I'm probably the only one here who likes Comcast.
To be fair, I haven't been with them long. The dew is still on the rose, I'm still paying the promotional rate, etc. Still, it feels like a huge breath of fresh air compared to before, and so far I'm very pleased with what I've gotten.
So, some background:
When I first moved to California, I had two choices for Internet. One was DSL through AT&T, the other was billed as "T1 Internet" through a local Bay Area company called Space Age. I was thrilled at the idea of getting a T1 connection, and the price seemed reasonable, so I sprang for it.
Well... it turns out that this is a T1 to the property, not a T1 to the unit. Speeds were decent, but far from remarkable, and actually seemed go get worse as the years continued (though part of this might have just been my increasing expectations). Even stuff like watching Hulu wasn't as smooth as I would have expected.
The other really annoying thing about Space Age was that they don't give out public IP addresses; when I'd previously had service through SBC DSL and RoadRunner cable, I was able to run my own Apache web server, SVN repository, SSH server, and other useful geeky things. I use Linux on my public-facing servers and lock them down pretty strongly, and... I dunno, it's just really useful to have. So, it was super annoying to not have access to this from a more expensive provider. I went back and forth with them for a while shortly after signing up before I gave up.
I was periodically tempted to switch, but always ended up staying. The first big reason is that I hate AT&T. Historically, SBC has been my least favorite company and AT&T my second-least-favorite, so when they merged it was as if Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong Il had formed an alliance. The second, more positive reason was that Space Age had phenomenal customer service. When you called, you got the one particular guy who did everything. He'd come out to the property to fix stuff, and always knew what was going on. When things went wrong (and they periodically did - we sometimes lost Internet access for upwards of a week), he would leave long, detailed explanations of what the situation was, what to expect, what we could do, etc. Infinitely better than the standard, anonymous incompetence that I've come to expect from larger service companies.
More recently, my options expanded. When U-verse came, I realized that I could get drastically faster speeds at a slightly lower price point, or equivalent speeds at a drastically lower price, than I did with Space Age. I might have signed up, except that (1) I still hate AT&T; (2) it's tremendously complicated to get just Internet access without phone and TV service; and (3) they charge about $150 in "setup" fees.
Then, Comcast came. They drilled and installed some new jacks. A bit later, I got a flyer encouraging me to sign up with them. It offered special promotional fares which had expired the previous week. Since I'm not sure how long I'll be around here, I decided it would be more complicated than it would be worth to switch, so I stuck with Space Age.
And then, I couldn't. I walked home one day and found a notice taped to my door, simply stating that as of the following Friday, I would have no more Internet access. Aaaaaaaaaaaa!
I frantically jumped online. Losing the Internet wouldn't just be an annoyance; it would keep me from being able to work. I quickly re-researched my options, found that Comcast still looked better than AT&T, and pulled the trigger.
A few things did worry me about Comcast. They let you pick a stand-along Internet option, but the language on their web site indicated that the pricing was only available in connection with cable television, and I couldn't see anything that said what the monthly price would be if I got it alone. Also, I couldn't complete the order online, but would need to do one of those bizarre chat IM things to finish it. So that was annoying, but still way better than, you know, actually calling someone, so I went ahead with it.
It ended up being one of the smoothest transactions I've had in a while. I got the advertised price, even without any add-ons. I was delighted that they didn't even try to upsell me (except for one bogus warranty thing, but there was no pressure even there). Everything was pleasant and comfortable, and I got my service appointment scheduled.
There was some question at the time about whether I'd be leaving on a business trip to the East Coast that weekend or not. I jotted down a 1-800 number they had for scheduling stuff, just in case I needed to leave. I was a bit worried about that - the earliest appointment available to me had been about 10 days out, and if I missed my scheduled day, I would hate to lose access for another 10 days. It all ended up being moot, as I was in town and available.
My time range was 1pm-3pm. I got a call from the technician a little after 10am asking if I was available to do it then. I was all like, "Yeah!" At the time I was making an almond-pear slump, and liked the idea of wrapping everything up in the morning so I could take my standard hike that afternoon.
They arrived, and after a little initial confusion (the apartments in my complex are not very logically numbered), they got to work. They did some magic outside that I didn't see, then came inside. I had bought a Motorola cable modem from eBay so I wouldn't need to lease anything, and had already connected it to the computer. I had thought that they would connect to the new outlets that had been drilled a few months earlier, but we eventually found that the signal was coming in through the old Space Age outlet. Strange! They installed the Comcast software, and we spent several minutes typing in character recognition challenges and clicking through disclosures. At the end, they opened up the speed test web site, and I saw that we were at a blazing 21Mbps (above my paid "maximum" of 15Mbps). W00t! It hasn't been as fast since then, but every time that I ping it it is drastically faster than the old Space Age connection. Upload speeds are very constant at right around 3Mbps. I can smoothly watch Hulu, grab new Ubuntu ISOs, and generally geek out.
And, the price seems pretty good. My younger brother has tempted me with tales of a mythical Chicago cable company that sells good Internet access for just $9.99 a month. Comcast definitely isn't that, but still... with Space Age I was paying $39.99/month. In my 6 month intro period I'll be paying half that. Once that's done it shoots up to $42.99... three bucks more than before, but things are SO much faster that I don't mind.
