A Fort Made of Books

Musical Film & Filmic Music

2012-01-14T23:01:00.005-06:00

+++ PHOTOS PENDING (when the anti-SOPA blackout is over) +++

This weekend I went to a brand new, black-and-white silent movie called The Artist, and I saw international opera star Christine Brewer sing Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs in person.

I chose to see The Artist on Friday evening because it was starting immediately. Otherwise my choice might have been The Iron Lady, a Margaret Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep. While I still may see the Streep flick another weekend, I'm glad I saw The Artist. It was really a beautiful movie, and fun to watch too. Using a minimum of dialogue cards to explain what people are saying, and accompanied by a steady stream of really good film music, the movie tells the story of a silent film actor whose career goes into crisis with the advent of "talkies." Meanwhile, his young female protege takes off like a Roman candle. Their life trajectories pass in many different ways, until a romance grows up between them.

Featuring an international cast, including French leads and several supporting American actors (notably John Goodman), plus an adorable dog, it's a delightful fantasy that plays around with the idea of silent films giving way to the sound era in a variety of ways. For example, there is a dream sequence in which the protagonist starts hearing sound effects intruding into his silent world; and later, a nightmarish scene in which he can't seem to hear anything anybody says. The movie is loaded with gimmicks and in-jokes—I was the only one in the theater who laughed when the starlet told her chauffeur, "Take me home. I want to be alone"—and did I mention that the music is awesome? I would like to see David Robertson conduct a performance-to-projection version someday.

But this evening, I saw him conduct three other pieces of music. In the first half of the program, he played the socks off of Dvorak's 7th (Sorry, I meant to paste in the spelling of his name with all the strokes and squiggles, but as I write this Wiki is down in protest against SOPA). Robertson's pre-concert lecture really sold this symphony short. Dark and brooding at the start, with a complex and mysterious slow movement, a wildly rhythmic scherzo, and a finale that moves from horror to triumph, I thought it absolutely was the type of piece that would have brought down the house at the end of the concert. But in his lecture, Robertson opined that, although he considers it the greatest of Dvorak's nine symphonies, it lacks the blockbuster appeal of the 8th or 9th that make for a really good closer. So, instead of the usual program order, he put the symphony first, then after the intermission he programmed a 20-minute piece by modern composer George Crumb and the Four Last Songs.

Robertson may or may not be surprised to hear that some, like myself, felt that the concert order of which he was so proud ran counter to order in which the pieces interested us. But even I was surprised to discover that I liked the Crumb piece ("Haunted Landscape") better than the Strauss. The first reason is that the Crumb piece was actually cool to listen to. I disagree with the patron I overheard bitching about "New Age music" at the end of the concert. I heard an intelligible structure with distinct musical ideas. I heard a composer playing around with sound, really quite like Robertson's pre-concert comparison between Crumb and a child messing around with fingerpaints. And I picked up on a real, scary-movie type of spookiness which I believe the music was intended to convey.

As for the other reason I preferred the Crumb to the Strauss... at the risk of exposing myself as a complete boob in the world of high culture... I have to admit that Richard Strauss' music generally leaves me cold. I can't explain exactly why. But the Four Last Songs was no exception. I've given many of Strauss' works several chances each, and I just can't seem to get excited about them. In the case of Four Last Songs, I'll admit the harmony is very expressive and the orchestral colorings are deep and lush, but I was constantly irritated by the balance between the orchestra and the voice part. Christine Brewer has a wonderful voice, so I don't doubt the fault lies with Strauss, but only rarely does the vocal line soar above the accompaniment; seldom is it even very interesting. More often, it seemed to me that Strauss only gave the voice part a minimum of notes to cover the syllables of the text, then stretched them out to fill enough of each movement's length to make it seem worthwhile. And then he scored the orchestra so that it would all but drown out even as renowned a Wagnerian as Christine!

I'm a Christine Brewer booster, so I have to assume there's something to this piece. After all, according to Robertson, she fell in love with it at an early age and has performed it dozens of times worldwide. But the way I look at things, it seems odd that an opera star would choose to be upstaged by the orchestra. What they played was worth hearing; but I still don't understand what Christine sang that was worth singing. I've felt the same way about certain other pieces, including (here I go) Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, so my quibble may really be with an aesthetic of setting words to music shared among composers of the Strauss-Mahler generation; it may simply be a sign that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Rossinian, or Mozartian, or maybe Bach-and-Handelian, where the relationship between lyrics and music is concerned; but even if there were valid principles that drove Strauss to treat his leading lady so, I think these four brief songs took those principles to an extreme.

War Horse

2012-01-08T17:53:00.006-06:00

My weekend debauch was a plate of goat meat at a Mexican restaurant and a matinee showing of the new Spielberg picture, the beautiful War Horse.

I like to drop names of cast members, but the average Yank isn't likely to recognize a lot of the faces in this movie. This is chiefly because most of them are British faces. Harry Potter fans might recognize David Thewlis (lately "Prof. Remus Lupin") as the sharp-tongued landlord and Peter Mullan (lately pony-tailed Death-Eater "Yaxley") as the hero boy's broken-down father. Emily Watson, late of Breaking the Waves and more recently The Water Horse, plays the boy's mother. Eddie Marsan (lately "Inspector Lestrade" in the Sherlock Holmes movies) plays a sergeant in the trenches of World War I.

The boy himself, who is most likely on his way to becoming a big star, has a face that you'll feel you've seen before, but in fact this is his first movie. The actor, whose screen name is Jeremy Irvine, is already featured in three upcoming films, including the role of Pip in Great Expectations. Maybe that gives you an idea of his type & the direction his career is going. Topping the bill of an epic, tear-jerking, Spielberg-directed war movie must be a great way to start a career in the movies. Being a really good actor with male-model looks and the ability to shed tears on cue make him a threat to a whole generation of up-and-coming leading men.

The movie is a love story between a young man and a horse, a handsome thoroughbred stallion he raised and trained, in defiance of what everyone in his Devon village considered possible, to be a serviceable plowhorse. Albie (the boy) and Joey (the horse) are meant to be inseparable, but thanks to a crop-destroying rainstorm and the outbreak of World War I, they are indeed separated. Sold to a young cavalry captain, Joey sets out on a series of heartbreaking adventures, passes from owner to ill-fated owner, and finally—in a scene that made me cringe and groan, "Oh no"—gets tangled in barbed wire in the no-man's-land between the British and German trenches at the Somme.

Albie, meanwhile, undergoes his own hardships among the machine-guns, the mustard gas, and the insanely high cost in human life of a few yards of muddy wasteland. Even when boy and horse are miraculously reunited, the chance remains that regulations and rival claims will separate them again. The movie ends with a scene shot in amazing light, with a silhouette-like composition and hardly any dialogue, proving that the filmmaker can be a more powerful storyteller than even the writers and the actors. It is but one of many Spielbergian stylistic touches, another notable example being the use of a moving windmill blade to render a firing-squad execution both less gruesome and more dreadful.

To be sure, however, credit for the emotional power of this movie must also be given to composer John Williams (whose score is steeped in British folk melody), cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who won Oscars for two previous Spielberg movies, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List), and of course, all those magnificent horses. Assuming that some of them were actual, live animals and not just CGI effects, a lot of effort must have gone into training them to act, and remain calm, among crowds of extras, battalions of war-machines, and heaps of oozing mud. I can't believe that they would subject a live animal to some of the strains depicted in the film; there must be laws against that sort of cruelty. So the effectiveness of these gut-tearing images must be due, at least in part, to special effects.

Where No Tackiness Has Gone Before

2012-01-08T16:25:00.003-06:00

This week's lighted-sign fiasco at the neighborhood ELCA parish:

EPIPHANY--AN ENTERPRISING STAR TREK!

Aaargghhhh... That turns my stomach on so many levels that I feel myself becoming a ruminant. Most disturbing of all, once the vomit backs down my esophagus, is the question: "In what way do they mean 'enterprising'?" Did I miss the verse in Matthew 2 where the wise men received double their investment in gold, frankincense, and myrrh?

Voyager Season 4

2012-01-07T08:52:00.030-06:00

Season Four of Star Trek: Voyager originally aired between 1997 and 1998, roughly my second year of post-B.A. studies. As was the case with Season 3, I only remember seeing a handful of its episodes when they first aired; the rest I am now seeing, for the first time, as Netflix sends me one four-episode DVD at a time. Still, I was aware of the overall arc of this season, which introduced Jeri Ryan's role as the sexy Borgette in recovery, Seven of Nine. As Seven was eased into the show, the first two episodes eased out Jennifer Lien's character of Kes (still a sore point for me). I can only fondly imagine how different this year's storylines would have been with both characters in the cast.

Meanwhile, it was a season that didn't quite justify Season 3's ominous buildup toward a year of conflict with the Borg and Species 8472. Indeed, after the season-opening conclusion to the previous year's cliffhanger, the Voyagers don't encounter the Borg, except in the form of Seven's memories and hallucinations, and indirectly through other aliens who have issues with them. Maybe this was because the development of Seven's character was enough Borg for the writers' taste. As for Species 8472, their one appearance after the first episode of the season is upstaged by the development of a new alien threat, the predatory Hirogen, who figure in no less than five episodes this year.

Other developments, however, remain on pace. Tom and B'Elanna increasingly become the couple Season 3 suggested they would be. A two-part episode fulfills the previous year's foreshadowing of the "Year of Hell" which, after all the cards were laid down, turned out not to have happened anyway. (Maybe if Kes had still been on board, she would have remembered...) Leonardo's studio, introduced at the end of last season, becomes a regular holographic retreat for our characters, and Leonardo himself (played for the second and last time by John Rhys Davies) even gets an away mission of sorts, with help from the Doctor's mobile holo-emitter. The Voyagers finally succeed in communicating with Starfleet, ensuring that somebody back home will be trying to find a way to bring them home. The same episode also provides a point of reference to where Deep Space Nine was at during the same period, dropping a hint about the Federation's war with the Dominion. (Who?) And the show's list of big-name guest stars grows to include Virginia Madsen of Sideways, Kurtwood Smith of That '70s Show, and Andy Dick of TV's News Radio.

Scorpion, Part II kicks off the season with Captain Janeway making an alliance with the Borg. In exchange for the technology to defend themselves against Species 8472, the Borg are to escort Voyager safely through their space. While this is all right in theory, reality tests the alliance to the limit. First Janeway gets hurt and, while temporarily in command, Chakotay pulls back from what he considers a reckless plan. Then the spokesBorg, a ruthless and arrogant number with a trim waist-line, tries to get the ship assimilated. Just when Janeway has no choice but to save the Borg from their even worse enemy, she learns that the Borg provoked the war she is helping to end. All that and a visit to a fantastic realm known as "Fluid Space"... Wow!

The Gift is the transitional episode in which Seven of Nine makes the difficult adjustment to being cut off from the Collective and forced to begin exploring her humanity; and in which Kes makes the transition to being some kind of non-corporeal life-form. The latter seems to be the more traumatic of the two adjustments, if you measure trauma in terms of how close it comes to annihilating the entire ship, but in the end the Voyagers end up ten years closer to home (Kes's parting gift). It's a grueling episode for Janeway in particular, as she has to hand-hold both women through this difficult time in their lives. Especially effective is her tearful "I'm going to miss you" before hugging Kes goodbye. The ethics of her decision to force Seven to live without the Borg Collective are more likely to stimulate discussion.

Day of Honor is partly a story about a rough day for B'Elanna Torres and partly an illustration of the risks of giving to charity. The aliens in this episode come to Voyager with open hands, begging for humanitarian aid. Having gotten as much as the Voyagers can afford to give, they come back with reinforcements and try to take what they want—including Seven, who will be punished because of what the Borg did to their society. Meanwhile, B'Elanna is torn as to whether or not to observe the Klingon Day of Honor. On the one hand, she always resented being forced by her mother to partake of Klingon traditions. On the other hand, a part of her is ashamed of not living up to Klingon standards of honor and courage. It epitomizes the inner conflict that has kept her aloof from others all her life, but during a disastrous shuttle mission that finds her and Tom stranded as pictured here, the vacuum of space boils her dilemma down to the essence: that only under threat of imminent death will she confess that she loves Tom Paris.

Nemesis is the one where Chakotay's shuttle is shot down over a war zone. Welcomed by a unit of young Vori defenders who are holding out against their Kradin "nemesis," Chakotay expects to be escorted to a command center where he can signal his ship. Instead, he finds himself drawn into the conflict between the seemingly good-natured Vori and the Kradin, whose atrocities have earned them the name of "the Beast." Only when Chakotay has so completely identified with the Vori that he is willing to kill or die for their cause, does he realize that the Kradin Beast at the end of his rifle barrel is actually Tuvok, trying to reason him into lowering his weapon. Yes, kids, Chakotay has been brainwashed by a Vori combat-training simulation, like thousands of their own people, to say nothing of waylaid aliens, who have been conscripted in this way. It is, after all, the snaggle-toothed Kradin who help the Voyagers recover Chakotay—though this doesn't help the Commander overcome his revulsion toward them. As he says in the final line of the episode, "I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start." A grim, action-filled, perhaps heavy-handed episode, it sticks in the memory partly because of the Vori culture's strange lingo and partly because of the sympathy elicited, then betrayed, by its illusory people.

Revulsion is the Trek franchise's answer to the movie Dead Calm, featuring four-time Trek guest Leland Orser as Dejaren, a psychotic maintenance hologram who murders the crew of his ship. B'Elanna and the Doctor don't realize this until they're trapped on the ship with him, alternately humoring his flights of fancy (which include one especially nasty tirade against "organics") and trying to shut him down. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Tom Paris has been recruited as a medical assistant and, more interestingly, Harry and Seven have been assigned to work together to design a new astrometrics lab. For Harry, who is both intimidated by and attracted to the former Borg, their partnership is excruciatingly awkward. For the rest of us, particularly when Harry tries to explain to Chakotay why he doesn't want to be paired with Seven, the result is comic gold.

The Raven is part of a series of terrifying dreams and hallucinations that begin to plague Seven of Nine as Voyager approaches the territory of the paranoid and highly territorial B'omar (a representative pictured here). While the B'omar offer to let Voyager cross their space only under ridiculously restrictive conditions, Seven goes off the reservation in search of a Borg signal that both fascinates and terrifies her. Whether this is a sign that she is returning to the Collective, or discovering a new facet of her humanity, only becomes clear when she and Tuvok (whom she captures when he tries to bring her back) reach the source of the signal and find that it's a Raven of another kind—the ship of that name on which she and her human parents lived until the Borg assimilated them some 20 years ago. Seven's vulnerability as she gets closer to this discovery is very touching, but the episode is equally fulfilling for fans (like me) who also enjoy the sight of spaceships shooting at each other.

Scientific Method is a little talking piece about the ethics of medical research, as well as a creepy story about unseen invaders who can mess you up on so many levels, including a molecular one, that even if you knew they were there you couldn't do anything to stop them. When members of the crew start developing weird symptoms caused by overstimulation of certain parts of their genetic code, the Doctor and B'Elanna discover that somebody has stuck eensy-weensy transmitters to the victims' genes. It seems the Voyagers are being studied by someone on Voyager. But before they can alert anyone else to their findings, or do anything about it, the baddies incapacitate B'Elanna and drive the Doctor into hiding. Later, with modifications to her bionic eye, Seven becomes able to see the aliens; she finds the ship crawling with them, sticking nasty probes into everybody and monitoring the results. Fighting back is tricky when you have to pretend you don't see the invaders and you can't talk to anyone about them. Eventually, Seven takes the only course left to her: she blows the cover of one of the aliens, shifting the dilemma onto the Captain's shoulders. What Janeway does to get rid of the unwanted visitors is just plain crazy. But the most unnerving part of the episode may be how the captured alien seems so reasonable and, well, clinical, while justifying her people's atrocities and threatening even worse. Besides being a creepy and intense story, the writing of this episode is marked by some hilarious dialogue, including Tuvok asking Janeway whether he should flog people (you'd have to be there), and Neelix and Chakotay trying to outdo each other with medical complaints.

Year of Hell guest-stars John Loprieno (late of One Life to Live), three-time Trek guest Kurtwood Smith, and four-time Trek guest Peter Slutsker in his only non-Ferengi role in the franchise, all as members of the Krenim Imperium, a civilization that has risen, or fallen (depending on what timeline you're in), through the use of weaponized time. The episode begins with a Krenim time-ship commanded by Annorax (pictured here), blasting an entire planet with a weapon that erases its inhabitants from history. Their plan is to do this to as many civilizations as necessary to restore the timeline in which the Krenim had a huge empire. Meanwhile, Voyager finds itself under attack by Krenim ships which either grow or shrink, along with the Imperium itself, according to the results of each "temporal incursion" attempted by Annorax and his crew. Over a period of several months, things go pretty badly for the Voyagers, and they don't even know that their enemies are changing history until Seven of Nine invents a shield that insulates the ship from both chroniton torpedoes and changes in the timeline. In doing that, however, they make a personal enemy of Annorax, who moves in for the kill. The first half of this two-part episode ends with Tuvok blinded by an accident, Tom and Chakotay captured by the enemy, and most of the crew abandoning Voyager in escape-pods... Could it be the last one they ever made?

Year of Hell, Part II concludes the two-parter with Janeway leading a crew of six to try to put out all the fires on Voyager, seek out allies against the Krenim, and risk everything on a reckless gamble that will either destroy the ship completely or reset everything to the status quo ante. Annorax, meanwhile, regales his guests (Tom and Chakotay, remember) with the cuisine of cultures that, outside his weapon-ship's envelope of technobabble, never existed. While Tom cultivates a mutiny against Annorax, Chakotay tries to understand the villain's obsession with tweaking history until he restores the one thing that matters: his wife and the colony she lived on. For Annorax, this goal has eluded him for 200 years, driving him to commit acts of temporal genocide against countless races. Chakotay is convinced that there must be a way that both Annorax and the Voyager can benefit from a temporal incursion that doesn't hurt anybody, but his open-mindedness is matched only by Annorax's impatience. In the end it is Tom's plan that saves the day—or rather, erases it—in one of those frustrating time-travel-story endings in which all the events of the two-episode arc turn out never to have happened, and nobody even remembers them. So it was all, ultimately, pointless!

Random Thoughts guest stars Gwynyth Walsh, who appeared five times between TNG, DS9 and the movies as Klingon villain B'Etor. Here she plays a magistrate on a planet of telepaths where, over the previous three generations, they have virtually eliminated crime by purging violent thoughts from their minds. A marketplace mishap momentarily triggers B'Elanna's combative instincts. Minutes later, a man is beaten senseless, the victim of a telepath who had B'Elanna's violent thought in his mind. Naturally, in Star Trek logic, B'Elanna gets arrested and faces something called an "engrammatic purge" in the machine pictured here. But Tuvok insists on running his own investigation, made even more urgent when the same thought of B'Elanna's causes a murder days later. Obviously one passing thought could not have led directly to the second crime. Tuvok's suspicions lead him to uncover a black market in illicit thoughts, and an especially creepy telepath who hoards images of brutality. Tuvok's mind-meld with this character is one of the most ruthless things we have seen him do—very scary!

Concerning Flight features larger-than-life actor John Rhys Davies, who at that time was probably best known for his work in the Indiana Jones movies, in an encore of his third-season appearance as a hologram of Leonardo da Vinci. While wincing every time a crew member calls him "Mr. Da Vinci" (which is sort of like calling Seven of Nine "Miss Of Nine"), you can thrill to caper in which the 16th-century master, aided by the Doctor's mobile emitter, finds himself running around an alien planet, and even going airborne in a flying machine of his own design. Leonardo has a gang of space pirates to thank for this opportunity. Using their high-powered transporters to loot Voyager of crucial pieces of technology, including the main computer core, the robbers retire to their network of high-security warehouses on a mercantile planet. Janeway joins her holographic mentor to sniff out the computer core's hiding place, snatch it back, and make a low-tech getaway. Apart from the opportunity to enjoy John Rhys Davies in a long white beard, and the fun of seeing a 16th-century holo-character rationalizing his experiences on a 24th-century alien planet into his worldview, it actually isn't all that hot an episode. There are, in fact, moments when one wants to ask, "What is the point of this?" And, most damagingly, what was meant to be a climactic moment (Leonardo's flying machine taking off) comes over as rather anticlimactic and even, forgive me, ludicrous. Oh well...

Mortal Coil is the one in which Neelix takes one on the chin, waking up in sickbay some 18 hours later to learn that he has been dead. This leads the crew's morale officer into a serious existential crisis. Surprisingly, it isn't due to the fact that he has been brought back to life by Seven's Borg nanoprobes. It is simply that, after experiencing nothingness during his spell as a cadaver, Neelix can no longer believe in the Talaxian traditions about the afterlife. Since all his loved ones perished in a war (see Season 1's "Jetrel"), the belief that his family, and especially his sister Alixia, await him in the Great Forest has been all that kept him going. Now, without that belief, he has nothing to live for. Neelix tries to seek answers through a vision quest guided by Chakotay, but this only drives him deeper into depression. Finally, on the point of suicide, Neelix is brought back by his sense of duty, especially to a little girl who needs him to tuck her in at night. (Don't ask.)

Waking Moments finds the Voyagers being attacked by a race of aliens (representative pictured here) who are always asleep in the waking world, but who have serious kung-fu in the dream state in which they live their whole lives. Plus, they have a gadget that broadcasts technobabble over a wide region of space, causing anyone who passes through to fall asleep and become trapped in a shared dream in which the sleep aliens use said kung-fu to capture them. The only people on Voyager with a chance against them are the holographic Doctor (who doesn't sleep) and Chakotay, whose "ah-koo-chee-moya" shtick includes a lucid-dreaming subroutine. He manages to kick his way to the surface of all the dreams-within-dreams, breaching the waking world just long enough to point the ship's photon torpedoes at the sleep aliens' planet and set a three-minute countdown, before falling back into the dream to explain to the crew's not-really-there captors that they're about to become really not-there. I think it's Chakotay's level of commitment, being willing to die himself to make his point, that finally scares the aliens off in an episode whose concept is so ridiculous that it could only be Star Trek, if not more so.

Message in a Bottle is the episode in which the Voyagers finally get a message back to the folks back home in the Alpha Quadrant. Situated appropriately at about the midpoint of the series, it's sort of the "hump" beyond which the rest of their journey is, more or less, downhill—at least in the sense that, from now on, people at both ends are working on a way to bring them home. But first, the Doctor must survive being transmitted through an ancient network of alien communications relays, then take back an experimental Starfleet vessel whose entire crew has been slaughtered by Romulan agents, assisted only by the Emergency Medical Hologram "Mark 2," played to comic perfection by Andy Dick. Mark 1: "Stop breathing down my neck." Mark 2: "My breathing is only a simulation." Mark 1: "So is my neck. Stop it anyway." Playing one of the Romulans is Judson Scott, who besides a first-season TNG role also had a notable (but uncredited) role in the second Trek feature film. This also happens to be the episode that introduced a new alien threat, the savagely single-minded hunters known as the Hirogen.

Hunters further develops the wolf-like Hirogen culture, whose hunters—alone or in pairs, and occasionally in packs—stalk aliens across fantastic distances. They take satisfaction from a long and difficult chase, but even when their prey is as easy to capture as Tuvok and Seven (whose shuttlecraft only puts up a few moments of resistance), they are also into possessing the "relics of the hunt" (i.e., the clean white bones), being the first to bag a new species, and bagging it on their own. Their quick study of these characteristics proves to be Tuvok and Seven's only defense, but it gives them just enough time to avoid being skinned before Voyager comes to their rescue. Meanwhile, messages from home have started to come through the alien relay network to which the Hirogen lay claim, adding a layer of urgency and expectation to the drama on the Voyager's decks. The "Alpha" Hirogen in this episode is played by the same ironically-named Tiny Ron who played Maihar'du (Grand Nagus Zek's footman) in seven episodes of DS9.

Prey features Tony Todd, who played Worf's brother Kurn on both TNG and DS9 as well as a grown-up version of Jake Sisko in DS9's "The Visitor," as another Alpha-Hirogen who is brought on board Voyager, barely alive, after attempting to bag a Species 8472. Unfortunately his quarry also finds his way onto the ship. This leads to spooky scenes in which the alien is seen crawling on the outside of the ship's hull, and spacesuited crewpersons stalk darkened corridors lit only by the lights on the barrels of their phaser rifles. It also leads to an intense showdown between the Captain, who intends to help the wounded and demoralized Species 8472 back to the dimension it calls home, and Seven, who thinks they should give into the Hirogen hunter's demand for his prey before his buddies arrive and blow the Voyager up. This conflict between the ethics of Borg pragmatism and human compassion forms the heart of an episode which, nevertheless, will be best remembered for making you think, "Could the Hirogen be even badder than Species 8472? Cool!"

Retrospect guest-stars Michael Horton, late of Murder, She Wrote and a role in two TNG feature films, as an ill-fated weapons dealer named Kovin in a story that dramatizes the limitations of recovered memories as evidence of a crime. The Doctor, trying out some new "Ship's Counselor" subroutines he has added to his program, observes Seven of Nine having an anxiety attack while he gives her a routine exam. Using memory regression techniques of his own devising, the Doctor teases out a repressed memory in which Kovin stunned Seven, extracted Borg nanoprobes from her body, then covered up the assault with false memory engrams about an accidental technobabble overload. Seven warps directly from having no memory of the crime to being determined to see Kovin pay for it. Between technobabble and psychobabble, the investigation eventually proves Kovin innocent, but not before the trader, convinced that he is being set up, gets himself killed trying to escape. The whole affair opens new emotional vistas for Seven and leads the remorseful Doctor to ask Janeway to reset his program to its default settings. Which, of course, would be boring; so, request denied!

The Killing Game finds the Voyager in the hands of the Hirogen. Several weeks after being captured, the ship has become a prison for most of the crew, while the senior officers are forced to take part in holodeck simulations of the most violent periods in history. They don't know that it's only a shadow play, thanks to neural implants that keep them in character. So we find Janeway leading the French resistance in a small town overrun by Nazis, while the Americans led by General Chakotay close in. When the flesh-and-blood characters are injured, the Hirogen force the Doctor to patch them up and send them back into the fray. The Doc uses an opportunity to treat an injured Seven of Nine to break the implant's hold on her, so that she becomes the seed of a resistance within the resistance, fighting not only against a holographic German occupation force but against the very real Hirogen one. Either of these enemies may be equally deadly since, with the holodeck safeties turned off, the holographic weapons are as deadly as the real ones. And so this first half of a two-parter ends with an explosion blasting an opening between the holodeck and the corridors of the Voyager, which the Hirogen have just rigged with emitters, enabling World War II to spill out onto the decks of a 24th century starship...

The Killing Game, Part II continues the Voyagers' struggle to retake their ship from the Hirogen, while the chief of the hunters battles his own subordinates in a campaign to use holodeck tech to build a new future for his people. Janeway and Seven have to do some nimble footwork to free their crewmates from Hirogen thought-control while keeping up the charade that the World War II holonovel in which they are all trapped is real. Alpha-Hirogen Karr, meanwhile, fears that the hunt has spread his species too thin, that in a few generations their culture will no longer exist unless they can find a way to come back together. He believes holography is the key, but he is killed by one of his own men just when he and Janeway are about to make a deal. This ensures a final, climatic battle in which holographic Nazis, Americans, French resistance fighters, and Klingons get mixed up with flesh-and-blood Voyagers and Hirogen. This two-parter features guest actors Danny Goldring (who played 5 guest roles in various Star Trek spinoffs), Mark Metcalf (of Animal House fame), Mark Deakins (a Star Trek: Insurrection alum who provided a love interest for Seven of Nine in a later two-parter), J. Paul Boehmer (in his first of five Trek roles, including another Nazi), and Paul Eckstein (whose six Trek roles all involved heavy prosthetics).

Vis à Vis features Dan Butler (late of Frasier) as an alien named Steth who... Nope. Wow, this is going to be hard to describe without getting the facts mixed up! Let's try again. The male alien pictured here, played by Dan Butler, is actually Tom Paris; the woman next to him is really the male alien named Steth who owns the body Tom Paris is... No, that isn't right either. The character played by Dan Butler at the beginning of this episode calls himself Steth, but really isn't Steth, and after he swaps genomes with Tom P. (a little trick the unnamed alien is good at), he sends a stunned Tom flying off in his experimental spaceship, looking like Steth, while he (the alien) tries to pass himself off as Tom back on Voyager. This proves to be harder than the alien expected, which leads one to suspect that the alien isn't very bright except when it comes to genome-swapping, which he also does with Janeway. And so, at one point, Janeway finds herself looking like Tom Paris. All of which is pretty confusing for everybody, but remarkably fun to watch. For a moment (e.g., when the fake Paris is trying to find sickbay), you might actually sympathize with the dastardly alien as he struggles to cover his ignorance of all the things one would have to know to pass as a Voyager crewman; for reasons that soon become obvious, psychotic tricks like his only mix well with a solitary lifestyle. Which is why he/she/it (in the image of Janeway) eventually makes a break for it in a shuttlecraft. They have to catch the alien, at the very least so that Janeway needn't look like Paris for the rest of the series. It's wicked fun and, again, as loopy as Trek can be.

The Omega Directive

Unforgettable

Living Witness

Demon

One

Hope and Fear

For more on spaceship-based TV series, see my reviews of Star Trek: TOS seasons one, two, and three; of TNG seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of DS9 seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of Voyager seasons one, two, and three; and of Enterprise season one. See also my review of Farscape seasons one, two, three, and four; of Firefly; and of Babylon 5 seasons one, two, three, and four.

Christmas Season Hymn

2012-01-03T22:25:00.021-06:00

Here's a little something for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and not a partridge or a pear tree in sight!

With thankfulness give thanks! Rejoice with joy!
For at the favored hour is born a Boy
Whose ageless might, now clothed in humble birth,
Shall shower gifts o'er all who dwell on earth.

