THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/01/11 -- Vol. 30, No. 1, Whole Number 1656
Frick: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Frack: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups (NJ)
Why Does the MT VOID Volume Number Change on July 1?
(comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Food for Thought (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Natural Disasters (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
My Picks for Turner Classic Movies for July (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
ROMEO AND JULIET IN YIDDISH (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Detritus and GREEN LANTERN (letter of comment
by John Purcell)
Closed Captions (letter of comment by Pete Brady)
This Week's Reading (THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE
WRITING 2009) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups (NJ)
July 14 (Thu): COLOSSUS THE FORBIN PROJECT by D. F. Jones,
Middletown (NJ) Public Library, film at 5:30PM, discussion of
the book and film after film
July 28 (Thu): DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis, Old Bridge (NJ)
Public Library, 7PM
August 11 (Thu): PANIC IN YEAR ZERO and some associated book to be
determined, Middletown (NJ) Public Library, film at 5:30PM,
discussion after film
August (TBD): THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2009
edited by Elizabeth Kolbert, Old Bridge (NJ) Public Library,
7PM
==================================================================
TOPIC: Why Does the MT VOID Volume Number Change on July 1?
(comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
You may have noticed that we change our volume number on July 1,
not January 1. Why? Well, the MT VOID started life as the
newsletter ("notice") for the Science Fiction Club at Bell Labs.
Back in the 1980s, when the Bell System was split up, Mark and I
(and the Science Fiction Club) went to a new company "American
Bell" (which eventually ended up merged back into AT&T). There was
a division between AT&T and American Bell that took effect July 1,
1983 (if I recall correctly) and we re-numbered the new newsletter
at that time. When the re-merge happened, we increased the volume
number to reflect the actual age, but left the roll-over point at
July 1. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Food for Thought (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
You might know that I am eating a lot of spicy food. Of late I
wonder if that is such a good idea. Am I using my stomach as a
breeding ground for capsaicin-resistant pylori? [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Natural Disasters (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
It used to be that when a natural disaster or plague hit a
community, the response was that they had somehow sinned against
God, this was Divine retribution, and they should mend their ways.
Now the reaction seems to be to blame whoever their enemies are for
somehow causing the disaster and then to start trying to come up
with a way to exact revenge. (In fairness, this reaction was not
unknown in earlier times, but it seems to be the standard these
days.) Their enemies seem to be 1) some branch of the government,
2) the gays in some other place entirely, or 3) a vast secret
terrorist conspiracy. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: My Picks for Turner Classic Movies for July (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
[Note: all times given are Eastern Daylight Time.]
Another month is upon us and it is time for me to point out some of
the more interesting films coming up on Turner Classic Movies.
Unfortunately there is little I can point to that I would call an
"unknown gem." I guess after the large collection of science
fiction and fantasy films Turner ran last month they do not feel
they need to run as many this month.
We have seen released to theaters recently three super-hero films:
THOR, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, and GREEN LANTERN. It might be a good
time to see and compare a super hero film almost eighty years old.
I guess I would say one of the more interesting films is probably
CHANDU THE MAGICIAN, a big-screen version of a radio program that
ran at the same time the film was made. CHANDU was introduced
about two years after the popular THE SHADOW. Chandu was really
good old American Frank Chandler who learned psychic powers from
the Yogis in India. He could teleport, project his mind outside
his body, and hypnotize people. He took the name Chandu, but
inside he was patriotic American Frank Chandler, using his powers
to protect the United States. Chandu's chief nemesis was the evil
Roxor. Before the radio program was a year old there was a film
made, CHANDU THE MAGICIAN, directed by William Cameron Menzies, who
would four years later direct THINGS TO COME and four years after
that would be directing THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. For this film version
Edmund Lowe played Frank Chandler a.k.a. Chandu. The evil Roxor
was played by the great villain of the screen at that time, Bela
Lugosi. In this film Roxor wants to rule the world with the use of
his powerful death ray. Curiously, when a serial was made of
Chandu in 1934 THE RETURN OF CHANDU also starred Bela Lugosi, but
this time as the very American Frank Chandler (who for that film
had a thick Hungarian accent, I guess). Anyway, though Chandu
never had a pulp magazine like The Shadow did, this film has a good
pulp magazine feel. Perhaps today we would even call it campy.