Plus, I finally am a first-class citizen on the Internet again! My services aren't currently running - there wasn't any point in keeping most of them up during the interregnum - but I can ping my box from the outside and pull up my default Apache page again. That'll be great. I actually have had to occasionally pay for hosting services on some personal projects in the last 5 years that I totally could have hosted myself if only I could connect home. Mmmm, it feels good to be real again.
So, that's that. I don't have illusions; after the first time that my connection inexplicably breaks, or I find I'm being throttled for no reason, or I am mis-billed, I'm sure I'll join the ranks of Comcast-haters. Until that happens, though, I'll cheerfully be a lonely voice proclaiming that they're offering me a good service and I'm happy to have them.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Ringing
Wheeeee!
My younger brother, Pat, is an Actor. That's a capital A - he's performed on a variety of stages in the Chicago theater scene, playing a broad range of roles and building up his dramatic career. He's also an awesome guy, and since half a continent separates us, I don't get to see him nearly as often as I would like.
Late last year, he told me about this nifty, crazy project he was working on - a group of actors were going to try and adapt The Ring Cycle for the stage. In their initial test run, he played Alberich the villainous dwarf, among other roles. The operas are vast, sprawling things, with a much larger number of characters than available actors, so everyone got to play many roles.
The play was picked up, the roles were re-jiggered, and Pat was cast in the main show. It would combine all 4 operas. In most productions, each individual opera takes about 4 hours to perform (depending on the speed of the conductor), so there were about 16 hours of source material. That's with singing, though. The Ring Cycle's theatrical adaptation kept all of the original story and plot, updated the language, set it in English rather than Italian, and managed to whittle the running time down to a lean six hours.
I thought it sounded amazing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was a Really Big Deal. If I lived in Chicago I'd go to see all of Pat's plays; as it is I only get to see a few, but I knew that this would be worth making a special trip. I coordinated with the rest of my family to figure out when the best time would be to visit, then made arrangements to do it.
I have never heard any of the operas, and had no prior experience of The Ring Cycle. Pretty much all of my knowledge about the opera comes from second-source commentary describing how The Ring Cycle is similar to and different from The Lord of the Rings. That, and the random bits and pieces that one picks up from pop culture: Valkyries, Germanic gods, dwarfs. It felt cool to step into such an epic work with so much history and have such a blank slate.
The performance was, in a word, stunning. For starters, it did an amazing job at capturing a lot of the grandeur that one would expect from an opera, even though we were in a fairly small space and they didn't have the Metropolitan Opera's budget to work with. They didn't have elaborate painted backgrounds, crowds of extras, giant mechanical mystical creatures. Instead, they cleverly used simple techniques to convey the magical setting of the play - this required a bit more active participation on the part of the viewer, but we all readily gave it, and the overall result was much more effective than would have been produced with painted props.
At the very start of the play, we are introduced to the Rhinemaidens. Now, ALL of the actors in this play were great, but the three ladies who played the Rhinemaidens and, later, the birds, were astonishing: not only actors, but also acrobats and singers as well. Large rolls of blue fabric descended from the ceiling, and the maidens "swam" up and down them, seeming to move horizontally as well as vertically. When Alberich crept onstage, they teased and toyed with him; one would hang upside down and stretch a hand out toward him, only to pull herself up and out of the way when he lunged. It was pretty incredible three-dimensional staging.
The Giants are also particularly well done. Two broad-shouldered gentlemen play Fafner and... the other one, whose name currently escapes me. When they come on stage, they pull out some lights that project their shadows onto the walls. Thereafter, the other actors interact with the shadows, who loom giant-sized above them. That was a neat trick. Even besides the shadows, though, the actors are great at moving and acting like giants. Every motion they make seems to have a great weight behind it, and you constantly get an impression of barely restrained power.
A similar technique is used to great effect in "Siegfried" with the dragon. Several actors bring the dragon to life, with two operating its enormous head and several others operating its tail. Siegried leaps and runs from one end of the stage to the other, with his shadow doing battle with the much larger shadow of the dragon. Awesome stuff, and I'm impressed by all the pieces that The Building Stage needed to put together in order to pull this off.
There was almost no singing in the production, but the three ladies did sing a little about the Rhinegold. For music, they had a cool little live band on stage, tucked away in a sort of mini orchestra pit towards the back. They generally did the transitions between scenes, only occasionally providing cues to the current action. I later learned that the drummer had written the adaptation, which is pretty amazing. Since I'm not familiar with the original operas, I probably didn't pick up on most of the adaptations, but it was pretty hard to miss the theme for Flight of the Valkyries. It was cool and chilling to hear, a slower and almost meditative rumination on electric guitar.
I was delighted to find that the plot, which certainly complex, was eminently follow-able in this medium. It's hard to keep all the characters and plotlines and feuds in your head at the same time, but I never felt lost; for any particular thing which is happening onstage, you can easily work backwards to connect it with what we've seen before. The plot, incidentally, is pretty amazing. It's also really bleak. Throughout the first two acts/operas, not a single character is really likeable. The gods are arrogant and haughty; Alberich is avaricious and power-mad; the Rhinemaidens are teases; the giants are dull and greedy; Siegmund is hot-tempered (not to mention incestuous); and so on.
I pretty quickly worked out that German gods are more or less the same as Norse gods. I found myself thinking often of American Gods, which actually serves as a useful crutch for a few of the major characters. Wotan was clearly Odin, down to the spear. Loge was Loki, and making that connection helped me understand that character much more. It's a bit of a shame that Loge only appears in the first part. He's such an interesting character, and he ends his last scene with a teasing comment about his plots for the future. I suspect that the original audience, steeped in the mythology, would have recognized Loge's fated participation in Ragnarok (or whatever they call it in Germany) and seen his hand behind the later events of the opera, even if he does not appear in flesh to move it along.