What poverty and rudeness marked His birth!
A den of beasts first welcomed Him to earth;
While men of means despised His kingly claim,
Mean men from flock and fold first praised His name.

With penitence repent! As beggars pray
That now, and on the awful youngest day,
We be rewarded not for what we've done,
But for the sake of Mary's holy Son.

At eight days pierced according to the law,
The Christ first bled to mend our flesh's flaw;
The sonship-covenant He lay beneath
Now gathers in those baptized in His death.

At eight days named the angel-whispered name,
Our Savior fully into office came.
For this alone our God with us did dwell:
To save Immanuel's race from sin and hell.

At forty days presented to the priest,
His mother from impurity released,
They made th' appointed off'ring, though in fact
His soul was pure, her maidenhead intact.

Still, in that hour, He caused the prophetess
Her faith in Israel's Savior to confess,
And brought the light of joy into the eyes
Of him who hoped the Lord to recognize.

Said Simeon: Now, Lord, I go to my rest,
Glad of this Child in whom the world is blessed;
Though sword may cut and tongue may idly play,
The thoughts of many hearts lie toward this day.

Then, while the city murmured of a star
And tidings brought by sages from afar,
They found Him, worshiped Him, and presents gave
Fit for the coffer, altar, and the grave.

Pursued by kings, bereft of home and land,
The holy Child fulfilled what God had planned:
From Egypt, whence His chosen line had run,
God called again His bondage-breaking Son.

With faith, believe the tidings you have heard!
Break forth in song! Repeat and praise the Word
Through whose becoming flesh we have been given
The right to be God's children, heirs of heaven!

All glory be to God among His host,
Eternal Father, Son, and Holy Ghost:
Sending and sent, He shone on us His face
That we might taste peace, pardon, joy, and grace.

Gaiman, Larsson, Gaiman, Pratchett, Gaiman

2012-01-02T13:13:00.027-06:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
Recommended Ages: 16+

This is the first book in the "Millennium Trilogy," named after the magazine published by its main character, Swedish financial writer Mikael Blomkvist. The six-part Swedish TV miniseries based on these books is packaged in the U.S. as the "Dragon Tattoo Trilogy." American audiences can now see a big-screen version of this book, starring Daniel Craig in the role of Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist, a crusading journalist who (like the author who created him) specializes in exposing right-wing corruption—though, unlike Larsson, he does so mainly in the context of business. He is nicknamed "Kalle Blomkvist" after an Astrid Lindgren character known to all Swedes today, but whose stories have not come over to the U.S. in a big way. Adding still more confusion to this background is the fact that the book's original, Swedish title translates as "Men Who Hate Women," so if you try to start a conversation about this book with an acquaintance from Sweden, you are apt to get a blank look.

While you probably know already that this trilogy came out quite recently and is all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic, you might be surprised to learn that Stieg Larsson is no longer around to clear up any confusion or ambiguities in his books. Larsson, age 50, died of a sudden heart attack in 2004 after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office when the elevator was broken (source: Wikipedia). Keep your elevators in running order, people! We can't afford to lose good writers like that! At the time of his death, the Millennium Trilogy was only an unpublished manuscript, and a half-written fourth book was saved on the author's computer. Now see how far it has gone! Unfortunately, conflicting inheritance claims make it unlikely that any of us will live to see Book 4, finished or otherwise. So if you are as crazy about this book as millions of other readers, you will have to settle for the two sequels already published: The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (whose Swedish title means "The Air Castle that Was Blown Up").

It is obvious from these titles that the American market is more interested in the character of Lisbeth Salander, a 24-year-old, starved-looking, tattooed, pierced, socially awkward genius hacker who provides highly detailed background research for the clients of a major security firm, while at the same time living under a guardian because she is considered legally incompetent. I don't know if this is a result of something like Asperger's Syndrome (which Mikael Blomkvist suspects) or because of some kind of childhood trauma. (The Swedish telefilm, which I watched just after I read this book, drops some hints in that direction, but the book stays mum.) Diffident, self-contained, and elusive, Lisbeth is a hard person to get to know.

Salander gets to know Blomkvist long before he even knows she exists. She digs up his background for a prospective employer, who then hires Blomkvist in the aftermath of a disastrous libel conviction. In exchange for some real dirt on the white-collar gangster who set him up, Blomkvist agrees to write the family history of one of the oldest family-owned industrial firms in Sweden. Henrik Vanger, the retired CEO of the Vanger Corporation, sets the left-wing Blomkvist this unpleasant task mainly as a cover, while his real job is to try to solve the 40-year-old mystery of who killed a beautiful teenager named Harriet. One day, while the only bridge onto the family-owned island of Hedeby was blocked by an accident, Harriet disappeared and was never seen again. Since then, every year on Henrik Vanger's birthday, the old man has received a pressed flower like the ones Harriet used to give him. Vanger thinks the murderer is taunting him. He is convinced the killer is a member of his big, dysfunctional family, that Harriet was killed to hurt him, and that the flowers represent a 40-year campaign to drive the family patriarch insane.

At first unenthusiastic about his chances of finding anything that 40 years of police work might have missed, Blomkvist quickly realizes that he is onto something. A cryptic note in the back of Harriet's diary leads him to suspect that the girl was killed while trying to expose a serial killer in the family. Once Blomkvist brings Salander on board as his research assistant (the beginning of a relationship too complex to be missed, almost too explosive to be believed), the case starts to crack open like lake ice at the spring breakup. Suddenly both the girl with the tattoo and the journalist with a crusader's heart find themselves in terrible danger. And the truth turns out to be far weirder than either of them imagined.

Lisbeth Salander is, make no mistake, a fascinating character. Her fascination affects the men around her in fascinating ways. While they worry that she may be the perfect victim for a male predator who likes to hurt women, Lisbeth proves surprisingly resourceful, not to say relentless, in deflecting danger back onto the "men who hate women." And when you get down to brass tacks, violence against women is what this book is really all about. A lingering stench of Swedish Nazism, a brusque polemic against financial journalists who toady up to big-business interests, a subplot about corporate espionage in the journalistic field, and some "adult content advisory" worthy bedroom scenes add dimension to the tale; but what will really shock you, what will echo in your mind, what will haunt your dreams for days after you open this book, are the statistics of violence against women, including physical assault as well as rape and murder, quoted at strategic points throughout this book... and the steps the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would take to punish the men who perpetrate it.

Good Omens
by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Recommended Ages: 14+

Two of my favorite authors teamed up in 1990 to write this irreverently funny take on prophecy, the Antichrist, and Armageddon. Then audiobook reader Martin Jarvis joined the party and kept me in stitches for a week's worth of my daily drive to and from work.

The full title of the book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. We find out, within the book, that Agnes had the misfortune of being the only 100% accurate prophet in English history. As a trade-off for all her predictions coming true, Agnes couched them in bizarre riddles which are impossible to decipher until after their fulfillment; and she made sure that her book of prophecies, its only surviving copy handed down through generations of her descendants, focused specifically on the fortunes and misfortunes of her own family. So, where it comes to predicting the winners of the next World Series, Mrs. Nutter will be no help. But she has plenty to say about the End of the World.

Meanwhile, in the hilariously twisted cosmos imagined by Messrs. Pratchett and Gaiman, the powers of Good and Evil have their own plans. An eleven-year countdown to Doomsday begins with the birth of the Spawn of Hell in a tiny, rural hospital run by a very talkative order of nuns who are secretly satanic. The nuns are supposed to swap the Antichrist-child with the son of an American diplomat and his wife, but due to a farcical mix-up, he gets raised by a salt-of-the-earth family in a small English village and turns out, by sheer chance, to be a rather nice boy. Adam Young unwittingly uses his reality-bending powers to keep his hometown safely isolated from the rapidly changing outside world. Even the hellhound sent to Adam on his eleventh birthday becomes, at his master's whim, an adorable little mongrel with one twisted ear. Adam's small gang follows him in an endless series of games driven by the power of sheer imagination... hardly guessing how much power that is. And the angels of light and darkness haven't a clue.

Two of those angels have formed an unlikely friendship over the millennia, in spite of being on opposite sides. Aziraphale (the flaming-sword guy from the Garden of Eden) and Crowley (formerly Crawly, the serpent from ditto), disapprove of each other's methods but get along like an old married couple. They rather like the world, particularly the comforts of twentieth-century life, and aren't in a hurry to see it end. But what can they do, when those higher up (and lower down) will brook no interference in the Ineffable Plan?

Whatever they do, it's going to be a mess. For not just the two angels, but a lot of other confused people with conflicting points of view show up for the party, including an apprenctice witch-finder whose heart isn't quite in it, a nice young witch with an encyclopedic knowledge of coming events, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who are now more accurately described as the Four Motorcyclists and who enjoy their work a little too much. The tension of worldwide catastrophe builds and builds, not (as one might expect) in the Middle East, but in a sleepy village in the English countryside where all depends, finally, on whether young Adam's nature (being the Seed of Satan) or nurture (his nice upbringing) win out.

Here is a book that impishly pokes at millennialistic notions about the End Times, the interpretation and re-interpretation of obscure medieval prophecies that fill pages of each week's supermarket tabloids. It might, perhaps, poke a little harder than one quite likes at Judaeo-Christian cosmology in general, and it certainly deserves both "occult" and "adult" content advisories. But if you lighten up a little, you might enjoy it anyway; enjoy it for its quirky characters, the comic-opera pacing of its various plot-lines, the goofily bizarre imagery, the cutting wit, and the disarming silliness of the sayings and doings it describes, from the revenge of a medieval witch about to be burned at the stake to the good-natured bickering of four children in an idyllic small town. All that and a funny dog too! How can it go wrong?

The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 12+

This novel for young readers by the author of Coraline won the 2009 Hugo Award, Carnegie Medal, and Newbery Medal—a hat-trick unique in the the history of these three awards—respectively the highest honors for English-language fantasy novels, children's novels published in the U.K., and ditto in the U.S. When I got around to reading it some three years later, it achieved another honor that only applies to the very best books: It made me cry. But that happened at the end of the book; let's not get ahead of ourselves!

It's the story about a boy who grew up in a graveyard. His name: Nobody. Nobody Owens, adopted by a couple of kindly ghosts on the night his parents and older sister were murdered, has been given the freedom of the graveyard until he grows up. This means that, for the time being, he can "fade" so that ordinary mortals cannot see him; he can "haunt" by putting the frighteners on the living; and he can slide through solid stone and earth to visit the crypts and coffins of the neighborhood, whose owners form a sort of extended family to him. Because, don't you know, it takes a graveyard to raise a child.

Nobody's adventures bring him into contact with some strange beings, including ghouls, a werewolf, a witch, and a vampire. But he is only really in danger from a secret organization whose motives for killing his first family, and for planning to kill the boy himself, are revealed at the very end of the book. Though Nobody is pretty safe while he remains inside the cemetery gates, his danger remains very real because—well, because boys will be boys. Sometimes they rebel. Sometimes they sulk. Sometimes they get lonely for the company of kids their own age. For a while, Nobody even tries to go to school. In spite of all his mistakes and near-disasters, he remains a spirited and active youngster whose wits make him a match for men far stronger than himself.

Whimsical and weird, moving and macabre, this story is like a cross between Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books. You can laugh at the little ways of all the denizens of Nobody's graveyard, but because he loves them, you can't help but love them too. And while the character of Silas, Nobody's undead (but also unliving) guardian, is not the first vampire in fiction to be depicted as a sympathetic character, the reason why he is one in this case comes across (at least to me) as the final twist of the corkscrew, unstopping the tear ducts all the way to the book's messy, nasally congested finish.

Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 13+

One of the most enjoyable weeks I have spent commuting to and from my workplace was the week I borrowed the CD book of Neil Gaiman himself reading his "Author's Preferred Text" of this novel. This is the novel that, in 1996, really put him on the map for those of us who missed the Sandman graphic novels and the BBC teleseries (co-written by Lenny Henry) on which this book was based. In fact, it is now regarded as something of a classic, the starting point of a flourishing genre of "London Below" fiction, so that the dust-jacket blurbs of such books as Mike Shevdon's Sixty-One Nails and China Miéville's Un Lun Dun tout them as "Neverwhere for the next generation," or the like. Having read those books before this one, I can't help sensing that I've fallen behind the class!

Well, thanks to the miracle of audiobooks, I'm not so far behind now. And I can't complain that the book reader didn't know the author's intentions. With Gaiman himself reading his preferred text, I learned that he has a good voice for storytelling, that he knows how to sell a variety of character voices and British dialects, and that he may even be as good an actor as writer. An all around entertainer, our Neil is. And judging from the fact that London seems to occupy more alternate realities than any other city on Earth, his influence appears to be spreading.

Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London office worker with a gentle spirit, a bossy fiancée, and a blissfully ordinary life. One night as Richard is walking to a dinner date, an encounter with a gravely injured street person knocks his life out of its comfortable groove. Because he stops to help a filthy and bleeding girl named Door, Richard loses his fiancée, his job, his flat, and finally, his connection to reality as he knows it. Suddenly people can no longer see or hear him, or remember that he existed. So Richard goes underground. Literally. Down into the London Below, from which Door came and to which she has returned.

All Richard really wants is a way back to the life he knew. But before he can get it, he must learn to believe six thousand impossible things, and without the benefit of breakfast. He meets people who can communicate with birds and rats. He encounters an angel, a vampire-like creature called a velvet, a legendary beast, and a dead man come back to life. He makes friends with a girl who has the power to open any door, even where there wasn't a door before; and he makes enemies with two characters who have been torturing and killing for fun and profit since the world began. He visits a "floating market" where more or less fabulous beings swap more or less fabulous items; he undergoes an ordeal that many have tried before, but none have survived; and he demonstrates a curious blend of abject cowardice and heroic courage that ensure, whether or not he gets home to London Above, that London Below will never be the same.

Richard and Door are a likable couple. So are some of their dodgier neighbors in the underworld of magic, menace, and outright madness; though you may not immediately guess which ones are and aren't to be trusted. Through Gaiman's written and spoken word, they live vividly in my imagination. I am actually afraid to watch the BBC series, lest the world of Neverwhere become an obsession. I already have plenty of obsessions. But my inner world has plenty of room for another first-rate fantasy like this!

A Very Absinthe Christmas

2011-12-28T18:31:00.005-06:00

How did I spend my Christmas vacation? Well, teacher (and fellow classmates), I applied myself energetically to accompanying three Divine Services, complete with vocal solos, choir numbers, and more than the usual quantity of hymns. Then I set the cats up for a few days on their own (putting out extra food and water), gathered up a few things, and hit the road.

Sunday the 25th was a beautiful day to drive from Saint Louis to the Lake of the Ozarks. Ideal, in fact: the temperatures were cool but not cold, the sky was a bright clear blue, the traffic was within mental-health tolerances, and I managed not to get ticketed for speeding this time.

I arrived at my parents' lovely home around three in the afternoon. I enjoyed playing Santa Claus, contributing to their nicely-stocked minibar a bottle of Glendronach 12-year-old single malt Scotch and a selection of beer bottle bracelets to help keep track of whose beer is whose at any reasonably-sized convivial gathering. I also brought along a bottle of 110-proof absinthe, a box of sugar cubes, and a slotted spoon designed to rest on top of a glass, so that we could experiment with that oft-romanticized, and sometimes demonized, herbal spirit.

Well, I'm no wiser as to what wormwood tastes like, but the herbal blend of which it is a part tasted to me a lot like licorice. Licorice with a kick. After sipping it straight, mixing it in the wrong proportions, and then mixing it right (with two parts absinthe to three of water and a sugar cube), my father and I both concluded that one was too many, and two was not enough. We were pretty well buzzed after having two absinthes each for lunch on Tuesday.

We enjoyed food as much as drink. For Christmas Day's supper, Stepmum cooked up a wonderful shank-cut, hickory-smoked ham and served it with crusty bread, scalloped potatoes, and an off-the-beaten-path green bean casserole made in the style of cauliflower casserole (with cheese and biscuit crumbs and... heck, I'm going to need to get that recipe!). Monday night's feast focused on homemade pizza whose crust was made with beer, and topped with a generous mixture of shredded mozzarella and fontina, plus a sprinkling of Grana Padano. One pie was dressed in black olive which we all found very yummy, the other in a combination of pepperoni, onion, and mushrooms which might be frankly dangerous. And finally, Tuesday night we dined out at a Mexican joint that served $1.50 margaritas and cuisine that sets one's mouth on fire so that it isn't hard to down three margaritas in an hour.

Besides watching whatever was on TV, we spent our time in a variety of amusements. Dad and I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and to consume mass quantities of popcorn. One day we also watched a DVD of District 9 while Stepmom was at work, and we agreed that she wouldn't have liked it. I particularly enjoyed the cheese flight we shared over lunch on Monday, and the return flight on Tuesday, when the main attractions were taleggio (a soft, strong-flavored Italian cheese), manchego (a hard, flavorful Spanish sheep's-milk variety), and a nice safe English favorite, Double Gloucester. Cut into hunks, they all went nicely when eaten alone or on a cracker.

The days I spent relaxing with my folks were very restorative. I didn't mind being indoors while it rained, froze, and frosted up over the successive days and nights, so long as it always seemed to be sunny or at least clear when we went out, and I had good weather for driving home again. I got a bit of reading done too, both in audio-book form (with a couple of Neil Gaiman novels on my CD player) and on paper (as I've been working my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And I'll soon be spending more time reading books in electronic format, now that my boss & his wife have given me a sleek Kindle for Christmas. I've already "bought" a couple dozen free books in Kindle format.

But, after all, it's nice to be home. I started to miss my cats, painfully, last night when something on my parents' TV reminded me of them. And I've been missing my very own, familiar bed on which I seem to get more sleep, and better sleep, than anywhere else on average. I had fun with my parents, and their hospitality is wonderful, but there's no pillow like your own pillow!

Film Music Fun

2011-12-28T18:25:00.009-06:00

On the fourth day of Christmas, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, in which I sing, came together for an afternoon rehearsal to prepare for two sold-out concerts of John Williams film music on the following two nights, December 29 and 30. The New Years Eve surprise-party concert was also sold out, by the way; but that was a totally different program. It's concerts like these that give us the financial freedom to do stuff like John Adams' Harmonium, coming up next month.

First, the Symphony Chorus got to sit out in the hall and listen to the St. Louis Children Choirs' Concert Choir sing their numbers with the orchestra: "Star of Bethlehem" from Home Alone (which is way too good for the movie), and "Double Trouble" from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Then both the kids and the grown-up chorus together got to rehearse the jubilant "Dry Your Tears, Africa" from the wonderful movie Amistad.

I shall not embarrass myself by saying that it was a dream come true, being part of a concert in which excerpts from the Harry Potter film scores are played, as though I was part of the film itself in a way. Rather (and this is an update from after the concerts themselves) I might say that about being onstage while the orchestra, seated right in front of me, played the daylights out of the Main Title, Imperial March, Throne Room Scene and End Titles from the original Star Wars trilogy.

I felt the same feeling even more strongly as I actually stood up to sing in the terrifying "Duel of Fates" from Episode I: The Fandom Menace (pardon my slip). Though it wasn't until the opening night of the concert that I learned from conductor David Robertson's introductory spiel that the words I was singing were a Sanskrit translation of a Welsh program about a battle of the trees, which seems to have also inspired certain scenes in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle. I even sensed a kinship between Williams' music in this piece and some of the LOTR material I have sung over the past few years.

Other numbers that the chorus sang include the glorious "Exsultate Justi" from The Empire of the Sun and the wordless yet movingly expressive "Hymn for the Fallen" from Saving Private Ryan. Our voices joined again in the first of two encores, a "Call of the Victors" from the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; and finally we sat down and enjoyed, from an orchestral point of view, the Superman theme, which the audience welcomed with wild excitement.

Our part of the concert came after the intermission. The first half, for us of the chorus, was spent relaxing in the comfort of the Whitaker Room in the basement of Powell Hall, where there was plenty of room and furniture for us all to sit on, men's and women's lavatories, a cooler full of drinking water, and a subterranean route directly to where we needed to line up before walking onstage. In other words, it's way better than the Green Room; it's just too bad it took having the children's choir in the latter to force us downstairs! Meanwhile, piped in from upstairs, the music of the first half lent a festive background to our comfortable waiting—including still more excerpts from the Harry Potter films, themes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jurassic Park. And we were visited by gorgeously made-up dudes dressed as storm troopers and Sith lords (pictured).

The music was easy to learn, fun to perform, and a standing-room-only success at the box office. And as I said, it pays for some of our more daring artistic ventures still to come. I guess that's worth a bit of bother during the week after Christmas!

Table Prayer Fellowship

2011-12-24T08:16:00.009-06:00

I grew up in a home where people said grace before, and sometimes after, every meal. But as I have moved around the country, and visited different parts of my family, I have picked up a number of variants in what is considered the "common table prayer."

First of all, there's the one that Missouri Synod Lutherans everywhere seem to know, and fall back on as a default at church dinners and family get-togethers. They seem to consider it the Common Table Prayer, with capitalized initials. It goes something like this:

Come, Lord Jesus;
Be our Guest,
And let these gifts
To us be blessed.

I say "something like" because one still sometimes runs across a very tradition-oriented group who insist on preserving King James English, and so they put "Thy" in the place of "these." Under my father's roof, meanwhile, you can hear a compromise position: "these, Thy gifts..." It doesn't scan well, but nobody can complain that the word they prefer was left out.

This would be an adequate reason for squeezing both "these" and "Thy" into the ditty, but when he explains his reasons for the redaction, my Dad doesn't stop there. He goes on to wax nostalgic about an older pastor, brought up in the days when LCMS worship and instruction were all in German, whom he had heard rattling off the original German table prayer. Dad swears up and down he heard a "diese deine" in there.

To no effect, then, do I remind him that I have also dined in at least one Lutheran home where they said the Common Table Prayer in German. The one before the meal, from which our English version is translated, goes:

Komm, Herr Jesu, sei Du unser Gast,
und segne, was Du uns bescheret hast.

The after-meal blessing was even shorter and sweeter:

Gott sei Dank
für Speis und Trank
durch Jesum Christum, Amen.

...For what it's worth. No matter; Dad, invincible in his (ahem) conviction, is willing to agree to disagree on the assumption that some people obviously learned a corrupted version of the original German. Still, I'm pretty sure I can explain his "diese deine" memory. The table grace for before the meal in the Daily Prayers section of Luther's Small Catechism, imported directly from Roman Catholicism, says (after a few preliminary Psalm verses):

Lord God, heavenly Father, bless us and these Thy gifts, which we receive from Thy bountiful goodness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Of course, that's too "catholic" for most Lutherans' sensibilities; though exactly why that's a bad thing, I'm sure I don't know. I find it a little odd to see eyebrows tilted at no less a Lutheran authority than Luther's Small Catechism. But that's just me.

Out west, where I pastored my second parish, I discovered an appendix to the Common Table Prayer that many people automatically recited, swearing that they had always done so regardless of where in the country they came from:

...And let there be an equal share
On every table, everywhere.

I went along with this add-on so as not to stir up needless conflict, but I had never experienced it anywhere else, and have never encountered it since. Besides this, it always brought to mind the proverb, "Be careful what you wish for"—or, in paraphrase, "what you pray for." I mean, it could be quite awful if everyone actually got an equal share. It depends on how big or small that share is. It seems to me that you're better of just asking God to bless what He has given you, and leaving it at that.

Some of my Calvinist relatives used a different rhyming prayer, which I learned while visiting them in my childhood years:

God is great, God is good;
Let us thank Him for our food.
By His hand we all are fed;
Give us, Lord, our daily bread.

That's all very well, I suppose. I just can't help noticing that Jesus isn't in it. And, in a typical Reformed move, the greatness-of-God card is played on the first trick.

Luther's Daily Prayers also include a brief after-meal grace, which I have yet to hear anybody use in real life (except myself, on purpose to try to get the tradition going). Again, after a preliminary excerpt from the Psalms, it says:

We thank Thee, Lord God, heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord, for all your benefits; who livest and reignest forever and ever. Amen.

I suppose the awkwardness of the sentence structure might have something to do with this formula's unpopularity. Still, I find that it sticks in the memory pretty well.

When my brother and I were snotty little brats, we frequently livened up the saying of grace at family get-togethers by starting additional table prayers after the initial petition had been said. Just when everyone was starting to unfold their hands, open their eyes, and dart a greedy paw toward the mashed potatoes, one of us (by turns) would start another prayer rolling, and quiver with impious glee at the frustration of everyone else who felt it his or her duty to fold their hands, close their eyes, and pray along with us again. Sometimes, and not without the encouragement of some very irresponsible adults, our repertoire would wind down to almost blasphemously silly table prayers, such as:

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Thank God for the grub

and:

Good bread,
Good meat;
Good Lord,
Let's eat!

Still, I can't help feeling that all our mischief falls short of the fundraising video for the LCMS seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which came out while I was a student there. One scene depicted a classmate of mine sitting down to dinner with his wife and kids. They folded their hands and, obviously modeling a widespread practice among Fort Wayne-area Lutherans, sang "The Lord's been good to me" from the classic Disney animated short about Johnny Appleseed. I remember, as a schoolboy in Fort Wayne, being impressed to see John Chapman's grave from the window of my school bus every day, situated next to a big Lutheran church. The unspoken assumption then followed that Johnny Appleseed was some kind of Lutheran saint. Even Disney depicted him walking the length and breadth of the Ohio River drainage basin, planting apple trees and proclaiming the Word of God.

It wasn't until I was actually a Lutheran seminarian that I learned that John Chapman was, in fact, proselytizing for a heretical sect known as the Schwenckfelders, which might even have been considered a cult by some modern definitions of the term. You can't imagine how it tickles me to think about those pious Lutheran families, reverently singing a Disney song from a cartoon about a sectarian missionary. I wonder how they feel about the Tannhäuser march being used in church weddings... Anyway, I'm not saying this to condemn anyone. Just to explain a few of the many reasons that scene made me snicker.

I reckon you can almost perceive the boundaries of denominational fellowship within a large group of dinner guests, such as members of your extended family, by observing what (if anything) they pray before meals. There are those middle-of-the-road Lutherans ("these gifts"), the right-wingers ("Thy gifts"), and then my Dad ("these Thy gifts") who is so far beyond the right winger that he may actually be on the left wing of the next goose over. You have the side of the family that converted to Presbyterianism ("God is great"), the old uncle who stayed put in the Catholic church ("Lord God, heavenly Father") and who may be the only person who crosses himself at the end of his prayer; and, if the juvenile delinquents can manage to stifle their giggles long enough to sneak past the restraints of their parents' chilly stare, perhaps a whimsical table grace as well. But if you hear someone start to sing, "The Lord's been good to me," you'd better break out the cider. Preferably a nice, stiff, hard cider.

Balliett, Birdsall, Dostoevsky, Gaiman

2011-12-19T01:38:00.013-06:00

The Calder Game
by Blue Balliett
Recommended Ages: 12+

In this sequel to Chasing Vermeer and The Wright 3, three clever young unconventional thinkers from Chicago, USA, find themselves caught up in a life-endangering mystery in a small English town. Calder, Tommy, and Petra are still working out the whole "trio of friends" thing when Calder, the best friend in the middle, gets pulled out of the deck by a chance to visit the U.K. with his father. Tommy and Petra are still at the mutually-irritating, jealous-of-each-other stage of getting used to having to share Calder's friendship, and now suddenly they have to work together to help Mr. Pillay (Calder's dad) and the authorities find their friend.

Why? Because Calder has disappeared, silly! What could be behind his missing-persons case? Could it be a case of foul play? The fact that an unpopular piece of modern art, recently placed in the village square by an anonymous donor, also happened to disappear on the same night as Calder, makes that seem likely. But why would anyone want to kidnap Calder? And whether that happened or something else—such as an accident, or maybe getting lost in a hedge maze—how long do his friends have to find Calder before the chances of recovering him safely shrink to zero?

Tommy and Petra apply their own brand of unconventional thinking to solving these riddles; and sometimes, they try thinking like Calder himself—an exercise that has a weirdly high success rate, not only in solving problems but in bringing together two awkward kids, a grumpy old lady, and others.

Being used to the diet and habits of the common, or garden, children's mystery, you may be surprised by this story. It doesn't resolve itself as easily as you might expect. The solution to the mystery is both deceptively simple and scarily dangerous. And the whole adventure is kind of a sneaky way to get kids interested in the unusual, three-dimensional art work of Alexander Calder, the historic and scenic wonders of the Blenheim Palace and its neighborhood, and some further applications of those good old Pentominoes that you might not want to try at home.

This book will especially appeal to kids who are interested in history, art, foreign travel, and the type of education that isn't reduced to preparing for standardized tests. It might be a good book for teachers to read, too. If they learn the lesson one teacher in the book learns, more schools might become places of real learning and discovery. Or they might enjoy the book, at least. That could happen too. For more adventures of Calder and friends, look up the fourth book in the series, titled The Danger Box.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street
by Jeanne Birdsall
Recommended Ages: 12+

In this sequel to The Penderwicks, the four vivacious Penderwick sisters continue their adventures beyond the end of summer vacation, into the next school year. Strange but true: all adventures don't take place during school holidays!

Take, for example, the Save Daddy Plan. The time has come for the girls' widowed father to start dating again. Even their late mother agrees; in fact, a letter she left behind proves that it was her idea. Eldest daughter Rosalind, however, fears that dating might lead to a stepmother, and all kinds of awful changes. Their strategy? To set their father up on the most miserable dates imaginable, so none of those changes need to happen. Of course, nobody takes into account such wildcards as the possibility that Daddy may be going on phony dates because he doesn't like the idea either; or that the young widow next door might be just the kind of addition to the family everyone would like.

Then there are the boys across the street, especially football-mad Tommy, whose feelings for Rosalind are confusing to everybody, most of all himself. And middle sisters Skye and Jane are up to their own brand of trouble, starting when they swap homework assignments and snowballing from there. Batty, the baby of the family, adds a keen edge of chaos as she puts her new red wagon through all its paces, anoints herself detective in the case of the suspicious Bug Man, and tries to teach the toddler next door to say anything besides "Duck."

