The group read of The Brothers Karamazov that I announced a few days ago is about to get underway. Check Collaboratory for details.
Untitled Post
The folks over at Soundtrack.net are online with the first detailed listen of Howard Shore’s certain-to-be-magnificent score to The Two Towers, complete with audio clips. I, for one, cannot wait.
In other filmscore news, the CD for the new Bond flick, Die Another Day is now out. The music is by Bond-composer-in-residence David Arnold, and the title song is by Madonna. I haven’t played the CD all the way through yet, but I like Arnold’s music a good deal — even the techno aspects of it, which are fairly controversial with score-hounds like myself. Madonna’s song, though, is going to take a while for me. My immediate impression of it is: “Decent song, but it is not a Bond song.” This song is about as far as you can get from the Shirley Bassey-Tom Jones Bond songs of yore.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Unique to the NFL season, of all the major sports, is the “weird day”. Because everyone plays on the same day (except for the Monday night teams), whenever the weirdness all hits in a single day, it’s more notable than in the other sports.
:: I’m not surprised that the Bills lost to the Chiefs. Arrowhead Stadium is a very hard place to play, if you’re the visitor, for which reason I’ve become used to seeing me beloved Bills go in there and get clobbered. It used to be a yearly ritual in the Jim Kelly years, when the Bills were pounding everyone on the way to the Super Bowl, they would at some point in the regular season go to Kansas City and get beat 30-3 or something like that. So the Bills lost. But there were a ton of surprising aspects to the way they lost.
First, the game featured two of the league’s highest scoring offenses matching up porous opposing defenses. That the margin of victory was a single point didn’t surprise me. That the two teams combined for only 33 points did. In his “Two Minute Drill” this weekend, Chris Berman suggested a final score of 67-66, or something like that. So, 17-16 was something of a shock.
Despite the loss, this was probably the best job of coaching I have seen done by the Bills’ staff. The game plan was perfectly devised: execute a ball-control offensive scheme, which would keep the Chiefs’ firepower-laden offense off the field and thus keep the crowd quiet. On defense, the Bills brought a new focus on — gasp! — tackling, which paid off rather well. (Of course, I have to wonder why, if the Bills can evidently play this well defensively against a scoring machine on the road, they therefore got crunched against a less-high powered offense at home two weeks ago.) It would still be nice to see the Bills generate some more pressure on the opposing quarterbacks, and it would be really nice if the Bills’ DBs could actually come up with the ball sometimes when it’s going through their hands or bouncing off their chests. I counted three possible interceptions that the Bills didn’t reel in yesterday, in a game where a turnover could make the difference…
…as it did in the end, when Drew Bledsoe threw a fateful interception with four minutes left, killing the Bills’ drive for the potential game-winning score. (They were only down by one, remember; all they needed was a field goal, and the crucial INT took place very near the end zone, if not inside it.) The Bills have played a bunch of games this year that were won by a great Bledsoe play. This one, sadly, is the first which they lost because of a bad Bledsoe play. Oh well.
So now the Bills are 5-5, and 1-2 in the AFC East. I hate to be a nay-sayer, but I think their playoff hopes are barely flickering. I see them splitting the six games that are left, to finish 8-8.
:: If you want to see “parity”, look at today’s NFL standings. Seventeen of the NFL’s thirty-two teams have between four and six wins, with all the teams (except St. Louis and Chicago, tonight’s teams) having played ten games. Seven teams have won seven or more, and only two have won two or fewer. Two divisions — the AFCs East and West — have all their teams at or above .500. Only one division leader — Green Bay — is running away with its division, and they are still by no means a lock for home-field advantage. That’s what you call, “competitive balance”. I actually prefer it this way.
:: I think that the football gods have been looking down upon me as I’ve been tracking the progress of my Super Bowl picks, the Eagles and the Steelers, and they’ve been shaking their heads and saying, “He just isn’t getting it.” So they decided to make it crystal clear yesterday, by taking out both teams’ starting quarterbacks with bad injuries. Maybe Kordell Stewart can find his on-again, off-again form and get the Steelers back into the playoffs (assuming that Tommy Maddox doesn’t come back for a while), but I wouldn’t bet on Koy Detmer being the answer in Philly. Here’s hoping, though, that Maddox’s injury is not serious, and here’s toasting Donovan McNabb’s heart for playing the entire game with his broken ankle. Wow.
