Month: January 2004

You know it must be incredibly cold in New York City when, during the “outside mingling with the crowd” stuff on The Today Show, Katie Couric makes no attempt whatsoever to mingle with the crowd or even make her face visible to the camera. She just stood there, perfectly still and partially hunched over, while Matt Lauer droned on. Man, that’s cold.

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Kevin Drum is pretty cynical about the Bush Administration’s new space policy. I don’t share Kevin’s attitude of “Space, schmace — been there, done that, let’s work on nanotechnology instead”, but I share his lack of enthusiasm on the other grounds he mentions.

I’m not sure, though, if it’s really fair to list the space policy alongside other Bush policies that are specifically designed to really take effect after a Bush second term would end, a habit of the President’s that Kevin noted a while back. The space policy really is something that would take that long. It frustrates the hell out of me, as a space exploration fan, that we allowed things to atrophy to the point where we’re going to have to do everything from the ground up again, but that’s the way of it. It would have been this way for any President proposing such a space policy.

Here‘s another fairly negative reaction, by Robert Merkel, which points out that the Moon is not a worthless destination in itself, but in the context of Mars missions, the Moon makes no sense. He also links an editorial by Jeffrey Bell, a planetologist at the University of Hawaii, in which Bell suggests that the new policy’s funding will, among other things, require NASA to stop the kinds of “pure science” missions that it has actually become so good at since the “Ho hum” attitude of manned flight took hold: space-based telescopes, probes to asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, et cetera. That’s kind of weird for a policy that’s purportedly about science.

Finally, Gregg Easterbrook wrote about the new policy a week ago. His verdict? “Either he’s [President Bush] a science illiterate surrounded by advisors who are science illiterates, or it’s a blank check for aerospace contractors.” Ouch.

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Winters in Buffalo are notable for snow, but they’re not particularly notable for cold. We usually only reach the single digits five or six times during a winter, and it’s really unusual to dip below zero.

Like we’re doing today. Wow.

The good news about this cold is that if it lasts long enough — and tomorrow’s supposed to be only slightly warmer — it will help Lake Erie freeze over, which will shut down the lake effect. Otherwise, this weather doesn’t have an upside: it’s too friggin’ cold.

So, a word to the wise: If you’re outside today, for God’s sake, find a dead Tauntaun, slice open its belly, and crawl inside. It wil keep you warm until Rogue Two can find you.

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Lynn Sislo mentions the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg, which is as she notes often suggested to people who are trying out 12-tone music for the first time. I posted about the Concerto back in July of 2002, when I myself listened to it the first time.

:: 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.

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Sunsets, Kitties, and Fog.

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There’s a bit of discussion this morning about Mars and a Joe Conason journal entry (Salon day-pass required) that points out the involvement of Vice President Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, in developing technology for drilling on the Red Planet. Drilling for what? Well, not oil — I assume it would come as something of a huge surprise if petroleum was found on another planet — but liquid water, which would obviously be necessary for the survival of our Martianauts. (I just made that word up, and I rather like it….”Martianauts”….cool!)

Anyway, there’s a lot of handwringing going on. I first caught wind via Oliver Willis, who points to Glenn Reynolds, who points to (among others) Jay Manifold.

Jay’s analysis is the one to read; Glenn is apparently one of those people who only needs to see the word “oil” in a piece written by a lefty to assume that it’s part of the “It’s all about oil!” argument (which isn’t even always to be ignored, but we’ll let that go). Glenn seems to think that Conason’s belief is that Halliburton wants to literally ship Martian oil back to the Earth, a supposition which to my eyes has absolutely no basis in Conason’s article. Conason doesn’t seem to realize that drilling would be an important part of any colonization project, but that’s not the same thing as saying “He thinks Bush wants Mars’s oil!” (“But why all the oil references, then?” Glenn asks — but the word “oil” appears only twice in the whole piece, and neither time in Martian context. Ditto the word “petroleum”.)

