Another test. Man, is Movable Type lookin’ good right now….

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For some reason I haven’t been able to get into Alias, despite the fact that its subject matter should be right up my alley. But, the episode that aired last night after the Super Bowl has been billed in numerous places as not just an outstanding episode but also a good “jumping-on” point for people who haven’t been watching all along. I taped it, and will report later in the week.

I’m also looking forward to tonight’s premiere of Miracles, which I’m hoping can fill some of the void that was left by the dismantling and ultimate cancellation of the brilliant, underappreciated Millennium. (This one’s being taped as well.) I have high hopes for Miracles, because — if it’s done well — dark stories about spiritual supernaturalism always captivate me. The problem, though, is the stories in this vein that are done poorly — and it’s very easy to screw them up.

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So that’s it, then: the season is over, and we are now officially waiting for next year. Soon there will be free-agent signings galore, and then the draft; then minicamps, followed by training camp. Before we know it, another regular season will have begun in the NFL, and everyone will be lining up to knock the Tampa Bay Buccaneers off their perch.

The Buccaneers.

It’s a brave, new world, folks.

So, my final post about the 2002 NFL season is at hand. Commencing forthwith:

:: There’s a generally-held belief that blowouts are inherently uninteresting and boring. In the case of the Super Bowl, where blow-outs have traditionally been the norm, it’s reached such a point that the corollary belief is that the commercials are more interesting than the game itself. I don’t agree. Blowouts are certainly interesting if it’s your team doing the blowing out; as a Bills fan, I can confirm that my attention was riveted in that AFC Championship Game twelve years ago, when the Bills dismantled the Raiders 51-3. But blow-outs can be interesting on other grounds, as well. Yes, some are boring — Super Bowl XXIX, for example, when the 49ers whalloped the Chargers 49-26 — but some are definitely interesting. This game is an example. Just the fact that it was the Bucs who were blowing out the Raiders, and not the other way around, was interesting in itself. And the game wasn’t quite the blow-out that the final score indicates; the Raiders had actually closed to within thirteen before the Bucs put it away and then appended the exclamation-point. But to the extent that anyone expected a blow-out, it was not expected to be the Raiders on the receiving end. On that basis — the unexpected nature of this blow-out — I found the game interesting.

:: All week I heard about the veteran leadership abounding on the Oakland sideline. So where was it? Why were Jerry Rice, Tim Brown, Bill Romanowski, Rich Gannon, et al not in their teammates’ faces, getting them the #$&%!! back into the game? When they caught Rice on camera early in the third, sitting on the sideline moping, I knew the game was over, despite the flicker of life the Raiders showed a little later on.

:: I was very pleased to see the Super Bowl won decisively by a team that executed fundamentals so solidly, after a season where fundamentals were tossed aside by just about everyone. It’s great to see that defense still wins championships; that running the ball and grinding the clock when one is leading in the second half is still excellent strategy (Dave Wannstedt, are you listening?); and that one does not need a stellar passing game to win a Super Bowl.

:: Joe Theissman is still an idiot. In his pregame pick, he announced that the Raiders would win. OK, fine — a lot of people picked them. But he went on to say why: “The Raiders were, week in and week out, the best team in the NFL this season.” Was Joe watching the same NFL season that I was? Was he watching when the Raiders went on a four-game losing streak? Was he watching when, “week in and week out”, there was no clearly dominant team in the league? Hell, the Raiders didn’t even have the better regular-season record of this year’s two Super Bowl teams. I wonder if Theissman’s brain was affected when his leg was broken all those years ago.

:: Commercials: I liked three of them. There was the FedEx Castaway spoof, the “Osbournes” Pepsi Twist ad, and the Bud Light ad with the guy who decided to get a third arm. That’s about it. (Oh, and a new SportsCenter ad where Joe Montana is a chef, and he loses his Super Bowl ring in the food, to have Stuart Scott find it.)

:: Halftime: What on earth was Shania Twain wearing?! Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. If this is what country music is about these days, then Patsy Cline must be gyrating in her burial place.

:: Pregame: I’m probably going to hell for saying this, but I’m finally tired of “God Bless America”. I understood why the song shot to the forefront of our consciousness after 9-11-01, but now apparently we’re to hear it at every sporting event — even before the actual National Anthem. Still, Celine Dion sang it well. This year featured one of the better “Star Spangled Banner”‘s in recent memory; the Dixie Chicks did a simple rendition, solemn and with lovely vocal harmony. I was baffled that they did away with player introductions; maybe everyone was awestruck by the Patriots’ “Introduce us as a team” gimick from last year. It was nice, though, that they did a little season-recap for each team, showing their respective roads to the Super Bowl.

