Today’s news links come courtesy of the Post Chronicle, not quite the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung …
- Six-Foot Chocolate Jesus Most Anticipated Easter Work At Gallery “Cavallaro‘s work, entitled ‘My Sweet Lord’ is a 6 foot tall, anatomically correct sculpture of Jesus Christ in milk chocolate.” As usual, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (like the JLA but without Wonder Woman, Green Lantern or the rest …) is upset.
- Deep Throat Actor Coaches Daughter’s Sex Scenes In New Movie: “Thora Birch’s father, who is a former porn star, coached her during the sex scenes of her latest movie.” At least he wasn’t in the scene.
That second “story” reminds me vaguely of Excalibur (1981) by John Boorman, who directed his own daughter in the film’s early rape scene.
Today’s proto-emo poem comes to us from Hermann Hesse, best known for Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, at least when it comes to American readers.
“Allein”
Es führen über die Erde
Straß und Wege viel,
Aber alle haben
Das selbe Ziel.Du kannst reiten und fahren
Zu zwein und zu drein,
Den letzten Schritt mußt du
Gehen allein.Drum ist kein Wissen
Noch Können so gut,
Als daß man alles Schwere
Alleine tut.
In the 10th grade we read Siddhartha; Mrs. Johnson had us read it at the beginning of the year and planned on having us read it again at the end as a sort of reflection. We never got to it the second time; even my teachers were overly-optimistic about how much material we could cover. Perhaps that’s why I keep making the same mistake in my classes.
Since they (the management company) wanted to show the place today, I took a walk to Mother Fool’s for coffee, a cranberry scone, a couple hours of reading (The Secret History), and free wireless for downloading software updates for my iBook. Not particularly fast wireless, mind you, but faster than my modem.
I watched Stargate Atlantis 3×17-3×20 today; it ends on a sort of cliffhanger, but not quite as cliffhangy, so to speak, as the first two seasons. We know the city will survive and we’ve already concluded, probably, that it will just end up on a new planet. We’re just not sure how. In the first season or so it was always possible that the Wraith would destroy the city but our heroes would escape; guerilla Stargate Atlantis, so to speak. Or major characters would die. They’ve already killed their major character for the season and they’ve written out another one enough that the actor (actress) is free to do other things.
I always find this intrusion of external logic into the story-world fascinating. Analogous things rarely happen in other “artistic” media … characters killed because, um, no one wants to “play” the character? Same in comics or music or drama. It’s a TV thing, really. Doctor Who got around it brilliantly; in a few other shows they’ve recast the character (see: Lexx), sometimes with some sort of story-internal logic, other times it’s just a matter of saying, “Hey, this is the new so-and-so, live with it.” Think: Bewitched.
And the cliffhanger … an interesting end-of-season twist in TV these days. It’s a big thing in the Stargate universe as well as Battlestar Galactica. We’ve gotten used to them, but when I think of “comparable” shows — high-concept things that also attract smart-enough viewers and good writers etc., I notice that not a lot of them use end-of-season cliffhangers … and if you go further back in TV history you’ll find even fewer, I think. Look at Buffy or Alias — neither relied on end-of-season cliffhangers. Alias had something approaching one at the end of seasons one and two, but really only the end of season four counts — that’s the one where we go “WTF mate? How are they going to fix this?” Other than that Alias used the season breaks for reboots of sorts. 2-3 did so, a did 3-4. Season 2 followed straight upon 1, and 5 upon 4, but after the first episode or so of season 5 there was a “conceptual break” … 4 months later …
The old Star Trek series were much more episodic than serial and more serial than long-arc (except in some of the later seasons), though TNG did have some cliffhangers, now that I think about it, but more for in-the-season things. I find it an interesting development in television storytelling technique.
