Month: March 2005

Over the last week, I’ve written and edited an entire short story — 2100 words. Not an amazing accomplishment, really, but ever since Little Quinn’s birth the “fiction” part of my brain has been pretty much stalled. This is an interesting development. I hope it continues.

The story, by the way, is a reworking of the myth of the Selkie Mermaid, told from the point of view of the child produced by the union of the mermaid and a man. I’m not sure why this story poured out of me so quickly — maybe it’s just the impending St. Patrick’s Day, coupled with the fact that lately Celtic music has comprised the major part of my music listening. Anyway, I’m not complaining.

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As long as I’m poking around Simon’s blog, I see that he posts answers to an extensive poll about all things Star Wars. And obviously, I can’t allow this to go unanswered, myself, so here goes.

(First off, the significance of the title of Simon’s post is that the number in question is the serial number of the trash compactor in A New Hope.)

And now, the queries:

1. Best Star Wars moment:

For me, the defining moment in the entire saga is when Luke’s X-wing sinks into the swamp in The Empire Strikes Back, and Yoda chooses that moment to make his most profound object lesson. Plus, that particular scene is scored wondrously by John Williams.

2. Best Hero:

Luke Skywalker. I guess Han Solo would be the “cool” pick, but I’ve got to go with the guy who redeems Darth Vader.

3. Best Villain:

I’ll rule out Vader and Palpatine, since they’re blindingly obvious. For the rest, I’ll pick Count Dooku. I love his chilling switch from trying to convince Obi Wan to join him to a more ominous, “It may be difficult to secure your release.” Meaning, “We’re going to kill you.”

4. Best Alien / Creature:

The succession of large fish in the underwater segment of The Phantom Menace.

5. Best Minor Character:

Jango Fett. (“I’m just a simple man trying to make my way in the Universe” is a great line.)

6. Best line of dialogue:

Han Solo: “Never tell me the odds!”

7. Sexiest character:

I really don’t think of Star Wars in terms of sexual themes. That said, Padme looks really gorgeous when she and Anakin arrive at the island retreat in Attack of the Clones. (Leia and the gold bikini never excited me, really. Since I dig long hair, Leia’s dress in the Ewok village was much more my speed. Although I’ve always wondered how the Ewoks were able to sew something so perfectly for someone twice their measurements.)

8. Best costume:

Again, I have to rule out the obvious (Darth Vader). Those red-clad Imperial Guards sure looked menacing.

9. Best haircut:

Huh?! I mean — huh?! Qui Gon Jinn, I guess.

10. Best innuendo:

OK, this is going to get me totally pilloried, but I don’t care. I actually like Anakin’s ham-handed attempt to be poetic (“I don’t like sand….”) in AoTC. Padme just kind of gets this look like she has no idea what the hell he’s babbling about. I’ve always believed that this awful line is awful by design (it’s no accident, I think, that every horrible line in that film comes from Anakin).

11. Best Lightsabre:

Luke’s green one in Return of the Jedi. It’s the first time we really see Luke pop open the proverbial can o’ Jedi whoop-ass.

12. Best Gun:

Han’s blaster.

13. Best Fight:

Should I just go ahead and name the Obi Wan/Anakin thriller that’s coming in Revenge of the Sith? If not, I’ll take Vader versus Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.

14. Best Vehicle:

The Millennium Falcon. Although Count Dooku’s solar-sailer is pretty neat.

15. Best Title:

Attack of the Clones. It just sounds campy as all hell, which is as it should be. I find it funny that people like me get all hyper and serious about a movie series with titles like Attack of the Clones, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Phantom Menace.

16. Best Toy:

Huh. Truth to tell, I never had that many Star Wars toys. I’ve always wanted a die-cast Millennium Falcon, though.

17. Best Spoof / Spinoff:

This. I still watch this every now and then.

18. Best Game:

Not familiar with many of them at all. But I did like the vector-graphics 1980s arcade Star Wars game.

19. Best use of, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Anakin’s, as the execution-by-horrible-hungry-beastie in AoTC begins. He managed to sound cocky and understated at the same time.

