Superior Saturday!
Oh baby!
Garth Nix reading the prologue to Superior Saturday. At last! I’ve been looking forward to this book for, oh, a year? However long it’s been since Lady Friday came out. What makes it sad is that as soon as I get hold of it… it will be read, in a couple of hours, and then I’ll have to wait a year or so until finally Lord Sunday, and I get completion. I hope.
Anyway: June this year! That’s not really that long away!
Call yourself a space fan?
If you do, and haven’t either seen In the Shadow of the Moon or made plans to do so – hang your head in shame!
Seriously, one of the best things I’ve seen at the cinema in ages. Ages and ages.
Take as many of the Apollo astronauts as are still alive (as far as I can tell; except Armstrong, who has apparently been basically a recluse almost since we got back to terra cognita), and make them talk about what it was like becoming an astronaut, flying in space and to the moon, and being home again. Splice this with genuine, rarely-seen before footage, and you have a spellbinding nearly-two-hour movie.
There’s no interviewer shown, so it’s just the blokes in their own words (and it is, by its nature, very blokey – there’s maybe two women who speak in the whole thing, and they’re in interviews from the sixties). All the men are given identical, nondescript backgrounds behind them – and they’re all only shown from the torso up. It’s almost like they’re floating in space, or outside of real time – which sounds daft, but bear with me: they’re utterly divorced from now – they only exist with relation to the space programme; they don’t interact with anyone except the viewer; and there’s nothing to date the film, except their clothes which are utterly nondescript as well. It was a fascinating way of compiling them.
The footage shown… well, I had to watch until the end of the credits to make sure it was all genuine NASA footage, with no CGI, because I’ve got a bit cynical in my old age. But, apparently, it was all real – and it was awesome. And so much that I, at least, had never seen! Views looking out as the stages separate – the moon buggies – that Earth-rise… I got goosebumps at several points, it was all just so beautiful. And there’s real audio too – Armstrong’s famous bit, of course, but also stuff from inside the command module (footage from there, too): it was almost funny listening to Jim Lovell’s voice, because I could almost recite his words along with him c/o Apollo 13. And I really did get goosebumps when they showed the first men who went around the moon – Apollo 8 maybe? – and they read from Genesis: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning — the first day.[1]
Probably the person who was most interesting to listen to was Michael Collins – the poor sucker who got stuck in the Command Module, while Neil and Buzz went walking. He was fascinating, and a great speaker. Eugene Cernan, too, was also great… actually they all were, pretty much.
I cannot stress it enough: if you like this sort of thing, you really should try to see it on the big screen. Yes, it will be OK on DVD – but some of that footage just looks so much more impressive when it’s huge![2]
[1] And then to hear that some woman sued them, when they got back to Earth, for mixing church and state… hilarious!
[2] We sat in the second row, in a tiny little cinema… it was insane, but very cool.
The Great Debate
It was about the most outgoing weekend I’ve had since… oh, Swancon ;]
I really wanted to go to some stuff at the Comedy Festival this year, and the Great Debate seemed like a pretty good bet. (I really wanted to go to the Gala, but it turns out the tix for that are available about six months beforehand, and sell out in, oh, a day or so.) When we bought tickets, there was no info about either the topic or the participants. A couple of days before, I found out that Hamish Blake and Cal Wilson were in it – which I thought boded well, because I really like Hamish… Cal I’m indifferent towards.
It’s a very awesome venue, the Melbourne Town Hall: lots of seating but still not enormous; we were in the front row of the circle, and right in the middle which was cool: I worried for a bit that there would be someone in front of us, at the sound desk, but it turned out OK. The compere was Corinne Grant, whom I generally enjoy, and she was very funny. The other funny thing, which was also a bit disturbing, was that we could see the tele-prompter from where we sat: I was very worried that the whole lot would be like that, but only Corinne’s between-participant bits were prompted (and were, frankly, dull).