Oh, costumes! They were a bit odd at first, but once I got it I loved them. The dress is more or less modern, not medieval, and is highly class-conscious. The gods are all dressed up in preppy clothes: stylish slacks, attractive haircuts for the women, expensive-looking shirts for the gents. When Donner (who I think might be Thor?) carries his hammer, it sometimes feels like a Lacrosse stick. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Nibelheim (dwarfs) are blue-collar, wearing heavy aprons, with matted hair and heavy boots. And Loge - as one of the gods, he is expensively dressed, but as the trickster half-mortal outsider, he doesn't adapt the fashions of his fully-immortal counterparts; he has a cool hat, and colorful trousers, and a bearing all his own, at once confident and wary. (This is as good a point as any to mention that Loge is actually played by a woman, which is yet another bit of brilliant casting.)
We finally get some more sympathetic characters in the third act. Well, actually a bit before then: Brunhilde shows up near the end of the second act, and earns our respect by defying Wotan in order to help save the gods from destruction. She is roundly punished. The third act brings back Brunhilde, and more immediately introduces us to Siegfried, the unquestioned hero of the piece. It's all very Germanic: he knows no fear, is a tireless warrior, perhaps not the brightest guy around but making up for it with his unwavering enthusiasm. He slays the dragon, wins the girl, and takes the Ring while remaining free of its curse; what more could a guy want?
Okay, so the Ring: I was actually surprised by just how similar Wagner's description of The Ring is to that of Tolkien. I'd somehow been under the impression that The Rhinegold Ring was more of a good object that was being fought over, while The One Ring was an object of pure evil. Actually, the Rhinegold ring is cursed, and drives people in much the same way as Sauron's ring. Alberich and Hogan and... the other dwarf whose name I forget all come across as pretty Gollum-like in their obsession with reclaiming the ring. (One of the only bits of the play that I didn't really care for was a "conversation" between Alberich and Hogan in the fourth act which seemed to have been lifted from Gollum's schizophrenic soliloquy in the movie version of The Two Towers.) Although, now that I think about it, the dwarfs want the Rhinegold ring because it will give them unlimited power over the world. In Lord of the Rings, someone like Gandalf or Aragon might have been able to use The One Ring for their own power, but almost anyone else would have simply come under the power of Sauron and become his slave. Alberich with his ring would have been a terror; Gollum with his ring would still be pathetic.
All that said, the overall feel that one gets about The Ring is quite similar in both works. It's something both desirable and feared, it promises wealth and power while carrying incredible danger, most people lust after it while a few wise people shun it, and only the very unusual (Tom Bombadil who cares not for The Ring, or Siegfried who knows no fear and knows not what the Ring promises) are free from its pull.
MEGA SPOILERS
Even the very end resolution is very similar. Gollum grabs The Ring and falls into the flames. Hogan grabs The Ring and falls into the Rhine.
END SPOILERS
So, uh, Tolkien is a hack? Nope. Lord of the Rings was a point far long on his lifelong quest to create an English mythology. As a child he fell in love with the Northern mythos, from the Norse and the Germans, and was sad that the English had nothing equivalent. He didn't set out to make a copy, but was heavily influenced by the feel of that mythology. I'm a little surprised at how similar The Ring stuff is, but it isn't exactly the same, and you can make a really strong case that Tolkien's Catholic values subvert the pagan values in The Ring Cycle.
Wow, that was a digression. Back to the play:
Each of the individual four acts was around 70 minutes long. The Building Stage offered a 10 minute intermission between acts 1 and 2, and between acts 3 and 4. In between acts 2 and 3 was a forty-five-minute dinner break. We came prepared! I attended with my parents and sister, and we brought along a delicious spinach salad, a chicken fruit pasta salad, excellent rosemary bread. We were envied by all. For the piece de resistance, we feasted on homemade pecan pie. It was delightful. It was also great to chat a little with the actors, who passed through the stage and greeted people. By now I've met a few of Pat's associates from other plays, so it was really cool to recognize people and chat with them.
This is going to sound trite, but in terms of overall dramatic movement, The Ring Cycle is the exact opposite of a romantic comedy. Most rom-coms follow this general pattern: up, up, down, up. Boy meets girl, they build a relationship, some problem happens that drives them apart, then they resolve the problem and end the movie better than ever. The Ring Cycle is down, down, up, down. After the third act, the curse of The Ring catches up to people, Wotan's scheming falls apart, Alberich wreaks vengeance from beyond the grave. There's a lot of shouting and crying. Fortunately, the very, very end of the play ends on an upbeat note, or at least as upbeat as you can expect from a Germanic story.
In the days since seeing the play, I find that I'm regularly replaying it in my head, unpacking the scenes, remembering little flourishes that struck me as especially neat, even retracing the plot in my head to assure myself that I have everything straight. It's incredibly rich source material, and I can see why the operas have endured for over a century. Sadly, the play doesn't have that much longer of a run left, which is doubly unfortunate since they are now selling out their shows and people increasingly want to see it. I'm delighted that I got a chance to experience it, and proud of the whole crew for pulling off this audacious performance.
