Day: December 9, 2003

I watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine last night on DVD that had arrived earlier in the day from Netflix. Two things amused me. First, there was the following exchange:

QUARK: Why can’t you take after your friend here? He knows enough to stay out of Starfleet. Even a human can see that there are a lot more profitable opportunities out there for a young man with ambition.

NOG: Uncle, he wants to be a writer. There’s no profit in that.

Which I guess was the writers having a little fun at their own expense. And second, there was the realization that the Star Trek universe is no longer one in which Fermat’s last equation still hasn’t been solved.

I have yet to see either the play or the movie, but I found this review of Angels in America in this week’s New Yorker very interesting:

Anyone who makes the effort to transfer a play to TV runs the risk of focussing excessively on plot and dialogue and of failing to catch the elusive nonverbal elements in his butterfly net….There is a certain kind of magic in the theatre that can’t be replicated in any other form, and it doesn’t depend on the audience’s not seeing how it’s done; it’s the fact that you often can see how it’s done — whether it’s an actor undergoing a transformation in front of you or a set design or a lighting effect—that makes you marvel. Kushner acknowledges this in his stage notes. Such moments, he says, “are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion — which means it’s O.K. if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.”

I was reminded of something I quoted back in May, an interview Teller gave to the Onion, in which he said:

Everything that’s evil about lying, once you put it in a frame on a stage, becomes virtuous and becomes wonderful. And people love that, and they love measuring one view of reality against another. They love situations in which they can look at something and sort out for themselves where make-believe leaves off and reality begins. So I’m not surprised that that [masked magician] show is popular, because it’s not in any way a dismissal of magic. It’s a tribute to the fact that people are fascinated by magic. They’re not fascinated by illusion, as Doug Henning would have us believe. Magic is a much tougher thing: It’s not about watching a cartoon or a special effect. It’s about seeing something that seems to violate all your previous experiences in the world, and coming to some sort of terms with that — whether it’s coming to terms with it as poetry, or coming to terms with it as deceit, or coming to terms with it as technology. It’s an incredibly vigorous kind of natural form to work in.”

Just interesting, is all. But be careful before visiting my archives from May. Just below that Teller quote, there’s a link to Whose Line…? fan fiction, which should be avoided at all cost.