Conason’s argument actually seems to be that Halliburton is riding piggy-back on the Mars project to secure government funding of its development of new drilling technology which could be used on Earth to get at peskier, harder-to-get-to oil reserves — de facto government funding of Halliburton’s R & D operations, really. Conason, therefore, isn’t so much saying “It’s all about oil!”, but pointing out a pattern: It seems that whenever it comes time for the Bush Administration to parcel out lucrative contracts, Halliburton’s name always pops up. The merits of that argument aside, Conason’s piece simply does not support Glenn’s reading. Once again, it would be really nice if Glenn would “read the whole thing” once in a while.

(Oh, and as for the “already debunked” memo that Conason says is part of the whole “divvy-up the Iraqi oilfields” plan, the article Glenn links to showing that it’s “already debunked” appeared the same day as Conason’s piece, and quotes as its source an e-mail whose list of recipients I would suspect does not include Joe Conason. He wasn’t recycling anything; he was referring to something he in all likelihood did not know was “debunked”, assuming the “debunking” is true, on which I have no opinion. Blasting someone for referring to something that has been “debunked” for all-of-four hours or so doesn’t seem fair, especially when the “Al Gore was told to wear brown sweaters” canard is still going strong.)

I also confess to feeling at least some of the feelings Jay writes about at the end of his post. When I consider how many of the current Administration’s activities really are geared toward nothing more than political strategies, it’s hard for me to get totally behind even something I really want to see, such as space colonization. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen virtually nothing from this Administration that hints to me of the “sense of wonder” Jay writes about that I find it hard to feel it myself. I’ve seen how President Bush the Elder rolled out a Mars proposal, and then he put Vice President Quayle in charge of “space policy”, which prompty went absolutely nowhere, and I know how the real motivation of Apollo was not so much “sense of cosmic wonder” as “beating the Russians”. Big projects like these are almost always political, and given this Administration’s tendency to be “All politics, all the time”, it’s hard not to think that way about this one.

Plus, I’m wondering why they’re talking about drilling already, since we don’t even have the first idea what the Earth-to-Mars spaceship would be like, nor do we even have a booster rocket to lift the kind of payloads we’re going to need. (There aren’t any more Saturn V‘s lying about in some warehouse, unfortunately. We’ll be doing this from scratch.) Planning for the drilling of the Martian surface at this point seems, to me, like a rookie baseball player worrying about how his plaque will look in the Hall of Fame.

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OK, I just saw this over on The Gamer’s Nook. It’s a list of one hundred movies, with the ones I have seen in bold. I’m sure this will open me to uncomfortable amounts of ridicule from certain quarters that are more cinematically-literate than I, but hey, if you can’t stand the nasty comments, get out of Blogistan and go back to Usenet.

1. Godfather, The (1972)

2. Shawshank Redemption, The (1994)

3. Godfather: Part II, The (1974)

4. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The (2003)

5. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002)

6. Casablanca (1942)

7. Schindler’s List (1993)

8. Shichinin no samurai (1954)

9. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001)

10. Citizen Kane (1941)

11. Star Wars (1977)

12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

13. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

14. Rear Window (1954)

15. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

16. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

17. Memento (2000)

18. Usual Suspects, The (1995)

19. Pulp Fiction (1994)

20. North by Northwest (1959)

21. Fabuleux destin d’Amelie Poulain, Le (2001)

22. Psycho (1960)

23. 12 Angry Men (1957)

24. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

25. Silence of the Lambs, The (1991)

26. Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)

27. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

28. Goodfellas (1990)

29. American Beauty (1999)

30. Vertigo (1958)

31. Sunset Blvd. (1950)

32. Pianist, The (2002)

33. Matrix, The (1999)

34. Apocalypse Now (1979)

35. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

36. Some Like It Hot (1959)

37. Taxi Driver (1976)

38. Paths of Glory (1957)

39. Third Man, The (1949)

40. C’era una volta il West (1968)

41. Fight Club (1999)

42. Boot, Das (1981)

43. Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) (Spirited Away)

