Check that alliteration out! That’s a 5 in a row and 5 out of 7. Don’t try this at home!
Anyway, here’s my weekly post for Times And Seasons, in which I jump into the fracas over (former Power Ranger, current swimwear designer) Jessica Rey and her comments about bikinis, modesty, and empowerment.
This one is definitely less heavy on the Mormon terminology and more universal in scope, although it does address more the concerns of religious (not necessarily Mormon) social liberals and social conservatives. I’m going to turn comments off on this thread, so feel free to weigh in over there if you’d like.
So “sanctity of marriage” is a phrase that almost always means “we’re talking about gay marriage”. But it shouldn’t. There are other fish to fry, and the The Daily Beast has a feature article called The ‘Me, Me, Me’ Wedding serving up a big one: the superficiality and selfishness of America’s bridezilla culture. From the article:
In many pockets of 21st-century America, the idea of the wedding as something communal is anathema—a relic from a bygone era or the realm of the devoutly religious. Nuptials today are defined by your Pinterest board, of which there are a multiplying number of wedding-related ones, three-day destination extravaganzas, and $200 spoons from Michael C. Fina. So, many American weddings have evolved into a fixation with material details, trials of abject devotion by members of the wedding party, and resigned acceptance of bridal crusades for perfection that threaten to crush all in their path. Because, well, you deserve it—it’s your day.
The article also points out that this wedding culture is just a a toxic spawn of conspicuous consumption more generally with this memorable line:
Peggy Olson or Don Draper couldn’t have conceived a better marketing slogan than “This is your day”—the kind of tagline that so deeply, and reliably, influences consumer behavior.
The whole thing is worth reading, both on its own merit and as a reminder that the institution of marriage in the United States has many, many problems.
So this is pretty amazing: if you dress up famous statues in hipster clothing (even those in seemingly ridiculous poses like the one above), you transform them into relatable characters. It’s amazing. I sort of think that it might actually be the closest we can come to seeing these statues the way they were originally perceived by their historical audiences. We tend to think of people from the distant past as being much different, but I figure folks are mostly just folks, and a lot of the same things we care about (e.g. being cool) are pretty constant through society. In any case, these are cool images. Check them out.
It took us about a week of evening viewing, buy my wife and I watched all 15 episodes of the new, fourth season of Arrested Development. I think this Washington Post review does a pretty good job of summarizing what the show has historically done right artistically:
“Arrested Development” was five years ahead of its time. Its meme-ability predated the rise of the meme. Its parodies of 1 percenters and malfeasant corporations were 1,000 news cycles ahead of the subprime mortgage crisis and the Olympic debut of Rafalca. The metastatic third and final network season, which wrapped in early 2006, thumbed its nose at the mundane forces that brought about its demise: modest viewership, fleeing advertisers and fickle TV executives. Each would soon be immaterial to a series’ distribution and survival.
Dan Zak, who wrote the review, then goes on to heap accolades on the newest season, although conceding that it’s not exactly cotton-candy entertainment:
The new 15-episode season of “Arrested Development” is staggering in its ambition, surgical in its execution and diabolical in its conclusion. It’s a chore to watch and a delight to decrypt. Its overwhelmingness contributes to its initial underwhelmingness. But in time, with a moment to reflect, it begins to feel like the fullest and fraughtest expression of its form.
It is, in a perverse way, the “Ulysses” of sitcoms.
George Michael: He was innocent and likable before, but he’s sort of a tool now.
Maybe Zak is right, but the vicious ambition of the show is not what drew me in as a fan in the first place, and so the most recent season missed it’s mark with me.
Everyone knows this man is a grumpy, time-traveling hobbit, right?
[Here there be spoilers!]
Allow me to regale you with a tale of my relationship to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Once upon a time, long, long before most of you who watch Game of Thrones had ever heard of it, I read the first book. I was immediately impressed by Martin’s craft. The man can write, and I would never question that. But what he chose to write really rubbed me the wrong way. Specifically: I felt like the books were engineered to manufacture a sense of realism by deliberately doing horrible things to likable characters. When Ned Stark got executed at the end of the book I set it down, and I’ve never been tempted to pick up another one.
So, when all the Red Wedding stuff started breaking out over Twitter, it took me a few days enough to bother to investigate. When I eventually read a description of what had happened, I felt incredibly vindicated. And it’s not just that Martin killed off more likable characters, but it’s why he does it.
Fiddle Oak is the name of a precocious 14-year old photography / digital manipulator, and his work is fantastic. I found a gallery at demilked (who names these things?) with some fantastic examples.
