What Editing Feels Like (at times)
On the ‘War on Christmas’
Something for Thursday
Clearly I need to do a better job of planning for this feature! Anyway, Johannes Brahms’s Symphony #2 in D has always been my favorite of his four symphonies, although #1 is always right there behind it in strong contention. The #2, though, is generally conceded to be the ‘sunniest’ of Brahms’s symphonies, and that’s saying something, because Brahms is not a composer known for long moments of optimism. Such moments abide in this symphony. Below is the symphony in its complete form, as played by what appears to be a youth orchestra from someplace in Asia.
You know what? I had a hart time picking which performance to use for this post, because there are a ton of good ones on YouTube, and I was down to this one or one other. But it’s my blog and there’s no reason to impose any arbitary limits, so if you feel like hearing the same symphony in the hands of a different orchestra, a European one this time, listen to this one, also wonderful. (This one splits the first movement across two videos.)
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Klytus, I'm bored! What plaything can you offer me today?
What an amazing image! It’s a composite, done in this manner (copied from the NASA Goddard Flickr page):
This image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.
The nighttime view was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. In this case, auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed to emphasize the city lights.
Stunning. Just wonderful. I love the whole world! Boom de yada! (Uh-oh…that song’s gonna lodge itself in my head now….)
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Experimenting….
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
They will be, oh, I don’t know, TREKKING at some point, yes?
The new Star Trek movie has a title: Star Trek Into Darkness.
OK.
The new Star Trek movie also has a teasing synopsis:
After the crew of the Enterprise find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.
And, the new Star Trek movie has a poster:
OK. Now, I haven’t seen the movie yet, obviously. And I liked the last one, despite its nonsensical plot and complete mishandling of any characters not named Kirk, because it was a very slickly made entertainment with great-looking visuals, fun dialogue, and a frankly wonderful cast. But you know what this rebooted incarnation of Star Trek doesn’t seem to have?
Star Trek.
Again, I haven’t seen the movie, so it’s entirely possible that it will be a very good film. But here’s the thing: Star Trek was a lot of things over the years, even as it creatively petered out in the Enterprise and Star Trek Nemesis days. It was sometimes good old fashioned space opera. It was military science fiction. It was sociological SF. It was comedy. It gave us some of the best time travel stories ever. It produced an outstanding submarine thriller in The Wrath of Khan, and it did political allegory at times very well (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), and at times it did political allegory not very well at all (The Omega Glory). Star Trek told some of the best love stories I’ve ever seen, whether the love was romantic love (“The City on the Edge of Forever”), the love between friends (“The Empath”, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock), or the love between fathers and sons (“The Visitor”).
But what Star Trek never was, even in its most flamboyant journeys into explodey-spaceshippy-goodness (“Yesterday’s Enterprise“), was a tent-pole action franchise. And between that title, that synopsis, and that poster, that sure as hell seems like what the current creative team is shaping up Star Trek to be. So I guess we’ll see no more exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations, then? Will this crew at no point be boldly going much of anyplace at all, certainly not where no one has gone before? I mean, look at that poster. What are we looking at? The optimistic future? A future of science, and of exploration? Or are we looking on twisted, mangled wreckage with some bad-ass villain standing in the middle of it?
I know, I know. It’s a reboot, so they’re telling ‘new stories’. But you can only take the concept of a reboot so far before it becomes unrecognizable. You can make Sherlock Holmes a modern-day detective, but you can’t make him a tee-totaling policeman with a wife and kids. You can’t call your movie a remake of Rashomon and only tell the story from one viewpoint. If your Romeo and your Juliet live at the end and get married, then they’re not Romeo and Juliet.
And if the Enterprise crew is an action star split into seven people…then it might be a fun movie to watch, like the last one was. But it won’t be Star Trek.
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For my new Australian friends: Shark porn!
Because nothing says ‘Hello’ to folks from a land known for having lots of sharks amongst its barrier reefs like the sex organs of a boy shark. (Apparently those are called ‘claspers’, and the boy sharks use them for…gripping things while they are, well, you know.)
(I took this photo during a trip to the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium last year.)
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A brief teevee observation
Tonight is apparently the 150th episode of Bones, so they’re doing something ‘inventive’: they’re doing the episode from the viewpoint of the skull of the dead victim. It’s more than a little creepy…as in, I may lay awake tonight for fear that, well, what if that’s what death is like? We get to watch helplessly as people handle our skulls?
And consider: what if the Royal Shakespeare Company always uses the same skull for productions of Hamlet? Someone may actually be playing Yorick!
UPDATE: I think what’s really hurting this episode is the obvious problem that in order to work, the skull must always be facing whatever is most important in the scene…and we also have to see a lot of scenes of the Jeffersonian team actually talking to the skull. This episode just isn’t working.
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Your disapproval hurts me to the quick
This is my reaction to learning that this fellow doesn’t much care for me.
Actually, it isn’t. This is actually my reaction to thinking, “Hmmm, I could go for a sip of rum right now.” Oh well. ‘Tis always curious when someone goes to lengths to announce their opinion that I am shit, though! Is there no better use of their time? Take up knitting? Deify plums?
I think I’ll do some writing now.
UPDATE: I’m getting a nice dose of traffic because of this, so all joking aside, thanks for visiting! Australia has always been high on my list of places to visit. (Unfortunately it’s also high on my list of places I’m not terribly likely to ever be able to afford to visit, but you never know….)