You might think that I've spoiled the whole book by now, but I really haven't. The charm of it lies in how the Penderwicks talk with each other, the girls' hilarious thought processes, and the everyday distractions that keep them from seeing what's going on right in front of them. It's a warm, funny, gentle book featuring a loving and lovable family, right down to the incredibly smart dog (who always knows when a "woof" is needed). Laughing with the Penderwicks might be especially good for some teen and preteen girls who need to learn to step back and laugh at themselves sometimes. The charms of the story speak for itself. And a third book in the series, titled The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, is now available.

Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Recommended Ages: 14+

I would like to thank the Saint Louis County Library system, Recorded Books LLC, audiobook reader George Guidall, and translator Constance Garnett for making it possible for me to enjoy this book during my daily drive to and from work, one hour each way. I had always been intimidated by this book and had never gotten any closer to reading it than having a copy on my bookshelf and occasionally, nervously, holding it in my hands. I had some faint idea of the novel's gravity, psychological depth, and literary significance, which together added up to a conflict between the side of me that felt destined to read the book and the side that shuddered at the idea. I could draw an inept parallel between my inner conflict and that which drives the main character in this book, but I won't, because it would be stupid. Luckily, I was delivered from my dilemma by the idea of listening to the book on CD while commuting.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (or Dostoyevsky) knew a lot about inner conflict. Consider his history: a political radical in Russia's pre-Revolution days, reprieved from a death sentence at the last moment, pardoned after several years imprisoned in Siberia, then celebrated for a writing career in which the two sides of his character warred with each other: the rebel who was almost hanged for his activities, and the penitent mystic who polemicized against the very ideals he had once nearly died for. Right in the middle of that same conflict is the novel's central figure, Rodyon Romanovich Raskolnikov: an impoverished student in the far northern capital city of Saint Petersburg, who dares himself to murder another human being in order to prove whether or not he is like Napoleon—a man who can "speak a new word," a leader, a world-changer.

If I don't want this to be a tediously long-winded review, I will have to forgo the customary word-sketch of who's who and what happens. There are a lot of unforgettable characters in this book, some with big bright souls, others shriveled and dark. There are pages of agonizing suspense, gripping psychological drama, touching romance, shattering tragedy, and even now again a moment of macabre humor. There is a character who inspired the TV detective Columbo, and a strikingly strong and almost "modern" female character, and a saintly angelic female character, and a goofy sidekick who will steal everyone's heart. There is a whole family that would seem right at home in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, dramatizing the evils of alcoholism in a way that, seemingly beyond possibility, is both heartbreaking and ludicrous at the same time. There is a murder mystery in which who done it, and how, is the first thing you know; why he done it, you learn later; and what leads him to confess his crime, when he has a real chance of getting away with it, is the real crux.

Your world lit teacher will probably tell you that this book, first published in a serialized format in 1866, broke new ground by inventing the "third-person omniscient" narrator. He may also express embarrassment over a couple of casually antisemitic comments in the book (including a caricatured physical description that Dostoevsky assigns to "all Jews without exception"). Or he might just take it easy on you and let you read lighter stuff like Chekov and Pushkin, and leave this book for grad students and bookworms to discover on their own. None of these possibilities is really quite necessary. You're not going to notice anything novel about the book's point-of-view because you're used to that sort of thing; you're big enough and intelligent enough to recognize that no person or period in history was perfect, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be discussed and thought about in their own context and on their own terms; and, after all, this is really a surprisingly clear, readable, and powerful book that you won't have any trouble finishing once you've well begun it.

American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 16+

As the tale within admits, the title on the cover of this book is a contradiction. Gods, this present-day quest-myth tells us, do not grow robustly in American soil. The beliefs indigenous to this continent may have had more-or-less impersonal creators lurking behind the scenery, but folklore heroes and the nymphlike spirits of animals and plants sufficed for most day-to-day purposes. So when people started to arrive from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, the gods they brought with them had to get by in a pluralistic landscape, crowded with other transplanted deities, all jostling to nourish themselves on the meager faith of a dwindling number of believers. Inhospitable soil indeed!

And now it is the present day, and a new pantheon has at last begun to push out the old gods. Media, technology, and similar idols are on the way up as gods from ancient Egypt, Africa, India, and China come down. And as if that isn't happening fast enough on its own, a war is brewing between the old gods and the new. Stuck in the middle of it all, by virtue of his job as the Norse god Odin's personal assistant, is a gentle giant named Shadow. Hired fresh out of prison as he travels to his wife's funeral, Shadow grows from being a complete skeptic to playing a pivotal role in the fate of beings as old as they are strange. He makes friends with an ill-fated leprechaun, wagers his life on a game of checkers, solves a serial killer case that has been going on for over a century, encounters the walking dead, fools around with a shape-changing goddess, works for a spell in the oldest continually-operating independent mortuary in world history, teaches himself some really awesome coin tricks, and rises from the dead. And he goes through it all with a wonderful attitude of not being surprised by anything, because after the first thing he experiences in this story, nothing is impossible.

This is one of the most serious and mature-themed books I have seen under Neil Gaiman's authorship. And I only partly mean that in the sense of the "adult content advisory" which it most definitely deserves. There are some extremely graphic, even disturbing sex scenes in this book, of a nature in keeping with its overall theme of America as a melting pot of gods of all nationalities, shapes, sizes, and character-types, stirred up together in a crazy, numinous potpourri. But there are is also a lot of death and dismemberment, torture, slavery, decomposing bodies, arcs of arterial blood squirting all over the place, and other gruesome manifestations of fate, sacrifice, and polymythic conflict. There are wonderful fantasyscapes depicting dimensions too weird to imagine, mixed in among scenes of desperate normalcy in a small, sheltered Wisconsin town.

Partly because it is longer than most of Gaiman's books, and partly because his writing style does not sparkle with quite its usual consistency of endlessly effervescent wit, American Gods seems to sit heavier on one's hands, heart, and mind. But as a well-researched traveler's guide to the faiths imported to the U.S., combined with a brilliantly imaginative thriller about war games with cosmic stakes, the tone might be just about right.

Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 14+

For my listening pleasure during my daily two-hour commute, I checked an audio CD of Anansi Boys out of the library. Great indeed was my pleasure in listening to British comedian Lenny Henry narrate this companion book to American Gods. I particularly noted the glee with which he impersonated its colorful cast of characters. He really knows his way around a West Indian dialect, making my time with this book somewhat like having a series of perfectly blended mojitos poured into my ears.

This lighthearted, tightly paced, frequently hilarious book bears a night-and-day contrast to the at times graphically nasty grimness of American Gods. Its main character, "Fat Charlie" Nancy, is a regular bloke, brought up by his Londoner mum since she split with his Florida-based father, whom Charles remembers mostly with embarrassment. Nevertheless, Fat Charlie goes back to Florida to bury the old man after he drops dead in the middle of a karaoke number. Among the vague memories stirred by the Caribbean ladies from his old neighborhood is the fact that Fat Charlie has a brother named Spider, and all he has to do if he wants to see him is talk to a spider about it. Charlie finds this almost as hard to believe as the notion that his late Dad was the ancient West African spider-god Anansi, but when he tries it (the spider-talking bit) back in his London flat, he discovers that his long-lost brother is very real. And very, very cool.

Spider is all the things Charlie likes to imagine himself to be but is not. Spider is good-looking, confident, handy with the girls. He has also inherited all the godlike powers in the family, power such as the ability to push people's minds and to bend the laws of space-time. But with these powers comes a number of not-so-nice divine attributes, such as capriciousness, selfishness, and indifference to the wellbeing of puny mortals. In a trice, Spider steals Fat Charlie's fiancée and goads his normally nice, easy-going brother into taking otherworldly steps to get rid of him.

By then, the balance of Fat Charlie's carefully ordinary life has been tipped and things begin to happen of themselves, out of control. His fiancée calls off the engagement and sails off with her bitter prune of a mother. A swindling money manager moves a peg up to kidnapping and murder, and tries to frame Fat Charlie for his crimes. A pretty cop flushes her career down the toilet to pursue her own investigation. And Fat Charlie realizes that he and Spider need each other, only when the latter is at the mercy of their family's most ancient enemy.

This book earns a big, bright "occult content advisory" with its cheerful depiction of ancient African gods and animistic West Indian rituals. Aside from that and a little blood, guts, and scary imagery, it is a surprisingly family-friendly novel (again, in marked contrast to American Gods), and full of laughs, surprises, romance, suspense, elemental storytelling, and for all its exotic subject matter, people and experiences that somehow seem so familiar that you have no trouble believing in it all. Perhaps that is why it won both the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award for best novel of 2006, ranking it among the best works of fantasy literature in our time. All I can say for sure, though, is that it was the most fun I'd had at the wheel of my car since I started listening to audiobooks. It made me look forward to driving to work each day!

Anime Dream

2011-12-19T01:10:00.004-06:00

I just woke from an anime dream in which the character I identified with, similar to a house spirit or genius of a place, led a conga-line of customers to a struggling restaurant and the neighboring shop. Other than that I remember a lot of bowing and scraping, Japanese manner, and an earlier scene (now only vaguely remembered) in which I resigned from my previous establishment because the owner did not properly appreciate all that I did.

Adding to the interest of my mental screenplay was a gimmick in which each character described how he would depict the Sun as a cartoon character, sort of like a temperamentally opposite ripoff of the moon gimmick in Wilde's Salome. One character, I remember, would have painted the sun as a yellow cake with green seeds in it. Another wanted to paint it as a face with the smile, for some reason, on one side rather than at the bottom.

The overall texture of the dream was very paint-y. It was well lit and colorful, and the conga-line bit was fun. I could really feel my body moving to the beat, and enjoyed the looks I got from lookers-on. The ruse worked, the businesses overflowed with patrons, and when my bladder woke me, I was reluctant to let go of the dream, in spite of its naughty animistic theology. I must be more excited than I realized about the upcoming Studio Ghibli film The Secret World of Arrietty.

IMAGE: A still from Spirited Away, in which my character from tonight's dream may be seen crossing the bridge at right, somewhere among his own kind.

Half a Dozen Movies

2011-12-17T19:39:00.011-06:00

Either in the week or two before I started this post, or in the weeks after I started it but before I published it, I took in more than a handful of movies, either on the big screen or the small.

First, I saw Sherlock Holmes: The Game of Shadows, both on its opening weekend on my own, and over the Christmas holiday with my Dad. I enjoyed it both times, and Dad enjoyed it with me—partly thanks (I am sure) to a bottomless bag of popcorn that accompanied us to the show. Robert Downey Jr. (Holmes), Jude Law (Watson), Jared Harris (Moriarty), and others reprise their roles from the next-most-recent Sherlock Holmes movie, keeping the pace of impish humor, sexual innuendo, and ludicrously intense action sequences at or above the previous outing's. In spite of a good deal of non-canonical combat scenes, the new film (co-written by sometime actor Kieran Mulroney, brother of the well-known Dermot) makes enough of an effort to score points with Holmes purists to include the joint Holmes-Moriarty plunge over Reichenbach Falls in the story, though the results in the film are both less ambiguous and less final.

Joining the ensemble is Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress best known for her title role in the Swedish film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—a film that I saw on video as soon as I finished reading the book. I haven't yet seen the American version, however. Since I have a book review of the source novel on the wheel, I won't say much about this film right now, except to note that: (1) It is actually two of six parts of a Swedish TV miniseries covering the entire Millennium t rilogy by the late Stieg Larsson; and (2) that it's a very dark, edgy tale about a journalist solving a missing persons case, catching a serial killer, and unmasking a white-collar gangster, with the aid of a borderline-anorexic, tattooed-and-pierced hacker girl with a touch of Asperger's syndrome and a history of exacting a terrible revenge upon Men Who Hate Women (here capitalized because it was the original title of both the book and the telefilm). And a deep breath...

Another movie I saw on video, after putting it off for a long time and for no reason that I can precisely recall, was the Hugo and Bradbury Award-winning 2010 hit Inception. Again, what of substance can I add to the massive volume of reviews of this movie? It's almost pointless for me to express my opinion. Simply in terms of relating my experience, I would say the movie captivated me with its intricate structure and thrilled me with its mythopoeic power. I watched it two nights in a row, and for the better part of a week my mind was filled with its vibrant imagery, with the lingering emotional impact of several of its plot lines, and with a perverse relish in the ambiguity of its final shot. I enjoyed the ensemble cast so much that I expect the actors will be forever linked in my mind, while at the same time I perceived that Leonardo DiCaprio still has some leading-man juice to burn.

Back to the big screen, I used a free pass to see Tower Heist, a movie for which I did not have very high hopes, and thus one I was glad not to have to pay for. A crime caper starring aging comedians Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, and Matthew Broderick, the agelessly attractive Tea Leoni, and Judd Hirsch and Alan Alda of the already choice vintage, it needs have no more said of it than that it was much, much better than I expected, though still not particularly good.

Then there was The Muppets, whose cast hardly needs to be introduced, except to note that I still catch myself repeating Chris Cooper's villainous tagline ("Maniacal laughter!") and giggling over the whole "Let's travel by map!" sequence. A family-friendly musical not afraid to parody itself, it also stars Jason Segel and Amy Adams as a flesh-and-blood pair of romantic leads whose presence in the movie lends itself admirably to the creation of spoof trailers—many of which, no doubt, will show up on the DVD—but really does not seem vital to the plot, in retrospect. You have to give them props, though, for being willing to look like complete fools.

And finally, the climax of my 2011 movie-going proved to be the Peter Jackson produced, Steven Spielberg directed adaptation of the iconic Belgian comic, The Adventures of Tintin. This is one of those boundary-pushing films of the type that is shot with live actors in motion-capture gear, then painted over with computer animation. And it really takes that type of film a huge step forward. I spotted this even before seeing an encore presentation of The Polar Express on my parents' cable over Christmas vacation. The characters in this new movie, particularly Tintin himself, have a lifelike liveliness, particularly in the eyes, which were once widely considered an insurmountable obstacle to making realistic, computer-animated human characters come to life. Gone is the vacant-eyed-automaton look that used to make one's flesh crawl the more realistic the rest of the character looked. Except perhaps for a few awkward hand gestures, digital actors now seem almost ready to replace the real thing—only, what would the tabloids do without the likes of Tom Cruise?

Worship Director?

2011-12-10T08:23:00.009-06:00

I've been reading the job description of a position currently open at LCMS headquarters: "Worship Director & International Center Chaplain." The language of the Worship Director's list of duties creates some interesting dissonance against the theology of worship I have been brought up to. Here are some examples:

1. "Propose and create programs that will carry out the purposes and aims of the Synod in matters of worship"—Does that mean every act of worship has a measurable objective? Or are we talking about this job in terms of a bully pulpit for liturgical reform?

3. "Render informal chaplaincy and counseling services to employees as requested... keeping in mind the employer role through input/feedback from the Department of Human Resources where necessary or requested"—Does that mean you have to balance pastoral confidentiality against the fact that you're in a management position over the people you may be counseling?

4. "Provide pastoral leadership to develop a faithful Lutheran community at the International Center, counting with the collaboration of the Department of Human Resources as needed or requested"—In other words, you can't assume that everyone who works at LCMS Headquarters is a faithful Lutheran Christian; but if you're going to whine about it, whine to H.R.

5. "Periodically review the performance and effectiveness of worship programs and report results to the Executive Director and the Board of National Mission"—In other words, since the objectives of worship are measurable (see #1), you should occasionally measure your success.

8. "Be accountable for the technical and professional work of various adjunct committees as they produce worship materials"—though a previous item hints that you only have an advisory role in selecting these committee members. As far as I.C. chapel services are concerned, this means "just doing it by the book" is out of the question; in terms of the "bully pulpit," however, I can see where having a few extra hands writing the weekly prayers and lectionary summaries could be a help.

9. "Consult with the worship and music departments of the Synod schools to establish principles and practices in this area of the Church’s life which best reflect the biblical and confessional spirit of Lutheran worship"—principles which, obviously, haven't been discovered yet, or which change frequently enough that someone needs to do this on an ongoing basis.

All that, surprisingly, is beside duties of the I. C. Chaplain, which include some of the same duties, only stripped of prolix qualifying clauses that make the position sound like a stooge for whatever side of the "worship wars" is currently in favor. I think I would rather be the I. C. Chaplain than Julie the Worship Director, and I don't know how anyone could really be both; but I will probably never be either, because the requirements of the job include "significant knowledge and resourcefulness coupled with sound judgment in the fields of theology, liturgy, hymnody, church music, and related arts"—all of which I daresay I have, except perhaps the "sound judgment" part—and whether I've got that, too, seems a politically charged, subjective question.

To be sure, there's also the matter of having at least five years in the parish ministry (when I resigned after three and a half) and a master's or terminal degree in music and/or theology (when I have a B.A. in one and an M.Div., which in purely academic terms is virtually another B.A., in the other). But still, I can thank God I'm not qualified for this position because, from where I stand now, the spiritual compromises and conflicting priorities of the job would be a real cross to bear.

Being Barked At

2011-12-04T19:57:00.005-06:00

I live with two cats, but I'm as much a dog person as a cat person. I have always loved dogs, lived with many of them growing up, and enjoyed the company of most of the dogs who shared my parents' home when I came back to visit as a grown-up. Right now, for almost the first time in my life, neither of my parents has a dog at home. My Dad & Stepmom's 14-year-old miniature schnauzer went to his reward this past summer, and my mother finally (mercifully) parted company with her yippy little Chihuahua rat-dog only a couple weeks ago.

I am proud of many of the dogs we owned when I was a kid. We had a toy poodle once, best remembered for eating my Dad's shoes. Later, there was a golden retriever mix who whelped ten puppies on my brother's bed, bless her. Their father was an itinerant black lab whose liaisons with our Honey taught my brother and me the facts of life in a really down-to-earth way.

Sometime between the poodle and Honey, when we lived in a house in the country with lots of yard to run in, we had a gentle, friendly Afghan hound with a rare coat of cream-colored, shaggy fur. Pete, as we called him, had learned a certain stillness (the hard way, from his nasty previous owners), so that visitors often mistook him for a lawn ornament until they pulled up, whereupon he would saunter interestedly over to see who had called. Besides these nasty surprises, there was no harm in Pete, who lived a wild and free outdoor life, sprinting swiftly along the side of the highway and keeping up with passing cars for as much as a quarter-mile. Pete didn't live long after we moved away from that place. A neighboring farmer, who had promised to take him in, waited until our tail-lights faded in the distance, then shot him to save himself any further trouble.

One of our best pets was VP, short for "Vision Puppy," which in turn is but one of many jokes that circulated among our family and friends at the time we adopted the miniature longhair dachshund puppy. Dad told someone that Stepmom was a "vision of loveliness," and a multitude of gags was born. The vision meme blew over soon enough, except that for all eleven years of her adorable existence, VP's name perpetuated its memory. She was a remarkable little dog: daft as a bag of hair, but frisky and vocal and sociable and unusually patient with small children, who in return could not get enough of holding her, rubbing her, fiddling with her tail, and pulling her floppy ears. VP had so many quirky little ways that I could bore you endlessly about them, and that's probably because she was in my life for such a long time and at just the right range of years for me to remember nearly all of them. (Her end came when I was in college.) She lived to have three proteges: a neurotic mini dachs named Dixie, a psychotic mini schnauzer named Katie, and the late Martin, whose recent demise closed 25 years of unbroken dog ownership by my Dad & Stepmom.

Martin was the most lovable of the family dogs that I only knew from visiting home, rather than sharing a home with him. He became my parents' baby after I had left the nest, but he was always thrilled to see me when I came to visit (as Katie had been, in spite of her embarrassing viciousness towards selected people). I loved seeing his bobtailed butt wiggling with excitement, and I was one of the best at stroking him and talking to him until he calmed down. Other dogs that I visited and loved, but never cohabitated with, included my maternal grandparents' beagle Deanna (whom I named after a Sesame Street character the day they adopted her), my stepmom's dad's gormless yellow lab Conor (who was always adorably cowed by first VP and then Katie), my mom's woebegone Basset hound Lottie, and the mini dachshund Max whose owners (friends of mine) let me dog-sit him. Max adored me ever afterward, because I was a pushover for walkies and let him take all the time he wanted to claim ownership of the neighborhood and to read pee-mail left by other canines.

Nowadays, I enjoy my fellowship with dogs in minute doses. I've been getting to know the dogs who guard a series of fenced backyards along the street where I often take walks. Our relationship is fairly one-sided. They run toward the fence and bark at me, while I walk by as innocently as possible. Sometimes, if I'm in the mood, I'll make remarks at them -- observations about their character, their looks, the timbre of their voices, etc. Sometimes I'll just stare at them as I walk by, because I can and that's the type of S.O.B. I am. I enjoy the company. It's what I've got in that line, anyway.

Furthest out of the three dog-yards in my neighborhood is one where three miniature pinschers dwell, unless my breed-spotting is out. They represent the full range of coloring and vocal quality of that breed, and they hop up and down and yap non-stop the whole time I am within sight of their fence. One of them has a small-dog yipping quality to his (her?) bark; the other two have a more gruff voice type. I like their looks, but I doubt they would let me reach over the fence and scratch their scruff without charging a finger or two.

Next in on my homeward route is the rottweiler that could probably easily jump over the fence and take me down like a gimpy wildebeest. But it contents itself with bouncing up and down on its hind legs and woofing at me. Last time I approached it, it let me tell it what a good-looking dog it was before it started barking in my face. The first couple of times I walked by its yard, I didn't even know it was there until I had just passed the last of its fence, when it rushed up out of a sunken stairwell and came at me barking from behind. I'm sure my jump of surprise gratified him, but I called him a coward then and I still wonder at his cowardice. I could probably drop-kick any of those mini pinschers halfway down the block, but they meet me with snarls of defiance as I approach their yard, fearlessly protective. Meanwhile the big, jowly rottweiler, who could probably crush my hyoid bone between his jaws before I saw him coming, skulks out of sight until I've passed and THEN darts forward and shout's BOO! at my back.

And finally, my favorite, closest to home: the elderly beagle, somewhat portly, with eyes whitened by glaucoma, who leans his forepaws against the chain-link fence, cranes his neck backward, and barks straight up in the air. The mini pinschers are just doing their job, mind; and the rottweiler is doing what he can to keep up appearances. But this beast, already with one paw in the grave, barks at me with such gusto, such passion, that I know he means it right down to the ends of his whiskers. His is a joy in being a dog that even blindness and a touch of gout cannot take away: an attitude that says, "Hey! Who are you? This is my block! Don't forget it!"

Tahoe Joe's

2011-12-01T19:52:00.008-06:00

I have had a lot of interesting food adventures lately—so many that I don't have time to do justice to all of them in writing.

For example, I would like to rhapsodize about the chicken tikka masala and onion kulcha at the Taj Palace in Chesterfield MO, where I dined on linen table cloths one cold, drizzly evening within the past week; but there have to be many still-more-spectacular dining experiences awaiting me in that little storefront restaurant, since tikka masala is merely the gateway dish to many other delights, hardly even Indian when you get down to it. I mean, I've read somewhere that the dish was invented in Scotland; so it's about as Indian as General Tso's chicken is Chinese. But still, it was a really good dinner.

Then there is the shrimp po'boy sandwich I had last night* at the Schlafly Tap Room in downtown St. Louis. I thought it was something special, but what do I know? I had never even had a po'boy before. I wasn't even sure how to go about eating it, a task that seemed equally a matter of picking bits off with the fork as of hefting the entire hoagie-bunned, red-sauced extravagance with both hands and biting into it. I was equally at a loss today* at Denny's when, for a brunch-break during a walk in perfect hoodie-sweater weather, I ordered a Bacon Slamburger, complete with ground beef, hash browns, hollandaise, and an egg cooked to order, in my case a poached egg whose yolk burst and ran all over the plate when I tried to pick the sandwich up. In the end I just picked off the sesame-seed bun and went at it with a knife and fork, finishing by mopping up leftover yolk and hollandaise with the remaining bread and crinkly steak fries.

But the honor of a full restaurant review, with enough stars to grace a fireworks show, goes to the new Tahoe Joe's steakhouse that opened in Chesterfield two weeks ago. A few nights ago* I stopped there for dinner and learned that it is the first restaurant of its small chain to open outside the state of California, which is quite an honor for the Chesterfield Commons shopping area, even if it is the largest open-air mall in the U.S. (Document that for yourself. I don't remember where I read it, and I'm too fat and happy to go researching it now.) But what you want to know is that Tahoe Joe's is exactly like a restaurant that you might see featured on the Food Network, from its distinctive look (based on glossy wood paneling and columns trimmed with smooth rocks cemented together) to its chatty wait staff, all the way to the unusual but staggeringly delicious signature dishes which come to your table in architecturally stylish arrangements.

I started with an appetizer called "Railroad Camp Shrimp," which was ten large, peeled shrimp, breaded and fried in something of a tempura style, and formed into a sticky tower on top of a salad tossed with fried wonton chips, crispy chow mein noodles, and an Asian-inspired dressing. All of this was arranged on a funky pedestal-shaped device and accompanied by a cup of sweet brown dipping sauce, similar to the stuff you dunk pot stickers in at a Chinese-American restaurant. I was literally still savoring the flavors of this dish when my waiter presented me with an unsolicited cup of chicken noodle soup, which (I must admit) tasted a little funky coming down off a mountain of sticky-sweet Asian tempura shrimp salad, but improved vastly after I cleansed my palate. With what did I cleanse it, you ask? Have I not mentioned the mason jar full of tart-sweet lemonade that came with my meal? I instantly pegged it as one of the three best lemonades I have ever tasted, its flavor so profoundly tangy that I almost suspected a hint of rhubarb in the recipe.

But all that was prelude to the main dish. My waiter explained that Tahoe Joe's signature dish of all siganture dishes, notwithstanding their excellent ribs and pork chops, is a number known simply as Tahoe Joe's Steak: a juicy sirloin steak that is first slow-roasted for 19 hours before being grilled to anywhere between medium and well-done, more or less just to add that final touch of charcoal-smoke flavor. But a little lower down on the facing page of the menu is what I actually ordered: the Tahoe Joe's Steak Sandwich.

This sandwich came, first of all, with a pile of fries so huge that I groaned when I saw it. I picked at only a few of the fries. The waiter was nice enough to bring me a cup of horseradish sauce that I requested before I tried the sandwich, but after tasting it I couldn't bring myself to change a thing about it, so I used the horsey sauce to dip the fries in and that proved to be an excellent idea. Nevertheless, the pile of fries remained pretty much untouched when my meal ended, and it ended simply because I was too full to eat one more bite.

The sandwich itself was huger than I expected, sliced into two halves that overlapped each other on the plate, each mounded high with slivers of beef cooked in such a way that it seems equally right to call it a pot roast as a steak. The meat was delicious, tender, and juicy, and the bread was that really crispy type of grilled bread that probably has parmesan cheese grilled right into it, forming an especially stiff crust on the outside of the sandwich to complement the gushy goodness within. In with the meat in that goodness were large slices of grilled pepper, long strands of grilled onion, a stretchy layer of melted white cheese, some kind of tangy sauce, a couple of slices of bacon (which I discovered with a guffaw of disbelief), and slices of little round grilled mushrooms and of one big juicy tomato.

This is a sandwich whose awesomeness cannot be sufficiently described, or if so described, believed. It must be experienced. So when you get to the bottom of this post, close your browser, grab your wallet and keys, and drive with all the speed that public safety and the Missouri Highway Code allow to 17258 Chesterfield Airport Road, a wee bit east of the Boone's Crossing ramp off I-64. Don't tell your waiter I sent you, because that won't add anything to your experience. Just take my advice: order the sandwich I described, and save room for dessert. I'm going to have to use one of those "call this number to tell us what you think and we'll comp you a slice of cheesecake" gimmicks before I get to try their New York-style cheesecake. The one thing I regret about my first visit to Tahoe Joe's is not having enough room even to think about ordering dessert. In fact, I was so full after the shrimp, the chicken soup, and a second mason jar of lemonade that I only managed to eat about 88% of my sandwich, and that in spite of having passed the point of pain & being obliged to pick bits out of it with a knife and fork (which seems to be a keynote of my sandwich-eating career, lately).

I explained to the waiter, as I fished for fragments of bacon amongst the remnants of congealed cheese, that it is a sin to leave bacon uneaten; I don't think he got the joke, but the restaurant got my enthusiasm and, I expect, will keep it at least long enough for me to try everything on its menu. There aren't that many dishes on it, a good sign if you salivate for the kind of gourmet-quality comfort food you see regularly on the Food Network, but rarely in real life. I'll keep you posted if any more of Tahoe Joe's menu offerings change my life the way that sandwich did.

* Timeline: I started writing this review the night of my visit to Tahoe Joe's, as the date stamp on the post shows; my visits to Schlafly's and Denny's took place on Friday and Saturday respectively. Because I dragged out completing this review until Saturday afternoon, the verb tenses and time tags throughout the review are kiddywumpus. But what is a journal for, if not to make virtual time travel possible?

Hugo

2011-11-29T22:55:00.008-06:00

Anyone looking up the title Hugo on IMDB is going to discover that, since 1990 alone, there have been two TV series, a made-for-video movie, and seven (7) feature films by that name. Perhaps that reveals director Martin Scorsese's lack of insight into the art of giving a film a unique and memorable title, especially given that his latest movie is based on a book with the rather more distinctive title The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Now, a word about the book. I haven't read it yet. I've been keeping my eye on it at bookstores, though. And it seems to be one of those eternal hardcovers that persistently deny gratification to cheapskate bibliophiles, like me, who prefer to wait for the paperback. Brian Selznick's impressive-looking tome-for-tots has been on sale since 2007 and, to date, shows no sign of being released in paperback. I haven't felt so thwarted since A Series of Unfortunate Events (which didn't start appearing in paperback until all thirteen installments had been published in hardcover). Or maybe it's the Charlie Bone series by Jenny Nimmo. You see how my mental association runs. One can only hold out for the paperback for so long before one runs out of patience. But in the case of Hugo Cabret, I have managed to stare down the hardcover for nearly five years and, though I would still like to read it, I mean to outstare it.

