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Saturday, January 01, 2005
Santa Cruz
New Year's Day, 2005  
posted by gbarto at 10:46 PM
Friday, December 31, 2004
Instapundit's been music blogging. He makes mention of Delerium's Chimera. Good taste. For new-age/pop to blog to, drive to or kill an afternoon to, it can't be beat. As a matter of fact, I just finished listening to "Stopwatch Hearts," from the second disc in the set.
posted by gbarto at 11:00 PM
For all the folks on the East Coast (as we post) and for everyone else as the hours roll by...
posted by gbarto at 8:53 PM
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Went over to Hewitt's place, started following links from page to page and encountered much bloggy goodness. With something like a dozen windows open, I thought I'd pass along some of the best, most interesting and most alarming so that I'll remember where it is and you can enjoy. Here we go:
The other day, Hewitt posted a list of questions journalists and opinion writers should have to answer to know where they're coming from. The TurkeyBlog answered here.
Siflay Hraka also answered, along with rounding up other people's responses here.
One of those people, over at Pajama Pundits, didn't much care for Hugh's bit, but played along. I'll agree that the questions and the simple answers they seem to call for don't do much to draw out the larger, more complex person behind the answers. But that doesn't mean they're not useful. They do provide something of a snapshot. For example, by having gay marriage, late term abortion and the votes, you get a feeling for whether the person is conservative, liberal or libertarian. With respect to the MSM, you'd get a good feel for whether you were talking to someone who toed the line on liberal orthodoxy or who had a few quirks that would let you know whether you might find something unexpected in their writing every now and again. Throw in welfare reform and tax cuts and throw out the president's question and I think you'd get even more out of this.
Visiting some of the other respondents, I found out three interesting/frightening bits about the tsunami:
Fresh bilge has this post on how seismic events lead to other seismic events, like volcano eruptions, along with the note that Barren Island has started spewing. And then, there's this bit on death tolls going as high as 400,000, that post launched by a Drudge headline.
And Shaking Spears has this post on the possibility that the animals might just be smarter than us. In Sri Lanka, it appears, most of the animals took cover before everything went to hell.
And now, with four windows closed, we'll close this post.
posted by gbarto at 11:23 PM
Cicero is talking up a religio-philosophical storm, including this post in which he asks:Given that God can do miracles, (a) are there grounds for saying in a general way whether or not he would do miracles and, (b) supposing he would, are there general factors that would help us sort out the real thing from lies, hoaxes, honest mistakes, the meddling of aliens with a sense of humor, etc.? He goes on to note that while many other issues regarding miracles get debated, nobody seems to address these two. The answer to the second question, at least, is "no." I suspect it's the answer to the first as well.
Here's the problem and the paradox that explains it all in rendering it inexplicable (who was it who said that anything worth knowing can't be taught?): Basically, it goes like this. Physicists disagree on how many dimensions there are, with even level-headed ones coming up with numbers in the twenties. From the vantage point of mortals, though, there are four. Those are, of course, the three we inhabit in space along with a timeline along which we are confined to stumbling forward. If you operate according to the human senses, that fourth one really stands out. That's because we can only go one way along that axis, whereas we can go two directions along all the other axes.
Mathematically, going two minutes forward in time and two feet forward in space are not remarkably different things. They're both little hops in which our molecular groupings, at bottom energy clusters, skitter along the grid and wind up slightly reformed and slightly displaced. What makes humans unusual (perhaps with a few of the other higher animals) is that the molecular groupings can be changed a great deal as we move along the axes but still be the same thing because of something ineffable that makes them what they are, namely personalities or souls.
Where God stands in all this, of course, is that He is of it, with it and the thing itself, and always has been: In the beginning was the word, and the word was God and the word was with God... Which means, if the world is one big, multidimensional edifice, His is the reason which created and organized and still creates and organizes it. Here's the tricky part: Can He see the whole thing at once? We can't. Along the fourth axis, we can only see one room at a time and we don't even get to pick which room. But God's ability to see all or part or all or a part of His choosing determines, in its perverse way, whether there's free will granted us as we march from room to room on the time axis or whether, because He can look at us in a room we won't reach for twenty years and see what we're doing there, if it's all predestined. How He chooses to observe the world He has created, then, determines how this all works out, and that's up to Him. All I'm doing is offering my best guess of how free will and predestination reconcile.