44. Double Indemnity (1944)

45. L.A. Confidential (1997)

46. Chinatown (1974)

47. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

48. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

49. Maltese Falcon, The (1941)

50. M (1931)

51. All About Eve (1950)

52. Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957)

53. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

54. Se7en (1995)

55. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

56. Cidade de Deus (2002)

57. Raging Bull (1980)

58. Wizard of Oz, The (1939)

59. Rashemon (1950)

60. Sting, The (1973)

61. American History X (1998)

62. Alien (1979)

63. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

64. Leon (The Professional) (1994)

65. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

66. Vita bella, La (1997) (Life Is Beautiful)

67. Touch of Evil (1958)

68. Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

69. Wo hu cang long (2000) (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon)

70. Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (1948)

71. Great Escape, The (1963)

72. Clockwork Orange, A (1971)

73. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

74. Annie Hall (1977)

75. Amadeus (1984)

76. Jaws (1975)

77. Ran (1985)

78. On the Waterfront (1954)

79. Modern Times (1936)

80. High Noon (1952)

81. Braveheart (1995)

82. Apartment, The (1960)

83. Sixth Sense, The (1999)

84. Fargo (1996)

85. Aliens (1986)

86. Shining, The (1980)

87. Blade Runner (1982)

88. Strangers on a Train (1951)

89. Duck Soup (1933)

90. Metropolis (1927)

91. Finding Nemo (2003)

92. Donnie Darko (2001)

93. Toy Story 2 (1999)

94. Princess Bride, The (1987)

95. General, The (1927)

96. City Lights (1931)

97. Lola rennt (1998) (Run Lola Run)

98. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

99. Notorious (1946)

100. Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)

Not a very good percentage, I’m sorry to say — 53 percent, if I counted right. The one I feel most embarrassed about is Lawrence of Arabia, which I really gotta get around to seeing one of these days. And despite my admission that I probably should watch the first two Godfather movies, I find it hard to get beyond my complete lack of interest in stories about the Mob. And some of these I haven’t seen in so long that I can’t be said to have any kind of reliable opinion about them (I caught Annie Hall, for instance, by virtue of being in the same room while my sister watched it, when I was in eighth grade or so).

I’m also a bit befuddled by this list’s almost total lack of musicals, with the singular exception of Singin’ In the Rain and The Wizard of Oz. Has that genre so totally fallen by the wayside that only these two titles suffice? I have no idea where this list started, and I guess it’s not meant to be anything more than, well, 100 notable movies. But still, just two musicals? Sheesh!

EDIT: Like Scott, I didn’t recognize the Italian title of #26, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Thus my score goes up by one. Huzzah!

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Football, football, football!

:: The Buffalo Bills have apparently selected their new head coach: current Steelers offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey, who is also a former NFL tight end who played with the Vikings. I found his appointment kind-of surprising, since his name didn’t really come up in the coach-search news reports until the last couple of days, but it’s really not that surprising considering that the Bills’ general manager, Tom Donahoe, is familiar with Mularkey by virtue of being the Pittsburgh GM before coming here.

From what I’m reading, Mularkey has been a high-regarded assistant coach in the last few years — apparently he even turned down being head coach of the Bengals a year ago — and he’s a bright offensive mind, which is what the Bills really wanted after their offense proved last year to be, shall we say, “crappy”. I’m not sure how Mularkey’s stock continued to rise given that the Steelers had a dismal season of their own this year, but there’s got to be some explanation for that.

:: Also, in a neat bit of symmetry, I see that not only did the Bills hire a former Viking, but the Vikings hired a former Bill: onetime Buffalo defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell, who had the same position with the Jets the last couple of years, will now be the coordinator for the Vikings. Cottrell’s a fine, experienced coach who was in charge of the fine Bills defenses during Wade Philips’s tenure as head coach from 1998 to 2000, and he did good work for the Jets (although this year was a bit of a disappointment in that regard, which is why he was looking for a job in the first place). Vikes fans should be happy at this hiring.

