The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Oddities abound! (Not so many as usual, due to less time spent online this week, but still.)
:: Searching for something else, I happened upon this: guys in Norway who put on a suit that has webbing between the legs and between the arms and torso. So attired, you leap from a cliff and spread your arms and legs wide, thus allowing all that extra fabric around your body to fill with air, allowing you to “fly”. Of course there’s video!
That’s…psychotic. Wow.
:: After my posting the other day about the kayaker who set the new record for waterfall-running, I checked out some other videos on YouTube of some extreme kayakers at work. Here’s one in which I guy runs a not-particularly-high waterfall that doesn’t drop straight down, so you might not think it’s all that impressive, but he commits one massive error, for some reason I can’t fathom: he tosses his paddle aside as he goes over the brink. The result is nearly fatal:
That’s about all. More next week….
I mentioned “Extreme Kayaking” just last week, and now I see an actual example. These photos stunned me on a number of levels. A kayaker successfully ran a 186-foot high waterfall in eastern Washington.
That waterfall is higher than Niagara Falls. Of course, the volume of water is significantly less, but still — 186 feet? I find that mindboggling. Truly mindboggling.
I’ve had marches on the brain for a while, but I think it’s time to change the pace a bit. All marches — funeral marches, circus marches, military marches, grand marches — are, at heart, processionals; but there are other ways to write processional music. Here is one of my favorite processional works of all.
I couldn’t decide which of these two renditions of this piece of music to use, so I’m using both. From Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, here is “Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral”, with original orchestra and chorus:
And here it is, with a wonderful animation, played by wind ensemble in a wonderful arrangement that is a staple of wind ensemble repertoire:
Note that both end differently, as well — this is because in the opera, the piece doesn’t end at all but immediately segues into a dramatic scene. For concert performance of just the “Procession”, new endings had to be composed.
One of my long-standing wishes is that Guy Gavriel Kay would turn his historical-fantasy approach to Asia — China, Japan, wherever. According to news posted by GGK himself to Bright Weavings, that’s exactly what he’s done with his new book:
The new novel is called UNDER HEAVEN. It is a long, single-volume historical fantasy inspired by the extraordinary Tang Dynasty, essentially 8th century China.
It will appear in the English-language markets in April and May of 2010.
Huzzah, again!
Someone at a science fiction convention in Australia caught up with Jake Lloyd, who ten years ago was appearing in theaters everywhere as the future Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker. Lots of people hated Lloyd in the movie, but I never did; I found him fine for the most part, and only think that he probably would have benefited from a director more gifted than George Lucas in handling children. (I’ve always believed that if ever Steven Spielberg was to have directed a Star Wars movie, TPM would have been the one.) Anyway, here’s Mr. Lloyd now, thinking back:
Interestingly, he seems to have just a tiny little bit of residual bitterness toward the people who made fun of him in school for having been Anakin Skywalker. That look in his eye suggests a potential turning-to-the-Dark-Side to me. Hmmmm…maybe Lucas should have just waited ten years and made Attack of the Clones with Lloyd!
The first real indication I had as a kid that geek culture could be a lonely thing was when the movie TRON came out. I thought TRON was amazing; I loved it. I was just starting to become a minor-league computer nerd, and at the time, computers weren’t nearly as omnipresent as they are now. To use a computer I’d go with my father to the college, where we’d use terminals hooked up to the mainframe; there I’d dink around and play Colossal Cave and experiment with programming in BASIC and whatnot. Computers in public schools, though? This was rare — very rare, actually. As in, the purchase of a single computer for a single classroom would be taken up at a school board meeting. There were kids in my class who were years away from ever even touching a computer. Strange times, those.
So when TRON came along, I remember being the only kid in my grade who actually saw the thing. This befuddled me for a while: after all, every kid saw Star Wars! Every kid saw Raiders of the Lost Ark! Every kid saw ET, and Star Trek, and whatever else there was. But TRON? Nope. Nobody saw that one. Oddly enough, the other kids who were only vaguely aware of the existence of the movie were certainly aware of the video game. On the rare occasion when I’d get to go into an arcade (my parents weren’t wild about giving me fistfuls of quarters to go into those dark dens of video temptation, for some reason), I’d watch some kid play TRON:
KID: I’m gonna do the lightcycles next! That’s my favorite part of the game!
ME: Yeah. That part of the movie is so cool! (I don’t remember what the slang was back then — “rad”, maybe? Or did “rad” come along later?)
KID:: Movie? Oh yeah, this game’s from a movie. Huh.
And so it would go.
Cut to now, though: TRON‘s reputation has improved over the years. It’s remembered by many a geek now as a seminal event, and it’s not even a bad movie, either — a bit awkward in places, and in a couple of others it’s hilariously dated, but still, TRON still tickles the strings my geek heart:
So now, they’re doing a sequel: TRON Legacy. Right now I’m kind of excited about this, especially on the basis of a pretty amazing trailer that’s making the rounds of the Interweb right now. Yeah, trailers rarely reflect the quality of a movie, but…well, WOW. (Video embedding is disabled, so click over to see it.) Wow, those lightcycles have sure come a long way since 1982…and I love the visual homage to the Pod Race from The Phantom Menace that’s in there.
What am I hoping for? Well…the original was nifty and computer-esque without being full of dark, dank and cynical expression like The Matrix. I hope for that, at least. And I want lots of lightcycles and Recognizers and program identity discs and all that jazz. I can’t wait!
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
