Newsweek has an interesting article online about the future of high-rise skyscrapers.
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And thus did the Bash Brothers pass into baseball memory, there to dwell forever with the likes of the Gashouse Gang and “Tinker to Evers to Chance”. Jose Canseco has retired. I always rather liked Canseco, with his “Yeah, I’m a big-time sports star and I’m just going to have fun with it”. You have to like any ballplayer who, while playing outfield, goes to run down a deep fly ball at the warning track and has the ball bounce off his head and over the fence for a home run.
Canseco is one of those borderline players who will appear on many Hall of Fame ballots before he’s eventually admitted, if at all. I suspect he’ll eventually get in, but it may take him years into his “Veterans Committee” eligibility. Anyway, best of luck to him.
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I supported the recording industry’s legal fights against Napster and other such services, not so much for the good of the record companies but for the artists. No one will claim that the artists have been fairly treated by the record companies; in fact, their track record in that regard is two steps removed from indentured servitude. But I failed to see the logic, argued heatedly by Napster proponents, that since record companies so often treated the artists unfairly viz. the compensation they paid the artists for their efforts, it was therefore an improvement to switch to a system whereby there was no compensation whatsoever for the artists, whose work was distributed without their consent. I called this the “Robin Hood argument”, and I never bought it; instead, I suspected ulterior motives on the part of the pro-Napsterites — and my suspicions were in part born out by the tone many of them took in their argumentation. They usually ended up sounding like nothing so much as pale imitators of the Veruca Salt character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: “Daddy, I want my free music now!!!”
But now, just a year and a half later, the recording industry has shot itself in the foot with their clumsy attempts at copy-protecting CDs. They are terrified of piracy, which is made absurdly easy by the prevalence of CD-R drives. The problem, though, is that their copy-protection schemes frequently render CDs unplayable in some players, and in any event are easily circumvented. The whole enterprise is glaringly disrespectful of the idea of fair use, and is in all likelihood ridiculously futile anyway. The record companies need desperately to get on the bandwagon of new technology, or they will soon be extinct.
A good article on the quandaries facing the recording industry appears in the current issue of Time, and also appears online here. (ASIDE: for some unintentional hilarity, check out the article’s accompanying photograph of Morpheus founder Steve Griffin. His picture is taken sitting down, and behind him is a wall-hanging hung in such a way that the picture makes it appear as if Griffin is wearing some kind of gonzo Ancient Egyptian headdress.) A sidebar article features a guy who created a site to let music consumers pay artists directly for the music they download, eliminating the record company as middle man entirely. That article is here.
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(WARNING: RANT AHEAD!)
George Lucas has been blamed for a lot of things. The most common charge against him, mainly by film critics, is that he paved the way for Hollywood’s ever-increasing obsession with huge blockbusters at the expense of quality films. The road leading to Armageddon, Godzilla, and The Scorpion King begins, they say, with Star Wars. This may be partly true, but to blame Lucas for that seems harsh. After all, Lucas had absolutely no idea how Star Wars would be received when it opened, and in any event the first real huge blockbuster came two years earlier, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Additionally, one need only watch AMC for a week to see that the idea that cinema used to produce films the caliber of Casablanca on a regular basis is false. There have always been bad movies; we merely remember the hits and forget the misses. So George Lucas isn’t totally to blame for the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood these days. But there is one thing that I will blame on George Lucas: the evolution of the lunatic fanboy. Witness this AICN review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
I have not yet seen the movie. I will be seeing it on opening day, three days from now. Thus, I do not challenge this person’s view of the film, and even if after seeing it I disagree entirely, I still won’t challenge it. Opinions are tricky things, not usually governed by reason (although reason can and should be brought to bear). A cut of meat one man wouldn’t use to make shoe leather is another man’s beef brisket, and we all would do well to remember that. This reviewer was decidedly unimpressed with Attack of the Clones. Fair enough.
But not fair enough is the vitriol with which he attacks the film and, both implicity and explicitly, George Lucas. It is no secret that many (if not most) filmgoers were disappointed with The Phantom Menace (I am one of the few who liked it; we are sufficiently low in number that we have petitioned EPA Administrator Christie Whitman for “Endangered Species” status). But the sheer hatred that film seems to engender is utterly mystifying to me. Consider the third paragraph of the review in question, and try while reading it to not hear in your innermost ear, as I did, the voice of William Shatner intoning “Get a life….it’s just a movie….”. I find it somewhat disturbing that some people would form such angry hatred for a Star Wars movie, and I would be bothered enough by this review if that paragraph stopped just after the first sentence. But then the reviewer goes on to intone the single most repugnant phrase I’ve ever heard from any sector of fandom:
“George Lucas raped my childhood.”
