I just know that one of these days the amount of books inside my home is going to reach some critical mass that exceeds the structural limitations of the house itself, and then…
(This is actually an art installation in Madrid, Spain; I’m normally not too keen on modern art “installations,” but this one amuses me. Details and more pictures — and even a video of the thing in motion, because those are actual books that blow around in the breeze — here. And I found it via Boing Boing, naturally.)
Over the past week, the British magazine The Economist has been hosting an online debate between security consultant (and highly vocal TSA critic) Bruce Schneier and former TSA administrator (and current TSA apologist) Kip Hawley over whether, in fact, post-9/11 airport security procedures have done more harm than good. My own views line up nearly one-to-one with Schneier’s: I think the rigamarole you have to go through to get on a plane these days is needlessly demeaning, intrusive nonsense designed to make it look like the government is doing something to make traveling safer, but which ultimately accomplishes little except inconveniencing and intimidating travelers. (For one thing, all the procedures are designed to stop whatever the last would-be terrorist attempted to do; logically, that just means the next attempt will be something new that the TSA’s not screening for.) I could go on at length about this, and about how incredible I find it that a people who genuflect to the concept of individual liberty are so willing to simply “hand over their papers” (so to speak) when somebody in uniform demands them, as long as they think they’re doing it in the name of their own safety. But instead I think I’ll just quote the final two paragraphs of Schneier’s closing remarks:
The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It’s our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us–to effectively do the terrorists’ job for them–is the greatest harm of all.
Return airport security checkpoints to pre-9/11 levels. Get rid of everything that isn’t needed to protect against random amateur terrorists and won’t work against professional al-Qaeda plots. Take the savings thus earned and invest them in investigation, intelligence, and emergency response: security outside the airport, security that does not require us to play guessing games about plots. Recognise that 100% safety is impossible, and also that terrorism is not an “existential threat” to our way of life. Respond to terrorism not with fear but with indomitability. Refuse to be terrorized.
The whole of the debate is worth skimming, although I remained totally unconvinced by Hawley’s arguments, which seem to basically consist of “hey, nothing’s happened, so we must be doing something right!” and “we’ve had lots of successes, we just can’t tell you about them.” I found Schneier’s comment that airports have become effectively “rights-free zones” where TSA “officers” can do pretty much anything they want to you and your belongings in the name of “security” especially trenchant… and chilling. Just lately, though, I’ve been seeing some signs that the tide may be turning, that people may be regaining a bit of sanity a bit on this subject, or perhaps they’re just getting tired of minimum-wage rent-a-cops feeling up their grandmas and confiscating their baby formula. Either way, I fervently hope we’re eventually going to ratchet things down to something that more resembles the way it was when I first started flying.
It’d be lovely to be able to go to the airport for a hotdog and an afternoon of people-watching again…
That’s a snap of an unmanned cargo ship — technically referred to in NASA-speak as an Automated Transfer Vehicle — firing its maneuvering thrusters as it approached the International Space Station yesterday. This image was taken by astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS, and I think it’s simply incredible. Even just a few years ago, you could only see something like this on a fictional TV show like Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5, but here it is, actually happening right over our heads, captured on a perfectly ordinary digital camera and posted to both Twitter and Flickr like any old photo of somebody’s cat. The future hasn’t turned out to be quite what we were promised as kids, but every once in a while, it comes close.
Go here for a couple more…
This morning, Boing Boing linked to an article I found interesting, on the way science-fiction stories often feature apparent “gaps” or imbalances in the technology of their imaginary worlds, and why those gaps are not necessarily a failure on the writer’s part. The starting point for the article was the current phenom movie The Hunger Games and the books from which it is adapted. I haven’t read or seen The Hunger Games myself, but apparently the story has drawn a certain amount of criticism because the futuristic dystopia in which it is set (supposedly descended from our own United States of America following some kind of apocalypse) includes such high-tech flourishes as hovercraft, force fields, and genetically engineered animals, but it still relies on coal-fired powerplants for electricity and has nothing resembling the Internet. Some readers/viewers question the idea of a society that’s so advanced in some ways but not in others. The article goes on to make the argument that real societies choose to adopt or abandon technologies for all sorts of reasons — political, economic, and/or cultural — and the seeming flaws of imagination in this story can be explained quite logically, given the assumptions of the society in question. The whole thing reminded me of what I said a couple weeks ago regarding the usage of swords in so much of the “planetary romance” sub-genre of science fiction, i.e., that it’s not at all unreasonable for John Carter or Flash Gordon to fight the bad guys with a sword while anti-gravity airships hang overhead, because Barsoom and Mongo have societies that, for whatever reason, still value prowess with a blade, even though firearms are available. Because, you know, swordfighting is cool. Especially in stories, which are all this stuff really is, after all.
