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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/27/97 -- Vol. 15, No. 52
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/~ecl.
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week: http://yarra.vicnet.net.au/~msfc/george.htm.
The George Turner Memorial Page.
George Turner died 8 June 1997 of a stroke at the age of 80. He
won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1988 for THE DROWNING TOWERS,
which was also nominated for the Nebula and John W. Campbell
Awards. He was scheduled to be one of the Guests of Honour at
Aussiecon 3, the 1998 Worldcon. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. Last week I wrote a piece on how I was just using red tape to my
advantage by asking fund-raisers who call to apply for an account
number before I can contribute to them. I admit now it was a joke,
or perhaps a thought experiment. But you know some of my jokes
turn out not to be so absurd. I have decided to actually try
telling a fund-raiser that they have to fill out an application for
me to contribute to their cause. It was a broadcast station that I
have contributed to quite generously for year and continue to. But
of course they want me to increase my pledge and frankly, I am not
sure they deserve much more. The more I thought about it the more
I decided if they really wanted more money it seems only fair to
have them fill out an application form. So I really have tried
telling them when they called that they had to send me a stamped,
self addressed envelope and I would send them an application.
Now I am not saying that if you think that a charity is really
worthwhile you cannot waive this procedure. I am a great believer
in OXFAM--Oxford Famine Relief (plug! Plug!). But I get tired of
being called by all kinds of alumni associations--four or five
different ones claim me. I am a pretty soft touch and have a hard
time saying "no." So I hit on this scheme to have people
requesting money fill out an application form. This way I can seem
absolutely sympathetic. I have never yet seen a charity willing to
go through the effort to fill out an application form to get my
patronage. They may want money, but not that badly. There are
easier pickings out there. The problem is some fund-raiser may at
some point decide they really do want to apply for my funding. In
this case I told the caller that if he wanted funding he would have
to fill out an application and apply for it. His response was a
simple if bewildered OK. And I expect never to hear from them.
But I still am not sure.
Well, I decided that I might actually need to have an application
form, just in case someone actually asked for one. I thought of it
as just a responsibility. That is up until the moment I started
putting together the application. Suddenly I realized this was
going to be the fun part of the job. Hey, putting together an
application is a kick. No wonder so many banks and universities,
and who knows what else use them. You can ask just about anything
you want. If you were a public institution there are only certain
things it would be legal to ask. But I seriously doubt there are
any laws protecting fund-raisers. That is because nobody says I
have to give them anything. We let ourselves be hounded by people
wanting money for all sorts of things, but you really have to bear
in mind that they are dependent on you, not the other way around.
If they don't like what you ask them, they don't need to apply. If
you wanted to ask the application filler about his or her sex life
you really could do it. I mean, you aren't disbursing public
funds. You are doing this on your own dime. And if they lie they
are fraudulently collecting funds. They can refuse to answer a
question, but you can refuse to fund them.
It may sound like actually putting together an application is a lot
of work, but don't forget all you need is a pencil and a blank
piece of paper. Nobody says an application form has to be neat. I
would say just make up a rough application form in pencil on a
blank piece of paper. As soon as I started thinking about what I
should put on the application, the more enjoyable task it became.
What would I want to know? Hey, how much did you take in last
year? What proportion went to operating expenses? What is the
highest salary in your organization? If I give you one dollar,
what will you do with it? What if it is 10 dollars. $100?
$10,000? A cool million? Well, you get the idea. Well, probably
nobody is ever going to apply for funding using the application.
But then even so it has served its purpose. My phone no longer
rings four times a night. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. BLUE MARS (Bantam Spectra, 671pp, ISBN 0-553-1144-7) (a book
review by Joseph A. Karpierz):
With BLUE MARS, Kim Stanley Robinson finishes his ambitious work on
the colonization of Mars. The first two novels, RED MARS and GREEN
MARS, have won numerous awards. BLUE MARS puts a fine finish on
the trilogy, but I don't think it lives up to its predecessors. It
seems a tad long, and to me it wanders in spots, and it acts as if
it is in search of a real ending. Having said that, I gained an
appreciation for what Robinson was really doing about halfway
through the book, so much so that the length didn't bother me as
much as it first did.
