A Galaxy Far, Far Away

Stargate Universe returns this Friday for the second half of its first season (and by the way, I dislike these split seasons). For those of you who don’t remember, this is the show about a group of humans who are suddenly transported to a decrepit old alien vessel in a galaxy far, far away.
As I wrote in November:

A group of persons, most of whom never really wanted to do space travel, were transported to an old spaceship whose operating code they cannot crack. Like The Flying Dutchman the decrepit old ship just sails on not needing a live crew. But the newcomers need to figure out how to replenish the power, the water, the food supply. Every day is a struggle to survive.
All of that might be realistic. If you happened to be transported to a decrepit old spaceship you probably would be concerned with those things. But it isn’t particularly fun to watch. Mostly the passengers all just want to go home and I can’t blame them. The problem for the producers is that I have no limitations on my ability to leave the ship – all I have to do is change the channel (or, in my case, turn off hulu).

I was thinking about this as I’ve been working my way through the DVDs of FarScape (I’m now in the first half of season 3). Like SGU, FarScape involves an astronaut suddenly transported to a galaxy far, far away who is stuck on a spaceship with a group of people who have a hard time getting along. Unlike SGU there are tons of great special affects to watch when the arguments get boring.

The first thing that struck me about FarScape was that it was an expensive show. The original Stargate:SG1 was laughable in its lack of effects. Every planet they went to looked like the boreal forests of Canada – because they were the forests of Canada. Most of the aliens were humanoid (and spoke English, which was never adequately explained). The first four or five years of the show I described it as cheesy because it was so low budget compared to a sci fi movie, or even a Star Trek series. Later, they got more of a budget and things improved. SGU has more effects but mostly these people are stuck on a spaceship that is visually uninteresting (and dark).

FarScape is a visual treat. I recently read somewhere that George Lucas was planning a live action sci fi television series set in the years immediately before Luke meets Obi Wan. It wouldn’t involve any of the Star Wars major characters. They ought to salvage the old FarScape sets and costumes for it because that’s what FarScape looks like (when they actually get off the ship). The aliens (created by the Henson Creature Shop) are truly alien just as they were in the bar scene on Tatooine in the first Star Wars. In fact, I keep expecting the FarScape cast to eventually walk into the bar on Tatooine. Two major characters are aliens that are depicted by puppets (as jabba the hut was). But the humanoid aliens are often very different from regular humans, especially their eyes (which make me think of something out of Dune). Even the space ship is a living character and is visually interesting.

The main characters of FarScape are interesting because none of them are human except Crichton. And, unlike, SGU, it isn’t a cast of thousands. There were originally four passengers and a pilot on the ship (and some small animal-like mechanical creatures very reminiscent of the one Chewbacca scared on the first Death Star). There were a couple of additions made over the years (and one loss, so far) and there are a couple of bad guys (well, one is reformed, we think). It’s easy to keep track of who is who, unlike on SGU where you have no idea who all those people are (I hear that they are introducing a new character who they are going to claim has been on the ship the whole time. Presumably, in the great mass of unnamed people who mill around at meetings.)

The acting on FarScape is better than the original SG-1 actors (and, so far, the SGU actors) – although maybe that’s because the dialog is written better. SG-1 had better jokes but the drama was cheesy. FarScape is almost all drama with a few jokes here and there from Crichton (that mostly the other characters don’t get). Ben Browder and Claudia Black later joined the Stargate SG-1 cast and I’m amazed at how Claudia Black’s facial expressions are totally different on FarScape than on SG-1.

But where FarScape and SGU unfortunately collide is in the plotting. Yes, being stuck on a spaceship would be hard. Yes, wanting to go home is a natural feeling. Yes, sometimes tempers flare when people who aren’t alike are stuck together. But after a while … watching it gets old. Especially in the first season of FarScape I felt like I was caught in a never-ending loop where the plot would involve some big crisis where everyone had to learn to trust each other (because otherwise they were all going to DIE!) but then the next episode would start and it was as if that other episode never took place. (Maybe this wouldn’t be so obvious if one were watching on a weekly basis rather than back to back episodes on DVD.) Recently, in my season 3 viewing the character of Pilot sent two characters off on “shore leave” because he and the ship couldn’t take their bickering any more. I approved.

Just as I said in my discussion of SGU, it would help if they had a mission. Star Trek had a mission and it worked. Star Trek Voyager didn’t have a mission and was just trying to get home and it didn’t work so well. Firefly had a mission – smuggling etc. It worked. SGU has no mission. It is, so far, not working. FarScape really doesn’t have a real mission; they aren’t positively trying to achieve anything except getting home. They are trying to achieve negatives: elude the bad guys who are chasing them.

