Contact: Book versus Movie

A few decades ago, I read The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I love Dickens and I have been seeing television versions of it since I was a child, probably at least two dozens. Heck, even the Six Million Dollar Man did a version of it. I was curious as to how accurate they were to the book. I discovered that reading it wasn't as enjoyable as I'd expected. Really. It was beautifully written of course, but because I knew the story so well, there were no surprises, same characters, nothing new.  Most of these film and play productions of the Christmas classic, it ends up, are actually quite accurate. I was expecting my reading of Carl Sagan's Contact to be like this because I had seen the movie so many times. It was not, at all.

Contact, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film, is one of my favorites. Jodie Foster in a thought-provoking hard science fiction (a real sci-fi story, not like Star Wars) with ethical and theological paradoxes ... what could be better? Not much actually. I have seen this film many times. Much is different in the book, which makes it an enjoyable read, but unfortunately, it might be one of those few books where the movie is better than the book. 

**Fair warning: I tell you now, if you have not read the book or seen the movie, there are spoilers coming. You have been warned.  You may want to stop and watch the movie now. You won't regret it.  

The first thing you should realize is that it was originally conceived of as a movie, not a book, in 1977. Sagan and Ann Druyan (whom he later married) wrote the story. It bounced around Hollywood for a few years taking on many different forms, in the meantime, Sagan decided to write the novel which was eventually published by Simon and Schuster in 1985. It reached #7 on the New York Times Best Seller list. It returned to the list in 1997, briefly, when the movie came out. 

In the book, we get a lot more of Ellie Arroway's (Jodie Foster) back story. She was based on Jill Tarter, an astronomer for SETI.  Her name comes from Eleanor Roosevelt and Francois-Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire).  We do get the scene of her with her father conversing about the stars and he dies while she is still young, but the book also shows her mom remarrying a very pious man whom Ellie does not get along with and there are some surprises to their relationship as well. In the movie, her mother dies while giving birth to Ellie and is a non-entity in her life. She calls her mother throughout the book. We also read about Ellie going to college with her sexual exploits and the continued sexism she gets exposed to her in her field. Many characters are in the book that don't make it into the movie. Her lover is Presidential Science Adviser Ken der Heer. He isn't even in the movie. The movie has Ellie in a relationship with Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) which is only hinted at in the book. She seems to be attracted to him but is more interested in their intellectual sparring than anything physical. 

Some characters from the movie are not in the book at all, like the guys in the lab. They are there, but they aren't named. Remember the blind guy, Kent (portrayed by William Fichtner). Not in the book. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when Kent actually hears the message from space in the static, he hears structure while others cannot. I could imagine this scene was added to create drama to the moment of discovery. This character is based on a real guy, a scientist that worked at SETI, Kent Cullers.  Rob Lowe's Richard Rank is a parody of Ralph Reed and is not in the book. The book does have Billy Jo Rankin but he is less extreme and less cartoonish. I can understand this change since the book came out in the 80's and much had changed with religion in American, a la the Christian Coalition, by the late 90's when the film came out. It needed an upgrade. James Wood owns the character of Kitz. Kitz who is in the book and is still quite obnoxious but Wood pushes him into the realm of belligerence which makes him much more interesting. He is a character you love to hate.  

One big change is that the US President, in the book, has a big role and the president is a woman. The movie only shows the President once and it is Bill Clinton. Zemeckis very creatively uses news footage from 1996 of Clinton talking about a Mars rock, but the clips are so vague it appears that he is talking about the message from Vega. Zemeckis received a complaint letter from the White House because they never granted permission for the footage. The original plan was for Sydney Poitier to play the president but he turned the role down. So the president wasn't a woman in the film but was supposed to be black, both of which were quite progressive for their time. 

There is more science in the book which is a good thing. Carl Sagan is one of the best science educators of the 20th century and it makes sense that even in his only book of fiction, he continues to educate. As I read I learned about the star Vega and Polaris, about the moons of our solar system, about message decoding, radio and television waves, and about the general nature of the universe. A number of compelling conversations/arguments take place between scientists and religious folks throughout the book. These are fascinating, as they are in the movie, but the book has more of them.  

Of course, the movie is filled with stuff  not in the book that must have been added because it works. Another memorable scene is Ellie laying on her Thunderbird's hood with headphones listening to the "cosmic static." Not in the book, but it is a fine scene. Her relationship with Dumlin (Tom Skerritt's character) is strained, but it is a much bigger part of the movie than it is in the book. He was her faculty adviser and was disappointed in her career choice of searching for E.T.

The message is prime numbers (mathematics is the language of science) and is being broadcast from distance aliens with hidden instructions to build a machine. They don't know what the machine is, a Trojan Horse perhaps. It takes about a decade to build in the book, but it doesn't seem that long in the movie. The world builds two in the movie, but three in the book because the USSR had to build one as well. Written in 1985 after all, the Cold War is still raging in Sagan's future. The book's machine has five seats while the movie's only has one for Ellie. In the book, her trip across the galaxy takes place on New Year's Eve 1999; there is no mention of the Y2K bug. The trip takes 20 minutes Earth time while the movie has it taking just a few seconds. 

The oddest thing about the book is the terrorist attack. This is a big moment in the movie. Ellie recognizes a religious fanatic at a testing of the machine and he has a bomb on him. It goes off and destroys it. It is quite a spectacle. While reading this in the book, I was reminded that Sagan is not a novelist, but a scientist. It only took place in one paragraph that ended the chapter. I wasn't even sure it had happened so I reread it. It was there, but very vague. The next chapter started with Drumlin's funeral so it was there. I don't think I would have known what happened if I hadn't seen the movie. 

I am a non-believer. I call myself an Atheist but at times, I found this to be extreme. Atheism seems to be fundamentalist approach to science. If I had to come up with a name for what I am, in regards to the whole God question, I would have to call myself an Agnostic leaning strongly towards Atheism.  I have always wondered what I would need to convince me that there is a God, any god. I've never been able to come with anything. What I love about the end of Contact, is that it answers this question. The movie didn't come near this. When Ellie talks to the alien (in the guise of her father), they talk about the number π (aka pi). They talk about how it goes on and on, never repeating, but somewhere in there, the alien says, is a string of ones and zeroes. In this string of binary digits is a message. The book ends Ellie spending her time looking for this message. A message being discovered in pi would do it for me. It is interesting that a book by a great scientist, helped me figure out what I'd need to believe in God. 

Picks of the Year: 2018

Two dates hang over us separated by a hyphen. Our year of birth and our year of death. It is on the hyphen is where all the fun happens. Congratulations to everyone reading this. The date after the hyphen will at least be 2019, hopefully much higher.

2018 was a pretty shitty year in regards to history. The stock market has been a roller coaster ride, our president has been as bad as ever, school shootings are still plentiful and our environmental problems are escalating, but it is was still a pretty good year for me and my immediate family.

In March, we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary and had a group of friends and family over for a bonfire. In October, we took a trip to Boston to see the Red Sox play the first playoff game of the season and they not only won the game we attended, but they won the World Series, fourth time in the 21st century.

We lost our electricity for three days in November and we are currently without a fridge (for two weeks now). A new one is delivered on Thursday morning. 

Favorite Trip:
We had our first tropical vacation this year with a week in the Dominican Republic. A resort vacations are not our style, but it was incredibly relaxing. I'm not sure if I will ever go to resort again, but I enjoyed it. Staying one place during a vacation and not exploring isn't exactly what I am used to nor to my liking. 

We also had road trips to Kansas City to see the Red Sox with a stop in Chicago to see my wife's family and the Cubs. We went to Clearwater, Florida for a week with visits to Virginia and Baltimore to see friends. I had a business trip to Vegas which I hate and we went into Boston to see the Sox a couple of times. 

