Category: Culture

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales

Btlosttales
In the mail today (well, yesterday by when you read this), I got the direct-to-DVD movie Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, which is the first in a planned series of new Babylon 5 stories on DVD.

It’s 72 minutes long and consists of two stories that occur simultaneously and interlock to some degree.

I won’t give major spoilers here, but here are a few brief comments.

Both stories are set in 2271, ten years after the events of the first Babylon 5 TV series finished. The first story focuses on Captain Lochley, who is still in command of Babylon 5,and the second focuses on John Sheridan, who is still president of the Interstellar Alliance. Also skulking around is Galen the technomage, but these three are the only regular characters featured in the movie (other past cast members are planned to appear in future DVDs).

The CGI in the video is much improved over where it was ten years ago, when B5 was on the air (basically, CGI was at the stage that video games are now; this DVD may give you an idea of where video games will be in a few years).

The two stories are focused on questions (which is normal for how Joe Straczynski writes). The Lochley story focuses on a theological question, and the Sheridan story focuses on a moral one. (Actually, they both have moral questions, but the first is predicated on a theological question in addition.)

Br. Theo and the other Dominicans apparently aren’t on Babylon 5 any more, so they aren’t there to help Lochley wrestle with the theological issue that is thrust forward. (Oh, BTW, the pope is a man again.) Early on in this story there is a conversation which, when I heard it, I thought, "Joe’s atheism is showing through." I thought it was an interesting conversation, but I was still disappointed. I did suspect, though, that he might be setting us up for a larger issue, and that was true in spades!  I won’t say where this goes, but this has to be the most intensely theological thing that Straczynski has done on the show, and it ends in a way that is definitely respectful of religion.

The moral question at the heart of the Sheridan story is a variant of one that has been hashed over quite a number of times in science fiction, but it’s still a well-told tale with a nice resolution.

There are weak spots in the writing (e.g., the climax of the Lochley story is too talky and Sheridan says some things to an ISN reporter that no president trying to foster interplanetary relations would say to a reporter in a million years–BTW the reporter is Teryl Rothery or "Dr. Janet Frazier" from SG-1), as there often are with JMS’s writing, but the overall is interesting, entertaining, and it will definitely please the majority of B5 fans. (You can never please all fans, of any series, no matter what you do.)

There are also a lot of nice individual lines (JMS specializes in those), and a number of nice little touches that will please fans who know the background of the series.

GET THE STORIES.

NOTE: Please do not give significant spoilers in the combox (or I’ll delete them). In the future, after folks have had a chance to watch the DVD, I may come back to this and discuss the theological and moral questions the stories pose.

P.S. The featurettes are very nice. The memorial tributes to Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs are touching, and the Straczynski Diaries are hilarious.

The Economics of Magic

The Pharisaic Approach to Purity
Over at Jimmy’s blog, the discussion of Harry Potter proceeds apace, with the inevitable appearance of the Harry Haters who, not content with not wanting to read the books (which is their perfect right), also bound and determined to arraign Rowling as an evil person and those who enjoy the books as dupes and/or traitors to the Pure Faith, etc. ad nauseam. One comment in particular stands out for me as nicely summing up the failure of a particular sort of approach to the Faith, which is really not faith in the Catholic sense at all, but is more like Phariseeism:
One drop of poison in a clear glass of water still poisons the whole glass.
One drop of anything not authentically Catholic poisons the whole glass.
The thing is that since almost everything is poisoned these days, you have to go for the one that won’t kill you and still get rid of your thirst.
But then, that accomplishes the purpose of those books.
Give your thirst for true beauty and splendor a glass of poisoned water.

Updated: 7:49 a.m. PT Aug 1, 2007
BRADENTON, Fla. – Sometimes it’s a hassle being Harry Potter.
Especially when you’re a 78-year-old man who happens to share the name of a certain fictional boy wizard who is famous the world over.
Each time a new Harry Potter book or movie comes out, Bradenton resident Harry Potter starts getting phone calls from children, interview requests from the TV networks and autograph requests.

I am not a fan of the Harry Potter novels. I know lots of people who are, including people who are serious Catholics, but I’m uncomfortable with them for a variety of reasons.

While they’re not going to turn every kid who reads them into a practitioner of Wicca, at least some kids will be influenced by the novels into exploring the occult. That’s a risk that is taken whenever magic is explored in fiction. Lord of the Rings did the same thing.

The thing about literature (fiction or non-fiction) is that somebody in the audience is always going to go off in some crazy direction based on what they read.

Want proof?

Let’s take a very well-known piece of literature . . . the best-selling book in human history, in fact: The Bible.

Has anybody gone off in a crazy direction after reading that?

Well, let’s see . . . Marcion, Sabellius, Montanus, Tertullian, Arius, . . . uh, the list might get a little long, so let’s move on.

