The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
You know, at the rate new developments seem to be churning out for old mysteries, we’re gonna run out stuff for Indiana Jones to figure out.
:: A French architect has a new hypothesis for the construction of the Great Pyramid. Basically, he thinks they built it from the inside out.
:: An old diary has surfaced that may yield clues to what happened to Amelia Earhart.
Apparently the long-simmering deal to bring a Bass Pro store to downtown Buffalo’s waterfront has finally been brought to a boil: a deal was announced the other day for a newly-constructed complex right down by the water which will include the Bass Pro store and — well, a whole bunch of other stuff.
I have to admit that I’m a bit conflicted here. If they build this thing as proposed, I’ll yield to no one in my happiness about it. But I also will not believe it until I see actual construction being done. And when I say “construction”, I mean cranes and workers and actual work being done. I add that last because I remember the hoopla in Syracuse a few years back when then-Governor Pataki showed up for the “groundbreaking” for Destiny USA, and the repeated hoopla a year or so later when a whole bunch of steel beams were delivered to the site for the “impending” construction. And guess what? That steel is still sitting there, with nary a construction person in sight.
I know, the Bass Pro project isn’t remotely on the insane scale of Destiny USA, but there are other reasons to be skeptical here as well. Buffalo’s history with projects like these is not encouraging, and the history with this particular project is itself particularly spotty. There was a Big Announcement like this two or three years ago, with smiling politicians and Bass Pro senior managers and architectural drawings and all that, but it all came to nothing thus far. I need to see more, folks, before I get excited.
Here’s a quote from a Buffalo News story that gives me pause:
While the pact inked Friday is nonbinding — as was the memorandum of understanding the retailer signed in 2004 — this time around, Hagale said, the potential is greater and the hurdles are fewer. Shifting focus from the Aud to the Central Wharf made a key difference, according to the Bass Pro executive.
After more than three years of talking about Bass Pro, we’re only on our second nonbinding pact, on which there are apparently still “hurdles” to be surmounted.
Here, by the way, is what it supposedly will look like:
I note that they didn’t put the Skyway into their rendering.
I love the way this looks, don’t get me wrong. But I’m not getting excited until the Big Machines start cutting into actual earth. Over the years, Buffalo’s seemingly eternal quest for waterfront development has produced lots of scenes that look like this:
With all due respect (and hope), I’ll withhold my excitement until there’s a scene on the waterfront that looks like this:
Now that will be something worth getting exited over.
There seem to be two types of bloggers: those who cheerfully do “What kind of X are you” quizzes, and those who will do them but only with the proviso that they rarely do those kinds of quizzes. I’m in the latter camp; I rarely do these kinds of quizzes, but anyway, here are the results of the one I just did:
| What Be Your Nerd Type?
Your Result: Literature Nerd
Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and it’s eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today’s society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It’s okay. I understand. |
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| Musician |
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| Gamer/Computer Nerd |
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| Science/Math Nerd |
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| Social Nerd |
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| Anime Nerd |
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| Artistic Nerd |
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| Drama Nerd |
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| What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace |
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I guess that’s about right.
(via)
Over at Buffalonews.com, they’ve posted the nine finalists for the short story contest online, including the Grand Winner of All The Universe (ahem). Apparently they’re only up for thirty days (after which time I’ll probably post my own story here, thus ensuring its permanent location on the Interweb). The stories are as follows:
As of this writing, the only of these stories that I’ve read is Ms. Cantie’s, which I enjoyed. I’ll peruse the others over the next week or so as well.
Maybe next year’s contest will have a futuristic, Science Fiction theme; if so, I’ll set my story at the 2147 Grand Opening of Bass Pro Buffalo!
(And thanks to Sharon LoTempio of the News for the notification that the stories are online.)
Yup, time to babble a bit about football.
:: ESPN has given Joe Theismann the boot from Monday Night Football, and damn, it’s about time. Longtime readers know I can’t stand the guy, with his continual need to fill silences with idiotic comments such as when the Bills played New England, and Theismann fell over himself praising Tom Brady’s management of the game tempo during New England’s opening drive, about four minutes into the game. Ugh.