Media:
Best New Podcast:

I discovered a handful of new pod casts this year: 

• Retropod - a short history podcast by Washington Post
• The Indicator by Planet Money - a short economic podcast where they dissect a number                                                      from the economy
• This Song - a radio station out of Austin TX, KUTX, talks to musicians about a song that                                                     inspired them. 
• By the Book - these two woman read a self help book and for a month live by it. It is very                                                     funny. 
• Pod Dylan - One Bob Dylan song is dissected
• The Great Albums - One great rock album is dissected. 
• Everything Is Alive - an interview with an inanimate object. 

Everything Is Alive is my favorite new podcast. It is put out by producers of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. It is hysterical. They usually have comedians playing the objects. They interview a lamppost, a subway seat, a grain of sand, an elevator etc. 

Best Book I read this year:

I read the following books this year:

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates (audio book)
Lamb: The Gospel According to BIff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore
Because They Wanted To - Mary Gaitskill
A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Bachman
Grunt by Mary Roach
The Rising Plague by Brad Spellberg
A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving (reread)
Var the Stick by Piers Anthony
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (currently reading)

I didn't meet my goal of twelve books. Lamb was probably my favorite. Not often does a book make me laugh out loud. His writing reminded me of Tom Robbins. 

Favorite Movie I Saw in a Theater: 

I saw the following movies in the theater this year: 

Vice, Boy Erased, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Crazy Rich Asians, Won't You Be My Neighbor, Sorry to Bother You, RBG, Deadpool II, Avengers: Infinity War, The Post and BlackKKlansman. 

The Avengers movie might be my favorite in that I don't think I've ever been as shocked as I was by the ending. Overall, it was not a great year for movies.

Favorite new TV show: 

My wife and I just started rewatching ER from the very beginning on Hulu. We are pleasantly surprised how much the show holds up. We tried to watch St. Elsewhere and it didn't hold up at all. We are on season 2 of ER now and plan on bingeing all the way to the end. Maybe we'll finish by the end of 2019. 

In the meantime, I discovered a lot of new shows in 2018.  

Among them are:  Big Mouth, Star Trek: Discovery, The Marvelous Mrs Maizel, Homecoming, Jack Ryan, The Haunting of Hill House, Goliath, Humans, American Gods, The Rain, Safe, Disenchantment, Bodyguard, Ken Burns' Vietnam, Maniac, The Sinner, The Secret City, Collateral, Lost in Space, Requiem, Seven Seconds, The End of the Fucking World, Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams, Absentia, Victoria and Fleabag. 

Hands down, my favorite is The Marvelous Mrs. Maizel on Amazon. A Jewish housewife in 1950's NYC delves into stand up comedy. It is a treat for fans of comedy, history and drama. Big Mouth on Netflix is probably my second favorite, cringe-worthy, but fantastic comedy.

Favorite Albums:
I bought seven albums/CDs from 2018. I went fairly mellow this year. My favorite has to be John Prine's "The Tree of Forgiveness."  Yes, John Prine is still alive and putting out some of his best music. His lyrics are as witty and poignant as ever. 

Here are the albums:
"Secularia" by Eliza Gilkyson
"Free Yourself Up" by Lake Street Dive
"Everyday Life, Everyday People" by Slightly Stoopid
"The Deconstruction" by Eels
"By the Way, I Forgive You" by Brandi Carlile 
"All the Things That I Did, All the Things I Didn't Do" by Milk Carton Kids
"The Tree of Forgiveness" by John Prine

Favorite Songs:
I have 247 MP3 songs from 2018. Below is a list of some of my favorites. If I have to pick a favorite, which is difficult, I have to pick "Fire Drills" by Dessa. I don't often pick a hip-hop songs as the best but this one is truly great. I might have to go back to 2005 when I last picked a hip-hop song with Mood Ruff's "Rocketship."  

Favorite new songs of the year.
"Bloodless" Andrew Bird
"The Mother" Brandi Carlile
"Under the Wheels" Calexico
"My Old Man" Chuck Auerbach
"Crack the Case" Dawes
"On and On" Dead Horses
"Fire Drills" Dessa
"The Deconstruction" and "Rusty Pipes" The Eels
"Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone)" John Prine
"Summer's End" John Prine
"Beverly" Low Cut Connie
"Hey Mama" Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
"Baby Don't Leave Me Alone With My Thoughts" Lake Street Dive
"Hell-on" Neko Case
"Desire" Ought
"One More Night" Slightly Stoopid
"Choosing Sides" Benjamin Lazar Davis
"Wild" Molly Burch
"Things I Learned" Motel Mirrors
"Glass Jar" Tristen
"Your Dog" Soccer Mommy
"Lay Low" Gretchen Peters

Enjoy 2019. I'll be here. 

Green and Red in The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water won the best picture Oscar this year. It was a beautiful film, far more complex than its simple plot. Best picture? I don't think so. I will still go with Get Out for being more socially relevant and creative, but The Shape of Water is still worth seeing and talking about. **This blog post is full of spoilers.

The least pleasing aspect of the film is its simplistic plot. It is melodramatic and predictable. The "good" characters are very good and the "bad" characters are sadistic and mean with little gray area and not a lot of complexity. We have the marginalized (handicapped, black and gay characters) being victimized by the white straight man. The film's strength is its aesthetics. It is stunningly beautiful. It is an R rated fairy tale and it is immersive and at times, overwhelming. I wish I had seen it on the big screen.

A battle of colors is what is happening here, greens versus reds. Red is passionate and violent. Green (yellow mixed with blue) is the opposite of red. Green is pastoral, calm, normal and serene. Elisa, our main character, is a mute, not deaf, and an orphan. She literally doesn't have a voice in society. She still has the scars on her neck from a violent incident in her childhood. She works as janitorial staff at a scientific lab. She also lives in an apartment upstairs from a movie theater. Her apartment is dark green, filled with curvy lines with no right angles. It feels like you are underwater as del Toro's camera flows through the apartment. You feel like you are swimming. The only light is either coming through the floor boards from the movie theater or from the black and white television. It is 1962. It is the height of the Cold War, the height of black and white thinking.

The green is overwhelming in this film. Their Jello is green, they eat key lime pie, she drinks from a bright green cup. Her headband, janitorial uniform, desk and the walls of her bathroom are green. Her sadistic boss, Strickland's phone, his desk, his candy and his rotting fingers are green. His Cadillac is teal, "the color of the future." He gets pissed if you say it is green. He washes his hands with green hand soap before he urinates in front of Elisa as she cleans the men's room. He doesn't wash his hands afterward as a matter of principle. Even the chairs in this world are green. And of course, the humanoid fish-like creature with the power of healing, that Elisa falls in love with, is all green. The van which she rescues him with, you got it, is green.

Early in the film Elisa looks into the store window at a red pair of heels. She longs for them. After she first meets the creature, she rides home on the bus with red lights from the streets lighting her up. As her relationship with the creature progresses, she gets more red. She has a red headband, she buys the red heels and wears a red coat. Strickland rapes his wife while she is wearing a red sweater. He covers her mouth because he doesn't want to hear her talk. He then becomes interested in Elisa because she can't talk. He is a sick man. We don't see his wife wearing red afterward.

It is Elisa and the creature's lack of speech that make their relationship strong. Words lie, gestures do not. She sees herself as incomplete and she loves that he doesn't see her that way. In the end, both Elisa and the creature are covered in blood (red) from gun shots. The creature grabs her and pulls her into the water (all green). He cures her and the scars on her neck become gills. Imagine that a happy ending. This film takes your classic monster film and turns it upside-down. The marginalized are the heroes and the guy who seems to have it all, is more of a monster than the actual creature.