:: Postgame: since when do they do music in the postgame? What’s up with that? The game ends, and then it’s: “Congrats, Bucs. We’ll give you the Vince Lombardi Trophy just as soon as we’re all done listening to Bon Jovi!” And I was glad to see that Chris Berman still pulls out the orange necktie for special Buccaneer occasions.

And, finally, a couple of thoughts about the NFL itself.

:: While I can somewhat agree with the “purists” with regards to the current structure for overtime games, I have to conclude that a system whereby a team can win without the other team even touching the ball needs to be tweaked. My thinking is this: first of all, keep the coin toss, but don’t kick it off — just give the team winning the toss the ball, at the opposing twenty yard line. If they’re going to march down the field and score, make them march down the field. Second, if they do score, I think the other team should then get one possession in which they can either tie or win, depending on what the first team to score did. However, after both teams have each had a possession, then go right back to sudden death. I think that overtime is “sudden death” because of football’s status as the most physical of the major sports; you don’t want these guys out there for an extra hour or two beating on each other.

So, just to take a hypothetical example: if the Bills and Jets play to a tie in regulation, a coin is tossed. The Jets call it and win, and they get the ball first. Then, suppose they start at the 20 and drive downfield for a field-goal. Then, the Bills get a possession — also starting at the twenty. They, too, drive for a field goal. Now the Jets would get another possession, and the game would progress as before until the next team scores. Then, game over. This would not cheat the Bills at all, because they would have had the opportunity to score a touchdown on their OT possession, and thus win the game. Of course, this system would create a few weird instances: in my above example, if the Jets’ QB throws an interception on his first snap in OT, and that interception is run in for a touchdown, then the game’s over — because both teams will have had possession once, and the Bills would have a lead.

So: the first team to take the lead after both teams have possessed the ball, should win in OT.

:: Finally, a word about parity. I read a commentary a few weeks ago (I don’t recall the writer or location, unfortunately) that complained about parity because it’s meant the end of dynasties in the NFL, and thus there will presumably be less of a sense of history forged nowadays. I don’t agree. First of all, dynasties in themselves are pretty rare. There really was no “Team of the 1990s” (I don’t consider the Cowboys thus, because they won their three championships in four years early in the decade and were lackluster after that), so the last true dynasty was the 49ers of the 1980s. But their three championships in the 1980s were spread out, so I can’t believe anyone thought they were a dynasty when they won their first. Conversely, many were convinced that the 1985 Bears were the start of a dynasty, but it never came to pass. So, I don’t think we can really predict whether or not there will be dynasties.

However, it seems at least partly true that the old style of dynasty may be a thing of the past: a team putting together a core of players and keeping that core together for a long period of time. Future dynasties, thus, may not be the result of accretion of great talent on a single team, but rather by great front-office personnel and coaches on a team. Scouts and coaches are going to be more important in the future, and whereas we very well may not see a Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s again, I also think we’re unlikely to see a situation where a Chuck Knoll or a Don Shula or a Tom Landry can coach a colossus but then spend ten years coaching mediocre teams because the colossus eventually got dismantled. John Gruden might not win another Super Bowl with this same collection of Buccaneers, but I’d be shocked if his coaching career ended sometime in the future without another title under his belt. Selection of personnel is going to get more important, and this is the real reason why the Bengals and Cardinals are such train-wrecks: not only do they lack talent, but they also lack the proper management team to bring in talent in an era when talent can be acquired much more easily and not nearly as capriciously as in the day when there was the draft and little else.

I like parity. I like the fact that a team can go from being a doormat to a Super Bowl champion quickly. I like the fact that of the 19 teams that posted records of .500 or better in 2002, 12 posted losing records in either 2000 or 2001. I like the fact that “Wait ’till next year” can actually have some meaning now, as opposed to before when it meant “Wait until we have an awesome draft, start developing those kids, and then have another awesome draft the year after, and the same thing over four years until we’re a great team”.

The way teams acquire players has changed, but the game is still the same. It’s still line-’em-up, run and throw, stop the other guy, for sixty minutes each Sunday. So we’ve had five new Super Bowl Champions out of the last six Super Bowls. So five of those champions were teams that to that point in their franchise history had never won a Super Bowl before. So the best team in the NFL can actually change from year to year much more fluidly than before. Football is still football, the Super Bowl is still the Super Bowl, and the best team in the NFL was still crowned yesterday.