Somewhat gratuitously, here’s Theismann’s famous leg injury. The guy won a Super Bowl, but this is what he’ll always be famous for on the field. Crappy announcer, but that has to suck.
:: The Buffalo News‘s Allen Wilson gives a partial defense of Willis McGahee’s recent attacks on the city of Buffalo, here. The gist of it:
There have been a number of things said and written about former Bills running back Willis McGahee following his comments about the city in last Sunday’s Baltimore Sun. But there is some truth in part of what he said.
I’ve talked to a number of other single young men of McGahee’s age and background who have complained about a lack of things to do in our town. Some defenders of Buffalo’s night life will point to Chippewa Street, but not everybody likes to go bar-hopping. Some people have different tastes, like hanging out in more urban settings. But inner-city nightclubs for young adults are in short supply in Buffalo.
It should be noted that McGahee grew up in Miami, so compared to that city, Atlanta or Philadelphia, Buffalo does come up short in terms of diverse places for young adults to hang out.
I can see the point here, but really, I don’t much care. With the money McGahee made while here — even if he didn’t get his Really Big Contract until he got traded to Baltimore — he probably could have opened his own nightclub, right? But that would have required an actual desire to do something.
When you enter the NFL draft, you take your chances. Some guys get picked by the Giants and get to live in the country’s largest city. Some guys go to smaller, but still vibrant, cities. Some go to small markets that are trying to do the best they can. But all of them get paid a huge amount of money to do it.
Willis McGahee found Buffalo boring. Well, I watched the guy on the field, and aside from that first year he was here and the games against the Jets the rest of the time, I have to say that it was pretty mutual.
:: The Bills also traded linebacker Takeo Spikes to Philadelphia. I wish Spikes well; I hope he recovers from his injury enough to play close to his former level and that he finally gets to play for a playoff team. He left the Bengals for the Bills when it seemed like the Bills were getting better while the Bengals weren’t going anywhere, but it played out pretty much in reverse. And for his trouble, Spikes suffered a bad lag injury two years ago. Last year he wasn’t very productive at all, since he’d been in injury trouble all year.
I can see why the Bills traded him. The historical record for guys injured as Spikes was rebounding to one hundred percent is not encouraging. He may have a few good years left in him, but it’s highly unlikely that Spikes will ever again be the physical force he was before the injury; that being the case, the Bills would have been crazy to pay him the continued big money he was due.
Spikes was a terrific player here, and I hope that he gets back to that in Philly. I really do. He deserves better than what he’s received in his NFL career; he deserves better than to become the Archie Manning of linebackers.
I’ve been reading quite a few graphic novels of late, and I have some more in the “to read” stack, seeing as how the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library actually stocks them to a nice degree.
(If you live in or near a locality with a large public library system and you’re interested in graphic novels, give this route a try. I firmly believe that one big reason that graphic novels are seemingly forever stuck in that “on the brink” phase, where people are constantly saying things like “Hey, these aren’t the funny books you grew up with!”, is that graphic novels tend to be priced in so high a fashion as to seriously discourage random exploration of the medium. Do I strongly recommend Craig Thompson’s Blankets? Absolutely. But if someone came to me and said, “I have forty bucks. Recommend some reading material I might like”, I’d probably feel a little guilty if I advised them to blow their money on Blankets only to have it not be their cup of tea.)
I don’t know if we’re in some kind of “Golden Age” of graphic fiction, but there’s just some amazing work being done outside of the standard superhero stories. (Not that there is anything inherently wrong with superhero stories in the first place.) To anyone who would dismiss the graphic novel along the lines of “I don’t need pictures to go with my storytelling”, I’d simply ask if you keep your eyes shut when you go to the movies!
Here are some thoughts on some recent reads of mine.
:: I never saw the David Cronenberg film of A History of Violence, so I have no idea how accurate the film is to the original graphic novel. I heard that the film was very good, so I checked out the novel on that basis alone, much as I did with The Road to Perdition a few years back. In that case, I found the ways in which the film diverged from the novel interesting, and I couldn’t decide which version of the tale I preferred. (In fact, the versions are sufficiently different that I find it easy to like both equally.)