And just in case you still don’t buy the notion that a society really might choose to go deliberately retro or turn its back on certain technologies, consider the somewhat depressing final line from that Boing Boing post:
A decade ago, you could fly London to New York in a couple of hours. A year ago, America had a reusable spacecraft.
But not now. Because we decided those things were no longer economical. Or necessary.
In what seems to be turning into an annual tradition here at Simple Tricks, I’d like to wish a very happy birthday to the one and only William Shatner, who turns 81 years old today, and also to his friend and Star Trek costar Leonard Nimoy, who will be 81 as well on Monday. Their fictional counterparts, Kirk and Spock — as well as Doctor “Bones” McCoy, played by the late DeForest Kelley — were among my earliest heroes. They found their way into my life when I was a very small boy, and their example of loyalty, chemistry, camaraderie, and, yes, genuine love for each other strongly influenced my idea of what male friendship can and ought to be.
My thanks to Christopher Mills over at Space: 1970 (a really excellent blog if you, like me, happened to have been a sci-fi lovin’ kid during the “Me Decade”) for reminding me of this…
Well, I guess it’s officially a flop: Disney announced yesterday that it expects to lose $200 million on John Carter, all but guaranteeing that the first big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic Barsoom novels is also going to be the last. And what a damn shame, too, because I really liked it. The pacing was a little uneven, and I disagree with some of the changes that were made in adapting the story from the source material. (I could’ve done without the formulaic Hollywood backstory and character arc that was pasted onto the title character, i.e., the man who’s lost everything learning to live again; in the original stories, he was simply an adventurer who had to adapt to a new world, and then fell in love. Also, the books were filled with enough conflict between Barsoomian races and city-states without having to elevate the stakes to the would-be epic, survival-of-two-worlds-in-the-balance stuff that nearly every summer tentpole flick of the last 15 years has beaten into the ground. And I prefer the book’s conceit that JC was the only person who was capable of moving between Earth and Barsoom, and that he did it through mystical means rather than technological, as in the film.) But overall I was very pleased with the filmmakers’ fidelity to the details and spirit of the books, and I loved the fun, escapist tone that neither took itself too seriously nor played the material for campy laughs. And I thought the casting was spot-on. Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins aren’t John Carter and the lovely Dejah Thoris as I have imagined them for 30 years of my life… but they could be cousins to the people who live in my imagination, and that’s pretty damn satisfying.
I recognize that I approached John Carter with a certain predisposition to like it, and also viewed it through a particular filter, i.e., how well did it adapt the books I’ve loved since childhood? But I’ve also spoken to several people who admit they wouldn’t know Edgar Rice Burroughs from William S. Burroughs, so they had no preconceptions whatsoever, and they liked the movie, too. Based on their testimonies, I’m convinced the movie had the potential to appeal to a wider audience than it obviously has… which suggests to me that what I wrote a couple weeks ago about the weak marketing was right on target. Fingers are now being pointed in all directions, with some gossips blaming the film’s director, Andrew Stanton, for mistakenly believing this character was as well known as Tarzan and insisting on the vague, uninspiring ad campaign. Others are saying the movie fell victim to internal politics at Disney, with the execs who greenlighted the movie departing midway through its production and their replacements just wanting to get it out the door and over with. But again, whatever the cause, there’s no question in my mind that the marketing on this film stank worse than fresh calot droppings, and that had a tremendously negative impact on the movie’s performance. And it’s so deeply frustrating to me, both as an ERB fan and simply as a lover of good Saturday-matinee adventure flicks, because this movie so easily could have been handled differently, and with far happier results.