Everyone fights a lot. Everyone tries to avoid getting killed (week after week of WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE, just like SGU). It’s a wonder I’m still enjoying it. And I am. I just keep hoping that the characters will stop fighting so much. I was very happy when, in season 3, the crew split off into two parts and half stayed on the original ship and half went with the gunship Talon. It made for a change. So far season 3 seems different than the first 2 seasons and I’m hoping that the writers finally figured out where they were going with the plot. Although it won’t matter; I’m hooked despite the flaws and will watch it all the way through.

I’ll also keep watching SGU for the remainder of season 1 in the hope that they turn things around. But I really REALLY hope they get off that ship more or at least stop arguing with each other.

Influential, and all that …

There has been this meme going around the Big Bloggers. Name the 10 books that most influenced you. Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel like I’ve done this before. But I can’t remember when or what I said. So what the hay, I’ll do it again.

I should say that, as I looked at this list, I wondered why none of the great philosophers that I read when I was in school made the list. I’m sure they influenced my thinking as a whole. I’m sure that there were many other books that influenced me. But I’m limiting my list to books that influenced me in the sense that I can trace a change in the way I thought or behaved from the time that I read that book.

Remember, these are books that influenced me, not my favorite books.

1. Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelman. “In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived 12 little girls in two straight lines they left the house at half past nine in rain or shine the smallest one was Madeleine …” This was the book that made me want to learn to read by myself so I could stop bugging other people to read it to me. And learning to read was the most important thing that ever happened to me. (It also began my lifelong fascination with boarding school literature.)
   
2. The Witch Tree Symbol by Carolyn Keene. When I was about seven years old, one of our baby sitters who was going away to college gave my sister and I all of her old Nancy Drew books. They were too old for us and they sat on the steps going down to our basement for a very long time until I was about eight years old when, bored, I picked up one to read. It was The Witch Tree Symbol and, rightly or wrongly, I remember it as the first “chapter book” I ever read. I remember that reading it was a stretch for me at first, I didn’t understand all the vocabulary, but it was worth the effort. Over the rest of my childhood and young adulthood I read all the Nancy Drew books and discovered that girls could be smart and pretty and adventurous, all at the same time.
   
3. The Torah. Not the bible, although surely that influenced me. My dad had a leather copy of a book that was The Torah which was, as far as I could tell, the first five books of the Christian Old Testament. But written in slightly (or very) different language from what I heard in church. I don’t remember why I picked it up and read it but I read it from cover to cover. I’ve never thought of bible “stories” the same since then. There was nothing very spiritual in that book, all the adultery, and murder, and incest and other human frailties were there. It seemed much more real to me than the cleaned up versions I usually heard. And it made me realize that editing is everything. Even in religion.
   
4. The Making of the President, 1960, by Theodore White. This was my dad’s book. (I should see if he still has it or if it was given away when they moved). It sat on the “adult” bookshelf at home and I picked it up when I was in eighth grade when no one was around and I was bored. I can’t say that I never looked at a presidential election the same way again – I hadn’t lived through that many presidential elections. But it did change the way I looked at them; it fascinated me. I can’t say that it is what made me political, but it is what made me understand that politics isn’t just personal on the local level (I knew that from personal experience) but even on the presidential level. It also was a book that made me want to read non-fiction for pleasure, not just as assigned schoolwork.
   
5. Cows Pigs Wars & Witches: The Symbols of Culture by Marvin Harris. This was assigned reading in a Political Anthropology class that I took the last semester in college. The class fit into my schedule and the hours counted toward what I needed to graduate. It ended up being one of the best classes I’ve ever taken and I still have this book. When a group of people are doing something that looks, to you, like insanity it is more than likely not insane. It probably means that there is something about them and their culture you don’t understand.
   
6. Robert Kennedy and his Times, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I didn’t read this when it first came out, I was a freshman in college and I had too much else to read. But I read it a few years later. I was old enough to remember Bobby Kennedy’s run for president and his murder. But like many of my generation I tried not to think about it. As one of my work colleagues who is almost exactly my age explained to someone younger than us last year, when we were growing up the idea of assassination was “normal”. The idea that riots could break out anyplace, anytime, was “normal”. And when that “normalness” gave way to a different, more calm, kind of normalness it was tempting to forget those earlier times. This book made it possible to look back at a time from my childhood through the eyes of an adult. It made me see the good, but it made me hope never to live through that kind of time again.
   