A History of Violence has much the same kind of feel as Perdition; both involve (at least in part) the way big-city violence comes to small-town America. Even though both books are by different authors and have different artists, the same kind of emotional pall hangs over the story in each, a sense of impending doom where happiness will be destroyed forever, and quite violently, at that. Part of this comes from the art of History, which has the same stylistic feel as Perdition, with heavily-lined black-and-white images that make the larger panels almost impressionistic in nature.
I found the tale of History a bit less gripping than Perdition‘s. In History, a pair of violent killers come into a small town where they are done in when they run afoul of the wrong guy to pick on. The rest of the story comes out of the reasons why Tom McKenna is the wrong guy to pick on, and just what the secret history he’s concealing happens to be. I did find it a bit disappointing when it turned out that McKenna is your basic “running from the mob” kind of protagonist, but even so, the story does take some surprising twists as it heads toward its conclusion.
:: Of a completely different nature is Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. I read Persepolis more than a year ago (and seem to have inexplicably not posted about it here), but I finally read the second volume just a few weeks ago.
Here is an amazing memoir of an Iranian expat, now living in Paris, who grew up witnessing firsthand her country’s embrace of — or descent into — fundamentalism and oppression. The first volume deals mainly with Satrapi’s childhood and early adolescence, while in the second Satrapi goes to live abroad to finish her studies. Thus the books tell two stories: the first, an internal tale of a society’s willful decision to become fundamentalist, and in the second, a story about a person living abroad who happens to come from one of the more disliked nations on Earth.
As autobiography, Satrapi’s work is riveting. She has a keen perceptive gift that is the key to all good autobiography; in our lives, we all tend to be our own heroes and villains from time to time, and Satrapi never shies from depicting her own faults as well as her own strengths, her own mistakes as well as her own triumphs. And her ability to put into very few words and images the strife that surrounded her country in that tumultuous period is particularly noteworthy. At one point, while discussing the fundamentalist government’s focus on acceptable public clothing for women, Satrapi writes:
The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself:
“Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?”
…no longer asks herself:
“Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is ti livable? What’s going on in the political prisons?”
I wonder if there will be a Persepolis 3. I hope so. Satrapi’s art is simple and evocative, and her writing is exemplary.
:: Moving into equally serious territory, last night I read The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot. In this book, a teenaged runaway girl named Helen is living on the streets of London for a time with her pet rat; she has run away from home because of her father’s molestation of her. Over the course of the book, Helen draws much inspiration from the life of Beatrix Potter, to the point where she unconsciously (or perhaps partly consciously) begins to model her own life on that of Potter, with whom she apparently shares some parallels.
This is a difficult work to characterize. Parts of it seem almost fantastical, but those kinds of elements are always portrayed as being in the mind of Helen; and what I admired most was the book’s insistence on the role that story and fantasy can play in helping us heal from unspeakable hurts. Too often we view fiction as “escapism”, but in this story, Talbot gives us a character for whom fiction is an essential way of dealing with her particular part of the world.
:: And now into pure fantasy: The Life Eaters, written by David Brin and painted by Scott Hampton. This book depicts a World War II gone horribly awry when the concentration camps turn out to be massive “factories” for necromancy, thus bringing the gods of Norse mythology to horrible life.
Apparently this is based on a short story of Brin’s (and it reminded me in part of a story of mine; I’ll have to post that here at some point). It’s a fascinating blend of fantasy and SF tropes, as well as an enjoyably dark tale about the borders between science and mysticism. My only complaint here was that to me the ending felt a bit rushed.
:: Moving into the folkloric type of talespinning, there was the utterly gorgeous Book of Ballads with art by Charles Vess and written by many contributors, among them Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, and Jane Yolen. Seriously, this book contains in a fairly compact package the work of some of the top names in fantastic literature today.
According to Terri Windling’s introduction, in the 1990s Charles Vess illustrated a series of comics which simply told the stories of old ballads from the English, Irish, and other traditions. For anyone who is used to more “sanitized” folklore, the original tales and ballads often turn out to be quite dark, and a number of the tales contained in The Book of Ballads are downright grim. But each is done with charm, and Vess’s artwork — black and white, with so many tiny and precise marks that one wonders how much time Vess spends on a single panel — is always stunning.
