Today’s news links come courtesy of the Post Chronicle, not quite the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung …<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That second “story” reminds me vaguely of Excalibur<\/em> (1981) by John Boorman, who directed his own daughter in the film’s early rape scene.<\/p>\n Today’s proto-emo poem comes to us from Hermann Hesse, best known for Siddhartha<\/em> and Steppenwolf<\/em>, at least when it comes to American readers.<\/p>\n “Allein”<\/p>\n Es f\u00fchren \u00fcber die Erde Du kannst reiten und fahren Drum ist kein Wissen In the 10th grade we read Siddhartha<\/em>; 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>), and free wireless for downloading software updates for my iBook. Not particularly fast wireless, mind you, but faster than my modem.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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<\/em> that the actor (actress) is free to do other things.<\/p>\n I always find this intrusion<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>?” 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 …<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s news links come courtesy of the Post Chronicle, not quite the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[96,55,192,114,344],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-myspace","tag-coffee","tag-hesse","tag-movies-2","tag-poetry","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nStra\u00df und Wege viel,
\nAber alle haben
\nDas selbe Ziel.<\/p>\n
\nZu zwein und zu drein,
\nDen letzten Schritt mu\u00dft du
\nGehen allein.<\/p>\n
\nNoch K\u00f6nnen so gut,
\nAls da\u00df man alles Schwere
\nAlleine tut.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n