AICN reports that the great visual effects artist Peter Ellenshaw has died. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, check out his filmography. You almost certainly know his work.
Note to self
When Guy Gavriel Kay has a new novel coming out in the next week or two, don’t start reading a doorstop like Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon.
My unopened copy of Ysabel, which came via Amazon three days ago, is giving me a big old guilt trip right now.
(And man, is Gardens a dense read. I’ll say more about it when I finish it — right now I’m about halfway done — but so far, it seems to me that Erikson stands at the opposite pole from David Weber. With Weber, you get infodumps galore, whether you need them or not. With Erikson, you don’t get infodumps at all. It’s in medias res, all the time.)
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Whatever Groucho said about not joining a club that would have him as a member….
I’m not sure who it is at WNYMedia.net who felt that what they needed was some Ann Coulter, but that just about carves in stone my non-intention to join up.
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Why I miss Molly Ivins
From a column Ivins wrote about Camille Paglia, way back in 1991:
What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decandence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has “flashes of brilliance.” If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill.
Whole thing here.
(Via this MeFi thread on the occasion of Paglia’s return to Salon. I don’t read Salon unless someone I already read links something there, so I didn’t even know Paglia had been there before, much less left.)
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Five more and I get a set of steak knives.
Sorry for the silence the last couple of days, but real life has been busier than usual at home. (Not in any kind of bad way, but just busy.) Anyhow, time for a momentous revelation:
Five years ago today, Byzantium’s Shores went “live”.
Five years and more than five thousand posts later, here we are, keeping the beat marching on. How much longer can I go? Who knows? I suspect that there are fewer days ahead for this blog than there are behind, but you never know. Sometimes I get the hankering to sign off from Blogistan, but I’m kind of like Crash Davis in that regard: “Well, I quit! F*** this f***ing game! [beat] Who do we play tomorrow?”
I started off as a pseudonymous blogger, writing brief posts about books and movies and TV shows and the occasional sporting event. Now, I’m pretty much non-pseudonymous, but with the same kinds of posts about books and movies and TV shows and the occasional sporting event. The only real difference is that I’ve gotten more long-winded.
But five years is a pretty interesting chunk of time over which to survey once it’s over. In that time I’ve held a job I hated (and at which I sucked), got fired from said job, moved to Syracuse and spent a winter there*, moved back to Buffalo, spent a year-and-a-half unemployed, joined The Store, spent fifteen months attempting — and ultimately failing — to raise a son with severe cerebral palsy, and more. I’ve also met a whole lot of fine bloggers, both in cyberspace and outside of it, enough so as to enrich my life handsomely.
Anyhow, thanks to all my readers for dropping by over the past five years and to all the fellow travelers in Blogistan who have linked me from time to time.
* Hey, Buffalo, you want to know what winter’s like in Syracuse? Imagine the last week or so, and extend that from mid-December to mid-March. Why it’s Buffalo that’s got the snow-and-cold reputation is beyond me.
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Another reminder!
I’m gearing up for Ask Me Anything! version 2.0, so get your questions in! Anything goes. There are no stupid questions! (Well, OK, there’s a few, but I think my readership is smart enough to avoid those, right?)
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Norris Koana
The title of this post will make sense once you watch tonight’s episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which I of course watched last night courtesy of the good Canadians who show it on Sundays.
I was starting to have hopes for this show, but having seen this episode, I’m thinking that Aaron Sorkin is this close to completely blowing it. (You can’t see me, but I’m holding my thumb and forefinger really close together.) Why? Because Sorkin just can’t keep beating Matt and Harriet to death.
Let me back up a bit. Last week, Buffalo News TV critic Alan Pergament launched this column about Studio 60 thusly:
I’m still trying to understand why more of Buffalo and America hasn’t fallen in love with Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
It is one of the smartest, funniest and more romantic shows of the new season. It also has one of the season’s more appealing and unassuming stars, Sarah Paulson. Paulson, who plays born-again sketch performer Harriet Hayes, conceded during an interview on the show’s set in Hollywood last month that she stood out like a born-again Christian in Hollywood in a cast that includes Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, Timothy Busfield and D.L. Hughley.