I recommend this book highly; it’s made its way onto a short list of graphic novels of which I’d like to own my own copy.
:: OK, a brief digression here. I often have difficulty reading manga, and oddly enough, it’s nothing to do with the right-to-left thing. (For those who have never tried to read an authentic manga, they are printed in reverse of the way we print books in our culture, and you read right-to-left.) This is easy enough to get used to. My problem with a lot of manga is the artwork: I often find it terribly difficult to figure out just what it is that I’m looking at, and in a graphic novel, that’s not the effect one wants. The latest victim here was a book called Trigun, which I went into with high hopes, mainly because of its subtitle: who wouldn’t want to read a tale subtitled “Deep space planet future gun action!”?
I’ll try it again sometime. But for now, I found the art nearly incomprehensible a lot of the time.
:: OK, last one. This is the wonderful Castle Waiting by Linda Medley. This is another collection of installments of a comic, so the book ends without much sense of closure — so I fervently hope this isn’t the end! (And according to Medley’s official site, this is only Volume One. Huzzah!) But the book is incredibly generous in its contents: there are almost 450 pages here. Lots to get through.
Castle Waiting is the story of the denizens of, wait for it, Castle Waiting. This castle is the formerly abandoned home of Sleeping Beauty (the first chapter tells that story from a different perspective), but is now home to a motley collection of odd characters (a steward who has the head of a stork, for instance) whose lives have all come together at this castle. Into their midst comes a pregnant woman named Jain, whose past is rather mysterious (and which is never really explained in the extant volume!). Medley delves into the backstories of these strange people who have made their home in this abandoned castle, with its water sprites and mischievous bodyless demons (he’s a head with feet) and a nun from a cloister for bearded women and so on.
If I had to make an analogy, Castle Waiting feels cut from similar cloth as The Princess Bride; it’s not parody per se, but rather gentle pastiche, loaded with in-jokes and inside stories that descend into other stories of their own. The book meanders all over the place, and never once did I mind.
Bring on Volume Two.
If any of my readers are voting for Sanjaya Malakar on American Idol, would you please stop? Every time you vote for him, you make Jesus cry.
Thank you.
UPDATE: Not that Chris Sligh has been any kind of memorable performer; he hasn’t had a really good appearance since before the Final Twelve, and this week’s performance wasn’t very good at all. But Sanjaya has no musical ability whatsoever. And frankly, that the Simon-Paula-Randy Hydra failed to eliminate Sanjaya at any of the points at which they still had control kind of speaks volumes about their supposed fingers on the musical pulse. (Well, Randy and Simon, anyway. We all know that Paula is only firing on about nine synapses nowadays.)
One topic that seems to pop up regularly on political blogs these days is whether or not 24 is a right-wing show or not. Kevin Drum had a representative post a few days ago:
So what’s up? The hyperkinetic world of 24, where good and evil clash, torture is a necessary tool, and terrorist threats are everywhere, is indeed a paean to modern Bushian conservatism. But when the action switches to the Oval Office, hawks are almost universally portrayed as either ideologues who panic at the first sign of trouble or else scheming superpatriots who are desperate to push the United States into unjustified wars as a way of advancing their own mercenary agendas. If Joel Surnow’s name weren’t attached to the series, you might guess that it had been produced by Michael Moore.
So is 24 liberal or conservative? Schizophrenic, I’d say.
That’s about right. The show does pretty much whatever it wants. I remember that after Season Two ended with Jack successfully averting a US military strike against a Middle Eastern country or two that had been implicated by false evidence for involvement in an attempted nuclear bomb detonation in LA, the Objectivist Loon over at the FSM message boards was beside himself because obviously when someone attacks you, you’re supposed to go after anyone who might be kinda-sorta simpatico with your attackers but not actually involved with the attack, anyway. How weird.