So, obviously, I had to bend my general rule about reading the book before I see the movie. But then again, I've also started to learn that such a rule may not be all it's cooked up to be. Sometimes it seems that first falling in love with the book merely guarantees that you will hate the movie, even if (in strictly movie terms) it's an excellent film. So my conscience isn't much bothered by the sequence "see the movie, read the book" these days.

I shall spare you a synopsis of the movie because, eventually, I am going to review the book. (Maybe, at that time, I will skip summarizing the story on the rationale that I had already reviewed the movie. Stay tuned!) Let's just say that it's a surprising movie in a lot of ways. For one thing, it's family-friendly. There are no cuss words in it. No heads being blown off. No wise guys getting coked up, laid, or whacked. Both Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci are conspicuously absent, to name only a small portion of a top-dollar cast that does not appear in this movie. In fact, the headliner turns out to be Ben Kingsley, who won an Oscar for Gandhi almost 30 years ago and, since then, has been steadily working out the Career Damnation which customarily befalls those who peak too early. At least he's been steadily working, though I don't think I've seen any of his work since he played Fagin in 2005's Oliver Twist. Honestly, I kind-of thought he was dead. Rumors of his demise, etc.

Next below Kingsley in the billing is Sacha Baron Cohen, the genius mimic-cum-artfully offensive comedian best known for playing Brüno, Borat, and the Italian barber in Sweeney Todd. Here he plays the police inspector at the Paris train station where most of the film takes place, a performance that was intended to walk a tight-rope between humorous villainy and romantic pathos but which, in the event, comes across simply as strained and obnoxious. Fans of fantasy films will enjoy the rest of the cast, however. Jude Law (A Series of Unfortunate Events) plays Hugo's ill-fated father, and Ray Winstone (Beowulf) his inebriated uncle, who gives the boy a home within the walls of the train station and a purpose in keeping the clocks in order. Christopher Lee (The Lord of the Rings, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) gives the boy a book; Emily Mortimer (who lent her voice talents to the English version of Howl's Moving Castle) distracts the policeman with her flower-girl charms; Frances de la Tour (lately Madame Maxime in the Harry Potter films) unwittingly supplies him with warm croissants. Other Harry Potter alums present include Helen McCrory (a.k.a. Mama Malfoy) as Kingsley's wife, and Richard Griffiths (a.k.a. Uncle Vernon) as a newspaper vendor who distracts the croissant lady with his shy courtship, daily frustrated by a vicious wiener-dog. Playing the title role is young Asa Butterfield, a British youngster who starred in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and who is slated to play Ender Wiggin in an upcoming film on Ender's Game.

Having not read this book, I went to this movie and was surprised to find out exactly why Mr. Scorsese made it, even though it doesn't have any wise guys in it. It's a movie about the movies, looking back fondly (and mysteriously, and movingly) upon the era of the very earliest, silent films, and upon a magician-turned-filmmaker who "made dreams" on the big screen. How an orphaned urchin living inside the walls of a train station, eating stolen croissants, winding huge clocks, and borrowing wind-up-toy components to repair a spooky automaton, brings this long-lost film genius to light is what this movie is about. And while Hugo moves around inside the gears of clocks, you get to move around inside the making of the movies that changed movies from mere sideshow novelties into an art form, and a way of telling stories, without which the present world could hardly be imagined.

We Bought a Zoo

2011-11-26T22:21:00.002-06:00

I was looking up showtimes to see either Hugo or The Muppets when I spotted the title We Bought a Zoo, which I had never heard of. I looked up who was in it and what it was about, and so it was that I arrived at the cinema with the firm intention of seeing this movie. Cut to the end: I walked out of the theater smiling, but with a bit of red under my eyes from wiping tears away.

The story, loosely based on something that really happened, concerns an "adventure journalist" named Benjamin Mee who realizes, six months after his wife's cancer death, that he needs to change some things in his life for his kids' sake. For one thing, his son is having a lot of anger issues, drawing disturbing pictures and getting expelled from school. For another, his little girl is trying too hard to mother her father and brother when she just needs to be a little girl. So he starts looking for a new house, where they can try new schools, a new lifestyle, and move on without the ghost of Mom hanging around. Other than a couple of documentaries, We Bought a Zoo is the first film directed by Cameron Crowe since 2005's Elizabethtown; the director of Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky chose a surprisingly intimate and human story to add to his just-as-surprisingly short list of films.

At the end of a long and fruitless tour of properties for sale, the father and daughter find their dream house. It comes with a catch, though: whoever buys it must also buy the Exotic Animal Park that comes with it. And maintain the staff that takes care of the animals. The Mee family, lacking any experience in zookeeping, plunges into the task. They are immediately in over their head, realizing that lions, tigers, and bears (oh my) will not solve their personal problems, and that they will need a miracle to finance the improvements the state inspector requires before they can open for business.

The Mees go through some rough patches, make no mistake. They have to deal with teenage rebellion and a rocky teen romance; a hero tiger reaching the end of his life; a runaway bear; a crate of snakes (fresh off a plane, no doubt) left open overnight; a bookkeeper who campaigns to turn the staff against the new owners; and the still raw memory of a woman who will be hard to let go of. The turning point, and for my money the best scene in the movie, is when the boy and his father finally have it out in a very loud argument, culminating in the little girl asking, "What was that about the Easter Bunny?"

The show features Matt Damon in the lead role, supported by Colin Ford (lately the "young Sam Winchester" on TV's Supernatural), Elle Fanning (late of Super 8, Scarlett Johansson (lately "Black Widow" in the Marvel Comics films), Thomas Haden Church (of Sideways and Spiderman 3) as the grieving dad's older brother, John Michael Higgins (of A Mighty Wind, Best in Show, etc.) as the buttoned-up inspector, and Angus Macfadyen (of The Cradle Will Rock and Braveheart) as the wild guy who designs wild animal enclosures. If the guy with the monkey perched on his shoulder looks familiar to you, he's Patrick Fugit, whom I last saw playing "Evra the Snake Boy" in Cirque du Freak. If he's not familiar to you, then he isn't.

Basye, Hardy, McCaughrean, Miéville, Stiefvater

2011-11-26T16:28:00.029-06:00

Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck
by Dale E. Basye
Recommended Ages: 10+

In the first book of this series, we learned that Heck is "where the bad kids go." So when teen felon Marlo Fauster lands there after being buried in a marshmallow lava flow, it's hard to be surprised. The surprise is that her nerdy but virtuous brother Milton comes along for the ride, darned for eternity. Now the plot has moved on. Milton has found his way back to the land of the living, but he isn't adjusting well to being Resurrection Boy. People think he's a freak and either fear or ridicule him, sometimes both at once. He keeps having spiritual brown-outs, a side effect of crossing over and back again. He inadvertently sends the school bully to his eternal reward, and now a strange girl from a kooky religious cult is after him.

Meanwhile, back in the junior underworld, Marlo has matriculated into the Second Circle of Heck, where kids study such subjects as necroeconomics while being tormented by desire for material possessions. It's a very commercialized sector of the afterlife, with tantalizing commercial breaks promoting the fashion boutiques and outlet stores of Mallvana. Egged on by Rapacia's Vice Principal of Darkness—a giant tin Easter bunny named the Grabbit, whose hollow voice speaks in diabolically cute limericks—Marlo begins to plan the heist of all eternity: a diamond-snatching caper that could wreck the economy of the afterlife... and that's the best-case scenario.

By the end, the two siblings are together again, fighting spork-wielding demons, a cross-dressing bully, crowds of shoppers, and the type of bureaucrats who can really take the fun out of being dead. And all that's besides a parade of fiendish puns, a rogue's gallery of hilariously maladjusted characters, and an ingenious plot to destroy everything, poof! But if you're wondering whether the Fauster siblings make it out of the underworld, you'll have to get the next book in the series. Rumor has it there will eventually be nine of them, corresponding to the nine circles of aitch-ee-double-toothpicks popularized by Dante in The Divine Comedy. At this writing there are only five Circles of Heck, the titles following this installment being Blimpo, Fibble, and Snivel.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Recommended Ages: 14+

I continue to commute about ten hours a week, and listening to audio books on my car's CD player remains the best way of filling all that mentally wasted time with something that enriches my inner life. Plus, as I learned when I listened to an unabridged reading of War and Peace, it is also a great way to fill the gaps in my reading with books that I really should experience before I die, but might never do so at the rate things are going. Somehow I decided that the next author I needed to broach was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), an English writer who devoted most of his career to poetry, but who is now mainly remembered for his novels set in the fictitious British county of Wessex. His best-known titles, to judge by whether I had heard of them, include Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure. Together with the last of these, Tess of the d'Urbervilles stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy and harsh criticism that spurred Hardy to turn away from fiction at an early stage in his career. The student of English literature must regard this decision as a tragedy similar to, say, the music world's loss when Sibelius quit composing with thirty years left on his meter.

But where would be the fun of studying Brit Lit without sad stories like these? Suicides, drownings, early deaths in the trenches of the Great War, the toll of consumption upon all manner of promising young talent... It's enough to give the reading of great books an extra kick of morbid fascination. And even though Hardy outlived his doomed heroine by some 37 years, this particular book is enlivened by the scandal and (for faithful Christians) intellectual challenge that results from its attacks on Christian morals and beliefs. Among its ironies, however, is the fact that Hardy never openly reveals the syllogisms by which male protagonist Angel Clare apparently knocks Christian dogma into a cocked hat; he leaves them to the imagination, or perhaps to the research of people interested in the thought of that era.

Another irony is that, while the heroine's predicament tears the "conventional morality" of the Victorian era to bloody shreds, the most doctrinaire believers in it (Clare's parents) happen to be paragons of compassion and forgiveness; and as the narrator points out, the crucial point on which the whole tragedy turns is the point when Tess fails in her resolve to appeal to Parson and Mrs. Clare, fails to trust them to be exactly the open-hearted saints they would have been to her.

Tess's predicament stems from a youthful indiscretion, in which her innate purity and virtue were tested past the breaking point by an amoral seducer named Alec d'Urberville. In spite of what you might guess from the title, she never marries him, though she bears a child who does not live long. After living quietly for a few years, Tess tries to start over in life with the sovereign resolution to avoid entanglements with men, but soon after going to work on a dairy farm she meets and falls in love with Angel Clare, a parson's son whose freethinking tendencies have led him to seek a career in farming rather than the church. Ever conscious that her past could blight their future together, Tess resists Angel's proposal of marriage as long as she can, then delays the wedding day while dithering over whether or how to tell him her whole history.

It finally doesn't come out at all until their wedding night; and when Clare recoils from her, the author makes it clear that the faithful one of the couple is the wife who suffers while Clare looks for answers in Brazil. By the time he realizes that he is the one who has done wrong between them and rushes back to England to reunite with his wife, the thin line between "happily ever after" and unavoidable tragedy has already been crossed. Exactly what shape that tragedy will take, and how much of an emotional wreck it will leave you, will only become clearly apparent in the superbly paced final pages of the book.

I listened to this book as read by the amazing Anna Bentick, who brought a distinctive intonation and regional dialect to each and every character, male and female. Her voice, and Hardy's words, brought vividly to life a tragedy that at times reminded me of folk tales and myths, at others of lyric opera (I even idly considered sketching an outline of a libretto for one). And though my one-sentence review of this book will henceforth be that "I have been emotionally assaulted and battered by Thomas Hardy," I can't quite shake the idea that the next audio book I borrow from the library will be something by the same author.

Peter Pan in Scarlet
by Geraldine McCaughrean
Recommended Ages: 8+/-

Confession time: In my review of J. M. Barrie's book Peter Pan and Wendy, I got a few chronological details wrong. First of all, the character of "Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" appeared first in a 1902 novel for adults (in a passage later excerpted and published as a standalone book called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), then in a 1904 play under the title set off in quotes above, and finally in the book I reviewed, published in 1911 and also titled (in its various editions) Peter and Wendy and, simply, Peter Pan. What happened in 1906 (the year referenced in my previous review) was that Mr. Barrie donated the rights to Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. And so it was in 2005, in the run-up to the 100th anniversary of that gift, that GOSH announced a search for the author to write the first-ever "authorized sequel" to Peter Pan.

It's not as if there hadn't already been oodles of adaptations, spinoffs, and sequels, including a famous stage musical (which has been filmed for television several times), a bunch of animated films, a Spielberg movie, and a whole series of prequel novels by American writers Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (starting with 2004's Peter and the Starcatchers). But even while debate continues as to whether the copyright on Peter Pan has expired, there's something to be said for being chosen, authorized, and published by the trustees of the charity to which Barrie dedicated the book.

On the strength of her story outline and a sample chapter, Geraldine McCaughrean won that honor. And though the Barry-Pearson franchise is more vibrantly packaged and a roaring success, it seemed right that I should read this sequel first. Now that I have done it, I have doubts about the brainparts—not, mind you, of the Great Ormond Street trustees who entrusted their centennial sequel to McCaughrean, nor of the author herself—rather, doubts about the mental wellness of the reviewers who (according to my research, notably on Wiki) gave her book a "mixed but generally positive" critical reception. That's just absurd. What McCaughrean wrote is at least the equal of the original Peter Pan. In all likelihood, any critic who doesn't think so has let his memory of Barrie's actual work become colored by the spectacles of stage, screen, and high-gloss publishing that have accumulated on it like layers of tinted transparency, where each successive incarnation of Peter Pan must outdo all before it in blockbuster appeal—whereas this book is simply a lovely, charming, delightful children's book, clothed in whimsical drawings by Scott M. Fischer and a beautiful cover painting by Tony DiTerlizzi, exactly in the spirit of the 1911 book on which it builds.

Such a feat must have come natural to Geraldine McCaughrean (pronounced like "McCorkran"), author of dozens of books in which Bible stories, legends, myths, and historical events are retold and/or fictionalized for younger readers. The winner of a Carnegie Medal, three Whitbread Children's Book Awards, a Michael L. Printz Award, and numerous other honors, McCaughrean will probably be best remembered by future generations for her singular contribution to the Peter Pan mythos. For it is an original tale that reunites nearly all of the original characters in a way that combines lighthearted whimsy with touching pathos in the same elusive, magical proportions that made the first Peter Pan unforgettable.

The opening of the book finds the Lost Boys and Wendy all grown up, sometime after World War I, raising their own kids and moving on with their lives after having been adopted and educated by the kindly Darling family. But into their adulthood intrudes a series of thrilling dreams, from which they wake with objects from Neverland in their beds: cutlasses, alarm clocks, and the like. Getting together, they discuss what this may mean. It seems that something terrible has happened back in Neverland: Time has begun to pass where it ought to stand still. So, by means too wonderful for me to spoil here, they return to childhood and fly back to see what's up with Peter, the forest, the lagoon, and whatnot. While they find Peter very much the same as ever, everything else in Neverland has changed. Summer has moved on to autumn. Bones of mermaids and a crocodile litter the seashore. And a mysterious "ravelling man" has, with his menagerie of fierce beasts, somehow taken up residence in Peter's magical neighborhood.

Even worse disasters lie ahead, testing the survival of Neverland, the friendship of the boys, and the eternal youth of Peter. It is a swashbuckling adventure that combines lovable nonsense with scary suspense, in which touches of silly humor to make children giggle alternate with splashes of poetic brilliance to make grownups gasp with wonder. And finally the story wraps up in a way that leaves the ground both changed and open to another sequel. If GOSH doesn't mean to wait another hundred years for the next "authorized sequel," they couldn't do better than to give that assignment to McCaughrean too.

Un Lun Dun
by China Miéville
Recommended Ages: 12+

Weird things have started happening to London schoolgirls Zanna and Deeba. Well, they're happening to Zanna really; Deeba is only concerned because they are best friends. First there was a cloud that looked like Zanna. Then something weird came in the mail. Now animals are bowing to her, strangers are approaching her as though she were a celebrity and not just an ordinary girl. And then things start to get really serious. The word "Shwazzy" has been whispered concerning Zanna—possibly connected to a similar-sounding French word that means "chosen." She has started to show signs of strange power. Something dangerous seems to be after her. And then comes the night when a broken umbrella crawls out of a neighbor's garbage and, moving all by itself, appears to look in at Zanna's bedroom window. The two girls start to follow the umbrella as it makes its retreat, and before they catch up to it, they find their way into an alternate London—UnLondon, by name—the place where obsolete people and things go when our dimension no longer has room for them.

Little by little, Zanna is welcomed as a long-awaited hero whose exploits will save UnLondon in a war to come soon. But even with a talking book filled with prophecies about her and all kinds of signs proclaiming her the Shwazzy, Zanna proves unequal to her first encounter with the enemy: the dark, hungry intelligence known, for surprisingly straightforward reasons, as the Smog. Since air quality standards were passed in the U.K., London's heavy and sometimes deadly smog has become a thing of the past. Which, don't you know, makes it a very current thing in UnLondon, where enough of it has accumulated, with who-knows-what chemical ingredients, to form a conscious mind bent on burning, inhaling, and absorbing the knowledge in everyone and everything, everywhere. Only the Shwazzy can stop it, says the Book; but even the Book is at a loss when Zanna is defeated, and nearly dies, in her first battle against the Smog.

To Deeba's relief, the girls go back to their own London, and a ruse to draw the Smog's evil tendrils out of Zanna's lungs works, saving the Shwazzy to fight another day. Only... all her memories of UnLondon seem to have gone out with the smoke in her lungs. Deeba realizes that only she knows about that other world, and that she can't talk about it with anybody—especially Zanna. And then Deeba discovers that UnLondon is in more trouble than anybody suspected, and somebody has to go back. Who else is there but Deeba herself?

And so saving UnLondon from the fiendish plans of the Smog and its creatures becomes a quest for the Un-Chosen One. And when none of the authorities in UnLondon will believe what she has found out about the Smog and his allies, Deeba has to go it alone, on the run from friend and foe alike. With a no-nonsense attitude united to a warm and gentle heart, Deeba wins over a strange and unexpected group of companions, and follows a totally unconventional strategy—even by the standards of a city built on weirdness and whimsy. It is, after all, a city with flying buses, ghosts, giant insects, words come to life, a man with a caged bird for a head, and sun with a hole in its center, like a doughnut.

It has a Gothic church haunted by black windows (eight wooden legs and a snapping sash window). It has a band of stealth fighters disguised as trash cans (known locally as binja). It has a boy who can pass through walls, a bus conductor who can also conduct electricity, a man who wears clothing made out of books, and a neighborhood where everybody lives on the rooftops (though, to be on the safe side, the buildings are only a few inches tall). These are only a sample of the wonderful oddities Deeba finds in UnLondon, but oddest of all... she is the one the Smog fears most.

I won't spoil this remarkable and exciting book any further. It is enough to know that it holds a distinguished place among the growing band of books set in "other Londons," and such places. British author China Miéville, whose image inside the back flap of this book is almost the exact opposite of what his name led me to expect, considers himself a writer of "weird fiction," or the "New Weird" (as distinguished from the "Old Weird" of Lovecraft, Bierce, and the like). Many of his books have won awards, including a Hugo Award, two Arthur C. Clarke Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. Other acclaimed titles by China Tom Miéville include The Scar, King Rat, The City & the City, and Embassytown.

Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie
by Maggie Stiefvater
Recommended Ages: 14+

Having survived the summer of faerie-born peril depicted in Lament, best friends James and Dee begin a new school year at a special prep school for musically gifted kids. On some level they know, even before this sequel begins, that Thornking Ash has another reason to exist: a mission to protect young people with a sensitivity to magic; to prevent them from being snatched by the Fair Folk—who, as James and Dee know too well, don't play fair at all.

But no one—not even an English prof who used to be the Faerie Queen's consort—is prepared for the amount of danger these two, and others, are in the year James and Dee enter Thornking Ash. As a peerless bagpiper, James can hardly find a teacher to develop his skill, let alone a place to fit in. And for her own mysterious reasons, Dee is even more socially and emotionally cut off, even from the boy who loves her. Both of these problems, together with Dee's terrifying talent for drawing wild spirits to her, expose them and everyone on campus to a level of danger no one living has seen before.

For one, James has become the menu choice of a deadly muse-spirit called the leanan sidhe. Nuala's standard procedure is to offer a handsome young artist a bright, hot, fast-burning blast of creative energy, followed (by way of exchange) by an early death as she drains the life right out of him. But somehow, things are different with James. Maybe it's the fact that he has already pulled through a nearly fatal encounter with faeries and knows well enough to say No. Or maybe it's just plain love. Nuala finds herself weakening, starving herself for this boy. This could be a disaster, even for a being who must burn to ashes and be reborn every sixteen years, and who has a date with fire this very Halloween.

Meanwhile, something fishy is going on with Dee, but she isn't talking about it to anybody, especially James. It puts a real strain on their lifelong friendship, and it's one more thing for him to worry about. Whatever is going on, the new Faerie Queen seems to be planning something really bitchy for Halloween, and probably bloody into the bargain. And the Lord of the Dead has been singing at dusk nearly every night as autumn progresses, heard not only by James and Dee but by others as well. James's roommate Paul says he hears a list of people who are going to die soon, and all their names are on it. And when James finds out what he has to do to save both Nuala and Dee on the night all Faerie breaks loose, it isn't hard for him to believe what Paul says.

Here is another quick, intense novel of music, magic, teen romance, and all the reasons we should know better than to wish we could see fairies. They're dangerous, as you can learn from this book's spin on Celtic folk tales. It's a book that answers the question that might niggle at the back of your brain after you read Lament: How can someone with Dee's powers ever be safe from the deadly Fair Folk? Or maybe the question was: How could her Aunt Delia get away with her disgusting betrayal? Both of these questions, and others you haven't even thought of asking, will be answered amid this book's steadily building suspense and the emotional mangle of its climax.

Philharmonic Friday, Symphony Saturday

2011-11-19T23:07:00.011-06:00

The weekend before Thanksgiving was a musical weekend for me. Friday night, I accepted a last-minute invitation from some friends to attend the St. Louis Philharmonic; while, for Saturday night, I had a subscription ticket to the St. Louis Symphony!

On Friday's Philharmonic program were the tequila-soused debauchery of Aaron Copland's El Salon Mexico, the romantic charm and rhythmic musical palindromes of Zoltan Kodaly's Hary Janos Suite, the brooding melodrama of Giuseppe Verdi's overture to La Forza del Destino, and the scintillating LOUDNESS of Ottorino Respighi's Feste Romane. All these were conducted by the Philharmonic's longtime music director, Robert Hart Baker.

The Philharmonic, a semi-amateur campus/community band, only performs four programs a year. This is only my second time going to it. Having looked at their program for the season, I'm sad to have missed them doing Haydn's "Miracle" Symphony in October—I'm partial to anything Haydn wrote in D major. (Yeah, OK. I'm weird.) I should try to plan to go to their concerts later this season. In March they are doing Beethoven's 9th and Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer. In May they have a piece by Walton, Hindemith's Metamorphoses, and Shostakovich's 6th. I love all of these pieces (except the Walton, which I haven't heard; though after getting to know his symphonies, I am excited to learn more of his works).

As for this particular concert, I liked the pieces. The performances had some effective touches, and it's obvious that the Philharmonic is a well-liked community group that loves to play. Nevertheless I would be a dishonest reviewer if I didn't note that at times the players' lack of precision and unity created an occasional "blurring" effect around the edges of the musical lines. Since my ticket was a gift I have nothing to complain about. So please don't take it as bitchiness when I add that I what made me most happy about the Philharmonic concert was the sense that the Symphony was really going to sound awesome the following night. The latter, strictly professional group has the advantage of being under the hot lights every weekend—among other things. Nevertheless, my final impression of Friday's concert was to be struck by the genius of its programming. It really came full circle as both the beginning and the end depicted drunken revelry in a Latin culture.

Tonight at the Symphony, Maestro David Robertson revealed the baroque beauty of Henry Purcell (Chacony in G minor), the virtuosity of a local young artist playing a Luciano Berio violin showpiece (Corale), and the all-around awesomeness of Anton Bruckner's 7th Symphony. I have never heard a Bruckner symphony performed live before. It was easy to get swept up in the passion, yet the performance was amazingly detailed, bringing out lines and facets that can so easily be obscured by the massive blocks of brass and the sheer, overwhelming proportions of the piece.

I have also never knowingly been in the presence of Wagner tubas before, but Movement II of the Bruckner most effectively ended with the sound of four of them, combined with four French horns and otherwise accompanied only by the sketchiest of strings, in a musical postscript inspired by news of the death of Richard Wagner. Wow.

A Bruckner orchestra both looks and sounds different from any other, with the brass "in stereo"—horns and Wagner tubas at stage right; trombones, tubas, and trumpets stage left, and the woodwinds in a block between them—and the 1st and 2nd violins at opposite ends of the stage, violins and cellos clutched between them, and the basses in a long row against the upstage wall.

I could almost have been mesmerized just watching the orchestra perform in this configuration, even without the tremendous piles of harmony and far-flung themes that Bruckner gave them. Every moment was my favorite. The SLSO really DID sound great, and not just in contrast to last night's Philharmonic... though I was impressed enough by their performance of the "cock-a-doodle" Scherzo to note that, in spite of the persistent dotted rhythms that must grow exponentially harder to keep together as the movement goes on and on, I sensed absolutely no blurring or fuzziness around the edges of the sound. The orchestra's precision was superhuman!

To explain why the orchestra's configuration impressed me... usually, in the States at least, the strings are fanned out from stage right to stage left in order from 1st Violins to 2nd Violins to Violas to Cellos, with the basses bunched up at far stage left, the woodwinds stretched out in one or two rows just upstage of the strings & the brass against the upstage wall, with timpani & percussion fitted into whatever space is left. Any deviation from that must be done with some serious acoustic considerations in mind.

Another noteable feature of the Bruckner orchestra is the sheer weight of brass in proportion to other sections. 4 Wagner tubas & 5 French horns, 4 trombones, 1 bass tuba & 3 trumpets are HUGE when, pinched between them, the woodwind choir consists of 1 pair each of oboes, bassoons, flutes, and clarinets. Another acoustic distinctive is the fact that there were fully eight (8) string basses up there, an enormous congregation of that instrument given that the other string sections were in proportion to an average-sized romantic orchestra.

Also, I didn't mention the timpani, which are important in Bruckner's 7th because of the numerous "general pauses" in which the only thing happening is a quiet throb on a kettledrum. Three of these drums were wedged into the corner at stage left between the trumpets and the 2nd violins.

This big orchestra contrasts greatly with what was on stage at the top of the program, when Robertson plus a five-part string orchestra made up exactly 30 bodies on stage, for Purcell's Chacony. The Berio piece added a few additional string players, plus three French horns who—in another acoustic novelty—were divided onto opposite sides of the stage, two at stage left and one at stage right.

Voyager Season 3

2011-11-17T16:40:00.042-06:00

My Netflix queue has finally begun (EDIT: and ended) to cough up Season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager (1996-97), one four-episode DVD at a time. But at least this gives me bite-size chunks I can blog on without the despair and creative paralysis that results from having to write about the whole season in one sitting (as witnessed by the fact that my review of Farscape Season 4 is still, at this writing, in "Post in Progress" mode, and the fact that I have been ready to blog on Babylon 5 Season 5 for ages but haven't even begun).

What's special about Season 3 of the third Star Trek spinoff series? Well, to start with, it's the last season featuring the show's original cast, carrying the initial formula for Voyager adventures to its furthest development in 26 hours of (mostly) top-quality episodes. Specifically, it is the last full season to feature Jennifer Lien as Kes, who was subsequently written out—unfairly, in my opinion—to make room for Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine. I would have liked to see a Star Trek series with four babes on it (counting Janeway and Torres), fulfilling the producers' original plan to cut Harry Kim—aborted when actor Garrett Wang, for all his woodenness, made People magazine's annual list of the most beautiful people. But anyway, for these 26 episodes you can have your Kes and hate Harry too.

Voyager Season 3 also brings back Q for the second of his three crossover visits to this series. As the show leaves the plug-ugly Kazons behind forever, it reintroduces such "Alpha Quadrant" menaces as the Ferengi and the Borg. In a nod to the franchise's 30th anniversary, it revives characters from The Original Series in a surprisingly creative way. It takes vast strides in developing the character of The Doctor, as well as of Kes (who gets a lot of attention this year); and in a surprising number of episodes, it explores a topic of great import for deep-space travelers: potential problems arising in the holodeck. Issues such as the treatment of prisoners and cultural minorities, bio-ethics and the origins debate, are touched upon with varying degrees of sensitivity; and in one episode, the show takes a surprisingly un-Star Trek position on the relationship between science and religion. The characters are menaced by viruses, doppelgangers, telepaths, time travelers, homicidally fertile women, evil spirits, and their own sexual urges, to say nothing of first encounters with such future enemies as the Krenim and Species 8472.

Guest stars this season include Brad Dourif (making a touching exit from his recurring role as disturbed Betazoid Lon Suder); Bruce Davison (of the X-Men film franchise); popular comedians Chip Esten (of Whose Line Is It, Anyway?) and Sarah Silverman (of Saturday Night Live, etc.); Ed Begley, Jr. (of St. Elsewhere fame); Concetta Tomei (of China Beach); John Rhys Davies (of The Lord of the Rings); a very young Lindsey Haun (late of TV's True Blood); Wendy Schaal (of The 'burbs and TV's American Dad!); Robert Pine (of TV's CHiPs); Len Cariou (the original Sweeney Todd, late of TV's Blue Bloods); Harve Presnell (of Fargo); and, of course, George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney from the original Star Trek.