Picks of 2016

Regardless of this year's suckitude, I do still have my picks of the year.

MEDIA:
Best book I read in 2016:
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doeer was probably my favorite book this year.  I 've read some really great books this year: Lafayette In the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell, The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, Dead Wake by Erik Larson, The March by E.L. Doctorow and The Manticore by Robertson Davies. The Doerr book is definitely my favorite and I haven't even finished it yet.  Even though, I am getting a little tired of the WW II era, the book still captures me with some really fantastic writing. It tells the story of two young people, one blind French girl and an orphaned German boy. Their stories are told in parallel as their worlds are crushed around them. I am relishing every page.

Favorite new movie: 
Arrival was my favorite new movie this year.  Some other favorites were The Big Short, Deadpool, Doctor Strange, A Man Called Ove, Manchester By the Sea and Florence Foster Jenkins. These are very different films but Arrival was definitely my favorite. It reminded me of Contact or 2001: A Space Odyssey in that it was a real science fiction, unlike Star Wars which is more like an action film in space. When you watch Arrival, you get the feeling that there is something going that you don't understand. Halfway through the film you start figuring it out and by the end, your mind is blown because the story is very different than what you thought. I need to watch it again now that I know what I know.

Favorite new TV show:

I've watch some great television this year: The Exorcist, Paranoid, Glitch, The Get Down, Stranger Things, Maron, Roadies, One Mississippi, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and This Is Us. My favorite is probably The Get Down which is a Netflix show about the early days of hip hop. It is full of great music without the nonsense of a musical. It is edgy but really sweet simultaneously. One of the things I like most about the show is that the child characters are really well developed. They are not your usual one dimensional children that you usually see on television and the young actors are up for it.

Two shows really surprised me The Exorcist and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I didn't expect anyone to make a decent show of the classic horror film The Exorcist, but it is actually a very good show. They captured the creepiness of the classic while also sustaining a story throughout the season. I am not a believer in demons and such, but still, I find this all very intriguing and good story telling. Also, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is hysterical. I don't like musicals at all, but I guess, musicals that laugh at musicals is fine. Regardless, it is very entertaining and the star, Rachel Bloom, is a joy to watch.

Favorite quote:
"When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything," our future president. I don't really like this quote, but I think it best describes where we are as a nation ... not in a good place.

Favorite new podcast :
I've tried several new podcasts this year but most of them didn't cut it and I have unsubscribed. Among them are: Red Sox Beat Podcast, FiveThirtyEight Elections, What the Crime?, Dogsmarts and Rolling Stone Music Now.

I've found a few that I continue to listen to: Revisionist History, Radio Lab's More Perfect, the New Yorker Radio Hour, Next New England, You Must Remember This and Slate's Trumpcast. 

Trumpcast is probably my favorite. It not only keeps you up on the doings of the orange douche-nozzle, but they are funny. The best part is when they have a Trump impersonator read his tweets of the week. 

MUSIC:
Best concert I attended: 
The best concert I went to was Brandi Carlyle at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. This is my favorite local venue and she put on a great show. I didn't go to a lot of shows this year, mostly because my wife is in graduate school again and she doesn't have time. I hope to go to more in 2017.

Best album:  
I bought some great new albums this year, in MP3 format of course. I bought Ray Lamontagne's "Ouroboros," Avett Brother's "True Sadness," David Bowie's last album "Black Star," Andrew Bird's "Are You Serious," Rachel Yamagata's "Tightrope Walker," "A Monolith of Phobos" by The Claypool Lennon Delirium, "Human Performance" by the Parquet Courts and the soundtrack to "Roadies." I enjoyed all of them except for the Ray Lamontagne album, mostly because it is not what I expected from him. He usually delivers some decent bluesy pop songs but instead, he experimented and like many experiments, it failed.

It is difficult for me to pick a favorite out of all these, but since I have to pick one, I pick Andrew Bird's "Are You Serious." The lyrics are solid and the musical orchestration is phenomenal. 
 

Favorite new songs: 
I have 191 mp3 files of songs from 2016.

Here are some of my favorites:
"I Wish I Was Sober" by Frightened Rabbit
"Roma Fade," "The New Saint Jude" and "Capsized" by Andrew Bird
"Smithsonian," "I Wish I Was ..." and "Mama, I Don't Believe" by The Avett Brothers
"Golden Age" by Chris Staple
"No River" by Esmé Patterson
"Let Me Get There" by Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions
"Call Off Your Dogs" by Lake Street Dive
"Berlin Got Blurry" by the Parquet Courts
"Water" by Ra Ra Riot and Rostam
"Over" by Rachel Yamagata
"Open Your Eyes" by School of Seven Bells
"Quiet Americans" by Shearwater
"Cricket and the Genie" by The Claypool Lennon Delirium
"In Bloom" by Sturgill Simpson
"Hands of Time" by Margo Price
"Beautiful Strangers" by Kevin Morby
"Rican Beach" by Hurray for the Riff Raff
"Atomic Number" by case/lang/veirs

Since I have to pick a favorite, I pick "Smithsonian" by the Avett Brothers. I find the tune addictive and the lyrics very assuming. 

OTHER STUFF:
Favorite discovery of the year: 

The Library of Congress is DC is perhaps the most beautiful building in the United States. The building alone is a good enough reason to visit. But then you get to see some of the most amazing books. There is a copy of the Guttenberg Bible, an original copy of Common Sense and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." It is a really impressive place. You also get to see the remainder of Thomas Jefferson's personal library that he donated.

Best trip: 
Our trip to Arizona was definitely our best trip, to see the Cubs in Spring Training, especially since this was the team that won the World Series. The Cactus League is such a better experience than the Grapefruit League in Florida. All the games in Arizona are a short drive from each other, around Phoenix, as opposed to Florida, which is all over the state. We got a close up look at all the Cubs' rookies and actually got to meet their manager Joe Madden (see my wife below getting a ball signed). We also met some old time greats like Bill Buckner, Fergie Jenkins and Lee Smith. Lee Smith was a lot of fun. He laughed at me when I told him the Red Sox were going to the playoffs.  Jokes on him!

We also took a week long visit to Portland Maine, with our niece, mostly kayaking, walking our dog on the beach, eating out, minor league baseball and visiting friends. All other trips this year were relatively local: Boston (for Fenway), Rhode Island, Connecticut and Montreal.

This Year's Picks: 2015

The past few years, on Facebook, I have published my list of picks of the year in various media categories. I spend a lot of time putting it together and I usually don't get any comments and very few likes, so I figured why not create a blog post where it can get even less attention.

MEDIA:
Best book I read in 2015:
I did not read many books in 2015.   This is mostly because when we went to Paris, I decided to read a French classic.  Since I loved The Three Musketeers as a kid, I decided to read The Count of Monte Cristo.   I didn't realize what a tome it is. It is huge. I haven't finished it yet. Because of this, I haven't read many books. My favorite of the short list, was probably Ironweed by William Kennedy. I have mentioned before in this blog, that I love first person narratives. This narrative is of an alcoholic vagrant in Depression Era Albany, NY. His return to town is cluttered by his hallucinations which is confusing at first, but is very satisfying once you figure out what is going on.

Favorite new movie: It is difficult to pick my favorite movie of the year, mostly because I see so many. I am limiting my pick to movies I saw in the theater. For this I have to pick Spotlight. Growing up as a Catholic in the Boston area, this film really hit home for me. It is about the pedophile scandal in the Catholic church and how Boston Globe's Spotlight team of investigative journalists researched the story. The term "Based on a True Story" has become a joke these days. This film had the journalists involved in the film making to make sure it was accurate. It was more concentrated on investigative journalism rather than the crime they were researching which makes it easier to watch. It is probably the best film about investigative reporting, not just since All The President's Men, but ever. In an era where news organizations are getting leaner and leaner due the economic reality of the industry, this is an important film for everyone to see.