The Buccaneers are the Champions, and long live the Champions. At least until September.

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I’ve noticed in the last year or two that I will receive campaign mailings, seeking contributions, from candidates who are not in my state. I expect these are targeted to folks on the Mother Jones mailing list and the like, and they are invariably phrased in terms of “Support me, so that the Republicans don’t take control” or something like that. Sympathetic as I may be, I’m generally hesitant to donate any of my money to political causes, and I’m even more hesitant to do so in the case of candidates who don’t represent me.

I’m bringing this up because Scott Secrest recently received such a mailing from Tom Daschle (to whom I lovingly refer as “our Lemming-In-Chief”), and he actually wrote back, sending his regrets to Senator Daschle in no uncertain terms. He also posted his response to Collaboratory. I have to agree with Scott, almost entirely — one generally should be wary of requests for another chance for a guy whose most notable recent accomplishment is being the first to walk the plank.

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One minute to go. Observations to come tomorrow, but I just have to make this notation: I’ve been reading CalPundit for several months, and this is the first instance in all that time of him being stone wrong.

Oh well, every winning streak ends sooner or later. I’m sure he’ll get right back on the winning ride again tomorrow. Or later today….

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POETICAL EXCURSION #10

“The Bloody Sire”, by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962).

It is not bad. Let them play.

Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane

Speak his prodigious blasphemies.

It is not bad, it is high time,

Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.

What but the wolf’s tooth chiseled so fine

The fleet limbs of the antelope?

What but fear winged the birds and hunger

Gemmed with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

Who would remember Helen’s face

Lacking the terrible halo of spears?

Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,

The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?

Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

Never weep, let them play,

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

:: After reading this poem a week or so ago, I’ve been wondering a lot: how true is that Jeffers says here? How true is it that what we humans value, what we deem worthy, is shaped by violence and war? This poem suggests a sort of “catastrophistic” view of human nature: that our paradigms, our values, are born in moments of violence and blood-letting. Saddeningly, maddeningly, this may in fact be the case; and it leaves me wondering, on the eve of war, just what new values will be thus born.

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I wrote last week about a peculiar result of my rewatching a film that I didn’t like even though most other people did (Dead Poets Society); last night I did the reverse. I watched a film that I’ve loved since it came out, even though it may well be the single most reviled film, judging by the vitriol its mere mention seems to elicit, of the last ten years. I am talking, of course, of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

I can grant some of the flaws in the film. I really can. The dialogue, while not remotely as bad as many would insist, could have used some touching-up. While I am most emphatically not a Jar Jar hater, he could most definitely have been toned down a bit. While I think Jake Lloyd did a fine job as nine-year-old Anakin, I do think that he might have benefitted from the directorial hand of a director more attuned to working with children. (If ever Steven Spielberg was going to direct a Star Wars film, this would have been the one.) And so on and so forth. I do think that The Phantom Menace is probably the most obviously flawed film in the series, with the most blatant creaking spots in the narrative, but I’ve been mystified by the sheer level of dislike the film has generated. I remember one of those “Top Ten” lists on the MSN Entertainment page a year or two ago that listed the “Worst Sequels Ever Made”, and guess what film made the Number One spot (on a list that somehow managed to omit Superman III, for God’s sake). Weird.

I was going to write a lengthy defense of The Phantom Menace, addressing just about every negative about the film I could find, but I got a bit lucky in that someone’s beaten me to it. I agree with about eighty-five percent of what this guy says about the film. (I also disagree almost one hundred percent with his assessment of Return of the Jedi, but that’s for another time.)

It’s probably inevitable that there should be so much comparison right now between the Star Wars saga and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, since both are unfolding on the screen these days. The generally held view — although not by me — is that the LOTR films are everything that the current crop of Star Wars films are not, and that Peter Jackson’s work shows by its very greatness just how far George Lucas has fallen. Well, OK, I guess, but I disagree entirely — I still love both equally. But the current primacy of LOTR suggests to me an analogy, because the way Tolkien originally created his stories of Middle-Earth is in a way similar to the way Lucas has brought forth his own saga. First, Tolkien wrote his great trilogy, the one with Frodo and Sam and Aragorn and the War of the Ring and all the rest of it; that’s what captured so many imaginations. Likewise, George Lucas captured imaginations with his trilogy of films about Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Princess Leia and all the rest of it.