Basics, Part II concludes the cliffhanger ending of Season 2, where the majority of the Voyagers were left stranded on an inhospitable planet while Seska and the Kazon made off with their ship. While the crew tries to find a way to survive in a world short on nutrition and long on dangers (such as man-eating monsters, hostile stone-agers, and erupting volcanoes), the challenge of re-taking the ship falls to the unlikely trio of Tom Paris, the holographic Doctor, and the Betazoid psychopath who has been under house arrest since Season 2's "Meld." Oooh! Could this be the last one they ever made? Not likely! Within the allotted 45 minutes, the tables are turned, Seska (whose lovechild proves not to be Chakotay's) is killed, the tribesmen become friendly, and they all sail off into blessedly Kazon-free space.

Flashback celebrates the 30th anniversary of Trek with a deliciously weird exploration of Tuvok's unconscious mind. For some reason, a blue cloud of space gas triggers a repressed childhood memory of losing his grip and allowing a little girl to fall to her death. This traumatic memory wreaks havoc on the Vulcan's brain, requiring the most trusted person in his life—Captain Janeway—to join him in a mind-meld and help him re-integrate the suppressed memory into his conscious mind. Funnily enough, though, every time they attempt this, they are pulled into a memory from Tuvok's "first" Starfleet career, when he was the Vulcan race's nearest equivalent to a wild and rebellious young man, and when his first assignment was as a science officer on the USS Excelsior commanded by good old Sulu. The setting for this psychological mystery happens to be something that went on behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, but it actually turns out to have nothing to do with Captain Sulu, First Officer Janice Rand, or Klingon Commander Kang (in an encore appearance by Michael Ansara). So seeing them again is pure gravy!

The Chute is the one where Harry and Tom get flushed down the toilet of an alien society, a toilet which (until now) has never backed up. Their alleged crime is an act of terrorism, for which they have been convicted based on flimsy evidence and unscrupulous methods of interrogation. Their prison has only one way in (the titular chute) and no way out, thanks to a deadly forcefield which, even after Harry Kim disables it, turns out to have nothing to do with the reason nobody has ever escaped. Worse, all the prisoners have been implanted with a bioelectric "clamp" which causes them to become increasingly savage, apparently as a way of controlling the prison population by keeping everybody at each other's throats. In spite of the Captain's pleading with the planet's leader (played by a brusque Robert Pine), there seems to be no chance of getting them released—until Janeway hooks up with the actual bombers who have been hatching prison-break scenarios of their own. The episode ends with Harry & Tom's friendship passing a major test. Harry: "Don't you remember when I almost killed you?" Tom: "All I remember is you saying, 'This is my friend. Nobody touches him.'"

The Swarm is the one where the Doctor begins to lose his memories, and the option of rebooting his program (so that he has to start developing his personality all over again from Day One) seems to be the only way to stop his technobabble from degrading completely. Robert Picardo gets to play opposite himself in some scenes, as a diagnostic program designed in the image of their common creator tries to help fix the doc's program. Notable as the first time the acronym EMH (for "Emergency Medical Hologram") is used, this episode also features an "A story" in which the ship has to sneak across the territory of an extremely aggressive alien species who use pain-inflicting weapons and lots of itty-bitty ships to make sure nobody trespasses on their space. But, frankly, that "main plot" seems far less memorable than the Doctor's "subplot," perhaps a sign that this wasn't one of the best-written episodes of the year. And perhaps unfortunately, the writers did not see fit to carry over this episode's development in the Doctor's personality into later episodes.

False Profits reveals the fate of the two Ferengi, Arribor and Kol, last seen disappearing into a one-way wormhole in TNG's "The Price." In the seven years since then, the greedy pair have set themselves up as gods on a world where a prophetic poem conveniently predicts the coming of such "heavenly sages." Nobody familiar with Ferengi mores will be surprised to learn that they have abused their power for their own material gain, pushing their innocent subjects to develop their instincts for greed and high-pressure salesmanship. Only by selling the shoes off their feet can the Voyagers get enough information to combat these untouchable scoundrels. In an episode equally compounded of Prime Directive-based ethical dilemmas and over-the-top humor, the hew-mons (plus one Talaxian disguised as a Ferengi) eventually find a way to turn the song's prophecy against the Ferengi. Nevertheless the latter pair provide a repeat performance of their wormhole-aided disappearing trick, dashing the Voyagers' latest hope of getting home fast.

Remember features an alien race whose telepathic abilities enable B'Elanna to relive, in vivid detail, memories of a young woman's most tragic mistake, and the guilty secret of an entire society. It starts with intensely erotic dreams in which B'Elanna experiences love through the point of view of a young Enaran woman named Korenna, who is torn between her passion for an ill-fated young man and her loyalty to her father (played by Bruce Davison, as pictured here). Meanwhile, Enaran society is similarly torn between the forces of technological progress and a luddite sect known as the Regressives. Korenna's young man tells her that he is being deported on her father's orders, along with a bunch of Regressives; and further, that nobody has heard a peep out of the colony where they are being forcibly resettled. But her father manipulates Korenna into rejecting the rumor that the deportees are actually being exterminated, and she falls so far under his spell as to cheer at the brutal execution of her own lover on a charge of treason. After experiencing all of these memories at considerable risk to her own life and at the cost of the life of the older Enaran woman who has shared them with her, B'Elanna goes on the war path, hoping to expose the crime the Enarans committed against their own people. But due to the lack of physical evidence, she must content herself with sharing the memories that have been given to her with a young Enaran woman who agrees to consider them and investigate things for herself. It's a moving and impassioned episode that viewers will long remember, no pun intended.

Sacred Ground is the one where Capt. Janeway undertakes a spiritual quest to save the soul of Kes. The girl is in a coma, her chances of recovery fading, since being zapped by a natural energy field in a shrine sacred to the Nechani monks. The only person known to have recovered from such an injury was saved when his father appealed to the ancestral spirits and took responsibility for his son's trespass. This Janeway intends to do for Kes, reconciling the religious pilgrimage with her scientific outlook by reasoning that whatever ritual enables her to approach the spirits without harm, will involve some kind of biochemical change which can then be applied to Kes to cure her. But things don't go as planned, especially as the entire ordeal Janeway goes through proves to be completely meaningless. Without spoiling the entire episode, I'll just say that I found it really interesting, given Trek's secularist outlook, that Janeway would end up admitting (to herself, at least) that something cannot be explained by science. The episode guest-stars Harry Groener (TNG's "Tin Man") as the Nechani magistrate, Becky Ann Baker (TV's Freaks and Geeks) as Janeway's spiritual guide, and Estelle Harris (George's mother on Seinfeld) as one of an adorable trio of "ancestral spirits."

Future's End, Part I is the first part of a double episode guest-starring Sarah Silverman (pictured here) and Ed Begley, Jr. (next picture down). The Voyagers' time-travel adventure begins when a Federation ship from the 29th century attacks them, its Captain Braxton claiming that he has evidence showing that Voyager caused an accident in his time that wiped out the entire solar system. Thanks to some technobabble or other, both ships get sucked into a time warp, arriving 30 years apart on 20th-century Earth. When the Voyagers arrive in the mid 1990s, they learn that the technology boom of our era was the result of an unscrupulous businessman reverse-engineering components from the time-ship whose crash he had witnessed in the 1960s. Henry Starling, CEO of Chronowerx Inc., has just the right lack of morals to use 29th century technology to amass power and wealth for himself, and the weapons to prevent the Voyagers from carrying out their duty to prevent further contamination of the timeline. And when they finally track down the wreck that was Captain Braxton, he informs them that what they have already done is to set in motion the train of events that will destroy the world in his century.

Future's End, Part II concludes the Voyager's two-part visit to the mid-1990s by dragging everyone out of their comfort zone. The Doctor acquires his mobile holo-emitter thanks to a piece of purloined 29th-century technology. Harry spends time in the captain's chair. Chakotay and B'Elanna get banged up and held prisoner by libertarian yahoos. Tom Paris' enthusiasm for all things 20th Century falls short of enabling him to sell his cover as a secret agent with the pretty girl. With the integrity of the past at stake and a future holocaust to prevent, the Voyagers pull off some of their most complex, role-stretching derring-do yet. After a satisfying amount of shooting, kissing, and blowing stuff up, the Voyagers finally get to the point where the time-travel storyline comes full circle and the crazy time cop from the future needs only three words to explain why he can't just drop them off at Earth in the 24th century: "Temporal Prime Directive."

Warlord, the first episode this season that I can specifically remember having seen before, is especially memorable as the episode that best brings out the sexy, butch side of Jennifer Lien's acting talent. A brush with a dying alien in sick bay leads to Kes being possessed by the spirit of a 200-year-dead ruler who was overthrown by his own people. Now Tieran wants to stage a political comeback through another remorseless bout of killing and conniving. His plans are complicated by the fact that his wife isn't into chicks, but also doesn't care to see him pledge his hand to the scion of the planet's ruling dynasty. Even more troubling, however, is the fact that Kes's consciousness continues to fight Tieran's possession, wearing away at the strongman until a climactic standoff between their two personalities, just before the Voyagers beam down with a crack squad and a piece of technobabble designed to neuter the dogs of war. Guest stars include four-time Trek alien Brad Greenquist as Tieran's rival for the throne, Galyn Görg (of DS9's "The Visitor") as Tieran's wife, Karl Wiedergott (of Enterprise's "Dear Doctor") as Tieran's would-be husband, and Leigh J. McCloskey (of DS9's "Field of Fire") as Tieran himself.

The Q and the Grey is the second of three "Q" episodes in Voyager's seven seasons. In this clever and hilarious installment, Q importunes Capt. Janeway (a.k.a. "Kathy") with persistent romantic advances. Eventually he reveals that he wants to mate with her in order to enrich the Q gene pool with human DNA. He thinks this is necessary to heal the Q civil war which has erupted since the events of Season 2's "Death Wish," but his main squeeze for the past four billion years doesn't take kindly to the competition. Nevertheless the She-Q must come to the aid of the Voyagers when the war between the Q comes to a potentially galaxy-threatening crisis, while He-Q uses the American Civil War as a metaphor to allow "Kathy" and the crew to experience the Q Continuum. Suzie Plakson (whose other Trek roles included a Vulcan, an Andorian, and most famously the Klingon K'Ehleyr) plays Q's mate, while the late Harve Presnell plays the "Colonel" of the opposing Q faction.

Macrocosm is the one where Janeway and Neelix rendezvous with the ship after trade negotiations with the touchy, gesturally-fastidious Tak Tak... but Voyager doesn't show up. They track her down and find the ship drifting, its crew incapacitated by an airborne virus that has mutated into gigantic, stinging, tentacly monsters (example pictured). After Neelix gets taken, the Captain has to eradicate these beasties with no help except from the Doctor, who for all his holographicness is also at risk because the critters are attracted to the heat given off by his technobabble. Together they plan an ingenious ruse to round up the virus so that it can be "bug bombed" off the ship, just in time to keep their new Tak Tak friend from destroying Voyager in the name of public health. Three-time Trek guest Albie Selznick plays the flamboyant alien.

Fair Trade is the episode where Neelix's role as the ship's guide ends, as the ship reaches the Nekrit Expanse, beyond which he has never traveled. Desperate to find a map to this dangerous region of space, and influenced by a seedy old friend whom he owes big-time, Neelix gets himself into hot water with a murder investigation on one side and a narcotics smuggling ring on the other. His solution to the conundrum is adorably reckless, but the cost is one of Captain Janeway's "I am so disappointed in you" harangues that, frankly, doesn't seem to have its usual effect on the Talaxian. The guest cast includes Carlos Carrasco (pictured), a three-time DS9 guest who twice played a Klingon; Alexander Enberg, who had previously played a different Vulcan crewman on the Enterprise-D, in the first of his eight Voyager appearances as Vulcan Ensign Vorik; and James Horan, who played five characters across four Trek spinoffs, as the plug-ugly bad guy.

Alter Ego begins with Harry Kim making a shocking request of Tuvok: to teach him to suppress his emotions. The reason is that he has fallen in love with a holodeck character. Tuvok's interest in the case grows to the point where he alienates the holochick's affections, hurting Harry's feelings and winning for himself a pscyho girlfriend who—surprise!—turns out to have the power to control the ship. Marayna wants Tuvok so bad that she threatens to destroy Voyager if he doesn't say he'll be hers. Eventually the Voyagers locate the real Marayna (pictured), lurking on a space station that controls the plasma-and-light show of a fancy nebula, but she only relents when Tuvok beams down and reasons with her until she cries Uncle. Tuvok suggests that she try taking a vacation and socializing with her own people once in a while; she says this is OK for her, but will he always be alone? The look on Tuvok's face as this question hits him, at the same time as a transporter beam, lingers even through the final scene in which Tuvok offers Harry Kim lessons in the Vulcan equivalent of chess (which looks rather like that space-needle game in The Man Who Knew Too Little).

Coda features Len Cariou, late of TV's Blue Bloods, as the ghost of Captain Janeway's father. Or, at least, as something nasty that tries to pass himself off as the same. Before we meet him, however, the Captain has a weird series of experiences, like being trapped in a time loop in which each iteration ends with her death. In the most gruesome version of her death, the Doctor cold-bloodedly euthanases her after diagnosing her with the Vidiian phage. (Yes, for one episode, the Vidiians are back—only not in reality). These loops turn out to be a series of hallucinations while Chakotay tries to revive Kathryn after she is killed in a shuttle crash. Like a ghost, Janeway witnesses the crew's attempts to locate whatever phase of reality her consciousness has landed on (because, when you're the main character in a Star Trek series, death is really hard to accept). Only when everyone seems to accept the inevitable does Admiral Janeway appear, beckoning to his daughter to follow him into the light. But she insists on hanging back, claiming that she wants to be there at least in spirit to see what happens to her crew. As the Admiral grows more insistent, the Captain begins to see flashes of another reality in which she is still at the site of the crash, where her crew is still trying to revive her. She realizes that her "father" is actually some kind of alien entity who needs her to agree to go with him so that he can feed off her energy at the point of death. Like I said: nasty.

Blood Fever is the episode that follows the logic of Classic Trek's episode "Amok Time" to its deliriously sexy, violent, obvious conclusion. Ensign Vorik (pictured), in only his third episode, asks B'Elanna to be his mate and then attacks her when she turns him down. He turns out to be in the throes of pon farr, the Vulcan male's every-seventh-year birds-and-bees thing, which is so ludicrously primal that its logic-proud victims can't bear to talk about it. Which is probably why, if they don't cleanse themselves of the resulting "blood fever," and fast, they can actually die from it. Now, it's hard enough on Vorik, whose choices include going home to Vulcan to be with his chosen mate (strike one; not possible), finding another mate closer by (strike two; rejected), and resolving his passion either through meditation or cathartic violence. They might have called it "Green Blood, Blue Balls." But then it starts to look as though the pon farr has telepathically infected B'Elanna somehow. This leads to awkwardness on an away mission involving tremory tunnels, paranoid aliens, and an uncharacteristically gentlemanlike Tom Paris, who refuses to take advantage of B'Elanna no matter how hard she begs. I sense that you're having a hard time believing me, so obviously there's no point in going on to describe the Doctor's foray into holographic pimping, the gleefully low-tech "let Tom and B'Elanna go off into the bushes and make out" solution to her neurochemical crisis, and the way Tuvok shrewdly plays the "tradition" card to get Chakotay to allow Vorik and Torres to fight like animals. Amidst all this fun, it may be hard to catch two bits of foreshadowing at the end of the episode: one signaling a future relationship between Tom and B'Elanna, and the other hinting at a Borg problem to come.

Unity carries the threat of upcoming encounters with the Borg a step nearer, when Chakotay and an ill-fated Ensign follow a distress call to a planet where humans, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and other aliens live together, though not altogether at peace. At first they claim to have been abducted by aliens and dropped off on this ruined world to fend for themselves; then they admit to having been assimilated by the Borg. Their cube—which, meanwhile, the Voyagers have discovered drifting dead in space—was zapped by some kind of cosmic power surge, severing them from the Collective. Those drones who survived took refuge on the nearest inhabitable planet. Even now they can briefly, within a limited radius, join their minds in what they call a Cooperative, for example to boost Chakotay's ability to heal from a life-threatening injury. Through this sharing of the minds, the Cooperative takes control of Chakotay and uses him, against his judgment and Captain's orders, to re-start the Borg cube long enough to help them reinitiate the link with all the factions on their planet. Though the Cooperative turns Chakotay loose afterward, and destroys the cube before it can attack Voyager, the question lingers to the last line of the episode: with the power that the sharing of minds gives them, how long will the Cooperative stick to its peaceful ideals?

Darkling is a foreshadowing of Kes's departure from the show early in the next season. Now three years old and a third of the way through her life, the cute Ocampa has started to question whether she wants to spend the rest of her life on Voyager. Triggers for this questioning include her recent breakup with Neelix and her attraction to this dude (pictured), a member of a race of wandering loners who lead a life of romantically solitary exploration. Kes is tempted to run away with Zahir, but the Doctor gruffly advises her that she is making a mistake. The Doctor's gruffness is only the first symptom of a fast-developing problem with his personality, a result of his research into the personalities of historic figures, which he has started to add to his own program. While B'Elanna runs a program to purge the Doc's program of malicious subroutines, a dark-side personality emerges and tries to take control of the situation. Murder, dismemberment, torture, and hostage-taking ensue before the dramatic climax in which Kes and the Doctor are beamed up safety in the middle of plunging off an enormous cliff. In spite of guest work by actors Stephen Davies (in his third Trek role) and David Lee Smith (late of CSI: Miami), the most memorable guest in this episode is the Doctor's alter ego, played by Robert Picardo with a peculiar quirk of the eyes and lips that marks his Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation.

Rise is the one where Tuvok and Neelix survive the writing staff's favorite device for breaking open the relationship between two characters: a shuttle crash. Luckily, they land within a short walk of an orbital tether, and are able to use components from their shuttle to repair the carriage so they can ascend above the ionosphere and signal Voyager for a beam-out. Riding along with them, however, are four Nezu colonists, one of whom knows the secret behind the asteroids bombarding their planet, while another will kill to protect it. Caught between them are the Odd Couple of the Delta Quadrant. Three years of character tension between desperate-to-impress Neelix and hard-to-impress Tuvok come to a head when Neelix accuses Tuvok of treating him with contempt. Nevertheless they work together to bring the secrets to defending the Nezu planet back to Voyager, just in time to save the ship from the aggressive aliens whose guided asteroids were a tactic for driving off competing colonists. It's a strikingly memorable episode, which perhaps accounts for the fact that it is only about the sixth episode of this season that I could remember having seen before.

Favorite Son gives Harry Kim a bizarre opportunity to question whether he is a human or an alien. It starts with feelings of déjà vu, a sense of recognition about a region of space he could not possibly have visited before, and quickly develops to the point where he instinctively fires phasers on an alien ship, without orders from the Captain. Janeway suspends Harry from duty, but soon afterward admits that the sensor logs showed the alien ship was preparing to fire its weapons at them. Things get even weirder as the ship approaches a planet which Harry identifies, based on his recent dreams, as Taresia, even before the planet's leader (played by previous DS9 guest Deborah May, pictured) recognizes Harry as a fellow Taresian. Already growing spots and showing signs of hidden Taresian genes emerging into his DNA, Harry is told that his father carried embryo-Harry to Earth and implanted him in his human mother's womb, but now his genetic memory has called him home. At first Harry's welcome-home is warm, with a 9-to-1 ratio of women to men meaning that he is instantly surrounded by a touchy-feely bevy of beauties. But then he finds out that their method of mating means sucking out all his cellular material until he looks like like a mummy. To save Harry and make a clean getaway means flying Voyager through a tricky energy barrier and escaping under the fire of two alien fleets. It's sexy fun, and it's so weird that it could only happen on Star Trek!

Before and After is the episode that takes the unique possibilities of Kes, as an alien whose complete life cycle lasts nine years, as far as this show ever did. It begins with Kes opening her eyes in Sickbay at the end of her life, remembering nothing up to that point. A few moments later she has a cold flash, everything goes all white and fuzzy, and when it passes all she can remember is stuff that (from other people's point of view) hasn't happened yet. Each time this happens, she meets people who know her but whom she only remembers from their encounters in the future, which is the only past that she remembers. It takes a while for everyone to figure out that Kes is jumping backwards in time, and even longer to find out why. It has something to do with foreshadowing a two-part episode in Season 4 titled "Year of Hell," involving an alien menace called the Krenim who use time as a weapon. It's an exciting and weird episode, revealing that (at least in one possible future) Kes and Tom make a baby together, who in turn makes a baby with Harry Kim, and that before "Grandma and Grandpa" were a number, Tom almost died of grief when B'Elanna died alongside the Captain. But even though the Doctor's cure for Kes' little problem is absolutely saturated with technobabble, it works (though not quickly enough to prevent us from seeing Kes age backward to the moment of conception), and the episode ends with everything back to normal... for a while.

Real Life is the one where the Doctor decides to experience family life, albeit in a cutesie, unrealistic, holographic form. Halfway through a dinner party to which she was invited, B'Elanna screams, "Computer, freeze program!" Her attempt to inject a little randomized realism into the Doctor's family life proves to be almost more than "Kenneth" (as his wife calls him) can take. His son falls in with a gang of Klingon teens, his daughter (played by a darling little Lindsey Haun, now playing Sookie Stackhouse on True Blood) takes one on the chin in the rough world of athletics, and his wife (played by character actress Wendy Schaal) morphs from a submissive June Cleaver type into an independent, tough cookie whose love, nevertheless, the Doctor needs in their time of grief. Meanwhile, Tom Paris pops some shuttlecraft wheelies in a risky, and almost disastrous, study of a subspace anomaly that, in a strange half-Klingon way, brings B'Elanna one step closer to jumping his bones.

Distant Origin is such an in-your-face parable about the tension between science and religion, that I would really hate it if it weren't so niftily done. It's also unusual as to how much of it is depicted from the point of view of characters other than the Voyagers. It begins with the skull of poor Ensign Hogan, killed by a snake monster in the season premiere, being discovered by a pair of paleontologists from a race of highly advanced reptilian bipeds, known as the Voth. The Voth are so good at hiding from endotherms (i.e. mammalian humanoids) that no one even realizes that they claim hereditary rights to a vast area of the Delta Quadrant, considering themselves to be the "first race" to arise there, zillions of years ago. But Gegen, a scientist willing to challenge the Doctrine of his people, believes in the "Distant Origin Theory," and an analysis of the Voyager crewman's bones proves him right: the Voth evolved on Earth. (That's where the dinosaurs went!) Gegen and his assistant sneak up on Voyager and attempt to study its crew to find out more about where they came from, but things get hairy when (1) Gegen's assistant is captured; (2) Gegen captures Chakotay; and (3) the Voth city-ship captures the whole lot of them and their leader puts the thumbscrews (metaphorically speaking) to Gegen, similar to the way the Pope pressured Galileo to recant his astronomical discoveries. Chakotay's agony is visible as he watches silently, helplessly, while the Voth Minister uses the Voyager as a game-piece to checkmate Voth. Guest stars include three-time Trek guest Henry Woronicz, two-time Voyager guest Christopher Liam Moore, previous Jem'Hadar Marshal Teague, and Concetta Tomei of TV's Providence.

Displaced is the one where a bunch of seemingly confused and innocent aliens wearing funny hats just start appearing on the Voyager, one every 9 minutes and 20 seconds, while at the same time someone from the ship disappears. By the time the crew realizes that the Nyrians aren't so innocent, but are purposely replacing the crew in order to steal the ship, it's too late to stop them. Not for the first time this year, the Voyagers glumly find themselves marooned while aliens take off in their ship, though this time their surroundings are a bit more pleasant. Nevertheless, they find their way behind the scenes of what turns out to be a gigantic ship containing over 90 biospheres in which the Nyrians detain the former owners of all their stolen property. Luckily, the escaped prisoners also find the controls to the gizmo that transports people back and forth before Voyager returns with reinforcements. This enables the Voyagers to turn the tables and (predictably, since this isn't the last episode they ever made) continue their journey. Each making one of his or her two Trek appearances in this episode are Kenneth Tigar, Mark Taylor, James Noah, and Nancy Youngblut; Deborah Levin puts in her second of three appearances as Ensign Lang, here left (briefly) in command of the bridge while the ship is being taken.

Worst Case Scenario is the one where the Voyagers discover an unfinished holo-novel depicting a Maquis mutiny, set in the early stages of the joint crew's journey. Complete with a Bajoran-looking Seska, the interactive game is just starting to get interesting when Tom reaches the end of it—or rather, the point where its author quit writing it. A quick investigation turns up the fact that Tuvok wrote the story as a training module for junior security officers, at a point when a mutiny seemed more likely; then abandoned it when the likelihood grew less. Spurred on by the captain's enthusiasm for any form of creativity among the crew, Tuvok and Paris begin a reluctant collaboration to complete the holo-novel, bickering all the way. Unluckily for them, the act of re-opening Tuvok's encrypted technobabble triggers more technobabble which the late, unlamented Seska had planted in the program, a final act of revenge from beyond the grave. Now the unlikeliest co-authors have to do a lot of writing on their feet just to stay alive.

Scorpion begins with a group of Borg cubes cruising into the frame and beginning their "Resistance is futile" spiel, only to be blown out of space by a power even hairier and scarier than themselves. That power, pictured here, is known to the Borg as Species 8472, and they come from another dimension where they are the only living thing, and they plan to expand into our dimension after making it the same way. Their cosmic extermination program begins with the Borg, which would ordinarily be good news I suppose, but it so happens that the Voyager needs to cross hundreds of light years of Borg-controlled space just at the moment when Species 8472 is rearing its—I mean, really! By the end of this season-ending cliffhanger, Harry is flat on his back in Sickbay with a dollop of alien goo eating him alive, and Voyager has just been outpaced by fifteen (15) Borg cubes running as though the hounds of hell were at their heels, which you may suppose to be the case when you see the weapon the new bad-guy aliens have. Hint: It is pictured at the top of this post. Playing Leonardo da Vinci in Janeway's holo-program is John Rhys Davies of Indiana Jones, Sliders and Lord of the Rings fame.

For more on spaceship-based TV series, see my reviews of Star Trek: TOS seasons one, two, and three; of TNG seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of DS9 seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of Voyager seasons one and two; and of Enterprise season one. See also my review of Farscape seasons one, two, three, and four; of Firefly; and of Babylon 5 seasons one, two, three, and four.

Epochal Music, Mythic Film, Snowflake Food

2011-11-13T18:20:00.003-06:00

This past weekend I had a night at the movies, a night at the Symphony, and an exceptional meal in the midst of one of my few forays into public transit.

On Saturday the 12th, I used my first tickets of this season's subscription to hear Louie Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto played by Horacio Gutiérrez, Dick Strauss's "Death & Transfiguration" tone poem, and Maury Ravel's decadent "La Valse," conducted by Japanese-German maestro Jun Märkl. I had heard Gutiérrez play a Rachmaninoff concerto a year or two ago, and knew he was terrific; I had never heard Maestro Märkl at work.

It was a great program, with Beethoven's popular E-flat fifth concerto displaying both masculine assertiveness and tender lyricism, the latter especially in the slow middle movement. The Strauss piece, written in the youth of its composer who, when dying at age 85, famously testified that death really was like he had written it, uses pure music to depict the struggle of someone who has "striven for high ideals" (i.e. the artist) to accept his impending mortality, rising to a glorious culmination and including themes that John Williams would plunder a century later (e.g. the love theme from Superman).

Finally, Ravel held his own at the end of the program with a ballet score (rejected by Sergei Diaghilev, to the composer's deep hurt) in which the Vienna waltzes (and perhaps the entire way of life) of the previous century were held up against the lens of Paris in 1920: a smooth, graceful, decadent motor whose belts have begun to slip. The waltz step becomes increasingly disjointed and jarred by rhythmic and harmonic disturbances until, at the very end, it collapses into chaotic savagery. Whether it's an indictment of a present world in which such events as World War I could take place, or of a past which for all its shining promise held the germs of such events, is hard to tell. But it isn't every day that a waltz gives you chills.

On Sunday, after coming home from church on the type of bright, blue, clear day that I value so much, I decided to take one of my long walks. The "stick" motivating me is that I need to get in better shape. The "carrot" was the movie house in Clayton, to which I have walked several times before. By time I got there, I was just on time to catch a screening of the movie Immortals, a loose adaptation of the Greek legend of Theseus, directed by a Bollywood veteran and featuring British actor Henry Cavill (late of TV's The Tudors) as the studly hero.

I remember spotting Cavill playing Edmund Dantes' son in the version of The Count of Monte Cristo that featured Jim Caviezel in the title role. I remember thinking then that a youth with such chiseled features, upright figure, intense presence, and perfect teeth must someday, inevitably, become a big star. But not having seen The Tudors myself, I have known nothing of Cavill since then, except (what every Harry Potter fan knew at the time) that he was rumored to be on the list to play Cedric Diggory but didn't get the part, and (what even I didn't notice until the end titles rolled, because I didn't recognize him) that he played a supporting role in Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

And now, behold a superstar in the making... I don't know what happened to the youth who made a generation of British schoolgirls wish to see him play Cedric Diggory, but those who see Immortals will see an action hero in a class to which Robert Pattinson could never aspire to belong. With a jaw that could slay thousands with one flash of his still-perfect teeth, a sunburn that can't have come easily to a Brit in his native habitat, and a charisma that makes every frame that he isn't in languish in relative dullness even when his character is covered with noisome filth from head to toe, Henry Cavill puts all tween vampires in the shade—including the one who plays Poseidon in this film.