But after watching last night’s episode, I have to wonder why we keep talking about this, anyway. Last night we had the President of the United States in a medically-induced coma, and about two-thirds of the way through the hour (remember, 24‘s gimmick is that it takes place in ‘real time’), he actually crashed. And not only were the doctors able to bring him back from the brink of death, he was actually able to carry on a lucid conversation with his Vice President just minutes later! And remember, back in Season Two, at one point, Jack fell into the grips of the bad guys, who tortured him to the point where he was actually clinically dead — but of course, he rebounded minutes later to kill them and continue Bauerizing the world. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that on 24, nobody ever gets stuck in traffic. In Los Angeles. During a nuclear scare.
As for Jack and the dark deeds he always has to commit (he was ordered by the President to shoot his own commanding agent in the head in Season Three!), I’m starting to think that if they ever decide that a given season’s going to be the last season, I hope that all the bad stuff Jack’s had to do finally wears him down to the point where he goes over to the dark side and has to be taken out by the next guy. Jack’s last words should be “Tell Kim I’m sorry.” Nobody could do the things Jack’s had to do and not go insane.
I’ll close with a complaint: was the assassination attempt on David Palmer that closed out Season Two ever referenced again in any substantive way? I didn’t watch Seasons Four or Five, so I don’t know, but Season Two ended with an assassin shaking Palmer’s hand, and then with Palmer staring at his hand, and finally with Palmer writhing on the ground in agony. But when Season Three started the next fall, the calendar on the show had been moved up eight or nine months, and Palmer was out there Presidentin’ his heart out. The only reference to the assassination attempt I recall was a shot of the scar tissue on his hands. WTF? Imagine if Return of the Jedi had opened with the Millennium Falcon and Luke’s X-Wing rocketing away from Tatooine, with Han saying, “Hey Luke, thanks for rescuing me!”
Now that I’ve whined a bit about the lack of realism on 24, I hope you’ll excuse me while I pop Thunderball into the DVD player. That’s the stuff!
Ninety-two! Get ’em while they’re hot!
:: I am so very, very tired of finger-waving scolds, moralists, and prudes having a conniption fit over things that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in other parts of the country. I’m tired of the embarassment of the rest of the country thinking that everyone in Utah is like these folks that make so much trouble and end up in the “news of the weird” columns. More importantly, I’m tired of the prudes having such an outsized amount of influence over the culture in these parts. (While on vacation in Utah with my mother years ago, my father tried ordering a second beer in a restaurant. Hilarity ensued.)
:: Just what is the deal with home decor stores these days? All the goods for for sale are either bundles of brown sticks, lumps of unpainted clay, or a sheet of rusty and dented metal. It’s like browsing for housewares in the Khyber Pass: (Thanks, Lynn!)
:: It’s like a monk who decides to try alcohol for the first time, so he strides into the liquor store and gets a bottle of wine, some whiskey, a vodka, something printed in spanish which may or may not be be tequila, the makings for Jello-shots, and a case of beer. I mean, why screw around, right? (Geez, I only bought four games, spread over two trips to Target. And I only bought the cheap-o games, the ones that are $9.99 each. I haven’t bought the Star Wars Best of PC set yet, because it’s forty bucks, but even that works out to eight bucks per game.)
:: Ellen is offered a Zoo Pal plate as a consolation prize as well as the option of a Dinosaur Fork, a Piggy Spoon or (I am saying this out loud and LOUDLY as I pull the brown piece of plastic out of the box, by the 3rd syllable, I notice my fatal error but it’s too late to stop…) or this… (I’m not revealing the punchline. Go to Jen’s place to find out, and roundly laugh at her expense!
But really, you see products like this and you wonder if the people who came up with them were never in 7th grade? Can’t you just hear the Beavis-and-Butthead laughing in the background here?)
:: Al Gore’s recent congressional testimony on the subject, and the chilly reception he received from GOP members, suggest the discouraging conclusion that skepticism on global warming is hardening into party dogma. Like the notion that tax cuts are always good or that President Bush is a brave war leader, it’s something you almost have to believe if you’re an elected Republican. (Not a blog post, actually, but an interesting op-ed.)
:: I’m an officially published writer! (I hate her so much….)
:: It’s going to give every pirate fan an arrrrgasm, I think. (Boo, hiss! But what an awesome trailer. I hope the movie’s as good.)
And that’s all for this week. Carry on, folks.