I'd like to point out that I did not see Trainwreck in the theater. If I had I might be picking it. I watched it at home which is too bad because a good comedy is the best in the theater among strangers. We'll see how it does at the Oscars which usually ignores comedies, even sophisticated comedies like this.

Favorite new TV show: If you like the show Louie but find it too dark and depressing, you might like Netflix's Master of One. Like Louis C. K.'s character, the main character in Master of One, Dev (portrayed by Aziz Ansari) is a single man living in New York looking for love. He is a struggling actor of Indian descent, also struggling with stereo-types in a comical tasteful way. Ansari is a joy and extremely positive. The show is very creative. One episode, called "Mornings," shows a year of pivotal mornings in his relationship with his new girl friend. There are a lot of great new television shows, this is my favorite. 

favorite quote: Bernie Sanders

Favorite new podcast : I am currently subscribed to too many Podcasts. I end up deleting a lot. I have discovered a lot of new good ones. Serial became the most popular podcast ever this year. I enjoyed but it wasn't my favorite. Some of my favorites are Pitch (about the science of music), Between the Liner Notes (about the music industry), Note To Self (technology), Waking Up with Sam Harris (atheist intellectual talk), Slate's Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick (Supreme Court) and NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour.

My favorite, though, is another Slate podcast called Whistlestop. This is by one of my favorite journalists, John Dickerson, who is a panelist on Slate's Political Gabfest and is now the moderator of CBS's Face the Nation. Whistlestop dissects American elections from the past. My wife and I listen to this one together. It is perfect for anyone that is politically active and likes history. They are only about a half hour long and are incredibly interesting and told in an entertaining, jocular manner. I hope John continues doing it since his schedule must be insane.

MUSIC:
Best concert I attended:  If I had to pick the worst album of the year, I would have to pick Neil Young's new album The Monsanto Years. There are some good tunes on the album but overall, it is just a political tirade. It seems like he forgot how to write a song. He might have just copied and pasted a bunch of Internet comments and set them music to it. But his show at the Essex Fairground, here in Vermont, was spectacular. The show opened with Norah Jones' new band, Puss n' Boots, who was great as well. Vermont was the only US state that he had never played in, so now he's done all 50. He's welcome to come back because he was great.

I went to several other shows this year: The Great Lake Swimmers, The Decemberists, The Old Crow Medicine Show, Joshua Radin, Cary Brothers, Rachael Yamagata, Richard Shindell, Redbird, Max Creek, They Might Be Giants, Kat Wright and Peter Mulvey.  Not bad for someone who lives in Vermont.

Best album:  I only bought six albums this year that were new (released in 2015), those by Neil Young, The Decemberists, Alabama Shakes, Joshua Radin, Wilco and Brandi Carlile. (The Neil Young and Wilco album were free). I love them all other than the aforementioned Neil Young album. My favorite has to be The Decemberists' What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. They are one of my favorite newish bands. They put out concept albums which is a rarity these days. The album seems to be about personal conflict and the change you go through to made adjustments to an increasingly untenable world. The title of the album comes from one of the songs, "12/17/12," which is in response to President Obama's speech after the Sandy Hook shootings ... acknowledge the horror and be thankful for what you have going forward. Colin Meloy, the lead singer and principal songwriter, recently became a father so pathos over the state of world is all over this album.
 

Favorite new song: I have 190 mp3 files (songs) on my hard drive that were released this year.  iTunes says that it would take me 11 hours and 57 minutes to listen to them straight through. I have a lot of favorites, the list is below. If I have to pick one, I would pick "Mantra" by Keller Williams which is a contemporary bluegrass song about having difficulties meditating because your mind really wanders.

Here is the rest:
"Escape" by Blackalicious
"Atoms Never Die" by Adam Levy
"Let's All Stay in Tonight" by Blimp Rock
"Pedestrian At Best" by Courtney Bartnett
"Lake Song" by the Decemberists
"Old Friend" by Joshua Radin
"Pine Away" by Martin Sexton
"Getting Ready to Get Down" by Josh Ritter
"The Early Days" by Old Man Luedecke
"Don't Want To Fight No More" Alabama Shakes
"Heroes and Songs" by Brandi Carlile
"Winning Streak" by Glen Hansard
"Downtown" by Whitehorse

About half of these performers, I have never heard of until this year.



OTHER STUFF:
Favorite discovery of the year:  I got the Tile for Xmas. This is a little tile you can attach to your keys or put in your wallet, that beeps if you lose it. It is connected to your smart phone.  How cool!

Favorite New App: 
When we go into Burlington, parking is difficult sometimes. Since the city has implemented the ParkMobile app on their parking meters, it has gotten a lot easier. You park, type your zone (which is on the meter) on your phone, specify the time and it pays via Paypal etc. It takes about a second to do. No searching for change. 
 
Best trip:  I took a few trips this year. I went to Alabama and Kentucky in February. I had a business trip to New York, a Red Sox trip to Boston, a short trip to Canada and a Cubs trip to Chicago. Need I say that my trip to Paris was my best trip. Since I already blogged about it, do I need to say more?

The Slow Burn of M*A*S*H Jumping the Shark

I was pleased when I noticed that the television show M*A*S*H was added to Netflix for streaming. I often watch Star Trek while trying to sleep at night. I have seen these episodes so much that I can close my eyes and listen. It puts me out. Since I have never watched M*A*S*H from start to finish, this was a good time to start rewatching one of my favorite shows from my childhood. I've always been curious as to when the show got bad (aka Jumped the Shark). The show starts off as one of the best shows on television being both very funny and socially relevant, which is rare. It also has its fair share of pathos. By the end the 11th season, it is unwatchable. The last few seasons are so bad that I cannot watch it while trying to sleep. It just makes me angry. It is no longer funny, the drama is bad and so preachy and self-righteous. It is almost insulting at times. How did something so good get so bad?

For those that don't know, the term Jump the Shark, is in reference to an episode of Happy Days when the character Fonzie jumped a tank of sharks with his motorcycle. It marks the moment which the show went from being a pretty good show to a really bad show. When a show Jumps the Shark, they have started to decline into a bad show. This moment is not clear for M*A*S*H for its decline is a slow burn happening in stages.

The book MASH: A Novel About Three Army Surgeons by Richard Hooker (aka H. Richard Hornberger) came out in 1968. I haven't read it mostly because I've heard it isn't worth it. It is mostly a retelling of stories and anecdotes of his experiences in the Korean War with the names changed (the 8055th MASH unit was changed to 4077th etc). The general theme revolves around how three army doctors (Trapper John, Hawkeye Pierce and Duke Forrest) used comedy to deal with the tragedy and stress of war. The books covers the entire war and ends with a big good-bye scene when the war ends.

The film, based on the novel, came out in 1970 directed by Robert Altman, screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. and starring (the three army surgeons) Elliot Gould as Trapper, Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye and Tom Skerritt as Duke. Duke is the only one not to make it into the television show. The movie poster was the first place where the asterisks appeared between the letters in the name: M*A*S*H. It caught on afterwards. Altman was the 9th director offered the task. His style of directing clashed with the stars. Gould and Sutherland tried to get him fired at one point. Like most of his films, it is difficult to follow without a star or a strict plot but with an ensemble cast of characters appearing somewhat chaotically throughout the film. The script was only loosely followed because the actors were given direction on what was happening in the scene and asked to improvise. Most of the dialogue in the film come from the actors. Like most of his films, I love it. I find his films more lifelike because of the chaos. It won the Golden Globe that year for best film and the Palme d'Or at Cannes but lost all the major Oscars to Patton, a much more serious war picture.