20. Best use of the Force:

Luke’s trusting of the Force when he destroys the Death Star.

21. Best Poster:

The teaser poster for The Phantom Menace, in which Anakin-as-a-boy casts Darth Vader’s shadow on the wall.

22. Best Trailer:

The first trailer for The Phantom Menace, which provided our first glimpses back into the Star Wars universe in fifteen years.

23. Best Death:

Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker.

24. Best Entrance:

Not really an “entrance”, I guess, but when the doors open to the dining room in The Empire Strikes Back, revealing Darth Vader.

25. Best Chase Sequence:

The asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back.

26. Best Action Set Piece:

The Battle of Hoth.

27. Best musical cue:

Hoo-boy. Here’s a tough one. Seriously, John Williams has done so much amazing work on Star Wars that I’m tempted to duck this question entirely. But one cue always seems to rise to the top whenever I go on a Star Wars music listening binge: “The Clash of Lightsabers” from The Empire Strikes Back.

28. Best sound effect:

Lightsaber ignition.

29. Best visual effect:

An obvious choice would be lightsabers, so I’ll go non-obvious. Like him or hate him, Jar Jar is a pretty amazing accomplishment. So are the Clone Troopers. (Did you know that in all of AoTC, there is not a single shot of a clone trooper that involves an actor wearing a clone trooper costume? They are all digital.)

30. Best expanded universe character:

Hmmmm. Grand Admiral Thrawn is pretty obvious, so I’ll go with his second-in-command, Captain Paellion (my spelling may be off), who — while being Imperial — is competent and principled.

31. Best Gag:

Yup, the stormtrooper hitting his head on the door in A New Hope. I love that it’s become a recurrent gag, to the point that for the recent DVD release of the original trilogy, George Lucas actually added in an audible “bonk” sound for the gaffe.

32. Best Planet:

Coruscant. The ten-seconds or so in The Phantom Menace depicting sunset on Coruscant are as beautiful a sight as any I’ve ever seen in a film.

33. Best Special Edition Tweak:

The herd of Banthas in Return of the Jedi.

34. Best Film:

A New Hope. I know that conventional wisdom has TESB taking the prize, but ANH started it all.

(35. Worst scene:)

(I’m adding this entry, just because I don’t want anyone to think I’m so blinkered in my admiration of George Lucas that I think he’s done flawless work, especially on the Prequels. The scene between Padme and Jar Jar in the hold of the Queen’s ship in The Phantom Menace is just a horrible, awful scene. It’s a “filler” scene, it feels like a “filler” scene, and it’s not even a good “filler” scene.)

(36. Honorable mention Worst Scene:)

(Just to demonstrate that the Original Trilogy had its own hiccups, I point out the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke’s in the hospital bed. Here’s a scene that posits “scruffy-looking Nerf-herder” as a terrible insult. Ye Gods.)

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In the film Amadeus, there is a scene where Constanze Mozart, the great composer’s wife, goes behind his back to try and gain favor with Salieri, so that Mozart will be able to make more money. In this scene, Salieri — who has no intention of helping Mozart at all — gets on Constanze’s good side by offering her an apparently decadent confection of Roman chestnuts in brandied sugar. The more erotic name for this item is “Capezzoli di Venere”, or “Nipples of Venus”, because — well, they look like breasts.

Anyway, I did a Google search on “Nipples of Venus” on a whim, and actually found a recipe for them. Looking at the recipe, I’m not sure if this actually results in something that looks like what’s depicted in the movie, but it does look pretty good. Maybe with white chocolate instead of semi-sweet?

(EDIT: I changed the link to one that uses the same recipe as the previous link, but that includes a picture of the “Nipples of Venus” from the movie.)

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Here’s the first installment in my current iteration of the “Five Questions” game, with questions posed by Simon:

1. You are given free rein within a single paragraph to elucidate on the core of the appeal that Star Wars has to you. Make every word count.

It makes me wonder, it thrills me, it was the first thing that made me think of story in terms of archetype, and it was the first story that made me think in terms of good and evil. That’s all I need, really.