:: James Capozzola’s got a nasty case of Eagles fever, in the form of links to every Eagles story in the Philly papers today. (A question: do they really pronounce it “Iggles”? If so, it must be a Pennsylvania thing, because in Pittsburgh, “Our Steelers” comes out “Ahr Stillers”.)

:: And finally, I saw yesterday that a design has been proposed in New York for an Olympic Stadium that would become the home of the Jets after the 2012 Summer Games (assuming NYC’s Olympic bid is successful). It’s a gorgeous design, certainly, but we’re talking about the Jets here!

(I saw the link to the NYC stadium proposal on some blog yesterday, but I can’t for the life of me remember which one. Otherwise I’d credit it.)

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There is a high school in Williamsville, one of Buffalo’s suburbs, that has seen four students die since Christmas. One was killed in a car crash, one literally dropped dead while running on a treadmill, one lost a battle with cancer, and one died “while traveling” (I’m not sure what that means). That’s a lot of loss in so short a time, and of young people, to boot.

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I noted yesterday in my post about my reading habits that I enjoy what I call “kookery” — stuff about all those belief-systems you find out on the fringes of society. I just finished a nifty book about just such people, Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America, by Alex Heard. Heard is a former editor of WIRED Magazine who wrote this book out of a fascination with people who believe that the world is soon to end, or that humanity is soon to evolve, or that death will soon be conquered, or that the government will soon be overthrown. Soon.

Over the course of the book, Heard details his adventures and misadventures as he tracks down, meets, and in some cases, lives with “millennials”. We meet people like the Unarius Academy of Science, which is pretty unique in that the organization survived the passing of its charismatic founder. He profiles a farmer named Clyde Lott who is trying to breed red heifers (cattle which are somehow important in the whole Armageddon thing, I think, or in heralding the reclaiming of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). We meet UFO enthusiasts and glimpse a bit into the clash of personalities that are familiar to anyone who reads much about the UFO community. Heard shows us researchers who wish to literally conquer death: cryonicists, alternative medicine specialists, and people who wonder if severed human heads can be kept alive indefinitely. (In one hilarious passage, a “severed head theorist” speculates on whether museums would have to restrict “discorps” — discorporated heads — to visiting on certain days, since the sight of a head-in-a-vat being wheeled through, say, the Guggenheim might put off the whole-bodied patrons.)

Heard also takes us on a week-long retreat to some outfit that studies “out of body transit”, and to meet some libertarians who want to literally build an artificial island in one of the oceans so they can live in peace, thus going way over the heads of those more down-to-earth libertarians who simply want to take over one of the fifty states. And in a particularly disturbing chapter, Heard delves slightly into the mind of one Ron Cole, who comes off as a right-wing militant revolutionary wanna-be. “Don’t be surprised if you hear the name again,” Heard writes of Cole, who at the time of his writing was in jail on a weapons charge.

Interestingly, Heard mostly avoids the kind of condescending, “You gotta be joking” tone one might expect, although he doesn’t go all the way into sympathy with them, either. What seems to impress Heard the most — with the exception of the chapter about Cole and the Texas militants — is the general air of happiness and optimism he finds in the groups he profiles. “If I had to identify one unifying theme about what motivates contemporary millennialists,” Heard writes, “it would be this: they’d hopeful. Mainly, they hope for change in a world that annoys them.” Heard notes that while most of them believe that things are reaching a breaking point, they are loath to make specific predictions as to when that is to happen, or if they do, they leave themselves convenient “excuses” for why it didn’t take place as planned.

As enjoyable as the book is, there was a dark undertone that Heard certainly didn’t intend, as he wrote this during the late 1990s (the book came out in 1999, and Heard worked on it for several years). I wouldn’t mind seeing some follow-up, if not to the specific people profiled in the book, but as to how 9-11-01 affected millennialism in general. Some of the groups don’t seem nearly as benign in the light of those attacks. Still, the book is less than five years old, and as the few links I turned up above show, the organizations and people Heard profiles are still active. Hope springs eternal, I guess — even the hopes of “kookery”.

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