Open, endless free
Calling, voiceless, calling
My lonely self to me
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The peaceful sky is calling Open, endless free Calling, voiceless, calling My lonely self to me |
| date | 2000-12-29:12:52 |
| Movies |
Keneth Branagh is a genius. I watched his Love's Labour Lost last night, which is done in a 1930's musical motif and is simply delightful. The use of newsreel footage to peice the narrative together is wonderful, and the sheer playfulness of the production is a triumph. I'm fond of musical theater on the stage, because the stage is an inherently unrealistic medium. It requires a kind of suspension of disbelief that is profound, to forget you are watching a bunch of grown ups seriously pretending to be people who they are not doing things they would never do themselves. Periodically breaking into organized song and choreographed dance in the midst of that is not such a big step. Film tends much more strongly to realism--it is not in general possible to categorize films into clearly disjoint "documentary" and "non-documentary" classes, becuase the camera always presents what is in front of it. It may be people pretending to be who they are not, or it may be people as they are, and nothing about the medium of film as such tells us which is which. Like street-theater, film is about life in a way that theater on the stage is not, excepting rare special cases. So unless there is careful attention to stylistic details, to bring out the unrealism of the situation, I find musicals on film are often jarringly artificial. A good counter-example is the musical Annie, which I think worked very well. But a film like Oklahoma just does not work for me at all. Branagh is clearly aware of this problem, and uses all sorts of devices to shatter the implicit realism of the medium. The Shakespearean language itself helps a lot, but there are plenty of other nice stylistic touches that keep the sense that this is art for fun's sake clearly focussed--the king declaring himself to have been hiding behind a potted plant he has in hands that is about ten inches high is one. Branagh tap-dancing to iambic pentameter is another, which is so brilliantly done that I can only assume more was not done because it was incredibly hard to make work at all, much less as well as it does. Branagh is at his best with Shakespearean commedy--although his Hamlet will stand as a classic and his Henry V is good as is Othello, I don't think they hold a candle to Much Ado About Nothing or Love's Labour Lost, both of which are monuments to the joy and fun and folly of the comedy of love. |
| Play |
The kids got cross-country skis and boots for Christmas, so I've dug up my elderly ones and we've started practicing by skiing around the boundary of our property with short excursions into the field behind. Cross-country skis are for me like BSD unix--just similar enough to something I'm good at to completely screw me up. My downhill reflexes are all wrong, and I've never been a very good cross-country skier because of that. This time, I'm consciously trying to feel the skis as something completely different, to try to not lean on any of my downhill experience, to treat them more like skates than skis, if anything. So far, it seems to be working, although I still fall down a lot. I hope as the winter progresses we'll all get better at it, and that in the next few years we'll go further and further afield. The winter woods are very beautiful, and the only way to get there properly is by ski. It's something I miss a lot, being in the far outdoors in winter. In spring, summer and fall I hike and canoe, but the winter here is not something my childhood skills leave me well adapted to. But as I seem to be in the midst of learning new skills all the time now, much to my delight, it seems like a good time to learn how to cross-country ski properly, to make my peace with winter for the few years I am likely to be further subject to its grip. |
| Reading |
I am at last done with Homer. Yay! There are scenes on the Iliad that have their analogues right down to the modern day. It's remarkable how early certain ideas are adopted, as if the human mind has a deep and fundamental need to see particular things in stories. The first movie was released around 1910, and the first film with a car-chase appeared only three or four years later. And I expect that car-chases will still be used in any kinetic medium a thousand years from now. It's just too easy a way to fill time in a way that provides the illusion of something interesting. Likewise, it's clear that loving description of arms and armor didn't orginate with the Tom Clancy style of techno-thriller. Homer's descriptions of the goods of war have as much technical detail as ever Clancy lavished on a submarine or sub-machine-gun. And arming is used as a means of introducing these otherwise dull descriptions into the narrative flow--we see Achilles putting on his god-made greaves (improbably made of tin, which unless heavily alloyed is far too soft and pliable to turn so much as a pointed stick) and strapping the silver buckles of his burnished breastplate before going out to kill Hector. This is not different from scenes of Arnold Schwartznegger strapping on bandoliers of ammunition or Sylvester Stalone taping a couple of spare magazines to the butt of his rifle. Terry Pratchett does a wonderful send-up of scenes like this at the beginning of Pyramids, in which the description of Pteppic arming himself goes on for several pages, after which he slowly falls over under the weight of accumulated weaponry. But Homer did it first, although I guess there are roughly similar although far less detailed descriptions of the accoutrements of the hero in Gilgamesh. The bickering over the prizes in the chariot race at the funeral games for Patroclos is a nice touch, echoing the opening scenes. And Diomedes makes a token reappearance after vanishing for most of the second half of the poem. Is the death of Hector the logical climax of the story? Or the warring of the gods? Or the death of Patroclus? Some scenes that one might expect would be played for dramatic effect are passed over very lightly, such as Achilles hearing the news of his friend's death. Certainly Achilles dragging Hector's body around the walls of Troy is amongst the most vivid scenes, and is the culmination of Achilles wrath, and this is the story of the wrath of Achilles, so perhaps Hector's death is the logical climax. Everything after it is deflationary, so that fits as well. But Patroclus' death seems more central as a consquence of Achilles' behavior. The fighing between the gods prior to Hector's death could be seen as the climax of the story as well, though. Twice Zeus places the lives of mortals on the scales of Fate, and it could be that the central focus of the poem from the Greek perspective is that the gods themselves are as bound by Fate as mortals are, that this war is one that sweeps up all the forces of order in the universe. This would be consistent with my speculation that this is the story of the end of Mycenae, that in this band of marauding thugs we are seeing the end of civilization and the beginning of the Dark Age. The story has been transmuted by time, looking backward from the other side of that gulf of years, but perhaps that is where the seeds lie. Sumerian mythology sometimes (frequently, in fact) gets criticized for being so depressing, as if Greek mythology were any more upbeat. The Sumerians at least had an inkling, expressed most strongly in Siduri's Creed, that life on this earth could be good and pleasureable, even if not much excitement waited in the afterlife. The Greeks seemed to believe that life on this earth was at best short, bloody, brutal and "glorious", and was then followed by an afterlife every bit as depressing--if it's depiction in the Odyssey is anything to go by--as the Sumerian one. So I will take Sumer over Greece any day. Now that I'm done with Homer, I will have time to delve into the new translation of Gilgamesh, unfortunately from Assyrian rather than Sumerian texts, which is really necessary as nothing like a complete Sumerian text survives, but which filters the myth through a much more violent, marshal culture than the one of Sumer. |