His Theseus is a terrific hero, combining beach bum good looks with a run-straight-at-you-roaring-like-a-lion thing that could make him a terrifying guy to cross. He is supported by Stephen Dorff (a former vampire), John Hurt (a former wizard), Stephen McHattie (a former Romulan), Luke Evans (so recently a musketeer that both of his films are simultaneously playing), Mickey Rourke (like, duh), and loads of actors who seem to have been recruited for their ability to flex their abs impressively while vomiting lungfuls of blood. Expect lots of violence, blood, guts, decapitations, tongue-severings, castrations, etc., happening to mostly good-looking people, and a little hanky-panky with a Bollywood beauty who reveals enough to make up for the abs-and-blood stuff.

As I left the theater, thinking about whether I really wanted to walk all the way home, my streak of perfect timing continued as a bus pulled up right beside me. I hopped aboard, somehow managed to make exact change although I seldom carry hard currency on me, and collected a transfer ticket good through 7:00 p.m. when it was hardly 5:00. The bus driver very helpfully explained the route I needed to follow, and so I sat back and watched the sights of Washington University flow by—including the Gothic arch that is surely on the cover of the brochure, and a whole crowd of neo-baroque buildings overlooking Forest Park.

The bus dropped me off in front of a cafe that used to be the site of Talayna's pizzeria; from around the corner I caught a train (having to wait for only a few minutes at the Skinker Station, just long enough to realize I live with a skinker—my cat Tyrone having begun his pest-control career in Arizona where little beige lizards called skinks were as apt as mice to be caught invading your house). The train dropped me off, one stop later, a block south of the current site of Talayna's, and inspired by that coincidence, as well as the luxury of 90 minutes to go on my transfer ticket, I went into the restaurant and had dinner.

I have probably described Talayna's here before. It wasn't my first visit. But I had forgotten how exceptional their pizza is. So emphatically handmade that, like snowflakes, no two of its "New York style" crusts are identical in shape, they taste just how pizzas are meant to taste in the neighborhood of my brain that houses platonic ideals, and not at all as one would expect to taste in Saint Louis, where all pizzas seem to have evolved from the common ancestor of Imo's crispy, flat-crust, provel-cheese abomination. I had a "small" pepperoni-and-onion pizza at Talayna's and, although its warm crust of hand-tossed poorbread, its stretchy salty Mozzarrella cheese, and its rich seasonings evoked a sentimental memory of bygone pizzas, even glutton that I am I could not finish this pizza. And, alas, I didn't think I could take the leftovers with me, since I had another bus ride ahead of me.

I was crossing the street to get to the bus stop when I realized that the vehicle in front of which I was crossing was the bus I needed to catch. I ran to the bus stop, arriving just when the bus did, and enjoyed the last of my streak of perfect timing in a public transit system in which I have experienced waits of up to 45 minutes for a bus that I was expecting in no time flat. It was good to be home, not too excruciatingly footsore, enjoying memories of Immortals' ludicrously anachronistic armor, the gods' irritating habit of interfering in human battles as though to make the entertaining saga last longer, and the ambrosian pizza that Dionysus himself would have ordered if delivery hadn't been such a bitch.

Autumn Snap

2011-11-12T16:52:00.005-06:00

Chance draws my eyes up from the page;
My soul catches its breath.
Just opposite my sitting place:
A great broad-shouldered tree
(A lord of trees as one may say),
Its mane in full display
Of red-gold autumn death.

The setting sun's last slanting ray
Sets off each glowing leaf,
Their edges so revealed to me,
I know them, deep and true.
How I should like to risk a snap
(Had I my camera now),
Keep that elusive hue.

But though I ran to fetch it, I
Could not return in time:
This moment will not wait (the light
Will never be the same).
And so I stand and let it blaze
Through me, and out behind,
And fade into the dusk.

Moreover, what would be the use
Of such an autumn snap?
To keep this instant? Or to gloat?
Perhaps to share (though who
Would care I do not know)?
At best, I guess, to linger on
The glories that have passed.

No, rather I shall stand as still
As wind and blood allow,
And feast my eyes, and toast my heart,
And burn this moment now.
And though the gloaming shadows claim
That gleam, and mind forget,
I will not be the same.

Categorical Tackiness

2011-11-09T13:31:00.004-06:00

Clench your glutes for this week's theologically questionable letter-board sentiment coming from the neighborhood ELCA church:

GIVE YOURSELF TO GOD AND ALL OTHER GIVING WILL BE FUN

Wow. That so sounds like the last words a neckless thug, nicknamed "God," says to you before you black out in the prison shower.

It's also questionable how the idea that you "give yourself to God" fits into Lutheran thought. Is that how we get in with Him? I've read a lot of Lutheran theology, but if that concept belongs there, it's news to me. It seemed to me that one of the hallmarks of Lutheranism is its biblically faithful teaching that God gives Himself to us in Christ, and reconciles us to Himself even while we are His enemies; that He makes us His children, saints, and royal heirs without any prior action or decision of ours. Is that just me?

As the categorical result of getting in with God, "All giving will be fun" is equally questionable. All? So after coming to Christ we won't have any qualms, doubts, or weaknesses, and we'll find loving our neighbor to be easy and enjoyable all the time? So no sacrifice, no deprivation, no self-emptying leap of faith will ever be touched by pain or regret? I'm with Aramis (of Three Musketeers fame) in questioning whether it's really giving if you don't at all miss what you have given. But then, Aramis was a fictional French Catholic, and probably a heretic to boot. What would he know?

Virtual Reality Holographic Phone Call Dream

2011-11-09T02:46:00.009-06:00

I just woke up from the weirdest dream ever. I dreamt that I was spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my West Coast friends (people I have actually spent Thanksgiving with, so it wasn't totally surreal). Something really tragic had happened but none of us were talking about it.

Another guest who showed up for dinner was a guy named Dan that we all knew in college, who was the best man at my friends' wedding but with whom I had never been at all close. I remember at one point that he introduced himself to me and shook my hand as though we had never met before, all while I'm thinking, "What a dick. He's got to be kidding me."

Then it came time to call the family and say Happy Thanksgiving to them. I stepped into a type of telephone that enabled me to appear as a hologram before the people I was calling, and to interact with them in a real-time, virtual-reality experience of where they were at. I have no idea how this would work outside of Star Trek.

First I called my Dad and Stepmom. I think I appeared in the backseat of their car while they were driving home from dinner with another couple. This is the part of the dream I remember least clearly, but it was full of warmth and humor, and there was something in it about a gift exchange in which Dad had gotten her an electronic toy that he really wanted rather than the new TV she had been expecting, but the way Dad facetiously made a note of the TV idea suggested to me that he had one more surprise in store for her.

Then I called my Mom. With her were my half-brother Jake, my uncle Mark, and (I kid you not) my Stepdad, notwithstanding the fact that he died in 2004. Perhaps he was a feature of the VR. I noticed that he didn't say anything to me, and I didn't say anything to him, yet within the context of the dream I didn't consider it strange to see him there.

My Mom was having a fit because the boys weren't cooperating with her idea of a happy family holiday. They had started painting a mural together, which was supposed to show a cart full of the things they were thankful for, but after painting the cart they had started to argue, and so nothing else had been added. I tried to cheer Mom up, first with a holographic hug (in which I could have sworn I felt my fingers touch her back) and then by offering Jake a holographic kick in the ass, which made my Mom laugh for a moment.

But as she went on describing what was going on, my Mom began to cry and I didn't know what to say, so I walked away to follow Jake and see what he was doing in the next room. He was standing in front of the unfinished mural with paints and a brush, undecided about what to do. As I passed him, I said for his ears alone: "Hint: paint people."

Then, just to appear as cool as I felt, I kept walking, right out the side door (taking some satisfaction in how the screen slammed behind me) and down the sidewalk toward the street. It wasn't exactly where my Mom lives now. Maybe she had moved to Miami or something. The neighborhood was all lit up with decorations. But I only had eyes for the palms of my hands, which (in the VR simulation) were covered with labeled buttons controlling different aspects of the call. To my frustration, I couldn't find one that said "Hang up."

Plus, as sirens approached, I grew increasingly concerned that I may have accidentally pushed the "extreme emergency call" button and that my Mom would think I had prank-called 911 on her house. As the embarrassment reached dream-engulfing levels, I woke up and decided to write this. After taking a pee, that is.

And now that I've written it, I'm going to pick a couple of goofy pictures to stick with it, and click "publish post," so you can read it. And now you've read it, which catches us up to the present moment. So what do you think? Was that a weird dream, or what?

Ravel Week

2011-11-06T18:18:00.002-06:00

This past weekend, we of the St. Louis Symphony Chorus sang a score that had very few problems of foreign diction and declaiming text. It was Daphnis & Chloe, at nearly an hour long the biggest thing Maurice Ravel wrote. Composed over three years in the early 1920s for the Ballets Russes, it is still occasionally staged as a ballet but more frequently heard in the cut-down form of two suites. At Powell Symphony Hall, under the baton of guest conductor Stéphane Denève, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performed the complete work as Ravel himself conceived it: a "choreographic symphony," with an English translation of the stage scenario projected above the stage in sync with the music.

In this work, the chorus serves as an extra section of the orchestra. Instead of lyrics, we sing notes over such sketchy textual suggestions as "a" or "lips closed," and sometimes no specific directions at all. For reasons of dynamics and color variations, we sometimes changed the neutral syllable to "oo" or "oh," sometimes added an aggressive glottal stop or even a consonant to start the syllable (such as "da" or "ya"). Scant weeks after the demanding Russian diction of Stravinsky's Les Noces, it was a relief to have no worries about the text. Also unlike the Stravinsky, this score furnished the chorus with extensive rests, during which we could sit back and enjoy the lush, impressionistic music in which Ravel the orchestral colorist showed himself at the peak of his mastery. Themes of great beauty, scenes of tenderness and awe, wit and eroticism, horror and triumph filled the stage with an all but visible dramatic presence. The huge orchestra, wedged into every inch of available real estate, provided not only an incredible range of tone color but also extremes of loud and soft running the gamut from "deafening" to "Wait, have I gone deaf?" And in the heart of it all, the chorus gets a chance to show off its ability to sing an extended passage of tricky, chromatic music in tune. Wow. What an amazing thing to be part of!

Maestro Denève deserves a huge share of the credit for making these under-attended concerts (broadcast live on public radio Saturday night) an artistic success. You might not guess it from his easy-going charm and his Penn Jillette-like mop of springy hair, which wanted constant shaking or brushing out of the conductor's face; but Denève brings to the podium both the authority to control every detail of this vast and subtle score with great precision, and the energy to infuse it with colossal emotional power. He is technician enough that he can sing his way through a rapid flute solo in word-perfect solfege; he is musician enough that he can guide hundreds of players and singers through an hour's worth of tricky cues and cutoffs, constantly changing meters and tempi, and sudden contrasts of texture and loudness without forgetting that it must all sound spontaneous—like a watercolorist managing both to blend his colors smoothly and to prevent them from running together in an indistinct blur. I particularly enjoyed the way he audibly breathed and vocalized as he cued each orchestral entrance. His passion for this piece was amazing.

Also on the program were a couple of piano pieces by Schumann, orchestrated by Ravel, and Schumann's piano concerto with acclaimed Schumann expert Eric Le Sage playing the solo. I only heard these works during Thursday evening's concert-order rehearsal. The "Carnaval" pieces were lightweight works, nothing special about them except the impression I sometimes got that Ravel was trying to imitate the better facets of Schumann's style of orchestration. As for the concerto, Denève and Le Sage engaged that familiar piece in a way that brought heretofore unnoticed details into view through the transparent surface of their keenly detailed, restrained interpretation.

My final kudos for Ravel Week go to the Grand Center Arts Academy, currently serving grades 6-8 across Grand Blvd. from Powell Hall. GCAA, sited in a pair of adjacent buildings that have been brought together in one through a $24 million rehab project, furnished the Symphony Chorus with a gorgeous, comfortable, and much-needed gathering space while pianist Le Sage was in possession of Powell's green room. If your kids have talent in the fine arts, you should check this place out. It's really cool. And I'm told it will eventually go all the way up to grade 12.

Fighting Tackiness With Tackiness

2011-11-04T13:09:00.007-06:00

Fighting back against the scourge of "tackiness on holy ground" the best way I know how... by satirizing it!

Follow the address watermarked at the bottom of each image to the awesome site where I created these signs!

Strategic Tackiness

2011-11-04T08:18:00.004-06:00

This week, the neighborhood ELCA shrine of church sign tackiness proclaims:

"FALL BACK" ON GOD

I can't wait to see what they do with "Spring Forward." Meanwhile, I wonder what God thinks about being suggested as a "fallback," in case your own thing doesn't work out...

IMAGE courtesy of "Church Sign Maker." It's amazing what you can do on the internet!

Butcher, Cashore, Clare, Stiefvater

2011-11-04T06:33:00.026-06:00

Death Masks
by Jim Butcher
Recommended Ages: 14+

In this fifth novel in "The Dresden Files," Chicago's only professional wizard defies a prophecy of his own death to take on a case that involves fallen angels, a plague curse, and the theft of the Shroud of Turin. As if that isn't enough, he faces a vicious Red Court vampire from South America in a duel that could end the war between wizards and vampires... if he lives to fight it. And finally, he rekindles an old flame with Susan, who is only a drink away from completing her transformation into a vampire herself.

Only Susan's willpower, her vows to a secret organization, and a weird pattern of tattoos prevent her from drinking Dresden the minute she sees him. Two kinds of hunger battle it out with love caught between them in an erotic subplot that promises to keep Harry's romantically tortured edge keen and bright for several books to come. Meanwhile, the wizard's relationships with a White Court vampire named Thomas, a paladin named Michael, and his order of angelic-sword-wielding do-gooders, continue to deepen. A heavenly calling falls into Dresden's hands, one he is not sure he can ever live up to; and a new darkness enters his life as well, straight out of the depths of hell.

Like the other Harry Dresden novels, this book comes with a matched pair of "adult" and "occult" content advisories. Sensitive readers, and parents who care to be involved in their children's literary lives, should be advised that there is a steamy love scene in these pages. Plus, the magic depicted in this novel includes arcane rituals, the summoning of spirits, and (in its darker, more evil forms) blood sacrifice. Take these concerns under advisement before deciding if this book is for you or your kids. Also be aware that it is full of edge-of-your-seat danger, gruesome violence, strange alliances, terrifying monsters, magical surprises, and a steady patter of wry humor that guarantees at least a chuckle on almost every page. If you ever fantasized about Harry Potter's grown-up career as a hard-boiled crime fighter, with such stylish touches as a leather duster and an old-school VW Beetle—or even if you just like your crime novels sexy, funny, and with a touch of magic—the Dresden Files may be the very thing.

Blood Rites
by Jim Butcher
Recommended Ages: 14+

Here is the sixth novel in "The Dresden Files," an ongoing series that has been made into a television program, and which has been touted as the adult answer to Harry Potter. While I question the aptness of that comparison, I have enjoyed this series enough to be shocked at myself for falling so far behind. At this writing there are seven more Harry Dresden novels, plus a spinoff novelette and a short story collection. Plus, Jim Butcher has been simultaneously writing the six-book "Codex Alera" series of fantasy novels, beginning with The Furies of Calderon.

So I have a lot of catching up to do, and nothing makes me feel farther behind-the-game than the big change in Harry's life that happens in this book. Truly, I think I saw it coming a few books back, but the secret that has been brewing under the surface comes out in this book, and the Harry Dresden Story turns a corner that will affect the course of all his future adventures. How can I hint at it without giving it away? Let's start with the double entendre in the book's title. The story has to do with blood, in more than one sense of the word. It involves vampires, and it involves family, combined in a really twisted way. I'm not just talking about Harry's cop friend Murphy finding out that her emotionally predatory ex-husband has gotten engaged to her kid sister. I mean something way more twisted: a fiendish, deadly family reunion that gets all tangled up with the case Dresden has been hired to solve.

That case involves a series of magically freakish accidents that have been targeting the women surrounding the production of an adult film. Harry's White Court vampire friend Thomas (naturally) is the one who gets him involved in the case, and he increasingly suspects that the sexually predatory Whites are deeply involved. But while there's plenty of danger going around with an entropy curse swooping down on the porno's cast and crew every twelve hours, Harry has even bigger threats to deal with. Like a Black Court vampire and her scourge of undead, mostly-dead, and still-living minions gunning for Harry in a vendetta that could claim many innocent lives. Like a hired gun whose fee Harry can't afford to pay, and whose debt-collection tactics Harry can afford even less. Like a crisis of faith in the wizardly values he learned from his kindly but flawed surrogate father. Like a power play within an ancient crime family when Harry, as usual, is right in the middle.

At book six, I'm less than halfway caught up with the Dresden Files. Yet I'm far enough into the series that I can credibly conclude that Jim Butcher is not one of those authors whose work gets weaker with each installment. He seems far from getting tired of writing the Dresden Files, and I am far from getting tired of reading them. Each book excels the ones before it in displays of wizardly power, depths of otherworldly spookiness, mammoth conflicts between good and evil, and the steady flow of sexy charm and irreverent humor. And though I obviously can't avoid pasting an "adult content" and "occult content" advisory on this book, it is only fair to note that both Butcher and his hero have a conscience about these things, as evidenced (for example) when Dresden realizes that pornography is a tool sexual predators use to lure in their prey. All things considered, I give this book, its author, and its series high marks.

Fire
by Kristin Cashore
Recommended Ages: 14+

Welcome to the Kingdom of the Dells, wedged between impassable mountains, a wintry sea, and the hostile neighboring country of Pikkia. In this small, isolated world within the world, the first fact of life you need to know, if you mean to live long, is that monsters exist. In the Dells, "monsters" are not huge, ugly beasts. In fact, they look just like ordinary animals and people, except more beautiful—hypnotically, unnaturally beautiful. Their eyes and hair come in weird colors, which is how you can spot them. But beware: though they are shaped like regular birds, and beasts, and people, they are terribly dangerous. They hunger for blood and flesh, especially that of other monsters—though they will settle for human prey as well. And in the case of monster men and women, they have the ability to ensnare minds and bend others to their will.

One such human monster was the handsome devil Cansrel, who pulled the strings of the late King Nax, turning his reign into a lawless scramble for sensual pleasure, punctuated by explosions of sadistic anger. Now Nax and Cansrel are both gone. The new king Nash, who has some of his father's weaknesses, struggles to hang on to his throne while warlords at the northern and southern ends of his realm plot his overthrow. All his hopes lie in the military genius of his youngest brother Brigan, the espionage work of his middle siblings, and Cansrel's flame-headed daughter Fire, last of the human monsters.

Like A. Lee Martinez's Monster, the first surprise in this book may be that its title is also the name of its main character. Fire is beautiful not only on the outside, like any monster of the Dellian persuasion, but also where it counts. She dreads using her powers, or being used, for the kind of evil that led her country to the brink of ruin. She loves her childhood friend Archer, but can never love him the way he wants her to. She needs to be guarded, night and day, against predatory monster birds and beasts that would go into a feeding frenzy at the first glimpse of her hair or scent of her blood—and against those people whose minds are not guarded against the telepathic power that surrounds her, against her will, driving them mad with either love or hate. One of the people who has trouble controlling his love for her is King Nash, whom she doesn't love but loyally serves; while the man she really loves is his brother Brigan, whose violent way of life and ice-hard mental discipline nevertheless rankle at her.

Fire's adventure is partly a tale of war and intrigue with the fate of a kingdom in the balance, partly a tale of love and loss with Fire's heart at stake. Her most dangerous enemy turns out to be a "wild card"—a boy from the other side of the mountain barrier, where the proverbial "gift and curse" takes a very different form. Birth and death, crime and heroism, deadly extremes of cold and flame, the uncovering of long-kept secrets, and the discovery of new family ties, are only some of what is in store for Fire in this passionate, thrilling fantasy novel. This second book in the "Seven Kingdoms" trilogy is the sequel to Graceling. The third book, titled Bitterblue, comes out in 2012. Visit the author's blog for updates!

City of Glass
by Cassandra Clare
Recommended Ages: 14+

In this third book in "The Mortal Instruments" series, the irresistible attraction between Clary and her brother Jace comes to a crisis that could bring death to at least one of them, if not the entire demon-fighting, secret world of Shadowhunters. Their sibling relationship, revealed by their bad-guy father Valentine at the end of their previous adventure, has put a kibosh on their budding romance, but not on the forbidden feelings that continue to torment both of them. But in the even greater battle to come, a deadly new ingredient will be added to the already simmering emotional cauldron: another brother...

Partly to get away from her, and partly to protect her, Jace tries to keep Clary from joining him and the Lightwood family on a trip to the secret Shadowhunter citadel of Idris, the City of Glass. What he doesn't plan on is Clary's friend, the fledgling vampire Simon, being dragged along on the trip. Though he has the mysterious and unique ability to walk in sunlight, Simon is no match for the politics and betrayals of Idris. And with her ability to call up magical runes that no Shadowhunter has ever learned, a small thing like missing the portal to Idris isn't going to hold Clary back. But no sooner do brother, sister, and all their friends find themselves together again, than a new danger approaches, one greater than any they have faced before. It involves a magic mirror, a son with demon blood, and an army of hellish fiends that Valentine is ready to turn loose on the citizens of Idris, so that he can destroy all the Shadowhunters, call forth the angel who created them, and establish a new race of demon-fighting heroes.

Obviously, the good guys have to stop him, or they're all going to die. But it's not going to be easy when they are betrayed from within, crushed by griefs both old and new, torn between accepting help from "Downworlders" (vampires, werewolves, faeries, and wizards) and lumping them together with their enemies, and—in Jace's case—confused as to whether it is his destiny to do evil or good, or perhaps to go out in a blaze of glory before his own desires consume him from within. Fans of the "Twilight" saga, hungering for more action featuring fantasy heroes and villains of the teen fashion model type will find this series especially compelling. The rest of us will have to consider other merits of this book, such as a climactic angel visitation that I thought was portrayed with a surprising blend of terror and theological acuity. Truly, one should not wish lightly to be visited by an angel of God!

This book is a sequel to City of Bones and City of Ashes. The series continues with City of Fallen Angels (2011) and City of Lost Souls (coming in 2012). Cassandra Clare has also begun a prequel series called "The Infernal Devices." Set in the Victorian era, its titles so far include Clockwork Angel (2010) and Clockwork Prince (December 2011). For more information, visit the author's website.

Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception
by Maggie Stiefvater
Recommended Ages: 14+

This is the first book in a series called "Books of Faerie." I actually started to read its sequel, titled Ballad, before I realized that I needed to go back and read this book first. Even though this meant extra expense and tiresome delay, it was worth it. How could I resist a story combining faerie magic and the world of music?

Deirdre Monaghan and her best friend James are an odd couple. She is shy, introverted, functionally invisible in the high school social scene; he is outgoing, funny, a real character. It seems their gift for folk music—she a harpist, he a bagpiper—may be the only thing they have in common. But when the mysterious and sexy Luke shows up at a talent contest and swoops into the middle of Dee's act, a few more pieces of common ground come into view. For one, James is in love with Dee, but he only gathers up the courage to tell her so, and risk their friendship doing it, after she begins to fall for Luke. For another, they both have a talent for seeing faeries. And now that the Fair Folk have an idea of Dee's powers, they come out in force to turn her life into the stuff of tragic Irish ballads.

This is one of those dark adventures amid the outskirts of Faerie land, in which young mortals with their whole lives ahead of them are menaced by ageless beings who, at one point, are aptly described as "big, cruel children [who] want shiny new toys." Luke himself is not one of them, but he serves the Queen of Faerie in a ghastly role that proves just how dangerous they are. He has no choice, since his soul is held hostage, forcing him to do her bidding for thousands of deadly but undying years. It is up to Dee, who until lately never had the backbone to stand up to anyone, to fight for Luke's soul, and for James's life, in a confrontation with the Faerie Queen that steadily builds in intensity. Danger, romance, betrayal, the passion of folksong, and a fascinating range of breeds of fay, bubble together in a magical combination that may especially intrigue fans of Holly Black and Melissa Marr.

Maggie Stiefvater is also known for her "Wolves of Mercy Falls" trilogy, whose titles include Shiver, Linger, and Forever. Her latest novel as of 2011 is The Scorpio Races. For more information, check out the author's website.

Three Musketeers

2011-10-29T07:20:00.006-06:00

The new "Three Musketeers" film is a delightful entertainment. It is also, I think, immune to complaints about historical anachronisms & taking liberties with Dumas, since Dumas, after all, took great liberties in history when he first wrote his entertaining romance.

D'Artagnan is played by Logan Lerman, an American kid lately known for playing the title role in "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." He's still good at adding a touch of impish humor to everything he does. Unlike the last two D'Artagnans I've seen in film--Chris O'Donnell (1993) and Justin Chambers (2001)--Lerman neither makes you want to plant your fist in his face nor turns the role into a manga comic book. So that's nice.

The brooding, cynical Athos is played by Matthew MacFadyen, whom I think of as the dude who played Mr. Darcy opposite Keira Knightley in "Pride & Prejudice" (2005). He's the romantic lead type, should probably play Rochester in a "Jane Eyre" pic any day now, has already done Arthur Clennam in "Little Dorrit," and he plays Athos at a moment in his long suicide by alcohol poisoning when he can still pull off heroic derring-do now and then.

Aramis, the sometime priest who remains devout even as a musketeer, is played by Luke Evans who, in a couple of weeks, will be seen as Zeus in "The Immortals." He plays Aramis as the bitterly disillusioned intellectual among the friends. Porthos, the brawny musketeer who is always flush with cash thanks to his affair with a wealthy married woman (remember, these guys are FRENCH), is played by Ray Stevenson, an action film maven who has played vampires, gangsters, Norse gods, and the Punisher. Stevenson plays Porthos with directness and a touch of humor.

I would take this set of musketeers any day over Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt & Chris O'Donnell. And I like almost everyone else in the cast too, including Milla Jovovich as Milady de Winter, Christoph Waltz as Cardinal Richelieu, and other familiar & unfamiliar actors filling out a cast in what turns out to be a surprisingly faithful adaptation, apart from the Da Vinci's Vault bit and the airships.

My only complaint is what they did with Buckingham. Orlando Bloom makes him absolutely repulsive. Both historically and in Dumas, Buckingham was an amazing dude. Bloom makes him look like Count Olaf from "A Series of Unfortunate Events."

On the video front, I've finally signed up for Netflix (at a time when hundreds of thousands of others are bailing out--my usual good timing). I figured this might, at least, be a cheaper alternative to buying disks and selling them back to FYE, especially where "TV on DVD" is concerned. My first two rentals were films by Hayao Miyazaki, whose Howl's Moving Castle I already knew and loved. First I saw Kiki's Delivery Service, a young witch's coming of age story with broomsticks, airships, a pedal-powered flying machine, and a touch of teenage friendship that could develop (as the kids grow up) into true love. It also features a talking cat voiced, in the English dub, by the late Phil Hartman, who was so right for the role that I now wonder how Billy Crystal's part in Howl would sound if Hartman had lived.

My second Netflix rental was Spirited Away, also written and directed by Hayao and widely regarded as his masterpiece. It draws on the Japanese animistic tradition in which everything in nature has a spirit behind it, such as the spirit of a given river or the spirit of radishes, etc. The main character is a small girl named Chihiro, whose parents drag her against her will into what they think is a derelict theme park, but which is actually a magical resort where the spirits go to hot-tub after a hard day's work. The parents get turned into pigs, Chihiro gets signed into servitude, and in order to get herself and her parents out she will have to remember her real name (taken from her when she signs her contract). Now known as Sen, she sets out on an adventure involving a mysterious boy who can turn into a dragon, a pair of identical twin witches with dangerous power, an enormous baby shrunken into a chubby mouse, a stink spirit, and a creepy "No Face" spirit who starts out friendly but develops into a dangerous monster.

All three of Hayao's films that I have seen share several story elements. They are essentially built on the frame of a classic quest. They focus on a seemingly powerless girl finding her own inner strength, often in friendship or true love. The beauty of these films is in their details, their rich and strange imagery, often involving movement across a picturesque landscape with atmospheric music stretching across gaps in the dialogue. The individual films vary by the type of setting they depict (ranging from the Austro-Hungarian look of Howl's world to the modern Japan of Chihiro's), the type of magic in them (from western witches and wizards to eastern spirits), and the age level they address (from Chihiro's small child to Kiki's early teen to Howl's Sophie on the cusp of sexual maturity). But they have a similar appeal, which a bookworm like me can describe no better than to say that the story for only one of them came from the mind of Diana Wynne Jones... but any of them could have.

Starred Reviews

2011-10-28T07:39:00.008-06:00

As a confirmed Shelfarian, I know of two approaches to awarding up to 5 stars to a book: the "Critic" approach and the "Booster" approach.

The Critic says * is a mark of distinction an author has to earn; ** is for going above and beyond the reader's expectations; *** is for blowing the reader's mind; **** is for changing the world for the better; and ***** is for bringing about the millennial kingdom of God by the sheer power of the written word. Most books will have only one or two stars, and authors will have to fight hard for more than that. A critic who regularly gives out a lot of stars will often be read as over-generous, soft, or indulgent; yet, on the other hand, a truly obnoxious book simply cannot be rated at all, dropping off the scale with a zero-star rating that, ironically, has no effect on the book's average, as though it hadn't been scored at all.

For the Booster, however, ***** is a book that meets all expectations of reading pleasure. **** means there were a few off-moments, but overall the book is very good. *** means the book is all right, but it has serious problems. ** means it's not the reviewer's cup of tea. * means that the memory of this book rankles, like the taste of sickness, long after one has gotten over it. Ironically, although the Booster's 5-star scale has more scope for measuring the badness of a bad book, Critics will accuse Boosters of throwing softballs because most books on his Shelfari shelf have 4 or 5 stars; the ones that are really exceptional are tagged as "favorites."

I'll be up front about it, I'm a book booster. Because of my affiliation with MuggleNet, I am particularly a children's & young adults' book boster. I don't write critical reviews (though I don't withhold honest criticism either). I recommend books that I have enjoyed, hoping others (especially children) will read them & share my enjoyment.