I was hugely excited when I saw that Paul McDermott was on the bill! I’ve loved Paul since way back on Good News Week and the greatest ever breakfast radio team (Paul and Mikey Robbins. If you don’t remember, you’re too young or weren’t listening to a good station). Sadly, he was probably my least favourite for the whole night. Just… not that funny. *sigh* Hamish, though, was brilliant, as was Stephen K Amos; Julia Morris has impeccable timing; and Patton Oswalt was pretty good too. Cal, as expected, left me a bit flat.
Overall, it was a good night! Oh yes – the topic was “That reality is better on TV.” Which was a very appropriate topic – the cameras and all… it was delightfully meta-something.
James Bond and the MSO
We spent Saturday night at the Pops, with the MSO doing James Bond.
It was freaking brilliant. Absolutely overwhelming and hugely enjoyable (despite some bung notes from the main trumpeter… although I just found out yesterday that he had his face smashed in by some random punk last year, so maybe that explains it). They did all of the theme songs, except Die Another Day and A View to a Kill (and Tomorrow Never Dies as the encore, which was good).
The really good bits:
1. Sitting right in front of the double basses, and watching them do their thing – brilliant!
2. Mary Carewe singing “The Man with the Golden Gun” – so trashy, so funny.
3. Realising just how much work the tuba does in the Bond theme itself.
4. Oh look, basically everything except for…
The average bits:
I hadn’t expected there to be a singer, and I had been trying to figure out whether it would make the night better or not to have one. Mary Carewe sang maybe half the songs – a bit less I think. She did some spectacularly well – “Diamonds are Forever” and “Goldeneye” were up there. But I had three issues:
a) She was way too cabaret/musical theatre for my tastes: prancing around, hamming it up.
b) She sang “Live and Let Die” (and is no Paul McCartney, nor Axl Rose!), and “You Know my Name” (and sure isn’t Chris Cornell).
c) For me, she destroyed “The Look of Love” – one of my favourite sappy songs in the whole world. [1]
Also, my love and I had quite contradictory opinions on her costumes: I thought her first dress – a halter-neck affair – was dreadful, unflattering and quite ugly; he thought it was great. The second I thought was stunning – dark silver strapless, which I thought was very flattering, but he thought made her look frumpy! We both agreed that the third dress was lovely, though.
My laugh for the night was from the souvenir brochure. In part, it had this to say:
“With the recent success of the Die Hard, Terminator and Bourne pictures, Bond had to compete with other action heroes.”
Yup, totally with you there… although I’m not convinced that Bond is competing with Terminator for their audience. At any rate, the next sentence reads thus:
“As the Bond series has progressed, contemporary artists such as Wings, Duran Duran, Sheena Easton, A-ha, Gladys Knight and Sheryl Crow have been drafted in to keep up with the times.”
Excuse me while I hold my sides, because I’m laughing so darn hard.
And it was recorded for ABC Classic FM, so I reckon if you looked hard enough you’ll be able to find out when it’s on. In fact, I might do that too….
[1] If you’re confused: it was used in the original Casino Royale, which was a spoof with David Niven in it.
Run for the Kids
So we had a delightful ride down to the Gardens, this morning – my darling came with me, to cheer me on and make sure I didn’t get lost in finding the right place. Fat chance of that – there was a gazillion people standing around. Seriously; there were more than 25000 people, I think, in the race.
We then stood around for a while… which was kind of fun, but also a bit boring after a while.
It was very odd standing in such a huge group to begin with, and to be honest it was quite a pain. There were two groups for the short course, which I did: green and white. Green was for “active and semi-active” runners and joggers; white for slow joggers and walkers. I went in the white group, because I signed up weeks ago and I thought was realistic. I really ought to have been in the green group, and I should have pushed further to the front, too. It was madness to begin – I crossed the starting line 7 minutes or so after it officially began – and it took a while to push through people to get a clear run. And, really, I don’t feel like I got a clear run until maybe the 2km mark. Damned walkers! I was still passing walkers for aaages, and they got in the way for quite a while.