2. You are given the opportunity to bequeath perfect health upon your son at the cost of yourself inheriting his every malaise. What do you do and why?

Nothing, because I can’t predict the future for him, but I do recall one thing one of his doctors said in the NICU: “This level of brain injury in an adult would result in a complete, irreversible coma with no hope of awakening.”

This probably sounds flip; I mean, who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to confer perfect health upon their child? Well, there’s the nature of his illness, and the fact that for my family right now, a healthy him and a vegitative me would be far, far worse than the circumstance that exists now.

Plus, I’ve never been one to subscribe to the view that parents should be willing to sacrifice everything for their children. I don’t understand the view that once children arrive, all of an adult’s dreams and wishes and desires should suddenly be stuck on life’s back burner.

(Ironically enough, Simon has a post today that’s germane to this very topic. As bad as Little Quinn has it, the thing with cerebral palsy is that it doesn’t get worse. The affliction Simon’s co-worker’s son is suffering does.)

(BTW, I often think about how stunningly sad the entire Buffalo-Niagara region is going to be when Jim Kelly’s son inevitably passes away. It’s hard for me not to think about stuff like this nowadays.)

3. Working at The Store is not your dream job. What is, and, more specifically, what is preventing you from realising it?

Writing, obviously – writing what I want, when I want, how I want. For the most part, I am realizing it; except that I’m not getting paid for it. So why is that? Time, possibly; I don’t have enough of it. But then, neither do lots of people. So maybe I just don’t have the right level of “drive” to do what I need to do to get there — drive to write enough, drive to market it, who knows. Strangely, I’m slowly making my peace with that.

4. If you could give one piece of music to everyone in the world to listen to, which would it be?

Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 in E-minor. Or the Jeff Beck/Rod Stewart cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”. I’d probably flip a coin.

More seriously, though, I don’t think there’s any way that having everybody listen to a work of my choice would be very effective. There are classical listeners who would eat Rachmaninov up, but there are also classical listeners who can’t abide Russian Romanticism. And there are people who don’t grok classical at all.

So what I’d really like to do is give every single person on Earth an iPod or some similar device, tell them all to cue up some piece of music that means most to them, and then all sit down at one time and listen. Silence would reign all over the world — but in the inner ears of every human, there’d be music. And then a new era of peace and joy would dawn on Earth. (More likely, we’d just go back to screwing and killing each other, but man, that hour or so of silence would be golden.)

5. Finally getting around to cleaning up the clutter in your domicile, you stumble upon a time machine that you forgot you invented while in the throes of creative abandon. Which single historical event (in ANY time) do you go back to witness and not affect in any way?

Just one? Shit. I want to go to Dallas on November 22, 1963 and see just who, if anyone, was behind the fence on the grassy knoll. But I also want to be on the deck of the Titanic and see just how close James Cameron got it. I’d like to be able to see a “time lapse” of early life on Earth. I’d like to be at Agincourt and see how close Shakespeare was to what King Henry V really said. And for nerdy personal reasons, I’d want to be at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood on May 25, 1977. Oh, and I’d like to be at that magnificent Bills-Oilers playoff game in January 1993, when the Bills rallied to win after they fell behind 35-3. I’d like to see that one because…I went grocery shopping at halftime, figuring the Bills to be out of it. When I got home, they were only down 35-24.

I have another set of five questions coming soon (actually, I already have them, I just have to finish answering them and post ’em). If anyone wants me to ask five questions, leave your request in comments. And feel free to ask me five questions, if you so desire. It’s a fun way to “blog outside the box”.

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A friend e-mailed me this picture, and I feel the need to unleash its unnatural power upon Blogistan. Quiver, mere mortals!

You are powerless before the combined might of…the kitties!!!

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It ain’t gonna happen. Time to move on to something more productive.

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No, not that George. I’m talking about George Lucas. I watched last night’s interview with him on 60 Minutes, and as ever, he’s a fascinating man. And if he is, as Drew Vogel calls him, “a washed-up hack”, well — I hope that when I am a washed-up hack I’m as successful as George Lucas, with his multimedia empire. Of course, I don’t admit for one second that Lucas is a washed-up hack, but that’s neither here nor there.