(Wednesday, July 20, 2:30 AM)
FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1967) may not really be as obscure as
it once was. I have to say this is for me the best science fiction
film ever made. For several years I made a reputation for myself
telling people at science fiction conventions that they really HAD
to see this film. These days it frequently shows up on fans' top
ten science fiction film lists. And well it should. This film
(also known as QUATERMASS AND THE PIT) is based on the third of BBC
playwright Nigel Kneale's stories about the British rocket
scientist Quatermass. Each of the Quatermass stories is about
human first contact with aliens. This film glories in fascinating
ideas. It starts with a human fossil uncovered by workmen digging
a subway/underground tunnel and ends by explaining phenomena of our
world including race prejudice, telekinesis, why distant cultures
seem to have invented the same myths, why people see ghosts, and
more. The film works overtime in giving the viewer a lot to think
about and at the same time moves at a very good clip. Kneale like
themes of the supernatural being scientific phenomena that had
never been given their proper scientific explanations. The film
came out about a year before 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY on a similar
theme, but as far as I am concerned Kneale thought out the ideas
and implications better than even Arthur C. Clarke. In Britain
this film is a recognized classic. (Saturday, July 2, 1:30 PM)
I am a big fan of films about engineering and a big fan of films
about ancient history. The two interests rarely come together in
one film. LAND OF THE PHARAOHS (1955) is the fanciful story of the
Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu building his pyramid and at the same time
chasing an ambitious, power-hungry enslaved princess, played by
Joan Collins. It is melodramatic stuff, ancient potboiler, but
there is a lot of good information about Egypt and the details of
ancient engineering really make the film. This is quite a
spectacle, perhaps the best ever made about ancient Egypt. The
score is by the great Dimitri Tiomkin and the screenplay was co-
authored by--get this--William Faulkner. (Sunday, July 24, 9:45
PM) [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: ROMEO AND JULIET IN YIDDISH (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is a comedy about the making of the first Yiddish
production of Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET. Eve Annenberg
produces, writes, stars in, and directs this story of a director-
by-protest trying to get several formerly Ultra-Orthodox Jews to
cooperate in the writing and performance of the play. The story
has running some real comic possibilities, but few make it to the
finish line and many of are lost to technical flaws. Rating: 0 (-4
to +4) or 4/10
The title, ROMEO AND JULIET IN YIDDISH, leaves the content of this
film in question. Is it just a production of the Shakespeare play
in Yiddish or is it a comedy about the making of such a production
like Andrew Fleming's HAMLET 2? Well, it is somewhere in between
but more the latter. Eve Annenberg produces, writes, stars in, and
directs this comedy about trying to redo ROMEO AND JULIET in WEST
SIDE STORY fashion, but this time setting the story in the
conflicts between the Satmar and Lubavitch Chasidic, Ultra-Orthodox
Jewish communities. Certainly on the surface it is a funny idea.
One does not think of these groups as being very violent people.
Hearing Shakespeare rendered in Yiddish is a bit like hearing it
rendered into Klingon. Yiddish is very close in some ways to
German and it is odd to hear the poetry of Shakespeare wrapped
around the language of impoverished Eastern European Jews. The
timing of the release happens to be the same day, July 8, 2011, as
that of Joe Dorman's excellent documentary SHOLEM ALEICHEM:
LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS, about the greatest Yiddish writer. It
would be a delight to say that ROMEO AND JULIET IN YIDDISH makes a
very good companion film to the documentary. Unfortunately, I am
afraid that is not the case. Annenberg's film is marred by
technical flaws that make it at times hard to follow and which
certainly get in the way of the wit.