My aim was to complete the run in under 35 min, and to do it continuously. I did manage it in under 35 – only just, and I reckon I can claim a minute or so of time because of the faffing at the start! – but I didn’t quite manage it continuously. I walked for maybe a minute, half way up the heartbreaking hill that is Anderson St; then a minute or so on the other side as well, because I couldn’t catch my breath. Still, I think that’s a fairly good result! I’m pleased.
Now, to be able to do the 8km of a double Tan in a reasonable time…
Amazon eats its young: from an author-friend
You can read more of the gory details over here, but here’s an excerpt:
“By making a just-about-compulsory link with BookSurge (Amazon will continue to list books, apparently, but will turn off the ‘buy’ button), Amazon ensures that small publishers can’t go elsewhere. On top of this, they already demand (and apparently have no intention of changing their demand for) 48% of the published price for any small press books they sell, and they also apparently want small press to pay delivery charges. If publishers don’t do all this, they won’t see their books sold on Amazon. For books not currently listed, publishers will also have to pay a flat fee of $50 a book, just for processing.”
Sounds to me like Amazon is getting even more ambitious, and putting it some cost-cutters that it probably really doesn’t need to.
We love Nazi symbolism, right?
… are you offended yet?
Two bits of symbolism I feel like commenting on:
1. The Swastika
Not, as some people insist on calling it, a “broken cross,” implying some link between Nazism and Christianity; Nazis persecuted Catholics for their religion, too, you know.[1] It’s become about the most enduring symbol of the regime, and if I see my students drawing one (has happened once or twice) I just about hit the roof. But, of course, the Nazis did not invent it: as a symbol it’s been around for centuries, mostly in non-European settings. So I think it’s sad that it got appropriated by the Nazis, and is basically beyond hope of redemption.
2. The Olympic torch relay
Not, as is sometimes presumed, an aspect of the long-dead Greek games that’s been reintroduced for the modern ones. No, instead this is something that was – you guessed it – invented for the Munich games, to look good in Leni Riefenstahl’s movie. Don’t believe me? Mary Beard wrote it, and she’s a Cambridge classics scholar. This, I think, is the most insidious of Hitler’s legacy – neoNazi skinheads are nutters, but everyone turns out for the torch relay, don’t they? (Well, except for objectionable people like me.) We might spout things like cultural appropriation here, as with the swastika, and hope that that makes it better – but we’ve also given the ceremony a pseudo-history to make it seem ok. As an historian, I find that objectionable; as a moral human bean, I find that whole situation repugnant.
[1] Please, please note: I am in no way implying that this was in any way commensurate with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. And I know there are some suggestion that the then-Pope didn’t do as much as he ought to, to help the Jews (and the current Pope, too, seems to have copped a bit of that flak). That’s not the point of this post, though![2]
[2] No, I’m not Catholic; I’m a set in stone, dyed in the wool, Protestant. Again, not the point.
Sunday was good, too
Yeh, overloading on the old blog, ain’t I?
Sunday I did not run. I was tired, and wanted to give my knees a rest – having a room on the first floor, and being terrified of the lifts after hearing about them breaking down all the way back at last year’s natcon, gave the knees quite a workout!
I went to another academic panel, On the Historiographic in the Fantastic. It was primarily about the engagement between history and fantasy. The presenter – whose name I’ve forgotten – made an interesting point to begin with: for a genre proud of transgression, it’s also obsessed with its own categories and delineation. Very true. Anyway – she said fantasy is always engaged with history: using ‘real’ historical stuff, and/or making up its own history. Post-Enlightenment, history came to be posited as rationalist, scientific, positivist, etc – in contradistinction to ‘romance’, myth-making, and so on, which is where fantasy is situated (or has been situated). I wrote down a lot more, but won’t put it here because at least some of it doesn’t make sense to me anymore! – suffice to say all this got me thinking about Geoffrey of Monmouth, and those other ‘historians’ whose works we read today as fantasy. Big crossover there.