After the film's success, Hornberger wrote follow-up novels, the first being M*A*S*H Goes to Maine which follows the characters after the war and then M*A*S*H Mania, the characters in their old age. Eight more novels were published, written by ghost writers and published under Hornberger's pen name (Hooker). When the filming of the second book failed, it was decided to attempt a television show instead. The show started in 1970 and was almost cancelled after the first year due to low ratings but was saved after its time slot was changed to be after a hit show, All In the Family.  Time slots were important back then before DVRs and the Internet. Two of the best comedies ever made for American television were now going back to back. A few seasons in, I started watching when I was old enough to stay up that late. I remember having classmates in elementary school whose parents did not watch it or let their kids watch it because of the war aspect. "There is nothing funny about war." The Vietnam War was still very much active and in the news. Looking back on it now, comedy seems to be a completely appropriate response to the quagmire of war.

First big problem with the show is that the show went on almost four times longer than the actual war. The US was involved in the Korean War a little over three years ... from June 1950 to July 1953. The show went on for 11 seasons (255 episodes).  This means that, in showtime, roughly four days happens in between each episode. Watching the show now, this causes some problems. In one episode, they are suffering from a heatwave and the very next episode, they are preparing for below zero temperature. They also had four Christmas episodes (seasons 1, 7, 9 & 10).  Of course, when they were making the show back in the 70's, no one knew anyone would be binge watching in the 21th century. Also, when they started they didn't know they were going to have 11 seasons. If they did, they might have paced themselves differently. But don't you think once they had gotten to the third Christmas episode, they would have called an end to any new ones?

I've talked to people who were in MASH units in Korea and they like the show. They say that it is not a bad depiction of what it was like. The war, of course, is worst than 1970's American television could show and the jokes were dirtier but they basically got it right, which is really nice to hear. The big thing they got wrong is the amount of time the G.I.'s got to stay together. They spent a very short amount of times together. The characters Margaret and Hawkeye spend the entire war in the same unit together. This just did not happen. People were in and out of their lives so fleetingly that they barely got to know each other. Perhaps this made it easier to clown around. Close attachments were not made. As soon as you got close to someone, they were gone. Not to sound too meta, but perhaps this is why the show got so lame in the later years; the characters got to know each other too well. Intimacy eliminated the need for comedy.

It is ironic that if M*A*S*H had only been on television the same length of the war, it might have gone down as the best show ever. But as the main characters started leaving the show, they were replaced with good characters but not quite as good as the original. This makes the shows fall from grace to be a gradual one. When the show was cast, Wayne Rogers (who portrayed Trapper John) was told that his character would get equal billing to Hawkeye. But after a couple of seasons, he saw how his character was playing second fiddle to Alan Alda's. His character was edgy. He was cheating on his wife, he missed his kids and he drank heavily. He was replaced with B.J. Hunnecutt (portrayed by Mike Farrell) who was much less edgy and more moral than Trapper. B.J. doesn't look like a Californian in 50's; he looks more like a porn star from the 70's. McLean Stevenson (who portrayed Colonel Henry Blake) left the show the same season as Rogers for similar reasons. Stevenson's Blake was one of the funniest part of the early years. Blake was incompetent, bumbling and a skirt chaser. He was replaced by Harry Morgan's Colonel Potter who was stern, mature and not very funny. After a great three years, they lost two of the best characters, replaced them with less funny more moralistic counterparts. Let the shark jumping begin.

Another two seasons go by and the two trouble making surgeons continue to gang up on Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan and Major Frank Burns, but the two Majors are no longer a couple. Margaret gets married and Frank loses it. Frank, a cartoonish character, doesn't really develop much. The Major Burns that Robert Duval portrayed in the movie is much more serious and pious. Larry Linville's Burns is a buffoon that did not mature as the show progressed but became increasingly unbelievable as the show continued. Linville recognized this and was simply sick of playing the same fool for five years, he quit after his contract ran out. His leaving the show should have been an improvement at this point if they hadn't replaced him with Charles Emerson Winchester III (portrayed by David Ogden Stiers), a stereo-typical Boston snob. They replaced the buffoon with a self-righteous douche-bag. Another less funny character coming in making the show more serious.

The show is becoming a drama at this point, often called television's first dramedy, a poorly written drama with a laugh track. The laugh track always seemed out of place in this show because it was obvious that they weren't filming in front of a live audience. It is a left-over from the radio days when a joke could not be followed by silence. The network insisted on it. It is easy to forget it is even there until the jokes stop being funny. In the later seasons, when the show becomes painful to watch, the laugh track was toned down a little, but not enough. You can watch the last six seasons without laughing once, but that laugh track is there laughing along with the "jokes" as an awful reminder, this show used to be funny.

If you need a Jump the Shark moment, the best I can find is when all the characters began to get along. Of the two heavies in the early episodes, Margaret was the only one left. In the season five episode, "The Nurses," Margaret takes a turn toward being nice. She says to her nursing staff, "When did one of you ever even offer me a lousy cup of coffee?" and is invited into the nurses tent by the end of the episode. In season six's "Comrade in Arms," she and Hawkeye are caught behind enemy lines and have a love affair. From this point on, the show is not the same. Everyone gets along including Charles ... it is the camp against the world and no inner conflict. This makes for bad television. The fact that Margaret now has a 1980's style big hair perm at this point, makes the show downright ridiculous. They don't look like people from the 50's.

The Jump of the Shark is complete and we land on the other side of the shark tank when Radar (portrayed by Gary Burghoff) leaves the show at end of season eight. He is the only actor of the main characters to carry over from the movie and probably the most comically understated performances on the show. Burghoff hated portraying a teenager for eight years. By the time he left the show in 1979, he was in his mid-30's. His screen time was replaced by two recurring characters Klinger and Father Mulcahey who should never have left the shadows of any plot line.

Anything after this point is not worth watching. These late seasons are a reminder of how bad American television was back then. M*A*S*H  stood out as an excellent show for many years. It was a ground breaking show that should have ended long before it got this bad. It ended with a big bang though. The last episode in February 1983, a two and half hour long movie, had a record 125 million viewers. We only had 83 million homes at the time. These type of numbers nowadays are unheard of, mostly because we have a lot more options. Of the really bad episodes, it is one of the better ones but that is the best thing I can say about it. 

Avengers: Age of Excess

I was excited to see the new Avengers movie yesterday. I went to see it alone. I was quickly disappointed. It was choppy, uneven and difficult to follow at times. Having grown up reading Marvel comics, I await the newest installments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe with too much glee for a 50 year old man to admit. The technology did not exist to set these books to film when I was a kid, so I welcome the excess usually ... provided that the excess is well done and worth the money I spent to see it.  I can't say that Avengers: The Age of Ultron was worth it .. the wait or the money.

The Avengers were never my favorite comic. I read it and enjoyed it, but I was more into the more angst ridden heroes like Spider-Man, Daredevil and the X-men. The more cavalier Captain America and Iron Man were too perfect for me to wrap my little head around. A war hero loved by all and an obnoxious millionaire with high tech toys didn't really resonate with this post-hippy working class teenager. The Hulk was the only member of the Avengers that had any appeal to me, but he had his own book so The Avengers book took a back seat. But when Marvel came out with the first Avengers film a few years ago, they pulled me in again. It was one of the best comic book movies ever made. Most of them are stinkers, but when a good one comes along, I have to really embrace it. Among the better ones I would put Spider-Man 2, The Watchmen, Guardians of the Galaxy and Batman Begins. The Avengers joined that list. The follow-up to it, did not. Expectations were high and they fell miserably.