Authors can’t let the fact that somebody in the audience is going to go nuts based on what they write stop them from writing. If they did, we wouldn’t have the Bible. But authors can craft their work in a way that tries to minimize potential harmful effects, and I have sympathy for those who think that J.K. Rowling didn’t do as good a job of this in writing the Harry Potter series as J.R.R. Tolkien did in the Lord of the Rings.

And the fact is that the vast majority of kids who read Harry Potter are not going to turn into neopagans, so I can’t tell people that it’s morally impermissible for any child to read them.

There is another reason I’m uncomfortable with them: I just don’t like the way they’re written.

Now, you know what they say about disputing about tastes, and if Harry Potter is something that you really enjoy and that doesn’t challenge your faith then good for you. But I think that Rowling did not do a good job in several respects literarily, and here’s why.

I read the first novel back when there was a huge controversy about it and whether it was healthy for children, and from the opening pages I found myself not liking it. The reason is that Rowling is just too ham fisted in how she sets the plot in motion.

Harry Potter–the character, not the book series–is the most important boy in the magical world, yet he doesn’t know it.

Until chapter two. (Or whatever.)

Then, as soon as he’s introduced into the magical world, he’s suddently the center of attention, people are fawning all over him, privilege is lavished upon him, and a glorious new future is handed to him on a silver platter.

Too. Much. Wish. Fulfillment.

This is bad plotting. Harry Potter is catapulted out of ordinary life to the apex of magical society virtually instantaneously. There may be lots of interesting concepts that Rowling uses as tinsel to sparkle up her world–and this is what I think people really find attractive about the books (the tinsel, not the substance)–but you don’t slather on the wish fulfillment in this way.

Not unless you’re writing fan fic.

If you really want to have somebody be the most important boy in the world, you let this fact emerge piecemeal, a bit at a time, with the character paying his dues as his true identity becomes clear.

If you want to see that plot done right,

CHECK OUT THIS BOOK.

BTW, I recently gave this book to Steve and Janet Ray and they loved it.

Others have also commented on the ham fisted way Rowling writes–in fact the piece I’m about to link even uses the term "ham fisted."

It’s a piece by an economics reporter who looks at the bad economics in the book–and she doesn’t mean money. She means the magical economy:

If magic is too powerful then the characters will be omnipotent gods, and there won’t be a plot. Magic must have rules and limits in order to leave the author enough room to tell a story. In economic terms, there must be scarcity: magical power must be a finite resource.

GET THE STORY.

In The Mail

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John Allen’s book on Opus Dei actually came out a while ago, but the publisher just sent me a review copy.

I was pleased to get it because I like John Allen’s journalistic work, and I’d trust him more than most writers to handle the subject in an informed manner that is fair–neither uncritical nor overcritical.

I look forward to reading it. (When I can find the time!)

In the meanwhile,

GET THE BOOK.

Things Are Bad In The Music Industry

CD sales are down, but online sales haven’t picked up the slack.

But here’s a piece of good news:

Sales of rap, which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Maybe the culture is starting to turn away from rap.

I also found this interesting (EXCERPTS):

Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. “Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,” Mr. Sinnreich said, “and then everything goes kaput.”

Some music executives say that dropping copy-restriction software, also known as digital-rights management, would stoke business at iTunes’ competitors and generate a surge in sales. Others predict it would have little impact, though they add that the labels squandered years on failed attempts to restrict digital music instead of converting more fans into paying consumers.

“They were so slow to react, and let things get totally out of hand,” said Russ Crupnick, a senior entertainment industry analyst at NPD, the research company. “They just missed the boat.”

GET THE STORY.

Michael & Us

“The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes,” the non-profit group, which studies health care issues, said in a statement.
Canada rates second worst out of the six overall. Germany scored highest, followed by Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
“The United States is not getting value for the money that is spent on health care,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said in a telephone interview.
The group has consistently found that the United States, the only one of the six nations that does not provide universal health care, scores more poorly than the others on many measures of health care.
Link:
Report: U.S. health care expensive, inefficient: America ranks last among six countries on key measures, group finds

Michael Moore is, well, not my favorite person.

BUT I WAS STUNNED TO READ THIS ACCOUNT OF HOW HE GOES ABOUT HIS FILMMAKING.

Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.
Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria’s pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town’s cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.
The town will be centred around a 100-foot tall oratory and the first Catholic university to be built in America for 40 years. The university’s president, Nicholas J Healy, has said future students should “help rebuild the city of God” in a country suffering from “catastrophic cultural collapse.”

That’s the question being asked by David Boaz over at TCS Daily.

He notes that there have, actually, been some anti-Communist movies, but not nearly as many as there have been anti-Nazi movies, and the Communists killed far more people than the Nazis, thus creating innumerable dramatic human situations that could be illuminated through film.

I’ve got two thoughts on why there haven’t been as many anti-Communist movies:

1) Hollywood tends to the left of the political spectrum. It’s cultural/political ethos is socialistic to begin with, and there is less of a desire on filmmakers’ parts to go after Communists than people (like Nazis) that they perceive to be on the opposite end of the political spectrum (though, in actuality, the Nazi party was the National Socialist party).