Ironically, I have also been accused of "book censorship" because my book reviews routinely include "adult content advisories," "occult" ditto, and other hazard warnings where Christian parents may be concerned (such as books that promote the theory of evolution, anti-Christian polemics, disturbing ethical values, etc.). But my intent is never to discourage people from reading them; rather, these advisories are a "heads up" to Christian parents who are engaged in their children's inner lives, to be prepared to discuss things that may challenge the values they are trying to form. Banning, forbidding, or refusing to look at something is never the right response to "off-message" content. Children (and adults) should be encouraged to experience everything, apply critical thinking skills & discuss what they are reading openly and intelligently.

Rehearsal Dinner Whimsy

2011-10-27T06:37:00.004-06:00

FATHER OF THE BRIDE (standing up to make a toast).

Honey, it seems like only yesterday I held you in my arms, tugging on your little nose. But of course, it wouldn't come off, because it was real. I'm not saying you weren't a beautiful baby... but when you were born, the doctor slapped your mother.

Since that day, we've been proud to have you living under our roof for twenty-one wonderful years. The other fourteen years, not so much. Every time I thought about the day some man would come along and take you away from us, the agony I felt was unbearable. But you know how sharp your mother's elbows are. And now that day has come. Well, almost. I'm keeping my fingers crossed until two o'clock tomorrow.

I felt sure you had found your soul-mate the moment I met your husband-to-be. I'll never forget the look on his face. My heart went right out to him, he was so nervous. I don't know if it was the surprise when I sat up in the backseat, or if it was the click of the safety coming off my shotgun. I know exactly what he saw in you, though. I never realized till then how much the dashboard lights of an '82 Monte Carlo flatter you.

I am sure your father-in-law feels honored to have you as part of his proud family. Tears come to my eyes when I recall our first meeting, forty-five minutes ago. He said to me, "You're what's-his-face, aren't you?" I said, "That is undeniably true." Some of the greatest friendships in human history have been founded on less. And in our case, I look forward to a great deal less in the years to come.

I just want my little girl to know that, no matter what happens, there will always be a place for her to come back to, given at least thirty days' notice. We'll be renting out your room on a monthly basis, and we already have a tenant lined up. Don't worry about all your girlhood things. They're being well-cared for in a storage unit up by the airport. Your mother and I paid the first month's rent in your name, and the key and contract are tucked inside the card with your gift. Just our little way of showing how much we love you. And without further ado, I propose the bride!

Tonality Unraveled

2011-10-25T06:45:00.008-06:00

This tiny excerpt comes at the beginning of a magical moment in Maurice Ravel's magnum opus, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé. I have gotten to know it lately because I'm singing in a chorus that will be performing it next month with the St. Louis Symphony. And even though it's just one microscopic detail from a vast score—almost an hour's worth of sumptuous, impressionistic music—nevertheless this example has seized my imagination. It is a relic of a unique musical genius that could have been extended almost infinitely, but which Ravel throws away in a handful of brief phrases that only hint at their potential.

It is a harmonic progression of exquisite, almost arabesque symmetry that could form a chain going all the way round to where it started, obliterating any semblance of functional tonality while at the same time uniting intricate logic with a sense of lush exoticism as only Ravel could.

Observe the first two bars of the sample: They form a descending sequence, each bar starting with a minor triad (A minor and G minor, respectively), followed by a dominant-ninth chord whose root is a major third higher (C# and B, respectively), thus standing in a false relation to the Tenor II note of the preceding chord and a tritone (augmented fourth) from the root of the next chord. (The third bar of this sample breaks the pattern in going back to A minor, but in a later instance the pattern extends to the expected F minor chord.)

The remoteness of these chords from each other is what destroys one's sense of functional tonality in this phrase. The sense of musical logic, however, is restored, firstly, by the parallel progression of bar one and two (a descending harmonic sequence); and secondly, by the smooth symmetry of the chord voicings. The initial A minor chord is spaced with the root doubled at the octave (Bass I & II), and the remaining members of the triad closely stacked above (Tenor I & II forming the interval of a major third). The tenors then descend by half-steps, doggedly maintaining the same major-third interval between them, while the basses in contrary motion alternate between leaps of a major third and a major second—B1 down and B2 up a third, then B1 up and B2 down a second, so that on the second chord they find themselves a major third apart, and then an octave apart again, only a full step lower than at first. The chromatically descending tenors, meanwhile, move to create the same chord types in a pattern that could, in theory, continue through an entire descending octave, leading back tonally to where it began.

In the second iteration of this pattern, the one that follows through to F minor, Altos I & II take over the chromatically-descending tenor role. Meanwhile the basses, now in unison, alternately leap down a minor sixth and up a tritone, as though switching back and forth between the B1 and B2 parts of the initial pattern. In this way, Ravel seems simultaneously to compress and expand his tonally unsettled harmonic pattern, while an additional melody line (at first with the Sopranos in unison) cuts across it with a harmonically and rhythmically displaced melodic thread. Iteration 3 transposes this second version of the pattern up an octave, continuing the descent from F minor to C# minor, with the chords in an SST voicing and the countermelody—like a brushstroke that deliberately blurs the lines of a painting—crossing it in the Alto part. Thus Example #2:The fourth phrase of this amazing passage—evocatively scored for textless, a capella chorus in the middle of a huge orchestral masterpiece—introduces another variation of the original idea. Now with the chords in an SSAA voicing and the tenors continuing the descent of that line-blurring line, the chord pattern changes. Now the top Soprano line is spreading upward by half-steps, but for the moment Ravel has thrown aside the symmetrical motion of the other three chord parts. Also, the chord types have changed, moving from A major (2nd inversion) to A-sharp minor (ditto), to a root-position F-sharp major chord, and finally to a huge, first-inversion, G dominant-7th chord for the full chorus—again, a succession of harmonies from regions tonally remote from each other.

At this point the "blurring" melody line acquires a shadow, becoming two lines moving in parallel minor thirds, while underlying chord alternates between G7 and G#7 over a sustained B in the bass. And so we come to the next interesting variant of Ravel's musical thought, as shown in Example #3:Here Ravel seems to have taken his initial arabesque and turned it inside out—and yet it remains instantly recognizable. Notice that Bass I & II parts are now moving in parallel perfect fifths, down a whole step, then up a half-step, and repeat. Before the pattern can repeat for a third bar, it gets a surprise twist, first rhythmically delaying its expected half-step-up movement by a bar, then kinking it around for another whole-step down. Meanwhile, the Tenor I & II parts are the ones moving in contrary motion, starting a minor third apart to complete the minor-triad above the basses, then spreading apart a half-step in each direction to form a perfect fourth so that the T2 part adds a dissonant note (the second of the chord) to what would otherwise be an open-fifth chord. This T2 note, doubled in the soprano line, comes across as something of a passing tone as that voice continues to descend by half-steps, while the T1 part hops down the equivalent of a minor third to begin the second repetition of this pattern. Soprano 2, meanwhile, doubles the first B1 note of each bar and sustains it across the whole bar, in effect adding a 7th to the second chord of the pattern, while the Altos in unison cut their rhythmically and harmonically blurring swath across everything.

So, the effect is a harmonic progression from B minor to something G#-ish, or possibly a last-inversion D# thirteenth-chord, either of which is a leap of cosmic distances in terms of functional tonality; then, in sequence the same harmonic pattern descending from A minor to F#-and-change, resolving in an unexpected direction (and a beat later than expected) to good old E minor.

Ravel continues to develop and refine this idea in musically unexpected ways for a couple more phrases, swapping things around so that the chords are rhythmically offset and the counter-thread (now in the bass line) moves on the beat, and blending the colors of the other choral parts in a variety of ways. As the instruments begin to enter the argument, the mood darkens to a soft SATB chord in which another distinctive variant of the first pattern emerges, with B2 describing a spiral (M3 up, P4 down; m3 up, M2 down), T1 and T2 in chromatically descending major thirds, and B1 sustaining first an E, then a D across breathtakingly dissonant pairs of chords. Out of this emerges a chromatically climbing pattern that morphs into a crescendo for the full chorus, starting with:This phrase always gives me a Bartok flashback; something about the Bass parts reminds me of Cantata Profana. In complete disregard of traditional harmonic function, but confidently affirming the use of triadic harmony, Ravel proceeds from D# minor to D major in three chord-changes. As the crescendo continues, the sopranos rising chromatically and the chorus dividing into as many as six parts, overagainst C tremolos in the orchestra's lowest register and a tonally ambiguous swirl of accompaniment, the chorus surges thrillingly through a progression of chords no less bizarre than B major—A major—D# minor—D augmented—F# major—C major—A-flat—F major (with a G-flat added in the bass)—E-flat minor—and at triple forte, covering a three-octave spread, a climactic but extremely brief B minor chord. If you called this "taking the long way around a change from major to minor," you would be making an understatement. This harmonic route combines just about every possible shift between tonal areas that sound a world apart, in a broadening spiral of remoteness while, at the end, its chord-shapes flare outward like a colossal wedge.

It's dramatic. It's exciting. It's disturbing. It's music that pulls the threads out of the weave of traditional harmony and twists them into something altogether new. I hope I can figure out how to sing it within the next couple of weeks. It's very challenging and the chorus is so exposed! But it is also music that shakes the world in a peculiarly colorful way that could have been created by no one but Ravel.

Westerfeld, Westerfeld, Wilson

2011-10-22T06:30:00.013-06:00

Leviathan
by Scott Westerfeld
Recommended Ages: 12+

I surprise myself when I look back on the thousands of books I have reviewed and see so few, if any, that really belong to the Steampunk genre. The whole "alternate history of Queen Victoria's era with armed airships and high-tech high jinks" concept holds an immense appeal for a fantasy and historical fiction buff like me, but somehow I have only grazed the edges of this flourishing field. Books I have read by Stephen Elboz, Kenneth Oppel, and R. L. LaFevers are about as close to that type of story as I have wandered, more by chance than by design. So when I saw the cover of this book, I thought I was going to really plunge into the world of Steampunk once and for all. I won't say "alas," but I was mistaken. This book takes the world of Steampunk into the next generation, and gives it a twist all its own.

The alternate universe in which Leviathan takes place seems to have split off from the Steampunk waveform at the time of Charles Darwin. Not content with disabusing half of Europe of their belief in a divine creator, the Darwin of this world founded a branch of science devoted to combining the "life threads" (read "what they called DNA before they discovered DNA") of different animals into fabricated creatures that had all kinds of uses. Britain, France, and other "Darwinist" aligned nations have gotten a head-start on high tech, using these artificial beasties instead of gadgets and motors. So by the dawn of what we call World War I, they have vehicles drawn by elephantines and wolftigers, bio-engineered krakens serving in lieu of submarines, and most exciting of all, living airships ranging from single-passenger "Huxleys" (giant, hydrogen-breathing jellyfish) to airborne battleships built around flying whales like the good ship Leviathan herself!

Enter Deryn Sharpe, an aviator's daughter whose only ambition is to serve in the Royal Navy of the sky. So she cuts her hair, puts on a boy's uniform, and enlists under the name Dylan, relying on her androgynous looks, her innate "sky sense," and her incredible natural courage to overcome the disadvantage of being the one girl among a midshipmen's berth full of boys. Then a female boffin (that's British slang for "scientist") comes on board with a load of luggage and a secret cargo meant to play a role in sensitive negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. Suddenly, thanks to weight restrictions, Dylan finds herself one of only two middies left on board.

Meanwhile, in the opposing half of Europe—the half devoted to developing machine might beyond the coal-powered whimsies of the Steampunk era—the so-called "Clanker" powers have been gearing up for a war to end all wars. Their armored vehicles now run on diesel fuel, but instead of rolling on tractor treads they walk on legs, like giant insects or spiders carrying battleships over land. Just as in the real world, hostilities are ignited by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The twist is that the Germans poisoned the Archduke and his wife in the middle of the night, forcing their teenaged son Alek to flee for his life with a handful of loyal men.

Just when Alek's party makes it to the safety of a royal villa hidden in the Swiss Alps, Deryn's Leviathan is shot down by German fighter planes in the adjacent valley. With their airbeast crippled, an Alpine winter closing in, and German reinforcements on the way, they won't survive long... unless Alek risks exposing his safe haven, and his politically explosive family secret, to help them. What is it that brings these two desperate groups together? Necessity? Fate? Compassion? Fatal foolishness? Whatever it is, Alek, Deryn/Dylan, and their companions are about to share an adventure full of danger, daring, complex lines of loyalty and duty, and tremendous import for the life or death of millions of people. Their adventure only begins in this book, however, continuing in the sequel, Behemoth.

American author Scott Westerfeld is also the author of the Midnighters, Uglies, and Peeps series, and seems to specialize in writing fantasy thrillers about issues such as popularity, popular taste, and the perception of beauty. Married to Australian author Justine Larbalestier, he also writes contemporary ballet music and software while leading a forever-summer lifestyle, divided between New York and Sydney. Which, you know, kind of makes him my fantasy hero.

Behemoth
by Scott Westerfeld
Recommended Ages: 12+

In Book 2 of the Leviathan trilogy, an alternate-history version of World War I continues to play out between two great powers of Europe: the Clankers, whose war machines have advanced at an accelerated rate to include walking tanks and helicopter drones, as well as planes, submarines, and battleships; and the Darwinists, who have replaced mechanical technology with bio-engineered monstrosities such as the whale-sized, hydrogen-breathing airbeast Leviathan, known to our protagonists as home.

But the friendship between Alek and Dylan has become increasingly complicated. For one thing, Alek lets Dylan in on the secret that he is the rightful Archduke of Austria, heir to the elderly Emperor, and if he can hang on until the Emperor dies, he may be in a position to stop the war. But Alek is caught in a tricky situation when Austria enters the war on the Clanker side. Now he is at best a prisoner of war; if his secret gets out, he may even be forced into the role of traitor to his people. Meanwhile, Dylan hasn't yet figured out how to tell Alek that he is really a girl named Deryn, who posed as a boy in order to get into the air service and who now carries a hopeless torch for a young prince who can never, ever get romantically entangled with a commoner. And now their friendship and loyalties are put to the test in a diplomatic disaster over the Ottoman Empire's capital Istanbul, where the Clankers have all but sealed the deal on the Turks entering the war on their side, and where a lady boffin (i.e., scientist) is hatching a genetic surprise that may tilt the balance of power.

Things get out of hand before you can say, "Barking spiders!" Alek makes a reluctant escape from the Leviathans, only to get caught up in a popular revolution. Uncomfortable in his role as a freedom fighter (given that he is first in line for the throne of a vast empire), Alek nevertheless contributes the last of his Archduke father's hoard of gold and a genius for driving walking battle machines to the cause of keeping the Ottomans out of the war. He also obtains a new grandmother and the friendship of a beautiful female warrior. At the same time, Deryn has fallen to earth in a secret sabotage mission that has gone pear-shaped, and her only way out is through a furious and deadly battle that tests all her courage, loyalty, and strength. Caught between a prince who can never love her and an amorous girl she can never love (well, probably not...??), Deryn plays a crucial role in the fate of nations while risking, at every turn, putting her head in a noose for treason or mutiny. Nevertheless, her greatest test remains ahead, along with whatever difference Alek is meant to make in his alternate history of the 20th-century world. But to find out about that, you'll have to get the third book in this trilogy: Goliath (released in September 2011).

In my frank opinion, this is a smashingly entertaining series, sparkling with verve, derring-do, technological magic and scientific wonder. The main characters effervesce with personality, their catch-phrases and slang words are infectious, and their situation brims with whimsical humor, romantic tension, and a grim sense of fast-approaching obstacles to their happiness, and to the survival of millions across Europe—obstacles that threaten to be impossible to overcome. While the book is innocent of anything requiring an "adult" or "occult content advisory," however, I feel it is my duty to let concerned Christian parents know that among the conceits of Westerfeld's fantasy world is the assumption that Darwinism could (should? already has?) debunked the "superstition" and moral scruples of Christianity. One of the tensions between Deryn's and Alek's respective worlds is, after all, the spiritual repugnance that Clankers (as Christians) hold toward the Darwinists' "abominations." You may want to take this into account as you decide whether to gift these books to your kids, or in planning to discuss the series with them as you read it together. Either way, I believe this book will bring teens (and upward) enjoyment, enrich their inner world, and perhaps even stimulate them to explore the amazing worlds of history, mechanics, genetics, and the culture of what is now Turkey, all on their own.

The Chestnut King
by N. D. Wilson
Recommended Ages: 12+

In this final sequel to 100 Cupboards and Dandelion Fire, Henry York Maccabee girds himself for his final battle with the witch queen of Endor, knowing that if he fails, all life in the world he has learned to love will turn to ashes... beginning with those nearest and dearest to him. He must not lose, but how can he win when a drop of the witch's blood is eating away at his body and mind like an incurable cancer? How can a boy who, not so long ago, was a timid, insecure weakling, overcome such a powerful evil with nothing but a knack for baseball, a magical gift tuned to the key of dandelions, and a powerful new name he has only started to understand? How can he fight back against the combined might of an entire empire, an elite force of virtually unkillable killers, and an enemy who can find him anywhere he tries to hide—even in another world—even in his dreams?

Well, it won't be easy. In the most powerful stories, these kinds of things are as far from easy as anything can be. And this is one powerful story, emotionally moving at a deep level that tends to be difficult to move. It is an electrifying story told in vibrant language that sometimes teeters between poetry and prose. It is a work of pure fantasy that taps into truths from under spiritual sands that most modern writers seem loath to explore. It even made me cry until boogers ran out of my nose. You may find this hard to believe, but to me a book that can do that is a rare treasure. From Henry's determination to die for those he loves when it seems he can do no more, to his grandmother's touching farewell in a visit to Henry's dreams, this book resonates with Christian imagery without being preachy, sentimental, or even allegorical.

It's just a great story, give or take the longer-than-usual coda (two whole chapters and an epilogue after the resolution of the chief crisis) which, in all fairness, provides a satisfying glimpse into the surviving characters' ultimate fate. While, for me, the final floret on the proverbial cake-icing is the fact that my review of 100 Cupboards is quoted on the jacket—a proud achievement I showed all my friends, like a parent passing out baby photos—you may even feel yourself getting nostalgically choked up when the story turns full circle, back to the bus station in Henry, Kansas, where it all began. And so I congratulate Mr. Wilson on a most satisfying end to a great trilogy!

Top Ten Reasons Fall Is Good

2011-10-18T12:07:00.003-06:00

10. The leaves change color, fall from the trees, and drift into heaps that you can lose a child in. For a minute, anyway.

9. The melancholy pleasure of a rainy day, the sweet earthy smell of moldering leaves, and the subdued, gaslight quality of a sun that rises late and sets early.

8. The perfection of a blue-sky, sunny day when the high temperature is around 65° F, give or take 5 degrees, when a sweater or windbreaker gives just enough warmth but not too much.

7. The happy necessity of a daily cup of rich, dark, hot chocolate.

6. The sudden prevalence of pumpkins set out as decorations and baked into pies and other desserts. (Roasted pumpkin seeds are also a nice fall treat, by the way.)

5. The nighttime luxury of snuggling down under a heavy quilt or comforter, without fear of overheating.

4. Your favorite cat's tendency to snuggle down with you, in an especially well-behaved way, all night long.

3. The clarity that the air has when it is neither too damp nor too dry, too hot nor too cold.

2. The brief, exquisitely peaceful pause between the rumble of air conditioning and the rattle and clank of central heating.

1. The realization that, just for once, the climate is even nicer outside than inside...

Tackiness Boogie

2011-10-17T15:50:00.002-06:00

This week's new message on the lighted sign at the neighborhood's ELCA Tower of Tackiness:

JESUS IS THE ROCK AND HE ROLLED MY BLUES AWAY

I believe this is known, in dogmatics textbooks, as the "beat me, Daddy, eight to the bar" theory of atonement. It is closely related to the theory that the apostles were a hair band, although the general, unwashed public doesn't know this as it stumbles past this church, laughing themselves sick on a mental image of a bunch of stiff, Scandinavian Lutherans grooving to a backbeat. To me, however, it brings to mind Matthew 18:6 and the fact that one particular stone that rolls is called a millstone...

New Camera

2011-10-15T14:47:00.008-06:00

Here are some shots I took while playing with my new digital camera, figuring out how it works. Out of over 40 snaps I've taken over the past few days, just a handful really struck me as keepers. I guess I have a lot more to learn!

Here is Tyrone, the cat who has been my main dawg for over nine years now. He's still looking good, don't you think? And in this picture, slightly touched up by a bit of Photoshop magic, he looks like he's saying to me, "Dude, you gone."

This rust-colored classic is parked across the street from my office in the rustic burg of Defiance, Missouri. I thought it went nicely with the shed next to it, but I masked in the background foliage (from another photo I took yesterday) to conceal a rather ordinary house on the neighboring lot.

Here is the nice-looking bed-and-breakfast next to the building where I work in Defiance, Missouri. The painting and woodwork actually still need a little work, but overall it doesn't look half bad!

Here is a fancy birdbath on the grounds of the B&B pictured above. I'm mostly proud of the fact that I kept my hand still enough to get a good shot with the optical zoom cranked up most of the way. Also, I like the slightly wild, antique-looking settings. But I wish I had taken a picture of the gargoyle on the building next door! Ah, next week....

And here is a glimpse of the space I work in every day, fulfilling orders for a Christian doctrinal journal that has been published in some twenty languages and read around the world. While bulk shipments and single-copy subscriptions are shipped from other facilities, all your day-to-day back-issue orders, new subscriptions, and donations cross this desk and the packaging/mailing work bench next to it!

Tackiness World Series 2

2011-10-15T14:40:00.003-06:00

This week, another baseball-related message from the neighborhood ELCA church, whose book of whimsical bumper-sticker slogans must come equipped with a pun for every conceivable occasion:

GOD'S EYE IS ON THE SPARROWS, AND THE CARDINALS!

Yeah, but what about you turkeys?

A Most Historic Organ

2011-10-12T08:54:00.006-06:00

I thank Alan Creek for sending me these pictures of the historic pipe organ at St. Trinity Lutheran Church (LCMS) in St. Louis, almost in the same neighborhood as the church I attend. Besides these pictures he sent me many additional snaps of the innards of the organ, but I post these for the enjoyment of those more generally interested in the pipe organ.
First, here's a nice view of the pipes and of the space they fill with sound. Judging by the decorations (as well as an exterior shot of the church which showed snow on the roof), I gather these pictures were taken around Christmastime. It looks like an instrument that could create an impressive volume of brilliant, festive holiday music.

Second, here's a close-up of the console, with emphasis on the pedals. Note that the pedal board is flat, and that the pedals are all lined up parallel to each other. This reflects the historic pedal design favored in may parts of Europe to this day. American organs of the last few decades have spoiled organists (like me) with easier-to-reach pedal keys splayed out in a radiating, concave pattern, like the ribs of a folding fan that curves upward at both ends. The splayed configuration makes it easier to reach notes with your heels, so that you don't have to twist your ankle so much when reaching heel-to-toe across intervals of a third or fourth; the concave shape brings notes at the upper and lower end of the keyboard closer, so that you do not have to stretch your legs so far. Playing a straight pedal-board like this will really put hair on a guy's chest. But, it may also help performers develop a more historically authentic approach to works by Bach and other composers who played their own works on instruments like this.

Above the pedal-board are four additional pedals. The three on the left are simple on-off switches for couplers, which combine the stops for more than one keyboard onto a single keyboard. I am guessing that these couplers, from left to right, are "Great to Pedal," "Swell to Pedal," and "Swell to Great," where "Great" means the lower keyboard (controlling the pipes exposed on top of the organ) and "Swell" means the upper keyboard (controlling pipes enclosed inside a wooden chest). The larger, fancy "volume-pedal" looking thing to the right of these three is the Swell pedal, which opens and closes the jalousie doors on the swell chest, allowing the performer to raise or lower the loudness of at least part of the instrument. This may seem like a Rube Goldberg machine to you, but organs have been around a lot longer than electronics. This is simply the only way to adjust the volume on pipes, which in themselves are an "all or nothing, on or off" kind of instrument.

Here are the stops for Great and the Pedal. One pulls a piston out to bring a stop into action, and pushes it back in to shut it off. Bottom row first, L to R: "Bellows Signal" activates a signal (bell?) to alert the dude cranking the bellows that the organist needs more wind. It's interesting to see this on an organ in these days of electric air pumps! Next is the Bass Flute 8 ft., a pedal stop that plays a note at the actual pitch of the corresponding note in the score. Then there's the Bourdon 16 ft., which sounds an octave lower. On the middle row of pistons you have four 8 ft. stops on the Great (lower manual keyboard). The most important one is on the right: Open Diapason, a.k.a. the Principal -- the type of pipe with the most quintessentially "organy" sound, frequently used as the foundation of a strong, solid-sounding registration. To the left, apparently a more recent addition, is a trumpet stop, whose flaring pipes create a brilliant, brassy sound. Then there's the Gamba, a pipe whose tapering shape gives it a mellow, breathy sound that organists strangely associate with strings; and finally the Melodia, which I take to be a flute stop, lighter than the Diapason but clearer than the Gamba. Above these, from right to left, are: Octave 4 ft., a sound similar to the Diapason but one octave higher (adding strength and brightness to a tone-color combination); Flute d'Amore 4 ft., a flute sound at the same higher octave, probably contrasting gently with the Melodia but less forceful than the Octave; Super Octave 2 ft., another diapason two octaves above the written note and thus making the total combination even brighter; and the Mixture 3 rks., which is to say 3 ranks of pipes tuned to such intervals as a 4th or a 3rd above the 4-ft. pitch level, and sounding all together to create a buzzy mixture of tone colors, shrill and out of tune by themselves, but in combination with 8' and 4' stops gilding the total sound with a shimmer of brilliance.

The "Swell" stops are situated on the other side of the console, controlling the pipes in the swell box. The bottom row duplicates the coupler kick-switches above the pedal board, in a form that the performer may feel more confident using, provided he can spare a hand. The middle row, from left to right, starts with another 8 ft. Diapason, this one "stopped" as opposed to the "open" Diapason on the Great. This is to say, each pipe (probably made of wood put together in a boxy shape) has a plug stuck in the top end, forcing the wind through a narrower opening and creating a more flute-like sound. The Oboe Gamba 8 ft., like the trumpet, is a "reed" type of pipe, relying not just on air blowing across a slit in the pipe but on a little metal tongue inside the pipe to create the essential vibration that determines its vaguely oboe-like sound, best used for delicate solos. The Salicional is a stringy type of flute, and the Geigen Principal is a sort of cross between a string stop and a diapason, possibly with a hornlike tone color. On the top row of stops, from right to left, you have: the Tremolo, which puts a little shake in all the notes; the Flute Harmonique 4 ft., a type of flute pipe that is built to 8 ft. dimensions and then "overblown" so that it sounds an octave higher; the 4 ft. Violino, obviously a string stop sounding an octave higher than the written pitch; and the 2 fl. Flautino, a sharp flute sound two octaves up.

This would be an interesting instrument to play. I may prove to be wrong, but the feeling I get from looking at the design of this historic instrument is that it is inspired by the British school of organ building, so that its stops will tend to pile up in rich, dignified, solid masses of not very brilliant sound, with a slight tendency to blur independent lines together. In accompanying services on this organ, I predict that I would probably overuse the trumpet as an expedient for making the melody line "pop out" against the background, and the pedal couplers would be in nearly constant use. Pieces giving the pedal part a distinctive solo line against two contrasting lines of accompaniment in the manuals would be difficult to pull off. But for light, intimate pieces at a softer dynamic level, there would be a world of contrast and variety to play with. Now I look forward to test-driving this organ to see how far off my predictions are, and how quickly my ankles and knees can adapt to the straight pedalboard!

Raising the Widow's Son

2011-10-12T08:02:00.003-06:00

I get to preach tonight at the midweek "Parlor Mass" at a certain LCMS church in the city of St. Louis. The text, taken from the historic readings for the 16th Sunday after Trinity, is Luke 7:11–17.

Not one but two large crowds witnessed the miracle, plus many of Jesus’ disciples. Jesus arrived in Nain with a crowd following Him, just when another crowd came out of the city following the bier of a young man who had died. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow. And then Jesus says these awesome words—or maybe they are terrible words—or maybe they’re just plain silly. Jesus looks at this poor widow who now has no one left in the world to care for her, and He says: “Do not weep.”

He’s kidding, right? “Do not weep”? Why would He say this to the widow of Nain? Even though Luke tells us exactly why Jesus says it, there are a lot of weird ideas about what those words mean and why Jesus said them. Chances are, most of us have been taken in by these strange ideas.

First, there’s the idea that Jesus means you shouldn’t mourn for the dead. Don’t be sad! They’re in heaven, right? And of course, as the story unfolded at the gates of Nain, the young man came back to life and went back to his mother, just as each of us will see our loved ones restored to life some day. So does this mean funerals should be tear-free zones? Is Jesus telling us all not to cry? Is this where the Bible says that Christian death and burial should be a joyful celebration rather than a time of sorrow and grief? Good luck trying to enforce that rule! I have shed more tears at the death of dear, believing brothers and sisters in Christ than for some members of my own family. I won’t tell you that a Christian funeral should be happy or that you shouldn’t cry when a loved one departs. Even knowing that our loss is their gain, it is nevertheless our loss. We will miss them.

As David said when his infant son died, “He will not come to me, but I will go to him.” And in the meantime, the dear departed leave us full of hurt, longing, and loneliness. Even Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, both in his own grief for a beloved friend and in his compassion for the dead man’s family.

Another strange thought that people link with the words, “Do not weep,” is the idea that death is OK, that we shouldn’t dread it or hate it, but embrace it as a friend. That’s not true either. Death is still the wages of sin. It is not a natural part of the world order God created. It is not part of the destiny God has in mind for us. Death is a perversion of all that is good and lovely. Death is a parasite that has attached itself to our world through the wiles of Satan and our own (that is mankind’s) rebellion against the God of all life. Death is an enemy that snatches up young and old, strong and weak, good and bad without distinction. Death is a destroyer.