After the panel I went to City Church of Christ, which was awesome – a very diverse group of people; the minister preached the gospel loud and clear! It was embarrassing to be from an Anglican church, though; there are some vocal Perth Anglicans who don’t believe in the physical resurrection of Christ which is just, like, stupid (if you’re a Christian).
Got back in time to go to Mark Bould’s talk, which I think I will blog separately because it was so damned cool. Anyway – then lunch with , and onto one of the highlights of the con: Rob Shearman and Ian Mond doing a live commentary on the Dr Who episode Dalek! We got front row seats, and it was fantastic. Had a drink with some friends – went to dinner with Kathryn, “MacDog,” and Matt… sorry we stooged you with the bill for a while there, guys!!
Then… oh then, it was Ditmar time. I won two of them! – well, the Snapshot team and my cohorts and I won one. You can see a full list of winners here. My row was the place to be. And didn’t we just love it!
Then, finally, the mother of all room parties. I don’t know how many people there were over the night – lots – probably 20 or 30 at any one time. Sean provided some mighty fine tunes, and someone else provided The A-Team theme. I kicked everyone out, finally, at about 2am. People keep making a big thing of me doing that, so I’m left wondering: do room parties never get moved on by the room’s inhabitants? Or did I do it in a particularly memorable way?
Saturday #2
So after Dedman came Helen Merrick, who was also fascinating, talking about the science in women’s SF – which is something I’m enthralled by, having been a science-y type at school (I struggled all through year 12 over whether to do science or history at uni… no one told me it was possible to do both!). Anyway, to start with she looked at why women write SF in the first place: that many grew up reading it, and also have a background of science. It also allows women to engage with science, and critique it. There’s apparently been very little research done into the science in female-authored SF. Her take, though, is that the science can be liberating for women; it can be critiqued for social/ethical consequences, as well as critiquing the institution, methodology and hierarchy; and show ways of ‘doing science’ differently. In essence, the talk was Cool, and gave me a list of reading I should do….
Then, I ditched the academic programme, and went off to hear about The New Space Opera. Have I mentioned how much I love space opera? I love it. Anyway – this panel also gave me things I need to read, which is so totally fine. Despite not having any time for reading. Possibly my favourite quote of the entire con was Ken McLeod talking Ian Banks: apparently he said he wrote his Culture novels intending to “conquer the moral high ground for the left.” Yeeah! Anyway, a lot of the panel was more about the panelists talking about their own stuff and why/how it’s space opera, which was a bit of a pain when I hadn’t read any of it. Interestingly, you can make heaps more dough in writing fantasy that in scifi; didn’t know that. The panel did, though, pose an interesting question: can space opera survive modern technology and science? It started amidst the optimism about science of the 1920s and 1930s; can the pessimism of the 00s make us set space opera aside? I wonder whether we’ll keep reading it, but with a nostalgic rather than optimistic view.
Then.. oh my! It was our turn to do a panel! Me, Ben, Alisa, and Jonathan (with Tansy a noticeable absence), talking about that crazy Last Short Story thing. People were there! And asked questions! And seemed genuinely interested in the answers…. There were a few odd comments, but that’s ok. It was far more enjoyable than I had expected.
Another book launch that night… Alisa and Kathryn and I went out dinner after, and I had the hottest prawn and onion salad in the entire world. Followed by a reading from Rob Shearman’s new book Tiny Deaths, which I bought and made him write in and am happy to recommend to people having only heard the two stories that he read at the con. The kids roaming the room were a bit of a pain, though. This was followed by heading back to my room (notice a pattern?), and watching Claire McKenna’s movie Liminal, which I saw last year and wasn’t nearly as good on a computer screen sans speakers. Basically we talked over the whole thing, commentating, which was funny in its own way. Once again, I managed to kick people out at midnight.
Randomly Yours, Alex 