Where is Woody Guthrie when we so desperately need him?!
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Andrew Cory has some interesting thoughts about Star Wars, specifically focusing on the differences between the original trilogy and the prequels. He’s more charitable than many in discussing The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, although he’s clearly disappointed in them — he thinks that George Lucas is floundering and is unsure of how to proceed with his story. I don’t really agree with that, even if there are admittedly spots where the dialogue clunks (although not so many as others believe) or where the actors might have benefitted from a more hands-on director (although, again, not as many as most think).
Andrew makes the point, about TPM, that the film’s story is too “local” — meaning, it’s not as epic in tone as what we had expected. This is pretty much exactly the point I made a few months ago when I said that TPM is the Star Wars equivalent of The Hobbit, when fans were actually expecting The Silmarillion. I can somewhat understand the disconnect between what fans were expecting and what they got, but it never bothered me. In fact, I rather liked the idea that the big events we all know and love could have their beginning in a story that seems to be totally disconnected from it. It’s often that way in the real world as well; after all, who could have predicted that the scion of a Saudi Arabian family whose wealth was in construction would later become our greatest enemy and force a fundamental rethinking of a century of American foreign policy? I won’t delve more into that, since I’ve said my piece, but I have been considering something about George Lucas: he likes to leave fairly large whacks of his story off-screen, to be implied or established in passing.
Attack of the Clones ends with the first battle of the Clone Wars, and according to current rumor, Episode III begins with the final battle of those same Wars. That means that the Clone Wars take place, mostly, off-screen. This has caused some consternation amongst fans — it’s a point raised in those abominable AICN Jedi Councils, for instance — but when you really think about it, Lucas has always done this. Some examples:
:: In A New Hope, we get the feeling that the destruction of the Death Star is the Rebellion’s first big coup, but it’s not: the film’s opening crawl tells us that Rebel spaceships have already won their first major victory against the Empire. The war is already raging; Lucas has performed a classic in medias res opening. We don’t even get to learn what spies managed to steal the Death Star plans, or any of that.
:: In The Empire Strikes Back, the Imperial fleet pretty much hammer-punches the Rebellion, right? Well, not quite. Again, the opening crawl tells otherwise: “Imperial troops have driven the Rebel troops from their hidden base….” (emphasis mine) So, as we get ready to watch The Empire Strikes Back, we’re informed that the Empire already has struck back. The Battle of Hoth is not the first confrontation between the Rebels and the Empire since the Death Star; rather, it’s the culmination of the Empire’s current campaign.
:: Also in The Empire Strikes Back: when the Rebels flee Hoth, they make for a rendezvous point, which is presumably where the fleet is awaiting that we see at the film’s end. Why wasn’t that fleet at Hoth already? Clearly it wasn’t — the probe droid surely would have noticed some big ships like that orbitting the planet — and the implication thereof is that Hoth is only one Rebel base, not the Rebel base. This seems to imply a guerilla-like structure to the Rebellion that is only done away with the the Mon Calamari join up between TESB and ROTJ.
I tend to believe that the Clone Wars were never to be that big a part of the story — they are backdrop, certainly an important event in the Star Wars universe, but Lucas isn’t telling the story of the Star Wars universe. He’s telling the story of Anakin Skywalker, and he’s leaving a lot of the background stuff way in the background. I’m fine with that.
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Notes from our second day at the Erie County Fair:
:: We saw a performance by a troupe of Chinese acrobats. I don’t know what was more stunning: the staggering degree to which they could bend their bodies in any way they wished, or their equally astonishing sense of balance. It was incredibly cool, especially the opening of the act when four of the performers teamed up underneath big costumes to portray two playful cats.
:: The finest meal in the finest restaurant can’t taste any finer than an Italian sausage sandwich, piled high with grilled onions and peppers, consumed under the sky of early evening outside, and followed by a heaping plate of ribbon-cut fried potatoes.
:: Lately we’ve come to love Orville Reddenbacher’s microwave kettle corn. Yesterday, for the first time, we had real kettle corn: the stuff popped in a giant copper kettle whilst being stirred by a hulking guy wielding an equally hulking wooden spoon. This stuff was absolutely amazing.
