Month: November 2003

I’m sure that Darth Swank will get a kick out of this item I saw via Warren Ellis:

Japanese Superheroes!

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Last night I was looking through some old video tapes to see which ones actually had stuff we still needed to watch and forgot about in the course of two moves in a year, and which were reusable. In the course of so doing, I came across an episode of The West Wing from the second season, “17 People”, in which Toby figures out that something is going on, which in turn leads him being told about President Bartlet’s multiple sclerosis. So, I sat down to watch the episode, which was a pretty good one.

One of the subplots of the episode had Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes (the blond Republican lawyer who was played by Emily Procter before she left the show for CSI Miami) arguing about the merits of the Equal Rights Amendment. Toward the end, Ainsley pretty much ends the argument with this bit of impassioned dialogue:

“Becuase it’s humiliating. A new Amendment we vote on declaring that I’m equal under the law to a man? I am mortified to discover there’s reason to believe I wasn’t before. I am a citizen of this country, I am not a special sub-set in need of your protection, I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white, men.”

Upon hearing that line again, last night, I was immediately reminded of this: the ceremony at which President Bush signed the ban of partial-birth abortion into law:

Interesting bit of congruity, that.

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I was checking out Body and Soul, a blog I don’t read enough even though I’ve had it blogrolled for six months now, and I came across a post that starts off like this:

“One of my mother’s best friends lost her husband in Vietnam.

He didn’t die. Husbands have many ways of getting lost.”

I doubt I’ve yet encountered a blog post with a better opening than this one, in the nearly two years I’ve been reading them. “Husbands have many ways of getting lost” — what a perfectly haunting sentence. And the whole post is an excellent meditation on sexism, too. Check it out.

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The film music community received a bit of sad and shocking news today: composer Michael Kamen has died. He was only 56, but he had been battling multiple sclerosis for a number of years.

Kamen wrote the scores for all the Lethal Weapon films, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the first X-Men film, the James Bond film Licence to Kill, and — my favorite score of his — Mr. Holland’s Opus. Kamen’s work will also be known to rock fans; he was behind a lot of the orchestral stuff used by “arena bands” like Pink Floyd.

Yet again I have to wonder why creativity and the ability to bring pleasure to many people is so often not rewarded with long life.

Farewell, Michael Kamen.

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The Department of Useless Dichotomies has placed the following report.

:: It has come to our realization of late that the people who inhabit this world may be separated into two distinct populations. Of the first can be said this: They are polite, and they demonstrate such by using the phrase “Excuse me” in its intended circumstance: as a signal to people who are occupying the path they wish to travel, that said obstructing people might duly acknowledge the person and shift accordingly, thus allowing the polite person to pass.

More pernicious, though, are the members of the second population. These people, to whom the word “Boor” can be reasonably ascribed, do in fact use the phrase ‘Excuse me’, but they do not use it as a signal and request. Rather, they utter said phrase while continuing to move at their original rate of speed and along their original trajectory, whether the persons unfortunately in their path have sufficiently shifted to allow passage or not. The meaning of “Excuse me” to the members of the second population, therefore, appears to be a means of self-absolution of any responsibility for collisions that might occur by way of their failure to allow others sufficient time to move.

Of course, any suggestion that the “Boor” might actually be at fault for failing to either look in one’s path to note the presence of others or to at least slow their approach so that others might move is as futile as trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teaspoon; the inevitable refrain one shall hear upon attempting such correction is “I did say ‘Excuse me’!”, usually also accompanied with rolling of the eyes, if appropriate. The temptation here to simply inflict bodily injury on the offender should be resisted; the Department does not recommend physical violence as a matter of legal course. But it occurs to this Department that our sister organization, the Department of Just Desserts, might counsel one to utter a very quick and sotto voce “Excuse me” before punching such a “Boor” in the nose, and then say, “I did say ‘Excuse me’,” before departing the scene. As usual, the Department of Useless Dichotomies does not specifically endorse any recommendations by the Department of Just Desserts.

Yet.

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I’m surprised that it didn’t occur to me a week ago, given that it was Veterans’ Day and that Teresa Nielsen Hayden had a whole bunch of stuff up about World War I and Armistice Day (what Vets’ Day was, originally), but one of my favorite Celtic/Folk songs is “The Green Fields of France” by Eric Bogle, the lyrics of which I personally find more moving than the oft-cited WWI poem, “In Flanders Fields” (although the song alludes to that poem in the final verse). These are the lyrics as I know them from the several recordings of the song I own, but there are variations.

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,

Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?

And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,

I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.

I see by your gravestone you were only 19

When you joined the great fallen in 1916,

I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean

Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Chorus:

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?

Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?

Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?

Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind

In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?

And, though you died back in 1916,

To that faithful heart are you forever 19?

Or are you a stranger without even a name,

Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,

In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,

And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

(Chorus)

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;

The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.