7. What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies. This is an odd one. It isn’t even close to being my favorite novel by Robertson Davies but it is the first of his novels that I read. And it made me realize that I knew nothing of art and that I was even a little afraid of art. My fear sprang from an elementary school art teacher who belittled those of us who had no talent for creating art. Over the years I had convinced myself that I just didn’t like art. But when I read this novel I realized that wasn’t true. I liked to look at art but I was afraid of expressing any opinion about it. So I signed up for an art appreciation class at the museum and I never looked back. Now I wouldn’t give up looking and learning about art for anything.
   
8. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. I picked this book up at The Missouri Historical Society when I was doing some research into French colonization of the Upper Mississippi. White’s examination of the relationship between the Native Americans living around Lake Michigan and the French Voyageurs they encountered during this time period made me look at all of American History differently and pushed me into reading source materials from that time with a different eye.
   
9. The Problem of Pain: How Human Suffering Raises Almost Intolerable Intellectual Problems, by CS Lewis. It didn’t answer any questions for me but it profoundly affected my idea of the meaning of the word “love”.
   
10. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, by Lewis Hyde. I read this book within the last couple of years and I blogged extensively about it when I read it so I won’t go into it here. But since I read it I’ve thought about it regularly in many contexts and it is giving me a new perspective on the concept of satisfaction with a life’s work.

My Thoughts Exactly

This  funny (and spot on) parody of the Lady Gaga/Beyonce video “Telephone” made me laugh.  Because, really, I just do not GET the real video.  And I still do not GET why Beyonce bothers to be in these Lady Gaga telephone themed videos. 

Fresh

I recently had a birthday.  I thought I’d celebrate by giving myself a fresh, new template.  I wanted to give myself a new Prius but then Toyota went and screwed things up on that front.

A new template isn’t as nice as a new car but it’s a lot cheaper (especially when it is free).  And if I don’t like it I can switch to something else. 

I was going to have a new one in place on the actual day of my birthday but I found myself unable to decide.  And then I got frustrated at my inability to decide.  I should have known better than to set an arbitrary deadline for something that didn’t matter.  I have enough real deadlines in my life, I don’t need the stress of arbitrary deadlines.

In the midst of my frustration, when I was berating myself for not even being able to decide on a new template, I decided I would do something I’m really good at.  I would just walk away.  Walking away is one of the things I do best in life.  

I would like to have walked away from my birthday.  But that’s not possible.  So I walked away from the easiest thing I could.

I’ve always been a person who loved her birthday.  But not this one.  And I was getting really tired of people telling me “it’s better than the alternative”.  I started answering, “Is it?  Really, how do you know?”  That shut them up.

I feel bad about that now.  I went to a funeral yesterday.  One of my cousins, only a couple of years younger than me, died after a long fight with luekemia.

At the funeral, I watched her family and thought that the phrase “It’s better than the alternative” is really meant for the other people.  The people left behind.  For them, it was going to be hard. For her, it was probably a relief to be out of pain and suffering.  She put up a good fight.  But she would probably have liked to have celebrated the birthday  I just celebrated.

When I was young I had a deep superstition that I was going to be dead by the time I was 35.  I knew it was a superstition so I made plans and laid the groundwork for a post-35 life because that was the rational thing to do.  I went to law school, etc.  But deep down I was sure I was going to be dead by the time I was 35. 

And then I wasn’t.

And I suddenly had to face the fact that it was possible that I could live a very long time and what the HELL was I going to do with all that time?

I’ve never had an answer for that. 

Don’t worry, it’s not like I set myself a deadline for figuring it out.

But I think I decided that if I was going to be forced to have birthdays I might as well enjoy all those unanticipated post-35 birthdays.  And I have.  I never had to pretend.  I really did enjoy them. And I liked having the celebrations go on days and days.

Until this year.

It took every bit of energy I had to get through all the celebrations.  And I’m so glad it’s over and I don’t have to pretend anymore.

And once all that stress was removed from my life I found it was easy to pick a new template.

Closed Until Further Notice

Re-thinking lots of things in my life, including this blog.

Smile

This captures for me the joys of singing in a chorus and how it is, simultaneously, a group effort and an individual joy.

Thank you music teachers everywhere. :)

Here’s an article with more information.

And the winner is …

Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel has won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction.   I blogged about it here.  

Prizes are always nice for authors.  And it is always nice when a novel I enjoy wins a prize (this one also won the Booker Prize last year).  I thought it was beautifully written and certainly prize-worthy.

On the other hand, 2666 won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle prize.  And I just don’t see it.   So what do I know?