2) The Cold War never got hot. What made Naziism so riveting and enduring an evil in film is the fact that a whole generation of Americans went off to fight it. Communism was a looming menace, but since we and the Russians (or the Chinese) never squared off in an actual world war, that looming menace never turned into the generation-defining experience that World War II was. If Stalin massacred more civilians than Hitler did (let’s suppose; I haven’t checked the numbers), we never had to fight Stalin, and that kept him from becoming an archtypal villain equivalent to Hitler in cultural stature. (Though he has clearly been the first runner-up in that category.)

So those are my theories.

What’re yours?

Dr. Tim’s 3D House of Space!

M31r Jimmy’s 3D Mars Man post reminded me of those 3D posters that were popular for a while back in the ’80s/’90s. They usually resembled a cross between the white noise on your TV screen and some kind of LSD trip (at least, from what I hear). It was said that if you looked at the posters in just the right way (kind of crossing your eyes) that a 3D image would emerge.

It took me a while to actually make one of these work, but after that it got easier, and eventually I could make out the 3D image within a few seconds. Not that the actual image was anything to write home about… they were really sort of like crude paper cut-outs, but they were there, if you looked hard. It was a moderately interesting effect.

WARNING! ANALOGY ALERT! Barely thought-out spiritual musings ahead…

It occurred to me that in some ways, these posters are like the way we might approach religious faith. I heard from numbers of people I trusted that these posters really worked, and that there was something – some kind of image not immediately visible – "inside" them. There was the apparent image (which could look pretty chaotic), and then there was the image within the image. Thing is, to make out the deeper image took a little work. It did not just leap off the paper. To even give the thing a decent effort required a certain amount of trust. It took me quite a while, looking at a number of different images, before I could see what others already saw. If I hadn’t kept at it, I would never have seen that deeper dimension.

Now, that reminded me of another sorta-related thing which I found very cool;

INAKA’S 3D SPACE WORLD!

Akira Inaka creates 3D images of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. These images work in much the same way as the 3D posters I mentioned above. It might take some experimentation, but they really do work, and the effect on some of the images is pretty striking, giving the viewer a little sense of the spatial depth that is lacking in regular photos of galaxies and nebulae and other neat stuff. Inaka gives instructions on the site on how to make the things work. One note of advice; if you do this for too long, you might run into some serious eye fatigue, and maybe a headache. If you start to notice that happening, just quit and come back to the site later.

I found the site by following a link on the Hubble Heritage website (which I’ve plugged before). The site offers a convenient way to look at some very beautiful images of the cosmos. The captions can be as fascinating to read as the images are to see. The vast distances, mind-boggling dimensions and sheer energy represented by some of these photos can be truly staggering.

Pretty SCARY, eh keeds?! Ooooohh…

Whoa, Momma!

JohnnybravoEvery few years one network or another has a period when they’re doing really entertaining cartoons. Back in the ’90s, Nickelodeon had such a run when they were first doing Rugrats (before they got stale) and Doug. Then it was kind of slim pickins until they came up with SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly Oddparents (though Hey, Arnold! and The Wild Thornberrys could be good).

Kids WB (back when they were around) also had such a run with Animaniacs, Pinky & the Brain, Freakazoid, and Earthworm Jim.

And Cartoon Network had one with Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Ed, Edd, n Eddy.

I don’t know what it is, but these runs of good cartoons always seem to peter out after a couple three years and then you just have to wait until someone else starts doing good TV animation again.

Filling the gap between such little golden ages is, of course, why God created DVDs, but man hasn’t been doing his part up to now: The vast majority of these cartoons have never been released on DVD! (Yet another crime against the humanities!)

I was delighted to learn, therefore, that though it’s not yet out on DVD the first season of Johnny Bravo has been released on iTunes!

WOO-HOO!

I downloaded it immediately.

My guess is that they’re testing the waters to see how well it does before possibly putting it out on DVD–or at least expanding the number of whole-season releases of Cartoon Network’s classic toons.

For those who may not know, Johnny Bravo is the biggest, dumbest, most narcissistic, body-building blond Elvis-clone that the world has ever seen.

Bravodoobiedoo
The first season of the show also includes the immortal episode "Bravo Doobie Doo," in which Johnny meets the Mystery Inc. gang from Scooby Doo, and we get a double-franchise satire.

There are some really funny bits in that one.

A favorite moment: Velma’s glasses are knocked off in a chase scene, and she’s groping around on the floor for them saying, "My glasses! My glasses! I CAN’T SEE without my glasses!" then the camera pans over and we see that Johnny’s ever-present shades have been knocked off, too, and he’s crying, "My glasses! My glasses! I CAN’T BE SEEN without my glasses!"

Classic!

Amazing what you can do with the passive voice.

I just hope they release the rest of the series.

I can’t wait to watch the episode where Johnny runs for mayor against a ham sandwich and the ham sandwich is ahead in the polls.