Month: March 2005

I’ve just finished watching the trailer for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for the twelfth time, and I’m still wiping drool from the floor. Lord, this is going to be a good movie. It probably goes without saying that I can’t wait.

Looking at the few bits shown in the trailer, it appears that what drives Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side is not just his fear and anger but also his desire for power. The trailer depicts Chancellor Palpatine telling Anakin that the Dark Side can give him abilities “that some would call unnatural”, with Anakin responding “Can I learn this power?” Later, Anakin is visibly angered when the Jedi Council refuses to grant him the title “Master”. (Which gives a nice spin to the line in A New Hope, when Darth Vader tells Ben Kenobi, “Now I am the Master.”)

We can already look back to The Phantom Menace for traits in Anakin’s character that lead him to the Dark Side — chiefly, his pride in his being the only human who can steer a pod-racer. He’s already a kid who wants power, who craves uncommon ability. And that’s before he ever falls in love with Padme.

All of which goes to show that George Lucas knows what he’s doing, at the basic story level. But of course, we can’t give him credit for that, in this era in which “Dialogue is everything”.

(BTW, a commenter in this thread at Kevin Drum’s blog dredges up one of the most eye-rollingly stupid criticisms of the Star Wars prequels that continually arises: “Why is Lucas telling us this story, when we know how it ends!” What twaddle. Does anyone complain about Mel Gibson making a movie about Jesus, when we already know the end of the story? The fact that we knew that the boat sinks didn’t seem to dissuade people from flocking to see Titanic. The idea that stories are only worth telling if we don’t know the ending beforehand doesn’t stand up to the tiniest bit of scrutiny.)

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The new and official poster for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has been released; it can be viewed alongside its brethren posters, each designed by Drew Struzan, here.

I’ve seen some criticism of the new poster on grounds like the Vader helmet being off-center and the lighting on the faces being weird and the like. But it seems to me that the new poster cleverly emulates a few design quirks of the very first Star Wars poster ever, the one painted back in 1977 by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I place them side-by-side below:

The off-set Vader helmet provides a bookend of sorts to the offset Vader helmet, facing the opposite direction, in the original poster, and the “starburst” surrounding the clashing lightsabers in the Revenge of the Sith poster echoes the “starburst” in Luke’s lightsaber in the Hildebrandt poster. Also, the light pattern in those clashing lightsabers forms a circle, with a second, offset circle in the upper half, suggesting the Death Star.

So, it seems to me, the poster for the last ever Star Wars movie at least partially hints at that classic first-ever poster for the first-ever Star Wars movie. Very cool.

(I squashed the Episode III poster a little to get the images to line up correctly.)

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Darth Swank’s five-year-old daughter knows a thing or two about jazz.

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I’m not sure if that was a rejected name for their band or not, but Aaron was a member of a band called 44, or Forty-Four, or Phorty-Phour, or Forety-Fore!, or some variant thereof. Pfourty-Pfour was a destined for legendary status in the Minneapolis independent music scene, but then a series of mishaps ensued — one bandmember fell in love with a French actress and flew off to Paris to track her down, and he hasn’t been heard from since; another attempted re-enacting Robert Pirsig’s journey from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but this time on a motorized unicycle (the trip didn’t come to a good end); one of the band’s concerts ended in controversy after some confusion in the design specs resulted in a stage prop only being two-feet high instead of twenty feet (which made it look even worse when a dwarf came on stage to dance around it); another show ended in a fire breaking out on the stage when one of 44’s amps couldn’t handle its jury-rigged “Setting #12”; and the final straw came when the band’s bass player slept with the drummer, resulting in a child (surprisingly, a legitimate child, since the bass player had previously married the drummer in a burst of astonishing foresight).

Anyway, to make a long story short, 44 only managed to record a single album before suffering a fate not unlike that which befell The Wonders in That Thing You Do!. But what an album it is — lyrics of penetrating insight into the human condition, mingling love sentiments that are by turns wistful and searing with turns of phrase that allude to political troubles in Ireland, Canada, and Okinawa; guitar work that reminds one of the bastard love child of Andres Segovia and Edward Van Halen; and a hidden track wherein each band member solos with the Minnesota Orchestra. (It’s a very hidden track. Only one CD player in 10,000 is capable of rendering it.)

And now you can hear that album. It’s called Free Land Wall, and it’s the last album by a once-rising but now-defunct Minneapolis bar band you’ll ever need.

UPDATE: In comments, Aaron points out that he was only the bass player on a couple of tracks. So be it. And another band member points out some things the bandmates have been up to since they stopped making music together. I do think that Dan errs when he says that my identifying 44 as “a defunct band” implies that the bandmates have hung up their axes and dutifully reported for duty at various Twin Cities-area temp agencies and jobs behind the counters at Kinko’s. I think everyone knows that just because a band breaks up doesn’t mean the individuals from that band stop making music. Look at the Beatles. Not even Yoko could get those guys to shut up.