(“Washed-up hack” seems a bit strong, in any case. You may not like his recent films, but “washed-up hack” seems like a phrase one might apply to, say, David Lee Roth or Piers Anthony, not a man who continues to be a filmmaking giant.)

Lucas spoke a bit about the strong possibility that Revenge of the Sith may draw a PG-13 rating, and that it may be too strong for children. I plan to see it first, before I make any attempt to take The Daughter to see it. (I wanted to take her to Attack of the Clones, when she was three, but the execution scene at the end pretty much ixnayed that idea.) She has seen all of the Lord of the Rings movies, but only on video, at home. While her favorite scene is the fight with the Balrog at the beginning of The Two Towers, I doubt she’d have the same opinion had she seen that on the big screen. Ditto the encounter with Shelob.

Also in the same interview, Lucas himself insisted that Episode VII will not happen and the cinematic Star Wars saga will end with the release of Revenge of the Sith. (Strangely, no mention was made at all of persistent rumors that a post-Episode III Star Wars television series is in development. I can’t believe Leslie Stahl didn’t ask Lucas about that.)

Now, as luck would have it, just last week in comments to this post of mine, Jayme Lynn Blaschke had this to say:

Supposedly last Star Wars movie ever. Lucas changes his mind like other people change underwear. I’ll not completely write off 7, 8 and 9 until he’s pushing up the daisies.

What Jayme is referring to is that back in the day, the Star Wars saga was always referred to as being nine films, not six — although George Lucas has maintained in more recent interviews (and by “more recent” I mean, in the last ten years or so) that his real original idea was just to do six films. So I did a bit of research last night, looking into my incredibly-frayed copy of the book Once Upon an Empire: The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, which is basically an on-set diary kept by the unit publicist of The Empire Strikes Back. The book also includes interviews with just about every major person involved with making the film — including George Lucas. And toward the end of the book, I find this exchange (on page 247, for anyone who owns a copy of the book):

AA [Alan Arnold, the book’s author]: Tell me more about the overall concept of the Star Wars saga.

GL [George Lucas]: There are essentially nine films in three trilogies. The first trilogy is about the young Ben Kenobi and the early life of Luke’s father, when Luke was a little boy. This trilogy takes place some twenty years before the second trilogy which includes Star Wars and Empire. About a year or two passes between each story in a trilogy and about twenty years pass between the trilogies. The entire saga spans about 55 years.

So there we have it: there were supposed to be nine films originally, so Lucas is wrong when he says he always intended just six.

Or, so we would have it, if the interview ended there. The very next exchange goes as follows:

AA: How much is written?

GL: I have story treatments on all nine. I also have voluminous notes, histories, and other material I’ve developed for various purposes. Some of it will be used, some not. Originally, when I wrote Star Wars, it developed into an epic on the scale of War and Peace, so big I couldn’t possibly make it into a movie. So I cut it in half, but it was still too big, so I cut each half into three parts. I then had material for six movies. After the success of Star Wars I added another trilogy but stopped there, primarily because reality took over. After all, it takes three years to prepare and make a Star Wars picture. How many years are left? So I’m still left with three trilogies of nine films. At two hours each, that’s about eighteen hours of film!

So, there we have it. Yes, there were once ideas for a total of nine Star Wars films, but when Lucas maintains that his original, core idea for Star Wars involved six films, he’s telling the truth. Or at least, he’s sticking to the story he’s been telling since 1979, when this interview was conducted. His original story, the one which he wrote first and with which he is still emotionally invested, constituted six films. The seventh, eighth and ninth episodes were basically “afterthought”.

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One thing I’ve noticed over the last ten years or so is the growing need in the news media to come up with some kind of “Title” under which to categorize coverage of every major news story: “America, Under Attack!” was all over the place after 9-11; then it became “America Strikes Back!” when we attacked Afghanistan. I remember that I worked in an office during the first couple years of the Clinton Administration where we were subjected to Rush Limbaugh every day, and every hour led off with this deep-voiced guy saying “America — Under Siege!”