Most of the members of The Avengers already have their own film franchises (Captain America, Ironman, the Hulk) so no time is wasted on their back stories in this film.  The remaining two, Black Widow and Hawkeye don't, so screen time had to be wasted on character development. This isn't usually a problem if it is done well, but it isn't in this film. Hawkeye's back story, well, who cares? He is not a very interesting character. An archer just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense in this group. It didn't seem to make a lot of sense when I read the book as a kid. I wouldn't have been upset if they killed him off. Black Widow is a different story. She has an interesting back story and has always been an interesting character. She is the only woman in the group, so of course, her back story had to be a romance (of course not) ... with David Banner, a guy who can't get excited or he might hurt somebody. It was a bit too much like Twilight for me and just seem to be stuck in the film. It went no where. The one joy of the film is the introduction of The Vision, always one of the more elusive and mysterious characters. He was so well done in the film. His presence almost saved the film for me.

I haven't even gotten to the biggest problem with the film. It was just really hard to follow. For one, I couldn't tell what was going on in some of the action sequences. I had no sense of who was where in some of the scenes and who was fighting whom. They were so choppy that the moment I thought I understood what was happening it would cut to another shot or another scene altogether. This type of choppiness continued throughout the film, not just the action scenes, making the narrative difficult to follow.

As far as plot goes, I don't ever expect profundity or anything to challenge any of my ideals. I simply expect good fun and a few hours of pure entertainment in comic book films.  But I can't say I am entirely sure what our villain, Ultron's, evil plan was or what his motivations were. He was trying to destroy the human race so we could evolve into something new. What? When he couldn't get the nuclear codes, he decided to take some East European country, make it fly and turn it into a meteor to destroy us like the dinosaurs?  Uhm, what?  Am I right about this!  Did I get that right?  I am still unsure. Lets hope the next Avengers film is better and less of a muddle.  Hopefully, we'll get less excess and more clarity as to what the heck is going on.

Provincialism Under King's Dome

I don't think there has been a time in my life, at least since I was a eleven or twelve, that I haven't been in the middle of a book. I finished Stephen King's Under the Dome this morning, by the afternoon I was reading Paul Auster's The Music of Chance. I don't read as much as I used to. I am a better reader now, I see more and I am more critical, but I don't delve into them like I did when I was younger. The reasons for this are varied. For one, television is much better than it used to be. I avoided television most of my life because it was mostly very bad. But once shows like Madmen, The Wire and The Walking Dead started hitting the airwaves, I started paying more attention. Also, the internet has a lot to do with it. I am not reading full length books because the Net has so much quality stuff to read at my fingertips (and some not so much). I think I have maintained the same amount of quality of what I am reading, regardless of the medium. I can download this month 's Harper's Magazine onto my iPad whenever I want it. Not a bad thing at all.

I had given up on Stephen King novels long ago. I discovered him when I was in the ninth grade when the mini-series of Salem's Lot, starring David Soul, came on television. I ran out and bought the novel and read it quickly. When I hear sounds by my window at night, I still think of the child vampire tapping and it still freaks me out a little. This was his second novel, so I then read his first novel, Carrie, which I had already seen the Brian De Palma film. I was then reading his books as they came out, The Shining, Night Shift, The Stand and The Dead Zone. I loved them all. It was after reading The Fire Starter, I decided to stop reading him. I was a teenager, and I thought (as teenagers often do) that I was too good for this. I should be reading literature. It wasn't until I was in college that I picked him up again as some good summer reading. I read Different Seasons, Pet Sematary and half of Christine. Different Seasons was one of his best while the other two were horrendous. I had to stop half way through Christine because I was so annoyed. A haunted car? Really? I was seeing a formula that I didn't like. I stopped reading him then and hadn't read a word of his since, until now. I often wonder if I reread some of his old stuff, now that I am a better reader, if I'd like them as much as I did when I was a kid. But why ruin a good thing? Now, they are just a pleasant memory which is a good thing.

This summer I picked up Under the Dome at a yard sale for a dollar. It is a 1074 page tome that if I place on my passenger seat, my car tells me it needs a seat belt. It is huge. I had been told by a friend that I would like this one because finally King wrote something that could be considered literature. This excited me. It had been about three decades since I had read anything by him. It took me about three months to read it. Literature? I would say not, but it was a good read. I have read many good books that are probably not literature, but are simply good books. I would say that I enjoyed it but I am not going around recommending it.

I need to point out that I am in awe of Mr. King. I have no difficulty writing and coming up with great ideas and even characters, but I find plot to be horribly difficult. To arrange a piece of writing in a comprehensive story, to maintain it in an interesting narrative and consistent voice, I cannot imagine how he does it again and again. I have tried and I can't, not yet anyway. This story follows approximately 30 characters as they go about their business, for 8 days, after a mysterious dome covers their town. It is listed as science fiction but it is mostly a study of inner workings of a small town, surrounded by the dome, they can only rely on each other. How dependent are we on the outside world? Apparently very, at least according to Under the Dome. A power mad local politician, Big Jim, becomes a dictator within a few days by hoarding the propane supply, the only power supply, and demagoguing the most fearful of the town's citizens into a mob.  "A town is like a body, it seeks drugs to make it feel better." Big Jim is that drug.

The best thing I can say about the book is that it is perhaps the best portrayal of provincialism that I have ever read. If you have ever moved from a big city into a small town then I don't have to tell you what provincialism is. You already know too well. Being an outsider among people who have known each other their entire lives is an odd enough feeling, but when it starts having a detrimental effect on your life because of it, this is provincialism. Under the Dome does this very well. When the dome covers the town, they are looking for answers, they are terrified and are looking for someone to blame. The easiest target is the newest resident in town, a retired military officer named Barbie. You can guess who the hero of the book is. Like most of King's books, the good and evil sides are well defined. This is a trope of a lot genre fiction, particularly horror and fantasy, and the main reason I don't read much of it. Life is much more gray than the worlds that these generally portray. Science fiction usually doesn't fall into this trap, like horror. I probably won't be reading any more of King's fiction. I've read too many great books to spend time reading thousand pages of good-guys-versus-bad-guys and good guys win after a blood bath. Too many great books are out there waiting for me, literature or not, and I don't have enough time to read them.

Mud and the River

The plot in the film, Mud, unfolds like the storyline you will discover in fine literature. It is multi-layered and feeds the intellect. It is a coming of age story about two boys, Ellis and Neckbone, in rural Arkansas after a flood, that find a boat in a tree on an island in the river. Living in the tree they find the aptly named Mud, a homeless fugitive surprisingly well acted by Matthew McConaughey. Ellis, aged fourteen, becomes interested in Mud's view of the world, a mysterious combination of love and revenge. Ellis' parents have recently announced their separation rocking his understand of the world. His sense of love and place is being challenged for the first time in his short life. It also means that his home, an old river houseboat, will be lost to him, dismantle by the river authority. He will have to move into town and leave the river life behind.

I have blogged more than once about rivers. I do not hide my love of rivers. Rivers are the perfect poetic image. Whether it is Twain, Langston Hughes or Bruce Springsteen, the image of the river elicits the movement of time, of destiny and of growth. Life rolls by like a river flowing from the mountains to the sea with many rises and lows. The river eddies through the countryside, unpredictable and sometimes harsh, leaving in its wake beauty and destruction.  Mud portrays this beautifully with some stunning filming and story telling. The river is shown as an economic engine bringing livelihood to fishermen and boats men to the small Southern community of DeWitt. It is a spiritual and natural conduit to life and their connection to the outside world (at least in the film). "This river brings a lot of trash down. You gotta know what's worth keeping and what's worth letting go," says Galen, Neckbone's uncle who is raising him. Mud, the character, is the metaphorical trash he is talking about and like his namesake isn't easily nailed down. It is a universal story of the outside world invading on an insular existence. Mud is half in between these worlds, rejected by both, the river and the land.