The article proceeds to give a nice profile of Sarah Paulson, whom I actually do think does a good job on the show as Harriet Hayes. The whole problem with the show, so far as I see it, isn’t the fact that Sorkin can’t help but fall in love with his own turns of phrase and therefore keep using them over and over and over again from one show to the next; nor is it Sorkin’s apparent Gilbert-and-Sullivan fetish that also crops up in everything he writes (not the weirdest fetish out there, as fetishes go, but it’s certainly unusual and hard to work into shows constantly). The problem is that Sorkin won’t write the interesting stuff for his interesting characters because he’s freaking obsessed with his two least-interesting characters.
Harriet Hayes doesn’t get to be interesting just because she’s a born-again Christian. Born-again Christians can be interesting, and yet, Harriet is not. And why isn’t she? Because there’s no struggle involved. She just flits about the show, with her faith never really being challenged in any serious way. There’s no evidence that she ever struggles with her faith in the way that, say, President Bartlet did in The West Wing. Remember when Jed Bartlet cursed God? Can anyone see Harriet Hayes ever cursing God? There’s no conflict in Harriet, and conflict is what makes characters interesting. Why is Peter Parker more interesting than Clark Kent? Because Parker’s internal conflict is a lot more interesting than Kent’s. We never see any internal conflict in Harriet. Sure, there’s lots of external conflict — non-religious groups think she’s a bigot, religious groups think she isn’t religious enough — and yet we never get any real idea how this all affects her. Her faith remains as it is, totally unchanged.
Matt Albie doesn’t have any internal conflict either. He’s the mirror-image of Harriet, and it shows every time they get together, and Matt almost immediately goes into some uber-clever indictment of religion that sounds pre-rehearsed in his brain. (In tonight’s episode, he actually cites the percentage of the American people who believe in angels. Who goes around knowing that stuff?) Sorkin’s approach to writing these two characters is to say that “Person X believes this and Person Y believes that, and all I gotta do now is have them argue about it at length.”
And he does this for enough of each episode that it totally takes over everything else. The internal power struggles at the fictional TV network? The trials and tribulations of a young writing staff thrown into the deep end without a life preserver? The production problems inherent in a weekly sketch comedy show? The neuroses of comics who have to play multiple characters each week and keep them all straight? All of that is more inherently interesting than Matt-and-Harriet, and yet, Sorkin keeps the focus on Matt-and-Harriet.
Which brings me to tonight’s episode.
One of Sorkin’s favorite devices is the interwoven series of flashbacks, in which today’s events are presaged by what happened weeks, months, or years before. Here we keep flashing back to Matt’s early days with the show, when he meets for the first time — you guessed it — Harriet Hayes. And in their first extended conversation, Matt goes right into talking about religion as though he’s a professional pollster, of course offending Harriet. For the balance of the episode, their flashback banter revolves around tiny minutiae regarding that first conversation, long after we, the audience, have stopped caring.
There’s another big strike at work here, too: Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson just don’t have the chemistry between them that might be able to make it all work, if Sorkin weren’t writing it so poorly.
(On chemistry: I’m not necessarily referring to romantic chemistry. On West Wing, Rob Lowe had terrific onscreen chemistry with Emily Procter, and their characters weren’t romantically linked in any way at all. Perry and Paulson don’t seem to even have that kind of chemistry. Not that they can’t appear onscreen together, but they can’t pull off what’s supposed to be the emotional center of a show together.)