The real question with this review is "where do I begin?", for
Robinson covers so much ground in the 671 pages of the novel on so
many different levels that it is difficult to get a grasp on. On a
pure story level, it begins with a conflict between the various
groups on Mars as to whether the elevator to space should be
knocked down to isolate Mars from Earth. From there it goes to the
development of a constitution for Mars, the development of
effective and fast space travel, the colonization of the Solar
System, another revolution, political tensions among the various
factions on Mars as well as with Earth, and, well, you get the
idea.
But it's what surrounds and supports the story that makes the novel
so remarkable. It seems as if Robinson knows more than just a
little bit about politics, constitution building, weather, memory
research, and a host of other subjects. I feel as if I came away
with a better education than I did in some of my college courses.
But it's not just the plot and the ideas that carry this story.
Robinson takes the remaining First Hundred and others and weaves a
tale that made me care about them more than the first two novels in
the series. Part of the story concerns the dying off of the First
Hundred; there are less than twenty left by the end of the novel.
But as we watch those First Hundred change and realize that they
really won't live forever, the story shifts to the younger
generation, as they make Mars their own.
There is so much to this book that I can't begin to do it justice.
It is truly a rich book. But for me, the problem is its length and
focus. The entire series should have been broken down into smaller
books (but then you'd hear me complaining about how sf has nothing
but series being published). Overall, the Mars Trilogy is an
astounding piece of work, one that will probably go down as an all
time classic. For what this story is about is not just the
colonization of Mars (and the rest of the solar system), but about
man's struggle to reach out beyond himself to new places and new
experiences, and to forge new beginnings. Not unlike the settlers
of America, I suppose. It is certainly a series worth reading.
[-jk]
===================================================================
4. BATMAN AND ROBIN (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: CAPSULE: BATMAN AND ROBIN combines the
pacing of a Hong Kong action film with the plot
depth of a Hong Kong action film. The current
chapter has some interesting visuals if it
would ever slow down enough to let the audience
appreciate them, but the writing is the worst
of any of the series. Rating: low -1 (-4 to
+4), 2 (0 to 10)
New York Critics: 2 positive, 10 negative, 12
mixed
Someone decided it was time for another Batman film. Note that
this is not the same thing as saying that somebody had a good idea
for a Batman story that they wanted to film. I did not say that
someone was really excited about the possibilities for the Batman
character and the peripheral people in Batman's life. But time has
definitely passed and the cash cow was ready for another squeeze.
Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) battle
Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) a villain who wants to freeze
the world and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) who can make people love
her, has a poison kiss, and wants to make the world safe for
plants. Batman's butler Alfred (Michael Gough) is dying. Batman
and Robin have a falling out over Ivy. Alfred's British niece
(Alicia Silverstone) becomes Batgirl. And this plot is just one
minor feature of the new BATMAN AND ROBIN! If I seem not to
consider the plot very important, you should see the treatment it
gets from director Joel Schumacher. The script was not
Top-billed as Mr. Freeze is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who may be able
to benchpress a Buick but finds it beyond his ability to push a
performance out through thick layers of blue makeup and plastic
suit. The concept of a villain who fell into a freezing vat and
now wants to freeze the world left me cold, and Schwarzenegger's
performance is an absolute zero with none of his natural wit and
far too many lamely unfunny one-liners. Physically, George Clooney
looks the most like the comic book Bruce Wayne of the three actors
who have played him so far, or put another way, this is the first
one who looked at all the part. The problem is that Clooney is not
a very exciting or even interesting actor. And if you cannot be
exciting as Batman, you may just not be destined to be exciting at
all. Chris O'Donnell plays Robin, the Boy Wonder who in my days of
reading the comic was eternally about fourteen years old.
