Month: January 2004

My favorite quote so far relating to the Spirit rover: Bill Nye, the Science Guy, explaining to Fox News “THE BIG STORY” host John Gibson why it’s exciting to be getting new pictures of Mars.

“You know, if you land on the Earth, and you’re only allowed to look, say, in the Fox studio, that’s all the region that you’re allowed to explore, you might not have a very complete picture of the Earth. So, similarly, when you compare the images we got from two Viking landers 30 years ago or 25 years ago, you don’t have a very complete picture of Mars.”

I hope you had a happy and healthy holiday season. I had a nice and uneventful couple of weeks in New York, and I’m just now enjoying a couple more nice and uneventful days in State College before I have to return to work. I actually managed to get a couple of things done while I was gone, including this sketch, this long-overdue semi-bio, and this still somewhat embryonic book log. Feel free to check any of them out if you like.

I really don’t have much more news to share. Soon, I hope to have some more short film reviews in the sidebar, including my thoughts on Return of the King, which I finally managed to see today. I’ll also be adding some more to the book log, since I got a good bit of reading done while I was home for the holidays. I’ve made no formal resolutions for the New Year except for one: write more. The other important things for this year include finding a new job and new place to live, but you’re all pretty tired of hearing me bitch about that, now aren’t you?

Anyway, it’s weird (but good) to be back. I hope you’re all well. For those of you who are interested, I’m thinking of putting together another mix CD exchange with a due date of sometime in mid-to-late February. Just something to think about.

In the meantime, because I’d hoped to share them before I left last month, some more quotes from Alex Ross’ “The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs. Tolkien”, which appeared in the December 22 and 29 issue of The New Yorker:

For Tolkein, myth is a window on an ideal world. For Wagner, it is a magnifying mirror for the average, desperate modern soul.

The sexual opacity of Tolkien’s saga has often been noted, and the films faithfully replicate it. Desirable people appear onscreen, and one is given to understand that at some point they have had or will have had relations, but their entanglements are incidental to the plot. It is the little ring that brings out the lust in men and in hobbits. And what, honestly, do people want in it? Are they envious of Sauron’s bling-bling life style up on top of Barad-dûr? Tolkien mutes the romance of medieval stories and puts us out in self-abnegating, Anglican-modernist, T. S. Eliot territory. The ring is a never-ending nightmare to which people are drawn for no obvious reason. It generates lust and yet gives no satisfaction..

Perhaps what angered Tolkien most was that Wagner wrote a sixteen-hour mythic opera and then, at the end, blew up the foundations of myth.

The experience of film — and, in particular, of music in film — has probably had a prejudicial effect on the way people view live opera. They expect images to set the tone and music to match — “Mickey-Mousing,” Walt Disney’s composers called it. Howard Shore, in “The Lord of the Rings,” practices the art of Mickey-Mousing at an exalted level. But in opera the music takes the lead, generating an imaginary landscape that directors and performers struggle to realize however they can. Not even Peter Jackson would be able to keep pace with Wagner’s hurtling, hovering, ever-evolving musical images, although someday an opera house is certain to ask him to try. When I see the cycle at the Met next spring, I will close my eyes from time to time and imagine movie and opera fused — as the one “Ring” to rule them all.

That’ll have to do for now. I really only did just get back yesterday.