Who nose?

The 50th anniversary Doctor Who special (or, the Adventures of Sand Shoes, Dickie Bow, and Grandpa) was yesterday!  I noticed an old Whovian picture post of mine getting some extra hits, so why not another?  Feel free to discuss speculations and spoilers, sweeties, in the comments.

Alpha-Bytes: the Deseret alphabet

It's been a while since I've done one of these posts about my favorite weird alphabets and languages.  Today I'm thinking about a fascinating bit of 19th century American history: the Deseret Alphabet of Brigham Young and the early Mormon community.

This says "Holiness to the Lord"

The reasons why this religious leader decided to promulgate a new alphabet aren't universally agreed upon.  Young did state that a main goal of this project was to simplify written English and save schoolchildren years of anguish learning to spell.  He wasn't alone, of course; see my earlier post on various attempts at orthographic reform that kept on chugging through the 20th century.  However, some also believe this alphabet was an attempt to set apart the new Mormon community from the rest of mundane America.

Click to be magnified

The Deseret alphabet only really lasted a few decades as a major "supported feature" of Utah Mormonism.  After Brigham Young's death in 1877 it quickly faded into history. The letters have a kind of an ornate beauty to them, but they may be a tad too complicated for their own good.  Still, like many other obscure interests, our lovely inter webby super highway has brought together its fans and energized its community.

As an eternal searcher in realms spiritual, I sometimes get a bit jealous of groups like Mormonism that set themselves apart and live a life so full of symbolism and meaning.  To be clear, I'm not eager for someone to spoon-feed me my beliefs, but the idea of living within an ornate surreality (see here for more thoughts on that word), decorated with such a rich interior design of ideas, has a strong pull.  In some ways, I already do that with the concepts of Thelema and Hermetic Kabbalah, but I don't tend to identify with many of the actual people who work with those ideas.  The surreality is built more strongly in like-minded community, I suppose.

Oh well, there are plenty of other communities... family, professional, and blogospheric... they're sometimes too much for me to handle already... why would I want to add something else?  :-)

FYI, the next few weeks will be filled with hectic travel for me, so posting may be sparser than usual.  Best wishes to all as we head into the dark days of winter!

Good at night

On Day 24 of my accelerated stroll through the 30 Songs in 30 Days challenge, I mentioned an important song for which I couldn't find a good link.  Well, if you can't hear it, you can at least read the lyrics.  (Hmm... it's weird. As I read the words with my eyes, they kind of seem a bit boastful... but that's the complete opposite of the feeling you get when listening.)

Anyway, off John Gorka's 1991 album "Jack's Crows," here's "Good."

I am good at dreams

I am good at dreams

Bad at savings bonds;

Fashion magazines

I am good at dreams

I am good at dreams

I am good at night

I am good at night

Sun don't fit me right

I tried with all my might

I am good at night

I am good at night

I am good at stars

I am good at skies

Not like other guys

I am good at skies

I could close my eyes

I could be your size

I would still be good at skies

I am good at wind

I am good at stone

I am good at rain

Good at all alone

I am good at you

And good at home

I am good at night

I am good at night

Sun don't fit me right

I tried with all my might

I am good at night

I am good at night

I am good at dreams

I am good at dreams

I am good at night

I am good at night.

Space: Above and Beyond

"Courage. Honor. Dedication. Sacrifice. These are just the words they used to get you here. Now the only word that means a damn to you is life -- yours, your buddy's. The one certainty in war is that in an hour, maybe two, you'll either still be alive or you'll be dead.  For the next hour, here's your best chance of staying alive."

I forget if I've talked about my family's tradition of watching some good (or bad) sci-fi on the weekends.  Last week we finished going through the full set of David Tennant's run as the 10th Doctor.  This weekend we started something a bit different.

Space: Above and Beyond was a science fiction TV series that ran from 1995 to 1996.  Yup, just one season.  But what a season!  This show is typically in top-ten lists of "awesome shows that were cancelled before their time."  It was created by Glen Morgan and James Wong, two guys that started out writing some of the best early episodes of the X-Files, and then were given the chance to create their own show for Fox in the mid-90s.

My wife and I enjoyed this show at the time it first aired, and we were disappointed at its cancellation.  Watching the pilot again today, we were pleased at how much held up.  The characters remain engaging, the special effects aren't too clunky, and the patented Morgan-Wong monologues still have the ability to tug at the heart strings.  (They must have been big fans of classic American theater... Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and so on... They put in at least 2 or 3 identifiable bits of eloquent speechifyin' per episode.  For a show about war, love, and loss, it works.)  Our boy really enjoyed it, too.