Consider this: Two clicks of my mouse this afternoon turned up a fan-made trailer that uses the same footage as the official ones, but is so much more reflective of what this movie is about, who John Carter is, why these stories matter, and how frickin’ awesome they can be:
Now that’s how you do a trailer for a rollicking planetary romance based on a seminal but no longer well-remembered literary work. This trailer makes me want to run out and see the film again, right now. So why couldn’t anyone at Disney figure out how to do something that good? Why didn’t they care about nurturing something that could’ve been major for them, instead of setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure? (I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess; I’ve been asking the same questions for 20 years in regards to The Rocketeer, another great little movie with lots of franchise potential that Disney essentially dumped into theaters with very little support.)
Someday, somebody’s going to write a very interesting book on this debacle. In the meantime, I really hope this movie finds its audience on home video, and eventually comes to be recognized as something more than it was initially taken for.
Just lately, I’ve been teetering on the edge of another one of those funks when I feel like my moment has come and gone, and the Arbiters of Cool have declared all the things I like obsolete and irrelevant, and it’s just as well I don’t have kids because what the hell could I possibly have in common with them at this point? You know, that thing Grampa Simpson was talking about when he said “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.” (You see! A Simpsons reference. How passe’ is that? I hate it when I inadvertently prove my own point!)
But then today, just as the Generation Gap was yawning before me like the Grand Canyon and the edge was crumbling under my feet, onto my morning train stepped a pretty young blonde that I would guess was about seventeen years old. (Must… resist… obvious reference to the Stray Cats song…) She wore jeans that were ripped out at the knees, with red-and-black striped tights beneath, and fingerless knit gloves, and the ubiquitous hoodie. She was the sort of girl I would’ve fallen instantly in love with, once upon a far-off time when I was seventeen myself. She was holding an iPhone on which I could see a video playing, and she was bopping her head along to the accompanying music.
I cringed, because I really wasn’t in the mood to have some inconsiderate Damn Kid(tm) who can’t be bothered to wear headphones foisting her crappy music on me. My irritation rose as she sat down right across the aisle from me and turned her gadget toward me so the music grew even louder. And then I caught what she was listening to… and my mouth almost literally fell open from the surprise. It was something I knew. More than that, it was something I like, a song called “I Need to Know,” written by Tom Petty.
This particular version of the song was a live clip featuring my rock-n-roll sweetheart, the eternally sexy (in my eyes) Stevie Nicks, singing the lead while Petty provides the guitar and back-up vocal. In fact, I think it was this very clip here:
Seeing a teenage girl so obviously and unironically enjoying a song that was originally recorded when I was just a kid myself — 1978, to be exact — performed by two people old enough to be her grandparents, gave me such a simple feeling of genuine happiness that I feel foolish even trying to describe it.
My train stop came up just as the song was ending. I debated over saying something to the girl, telling her that she’d dispelled a black fog from my heart, or maybe just that she had excellent taste in music, but I feared coming across as some kind of creep. (It pains me deeply that a grown man can’t even speak to a young girl anymore without worrying that he’ll be, ahem, misunderstood!) So I settled for just tapping her on the shoulder as I passed and saying, “For what it’s worth, I love that one.”
She giggled. She actually giggled. And I had the brief impression I’d made her day as much as she’d made mine.
Then I stepped off the train and started walking toward the office. I noticed I had something resembling a spring in my step. And I was smiling, too.
Thanks, kid. Whoever you were. You don’t know how much good you did this morning.
A couple weeks ago, there was a cute little cartoon making the rounds titled “If My Childhood Plans Had Panned Out…” It easily lends itself to a fun mental exercise with several components to think about, so naturally somebody turned it into an Internet meme. (Thanks, Michael May!)
I chose to make my own responses to the questions raised in the form of photos, which I will place after the fold to save y’all some bandwidth. And for the record, I defined childhood for this thing as being between the ages of seven and 10, which for me would’ve covered the years 1976 through ’79. Click through if you’re curious…
I had fun at John Carter. Just not $250 million worth of fun, which leads us to the central and vexing problem: Moviegoing pleasure can no longer be casual. We’re now acutely aware of how much every movie cost, how much every studio – in this case, Disney – has riding on every given project. “What does Disney need to make its money back?” becomes the overriding question, when what we really should be asking is, “Did you see how John Carter slashed his way out of that big, blubbery whatsis and came out all blue and shit?” — Stephanie Zacharek
Indeed. The media’s obsession over opening-weekend box-office take is sooooo tedious.
