk like he’s supposed to, Faulk gets hurt. That’s just horrible luck.
The other key observation last night was the telling statistic that the Rams currently own the longest losing streak in football when they’re trailing at the outset of the fourth quarter (it was either 16 or 19 games; I don’t recall which). That indicates a team that simply does not respond well to adversity, which is also indicative of coaching. Chris Berman of ESPN has often said: “Nobody circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills.” Well, it seems like the St. Louis Rams don’t circle the wagons at all. The Rams look like a team that is floundering without direction, and then when they do start to show some direction the injury bug nips them.
(And for the Love of GOD, will someone please beat the Patriots? Aieee!!!)