You can barely tell what era the film is based in. This contributes to its universality. When I lived in Boston I attended a writer's workshop taught by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. One of the things he said that stuck with me was that a writer becomes "universal by being provincial" (I am paraphrasing here). This is what you have with Mud. This is a small film with a small story that is really just about a boy's perception of love being formed by the actions of the adults around him. The smallness of its theme makes it huge in concept. It is universal in many ways. No matter what town you grew up in, you know of a character like Mud who was very much apart of the town, but outside of it as well. The large big budget films, that will fill the Oscar nomination list, don't begin to illicit the emotions that a small one like Mud does. Every year when the nominations for Oscars comes out, I usually just shake my head and think, "What a joke!" but occasionally they get it right.  Three years ago, Winter's Bone made it on the list of nominations along with this star, the wonderful Jennifer Lawrence. It didn't win anything but at least it got the recognition that it deserved.  It too was better than most of the other films on the list of nominees. Mud deserves some accolades, the big budget films that rake in millions do not. They have already gotten their recognition.

Star Trek and Physics

Whenever you watch a show like Star Trek, you have to suspend disbelief for the duration of the show, like when you watch a musical. You have to get yourself in a state out of your mind that some impossible or unlikely stuff is going to happen and you have accept them in the parameters of the story. In reality people don't spontaneously break out in song and warp drive will probably never be possible. But there are other things that Star Trek just gets wrong about science and if you know anything about physics watching the show will just bother you. You have to teach yourself to ignore it and enjoy yourself.  The most obvious example is the explosions that go boom, big loud booms. We all know that there is no sound in space. "In space, no one can hear you scream" because sound waves have nothing to bounce off of, there are no molecules to vibrate. Star Trek is good television but mostly bad science so we accept the big booms after the ship explodes because it looks cool and spaceships exploding quietly is just plain boring. Another obvious example is the fact that they never loose gravitational control. Their ships are running out of power and barely enough for life-support and yet, they are not losing gravity. They sometimes find dead ships floating through space that never seem to have lost gravity.  What? I could imagine that the portrayal of our beloved characters floating through the corridors of the Enterprise would be very expensive for a television show, but they should at least be consistent or mention gravitational control once in a while.  They seem to pull gravity out from hiding, like an unwanted step-child, only using it when it is convenient to their plot. When the ship gets hit with a torpedo, they all stumble (sometimes in different directions). But if they have artificial gravity, would this even happen? If so, then wouldn't they also all end up flying to the back of the ship when it goes into warp? I don't know, comment if you do.

These things usually don't bother me with Star Trek. I am not a scientist, I am only moderately knowledgeable about science and I realize Star Trek is, again, just good entertainment but not good science.  But the most recent installment of the franchise pushed me over of the limit. The creators of Star Trek: In the Darkness obviously didn't put believability high on their list of priorities. If a non-scientist like me can verify the wrongness of your physics with 5 minutes on Google then your writers are just damn lazy. The biggest problem is again, gravity. The Enterprise is orbiting the moon when it losing power. It gets pulled into the Earth's gravitational pull and starts plummeting. This actually makes sense because the Earth does pull objects, like the moon, into its gravity. The problem here is that in film it took about 10 minutes to reach the Earth. It took Apollo 11 over three days to cover the same distance, 238,900 miles. A ship with no power, plummeting this distance in minutes ... um ... no! This was distracting to say the least. I had to watch this scene again after the film was done just to see if I had missed something. The reentry into the Earth's atmosphere was also anti-climatic. We were set up for it by Sulu saying, "if we don't get power and shields back on-line we are going to get incinerated on re-entry." A minute or so later, we see the ship burning a little. No one on the ship seems hot or even phased by the re-entry at all.  No incineration, just a few burnt panels. Darn you young Mr. Sulu, I'll never believe any of your hyperbole ever again.

This film was more Star Wars than Star Trek. It was very little adventure but mostly explosions and action. This is not what Star Trek fans signed up for. We want interesting alien cultures, intrigue, a seemingly insurmountable problem, a last minute resolution, some social commentary and a little bit of action. In looking for a wider audience, they lost their base of fans. This is the Mitt Romney of Star Trek movies. The one thing they did right, the opening scene was really cool. It had an alien race, the social commentary and a volcano, but even this had its science problems.  Sulu (again Sulu!) says that the ship's shields can't sustain the heat of a volcano. Really? So a ship designed for deep space travel and entry into planets atmospheres (like it did to the Earth's without its shields later in this same film), can't sustain the heat from a volcano. I beg to differ. Lava is around 2200 degrees F while the temperature of the space shuttle recorded on re-entry in 1981 was 2500 degrees.  (Thank you Google). If you can handle re-entry into in the atmosphere, you can handle a freakin' volcano eruption.

This film is also plagued by something that plagues many prequels. This is supposed to be take place a few years before the original series and yet, they seem to have technology that even the later shows don't have. Apparently, you can transport to Kronus from Earth, you can call someone on Earth on your communicator while orbiting Kronus and they have some really cool automatic seat belts that come in really handy when that selective grativy starts to act up. I would imagine writing for a prequel has its challenges. It must be hard to resist showing new gadgets, but these are very challenging to swallow. I agree that the Star Trek franchise needed a reboot. The actors in this reboot are fantastic (except for Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal of Khan) and the special effects couldn't be better. After the travesty of Star Trek:Voyager series and the failure of Star Trek: Enterprise, the show needed new ideas and a new approach, but they needed to become more visionary not digress into an average action film. If this continues, I half expect to see Bruce Willis or Sly Stallone in the next film. I am glad to see JJ Abrams move onto the Star Wars franchise and leave this one alone. Star Wars fans like things-that-go-boom and shitty dialogue. He should feel welcome there.

East of Eden

I have blogged about Tolkien a lot in the past, more than other writers. This is mostly because of the Peter Jackson films. I do enjoy Tolkien's writing but if I were list my favorite writers he wouldn't be high on the list, but he'd be on it.  My problem with his work is the well defined line between good and evil. Characters are either good or evil. This doesn't bode well with my world view. Reality is more nuanced than that. It is not black and white, people teeter back and forward through many shades of gray. Evil and good are not entities. People, everyone, has capacity for both. I am not too critical of Tolkien, I still love his books. Perhaps I'd I have a different take on good and evil if I were writing a novel while living in England during World War II.  He wrote it in the malaise of one of the few conflicts in the history of the world where there certainly were well defined lines of good and evil.

Higher on that list (and I promise I will put it together someday) is John Steinbeck. I just finished reading East of Eden, a book that I have wanted to read for years, and I have the same problem with it that I have with Tolkien, at least, the beginning of the book. He has good characters and evil characters with very little gray. This is the fourth book of his that I have read and I might have to put it as my least favorite, certainly below Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. 

Perhaps it is hubris, but since I have been reading novels for close to four decades now, I am confident enough in my reading that I feel that I could edit some canonized works of literature to make them better.  For example, I love Moby Dick, but I think it would be a better book if those 80 pages about the history of whaling were removed in the middle of the book.  East of Eden is about two families, I think it would have been a better book if it were only about one.  One of the families in the book is Steinbeck's, the Hamilton family. He is the narrator of the book and he even makes an appearance now and then mostly as an infant.  While reading the book, you find yourself wanting to skip over the chapters about his family to get to the chapters about the more compelling Trask family.