We never, not once, buy the idea that these two are anything but doomed. I had hope of that in the previous couple of episodes, when Harriet suddenly realized that the relationship was utterly dead in the water, but now, here we are, beating it to death again. Now, maybe Aaron Sorkin is trying something more sophisticated here, in depicting Matt Albie as a guy who is hopelessly attached to a relationship that can’t possibly go anywhere, but the problem there is, it just doesn’t feel like Sorkin is writing that story. Instead it feels like Sorkin genuinely believes he can get these two together in the end, and right now he’s just working through it all. Well, I don’t want to see it. I want to see the other stuff.
Some of my favorite movies and TV shows are “backstage” stories set in show business. Shouldn’t it tell Aaron Sorkin something that he keeps dwelling on Matt Albie, a guy who almost never leaves his own office? There’s a reason why Captain Kirk was always leaving the bridge of the Enterprise, and it’s not because Kirk was some kind of grand adventurer. It’s because keeping him on the bridge would have made him a really boring character.
Ultimately, by having these two only ever talk about a single subject, we not only never see that Matt and Harriet could love each other, we end up with no clue why they ever would love each other. If Aaron Sorkin wants Studio 60 to succeed, he needs to put the Matt and Harriet relationship behind him. He can write about Matt, and he can write about Harriet. But constantly writing about Matt-and-Harriet is killing the show.
(No, I didn’t like tonight’s episode. Apparently Matt is now starting to lose it.)
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Widgets! Got your widgets here!
A pet peeve
I hate it when people point out that “Just because that’s the way we’ve always done it is no reason to keep doing it that way.” Why do I hate this? Well, it’s always true to note this, of course; it really is the case that tradition isn’t in itself a good reason to keep doing something.
What irritates me is that this bit of wisdom is, in my experience, usually advanced in support of making a change, in and of itself, as though change is a priori good. The above mantra is often tossed out there as a means of shutting off debate of a change that amounts to little more than a whim on the part of whoever wants things changed in the first place.
So my response is usually to say, “I agree, but you haven’t sold me on your idea yet, either. Why make a change?” If there’s no convincing answer forthcoming to that, then I say, keep things the way they are.
(No, this post is not occasioned by anything specific that happened at work or in real life recently. It’s just a thought that I have every so often. Kind of like my dislike of the idea of “common sense”.)
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Sentential Links #86
Yup, we’ve reached Installment #86 of Sentential Links. However, we will not be 86ing the series. Just in case anyone was wondering.
:: I had a wild hair and decided to redesign my weblog. (Sean’s is the first blog I ever saw, and aside from changing the contents of his sidebar on occasion, his blog has maintained its look for the entire time — until last week.)
:: Well, here it is. It’s not too pink, is it? (No. It’s more of a faded salmon color, actually. [Little Friends joke there.] Lynn redid her blog’s appearance too.)
:: Every time we receive one message it means we are not receiving something else. (I haven’t commented on the Anna Nicole Smith thing because it just doesn’t interest me, except that I’ve noted what Belladonna notes here — the media focus on her was absurd. I just don’t get it. Her death was the banner headline that day in the Buffalo News, beating out the ongoing trial of a former close associate of the Vice President of the United States. There’s a statement in there about our priorities.)
:: The ESRB is so eager to let me know if the game will torment my ears with bad words, or if my eyes might be scalded by the sight of boobies, but they never tell me what I really want to know: They never warn me that I need to pick up an extra controller or mouse while I’m buying the game, to replace the one I’m inevitably going to smash. (I have got to stop reading Shamus’s blog, because every day I read him I feel my resistance to allowing computer games in the home to slip a little. The other day at Target I very nearly dropped forty bucks on a five-pack of Star Wars games, but luckily for me and my wallet and that pesky marriage thing, I recovered after a self-administered dope-slap. But you can’t go around giving yourself dope-slaps forever; sooner or later their effectiveness wears off, and then you’re just that weird long-haired guy in overalls who keeps slapping himself in public. And believe me, I don’t want to be that guy.)
On the other hand: you’re doing exactly what you always wanted to do (or you’d get frustrated and go do something else). And what could be better than that?
Enough for now. Tune back in next week for more exciting stuff.