One of the better writers of the space opera subgenre in science fiction is Timothy Zahn. His novels set in the Star Wars universe are probably the best available, and I’ve just finished Conquerors’ Heritage, the second volume in his Conquerors trilogy. This is the story of a war between spacefaring humanity and what is at first presented as a ruthless conquering alien race called the Zhirzh. However, the second book of the trilogy is told from the Zhirzh point of view, and the war takes on a new light as it becomes clear that the whole thing is the sad result of a series of unfortunate mistakes, blunders, and failures of understanding. One of these errors is fairly obvious well before it is revealed at the end of Book Two, and the Zhirzh — despite some interesting cultural habits — don’t seem “alien” enough. Zahn hasn’t quite met John Campbell’s challenge of showing an alien who thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. Those are really mere quibbles, though. Zahn tells a tight story with interesting subplots that come together in unexpected ways. I’m looking forward to reading the third book in this trilogy.
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Congratulations to Timothy Goebel, who just won the silver at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano, Japan. (Of course, had Evgeny Pleshenko competed Goebel probably would have finished bronze.) As for the new World Champion, what can be said? Alexei Yagudin is far and away better than anyone else skating right now.
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Just finished: Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventures by Noah Adams. Adams, a commentator for NPR, wrote this book to recount a year he spent attempting to learn how to play the piano. It’s a charming book that tells the story of what might be considered a kind of “midlife crisis”.
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There is always something kind of goofy about the World Championships of Figure Skating during Olympic years. They’re always held just a month or so after the Games, and they invariably feel a tad anticlimactic, especially since just about all of the skaters use the exact same programs with which they competed in the Olympics, and some of the newly-crowned Olympic champions or runners-up end up not competing at Worlds. Notable absences this year include America’s Sarah Hughes and Russia’s Evgeny Pleshenko. (Not that it matters in the latter case; Alexei Yagudin right now is the skating equivalent of the 1990s Chicago Bulls.)
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It’s funny how we long to visit places that are far away, and yet we so often don’t know what’s in our own backyards. Years of living in Western New York, and I didn’t know anything about this place until today.
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The Simpsons delivered its best episode in quite some time last night, a hilarious take on three classic stories: The Odyssey, the tale of Joan of Arc, and Hamlet. As is usually the case in these types of episodes, the Simpsons themselves play the main characters with the regular townsfolk rounding out the supporting cast. Having Mayor Quimby as Zeus and the Old Sea Captain as Poseidon were brilliant touches, as was Moe as Claudius in Hamlet. The show doesn’t hit these heights nearly as often or as consistently as it used to, but it’s nice to see that they can still pull one out once in a while.
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The second installment of NPR’s annual survey of Oscar-nominated filmscores is here. This week’s discussed scores are Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (John Williams) and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Howard Shore).
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I finished Aaron Copland’s book What To Listen For In Music today. It is an excellent volume, designed to introduce laypeople to the inner workings and complexities of classical music. Copland’s language is never overly technical, and people wishing to start digging beneath the appeals of mere surface beauty to find deeper pleasures in music will be hard-pressed to find a better starting point.
It would be interesting if an edition of this book could be released that includes a CD of some of the works Copland discusses, because as he himself notes many, many times: proper enjoyment of music must involve listening, and listening to music is always preferable to reading a dozen books on music. Books like Copland’s make for smarter listeners, which is all to the good. Reading this book I was constantly reminded of something Leonard Bernstein wrote in his wonderful The Infinite Variety of Music: We hear too much music, allowing it to become background filler material for our lives rather than attending to it as art in its own right, something in which to be engaged rather than something allowed to wash over us. A book like this, well-written, will create a keen feeling of curiosity in the reader, a desire to go out and learn more about the subject at hand. What To Listen For In Music absolutely succeeded on that level.
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I’ve added a permanent link to The Berlioz Society, dedicated to the greatest of all French composers. His bicentennary is approaching next year. (Mini-rant: As much as I love the Impressions de France film at Epcot, it annoys me that it purports to include music from France’s great composers, and yet includes not a note by Berlioz.)
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The Man With the Golden Gun is probably the most problematic of the James Bond films. It has moments when it is very, very good; it also has moments when it is bone-chillingly awful. On balance, I have to say that I like it; its photography is too beautiful, John Barry’s score is excellent, Roger Moore settles into the role much more nicely than he did in Live and Let Die, and Christopher Lee makes a wonderful Bond villain. We always talk about “chemistry” as it applies to two romantic leads, but there also has to be a kind of “chemistry” between a hero and the villain. TMWTGG has that chemistry in spades, in the idea that Bond and Scaramanga are the best in the world at what they do, and that in the end only one of them can survive. (Hmmm….give them both swords and this could be a Highlander movie.) This plays out in a gun-duel on Scaramanga’s South China Sea island, and that sequence really is filled with tension. There is a genuine sense that Bond has, in fact, met an equal among all the villains with whom he tangles. I like that a lot.
Of course, it’s not enough for a Bond film to have the bad guy simply want to do Bond in; there has to be some kind of “world-domination” plot. The one in TMWTGG makes amazingly little sense, and as such I tend to completely ignore it. It’s really more of a Macguffin than anything else, designed to fill out the film’s running time and provide for the requisite “escape from an exploding fortress” that caps off most Bond films. The film’s attempts at scientific-sounding lingo surrounding this plot (something to do with hyper-efficient solar cells) are laughable.
The film continues, to some degree, with the sexism of Live and Let Die, with Bond clearly viewing women as nothing but sex objects. However, it isn’t quite as obnoxious as in the previous film. There is even a fairly amusing scene where Bond is actually rejected by the girl as he attempts to wine-and-dine her; he attributes his failure to get her into bed to the Chinese sparkling wine they had with dinner, a brand he has clearly never encountered before.
The action sequences in TMWTGG aren’t really anything to write home about, except for the gun duel. A couple of them are almost painful to watch, simply because someone thought it a bright idea to bring back Sheriff JW Pepper, a character stunning in his annoying-ness.
In summation: there is a lot to like in The Man With the Golden Gun, but there is a lot to dislike as well.