If you're still with me - and God help you if you are... I got lost after the second paragraph - there is a point this is leading to, and that is the question of miracles. A miracle is a thing to wonder or marvel at, presumably because it was caused by forces quite out of the ordinary. In its own way, that defines the whole of the universe, a wonder to behold and full of such stuff as we dare not dream. All we see is - at least by the book I was raised on - the stuff of divine creation, ultimately. When one reads of the 20 day old baby found safe upon a floating matress in the tsunami's wake, one gets the feeling that some of that divinity is still floating around. The larger question, the one the Catholics in their sainthood evaluations are especially trying to flush out, then, is not where God's hand is in all this, but where He has reached in a made a small adjustment contrary to what we'd normally expect. Where the little rooms I've spoken of have gotten their furniture rearranged after the whole mess was first put up. Considered in this way, there is a good definition of a miracle: it is a thing that should not have happened but did for reasons we cannot explain. Figuring out an origin, likewise, is an exercise in silliness for whatever created it stems first from the Creator. If space aliens want to cure cancer or turn the Statue of Liberty pink, they still need divine permission at one level or another. Which means the answers to Cicero's questions are yes, and yes.
Looking at the clock, I see the hour is late. Looking at the paragraphs above, I see I've offered two completely contradictory answers to worthy questions, and done so starting with the same points of departure. Fortunately, it is probably my premises that are flawed, rather than the very notion of logic. In other words, a wash, a mishmash, a bit of conclusive inconclusivity. In my experience, that makes it perfectly good religio-philosophizing, since if things could be conclusively shown we wouldn't need faith.
On a side note, does the tolle, legge passage from Augustine's Confessions, along with Augustine's canonization, mean the Catholic church sanctions bibliomancy? How about God? And are Augustine's works less sacred if the tolle, legge bit resulted from sunstroke and luck than if God actually sent word that it was time to do some reading? Or is the moment one within a multidimensional edifice of divine creation, rendering the question moot because everything is a miracle, with this whole argument being centered less on how the divine creates than on how and what the mortal perceives?
By the way, if the above were an exam question, I'd deduct 20 points from every essay that suggested that if everything is a miracle, nothing is a miracle.
posted by gbarto at 1:30 AM
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Try to remember...
The headline on AOL was "Law & Order star dies," and one quickly guessed that it was Jerry Orbach, the old guy, as it were. I'd only seen about four episodes, all from the period when he was partnered with Chris Noth (Kerri's Mr. Big on Sex and the City), but had a kindly disposition toward him when I saw him channel surfing. It wasn't until seeing the articles that I realized where I knew the name from.
Jerry Orbach was the original El Gallo in the Fantasticks, the guy who sings "Try to remember" and who teaches the young man and young woman enough about life that they're finally, really ready to start one together. Everybody knows the "Try to remember" bit, but the sharpest songs are probably the Rape Ballet and Round and Round/We'll Just Dance - in which he shows the young girl the good, the bad and the ugly of the world. Just my opinion of course. At any rate, let us assume the taking of one final bow by a legendary performer as we bid farewell to Jerry Orbach.
posted by gbarto at 11:52 PM
How to help...
That mighty font of information, Instapundit, has links to places for donating to the tsunami relief effort.
Amazon has a fund set up for donation to the Red Cross. You'll note we have a link on top in the left hand bar for that one. Last I checked, by the way, it had raised a little better than $2M from 37,000 people.