The show follows the path of five fresh lieutenants, space marines in the year 2063, who happened to join up right as humankind happens to discover that, no, we are not alone.  In the wake of a horrific series of Pearl Harbor type alien attacks, they have to finish their training fast and head to the front lines.  There they meet the 6th main member of the cast (and fan favorite), Colonel T. C. McQueen, a battle-hardened vet who gave the speech I quoted above.  The actor who portrayed him may share the same name as a famous mojo-risin' lizard king, but he's all about the gravitas, with a cauldron of emotion simmering under the surface.  Back in the 90s, we were hooked by the plot and effects, but we kept on watching for him.

We'll be going through this wonderful old show over the next 20 or so weekends.  I can't promise to review every single episode, but I'll pop in with thoughts as I have them.

30 Songs in 1 Day

I just learned of this challenge from seeing it on Michelle's blog.  Great timing, me.  The month is just about over.  Oh well, I thought I'd catch up with it in one mega-post.

The deal is to think of 30 songs that address a range of questions... most of which, I think, are meant to help uncover the real you.  Do they really?  Aw, who cares, I had fun doing it.  Apologies for taking a pass on some of the questions, and for not linking every song to a place where you can listen to it.  It may have been fun, but I didn't have a ton of time...

Day 01 – Your favorite song

This normally would have me scratching my head, what with all the decades and genres of good stuff out there.  But this was asked before, and I happily settled on Rush's Closer to the Heart.  (The link takes you to an extended concert version... the only way to fly.)

Day 02 – Your least favorite song

Yikes, that's difficult.  For years I hated the Beatles' Wild Honey Pie, because I thought it was John viciously mocking Paul's Honey Pie.  However, it really was Paul making goofy fun of himself!

Okay, I'm going to be controversial here:  I'm no longer a fan of Pink Floyd's Time, from Dark Side of the Moon.  I admit that it's a classic, quality piece of songwriting.  But the way I interpret the lyrics, there's a deep black core of nihilism at the center of this thing.  Every year older that I get, I want to fight against such pessimism more and more, and with everything I've got.

Day 03 – A song that makes you happy

Ah, good.  Something more uplifting.  Can anyone listen to Supertramp's Give A Little Bit and not have their mood instantly boosted into the stratosphere?

Day 04 – A song that makes you sad

Blegh.  There are too many of those.  The first thing that comes to mind is that the sax solo in Springsteen's Jungleland sounds so much sadder since we lost the Big Man.

Day 05 – A song that reminds you of someone

Billy Joel's The Longest Time.

Day 06 – A song that reminds you of somewhere

The Outfield's Your Love is psychically connected to Philadelphia's 30th Street Station in the spring of 1986.  So you get a "somewhere" and a "somewhen" all tangled up in a wibbly-wobbly ball.

Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event

Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down serves a doubly sad duty.  Its original release in 1989 seemed timed to be the soundtrack of the Tienanmen Square student protest and crackdown.  Later, it gave voice to my feelings about another event.

Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to

Putting aside Rush (since so many of Neil Peart's lyrics have been weaved into my DNA), I'd like to say something morally uplifting like Queen's Under Pressure.  However, I think I'd score a B- to C+ if I was tested on it.  Groan, I've got to admit that one I'd probably do really well on is AC/DC's You Shook Me All Night Long.

Day 09 – A song that you can dance to

If anyone has footage of myself and friends in college dancing around to the Housemartins' weird anthem Me and the Farmer, I'll pay dearly for its destruction.

Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep

I'm not sure if it's ever actually caused me to lose consciousness, but I think the most soothing, calming song in all of existence is the Fleetwoods' Come Softly To Me.  (Thanks, Libby.)

Day 11 – A song from your favorite band

Haven't I talked enough about those three guys from Willowdale?

Day 12 – A song from a band you hate

Gosh, there may be plenty of songs that I just can't stand, but I can't think of a band or artist that I'd put into that category.  Even the ones I think are politically stupid are just doing what they think is right.

Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure

I have no idea why, but... Kid Rock's Wasting Time.

Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love

See above?  :-)  

Day 15 – A song that describes you

I've been answering these out of order, so #24 below covers my first choice(s).

Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate

Back to Rush (sort of), so we're not really talking hatred, here.  But I often get annoyed with radio program directors, whose knowledge of this band seems to begin and end with the same song: their biggest hit, Tom Sawyer.  Whenever I hear it on the radio these days I end up switching stations.