They are all so good, and I didn’t want to pick the very best ones here, so these are just two that I happened to grab as examples.
Check out the full gallery and, if you’re interested in how the photos were made, Fiddleoak has his own blog where he explains his process.
[This post has no real spoilers for the most recent Star Trek movie, but it does have spoilers for a lot of older Star Trek material as well as World War Z and especially the book version of Ender’s Game.]
Gary Westfahl has an interesting review of the most recent Star Trek movie (which I haven’t seen) at Locus. In it, he laments the fact that recent Star Trek movies have abandoned Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic view of the future:
Essentially, Roddenberry envisioned a future universe in which everybody could get along; intelligent beings might have their differences, but they could still respect each other and strive to resolve their conflicts without resorting to all-out war.
For Westfahl, the first Star Trek movie epitomized this essentially peaceful narrative structure:
[It] was completely congruent with the spirit of the original series: an enormous alien construct approaches Earth and threatens to destroy humanity, but investigation reveals that it is merely being motivated by a confused recollection of instructions that the machine absorbed when it merged with the space probe Voyager, and when it then combines with a human partner, it peacefully leaves Earth to pursue new goals.
Unfortunately, however, this movie was not very commercially successful. It was Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan that breathed new life into the franchise. And it did so by taking an empathy opponent from an earlier episode (Khan) and rendering him purely evil so that he could get blown up at the end and everyone would cheer. For Westfahl, this represents the unfortunate trend towards polarization in modern society, and it’s regrettable that it became the pattern for additional Star Trek movies (including the most recent one). I’m with Westfahl on most of this, but there are two glaring omissions that struck me as extremely puzzling.
This article is totally right: NPR hosts have the best names. I’m pretty much addicted to NPR and have been for years, so it was fun recognizing all of these names and learning about where they come from. And also, quite frankly, just seeing how they are spelled!
First of all: I’m cautiously optimistic. Book adaptations are tough, and this one has been in the works forever. The problem was that they couldn’t get a good script, from what I’ve heard, and for this version Orson Scott Card finally took a hand in writing it himself. That’s risky, but the fact that they delayed it this long makes me hope they were willing to wait for the right script.
Another reason to be optimistic: the actors. Obvously Harrison Ford (as Graff) and Ben Kingsley (as Rackham) are serious stars. But they clearly made a decision to depart from the book a little bit by picking older kids for the children’s parts. In the book, Ender is selected for the Battle School at age 6. Asa Butterfield may be able to pass for younger than his actual age (16), but at 5’10” he’s not going to pass for a kindergartener. And that’s fine: adjusting the story to have older kids makes sense to get more experienced actors. Especially given the violence of the book: Ender kills his first opponent before he even leaves earth when he’s still just 6.
Another major change I noticed has to do with the first war. In the novels, Rackham’s brilliant final defense happens around Saturn, but in the trailer the battles are clearly being fought in Earth’s atmosphere with what look like current-generation fighter jets. So the story has been ratcheted back to be much closer to our timeline (although the actual events of the book happen 70 years after the first war, so we’ve got spaceships by then). I’m not sure what to make of that change. I don’t have anything against it, but I don’t see what is gained either.
As for the rest: the production looks stunning (of course) and so far I’m a huge fan of the sets and costumes. It’s got a really beautiful blend of sort of gritty, hard-sf (check out the muted colors on Ender’s Salamander Army uniform) and then a ton of glossy, bright futurism as well. I love the fusion, and so far I’m very excited by that glimpse into the tone of the movies. The Battleroom looks fantastic!
But it’s definitely too early to be confident. They’re going to have to make major departures from the book to fit this all into one book. After all: it spans several years of Ender’s childhood and several very distinct phases of storytelling, a lot of which involve Ender in almost total isolation. There’s also the fundamental problem that Ender directs the human fleet from a hollowed-out asteroid in our solar system, so none of the space-combat is first-person. It looks like they are getting around that by having Ender use some kind of virtual-reality technology to control the fleet, and that could be a really great way to make more of the narrative visual.
So, like I said, cautious optimistic. There are definitely hurdles to overcome, but the early signs are all mostly positive.
Well this is neat. Juvenile Instructor–a Mormon history blog–has a shout-out to my recent piece for Times And Seasons about Mormons and sci-fi. Edje Jeter notes that Mormons don’t just write sci-fi, they are often the subjects of sci-fi and lists 5 examples. I went ahead and added three more in the comments.