Meanwhile, both Hugh Hewitt and Tim Blair are recommending WorldVision. If you'd like to donate other than through the Red Cross, click the name for their page.
posted by gbarto at 11:16 AM
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
The Belmont Club has an interesting post on the need for better warning systems. In it, Wretchard notes:The real challenge is not so much to create a new dedicated network of staring systems against known threats but to tie current sensors to systems which are capable of cognition. The most valuable survival asset is situational awareness -- the ability to recognize threats you have never seen before and respond in an evolving manner -- and that capability has not yet come to the world as a whole. The first sentence is problematic. The second is genius. The problem with Wretchard's idea is that cognition is quite a tricky mess and figuring out what's a problem and what isn't requires a peculiar sort of judgment that I'm not sure can be programmed. Consider: You're in a large public building. All of a sudden, 30 people leap up and start running through the crowd, indifferent to who they bump or jostle. A riot? A terrorist act? Nope, the flight to Minneapolis just got moved from gate A6 to gate B4. Across town, a crowd is gathered around a black man screaming at them to go away. The closer they come, the more he kicks and punches. A lynch mob? A racist attack? Or a schizophrenic having a seizure? The only way to know is "situational awareness."
Wretchard is right on one count, and it's a big one. Situational awareness is key, but it is unevenly distributed. As I wrote yesterday, I've lived in California for about two years and am under the impression that we might have a tsunami warning system. I have no idea, however, how that system works, how the warning is issued, or what I am supposed to do according to the civil planners. However, having seen the news this week, I have a much better idea how to respond, what to watch for and what to worry about. Intellectually, I know that even tidal waves take time to move across large masses of water, but until I read the news this week, I'd never considered the idea that you could have up to two hours to take cover from an imminent tidal wave. Worldwide, situational awareness about tidal waves has increased a great deal. As a consequence, human beings know more not just about tidal waves, but about sudden floods, potential repercussions of earthquakes and more. The news is reporting that on top of the 55,000 killed in the actual event, many more will die in resultant epidemics. As the gruesome details roll in, I trust that our situational awareness of dealing with corpses, backed up sanitation systems and more will increase too. And as with the folks who took down Flight 93, the result will be populations that can deal not only with old situations but who can evaluate and respond to completely new ones.
Still, there is a fundamental problem with setting up warning systems with built in cognition, and it is this: There's only one model, and it's not as good as we'd like to think. The model is, of course, us. And it did a helluva job with the folks on Flight 93, for example. But, how many hours a week are spent evaluating slight moves in the stock market that turn out to be so much white noise? How many hours a week are spent worrying that the clipped tone in which the boss said good morning indicated that you're on his sh-t list - when in fact he was distracted because his wife was mad that he missed his daughter's ballet recital last night...? How many hours are spent waiting for that parking spot near the door that wasn't opening up after all?
Wretchard would have it right if he indicated it would be really cool if we could come up with a warning system with cognition that could get these things right. I think it would be neat if when I hung up the phone from a cranky customer, the other line would ring and a little computer voice would say, don't worry about him, he couldn't "perform" last night and needed to make a fuss to feel manly. But, it ain't gonna happen, and when we go from talking about what would be nice and seeing what we stumble across to talking about "needing" the stuff of a fail-safe world, we're in twilight zone territory.
Life is supposed to have risk, or we'd all live forever and do some very bad stuff as we lived it. And wake up calls about the precariousness of our existence, whether from the dark side of our own race or the vicissitudes of life as directed by Mother Nature are a thing with which we will have to deal from time to time. We are getting better and better at screening for them, which makes us all the more shocked when things go wrong, but things will go wrong and the best thing we can do in response is to cultivate that most useful situational awareness of all: the realization that we are, after all, individual and mortal, and that the preservation of life and soul alike rests finally not with government planners making life foolproof, but with our own willingness to keep our eyes and ears open to what has happened and to contemplate how we, individually, would choose to act in similar situations.
posted by gbarto at 11:59 PM
Monday, December 27, 2004
Hewitt thinks newspaper subscribers have a right to know who they're reading so they can discount for biases. He notes that we in the blogosphere are pretty open about our biases, which means you know what to make of our analysis. But just to be clear, here's my profile:
For whom did you vote for president in the past five elections? Bush, Dole, Bush, Bush (too young to vote in '88)
Do you attend church regularly and if so, in which denomination? irregularly, UCC
Do you believe that the late-term abortion procedure known as partial birth abortion should be legal? no
Do you believe same sex marriage ought to be legal? yes
Did you support the invasion of Iraq? yes
Do you support drilling in ANWR? damn straight
While we're talking about Hugh, I'd love to plug his new book, but I haven't read it, inasmuch as it's not actually out. Still, his section on blogs in If It's Not Close... revealed a man who knows a thing or two about the blogosphere, and Instantman says it's good stuff. So get ahead of the crowd and click the link in the upper left hand corner. If you don't, you'll be kicking yourself the third week of January when you're still waiting for yours.