My younger brother, Pat, is an Actor. That's a capital A - he's performed on a variety of stages in the Chicago theater scene, playing a broad range of roles and building up his dramatic career. He's also an awesome guy, and since half a continent separates us, I don't get to see him nearly as often as I would like.
Late last year, he told me about this nifty, crazy project he was working on - a group of actors were going to try and adapt The Ring Cycle for the stage. In their initial test run, he played Alberich the villainous dwarf, among other roles. The operas are vast, sprawling things, with a much larger number of characters than available actors, so everyone got to play many roles.
The play was picked up, the roles were re-jiggered, and Pat was cast in the main show. It would combine all 4 operas. In most productions, each individual opera takes about 4 hours to perform (depending on the speed of the conductor), so there were about 16 hours of source material. That's with singing, though. The Ring Cycle's theatrical adaptation kept all of the original story and plot, updated the language, set it in English rather than Italian, and managed to whittle the running time down to a lean six hours.
I thought it sounded amazing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was a Really Big Deal. If I lived in Chicago I'd go to see all of Pat's plays; as it is I only get to see a few, but I knew that this would be worth making a special trip. I coordinated with the rest of my family to figure out when the best time would be to visit, then made arrangements to do it.
I have never heard any of the operas, and had no prior experience of The Ring Cycle. Pretty much all of my knowledge about the opera comes from second-source commentary describing how The Ring Cycle is similar to and different from The Lord of the Rings. That, and the random bits and pieces that one picks up from pop culture: Valkyries, Germanic gods, dwarfs. It felt cool to step into such an epic work with so much history and have such a blank slate.
The performance was, in a word, stunning. For starters, it did an amazing job at capturing a lot of the grandeur that one would expect from an opera, even though we were in a fairly small space and they didn't have the Metropolitan Opera's budget to work with. They didn't have elaborate painted backgrounds, crowds of extras, giant mechanical mystical creatures. Instead, they cleverly used simple techniques to convey the magical setting of the play - this required a bit more active participation on the part of the viewer, but we all readily gave it, and the overall result was much more effective than would have been produced with painted props.
At the very start of the play, we are introduced to the Rhinemaidens. Now, ALL of the actors in this play were great, but the three ladies who played the Rhinemaidens and, later, the birds, were astonishing: not only actors, but also acrobats and singers as well. Large rolls of blue fabric descended from the ceiling, and the maidens "swam" up and down them, seeming to move horizontally as well as vertically. When Alberich crept onstage, they teased and toyed with him; one would hang upside down and stretch a hand out toward him, only to pull herself up and out of the way when he lunged. It was pretty incredible three-dimensional staging.
The Giants are also particularly well done. Two broad-shouldered gentlemen play Fafner and... the other one, whose name currently escapes me. When they come on stage, they pull out some lights that project their shadows onto the walls. Thereafter, the other actors interact with the shadows, who loom giant-sized above them. That was a neat trick. Even besides the shadows, though, the actors are great at moving and acting like giants. Every motion they make seems to have a great weight behind it, and you constantly get an impression of barely restrained power.
A similar technique is used to great effect in "Siegfried" with the dragon. Several actors bring the dragon to life, with two operating its enormous head and several others operating its tail. Siegried leaps and runs from one end of the stage to the other, with his shadow doing battle with the much larger shadow of the dragon. Awesome stuff, and I'm impressed by all the pieces that The Building Stage needed to put together in order to pull this off.
There was almost no singing in the production, but the three ladies did sing a little about the Rhinegold. For music, they had a cool little live band on stage, tucked away in a sort of mini orchestra pit towards the back. They generally did the transitions between scenes, only occasionally providing cues to the current action. I later learned that the drummer had written the adaptation, which is pretty amazing. Since I'm not familiar with the original operas, I probably didn't pick up on most of the adaptations, but it was pretty hard to miss the theme for Flight of the Valkyries. It was cool and chilling to hear, a slower and almost meditative rumination on electric guitar.
I was delighted to find that the plot, which certainly complex, was eminently follow-able in this medium. It's hard to keep all the characters and plotlines and feuds in your head at the same time, but I never felt lost; for any particular thing which is happening onstage, you can easily work backwards to connect it with what we've seen before. The plot, incidentally, is pretty amazing. It's also really bleak. Throughout the first two acts/operas, not a single character is really likeable. The gods are arrogant and haughty; Alberich is avaricious and power-mad; the Rhinemaidens are teases; the giants are dull and greedy; Siegmund is hot-tempered (not to mention incestuous); and so on.
I pretty quickly worked out that German gods are more or less the same as Norse gods. I found myself thinking often of American Gods, which actually serves as a useful crutch for a few of the major characters. Wotan was clearly Odin, down to the spear. Loge was Loki, and making that connection helped me understand that character much more. It's a bit of a shame that Loge only appears in the first part. He's such an interesting character, and he ends his last scene with a teasing comment about his plots for the future. I suspect that the original audience, steeped in the mythology, would have recognized Loge's fated participation in Ragnarok (or whatever they call it in Germany) and seen his hand behind the later events of the opera, even if he does not appear in flesh to move it along.