Unfortunately it is hard to find a fourteen-year-old with marquee
value. Putting O'Donnell in the role b
With each new Batman film Gotham City becomes more deeply engulfed
by the inevitable and all-consuming advance of Art Noveau. The art
style appears to be chewing up all the more normal-looking
buildings and spitting out titanic geometric formations and baroque
reliefs and statues of colossal human figures. Gotham seems unable
to stem the tide, but apparently Batman has not been called. The
city has gone from resembling Helsinki in the first film to being
an incredible architectural nightmare in BATMAN AND ROBIN. Perhaps
the one saving grace of the film is that it does bring this
abstract art-form to the masses. But this combines with Stephen
Goldblatt's dark photography and Dennis Virkler's fast editing.
The result is a film that might be entertaining to look at if it
were just a little more sparse and if the pace were cut down just a
bit. But there were many scenes in which I had to ask myself what
it was that I just saw.
BATMAN AND ROBIN is a sloppy and slapdash film that gets a low -1
on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. THE PILLOW BOOK (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: THE PILLOW BOOK is a stylishly
presented but overly long and deliberate
modernization of the 10th Century Pillow Book
of Sei Shonagon. What could have been a good
study of clash of traditional and modern values
never really gets beyond being self-indulgent
and even obscure. Rating: -1 (-4 to +4), 2 (0
to 10)
New York Critics: 8 positive, 2 negative, 4
mixed
Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker who often expects a lot from his
audience and takes chances. The downside of taking chances is that
sometimes you lose. THE PILLOW BOOK is one of his losses. This is
a film that is pretty to look at and one which does a lot of
strange and unexpected things with the visual style. But the story
is over-blown, over-long, overly-obscure, and overly melodramatic.
The basis and inspiration for Greenaway's latest film is the
original Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, published in Heian period,
the late 10th Century Japan. The original was a collection of
poetry, reminiscences--some amorous, lists, and anecdotes all
relevant to court life of the time. Greenaway's film inspired by
that book is the story of Nagiko (played by Vivian Wu), a modern
woman who one millennium later is collecting her own set of
experiences, mostly erotic, inspired by Sei, but also by her own
fascination with body painting. Nagiko's fascination stems from
her father's annual ritual of on her birthday painting text on her
face and neck and retelling of how God made people out of clay. In
his myth God painted each of them, naming them in the process. If
He approved of his work he also signed it.
Nagiko grows with an erotic fascination with having text painted on
her body. Her first requirement of a lover is that he be a good
calligrapher, painting nearly anything on her body in any language.
In flashbacks, often in only one small part of the screen, we see
how her father was betrayed by his publisher who also forced her
into marriage with his nephew. The husband proves to be a cruel
and insensitive man who is also a lousy calligrapher in bed. The
film has a problem in that most viewers from a European background
are uneducated in the subtleties of Japanese calligraphy and will
not know good work from work not so good. Nagiko eventually finds
love in the arms of Scotsman Jerome (Ewan McGregor of EMMA and of
course TRAINSPOTTING--any young Scottish actor you see these days
is probably from TRAINSPOTTING). But when the publisher's hand
reaches again into her life, she decides it is time for a
particularly appropriate retribution.
In the tradition of his PROSPERO'S BOOKS Greenaway plays with his
screen composition. He varies the size and shape of the screen.
He will inlay as many as four smaller frames with action into a
full-sized fifth frame, now reduced to a cross. Greenaway works to
combine the texture of the original Pillow Book on paper with his
own updated version of the story. The result is hypnotic but
eventually the slow and deliberate pacing and the repetition begin
to wear on the audience. Nagiko's attempts to recreate the
painting experience of her early youth in erotic terms almost
reminds one of Jack Nicholson's stylized erotic ritual toward the
end of CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. The pretensions of Greenaway's style
become a liability when there is too long for too little story. In
the final analysis the story seems more an erotic dream than an
intelligent narrative. Occasional pieces of wit do leaven the
story, but they require careful observation and are of a very dry
humor. One example: characters in the film are painted with texts
meaningful to them, and apparently in the same vain a van is
painted with road maps, the texts that it follows.
Greenaway's films are rich with style, but style without a good
plot can be as bad as plot without style. I found his recent THE
BABY OF MACON far more rewarding. Greenaway taking on Japanese
culture should have been a good deal more insightful and less
tedious. I rate it a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Men are born ignorant, not stupid;
they are made stupid by education.
-- Bertrand Russell