posted by gbarto at 5:43 PM
Yushchenko Declares Victory
And it looks like this time, the declaration is intended to highlight what the ballots reveal, not hide it. This is a bad day for Putin, of course, and a bad day all those who pooh-poohed Yushchenko as an American puppet with declarations to the effect that such an election was good enough to affirm Castro's rule, it ought to be good enough to affirm a pro-Soviet authoritarians.
The real focus, though, should be on who this is a good day for. It is a good day for those who view the will of the people as paramount and voting a process for determining it, not a good in its own right. It's a great day for those who want to see Eastern Europe become more than a satellite of either the EU or Russia (both of which had major actors who blew major calls). And it's a fantastic day for Ukrainians, even those whose candidate lost, in that it is finally assured, at least for a moment, that the power of governance is less a thing to be wielded over them than a thing they, themselves, wield.
Bravo to those who stood with the Ukrainian people in calling for real elections. And let us offer congratulations and sympathy to Mr. Yushchenko, who has won a hard fought victory and for his reward faces the still harder work of justifying his followers' faith in him while conciliating those who so opposed him. A big challenge awaits, one that he alone can't meet. But with the aid of his countryman, who knows? The Bay Area is even slowly accepting Bush's win, so anything's possible.
posted by gbarto at 4:58 PM
Tsunami Death Toll Nears 24,000
(from FoxNews)
It is simply amazing the kind of force Mother Nature can work up when things get out of synch. There are, of course, questions about whether warnings could have been delivered better, but I think that even the first world would have had a hell of a time with this.
I was a bit surprised by the declaration (reprinted on Instapundit yesterday) about responsible nations having warning systems in place. I've lived in California close to two years and could not tell you if he have a warning system for tsunamis, how it works or what to do. My first impulse would be to head for home, not because of any sentimental reasons but because I live about 5,000 feet above sea level three-quarters of the way up a good sized mountain in the Sierra Azul range and you can't get much further inland without actually going through the mountains into the Central Valley (where Gary Condit and Scott Peterson lurk, so how scary is that!). Whether such a course was wise or stupid depends on whether the mountain joined in the tumble or stood against it. The house I live in is over a hundred years old, so I'm hoping we're on a pretty solid rock.
Anyway, my point is that tsunamis are not like fires, hurricaines or even tornadoes. They come rarely and require very rapid responses from people who are not really prepared for them. Should we be? With 24,000 dead, it's hard to say "no," but who was writing about the need for better tsunami warning systems last week? Anybody not in the tsunami response biz? Not likely.
Like 9/11, there are certain things that come out of the blue. In retrospect, there are plenty of fingers to point about warning signs missed, officials who should have done more and so on. And when you're done, you discover that the people who were the most closely connected to the thing were muttering about nameless fears. But until you have a 9/11 or a Sumatra, these dangers don't gain enough traction in the public consciousness for effective civil action to be possible. After all, if every person who was deeply concerned about the lack of attention to his/her area of expertise were listened to, our kids would be doing math, English, foreign language and science 24 hours a day each, our cars would be made of nerf and have governors limiting them to five miles per hour and then our kids would die from fatigue while heart attack victims perished unable to get to a defibrillator in time.
Now is a time to notice what we can do better next time. This does, of course, involve figuring out what was done and where it went wrong. But the emphasis must be on the future, not the past. Every one of these things brings out an ugly sort of person who is deeply wounded and personally affronted that the guvmint and the broader society didn't make life perfect, perfectly safe and preferably at no cost. It also brings out the failed heroes who tried so hard to save us but were thwarted by their uncaring superiors. But at the end of it all, the uncaring superiors are a broader public that can only think about so many threats and pay so much in taxes before they are safer than they can afford to be, mentally, emotionally and fiscally. And the heroes uncaring superiors are, however much they aspire to be otherwise, underlings both of ours and of a universe of amazing complexity.