Oh, costumes! They were a bit odd at first, but once I got it I loved them. The dress is more or less modern, not medieval, and is highly class-conscious. The gods are all dressed up in preppy clothes: stylish slacks, attractive haircuts for the women, expensive-looking shirts for the gents. When Donner (who I think might be Thor?) carries his hammer, it sometimes feels like a Lacrosse stick. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Nibelheim (dwarfs) are blue-collar, wearing heavy aprons, with matted hair and heavy boots. And Loge - as one of the gods, he is expensively dressed, but as the trickster half-mortal outsider, he doesn't adapt the fashions of his fully-immortal counterparts; he has a cool hat, and colorful trousers, and a bearing all his own, at once confident and wary. (This is as good a point as any to mention that Loge is actually played by a woman, which is yet another bit of brilliant casting.)
We finally get some more sympathetic characters in the third act. Well, actually a bit before then: Brunhilde shows up near the end of the second act, and earns our respect by defying Wotan in order to help save the gods from destruction. She is roundly punished. The third act brings back Brunhilde, and more immediately introduces us to Siegfried, the unquestioned hero of the piece. It's all very Germanic: he knows no fear, is a tireless warrior, perhaps not the brightest guy around but making up for it with his unwavering enthusiasm. He slays the dragon, wins the girl, and takes the Ring while remaining free of its curse; what more could a guy want?
Okay, so the Ring: I was actually surprised by just how similar Wagner's description of The Ring is to that of Tolkien. I'd somehow been under the impression that The Rhinegold Ring was more of a good object that was being fought over, while The One Ring was an object of pure evil. Actually, the Rhinegold ring is cursed, and drives people in much the same way as Sauron's ring. Alberich and Hogan and... the other dwarf whose name I forget all come across as pretty Gollum-like in their obsession with reclaiming the ring. (One of the only bits of the play that I didn't really care for was a "conversation" between Alberich and Hogan in the fourth act which seemed to have been lifted from Gollum's schizophrenic soliloquy in the movie version of The Two Towers.) Although, now that I think about it, the dwarfs want the Rhinegold ring because it will give them unlimited power over the world. In Lord of the Rings, someone like Gandalf or Aragon might have been able to use The One Ring for their own power, but almost anyone else would have simply come under the power of Sauron and become his slave. Alberich with his ring would have been a terror; Gollum with his ring would still be pathetic.
All that said, the overall feel that one gets about The Ring is quite similar in both works. It's something both desirable and feared, it promises wealth and power while carrying incredible danger, most people lust after it while a few wise people shun it, and only the very unusual (Tom Bombadil who cares not for The Ring, or Siegfried who knows no fear and knows not what the Ring promises) are free from its pull.
MEGA SPOILERS
Even the very end resolution is very similar. Gollum grabs The Ring and falls into the flames. Hogan grabs The Ring and falls into the Rhine.
END SPOILERS
So, uh, Tolkien is a hack? Nope. Lord of the Rings was a point far long on his lifelong quest to create an English mythology. As a child he fell in love with the Northern mythos, from the Norse and the Germans, and was sad that the English had nothing equivalent. He didn't set out to make a copy, but was heavily influenced by the feel of that mythology. I'm a little surprised at how similar The Ring stuff is, but it isn't exactly the same, and you can make a really strong case that Tolkien's Catholic values subvert the pagan values in The Ring Cycle.
Wow, that was a digression. Back to the play:
Each of the individual four acts was around 70 minutes long. The Building Stage offered a 10 minute intermission between acts 1 and 2, and between acts 3 and 4. In between acts 2 and 3 was a forty-five-minute dinner break. We came prepared! I attended with my parents and sister, and we brought along a delicious spinach salad, a chicken fruit pasta salad, excellent rosemary bread. We were envied by all. For the piece de resistance, we feasted on homemade pecan pie. It was delightful. It was also great to chat a little with the actors, who passed through the stage and greeted people. By now I've met a few of Pat's associates from other plays, so it was really cool to recognize people and chat with them.
This is going to sound trite, but in terms of overall dramatic movement, The Ring Cycle is the exact opposite of a romantic comedy. Most rom-coms follow this general pattern: up, up, down, up. Boy meets girl, they build a relationship, some problem happens that drives them apart, then they resolve the problem and end the movie better than ever. The Ring Cycle is down, down, up, down. After the third act, the curse of The Ring catches up to people, Wotan's scheming falls apart, Alberich wreaks vengeance from beyond the grave. There's a lot of shouting and crying. Fortunately, the very, very end of the play ends on an upbeat note, or at least as upbeat as you can expect from a Germanic story.
In the days since seeing the play, I find that I'm regularly replaying it in my head, unpacking the scenes, remembering little flourishes that struck me as especially neat, even retracing the plot in my head to assure myself that I have everything straight. It's incredibly rich source material, and I can see why the operas have endured for over a century. Sadly, the play doesn't have that much longer of a run left, which is doubly unfortunate since they are now selling out their shows and people increasingly want to see it. I'm delighted that I got a chance to experience it, and proud of the whole crew for pulling off this audacious performance.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Poor Tom's A-Cold
Shakespeare wrote four Great Tragedies. Two of them are very widely performed and known in the popular culture: Hamlet and Macbeth. A third, Othello, isn't quite as widespread, and carries a particular set of baggage, but still gets quite a bit more exposure than the average Shakespeare play. The final one, King Lear, falls far behind the others. It gets performed, to be sure, but it doesn't get anywhere near the number of, say, Hollywood adaptations as Hamlet and Macbeth have.
There's a good reason for that: Lear is an incredibly bleak play. Of course, we all expect bleakness from the Great Tragedies, but there's a particular viciousness and sadism in Lear that limits its appeal in this age of uplifting endings.