Well, today at The Store I caught a bit of FOX News’s continuing coverage of the Atlanta courthouse shootings and the heroic hostage who managed to get away and turn the guy in, and all through the coverage, FOX ran the tagline at the bottom of the screen: “Justice Under Attack”. And I’m thinking, “Oh, come on.”

That guy wasn’t “attacking justice” just because he killed a judge and a deputy and a court reporter; he was a violent criminal committing a violent act in a bid for escape. That was it. Horrible, yes; an attack on an abstract concept, no. So why did FOX need that stupid tagline?

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Longtime readers will remember that last summer, my long quest for my favorite, and elusive, candy bar came to an end when I found the Boyer Peanut Butter Smoothie, an all-peanut butter peanut butter cup, on sale at Vidler’s in East Aurora. (Side note to my Buffalo readers: Vidler’s is a freaking treasure. You must go there. Why that place isn’t front-and-center on all of the Buffalo-Niagara region tourist literature is beyond me.)

Well, I’m at 7-11 this afternoon buying drinks for me and the kid (evil, thy name is “IBC Root Beer on tap at 7-11”), and I spied something nifty-looking: the fine people at Reese’s, who have been doing variations on their classic Peanut Butter Cup for several years now (White Chocolate cups, Inside-Out cups, Big Cups, et cetera) now have a “Peanut Butter Lover’s” limited edition out. Did I buy them? Oh, you bet.

And is it as good as the Boyer Peanut Butter Smoothie? Oh, it’s so damned close…but no.

It’s a really good item. I plan to fill my fridge with the things. But no, they’re not replacing the Boyer delicacy, because Reese’s just couldn’t get beyond the idea that there had to be chocolate in this thing, somewhere — so the bottom and sides of the cup are chocolate. There’s the same peanut butter filling, and the “lid” of the cup is a peanut-butter shell, but there’s still chocolate there. It’s almost like someone at Reese’s chickened out — “It can’t be all peanut butter! Who’d buy that!” — and so, well, it looks like the small candy company from Altoona is still the king of Peanut Butter Cup World, as far as I am concerned.

(Sadly, Reese’s is running a promotion where you vote for either the Peanut Butter Lover’s cup, or the “Chocolate Lover’s cup”, which I have not tried — I love chocolate, but what’s the point of that thing?? — and the Peanut Butter Lover’s cup is getting its ass kicked as of this writing, 75-25%. Come on, America! Chocolate is wonderful stuff, but there are other candy flavors out there, awaiting your discovery!)

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Alan, the BuffaloPundit has been looking into the background of James Ostrowski, a guy who is trying to launch what he calls a “grassroots” campaign amongst Buffalo citizens to…well, I’m not sure what, exactly, beyond gutting government and slashing taxes to the absolute lowest level possible. He feels that the group in question, FreeBuffalo, more looks like a group pushing Libertarianism wherever it can than a group pushing what’s best for Buffalo. As he said in this post:

The other thing that bugs me about Ostrowski and his group is what I perceive to be an underlying hostility; it’s not love of Buffalo that’s bringing them together, but hatred of taxes and politicians.

I hope that’s not it, but from what little I’ve read, that seems to be about the right of it. I make no secret that I’ve never much grokked Libertarianism, because I quite frankly never feel like Libertarians really see all of the stuff in the real world that adds up to, you know, the real world. At least, not the ones who actually go whole-hog and identify themselves as Libertarians. Now, I think that libertarianism is a useful impulse for judging what we want government to be doing, but as a full-fledged approach to governance, it just doesn’t do it for me.

So, if FreeBuffalo is really a group pushing for a Libertarian Buffalo, count me out, please.

(Oh, look: Ostrowski lists the ten worst US Presidents. I’m not sure I want to follow the political beliefs of a man who would make such a list and give spots 2, 3, and 4 to Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Harry Truman, respectively. I seriously doubt that I’m going to reach the same political conclusions as such a person.)

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