Month: February 2005

For some reason, The Promised King just isn’t showing up on search engine hits as high as I would like. Now, part of that is because I chose a title that seems to be a fairly common phrase in Christian theological writing (for reasons that should have occurred to me years ago, but we’ll not dig that up). So: if those of you with blogs would be kind enough to assist a Google-bombing in my behalf, I’d certainly appreciate it. I’m looking to have the thing linked both to its actual title and to my real name, as I did here. Thank you.

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I’ll probably be doing more linking to what I choose as my “Image of the Week” off-site, as opposed to always reproducing it here, because the last three months in a row I’ve come close to exceeding the bandwidth transfer allowed by my ISP. Not close enough to really sweat about it — I’ve been getting a notice upon hitting 75 % of my allowed monthly transfer around the third or fourth day from the end of the month, so it hasn’t become an issue yet — but I’m going to dial down the image use around here slightly. (Although this does give me more incentive to put that Flickr account of mine into use, doesn’t it?)

Additionally, I’ve had a couple of dry weeks as far as turning up suitable items for the Burst of Weirdness. Maybe I’m not looking in the right spots, but my approach until now has been to “Let the weirdness come to me”, a strategy which has never failed before. This is the Interweb, after all. So I’m going to kill two birds with one stone, and link this gallery of photos taken by a guy who shoots stuff to see what happens when he shoots stuff. The link is freely swiped from John Scalzi. Problem is, now I wanna shoot stuff.

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Lots of times on Super Bowl Sunday I like to ignore the pregame stuff on TV, most of which is pretty boring (“And now, here’s Greg Gumbel with a special feature on the long-snapper for the Eagles, and the unique struggles he’s had in his life and how lucky he is to be in the NFL…”) and watch a movie instead. Today it’s Apollo 13, which has been a favorite film of mine pretty much since its release in 1995. (The launch sequence has to rank as one of the most thrilling sequences in any film ever, as far as I am concerned.)

Anyway, when the command module first suffers the explosion of its oxygen tanks (the “Houston, we have a problem” scene), there’s a bit where Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) has to do some manual calculations of the ship’s trajectory so the numbers can be programmed into the computer on the Lunar Excursion Module. But he’s working very feverishly, so he tells Mission Control that he needs a check of his arithmetic, and as a bunch of NASA techs scrawl down his numbers and crank through the calculations, there’s a brief shot of a slide rule in operation.

I only used a slide rule once in school: in twelfth grade, my physics teacher — who maintained a stash of slide rules — spent a class session teaching us how they work, even though he admitted that they were very likely to go the way of the dodo. I seem to recall the slide rule being a fairly slick device, with an impressive amount of ingenuity behind the design of such an object. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a slide rule in real life since that day, and I don’t have a burning desire to own one, but it’s cool knowing that if I wanted one, I could get one from these people.

And if you just want to play around with one, there’s this handy Java-powered slide rule.

My physics teacher told us that experienced users of slide rules could whip through calculations not much slower than folks armed with electronic calculators. For some reason, I find that pretty cool.

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This morning I have posted Chapter Three of The Promised King, so you’ll all have something to read if the score of the Super Bowl is something like 27-3 in the second quarter. But we all know you’re going to read it regardless, right? Because if you don’t, as would-be centenarian Ayn Rand would say, you’re leading an irrational life full of contradictions. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

So go read Chapter Three. And for all you blog-owners out there, make sure you link Chapter Three. Failure to do so would be…ach, you get it already.

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According to AICN, someone is tossing around the possibility of doing another one of those “live-action versions of an animated classic” thingies. The animated classic in question?

Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Well…um…hmmm. I just don’t know what to think of this. What actually seems to be happening is a new adaptation of the series of children’s books on which Miyazaki’s film is based, as opposed to just a live-action version of Miyazaki’s film itself. If the former, then fine; if the latter, then please, someone, kill this project. We just don’t have a good track record when it comes to improving on movies that are already nearly perfect.