In the next few months, there will be a lot of talk about what tsunami warning systems can do, how many lives they can save and why it was so bad of governmental and other authorities not to have done more to start with. Before we join in the orgy of recriminations, we need to ask ourselves, for example, whether six months ago we would not have been among those leery of spending big bucks on some fantastic tsunami warning system even as the children's hospital down the street was closed for lack of funds. A week ago, tsunamis were not a big priority. Not for me, not for you, not for India nor Indonesia. If only we'd known... but we didn't, not enough of us to create a social movement to be better prepared for tsunamis at any rate. Such is life.
And so the TurkeyBlog sends out prayers for the lost, for the survivors, for those who have lost loved ones. And especially prayers for those to whom we look for our safety, forever called upon to have been better prepared for the last unforseeable disaster, to be alert to the next unforseeable disaster and to do it all in such a way that we're prepared for everything without becoming so fearful of life's dangers that we can't do anything. Glad I'm not in that job.
In the meantime, if you want to do the best thing possible, you can help those who have found themselves on fate's bad side this time. Dan Drezner has links to places to help (link found at Instapundit).
posted by gbarto at 4:05 PM
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Looking at the latest from the Belmont Club on how the AP operates and why it does such a good job of getting pics of terrorists in action, I am reminded of a problem I've pointed out before:
The problem with writing off bloggers is that they are not merely a threat to lazy, ideology driven reporting; they are also among the most serious consumers of news. From tv to magazines to newspapers, it's all about the eyeballs. But for those eyeballs to have value, they have to look. Check the bin at your local Starbucks. You'll discover tons of newspapers complete and untouched except for the sports, business and the comics/puzzle. AP thinks it's enlightening the world. In fact, it's providing a wrapper so that if you spill your coffee, you can still do your puzzle and find out how the Knicks did last night. All AP does for a lot of people is provide that one picture.
So, who reads the stuff that AP writes? The kind of people who blog, and the kind of people who read blogs. Who pays attention to much more than the pictures? Few moreso than the bloggers.
People who run newspapers aren't stupid. A lot of them already know that people read the sports and comics and use the rest to wrap their fish (or whatever). That's why the front section of a paper is increasingly wire reports. Not because the wires are good, but because there's no budget to create content special content that people aren't going to read anyway. This is also why celeb journalism is going nuts on television while "serious" - read piously liberal - programming is disappearing. Nobody cares.
In the image wars, AP, AFP and Reuters have been doing themselves a major disservice. A while back, National Review writers, starting - I think - with John O'Sullivan had a mini-forum about how it was no longer necessary to read the Times. Given the election results, people saw AP's photos and voted for Bush anyway. But who read the stories that went with the photos? I know bloggers do, because they tear them apart on a regular basis. But in cafés, restaurants, even bookstores, I rarely hear anyone talk about what they read in the newspaper. How long before the smart papers become American versions of France-Soir: lots of pictures, lots of captions, few actual stories. And what happens to the journalists.
Bottom line: The blogosphere loves the MSM. We read it, inspect it, rip it apart, discuss it, link it. If you want to find someone who actually cares what they write about in the papers, find yourself a blogger. He may hate the MSM, because it should do better, but he loves the idea of having something to learn from, point to and use as a point of departure for thinking about the world. Who else fits that description? A decade around universities convinces me it's not professors or students. Ordinary folks? Only to see who got picked up for DUI and if they've fired the home team's coach yet. Those who actually read the papers are a pretty small demographic, and the easiest way to locate it is not to run focus groups but to check out the characteristics of those who are actually writing back. Which makes it idiotic for the AP to think it has an educational mission of the sort it invokes when it snipes at the heels of the blogosphere. Those who read the newspaper are aware of a need to know more about the world or they wouldn't buy the damn thing. Meaning that the newspapers, and all the others, need to start cleaning up their acts or admitting their biases and more seriously aiming for the partisans' whose causes they not so secretly espouse.