All the more reason for "Fool"! I haven't read any of Christopher Moore's other books, but this is one great novel, and he pulls off the incredibly challenging job of writing a comic novel adaptation of Lear. It isn't pure comedy - you can't keep Gloucester's torture in a totally happy book - but it is biting, and witty, and overall is surprisingly enjoyable.
Fool is narrated by the hero, who in this telling is Lear's Fool. Fools are in many of the Bard's plays, but Lear's Fool is probably the most well-known and sympathetic. When people talk about how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are modern-day jesters who speaks truth to power, they're thinking about this character's archetype. The Fool is the only person who really sees what's happening, and who can warn the King about his mistakes without being punished for it.
There are a LOT of differences between the play and the novel, and one of the biggest is that here the Fool isn't just a commentator, but an actual actor in the play's events. He is downright Machiavellian, a far better schemer than Regan or Edmund, and his actions set mind-bogglingly-large events into motion. He's also granted a backstory and a personal journey of sorts, fleshing him out to a three-dimensional character instead of an archetype.
I really dig making the Fool a schemer. I'm a bit more ambivalent on the backstory. It's cool, and it works, but... I dunno. I can't claim that it isn't epic, but it isn't timeless in the way that Lear itself is. It's more like a really clever plot that hangs together well but doesn't illuminate anything outside itself. Which is totally fine - this is a comic novel, after all, and I wouldn't expect to receive eternal truths from it.
Oh, and the wordplay! Amazing! Virtually all the dialog is in modern English, although I suspect that some of the lines are lifted or adapted from the play's text. It's every bit as bawdy as the Bard, but using modern R-rated language instead of archaic swearing from Elizabethan England. I suspect that our reaction to this language is closer to the original audience's reaction to the original words. It's funny and shocking and clever. Moore is at his very best when the Fool is verbally bantering with someone. Actually, "Banter" isn't the right word, since the Fool totally dominates such exchanges; only Cordelia and Regan can come close to matching his wits.
There's a cool afterword to the book in which Moore talks about writing it. It's fascinating to get insight into making a book like this. He points out that the timeline of the original play is really hard to pin down; the historic King Leir probably lived around 600 BC, long before any of the cities in the play (Gloucester, Kent, etc.) were founded; there's a weird mixture of Roman and Celtic and Christian components to the tale. At one point in the original play, Moore writes, Shakespeare himself acknowledges how screwed up the timeline is when a character says something like, "This is the prophecy written by Merlin, even though he will be born after I die." It's as though Shakespeare is throwing up his hands and saying, "I don't know when the play is set, either! Wheeee!" Moore took that as his license to do what he wanted to, and he keeps the same sort of mixed-up timeline as the original without worrying about whether it makes sense. This almost entirely works, except for one really bizarre two-page digression on the two popes - rather than the historic Pope and Antipope, this is a conflict between the Discount Pope and the Retail Pope. It's pretty confusing, and while I like the idea of dueling Popes, it has nothing in the slightest to do with anything else and totally breaks the rhythm of the chapter. That's an anomaly, though... for the most part, Moore takes license with the timeframe in the service of doing other interesting stuff or establishing atmosphere.
This is the first book of Moore's that I've read, and it sounds like it might be pretty different from his other stuff.... I'm sure I'll check out something else from him at some point, though I'm not in an enormous rush to do so. In the meantime, blow, wind! Rage, rain! Get-Ready! The World is Coming to an End!
There's a good reason for that: Lear is an incredibly bleak play. Of course, we all expect bleakness from the Great Tragedies, but there's a particular viciousness and sadism in Lear that limits its appeal in this age of uplifting endings.
All the more reason for "Fool"! I haven't read any of Christopher Moore's other books, but this is one great novel, and he pulls off the incredibly challenging job of writing a comic novel adaptation of Lear. It isn't pure comedy - you can't keep Gloucester's torture in a totally happy book - but it is biting, and witty, and overall is surprisingly enjoyable.
Fool is narrated by the hero, who in this telling is Lear's Fool. Fools are in many of the Bard's plays, but Lear's Fool is probably the most well-known and sympathetic. When people talk about how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are modern-day jesters who speaks truth to power, they're thinking about this character's archetype. The Fool is the only person who really sees what's happening, and who can warn the King about his mistakes without being punished for it.
There are a LOT of differences between the play and the novel, and one of the biggest is that here the Fool isn't just a commentator, but an actual actor in the play's events. He is downright Machiavellian, a far better schemer than Regan or Edmund, and his actions set mind-bogglingly-large events into motion. He's also granted a backstory and a personal journey of sorts, fleshing him out to a three-dimensional character instead of an archetype.
I really dig making the Fool a schemer. I'm a bit more ambivalent on the backstory. It's cool, and it works, but... I dunno. I can't claim that it isn't epic, but it isn't timeless in the way that Lear itself is. It's more like a really clever plot that hangs together well but doesn't illuminate anything outside itself. Which is totally fine - this is a comic novel, after all, and I wouldn't expect to receive eternal truths from it.
Oh, and the wordplay! Amazing! Virtually all the dialog is in modern English, although I suspect that some of the lines are lifted or adapted from the play's text. It's every bit as bawdy as the Bard, but using modern R-rated language instead of archaic swearing from Elizabethan England. I suspect that our reaction to this language is closer to the original audience's reaction to the original words. It's funny and shocking and clever. Moore is at his very best when the Fool is verbally bantering with someone. Actually, "Banter" isn't the right word, since the Fool totally dominates such exchanges; only Cordelia and Regan can come close to matching his wits.