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Field of Dreams

Original score by James Horner

James Horner is, as ever, a troublesome topic for film music lovers. To me, he’s pretty much fallen off the radar in recent years. I’m told by the Horner fans that his recent work — the actual score to Troy, which replaced Gabriel Yared’s rejected (and brilliant) score, A Beautiful Mind, and so on — is still beautiful, well-constructed, and so on. But cursory listens to sample tracks have led me to conclude that I’ve pretty much heard all from Horner that I’m ever going to hear. That’s a pity, because he once showed evidence of being a very compelling voice in film music, as opposed to merely being the poster-child for slick competence in film music.

Anyway.

Field of Dreams, which tends to alternate with Bull Durham as my favorite baseball film, came out in 1989, so its score has been around a bit. To my ears, it marks the point where the up-and-coming Horner of the 1980s, who wrote big scores to films like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Aliens, and Willow, began yielding to the Horner of the 1990s, who tended to write more introspective music, dominated by strings and low winds, long and dreamy melodies, safer harmonies, and occasional flirtations with Americana. (To Horner’s detractors, this may also mark the point at which Horner finally reached the point where he had enough of a body of work that he could begin recycling his own material, as opposed to rather liberally borrowing from classical masters. Anyone who would decry John Williams as being a heavy borrower from classical masters only does so because they haven’t explored James Horner too closely. See Alex Ross for details.)

For Field of Dreams, though, Horner writes a score of genuine beauty. A hushed rendition of the main theme, played by a solo horn, accompanies the film’s opening credits, which then gives way to a bit of piano solo (played, I think, by Horner himself) that to my ears is as sepia-toned as the still-photos that flash by, slide-show style, to Ray Kinsella’s (Kevin Costner’s) narration.

Interestingly — to me, anyway — is how Horner keeps everything pretty understated until the film’s final scene. There’s some dark material along the way: sad musical meditations for Ray Kinsella’s meditations on his childhood, and fairly dark and mysterious material accompanying pretty much the entire Moonlight Graham subplot (dark material which gives way to more gentle material when young Archie takes the final step to becoming Doc Graham, and then back to some very sad music indeed as Ray realizes the sacrifice Doc has just made on his behalf). But it’s only in the very last scene, as dusk is settling and all of the film’s conflicts are settled save one, that Horner uncorks his main theme in full force. It’s a pretty obvious compositional trick, and there’s nothing earth-shaking in the music itself, and yet somehow it always makes me tear up, just a little.

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“Is this sad music? Because it’s making me feel sad.”

So said The Daughter just a few minutes ago (as I’m writing this, as I’m actually publishing the post on Sunday morning). That’s the first time, to my recall, that she’s ever commented on the emotional fabric of a piece of music. I found that interesting, as well as the fact that I didn’t find the music in question (the main theme from Once Upon a Time in the West, from the album Yo Yo Ma plays Ennio Morricone) particularly sad — certainly beautiful, and maybe elegiac, but not actually sad. But then, The Daughter is only five, so she still has yet to learn the fine gradations to emotions and how to describe them (such as the idea that there are sadnesses that are happy, if that makes sense). For now, I think it’s cool that she’s relating music to feeling.

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Well, it’s Super Bowl Sunday, folks. For my non-American readers, that’s when we all take breaks from our New Years’ Resolutions of health and exercise and whatnot to sit around eating junk food while watching the final two teams alive in the National Football League take each other on for the Super Bowl Championship, the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the right to make commercials for Disney resorts, and — if the winners are the New England Stupid Patriots — undying hatred from Yours Truly. O what a wonderful day!