I barely know where to start. First, I am baffled by the idea of one’s childhood as something that can be harmed retroactively, as if we didn’t learn until we were thirty that Christopher Reeve was buoyed by wires in Superman. When I learned that Errol Flynn, star of many films that I watched and loved when I was a kid, was a drunk and a rascal to such a degree that he basically drank himself to death, did learning that somehow harm the experiences I had enjoyed years before? If a heretofore unknown JRR Tolkien manuscript, detailing the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, comes to light and turns out to be a complete dud, has Tolkien somehow done injury to my original experience of reading The Lord of the Rings? The reviewer says, “Something died in me — and George Lucas killed it. Bastard.” No, he didn’t. He did nothing except fail to live up to one person’s expectations, and to call Lucas a “bastard” on that basis makes me wonder what we would say if George Lucas eventually was revealed to be the Zodiac Killer. (And of course, encountering such name-calling just three paragraphs into a lengthy review doesn’t bode well for what one would hope to be a piece of rational criticism.)
But in any event, the truly disgusting thing about the whole thing is the idea that one’s childhood could be “raped” by something so trivial as a movie. Sorry, folks. If you don’t like this Star Wars movie, the last one, or any of them, fine. But let’s reserve the overwrought hyperbole for people who really have a right to use it — the children of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, or Bosnia, for example. Or how about all those children who lost one or both parents on 11 September 2001. Their childhoods were raped. Anyone who wishes to claim that their childhood was raped by a Star Wars movie should be aware: they are still in their childhood, and really should grow up.
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After my rant the other day on the City of Buffalo and its haphazard pursuit of casino gambling, there comes a bit of good news in the form of possible economic development that is real and not just one more example of a reeling metropolis grasping at whatever it can graze with its bony, weak fingers. Buffalo is trying to get in on what is supposed to be the Next Big High-Tech Thing: bioinformatics. (I’m not entirely sure what “bioinformatics” is, but I know it involves advanced biological research and supercomputing.) In their pursuit of this endeavor, city and state officials have come up with a lot of money to jumpstart the project, beginning a research center and, according to this article from The Buffalo News, getting the right guy to head the whole project. I’m still a bit wary that this will be the next “silver bullet”; Buffalo leaders tend to focus exclusively on one large-scale project at a time, ignoring nearly everything else (an attitude which, just for one example, very nearly led to the demolition of a Buffalo house that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright). The Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics may be the first step on a long and properous road that could give Buffalo some much-needed credibility in the high-tech world, but there are so many other things that need to happen for this city to finally move out of the doldrums. Anyway, here’s hoping.
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A couple of book notes:
:: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is now available in mass-market paperback.
:: A few weeks ago I reviewed longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas’s book Front Row at the White House. She has a new book out: Thanks For the Memories, Mr. President. This is a “wit-and-wisdom” book, with a chapter devoted to each President that Thomas has covered in her long tenure at the White House. It mostly presents presidential humor, but there are some sober moments as well. This book is a very quick read, being basically a collection of anecdotes — I polished it off in a single evening. Nevertheless, it’s quite entertaining.
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The West Wing is ramping up toward the season finale, and is doing so very effectively. Last season’s end-of-year build-up was dominated by a single storyline, President Bartlett’s disclosure of the multiple sclerosis which he had carefully concealed during his first campaign. This year, though, Aaron Sorkin is weaving together a number of plots. The President’s reelection campaign is heating up, there is increasing tension regarding a possible terrorist threat, and someone is stalking CJ Cregg. Sorkin is an amazing writer, and I’m sure he’ll have this pot boiling quite nicely by the time the season finale airs.
My other favorite NBC show is on Wednesday nights. It’s not Law and Order. It’s Ed, a consistently smart and literate show about a former big-city lawyer who has returned to the small Ohio town where he grew up. With its quirky cast, Ed is reminiscent of Northern Exposure, without that show’s flights of fantasy. The season finale of Ed is next week, and I’m a bit apprehensive. The show has been developing a love triangle of sorts between Ed, his dream-woman Carol Vescey, and high school principal Dennis Martino. The problem with this triangle is that Dennis, who should be the odd man out, is actually a very likable character, and his romance with Carol has been handled with aplomb by the show’s writers. This should lead to a bittersweet ending, which is precisely the type of ending that can be really screwed up. Stay tuned.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Olmec Stone Head, Mexico. (Photograph by Santha Faiia)
One of my guilty pleasures (actually, sometimes I wonder if all of my pleasures are guilty, but that’s for another post) is gonzo theories of human origins, the kind of theories that might be breathlessly expounded by Agent Mulder on The X-Files. Some of the most enjoyable such theories are currently found in the books of Graham Hancock, a British writer who has hypothesized that a great human civilization, technological in nature, flourished more than fifteen thousand years ago before the most recent Ice Age. This, needless to say, flies in the face of all established anthropological and archaeological theory. The Olmec stone head pictured above is one of many that can be found throughout Central America. What interests Hancock in this case is the stone head’s Negroid features, when there is no evidence at all of any Negroid dispersion from Africa to the Americas (before they were helped along by Caucasian slave-traders). This is just one piece of “evidence” for Hancock’s theories, which can be found in such books as Fingerprints of the Gods, The Message of the Sphinx, and Heaven’s Mirror. An earlier book by Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, proposed an intriguing theory of where the Ark of the Covenant currently rests. The photograph links to Hancock’s official website.
(I am actually very skeptical of theories such as Hancock’s; my recommendation of his books should not be taken as an endorsement of his hypotheses. I will recommend some good books on skepticism in a future post.)