Later on in their lives, both Tolkien and Lucas felt it was time to go in and tell some of the backstory to their universes. Tolkien did this with The Silmarillion, a work which is also held in some high regard, although not as high as his original trilogy (mainly because of its more archaic tone, and the fact that Tolkien died before the work was complete). The Silmarillion tells the stories of how the Elves came to Middle Earth, and how the Rings of Power were forged, and all the rest of the stuff hinted at in The Lord of the Rings. I’ve never read The Silmarillion, so I can’t comment much on it, but it’s a vast epic story on its own. So, when George Lucas announced that he was at long last making the first three episodes of Star Wars, filling in the details of Darth Vader’s life, I think that most fans assumed that they were going to get the Star Wars equivalent of The Silmarillion. Thus their disappointment, at least in part, when Episode I finally arrived, and fans discovered that Lucas had not made The Silmarillion at all. He had made The Hobbit.

The Hobbit, to my way of thinking, stands in relation to The Lord of the Rings in much the same way that The Phantom Menace stands in relation to the remainder of the Star Wars saga. It’s not really a full part of the story; much of its action is peripheral to what is to come, and it really serves to introduce some of the characters who will play a part and to give a glimpse of this world in which the great drama will later unfold. The Hobbit is a smaller, more intimate work that has very little of the epic scope that would mark The Lord of the Rings. Sauron is never mentioned in The Hobbit, nor really is the fact that the Third Age may be ending; the Ring is just a magical trinket that makes its wearer invisible; Gollum is a creepy little monster; et cetera. It’s a straight-forward adventure story, and not much more than that. That’s also what The Phantom Menace is: a small introduction to the Star Wars story, which I think explains a lot of the film’s structure. This explains why Anakin Skywalker is not even the primary focus of the film. The Hobbit is not essential to the story of The Lord of the Rings, and likewise The Phantom Menace really isn’t essential to the Star Wars saga, except to show a few key events. In The Hobbit, it is the finding of the Ring, an event that in the book is not particularly momentous at all; in The Phantom Menace, it is a similar finding: the finding of Anakin Skywalker, even though his finding is likewise not momentous, in that it doesn’t have the kind of huge import on the events surrounding it that I think many Star Wars fans anticipated.

I’d also like to discuss the issue of heroes and protagonists, viz. the Star Wars films. A complaint I’ve seen made in different places — I think David Brin voiced it, in his famous article for Salon attacking The Phantom Menace, and I saw the complaint raised elsewhere by others — is that The Phantom Menace is fundamentally flawed because it is lacking a clear protagonist character. “Whose movie is this?” goes the refrain, and at first glance this seems fairly damning. But I don’t think it holds up.

At some point, I think it dawned on many people that the true protagonist of the saga is not Luke Skywalker but Anakin/Vader; the whole saga becomes the tale of this one Jedi’s rise, fall and redemption. Orson Scott Card made the point very well in his book How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, in which he outlined how in the “classic trilogy” we see Luke, Han, Leia and friends have a bunch of neat adventures, where all the while it is Darth Vader whose actions shape those of the heroes. Vader is the one setting the agenda; everything the heroes do is in response to Vader, and the saga’s key emotional moments come when Vader’s son rejects the Dark Side, and then Vader himself does the same. Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, turns out to be the main character of the saga; and yet, he’s not the hero, we don’t identify with him, and the story is not told from his point-of-view.

Much has been written over the years about the influence of Joseph Campbell on George Lucas, and how the Star Wars saga is a science-fictional, space-opera rendition of the classic “hero’s journey”. One can start with A New Hope and tick off the proper events: Luke’s “call to adventure”, his “refusal of the call”, his “meeting of the mentor”, his “supernatural aid”, his descent into “the belly of the whale”, et cetera. The hero journey of Luke Skywalker pretty much determines much, if not all, of the structure of the classic trilogy. But then, along comes The Phantom Menace, set years before Luke’s birth; but since we know that the entire saga is really Anakin’s story, we are tempted to expect The Phantom Menace to be Anakin’s story, and we are a bit surprised to find that it is not. At least, not overtly. Thus, we have David Brin, complaining that George Lucas is apparently making a Campbellian-style epic without a Campbellian hero at its heart.

But is he, really?

Keep in mind that, while the structure of the classic trilogy is undeniably Campbellian, it is so in the service of a character who is not the main character. Luke Skywalker may be the Campbellian hero, but Anakin is the main character. This particular counterpoint suggests that we are not meant to really follow Anakin’s struggles in the same way that we are meant to follow Luke’s, and thus it is entirely appropriate that The Phantom Menace does not set Anakin at its core the way we might have erroneously expected it to do.