There's a cool afterword to the book in which Moore talks about writing it. It's fascinating to get insight into making a book like this. He points out that the timeline of the original play is really hard to pin down; the historic King Leir probably lived around 600 BC, long before any of the cities in the play (Gloucester, Kent, etc.) were founded; there's a weird mixture of Roman and Celtic and Christian components to the tale. At one point in the original play, Moore writes, Shakespeare himself acknowledges how screwed up the timeline is when a character says something like, "This is the prophecy written by Merlin, even though he will be born after I die." It's as though Shakespeare is throwing up his hands and saying, "I don't know when the play is set, either! Wheeee!" Moore took that as his license to do what he wanted to, and he keeps the same sort of mixed-up timeline as the original without worrying about whether it makes sense. This almost entirely works, except for one really bizarre two-page digression on the two popes - rather than the historic Pope and Antipope, this is a conflict between the Discount Pope and the Retail Pope. It's pretty confusing, and while I like the idea of dueling Popes, it has nothing in the slightest to do with anything else and totally breaks the rhythm of the chapter. That's an anomaly, though... for the most part, Moore takes license with the timeframe in the service of doing other interesting stuff or establishing atmosphere.
This is the first book of Moore's that I've read, and it sounds like it might be pretty different from his other stuff.... I'm sure I'll check out something else from him at some point, though I'm not in an enormous rush to do so. In the meantime, blow, wind! Rage, rain! Get-Ready! The World is Coming to an End!
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Hellish
I think I need to lay off the "macabre comic book with sinister spiritual overtones" jag I've been on. It's messing with my head.
On the plus side, I can report that, yes, From Hell really IS that good. It's breathtakingly ambitious, incredibly broad in scope, laying out Victorian London in all its filth and glamor. Like many of my favorite works, it first focuses on getting the world right - making it real, ensuring we understand its rules and how it works, feeling the rhythm of the ordinary - before we plunge into the plot proper and experience Jack the Ripper's killings.
MINI SPOILERS
I'm definitely not an expert in JTR mythology, but it does feel like it's often presented as a mystery: the purpose of a JTR movie or book is to chase down the mysterious individual who perpetrated those crimes. From Hell inverts that. After a brief prologue, the very first thing we see is the man who will become Jack, as a small boy.
Only, we don't really see him. There are so many amazing techniques in this book that I can't start to list them all, but one of the earliest is its presentation of Gull. Through the entire chapter, we don't see him, and yet he is present in nearly every scene. Generally we are seeing from his perspective, literally looking through his eyes, Halloween-style. We see all the moments that the adults miss. We see the son playing with his dead father's face, giggling softly as the eyes open and shut. We see him finding an animal in the grasses, and cheerfully tearing it apart to expose its innards. With this as background, we see Gull steadily advance into the upper tiers of Victorian society, and bear the uneasy knowledge that the grown man likely holds the same morals as that young boy.
At the very end of the chapter, we finally see Gull himself. And, when we at last can connect a shape to those words, those thoughts, those actions, we find it to be perfectly ordinary. He's an Englishman, distinguished-looking, calm. Perfectly ordinary. Which, of course, makes it all the creepier.
The murders themselves take a long time to start. The wait is not a boring one. I made the mistake of reading From Hell right before bed, and blame it for some poor sleep over the last few weeks. There's one incredibly long chapter that features Gull and his coachman driving around London and looking at historical sites. Sounds dry, doesn't it? But there's an amazing diabolical energy behind that tour which pulses on every page. I felt my mouth growing dry as their sinister touring reached its conclusion. Gull is firmly in control, laying forth his erudite knowledge, the connections between points on the map and points in time, describing the gods of Britain, the gods of Atlantis, the God of Christianity. Netley, who doesn't seem to be a particularly pious of virtuous man, is driven, panting, to the limits of human endurance, by nothing more than Gull's words and some creepy architecture.
(Very rough analogy: think of the Winkie's Diner scene from Mulholland Drive. Nothing but talk, and yet, mind-blowingly frightening.)
Of course, this is all a huge testament to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's talent. Preacher frightens with buckets of blood. From Hell has buckets of blood, but it doesn't need them - you're awash in horror before the knife is ever drawn.
There's lots of other stuff I could mention, but I wanted to hit on Gull's visions. I thought this was an absolutely amazing idea. Gull has a minor stroke, and has a vision while his brain is under stress. This vision seems to propel him; he would have carried out his mission regardless, but that vision leads him to be Jack the Ripper and not just Jack the Causer of Accidental Death. Later, he starts to have more visions as he continues his murders, and they grow longer and more elaborate, seemingly in response to the increasing violence of his crimes.
So, with visions, we are naturally led to consider a Macbeth-like query: are those visions "real," in the sense that they actually are communication from some force outside of nature? Or are they illusions, brought on by physiological processes in our brain, and ascribed significance when they actually represent nothing more but randomly firing neurons?
Here, they opt for the first answer, and - this is the cool part - they completely take away the possibility of the second answer. Suppose that Gull's visions had been of, I don't know, a secret conversation in the Royal Palace, or a war in Egypt. He and we might take those visions as being "real", but we could still argue for him having invented them. Similarly, if he had had further visions of Jubelah, we would recognize their content as spiritual, but still not be able to say whether they refer to actual spiritual objects or not.