:: Bungee-jumping appears to be out; what’s in is being hoisted to the top of the tower, from which one then dangles posterior-first before being cut loose, to drop fifty feet or so into a big net. I’m not afraid of heights, and if I were in the company of sufficiently daring friends, I might well do this. What gets me is the price: thirty-five bucks a pop. That’s for the pleasure of experiencing about two seconds of free fall.
:: I don’t care about actually riding the rides; for me, one of life’s finest pleasures is in simply walking to Midway after dark, when colored lights and joyous noises abound. And while other people are roller-coaster enthusiasts, I could very well become a Ferris-wheel enthusiast. The Erie County Fair’s big one towered to 125 feet (at least that’s what the label said), and it is positioned such that at its apex one can see the downtown Buffalo skyline (about ten miles distant), Lake Erie, and Canada beyond.
:: Until yesterday, I had never heard the engines of a monster truck in person. They had one of those big monster-truck shows in the grandstand, and the revving engines of the vehicles could be heard no matter where we were on the Fairgrounds when they happened to press the gas. I don’t know — there just seems something absurdly wasteful to me about such things.
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Our local Blockbuster has a bad habit of being less-than-attentive when shelving movies. For instance, last week we thought we were renting Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, a film in which two dogs and a cat are stranded somehow in the wilderness and have to make their way across many miles of mountainous, wild terrain to their home. Well, I didn’t know that this 1993 movie was actually a remake of a 1963 movie, which is what we ended up with. All was well and good, though — the original turns out to be pretty good, and tells the same exact story.
But it’s interesting to note the changes between the 1963 sensibilities and the 1993 attitudes. In the later film, the animals are given voices with which they interact, Babe style, whereas the earlier film has one of those earnest-sounding Disney narrators who describes all of the action. More interesting, though, is the obvious differences in how filming with animals was different back then. There’s a scene where one of the dogs kills a rabbit, for example, and totes the dead bunny around in its mouth for a while; later on, the other dog has an unfortunate run-in with a porcupine. In each case I was wondering if they really killed a rabbit and inflicted a porcupine on the dog, since I assume this was before the days of the SPCA monitoring filming. Maybe, maybe not. It struck me, anyway.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The Illustrated Tale of Genji: the 44th quire Takekawa
My fascination with Asian culture, long smoldering, seems to be catching fire in the last couple of years. The Tale of Genji is one of the earliest works of literature that can actually be called a “novel”, and this detail is from an illustrated “edition” commissioned by aristocrats in the twelfth century. I have little knowledge of the book’s story (although I did find an online text and an extensive resource site), but I found this particular image interesting, mainly in the blend of color.
And tonight, I think it’s sushi for dinner. Yes, it’s sushi from the local supermarket. But hey, it’s kind of close.
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Virtually the same image is all over the news, but here’s the NYC skyline during the blackout, just after dusk but before total darkness settled.
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Like a lot of Net Geeks, I’ve been following the Texas court case in which a comics-store employee was convicted of selling an adult-comic to an adult (interesting commentary, with links, here). Like most, I’m annoyed at the clear entrapment here, and I’m also dismayed that the prosecuting attorney based his entire argument on comics being primarily a children’s medium. But what really got my goat was in his actual phrasing:
“Comic books, and I don’t care what type of evidence or what type of testimony is out there, use your rationality, use your common sense. Comic books, traditionally what we think of, are for kids.”
This angered me because I have come to absolutely detest the phrase “common sense”.
First, I hate the phrase because it’s totally nebulous. What constitutes “common sense” for one person is a lightning bolt of revelation for another. It’s just common sense that you don’t wear white after Labor Day. It’s just common sense that you have your oil changed every three thousand miles. It’s just common sense that you lather, rinse and repeat.