Incidentally, this post takes part of its inspiration from a very apolitical place: Steven Den Beste's Chizumatic site. On the site, we find some definitions of anime terms, including this, from the Yale Anime's 100 most important anime words:
3. aite- opponent. Be careful, the word has many applications that are counter-intuitive. A more literal reading of the characters would be "the one whom I must face." As a result, the word can also refer to one's dancing partner or the person whom you are addressing in a two-person conversation.
This, I think, defines the blogosphere and the MSM well in relation to one another. When we face each other, the result is quality reporting and interesting commentary. When we don't, the result is journalistic sludge and bloggy silliness. So, onward bloggers! Hold AP to their duty. It'll make for better reading and better thinking all round.
posted by gbarto at 2:08 PM
Speaking of divas…
The Phantom of the Opera and Callas
In the last two weeks, we’ve gotten two movies tangled up in the opera and the celebrated diva.
The Phantom of the Opera is the screen adaptation of the stage production of the novel which is connected to legend. Which gives us how many levels of mise-en-abyme (self-referential stories within stories)? The only thing for certain is that if they release a “Making of Phantom: the Movie,” there will be sufficiently concentrated inter-reflection and inter-refraction to set afire a small city.
The novel, the first serious Phantom production, was by Gaston Leroux, a journalist and mystery writer whose stories revealed the logical explanations behind the seemingly inexplicable. The Phantom of the Opera was no exception, showing how the Opera Ghost really created his stunning visual effects and used his knowledge of the catacombs to make himself a legend for his own purposes.
In Lloyd Webber’s stage production, the Phantom became a little more magical. We know the Phantom is just a man, but that doesn’t prevent him from keeping us on edge. Even as audiences discuss how the chandelier falls, how the water of the underground lake is simulated and more, they watch, breathless.
When Phantom came to the screen, it should have been something of a culmination, with the magic of special effects and the power of editing merging to create a seamless masterpiece of theater. Well, not quite. Surprisingly, the movie makes the Phantom more human than the musical. Unfortunately, it’s through a plot device – he suffered horrible abuse as a child – that is made just a little too compelling. Leroux’s Phantom, too, became a spiritual monster because of the treatment he received due to his disfigurement. But there was a little less of the “awwwwwwwwww” sentimentality to it, a little more of a call for society to do better or face the consequences.
There is a second problem with the Phantom – his casting. Give Gerard Butler credit: For someone who is not a trained singer, he didn’t do too badly. For the role as it was written and cast, he acted it well and convincingly. But 1) he’s too young. If, as the script makes clear, the Phantom is just a man, why does he look (on the undisfigured side, anyway) ten or twenty years younger than any of his contemporaries? 2) As I mentioned, Butler is not a trained singer. His voice isn’t bad, nor is his range. But his range is incomplete, and the effect is to make him sound at times like a teenage boy: one minute falsetto, the next minute deep, without the change following either the phrasing or the sense of what’s being sung. Not his fault, of course, but the casting director should have been alert to potential problems.
What’s right with Phantom: The Movie? In two words, Emmy Rossum. Only 18, Rossum is hopelessly gifted and has already done almost everything her role required. She’s sung in operas, acted on the stage and screen, danced. The whole nine yards. She is, of course, exquisitely pretty, and the result is that she is at times a bit more unearthly than the Phantom. This is probably what Lloyd Webber had in mind when he created the role for his ex-wife, Sarah Brightman (we’ll refrain from the usual unkind comments as to whether this makes Lloyd Webber the Phantom). In any case, there is a certain believability factor here: One can imagine even an opera company going a little bit crazy over this ingenue.
Another thing this Phantom got right was to give a little more heft to Raoul, Christine’s love. While he is still far from a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type, he battles with swords, dives blindly down dangerous passages and gives the general impression that something other than mere sentimentality might have stimulated Christine’s affections.