I generally have a lot of respect for the opinions of Roger Ebert. There’s no question the man knows his movies… their history, their industry, their overall aesthetic. He understands how they’re put together and what about them makes them work, and what doesn’t. But when it comes to science fiction, fantasy, and superhero movies, especially those adapted from some other source, he can say some mind-bogglingly ignorant things.
It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t really care for such films. He plainly considers them unsophisticated and even silly, and he admits in many of his reviews that he simply doesn’t know how to approach them. And that’s fine with me, it really is; I don’t expect everyone to be a fanboy like myself. (In fact, I enjoyed being a genre fan much more back in the days when SF&F wasn’t so mainstream.) But I would suggest he try exploring the source material a little more thoroughly — or at least hire a research assistant who can spend 20 minutes on Wikipedia and then give him a brief before he writes the review — so he doesn’t always appear so… well… out of touch to people who know and understand this stuff. Case in point: his review of John Carter.
I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m not going to question Roger’s judgment as to the film’s quality. (Full disclosure: he gave the movie two-and-a-half stars out of four, so he wasn’t being all that harsh, or at least not as harsh as I expected.) He complains the plot isn’t as tight as it ought to be and the CGI is occasionally dodgy. Fair enough; he may well be right about those problems. But what raised my hackles were the offhand remarks he made that indicate he just doesn’t know much about where this character comes from, and he can’t be bothered to find out. For example, here’s the paragraph that really made me grit my teeth:
When superior technology is at hand, it seems absurd for heroes to limit themselves to swords. When airships the size of a city block can float above a battle, why handicap yourself with cavalry charges involving lumbering alien rhinos? …
Such questions are never asked in the world of “John Carter,” and as a result, the movie is more Western than science fiction.
Roger, I respectfully counter that being more Western than sci-fi is actually a feature for this film, not a flaw. That means it’s at least somewhat faithful to A Princess of Mars, the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels about John Carter. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Princess out loud to The Girlfriend, one chapter per night, just before bed, and she observed very early on that the story is essentially a Western with giant, four-armed green men standing in for Native Americans. But of course that’s what it is. Consider the book’s history. It was originally published in serial form in 1912. Wyatt Earp was still alive in 1912, and I’m pretty sure Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was still touring then. The Old West occupied a tremendous amount of real estate in the popular imagination, Western stories dominated the pulp magazines that Burroughs was trying to break into, and science fiction as we now understand it did not really exist. (Indeed, Burroughs practically invented the sci-fi genre, or at least a certain subset of it.) Plot-wise, Princess actually starts off as a Western, with Carter fighting Apaches in the Arizona Territory just after the Civil War, before Burroughs unleashes his imagination. To complain that a movie based on this seminal, century-old story doesn’t fit so neatly into our modern generic pigeonholes indicates to me that you’re missing the point.
As to the issue of swords on a world that also boasts gravity-defying airships, it’s very plainly explained in the books (but, I grant, perhaps not in the movie) as a cultural thing. The peoples of Barsoom are violent, in constant conflict with one another, and they prize physical prowess and bravery above all other virtues. In addition, their world is dying and in many ways they have regressed into barbarism (some of the races, such as the green men of Thark, moreso than others, such as the more human-appearing red race). They fight with swords because skill with a blade is more impressive to them than merely shooting someone from a distance. Besides, this is a pulp adventure story — swords just come with that territory. The armies of Ming the Merciless fly around in rocket ships and blast people with ray guns, but they have sword duels as well. And what are the lightsabers of our generation’s touchstone pulp adventure, the Star Wars saga? Swords. Just swords, with a disco-era makeover.
One last thing: near the end of his review, Ebert makes this really silly remark:
The Tharks are ingenious, although I’m not sure why they need tusks.
At risk of sounding snotty, they have tusks because that’s how ERB imagined them!
Look, I know movies should stand or fall on their own merits and if you have to refer constantly to the source material to explain away flaws, the movie can be considered a failure… but it just strikes me as silly to nitpick this sort of thing in the case of an adaptation. It sounds to me like Ebert is criticizing the very things that make this movie recognizable as Burroughs’ creation. And isn’t that what it’s supposed to be? Burroughs’ Barsoom brought to life? That’s what I’m hoping to see, at least…