HOWEVER, a few years ago, I heard a remix of it (from the soundtrack a movie called "Small Soldiers") that blew me away and breathed new life into this song for me.  So I went from love to hate, then back around to love again.  :-)

Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio

I came up with a short list of overplayed finalists yesterday, and I decided to let fate decide the winner.  The next one I heard on the radio would be the one.  The very next time I got in the car, to pick up my son from karate, I heard one of them right away:  Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower.

But guess what?  Not so overplayed, because I listened through the whole thing.  Still a damn good song.

Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio

No one ever seems to play ELO's Hold On Tight (To Your Dreams) any more.

Day 19 – A song from your favorite album

V is for Vienna.

Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry

I guess I don't tend to plug in to music when I'm angry.  But if you want to channel your anger into personal power, you can't go wrong with Pink's So What.

Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy

Again, I don't think I run for the MP3 player when I'm feeling a strong emotion.  In the past, though, I was known to cycle through Van Morrison's Jackie Wilson Said, over and over, when feeling in an exuberant mood.

Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad

If I see myself start to wallow, I do my darndest to snap out of it.  Exercise, fueled by up-tempo stuff on my MP3 player, can sometimes do the trick.  No one specific song, though.

Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding

We didn't do the big catered shin-dig... no band or DJ.  Just the ceremony on a Saturday (with 6 or 7 people in attendance), then the party the next day -- a backyard gathering of about 30 to 40 people -- with somebody's boombox playing in the background.  I guess I wish we'd squeezed in Bill Withers' Lean on Me at some point, but the occasion was pretty much perfect none the less.

Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral

There are two that I can't decide between.  Both are by the same artist, and they share a word in their titles.  John Gorka wrote a song called "Good" in 1991, and then a song called "Good Noise" in 1994.  They're very different songs, but I'd like to think their intersection defines the person that I'd like to be remembered as being.  (Hm... Youtube doesn't seem to have "Good."  I may have to post some lyrics.)

Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh

Do parodies count?  (best line: coffee table)

Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument

Nope... I don't think I could even do Chopsticks correctly at this point.  :-)

Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play

Journey's Don't Stop Believin.  (Piano intro only)  :-)

Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty

The Eagles' Hotel California.  Ain't ever telling the story behind thaaaaat.

Day 29 – A song from your childhood

10cc's The Things We Do For Love was freakin' everywhere.

Day 30 – Your favorite song at this time last year

Ha!  I can actually check to see what I added to my electronic storehouse about one year ago, can't I?   The closest match in time is Prince's Kiss.  (Gotta love how he drops the falsetto at the end, right?)  If you limit it to new songs, then Muse's Madness.

Rock on!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Lost Worlds of 2001

The back cover of my copy of Arthur C. Clarke's 1972 memoir The Lost Worlds of 2001 contains the following blurb:

MIND-BLASTING

PROBES

INTO DAZZLING

ILLUMINATION

Yes sir, this was the late sixties / early seventies, all right.

This book is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the famed 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  A book like that, in itself, wouldn't be so unique, but I don't know if a book like this could be written about any other movie.  It contains some of Clarke's short stories that inspired the plot, entries from his writing journal, a bunch of unused chapters from his 1968 novel of the movie (with very different versions of events), and some interesting personal reminiscences about director Stanley Kubrick.

I hadn't appreciated the true nature of the multi-year back-and-forth creative process that went on between Clarke and Kubrick to make this combined... thing.  (Wikipedia calls it a "science fiction narrative" to convey the intertwined nature of the movie and novel.)  I had it in my mind that Clarke's novel was kind of written "on spec" and Kubrick was calling all the phantasmagorical shots.  In reality, it was a fascinating, tumultuous two-way collaboration.  Early on, they planned essentially for the movie to say "directed by Kubrick and Clarke" and the novel to say "written by Clarke and Kubrick."  (The lawyers didn't let them.)  The initial impetus, though, was Kubrick's.  According to Clarke,

"He [Kubrick] wanted to make a movie about Man's relation to the universe -- something which had never been attempted, still less achieved, in the history of motion pictures. Of course, there had been innumerable 'space' movies, most of them trash. Even the few that had been made with some skill and accuracy had been rather simpleminded, concerned more with the schoolboy excitement of space flight than its profound implications to society, philosophy, and religion."

My own history with 2001 is kind of strange... I read the novel, and did a middle school book report on it in 1978, prior to ever seeing the whole movie.  It was never about the phantasmagoria for me -- the novel explained many things that the movie left ambiguous and trippy.  Even the final "beyond the infinite" part was set in my mind as strange sci-fi, but still solidly in the realm of "this could someday happen."