Perhaps the most inspiring casting was that of Simon Callow in the role of M. André and Ciaran Hinds as M. Firmin. André and Firmin are the new owners of the Opéra, bought with the proceeds of their junk – er, scrap metal – business. The two play the paysan parvenu to the hilt, Firmin showing that he knows he’s out of his depth while André struggles to convince everyone of just how dedicated he is to the arts. Some have complained that their act is a trifle vaudevillean. Nonsense, it is the essence of vaudeville and a welcome interlude to high melodrama that might otherwise become unsustainable.
Minnie Driver is excellent as Carlotta and the person who provides her singing voice (Margaret Reece) handles the tonalities as well as Driver does the diva’s over the top histrionics. The lighter side of the Phantom is at its finest when la Carlotta and the owners get the chance to play off one another.
Lastly, one must mention Jennifer Ellison’s Meg Giry, who is no longer little Meg, young admirer of the blossoming Christine, but now Christine’s age and her number one gal pal. The change jars at first, but for the most part works. However, there is the occasional moment where Meg’s language seems rather deferential alongside her older, less girlish mannerisms and when she’s dancing, she has the same knowing winks and gestures as the other dancers. Both little Meg and the slightly older Meg are sweet, but they should have picked one and stuck with it.
Phantom fans will complain about changes in the staging, in the script, in the way the casting was done. I know, being one of them. Still, this is a pretty good production. The one surprise is that Joel Schumacher, who made a rather dark and gothic Batman has a fairly light and airy Phantom. Scenes with Christine, of course, call for the ethereal, but the Phantom’s lair could have been a little darker and danker. Still, a very nice show and a wonderful way to be bowled over for an afternoon.
As for Callas… we’re back in the land of meta-art. This time we’ve got a movie about making a movie about an opera that stars a legend. Zeffirelli’s production, however, is more real for its admitted unreality. The plot: Friends of Maria Callas, concerned about her decline after she lost Onassis, come up with a scheme to bring her back alive and give her art one last run. Specifically, they’re going to do a series of movies of the operas in which she starred. And since she can no longer sing, they’ll use new video editing technology so that they can put the old voice with the new pictures.
La Callas is, of course, properly scornful of this half-baked idea, until she realizes she has nothing else to do and would really like to be somebody again. But she has one stipulation: She will only do Carmen, since she has never actually performed the role, only sung it. Any other production would be pure fakery, an attempt to recapture something forever lost. But Carmen would involve the creation of something new – her visual presentation of the role.
The story is sweet and very well done. Jeremy Irons does a fine job as an aging agent/producer making a bid for immortality, in lieu of being the manager of last week’s hit sensation. And Fanny Ardant makes a very good Callas. The film is at its best when these two get together and start thinking about life and art.
For magic and mystery, the Phantom of the Opera is the show to see. But for beautiful music and operatic melodrama grounded in something closer to reality, Callas is wonderful.
posted by gbarto at 1:20 PM
Thousands Dead After Earthquake in Southeast Asia
Mother Nature in rare and awful form. It looks like, unlike usual disasters, the third world and first world are on pretty much equal footing here, with India (borderline first world) as hard hit as some far from advanced areas. Bottom line, there's not much to do in the face of a wall of water short of praying. (Update: Instapundit has some info suggesting this is not the case, that the first world would have done better if it had taken the risk of tidal waves seriously. Of course, we could also reduce speed limits to five miles per hour for a zero traffic fatality rate; it's hard to know where the line between "doing enough" and being a safety loonie is to be drawn.)
Post-disaster, of course, that will change. One would not like to be living, for example, on Sri Lanka, where whether soldiers are coming to rescue you depends on your being in an area where they have enough control to move freely.
The Red Cross is of course preparing to go on scene. Their efforts, true, are a mixed bag in war-torn areas: like reporters, they tend to be awfully nice to the bad guys, lest their efforts be hindered by these, but awfully unpleasant for the good guys who will let them do their work in spite of their bad attitude. However, they usually do some good in these areas. No specific funds yet, as far as I can see, but I did stumble across this:
Red Cross Sudanese refugees fund
You'll have to decide what you think of their work in that particular war-torn area.
posted by gbarto at 10:05 AM
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