(And no, I’m not comparing Krista to Yoko. Not even close. Krista’s way hotter than Yoko.)

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So, no sooner do I say that “Gee, I’d like to see a round of the ‘Five Questions’ game start up again” than I see a round of the ‘Five Questions’ game start up again, here and here. So, anybody wanna ask me five questions? They can be hypotheticals, or anything you’ve ever wondered about Your Humble Narrator (within reason). Go for it, folks!

UPDATE: One taker, in comments. Any others? (Yes, this is mainly a shameless ploy to grab some easy blogging topics.)

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Well, this is very embarrassing. I have a bit of advice to offer, folks: Don’t sign up for a Secret Santa gift exchange on a website if there’s any kind of likelihood that you might forget to send the gift to your “giftee” until…well, two weeks before Easter.

Konrad, the box is going in the mail tomorrow. I don’t know how long it takes parcels to get to Poland, but it’s coming.

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I have an article up at Destroy All Monsters, my first for them in quite a while, about Joe Hisaishi’s score to the film Princess Mononoke:

Admittedly, my knowledge of anime prior to Princess Mononoke was pretty much limited to the classical stereotype: I thought it mainly involved violent action set in urban dystopias, with battles between mecha-wearing anti-heroes and pseudo-villains accompanied by throbbing techno scores. And I’ve come to learn that yes, there’s a lot of anime that hews to precisely that line. But I also learned that other kinds of storytelling are possible, and that they often involve other kinds of music – such as Joe Hisaishi’s finely textured and classically nuanced orchestral scores, of which Princess Mononoke is one of the finest.

Read the whole thing.

And do read Chapter Five of The Promised King, if you so desire. Heck, do it if you don’t desire. Do it for the children. Do it for the trees. Do it for the whales.

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So I’m watching tonight’s installment of American Idol (my early view is that they can send everyone else home and just do ten weeks of the long-haired white guy and the long-haired black guy singing each week), and a seventeen-year-old girl sings “Somewhere” from West Side Story. And then, during the judges’ critiquing, they keep referring to whether this girl has taken a risk or not for doing a Barbra Streisand song. Setting that issue aside, I suppose the arrangement might be one that Barbra Streisand has used, but I don’t care: “Somewhere” isn’t a Barbra Streisand song, it’s a Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim song.

I’ve noticed that in recent years, music has become much more associated with performers than with composers or lyricists. I wonder if that might be part of classical music’s problem these days. I’ll bet that if you stop fifty people on the street, far more of them will be able to name a living classical music performer than will be able to name a living classical composer, and that’s a problem not just limited to classical music. I mean, does any teenage girl know who wrote “Oops! I Did It Again”?

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I haven’t posted much — nay, nothing at all — about the recent events in the Middle East, what with democratic reforms in places like Lebanon and Egypt and elections in the offing in Palestine and the recent vote in Iraq, mainly for two reasons: first, I don’t really know a whole lot about that stuff, and unlike many a blogger, I choose to be selective about the things I blog about without knowing anything about them; and second, history takes a long time to happen, and I’m generally skeptical that after decades, and in some cases centuries, of one climate holding sway in the Middle East, a few rapidfire events taking place over the course of two or three years really signals a grand new climate on the way.

I’m posting these thoughts in light of Matthew Yglesias‘s article about the political implications of things in the Middle East and Kevin Drum‘s post about some poll results in Lebanon. Ultimately, I think that cautious optimism, rather than outright triumphalism, should be the rule here. I’m reminded of a passage from President George Bush the Elder’s book A World Transformed (written with Brent Scowcroft), where the former President describes his feeling at the moment that the Berlin Wall had fallen that he did not want to engage in too triumphal a response. I think he was probably right about that at the time, and that such an approach would be correct now.

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A warning to people who do taxes online:

If you ever do your taxes online–as I have for the past several years–please be sure to doublecheck each page before you move on to the next. In particular, please be sure to assign the state withholding from your W-2’s to the proper state, and not another state you have never lived in.

I can attest to this personally, because something very similar happened to us a couple of years back. We filed online, and in the course of doing so we mistaken checked the box that, for the purposes of New York State, denotes that we are a residents of New York City or Yonkers. Doing so has a pretty, shall we say, significant effect on one’s overall tax bill.

We thought we corrected it before finalizing the return and sending it through, but somehow the NYS tax people got the wrong return anyway, and claimed that we owed money for living in NYC or Yonkers (where, obviously, we have never lived — in fact, the Wife has never been to NYC and I haven’t been there since a drive-through with my father in 1985 or thereabouts). It took the better part of a year to get this cleared up.

So watch what you’re clicking, and make sure you print several copies of everything you send through to your state government.

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