Steinbeck began writing East of Eden merely because he saw his beloved Salinas Valley in California changing dramatically. He started writing about the valley for his children so that they would know what it was like when he was a child, but the story evolved into a religious allegory.  The story of the Trask family is the story of Eden, Cain and Abel told in an American backdrop. The Eve character, Catherine (later called Kate) is pure evil. She uses her beauty and sexuality to get what she wants destroying people in her path. She has killed, blackmailed and has abandoned her children. The Trask storyline is of the good people who get hurt in her path. Adam who married her and her children, the twins, Aron (Abel) and Caleb (Cain).  As Sam Hamilton (Steinbeck's wise grandfather character) explains, something is missing in her. The goodness that Adam possesses, is nowhere to be found in Catherine. I'd love to read what Feminist critics thinks of this book.

The Trask story is a collection of antithetical pairs, opposing evil and good, all starting with C and A like Cain and Abel.  The story starts with Cyrus and Alice who are the parents of Charles and Adam. Adam's children, that may be Charles', are Caleb and Aron. The two main female characters are also a C and A match-up Catherine and Alba, girl friend of the twins, although they never actually meet in the story. The most interesting character, the youngest of the C characters, Caleb (or Cal) acknowledges the evil that he inherited from his mother (the sin he inherited from Eve) and struggles with it. The angst ridden Cal is famously portrayed by James Dean in the Elia Kazan film which whittles the story down even more than I would. The film concentrates on the twins Cal and Aron which is basically the last third of the book. Kazan might have it right, for evil that Cal struggles with is a far better story than the comic book like Catherine who doesn't struggle with it at all. She thrives on it. Magneto and Doctor Doom from Marvel Comics have more depth than her.

Most books that I love have a complex narrative structure. Three of my favorites, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, have first person narrators that are unreliable and biased minor characters.  Their imperfections as narrators make for complex interpretations and are fodder for many conversations of what is really going on in the novels. East of Eden is different in that the narrator (Steinbeck) is a very minor character but who obviously wasn't present during the time of the story.  So interpretation of his narration is problematic because everything he narrates was obviously told to the narrator, not a first hand account.  The narrator tells us that Adam Trask is a good man, but his actions are, sometimes, otherwise. He frequents prostitutes and he neglects his twins during their formative years. Evil no, but hardly is he as purely good as his wife is evil.

Like a Tolkien hobbit, Cal Trask struggles with an evil that possesses him. No magic here, though, nor is there an embodiment of evil, the evil is humanity itself. It makes for a more mature book when you have a main character who is full of flaws but you love him anyway.  This is why we love Gatsby and Heathcliff (from Wuthering Heights).  We see wrong in them and we want them to make good because the wrong we see in them, we see in ourselves.  It seems my problems with the book is that I don't believe in sin, original or otherwise.  So perhaps I would cut East of Eden down even further, like Kazan, to a short story or a short novel about Cal, a teenage boy trying to be good but failing, but I guess if I did that we'd just have another Catcher In the Rye.

They Might Be Giants

The difference between insanity and imagination is that insanity believes and imagination only considers.  At least, that's what I learned by watching the film They Might Be Giants.  This 1971 British film stars George C. Scott as a man, Playfair, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. He wanders the streets of London solving mysteries with his psychologist in tow, Dr. Watson (portrayed by Joann Woodward). It is not a great film, but amusing.  Like many films it makes mental illness into something to laugh at. The option in bad film seems that the mentally ill are either laughable or terrifying.

This film is a little better than that.  It at least attempts to make a distinction between the insane and the imaginative. In the film, Playfair references Don Quixote saying that the famous character from fiction was insane for thinking that the windmills were giants. He explains that insane people take things too far, while the imaginative mind only considers the possibility of the windmills being giants, doesn't believe it. Without the imaginative mind, we would probably still think the world was flat and would never have considered the possibility that the mold on bread could be used as medicine. The two characters in the film are a lot like Don Quixote and his travelling companion, Sancho Panza.  One delusions charismatic character on a quest with one grounded character that looks to the delusion with awe or in the case of the film, with love.  It is a case for charisma over logic, imagination over reality ... not different from how a groupie looks to their idol.

The alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants, got their name from this film. This doesn't surprise me much.. With songs like I Palindrome I and Particle Man, they do seem to straddle the line between creativity and insanity. It is probably this line straddling that allows them to make such good children's music.  Their CD Here Come the ABCs contains some of the best children's music I have heard. Because the songs are entertaining for both adults and children, they are the perfect music a young family to listen to.  The songs are fun, entertaining and quite ... imaginative.

Sci-fi and the Creation Myth

No form of fiction tackles the difficult subject of religion more than science fiction.  This might seem ironic to some, but science fiction has always been a good way tackle any subject, indirectly, because it gives the writer license to do whatever they want.  I once heard Ray Bradbury say that he used the Mars landscape as a setting so often not because he believe in Martians but that he was lazy and didn't want to do any research.  It was just easier to make things up.  Like Bradbury, a sci-fi writer can write about your religion without you even knowing it.  A writer can disguise a religious form of meditation in an alien religious group like the Bene Gesserit or Mentats in Frank Hebert's Dune.  They can write about a messiah like Robert Heinlein did with his character, Valentinen Michael Smith, in his Stranger in a Strange Land.  Millennialism and images of the devil are prominent themes in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.   Star Trek did it, Star Wars did it with the Jedis, ... heck... the latest Battlestar Gallactica series is just a very long religious elegy.  Every person that I know that is interested in religion also reads sci-fi.

Some consider Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a sci-fi novel.  The alternative title is the Modern Prometheus.  Like the Greek Titan Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein creates a new form of life. Prometheus created humanity from clay and was punished for it, while his modern namesake, created life from the body parts from grave robbing. The creation myth seems to be everywhere in sci-fi these days.  Star Trek uses it with their android character Data and holographic character The Doctor where they confront their creators and fight for their rights as censured beings.  The Cylons in Battlestar Gallactica  rebel against their creators in what could be interpreted as a religious upheaval of the slave monotheists over their polytheistic creators.  The movie director Ridley Scott is not foreign to the creation myth, not only is his latest film Prometheus but his heady take on Philip K. Dick's Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Blade Runner) is all about a rebelling group of androids seeking their creator.  They are lead by Roy Batty (portrayed amazingly by actor Rutger Hauer) who seeks their creator so that they can remove the chip that  prevents them from being immortal.  

Scott's latest film, Prometheus, brings this to a new level. **spoiler alert** The so-called prequel to the Alien series gives us a married couple of scientists, Holloway and Shaw (who can't have children) searching for an alien species, called The Engineers, who they believe created humanity.  So they cannot create life themselves but they are obsessed with their creators who are not god but an advanced species from a distant moon.  The excursion is funded by an eccentric billionaire who never had a son of own.  He created an android son with the name he intended for that his biological son, David, much to the dismay of his daughter who may be an android as well.  The created is now, like the mythical Prometheus, the creator.  Like the gods of Olympus, the Engineers want to punish us or probably destroy us for what reason, it is not explained.  Shaw is also cast into the role of the creator.  She is somehow impregnated and gives birth a day later to the xenomorph species from the original series.  She freaks out and attempts to kill it ... again creator who is a destroyer and the created that creates. This film is full of plot holes, it is at times captivating and quite compelling but it is one of those films that you leave the theater thinking, "Did I miss something?".  It is clear that Scott was trying to say something about the creation myth.  What that is might be hiding somewhere in the fog of the 3D special effects or lost in one of the deep chasm plot holes.