Dangling Conversations

Posted 23 Jan, 2006 at 22:04 by matt in /World | Permanent link

As of this writing, it's looking like the Conservatives have a small plurality in the federal election, and hence we'll have a new minority government. This is not one of my preferred outcomes -- I don't like the Conservatives in their current incarnation, and distrust a lot of the ideas they've been tossing about -- but it could have been a lot worse.

What happens now? Presumably the Conservatives aren't going to form a coalition with the Liberals; the NDPs, even if they could get along, aren't large enough to take a majority; so if the Conservatives are going to make a formal coalition, it's got to be with the Bloc. That seems unlikely, both because the Conservatives had a stronger showing in Quebec than expected -- and hence represent a real competition to the BQ -- and because of the rhetoric that Harper was tossing around back in December. The theory, then, is that the Conservatives will try to get support on an issue-by-issue basis, trusting that the other parties won't want to rock the boat and plunge Canada into another election anytime soon.

Reactions?

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Posted 18 Jan, 2006 at 16:07 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

In case you're on the look-out for "speculative fiction"...

• Bellwether by Connie Willis. This is my second attempt at Willis' work -- I hated The Doomsday Book, finding it tedious and full of characters I just couldn't bring myself to care about -- and this one went a lot better. Lots of neat bits about fads and the nature of scientific discovery, with not terribly inaccurate hints of chaos theory dropped in the mix.
• Idlewild and Edenborn by Nick Sagan. Neil Gaiman characterized the first of these as "Zelazny's Amber meets the Matrix", and there's certainly elements of both. (Idlewild starts with the first-person narrator waking up without any memory of who he is, which is pretty blatant as homage goes.) I didn't like how Idlewild ended, but the sequel puts it into some perspective. There's a lot of good world-building here, and some clever auctorial games.
• The Alera Codex by Jim Butcher. I came to these books by familiarity with the author's noir-fantasy series The Dresden Files, which I heartily recommend to anyone else who likes noir-fantasy. (If you have no idea what I mean by that, then check them out, or Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, to see what I'm talking about.) I'm not as fond of these books -- which are more high-fantasy in tone, but with a good richness of plot and political complexity; think Guy Gavriel Kay, or Jacqueline Carey, or Robin Hobb -- but they're still definitely worth reading.

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Posted 17 Jan, 2006 at 16:39 by matt in /System | Permanent link

You'll notice in the sidebar that we've got a new author on the site: Lisa, whose name has probably come up before in the context of being Brent's wife. Welcome!

I wanted to say that this makes Lisa our seventh author, but since our next-most-recent addition (Sky) has yet to bother posting anything, if she's quick I'm guessing she'll actually be the sixth. Although from another point of view she's the eighth, since there's a guy named Jason who asked to be put in the system over a year ago (and was; I even announced it) but who hasn't been heard from since. Or at least, not by me. It was maybe a little drunk out when he made the request, so I'm guessing he forgot all about it.

Anyway. Lisa, world; world, Lisa. Huzzah!

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Posted 12 Jan, 2006 at 14:22 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

For whatever reason, it seems like I can't go more than a fortnight or so without reading someone or other talking about The DaVinci Code; most recently, a thread on Crooked Timber about Judas revisionism. I've not read the book, and really have little inclination to read the book, but maybe some of you have.

If so, could you tell me what that book has that Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco does not? Or is there no serious comparison to be had between the books? Is Dan Brown just another of Belbo's lunatics?

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Posted 04 Jan, 2006 at 22:46 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Wow, it's been pretty quiet around these parts of late.

Caught a matinée of The Producers today with my Lovely Former Assistant. (Or Former Lovely Assistant? She's not my assistant anymore, but retains her loveliness.) As we were discussing the film afterwards, she told me that they'd deliberately tried to make it as close to the stage production as they could -- that is, they weren't making a movie of the show so much as packaging up the show onto film, if you follow me.

This shows in a number of ways. The ones that stood out for me were in the lighting choices, since that's something that I know a (very) little bit about; several scenes were lit in a very theatrical way, with no attempt at naturalism. (For instance, in one case a song starts and a totally white room is now lit in blue. Why? Not because of any external events -- the sun hasn't gone down or anything -- but because that's really what the song calls for.) Likewise the choreography, and the costumes, and -- well, and nearly everything. Everything was stylised. This isn't terrifically unusual in live theatre, where everything is stylised to some degree or another and abstract designs are fairly common; it's a little unusual in modern popular film.

Compare and contrast with the movie of Rent that came out a month or so ago. The Rent movie is very much a movie; while still a musical in conception, the producers of the film took full advantage of their medium. So you get Mark singing part of the opening number while cycling through the streets of New York, and it works very well, and it's an effect that would be nearly impossible to achieve on stage. Most of the rest of the staging is changed similarly; you get a lot of moving cameras, a lot of big outdoor scenes, very naturalistic lighting, etc.

Rent is conceived as a movie which happens to be based on a musical; like most movies in mainstream American cinema, it embraces an aesthetic of realism because realism -- concreteness, naturalism -- is something that film adapts to very easily. The Producers is a theatrical musical on film, and rejects bog-standard realism in favour of the theatrical experience of abstraction. (This isn't the only alternative to realism, of course; Sin City creates a different kind of abstraction, melding the comic-book aesthetic of its source with a kind of hyper-realism, and Naked Lunch creates a kind of surrealistic nightmare. But it seems that realism is the default setting for American cinema; to some extent, we even judge animated film based on how close it comes to realism.)

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