Still, the “Whose movie is this?” question is interesting to me, on other grounds, because there are two ways to view The Phantom Menace in relation to the entire saga, with each way suggesting a different answer to this question. If one views The Phantom Menace as a stand-alone chapter, telling its own story — which, in many ways, it is — then the question of whose movie it is may seem initially damning. After all, Anakin — who we’re told is the main character of the entire saga doesn’t show up until an hour’s gone by, and even then he’s a mere participant in the story and not its clear protagonist. Obi Wan Kenobi, the other character whom we might expect to be the focal character, is clearly not; he even drops off the screen for the most part during the entire Tatooine section of the film. It could be Queen Amidala’s movie, but since the film obscures her identity, it can’t really be her (even though it turns out that it might be). That leaves Qui Gon Jinn, who ends up dead. Is it Qui Gon’s movie? Maybe, but it seems to me that the film is more of an ensemble film, with a group of heroes all sharing the role of protagonist.

The idea that a story must have a single, clear-cut hero really doesn’t hold up. Consider some of those “disaster” films of the 1970s. Is the Gene Hackman character the clear hero of The Poseidon Adventure? Not really. He has the most screen time, and his actions drive much of the story, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s his movie. Consider two of the finer works of fantasy literature of recent years: Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Neither of these works has a single protagonist, opting instead for a large cast of characters. Martin’s work, in particular, so blurs the line between hero and villain that even now, with three of the series’s eventual six books in print, we don’t know really who the good guys are in the first place. Consider, even, The Lord of the Rings. It seems so obvious, at first glance, that Frodo Baggins is the main character. But is he, really? I could make a definite case — and some scholars actually have done so — that Aragorn is the true main character of LOTR. (The third installment’s title — The Return of the King — directly refers to Aragorn, for example.) So, the fact that The Phantom Menace lacks a strong central hero character doesn’t seem to me to be a fatal flaw. Or, if I may invoke a cliche-to-be of I’ve ever heard one, it’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

There is another view we can take, though, to answer the question of whose movie The Phantom Menace is. We can say that it’s still Anakin Skywalker’s movie, even though he doesn’t show up until well into the proceedings, because it’s only the first chapter of his entire story. Returning to The Lord of the Rings: if Aragorn is the main character, and he may well be, then it seems strange that he doesn’t show up until well into The Fellowship of the Ring, unless we realize that Fellowship is not intended to be viewed as a stand-alone work. Thus, to give The Phantom Menace demerits because it doesn’t introduce the main character until an hour’s gone by is wrong-headed, for precisely the same reason that it may be wrong-headed to fault Fellowship for not introducing Aragorn earlier. Of course, this seems a bit unsatisfying on other grounds; it means that we have to hold The Phantom Menace in abeyance until the second and third episodes are complete. This doesn’t strike me as a problem. I don’t think that The Empire Strikes Back was really appreciated for the great film that it is until after Return of the Jedi arrived, and not because ROTJ is a worse film but because it shows just where all that stuff in TESB was going in the first place. I think that Harry Knowles said it best, in his review of Attack of the Clones: “This movie makes The Phantom Menace a better movie.”

Of course, I thought it was a good movie in the first place. I was not disappointed in 1999, and I’m still not disappointed. I don’t hold The Phantom Menace as a guilty pleasure; I feel no guilt about it. As far as I am concerned, it’s a good movie.

(I do wish Lucas had left out the fart and poop jokes, though. And that scene between Padme and Jar Jar, when she’s cleaning R2-D2, is probably the most godawful scene in the entire Star Wars saga. But other than that, I love this movie.)

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For the last year, I’ve been eating healthy and exercising, resulting in 67 pounds off my original weight. I tend to only indulge in “unhealthy” items on special days, with today — Super Sunday — being one of them. However, that doesn’t mean I go “whole hog”; I was only planning to get a pizza to eat during the game. (Not that I’ve been abstaining from pizza; we’ve been making our own, though, out of Boboli crusts, low-fat cheese, low-fat pepperoni and more vegetables than I used to eat on a pizza.) That’s it. Just a pizza.

That was until some titanic wanker over on MeFi started this thread.

Later on, it’s off to the store to see what the local Syracuse chips are like….

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Ignore this; it’s a test. Blogger is acting, well, weird.

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Rachel Lucas is now my favorite conservative. This post of hers is why.

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