I suspect we all know people – – maybe from work, maybe from school – – who are near-savants when it comes to the books: they get good grades in tough subjects as easily as they breathe, the mere idea of them ever getting anything less than an A is unthinkable. But they are totally clueless in interpersonal relationships, perhaps; or maybe when you accompany them into a subway station they suddenly get that “caught in the headlights” look; or they lack any semblance of tact at all. We often say of these people, “Wow, they’re sure smart, but they have no common sense”. In that context, the phrase seems innocuous, simply describing knowledge that one really ought to have in order to function with others. But then, deciding just what constitutes that knowledge is a good deal more slippery than that. This is definitely the most harmless use of the phrase, but I still don’t like it because it smacks of a kind of superiority: “Yeah, they smoke us on the grades, but we know how to order from the Soup Nazi.”
Secondly, I hate it when politicians refer to “common sense”. Democrats and Republicans both do it, and it makes me crazy to hear these guys talk about “common sense tort reform” or “common sense healthcare reform” or “common sense antiterrorism measures” or “common sense” anything. You know, when I’m trying to elect someone to lead this country or my state, or represent me in Congress, I don’t want “common” sense. I’m looking for “uncommon” sense. I want someone who’s smart as hell, and who can come up with solutions that in all likelihood aren’t common-sensical at all. There was nothing “common sense” about the establishment of the United States Constitution, for example – – that took a convention of the smartest men (no women, sadly – – another way it took common sense a while to catch up) several months to hammer out a governmental structure such that no one was particularly enamored of the results. The United States exists because a bunch of people chose not to go with “common sense” in a time when “common sense” was that you followed your King and you liked it.
Of course, politicians aren’t actually intending to use “common sense”; it’s just a rhetorical tool, which leads me to my third and biggest reason for hating it: the phrase, like a lot of political catch-phrases (“We can’t throw money at the problem” being another prime example), is actually intended to simply shut off debate. In my experience, one hundred percent of the time when someone invokes the phrase “common sense” in advocating a position, whether it’s on something like educational policy or something so mundane as the fact that The Phantom Menace is a good movie, what they are really saying is: “My position is self-evident, and your disagreement with me is evidence of some deficiency on your part.” It is meant not to argue, but to assert and put the opponent on the defensive. The prosecutor quoted above appeals to both “rationality” and “common sense”, but note his use of “rationality”: Ignore the evidence. Ignore all other testimony. I don’t care what facts may exist that don’t agree with me. This is “rational”? Last time I checked, “rationality” meant looking at the facts and testimony and then using reason to draw a conclusion; but that’s not what this guy wants. He wants a predetermined conclusion, and anything that stands in opposition to that conclusion is, in his mind, to be completely ignored. Well, that’s not “rational” at all, in the sense of using reason. People who appeal to “common sense” don’t want you to use reason. What they want is for you to not think at all.
If you find yourself invoking “common sense” in a debate, the sad fact is this: you haven’t done your homework, and you’re conceding the logical ground to the other guy and resorting to brute force. Of course, it wouldn’t be such a popular catchphrase if it didn’t work a lot of the time. Just ask the poor comics dealer.
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Well, that was interesting.
Remember those safety movies they used to show in school, the ones that told us not to plug two octopus-plugs and four extension cords into a single electrical outlet? Well, those folks knew what they were talking about. I’m just sayin’….
But seriously, our own domicile never lost power, as of this writing. Weird. At about 5:15 yesterday, I turned on the TV for no particular reason, and saw footage of thousands of people hoofing-it out of NYC. Of course, my first thought was some kind of terrorist attack, but that was assuaged almost immediately by the headline of a massive blackout. And then the news flashed a map of the effected area, including all of New York State, Ontario, and the eastern half of the Great Lakes Region — and I’m sitting in the middle of it, with uninterrupted power.
I’m incredibly impressed at the general calm reaction to it all, pretty much everywhere — if going through something like 9-11-01 can ever be said to have a silver lining, that would probably be it. I find disheartening the parade of experts on TV pointing out that our electrical grid is an antiquated mess and has been for years; I just heard on the Today Show that a year ago Congress refused to allocate money for grid modernization, and I can’t wait for the inevitable debates as to the role deregulation played versus the solution being more deregulation. I do hope that maybe something like this will maybe get people to think of nuclear power in terms other than those shaped by Chernobyl.
(Oh, and I lost my writing day entirely due to the outage. Even though we never lost power, I turned off the computer and unplugged its cords in the expectation that we would lose electricity at some point during the restoration process.)