Time for some “Super Thoughts”:

:: The other day, the two hosts of one of the Buffalo sports-talk radio shows I listen to were debating on whether the Super Bowl should be moved to Saturdays in the future, or if it should be kept on Sunday. The main idea seems to be that it’s hard going to work the day after the Super Bowl, or something like that. I say, Bollocks. Consider the World Series in baseball: unless that thing goes to a Game Six, it’s guaranteed to end on a night preceding a work day (Game Seven falls on a Sunday), no matter when it ends (Games Four, Five or Seven). The big complaint about the World Series is that the games start ridiculously late: network coverage opens at 8:00 p.m., with the first pitch coming after lineups, the National Anthem, and so on. The Super Bowl, on the other hand, kicks off by 6:30 p.m. generally, and even with an extended halftime, the game itself is almost always over by 10:00 p.m. In fact, the Super Bowl always ends early enough that the network carrying it has time to put some show on after the game — sometimes a highly-regarded pilot, other times a special episode of a particularly popular show. If you regularly stay up to catch the late night news, you can stay up to catch the Super Bowl. It’s not that demanding.

The better argument comes from the convenience of getting all of the people actually at the Super Bowl site back home. Over the week before the game, thousands of people descend upon the Super Bowl city (this year it’s Jacksonville, Florida). And then, all of those people leave again on Monday or Tuesday after the game. Moving the game to Saturday would help alleviate traffic, heavy airport use, et cetera. Or so the argument went. Having never been to a Super Bowl, I wouldn’t know. But I just like having the thing on Sunday nights; I suspect that the game would suffer a bit as a “water cooler” topic if it was two days old by the time one went back to work.

(But then, for four years in a row I had to show my face around college the day after the Bills lost the Super Bowl, so there’s a reverse argument to be made, too. Hmmmm.)

:: Why the StuPats will win the Super Bowl.

:: Why the Eagles will win the Super Bowl.

:: My prediction? I suppose I should offer one. I’ve come close, a whole bunch of times, to convincing myself that the Eagles were going to win, but I just can’t pick them, much as I’d like to. I’ll still be rooting for them, and if they do win, I will of course dance with great joy as the StuPats fall from “dynasty” to “another memorable team that lost the Super Bowl”, much like Joe Theissman’s Redskins. But I just don’t think the scenarios that lead to an Eagles victory are all that likely. Sooner or later Tom Brady is going to look bad in a big game; sooner or later the StuPats’ patchwork defense will let them down; sooner or later Adam Vinatieri will honk a big kick; sooner or later some head coach will figure out that Bill Belichick actually doesn’t know what he’s going to do. But that day isn’t today. I’m not looking for a StuPat blowout — rhetoric aside, the StuPats aren’t the 1989 49ers, and the Eagles aren’t the 1989 Broncos, so no StuPat 55-10 win here — but I am expecting a fairly convincing win, something along the lines of StuPats 30, Eagles 17. And then, of course, the Archangels of Heaven will descend and elevate Bill Belichick and Tom Brady into the sky, where their spirits shall inhabit two new stars which shall shine down upon our fragile globe, thus ushering in a new era of Peace and Goodness on Earth.

Oh, Eagles, please! Make it stop!

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I left a couple of pithy comments over here last week (of the “Quit picking on liberals!” variety)…and she designates Byzantium’s Shores as her “Link of the Week”, because I challenged her and made her think. I’m grateful for that, especially since after leaving each comment I later thought, “Hmmm, I wonder if I was too pissy there.” I guess that one person’s “pissy” is another person’s “thought-provoking”, eh? Maybe I should infuse the posts here with more pissyness? Is that even a word?

(Oh, and speaking of Links of the Week, I completely forgot to do an Image of the Week last week, and I couldn’t find anything that really tripped my trigger for the “Burst of Weirdness”. Sorry about both. For a belated Image of Last Week, go here. The tear at the corner of that woman’s eye makes the whole photo. It’s very striking; thanks to Graham for posting it.)

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At some recent point, Jessica Duchen’s blog has accrued some kind of pop-up ad thing that appears as soon as one navigates away from her blog. According to one of her commenters, the culprit is the webcounter she’s been using, freewebcounter.com. It might not be a bad idea to spread the word that these folks force annoying pop-ups on the sites using them. Idiots.

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