The trenches have vanished long under the plow;

No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.

But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land

The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand

To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,

And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

(Chorus)

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,

Do all those who lie here know why they died?

Did they really believe when they answered the call,

Did they really believe that this war would end wars?

Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain

The killing and dying, was all done in vain,

For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,

And again, and again, and again, and again.

(Chorus)

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Via Nathan Newman I see that China is on the verge of implementing fuel economy standards that are tougher than those of the United States. According to the article, all new SUVs and minivans in China will be required to meet the same fuel efficiency standards as automatic-shift cars of the same weight. Wow. (Pickup trucks and commercial trucks are excluded, but apparently pickup trucks are not popular in China except for use by businesses.)

Another interesting factoid that I did not know was that American fuel efficiency standards are based on the averages for entire fleets, whereas the Chinese standards will apply to each vehicle. That is why American manufacturers can sell vehicles with abysmal mileage, as long as they have some other vehicle like a Geo Metro in the product line that brings the total average up. That won’t be possible under the Chinese rules.

Interesting.

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The Grey Bird has a few thoughts on the expectations people should have when entering the lair of a dog-owner. I can sympathize, but as always, I am very glad that I have seen the inherent superiority of cats.

(By the way, surely it is an indicator of something that you almost never see cats on Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks”, an installment of which aired last night featuring — you guessed it — two dogs and a macaw bird.)

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After finally engaging in a bit of a breakthrough over the last few days, the writing on the Novel-In-Progress has become easier, and as of this morning I broke 76,000 words. (I’m planning for a first draft between 180K and 190K words.) Very cool. Part of the problem, I’m convinced, has been that I’ve simply allowed too many days to go by without getting anything of substance written — less than 200 words, for example. That’s simply not enough to keep the ball going and the characters fresh. Continuity of effort is essential; otherwise, you simply lose sight of what the hell it is you’re doing.

Anyhoo, another weird problem came up. I have a main character — a fairly major character — who has been spending much of the book thus far behaving in a way that doesn’t entirely make sense. I mean, it’s not totally illogical, but there really are better ways for him to go about things, and I finally reached the point where that fact had to be confronted. Now, since I don’t work with outlines, my original temptation was to simply backtrack and fix this character’s actions so they make more sense, but I kept rejecting that on the basis that it would just be too much stupid work. I will backtrack if I have to, but I tend to be very militant in how I judge “if I have to”. Even if I’m writing a short story, I resist backtracking as much as I can; in a novel, a backtrack would represent the loss of several months of work. So I kept this character acting in ways that aren’t quite up-to-snuff, and over the last week I’ve written no fewer than four versions of a scene where he tries to explain himself.

Yesterday, though, I finally realized what I had been missing: I had been working too hard on making his explanations make sense, as if his actions really did have to make sense. Yesterday, though, a simple thought popped into my cranium: “What if he’s actually full of shit, and what if everyone around him knows it?” Which is, of course, the right answer, because it gives the character in question a much-needed third dimension, it adds conflict and tension, and best of all, it sets the stage for events which I already knew were to come. Now he’s not just a cog in my plot-wheel; this person’s actions will be partly responsible for a major disaster that’s in the offing a few chapters from now.

Lesson learned: If your characters are screwing things up, that is not a sign that you, the writer, are screwing things up.

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As I noted a few days ago, I’ve been recording some of my favorite film scores onto my hard drive for listening purposes when I’m writing. (Many times I like to listen to music on headphones when I write, unless I’m home alone.) One score that was a big favorite of mine in the late 90s, but which I hadn’t really listened to much in several years, is James Horner’s Braveheart. As much as I’ve become annoyed with Horner’s constant, well, “Hornerisms”, this score is still as good as I remember it, and the first half of it is downright extraordinary. It has a wonderful meditative quality that is almost otherworldly, particularly the track “The Secret Wedding”, in which Horner plays out one of his longest and most intricate melodies. I think the second half of the score (the stuff after the Battle of Stirling) isn’t quite as good, but man, those first nine tracks are sensational. I’ve long believed that James Horner reached his high point right around 1995, when he composed excellent scores to Braveheart, Apollo 13, and Legends of the Fall. Those three scores are why I didn’t mind when he won an Oscar a few years later for Titanic, even though that score really wasn’t all that great. Better a few years late than never, I always say.

I also picked up the score CD of The Matrix Revolutions yesterday, and I listened to most of it this morning. I’ve yet to see the film, and since I also missed Reloaded, I’ll likely wait for the DVD, but as I’ve long maintained, seeing the film is in no way a requirement for enjoying the score. Don Davis turns in some really superb work here — the disc is a fascinating blend of techno stuff and straight-forward orchestral writing, some of it purely atmospheric and some of it strongly melodic. This should tide me over until Monday, when the score CD to Return of the King hits the stores in what I am sure will be the film music event of all time. (Or at least November.)

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