That brings me to the unused chapters from Clarke's novel, which take up much of the real estate in Lost Worlds.  Like I said, the final version of the 1968 novel explained a lot more than the movie.  These "lost" chapters go even further to reveal much more about the plans and motivations of the aliens that make contact with early hominids, then wait patiently for us to catch up.  We often see events through their eyes.

I've got to say, though, that I was kind of surprised that the unused chapters felt so, well, 1950s-ish.  Is that a word?  Sci-fi readers will get my drift.  The aliens who sent the monolith were humanoid.  The astronauts were all standard issue scientist-heroes, smoking pipes and twirling ladies on the dance floor, prior to setting off in the Discovery.  HAL-9000 was a robot.  It was kind of amazing that Clarke, a leader in the sci-fi community, started out this project with such a hokey take on the material -- especially when so much New Wave experimentation was being done at the time by his colleagues.  It was even more amazing that such a counter-cultural masterpiece of a film eventually came out of it.  (Clarke kind of blamed a lot of the trippiness on the art department!)

Anyway, even though I'm glad that all the extra explanation and tired tropes were eventually pared away, it was fascinating to get such a complete and intimate peek at the origins of this classic story.

Oh, and that 1978 book report?  It was accompanied by a presentation at a school book fair.  Don't believe me, do you...?

Note, both in the poster behind me and on the table in front of me, that we "updated" the Pan Am space clipper from the movie to the real Space Shuttle that was just a couple of years away from its first launch.  No 60s nostalgia there!  :-)

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Pleae go even further beyond the infinite to visit the other blogs participating in this month's Cephalopod Coffeehouse!

The Meaning of Liff

I'm thoroughly enjoying the book that I'll be reviewing for Squid-man's Cephalopod Coffeehouse next week.  While reading, my eyes stopped on a short snippet that probably won't make it into my review, but I wanted to explore it a bit anyway.  While still keeping the identity of the book secret, I can share that isolated sentence:

"Only a space-faring culture could truly transcend its environment, and join others in giving a purpose to creation."

I'm sure I've talked about that first part before -- i.e., my hope that humanity will indeed follow this path and at least make the attempt to seed ourselves elsewhere.  It's the second part that struck me, though.  "Giving a purpose to creation."  It implies that there is no imposed, absolute purpose to creation, and we have to do that job ourselves.  Certainly not a new idea...

But it's still controversial.  On the surface, it seems to disagree with most established religions, which come packaged with tons of absolute purpose.  I really don't think there needs to be a contradiction, though.  With just a bit of leeway, the process of figuring out your purpose maps pretty cleanly onto the idea of "discovering God's plan for your life."  Much like the idea of natural rights in law, the details about who or where or whence it comes from don't seem so important in the end.  The key part is that your purpose isn't handed to you by other people.  It's your birthright to discover and follow, all by your lonesome.

On a whim, I wandered a bit through Wikipedia's article on The Meaning of Life and found several close parallels to the above ideas.  Like I said, not new.  :-)  That article didn't mention Crowley's Thelema, though, which apotheosizes the phrase "Do What Thou Wilt."  The twist is that you've got to think reeeally hard about what your true will is, and you'll eventually find that it's best when tempered with love.  It ends up being deeper and more subtle than something you can articulate into a few sentences, though trying to do that is helpful.  Sometimes, experience and hindsight helps you see it more clearly than anything else.

As I read over the above, it kind of sounds like I have it all figured out in my own case, doesn't it?  Nope!  :-)  But I do try to keep my compass needle pointed in the right direction with some prayer-like words.  A Thelemic colleague of mine came up with the following four aspirational phrases that occasionally pass through my brain...

Lead me to the Light of my true will.

Strengthen me to embrace every experience of Life.

Fulfill me in the rapture of thy Love.

Awaken me to the knowledge of Liberty.

I've got to say, though, that since I'm not sure to whom I'd be addressing these words, I don't use them all that frequently.  Something that feels more natural to me is the following, which I pieced together from several different ideas, starting with the Buddhist concept of dedication of merit:

May all be loved.

May all find liberty.

May all become co-creators of the cosmos.

That covers all the bases, doesn't it?  :-)

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Postscript:  I wanted to squeeze in a reference to Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy somewhere, but didn't manage it.  Also, for completeness, the title refers to this and the image to this.

Post-postscript, 10/20:  As I reread my final prayer after thinking about Squid's recent post on the plight of the Palestinians, I'm thinking... #FirstWorldProblems.  Maybe there should be a line at the beginning that asks first that "May all be safe and sound."