It is because of death that our need for a Savior is so urgent. We need someone stronger than death. We need someone with the authority, with the power, to halt death in its tracks and turn it back into life. More to the point, we need God to care about us enough, in spite of our sins and errors, to do for us what Jesus did for that widow’s son. We need God’s Son to enter into combat with death, and to prevail on our behalf.

This is what Jesus came to do. Because that is the kind of God we have—a God who has compassion on us, sinners though we be. And that, little children, is why Jesus said to the widow at Nain, “Do not weep.” For as Luke tells us, “When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her.” He wasn’t issuing a commandment from some lofty seat of authority, like “Thou shalt not weep.” He wasn’t delivering a philosophical nugget of wisdom, like “Death is nothing to cry about.” He wasn’t even teasing the miracle about to take place, like “Shush, wait till you see this!” It’s as simple as this: Jesus felt bad for the woman. It’s like when you see a child fall down and hurt himself, and you pick him up, and you see tears in his eyes, and you feel such pity that you almost start to cry yourself; so you wipe his tears away and you say, “Don’t cry. It’s going to be all right.” This is what Jesus is saying. He’s saying, “Your pain is My pain. Your sorrow is My sorrow. Your death is My death. I love you. Please, let Me comfort you, like a mother comforts her child.”

And then he touched the bier, so that the bearers stopped. Nowadays we are apt to miss the drama in this small gesture. But in Jesus’ time, touching a dead body was a serious no-no. People who handled the dead were regarded as unclean. But when Jesus touches the bier, something different happens. His authority over life and death is so apparent that it stops the pallbearers in their tracks. They’re waiting for the next thing to happen, which is simply that Jesus tells the young man to get up, and the dead man sits up and begins to talk. Obviously contact with the uncleanliness of death does not make Jesus unclean. And it’s not just because He is stronger than death. For even apart from that, all holiness dwells in Jesus. In Him, the holy and eternal God takes bodily, human form. And God cannot be desecrated, because He is holiness in and of Himself. So what He touches, no matter how unclean it may be, becomes clean. Neither the bier nor the corpse on it can make Jesus impure. Rather, Jesus makes the dead man pure. Likewise, as the Author of life in the flesh, it is in Jesus’ gift to make the dead alive.

This miracle at Nain matters to us now, and not just as historical trivia or as a demonstration of Jesus’ super powers. It matters to us because it shows in a very down-to-earth way how Jesus takes away our sins and delivers us from death. If Jesus is so clean that nothing can make Him unclean—if, indeed, whatever He touches becomes clean—then when He touches us in all His purifying purity, we too become pure. When He was poured onto us in Baptism, when He is breathed into us in Absolution, and most certainly when His body and blood sacrificed for sin is given for us to eat and drink, we are instantly and fully forgiven and righteous before God. For in His compassion for us sinners, Christ gave Himself up to be punished by God and men, to be flogged and hanged and pierced with a sword like a common criminal. He was made sin for us, and became a curse; and yet, since He is forever righteous and sinless, He cannot be stained by guilt, or held captive by any curse. Rather, by becoming sin and a curse on our behalf, He has removed our curse and guilt. And now by Word and Sacrament He touches our impurity and makes us pure. We know he can do this because, at Nain, Jesus made the unclean clean.

Likewise, death cannot overpower Him because He has power over death. Jesus showed this, too, at Nain, when He raised the young man from the dead. And on the cross He does the same for all of us. He absorbed death in all its horror and violence. He let death close its jaws around Him and swallow Him whole—but only so that He could burst its gizzard once and for all. For death cannot hold captive the Lord of life. It can touch him, but not claim Him for its own; rather, when Jesus lays His hand on it, death itself is transformed.

By His death and resurrection, Jesus has changed your death, and my death, into a brief sleep from which we will soon awaken. Death is now a gateway to heaven, where we but pause for a moment to await the fulfillment of all things. Then we will be raised from the dead—not like the young man at Nain, who eventually died again, but like Jesus, who is arisen never again to die. Then will begin a new life where we will never be troubled by death again. It is hard for us even to imagine that now. But we believe it, because God has promised it in Christ. And by doing miracles like raising the widow’s Son, Christ has proven His power to keep that promise, many times over—and not only the power, but also the love. By his love for the young man’s mother, by His holiness that cleanses the unclean, by His glory that banishes the shadow of death, Jesus shows us the forgiveness and life He now gives us, and will give us, because He loves us so. Let the report go out: God has visited His people—visited and saved us. Hallelujah!

Polly Shulman

2011-10-07T12:54:00.003-06:00

The Grimm Legacy
by Polly Shulman
Recommended Ages: 12+

Elizabeth has always had a soft spot for fairy tales. Maybe her own Cinderella-like situation has something to do with that. But her research paper on the Brothers Grimm leads her social studies teacher to recommend her for a job as a page at the New York Circulating Material Repository, a kind of library where people can check out historical artifacts rather than books; and there, in the basement, filed under "Special Collections," is a closely-guarded collection of the actual magic objects described by the Brothers Grimm. So Elizabeth's mental habit of being prepared for magic to happen might really pay off!

Before Elizabeth is allowed to try on the glass slippers, and so on, she must first pass some additional tests. She learns to find items requested by patrons, and to put returns back where they belong. She begins to master the Repository's low-tech communication system (pneumatic tubes!) and proves herself reliable enough to learn the password to the Grimm Collection.

But trouble is already brewing. Trouble worse than the basketball star from Elizabeth's school borrowing the Seven-League Boots to fly his little brother to the babysitter between practice and work. Someone is sucking the magic out of the pieces in the collection. Or rather, someone is stealing the real items and replacing them with weakly-enchanted fakes. The Repository is about to shut down access to the collection for good. And Elizabeth can't let that happen, not when her sense of direction has been pledged for the return of a mermaid's shell-comb. And most certainly not when some of her best friends have been snatched by magical villains.

Elizabeth and her fellow pages make an interesting team, bound together by criss-crossing romantic interests and divided by teenage jealousies and suspicions. The magic of first love gets mixed into the fairy tale mash-up while a shrink ray, a giant bird, a bossy little sister and an even littler brother, a piece of knotted string, and a snarky talking mirror each play a pivotal role. It's all lots of fun, with laughter and warmth, a few shivers and shudders, and a quirky inventiveness in its approach to fairy tale, fantasy, horror, and sci-fi gimmicks. (Wouldn't you like to see the Bradbury Bequest? Meanwhile, you wouldn't love to visit the Lovecraft room. Trust me!) With her friends, her sense of direction, and quite possibly her firstborn on the line, Elizabeth runs amazing magical and emotional risks. But it's all in a day's magic in this charming adventure from the author of a Pride and Prejudice spoof titled Enthusiasm.

Baking at Work

2011-10-06T08:02:00.004-06:00

Today I'm making pork chops with wild rice & mushrooms. Right now. At work. Something that requires a couple of hours in the oven & can be shared with some folks coming over towards lunchtime. It's nice to have a kitchen at the office!

I don't know how long I've had this box of Minnesota Wild Rice in my cupboard, but I've been saving it for this. Last weekend I picked up the remaining ingredients, save for the butter, which was already in the fridge at work. I even bought a disposable baking pan, to fill a void in my office kitchen. Today, finally, I got it all organized in one of those zip-up cooler bags they sell at Sam's Club and hauled it to work.

Here's what I brought to work with me today: the wild rice, 4 small cans sliced mushrooms, 1 can cream of mushroom soup, a pillow-pack of 4 pre-cooked, bone-in pork chops, and a shaker of blended seasonings. Plus a carefully folded length of aluminum foil & a 9"x13" aluminum foil pan. And, of course, the photo album full of recipes my stepmom put together when I went away to college. And finally, fingernail clippers. You'll know why in a bit.

Already in the fridge at work: sticks of butter. When I had time to take a break from my morning duties, I quickly breezed through the following steps...

Step 1: Warm a cube cut off the end of a stick of butter in the microwave for 30 seconds at 50% power, just to soften it a bit. Then holding it in a paper towel, smear it around the bottom of the pan.

Step 1.5: Pour a pot of water into the coffee maker, drop in a filter & pour the wild rice into it, then brew a pot of wild rice water. Pour the water down the drain & dump the contents of the filter into the greased pan.

Step 2: Use a coffee cup to measure 1.5 cups of water & pour it over the rice.

Step 2.5: Open the cans of mushrooms & pour them over the rice, juice and all, so that the bottom of the pan is evenly covered with mushrooms.

Step 3: Open the can of cream of mushroom soup & drop spoonfuls of it onto the mushrooms, distributing the glops evenly throughout the pan. There is no need to try to spread it around.

Step 3.5: Shake a generous amount of your spice blend over everything in the pan so far.

Step 4: Arrange the pork chops on top of everything else in the pan. They will probably take up almost all the room.

Step 5: Didn't I mention preheating the oven to 350? Oh, well. Do that now while you unfold the aluminum foil & cover the top of the pan, crimping the edges so that there is a tight seal all the way around. It won't hurt to let the mixture sit on the counter while the oven finishes preheating.

Step 6: Set the microwave to do a 90 minute "kitchen timer" countdown, starting when the pan is in the oven & the door is closed. When it beeps, set the timer for another 30 minutes. Or, you know, make a mental note of the time, add 2 hours and look for it to be done then.

Step 7: You forgot to bring potholders, you ass. All you have is 2 hand towels, one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. You're going to need them both to get this thing out of the oven.

Step 7.5: Clip your fingernails. (That's why you brought the clippers.) You don't want to scratch yourself when the delicious aroma of baking pork, rice, and mushrooms begins to drive you crazy.

Step 8: Hide the recipe album. Your guests don't need to know that you didn't invent this culinary masterpiece. Heck, you're in Missouri; they've probably never seen wild rice, which used to grow, like, wild where you come from.

Step 9: Take small bites to make this food last. This may be the hardest step, because the meat and rice will be so tender, and the flavors of mushroom, pork, and wild rice so perfectly blended, that you'll be tempted to inhale it.

Step 9.5: Make a mental note to bring 6 chops next time. Then you can enjoy the leftovers as well. This recipe also works with fully-cooked chicken or turkey breasts, by the way.

World Series of Tackiness

2011-10-04T15:23:00.007-06:00

Hear this, ye St. Louis Cardinals! Thus saith the lighted sign at the city ELCA parish whose former pastor literally wrote the book on lighted church sign messages:

GOD'S CARDINAL RULES:
LOVE GOD. LOVE OTHERS.
PLAY A HARD NINE.

This may sound like it's coming out of left field, but... well, it is.

Moneyball

2011-09-30T18:40:00.005-06:00

Tonight's TGIF victory dance was a movie, which I chose for the simple reason that it was the earliest available showtime: Moneyball, the story of the 2002 Oakland A's starring Brad Pitt as general manager Billy Beane and, you know, a sport. Sports movies choke me up. This one tried not to but still did.

Beane's 2002 season is historically significant because, on a paltry budget of $38 million (a tiny fraction of what the New York Yankees had), and in spite of an embarrassing losing streak at the beginning of the season, the A's broke the all-time American League record for consecutive wins (20 games) and ignited a revolution in major-league baseball that, the following season, helped the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.

What was Beane's secret weapon? It was a front-office staff of chubby eggheads who crunched player statistics based on a branch of mathematics called sabermetrics, pioneered by Bill James. The idea of sabermetrics is to use statistics to recruit players who are undervalued by the collective wisdom of baseball, so as to put together the winningest team possible on the titchiest payroll in the league. In actual history, Beane wasn't the first GM of the A's who used sabermetrics, but he followed through on it with dogged persistence in spite of being vilified as a heretic, blamed every time his team stumbled, and threatened by dire predictions of organizational doom.

Even the record winning streak only briefly silenced the naysayers, who gave all the credit to team manager Art Howe (played in the film by Philip Seymour Hoffmann), though the film depicts Howe as doing little except interfering with Beane's winning strategy. And when the team failed to make the league playoffs, Baseball (i.e., the collective consciousness of the game) forgot, for the most part, what Beane had accomplished. Except for the Red Sox, which used his strategies even more successfully the following season.

All this the film portrays in an alternation between documentary style and an intimate drama that focuses closely on Brad Pitt. And now that his face is no longer spectacularly pretty, it's interesting to discover that he is more than a pretty face. He may do better than Paul Newman and Robert Redford, previous holders of the title of "proverbial for good-looking leading man," and keep his leading-man chops even after the good looks fade. There are worse fates than becoming an elder statesman of the film industry, but if the acting in this movie is any indication, Pitt may be headed for a better one: continuing to be a box office draw into his fifties (which are coming soon).

The movie also features Jonah Hill of Superbad as a fictional character representing a whole range of people on Beane's staff, Robin Wright as his receptionist, Kathryn Morris of TV's Cold Case as his ex-wife, and a bunch of actors in the same talent bracket as the athletes they play—many of them with professional baseball experience of their own. Where I watched it, it had a surprisingly small audience for such a hyped movie, and such a good one at that. My laughter & snifter (I did get a bit choked up, as I always do at sport movies) echoed disturbingly in the empty hall, out of step with my unenthusiastic neighbors. As a fictionalized version of true events, I am sure it is no more historically accurate than it absolutely has to be. But as a look inside the business of running the front office of a team that is expected to win with a losing payroll, I thought it captured the desperation and drama pretty well. At any rate, it made for good viewing.

Heitz, Skye, Wilson, Yancey

2011-09-23T08:01:00.012-06:00

The Dwarves
by Markus Heitz
Recommended Ages: 14+

Girdlegard: a world within a world, cut off from whatever lies outside its encircling mountain barrier by vast wastes swarming with dark creatures. Within that perimeter is a complex map divided between several human kingdoms, overlapped by six enchanted realms under the rule of powerful magi, plus here and there an elven enclave, and around the edges five kingdoms ruled by the dwarves. These folks live together in an uneasy peace, made all the more uneasy by the powers of evil encroaching against them. Already the Fifthlings (one of the dwarf kingdoms) have been conquered by the powers of the Perished Land, which withers everything it touches and which turns all the dead into soulless zombie slaves. Reinforced with armies of orcs, ogres, and älfar (like evil, empty-eyed elves), and joined by an evil magus possessed by more than ambition, the Perished Land is about to make its move to bring all of Girdlegard under the dark.

Little does Tungdil the dwarf know it, but he is his world's only hope for survival. Tungdil is a foundling brought up by humans, especially the good magus Lot-Ionan. After trying without success to teach him magic, Lot-Ionan let Tungdil follow the calling of the blacksmith's forge. But only for a little while. Just before things start to get really nasty, Lot-Ionan sends Tungdil on a wizardly errand, supposedly to deliver a pouch of magical artifacts to one of his former apprentices. How much this errand owes to the magus's far-seeing wisdom is hard to tell, seeing that before very long, Lot-Ionan himself has fallen victim to the loathesome power of Nod'onn. Soon Tungdil is joined by a pair of fierce twins, the first dwarves he has ever met, who inform him that they have been sent to escort him to a council of the leading dwarves as a candidate to be their next High King.

Boïndil and Boëndal turn out to be excellent companions for a dwarf just starting to learn about who he is, while numerous people seem to be intent on killing him. The twins give Tungdil his first taste of dwarven cheese, his first experience of dwarven ballads, and his first lessons in dwarven martial arts. He has to learn fast, what with the armies of the Perished Land always right behind them and sometimes in front of them, and with a contract out on his head at least due to the magical parcel he carries, if not for the threat he represents to certain dwarves he hasn't even met yet. When the three dwarves finally arrive at the stronghold called Ogre's Death, however, it is only to begin a new and even more dangerous quest: to race against a savvy, experienced dwarf chieftain to be the first to forge the axe Keenfire, the only weapon which can destroy Nod'onn.

Tungdil's adventure is a test of his courage, tenacity, and blossoming leadership skills. Though he cares not so much for winning the race as for saving Girdlegard, Tungdil has to rein in the hostilities within his party, including dwarves of different clans, separated by personal grievances, character problems, political issues, and romantic tensions. Besides the dwarves whose skills he needs to forge Keenfire, Tungdil is joined by a troupe of actors, a tempestuous maga, and her mysterious bodyguard who can best be described as "someone (or something) who eats orcs for breakfast." Their journey underground and overland is hampered by rockfalls, enemy attacks, assassination attempts, spooky goings-on, and heartbreaking losses that call forth a courage stronger than death itself. But the outcome of the final battle will depend on Tungdil learning to accept who he truly is and what it may mean for the future of the dwarves.

A bestseller in its original German, this book comes to us in English through the translation skills of Sally-Ann Spencer. It is the first part of a trilogy that continues with The War of the Dwarves and The Revenge of the Dwarves.

Pillage
by Obert Skye
Recommended Ages: 12+

The author of the "Leven Thumps" quintet brings us this first book in an exciting new series which, strangely enough, seems to be packaged for an age group younger than its main character. When we first meet Beck Phillips, the smart-mouthed, fifteen-year-old mischief-maker has just lost his mother, a casualty of mental illness. Abandoned by his father at an early age, Beck has nobody except an uncle he has never heard of until the latter sends for him.

Even after a spooky train ride to a secluded valley, followed by a chauffeured drive up a mountain to the enormous mansion that will now be his home, Beck's resentment understandably grows. His Uncle Aeron lives as a recluse in the copper dome above the seventh floor, and seems uninterested in meeting the boy. The small staff keeps the huge old house up as best they can, occasionally selling pieces of furniture to pay the taxes, and they refuse to explain the reasons for all the strange rules they impose on Beck—rules such as "Don't go in the back yard" and "There is no basement, there never was a basement, and even if there was a basement, you are never to go down there."

Pretty soon Beck is in trouble at school, as he discovers that making enemies is only the least of his gifts. Even his two best friends show concern when Beck proves that he can make plants move and grow at his command. And that's before his exploration of all the forbidden places in and around his new home lead him to discover his family's long tradition of hatching dragons to pillage the countryside for them. Before Beck understands what is truly at stake, he is caught up in a scaly, fire-breathing, winged disaster that all goes back to an evil magician's curse. And unless Beck breaks the curse, either he or his newfound father will die a horrible death.

This is an exciting, scary, and emotionally complex book, beyond anything that the cover design and marketing would lead you to expect. Beck's first-person narration laces the drama and adventure with irreverent humor and teenage rebellion. And while the full realization of what he is up against builds slowly, its unfolding is rigged with cool surprises—including betrayal, deception, insane heroism, and the discovery of both friends and enemies in unexpected quarters. It is such a fun book that it may be hazardous to come to its end without having the sequel, titled Choke, on deck.

Choke
by Obert Skye
Recommended Ages: 12+

In the sequel to Pillage, sixteen-year-old Beck Phillips continues to wrestle with the curse that drives every female in his family to madness and every male to a gruesome death... a curse connected to dragons.

Life has almost returned to normal after Beck inadvertently unleashed ten rampaging dragons on the sleepy valley town where he moved after the suicide of his aunt, who had raised him from infancy. His newfound Dad, previously known to him as Uncle Aeron, still lives in seclusion in a copper-roofed dome at the top of their seven-story mansion. His real family seems to be the small staff that runs the house. And while we don't see much of his magical ability to make plants grow in this book, we do see a lot of Beck's strongest power: the power to make trouble for himself and everyone else.

Never good at following instructions or even advice, Beck starts this adventure by blowing up a big balloon in a small shed. He almost gets killed in the process. During his stay in the hospital, he gets few visitors except for a nosy reporter and a mysterious, cloaked figure with deathly-white skin. Neither of these characters does Beck any good as, against his better judgment, he seeks out the last dragon stone left after his previous brood perished and plants it in a secret hideout inside a nearby mountain cave. The beautiful but deadly creature that emerges is a queen dragon named Lizzie. Though Beck is enchanted with her, he knows that he will be held responsible for everything she pillages or destroys.

By the time he accepts the hard fact that he has to destroy Lizzie, Beck doesn't know how he can do it. Worse, he is hindered by not one, but two villains who pretend to be helpful just long enough to put Beck's life and that of his friend Kate in terrible danger—to say nothing of everyone else in the valley. To clean up this mess, and to bring his family a step closer to being free of its curse, Beck will have to ride a fast train to all but certain death. It's an exciting and scary ride, brightened by Beck's roguish humor, a twinkle of romance and a touch of family drama. Plus, of course, dragon fire. Expect another sequel; enough said!

The Dragon's Tooth
by N. D. Wilson
Recommended Ages: 12+

You probably didn't know this, but Columbus wasn't the first European explorer to discover America. And nor were Vikings such as Leif Ericson. According to this book, the first colony in the new world was planted by Saint Brendan, a sixth-century Irish monk whose followers started a community of hermits on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Now only one of several Estates that the Order of St. Brendan operates around the world, the community of Ashtown, Wisconsin, is a world apart from the world: not only a home for monks, but also headquarters for a worldwide society of explorers, an academy for a secret army of renaissance men and women trained to fight not only on the ground but in the air and by sea, a museum of magical artifacts, a zoo of freakishly deadly creatures, and (gulp) a prison in which the world's most dangerous villains are held in a state of suspended immortality.

But for siblings Cyrus and Antigone Smith, the story does not begin there. They do not even learn that Ashtown exists until they have lost pretty much everything and everyone they care about. Since the accident two years ago that killed their father and left their mother in a coma, Cy and Tigs have been raised by their older brother Dan, not in the family's oceanview home in California, but in a decaying wreck of a motel outside of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. (Take extra points for knowing how to pronounce that town.) And then the motel burns down, their mother and brother are kidnapped by a creep who alternately calls himself Dr. Phoenix and Mr. Ashes, and the godfather they never knew dies before their eyes and leaves them... well, among other things, a set of keys that can open any door, and a few other trinkets whose magical properties are the very thing Dr. Phoenix would kill for.

Suddenly Cyrus and Antigone are thrust into the world of Ashtown, the only place that can protect them from Phoenix and his semi-human goons. Only it can't protect them, not really. It starts not protecting them the moment they show up. Their induction into the Order of St. Brendan is deferred until they can meet the criteria for journeymen in the order—and not just the ridiculously demanding modern-day standards, but the all-but impossible pre-1914 ones. They have until New Year's to learn two foreign languages, master several forms of armed combat, learn to fly and sail like a pro, and more, while living in a dungeon infested with deadly Whip Spiders and being sabotaged at every turn by all the people who don't believe the Smiths have a right to be there. Befriended only by misfits, and menaced by bad guys who somehow never seem fazed by Ashtown's heavily armed defenses, they must finally rely on their own talent for trouble and a keychain loaded with magical goodies.

Here is the first book in a new series (titled "Ashtown Burials") from the author of 100 Cupboards and its sequels. Like that earlier trilogy, this new story presents an amazingly original new dimension of the "school of magic" concept. This book is anything but a cutesy romp in a world of sparkly hocus-pocus. It is an intense, scary, deadly-serious bullet train of danger, conflict, suffering, and loneliness. It shows a couple of good kids struggling not to be overwhelmed by an evil of terrifying proportions. It is a gallery of flawed characters, booby-trapped with betrayal and loss, and yet enlivened by the possibility of friendship, excitement, and awesome adventure.

There is actually an amazing "book trailer" for this book, featuring young Joel Courtney of Super 8. Mr. Wilson has also written the young adult novel Leepike Ridge, a couple of Christian-themed children's picture books, and a nonfiction book about the Shroud of Turin. Visit his website for more information.

The Curse of the Wendigo
by Rick Yancey
Recommended Ages: 13+

As the nineteenth century winds up, a self-absorbed monstrumologist (i.e., scientist who studies monsters) named Dr. Pellinore Warthrop is drawn out of himself, and out of his headquarters in a small New England town, along with his faithful apprentice Will Henry. It's difficult to be precisely certain what it is that draws him. It could be the anguished plea of the only woman he ever loved, begging him to save her missing husband (who, up until he broke up their engagement, was Warthrop's best friend). It could be his altruistic love for a man who shared his youthful apprenticeship to the legendary Dr. Abram von Helrung. Or it could be his determination to prevent Meister Abram from cheapening the science of monstrumology with superstitious nonsense.

Whatever may be his true reason, Warthrop takes his "indispensible" young assistant along on a gruelling and terrifying journey, first to the wilds of Canada and then to the streets of New York City. Their quarry is a beast whose existence Warthrop never accepts, but whose call Will Henry hears: the Wendigo. It is the voice that rides the high wind, the hunger that is never satisfied. While Pellinore Warthrop insists that his friend John Chanler is merely the victim of the well-documented "Wendigo Psychosis"—the belief that one is possessed by an evil spirit that craves human flesh—Dr. von Helrung and some other members of the Society of Monstrumologists think that such creatures really exist and that Chanler has become one. This raises a conflict between Pellinore and his old mentor, not to say everyone else, as to whether Chanler is a beast who must be destroyed, or a man who must be saved.

Whatever the true answer may be, there's always room for doubt—even from the point of view of narrator Will, who has heard the Wendigo's voice call his name. What is not beyond doubt is that John Chanler has become terrifyingly dangerous. Make no mistake, this is a horror novel. Though it is marketed for young adults, please do not mistake it for a children's book. Besides a smattering of PG-13 language, it contains imagery so disturbing that it may give even a seasoned adult bad dreams. Living conditions in the tenements of the era of Jacob Riis and Thomas Byrnes are so graphically depicted that your stomach might do flip-flops, even without the violence and gore that takes place in them. But what puts the final chilling touch on this horror novel is the conceit that it is not Rick Yancey's fictional brainchild, but a transcript of journals left behind by an impossibly old man, who may have been delusional or even writing fiction himself. Who knows?

This sequel to The Monstrumologist is by no means the end of the series. Book 3, titled The Isle of Blood, came out in September 2011. Mr. Yancey is also the author of the "Alfred Kropp" trilogy, the "Teddy Ruzak" mysteries (four books so far), the novel A Burning in Homeland, and the nonfiction book Confessions of a Tax Collector.

Stravinsky Week

2011-09-21T20:52:00.002-06:00

Last weekend was the season premiere of the St. Louis Symphony, and I was in it. The Symphony Chorus joined four vocal soloists (plus one soloist from the chorus), four pianists, seven percussionists, and music director David Robertson to perform the amazingly underplayed 1923 ballet Les Noces, a.k.a. Svadebka, a.k.a. "The Wedding."

For the chorus, this piece meant months of preparation. In its 25 minutes of music, unfamiliar to nearly everyone in the group, there are only a handful of bars without singing and most of them are right at the end. Its four tableaux form one continuous movement of almost relentless energy. Its tunes and lyrics, loosely based on Russian folk songs, dramatize the surprising customs and emotions surrounding a Russian peasant wedding, and more to the point, they comprise yards of tricky-to-pronounce Russian text, declaimed at times in a breathless rush. The bride mourns her girlish freedom, the mothers mourn their lost children, the groom poses as a warrior marching to victory, and the wedding party alternates between bawdy humor and invocations of the saints, while (according to Stravinsky's disciple Robert Craft) the real message has to do with Russia's loss of innocence in the communist revolution.

Also on the program were three other pieces by Igor Stravinsky: his 1941 arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner," his ballets Petrushka and The Rite of Spring (for orchestra alone). Unfortunately I did not get to hear the latter, though I did hear Petrushka on Saturday night. It was wonderful to watch David Robertson conduct it, or rather dance it, with his big expressive gestures and his relish of rhythmic challenges. Projected above the stage were stage directions and scenery from early productions of Petrushka, including images of Vaclav Nijinsky in the role that defined his career (see his tombstone, pictured here).

I didn't get to see so much of Robertson when I was facing him on the stage because, frankly, I had a lot to keep track of in the score of Les Noces and for several long passages, I had to rely on peripheral vision to pick up his gesture. But the chorus came through heroically, in spite of a multitude of tricky entrances in a piece in which the meter changes every third bar, on the average, and in which the tempo was liable to change suddenly at the exact moment the chorus was to come in. Somehow we made all our entrances (or at least, we didn't mess up in the same place both nights), and in spite of a few rough spots we sold the audience on a piece that one chorus member said would be the perfect piece to take to Carnegie Hall.

Plus, there is something uniquely gorgeous about an orchestra consisting of four Steinways fanned out across the middle of the stage, backed up by an arc of percussion instruments ranging from bass drum, timpani, and xylophone to snare, toms, triangle, and crotales. The piece ends with a sound like church bells ringing while everyone else waits in silence, their seemingly boundless energy for once held back.I regret missing The Rite of Spring, but after a traffic jam made me late for Friday's performance (so that I missed Petrushka) I decided to go home after Les Noces, during the second of the evening's two intermissions(!); while on Saturday, I was overcome by a physical weakness during Les Noces and only just managed to get through the whole piece without collapsing. So I decided, I think wisely, to take myself home immediately afterward. It's a bitter disappointment, because if I could only choose to hear one piece by David Robertson, it would be The Rite of Spring. I was also interested in it because the piece opens with a famous bassoon solo that would have been a terrific icebreaker for the orchestra's new principal bassoonist. Thousands of listeners in radioland were blessed to hear what I, a participant in the concert, ironically missed. But perhaps the broadcast will be repeated one of these days!

This focus on Stravinsky made for a daring opening-weekend program, but also sets the theme for the year: dance. The next piece the chorus takes part in, for example, is Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloe...

Looming Tackiness

2011-09-12T15:39:00.003-06:00

This week's lighted-sign message at the neighborhood ELCA Tabernacle of Tackiness:

WEAVE IN FAITH AND GOD WILL FIND THE THREAD

OK, I'm not sure I get this. Is it saying faith is that in which you weave, like underwater basket-weaving except with faith instead of water? Or is faith a thread that you are weaving into something? It rather sounds like the latter. Which is really an odd analogy coming from a "Lutheran" church. It makes faith out to be a merit you contribute in the hope that God will notice it and be pleased, rather than the funnel God uses to pour His undeserved gifts into you.

Maybe what they mean is that God will pull the thread...