:: I think that the best Super Bowl matchup right now would be the Jets and the Rams, both teams who are in the hunt after being almost certainly dead-in-the-water just three weeks ago.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Michael Kinsley is one of my favorite political writers, but he’s written a funny article today on the phenomenon of women who watch Law & Order obsessively. I rarely watch L&O, partly because I don’t like formula shows; I prefer story arcs and shows that depict progressions in their characters’ lives. For some people the attraction to L&O is precisely that its formula is so entrenched that the actors themselves are interchangeable, but that’s what turns me off — that, and a general boredom with courtroom dramas that set in with me years ago. (I think that David E. Kelley’s one-note, “quirky” writing on L.A.Law is part of what’s soured me on courtroom stories.)
(And I’d love to see NBC do a promo for L&O that said “We made this entire story up, without help from the headlines!” and “Don’t miss the first five minutes after the first commercial break!”. Just for a change.)
Share This Post
Untitled Post
If you want to see a Buffalo sports fan go into an immediate bout of hysterics, just whisper one of the following pairs of words into his or her ear: “Wide right”, “Homerun Throwback”, or “No goal”.
I mention this because two of these three items (“Homerun Throwback” and “No goal”) are mentioned in ESPN’s survey of the Most Controversial Plays in sports history. It’s interesting how plays like this can still arouse controversy and, in such cases as the “Oh, give the Russians another three seconds” Olympic basketball snafu in 1972, anger.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
In response to this post in which I complained a bit about the direction taken on the NBC show Ed, someone asked for my thoughts on what makes a successful long-term relationship.
I wish I knew.
The only answer that I can safely offer is that in a successful relationship, one should always find the idea of parting from the other person completely unpalatable, and always so — even when a problem has occurred, when a bump in the road has been discovered, even when one is so fed up with the other person that (s)he wants nothing better than to go away. I think it was said best in When Harry Met Sally…, when at the very end, Harry (Billy Crystal) is rattling off a list of things he loves about Sally (Meg Ryan), and he concludes with: “And I love that you are the last person I want to speak to before I go to sleep at night.” So, I think for a relationship to be successful, a person should believe of their partner: “Even when you’ve got me so mad that I don’t want to be around you, the thought of not being around you disgusts me.”
Not a very good answer, I suppose, but I think it’s a start.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
I recently went into a bit of a reading slump, where nothing I was reading was satisfying me, so I changed things up and read some graphic novels instead of the usual prose works that I read. I read three of these in particular:
:: Planetary: All Over the World and Other Stories by Warren Ellis (writer) and John Cassaday (artist). This book is actually a collection of the first seven issues or so of the Planetary comic series that Warren Ellis wrote before moving on to his major work, Transmetropolitan (which I have yet to read). As an initial volume, I enjoyed it, but I suspect that I will find the second volume of Planetary more to my liking. These first issues are mainly concerned with setting up Ellis’s characters and their goals and relationships, with the actual stories being self-contained and episodic in nature. They are interesting stories, though: one involves the ghost of a murdered Hong Kong police officer; another deals with an island near Japan (or part of Japan, I can’t remember) that is home to some horrible and huge beasts. The stories are reminiscent of The X-Files, but with a world-wide focus, and they are investigated by a team of “heroes” who are working for a shadowy organization called “Planetary”. This is really an appetite-whetting type of book, and on that basis it succeeds. I want to read more.