However, they give Gull extremely lucid visions of life in the 20th century. Which is brilliant. Gull doesn't understand what he's seeing - he knows that they're otherworldly, that he's being granted insight into something that his contemporaries cannot see, but has no framework for processing television sets, fax machines, computers, spandex. It's a mystery to him. But not to us. Moore and Campbell place the reader in the position of confirming Gull's visions. Within the context of the work, we know that there's no way Gull could have this knowledge, and no way he could have accurately imagined it, and so we are forced to acknowledge that some supernatural force is at work.
Like I said: Creepy!
END SPOILERS
Messes with my head, but in a very memorable way. From Hell fully deserves its reputation at the top of the comics heap. Any work of its scope and detail would inspire awe on its own, but it builds on top of its densely created world and creates one of the most amazing horror stories that I've read. If that sort of thing appeals to you, read it. If not, keep your distance!
On the plus side, I can report that, yes, From Hell really IS that good. It's breathtakingly ambitious, incredibly broad in scope, laying out Victorian London in all its filth and glamor. Like many of my favorite works, it first focuses on getting the world right - making it real, ensuring we understand its rules and how it works, feeling the rhythm of the ordinary - before we plunge into the plot proper and experience Jack the Ripper's killings.
MINI SPOILERS
I'm definitely not an expert in JTR mythology, but it does feel like it's often presented as a mystery: the purpose of a JTR movie or book is to chase down the mysterious individual who perpetrated those crimes. From Hell inverts that. After a brief prologue, the very first thing we see is the man who will become Jack, as a small boy.
Only, we don't really see him. There are so many amazing techniques in this book that I can't start to list them all, but one of the earliest is its presentation of Gull. Through the entire chapter, we don't see him, and yet he is present in nearly every scene. Generally we are seeing from his perspective, literally looking through his eyes, Halloween-style. We see all the moments that the adults miss. We see the son playing with his dead father's face, giggling softly as the eyes open and shut. We see him finding an animal in the grasses, and cheerfully tearing it apart to expose its innards. With this as background, we see Gull steadily advance into the upper tiers of Victorian society, and bear the uneasy knowledge that the grown man likely holds the same morals as that young boy.
At the very end of the chapter, we finally see Gull himself. And, when we at last can connect a shape to those words, those thoughts, those actions, we find it to be perfectly ordinary. He's an Englishman, distinguished-looking, calm. Perfectly ordinary. Which, of course, makes it all the creepier.
The murders themselves take a long time to start. The wait is not a boring one. I made the mistake of reading From Hell right before bed, and blame it for some poor sleep over the last few weeks. There's one incredibly long chapter that features Gull and his coachman driving around London and looking at historical sites. Sounds dry, doesn't it? But there's an amazing diabolical energy behind that tour which pulses on every page. I felt my mouth growing dry as their sinister touring reached its conclusion. Gull is firmly in control, laying forth his erudite knowledge, the connections between points on the map and points in time, describing the gods of Britain, the gods of Atlantis, the God of Christianity. Netley, who doesn't seem to be a particularly pious of virtuous man, is driven, panting, to the limits of human endurance, by nothing more than Gull's words and some creepy architecture.
(Very rough analogy: think of the Winkie's Diner scene from Mulholland Drive. Nothing but talk, and yet, mind-blowingly frightening.)
Of course, this is all a huge testament to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's talent. Preacher frightens with buckets of blood. From Hell has buckets of blood, but it doesn't need them - you're awash in horror before the knife is ever drawn.
There's lots of other stuff I could mention, but I wanted to hit on Gull's visions. I thought this was an absolutely amazing idea. Gull has a minor stroke, and has a vision while his brain is under stress. This vision seems to propel him; he would have carried out his mission regardless, but that vision leads him to be Jack the Ripper and not just Jack the Causer of Accidental Death. Later, he starts to have more visions as he continues his murders, and they grow longer and more elaborate, seemingly in response to the increasing violence of his crimes.
So, with visions, we are naturally led to consider a Macbeth-like query: are those visions "real," in the sense that they actually are communication from some force outside of nature? Or are they illusions, brought on by physiological processes in our brain, and ascribed significance when they actually represent nothing more but randomly firing neurons?
Here, they opt for the first answer, and - this is the cool part - they completely take away the possibility of the second answer. Suppose that Gull's visions had been of, I don't know, a secret conversation in the Royal Palace, or a war in Egypt. He and we might take those visions as being "real", but we could still argue for him having invented them. Similarly, if he had had further visions of Jubelah, we would recognize their content as spiritual, but still not be able to say whether they refer to actual spiritual objects or not.
However, they give Gull extremely lucid visions of life in the 20th century. Which is brilliant. Gull doesn't understand what he's seeing - he knows that they're otherworldly, that he's being granted insight into something that his contemporaries cannot see, but has no framework for processing television sets, fax machines, computers, spandex. It's a mystery to him. But not to us. Moore and Campbell place the reader in the position of confirming Gull's visions. Within the context of the work, we know that there's no way Gull could have this knowledge, and no way he could have accurately imagined it, and so we are forced to acknowledge that some supernatural force is at work.
Like I said: Creepy!
END SPOILERS
Messes with my head, but in a very memorable way. From Hell fully deserves its reputation at the top of the comics heap. Any work of its scope and detail would inspire awe on its own, but it builds on top of its densely created world and creates one of the most amazing horror stories that I've read. If that sort of thing appeals to you, read it. If not, keep your distance!
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