The film follows two story lines, one of the production of the play
and one of the play itself. Now, the play is done in modern
Chasidic dress against contemporary Brooklyn backgrounds. This
means that there is very little visual clue which story line one is
seeing. One can tell if the characters are speaking poetically we
are in the Shakespeare play. English is spoken only in the outer
story, but Yiddish is spoken more often in the outer story. And
often Shakespeare's poetry will be given a Yiddish turn of phrase.
Luckily most of the scenes from Shakespeare are familiar to many
viewers. But when the scene is less familiar it can be difficult
to know which story-line is being presented.
Eva (played by Annenberg) is coerced into directing this ugly dog
of a play at the risk of losing her college scholarship. She is
told by her advisor that she should love doing this play because
she is Jewish. The advisor has little idea how different one Jew
can be from another. Eva finds some Chasidim who left their
communities and gets them to translate the play and then to act in
it. The stories of these writers and actors are spiced with real
incidents from that actors' and writers' lives. But here is
another problem. Some of these people while superficially
appearing pious are scam artists for whom fraud is the family
business (as the subtitles blithely tell us). There are just too
few decent characters here to identify with or even wish well.
Incidentally, the film features some very artistically done nude
scenes. However they could never be artistic enough for the
actors' own families to be allowed to see. Seeing nudity is
forbidden to Chasidic Jews.
The film features mostly first-time actors from Brooklyn Chasidic
communities and much too often they simply do not project their
words. What might be funny lines in English come out garbled or
just difficult to hear. The lines in Yiddish are translated for
the viewer, but too often subtitles are whipped onto the screen and
off again without time enough to read.
I often wonder when I see a film that does not quite work and for
which one person is the writer, director, producer, and actor--or
more--if the problem is that one person performing all those
functions is spreading himself/herself too thinly. There are
natural conflicts between the people in some of these positions. A
director should not always agree with an actor and out of these
conflicts come a stronger film. Eve Annenberg was ambitious to
take all these jobs to herself, but it might not have been in the
best interests of the final film. As it stands I rate ROMEO AND
JULIET IN YIDDISH a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 4/10.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1632724/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Detritus and GREEN LANTERN (letter of comment by John
Purcell)
In response to Mark's comments on detritus in the 06/24/11 issue of
the MT VOID, John Purcell writes:
I definitely agree with you about the detritus of our lives. Our
house seems to function in the same manner as yours, which I
ascribe to the existence of our three children. All are grown
now--well, mostly; Daniel is the only teenager at fifteen--but they
all acquire things as they grow up, leaving them behind as their
interests change.
This accumulation of stuff may very well be the modern-day
equivalent of our hunter-gatherer forefathers. Think about it: if
you're like me, you enjoy the hunt for the rare and elusive book,
relish its flavor as you devour the story, then store its remains
among the clutter of all of the other textual corpses lining the
walls of your cave. For me, the same also goes for records, rare
coins, occasional comic books, and guitars. For my wife, it's
books, too, but also arts and crafts. Whenever we do spring
cleaning or spend any kind of time organizing and discarding stuff
in the garage/attic, our efforts resemble an archeological dig. It
has gotten to the point where we can identify how old the kids were
or what the weather was like based on an item's location in the
accumulated strata. It is a bit frightening, now that I think
about it. [-jp]
And in response to Dale Skran's review of GREEN LANTERN in the same
issue, John writes:
Last Sunday my older daughter and her long-time boyfriend (my
potential future son-in-law, of whom I approve) took me, her
brother, and his parents to see GREEN LANTERN in 3-D. I enjoyed
it. The movie is perfect summer entertainment fare: it's a
visually fun movie with fantastic effects, and the story-line is
very easy to follow. The thought of Kilowog being a racist jab is
silly to me. I definitely agree with Dale Skran's assessment that
everyone on Earth is seen as equal in the eyes of the Green Lantern
Corp. That's one of the main themes in the movie, as is the
classic "good wins out over evil" motif. The sequel with Senestra
as the Yellow Lantern should likewise be entertaining. Yeah, I'd
rate this as a 6 on a scale of 1-10.