:: Watchmen by Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator). Moore is one of the most renowned writers working in comics today, with his work on Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen standing out in his ouevre. His greatest work, though, is still Watchmen, the deeply cynical and dystopian story of masked superheroes in an alternate history where Richard Nixon did not fall after Watergate, but remained President and oversaw disastrous results in Viet Nam. As the book opens, a group of heroes called the Watchmen has broken up, with its members going their separate ways — until one, the Comedian (the most bitter and cynical of the bunch) is brutally murdered. The story involves the search for the Comedian’s murder, as well as a lot of delving into the lives of the Comedian’s former colleagues, the most striking of whom is the masked vigilante Rorschach. The characters in Watchmen are no sanitized, “Avengers”-style heroes who always act on the side of Right. “Truth, Justice and the American Way” is no part of the equation here. Instead, we get broken relationships, shocking violence, an emergent subplot involving a plot to do something unbelievably monstrous to New York City (which, in the post-9/11/01 world, is even more horrific than Moore had intended), explorations of the psychological causes of vigilantism, and examinations of the whole morality of vigilantism in the first place. The book also plays tricks of viewpoint and subtext, including after each chapter extraneous material such as a psychologist’s notes on the deeply disturbed Rorschach character and portions from books about the other characters. Another startling device is the constant return to a NYC sidewalk news vendor and the guy who sits on the ground nearby, reading a comic book about a shipwreck victim in the 1700s, whose plight somehow mirrors the events of Moore’s own fictional world. The “comic-within-a-comic” that reveals other facets of the larger story reminds the reader of Hamlet, and like the Bard’s best dramas, Watchmen provides no easy answers to the questions it asks. This is one of those stories that lingers in the mind for a long, long time once it’s done. (Watchmen is also apparently being made into a film.)
:: Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs (story and art). I don’t think I could possibly have picked a graphic novel farther in tone and style from Watchmen than Ethel and Ernest. Briggs is a noted author-illustrator, and this book tells the story of his parents — of how they met in Depression-era London, how they courted and married, how they lived through World War II and the years after, how they coped with all of the changes that the twentieth century wrought on English culture, and how they grew old and passed on. They were poor commoners, Ernest a milkman and Ethel a maid, and they appear to have remained poor commoners all their lives, and yet the book conveys the simple ingenuity with which they approached their lives and the deep love they shared, despite the fact that they differed on many things. Ethel is the more conservative of the two, and when Ernest’s favored Labour governments are not successful, Ethel seems to delight in poking fun at Ernest and his earlier promises of the good life for all. Despite all that, Ernest seems to be the more optimistic of the two, always able to find some way to get through in a shortage or down period, and he is able to get back by poking fun at the British Royalty as they encounter hard times. Briggs’s art is warm and lovely, evoking the best of those sunny Merchant-Ivory films.
These three books, with their mix of horror, superheroes, English city and country life, each in their own way demonstrate the vitality and power possible in the comics medium. Ethel and Ernest is a surprising little gem, Planetary is a fun beginning to (hopefully) something grand, and Watchmen is a masterpiece.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Glastonbury Tor, Glastonbury, England.
Glastonbury Tor is a unique hill in southern England, 512 feet above sea level and topped with a tower and the remains of a church that was destroyed in an earthquake. The Tor is one of England’s most mystical and spiritual sites, both in pagan Druidic tradition and in English Christianity. Glastonbury is said to be the spot where Joseph of Arimathea arrived on Britain, and by this association plus the site’s association to British paganism, the Tor and the nearby ruin of Glastonbury Abbey are closely associated with the Arthurian legends. The Tor is sometimes taken to be the Isle of Avalon (the surrounding landscape may have once been covered by water), and the Abbey is one legendary burial place of King Arthur.
The image links to the finest collection of Glastonbury-related photographs I have found on the Net, with photos of the Tor, the Abbey, the Chalice Well (a place related to the Grail legend), and others.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Untitled Post
Today on the local classical music station I was privileged to hear Aaron Copland’s wonderful ballet, Appalachian Spring. I’ve heard the work many times before, as it is a favorite of mine. (My favorite recording of it is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.) What was different today was that the radio station played the original version that Copland wrote for chamber orchestra, as opposed to the version for full symphony orchestra with which I am very familiar. Hearing the work in this new light — with sections of the work executed in the more intimate tonal qualities of a chamber ensemble — was very illuminating.