Many thanks for another posting of the VOID, Mark and Evelyn. As
always, an enjoyable read. [-jp]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Closed Captions (letter of comment by Pete Brady)
In response to Evelyn's comments on streaming content in the
06/24/11 issue of the MT VOID, Pete Brady writes:
You wrote, "The first problem is that most downloadable content
does not seem to have subtitle or closed-caption options. With
Netflix, if it's a foreign-language film, you will get English
subtitles, but if it's not and you cannot understand the dialogue,
you are out of luck. This is being worked on (supposedly), but
currently this is a problem. But there is a more basic
difficulty."
We don't have a high-speed connection or computers that can handle
them (we have DSL, which is fine for most web sites). Cathy and I
have become great fans of postal rental Netflix, and have watched
many English-language films. My informal guess is that about half
of them have captions. We just finished, and enjoyed, "The King's
Speech," which did have captions. [-ptb]
Evelyn responds:
Yes, the discs come with closed-captioning (I use that term and
"subtitling" interchangeably in my article), but the streaming
content ("Instant") does not. My point was that there are features
of the discs that streaming does not provide. (There are often
also lots of extras on the disc not available via streaming, but I
did not even address those.) [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Our general book discussion group (which has pretty much mutated
into a science book discussion group) read ten articles from THE
BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2009 (edited by Elizabeth
Kolbert) (ISBN 978-0-547-00259-0). This series is popular with our
group because one does not have to try to find a copy of the book;
almost all the articles in it are available free on-line. (In my
comments I will include the tinyurl for all of them.)
As I did with the Stephen Jay Gould book of essays I commented on a
while ago, I will give just a sentence or two on each.
"Faustian Economics" by Wendell Berry (Harper's Magazine)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-001: The key phrase in this
seems to be "the fantasy of limitlessness." We operate under
the (often explicitly expressed) assumption that "science will find
a way." It won't.
"The Ethics of Climate Change" by John Broome (Scientific American)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-011: This suggests we should
use cost-benefit analyses and the discount rate for future goods to
make decisions about climate change.
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr (The Atlantic
Monthly) http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-019: Is the Internet
making permanent changes to our cognition, such as decreasing our
ability for deep reading? Friedrich Nietzsche found that a
typewriter changed his writing style, and we know word processors
have had a big impact as well. Lewis Mumford said that the
invention of the mechanical clock "disassociated time from human
events and helped create the belief in an independent world of
mathematically measurably sequences."
"High-Tech Trash" by Chris Carroll (National Geographic)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-030: Our electronic waste, full
of dangerous and deadly materials, is exported to Third World
countries where it is disassembled, burned, and otherwise processed
for whatever can be re-sold, but with no attempt to protect either
the people who are working with it, or the environment.
(By this point in the book, one is tempted to just put it down and
shoot oneself.)
"Intel Inside" (a.k.a. "Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East
Germany's Secret Police") by Andrew Curry (Wired)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-039: Computers are being used
to piece together millions of documents shredded by the East German
Stasi. This reminds me the scene in SNOWCRASH of Hiro Protagonist
having the computer produce a picture of the intact ancient tablet
from the fragments created when the tablet was smashed on the
carrier deck.
"Blown Apart" by Keay Davidson (California)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-049: More about dark energy.
"Did Life Begin in Ice?" by Douglas Fox (Discover)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-056: Fox proposes the idea that
life is more likely to develop in a super-cold environment rather
than a hot one.
"The Day Before Genesis" by Adam Frank (Discover)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-066: This proposes three
different ideas. "The Incredible Bulk" says our universe is a 3D
brane moving through a 4D bulk. "Time's Arrow" says there is no
reason time has to run the way it does, and also that new universes
may still be popping out. "The Nows Have It" says that time does
not exist; what does exist is a set of instants that we piece
together as a timestream.
"The Itch" by Atul Gawande (The New Yorker)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-076: I skipped this one because
Mark said it was somewhat gross and disgusting.
"Last of the Neanderthals" by Stephen S. Hall (National Geographic)
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-tbasanw-103: Who were the Neanderthals
and what happened to them? [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Music is the pleasure that the human soul encounters
from counting without knowing that it is counting.
--Gottfried Leibniz