Star Wars Poem

 

Spacecraft

There are a lot of iconic spacecraft. 

The Starship 'Enterprise' and the ''Millennium Falcon'.

The Pan-Am 'Orion' and 'Discovery One' from 2001. 

'Red Dwarf' and the 'Liberator'.

'Nostromo'.

Probably the TARDIS counts too.


But this is, I think, my favourite.

... and we're back!

The Big Bang Visitor Experience Theory

I suppose it's true to say that over the last two years I've become a little addicted to The Big Bang Theory.  I've become a fan.

At its simplest, part of the attraction arises from the fact that most of the leads are physics or engineering geeks.  Or uber geeks. Sheldon et al have huge IQs and problematic social skills.  And you can't help loving them.

It is great that the main characters are interested in string theory, anisotropic universes and astronautics.  They love tech, and they are also into Stars Wars and Trek, Dr Who, comics, costumes and conventions. And they are surrounded by a bunch of other clever scientist people (and Penny).

Of course, as well as all the nerdy stuff, the other half of the show is admittedly more traditional - it's about relationships and love and stuff, and just how metrosexual is Raj? But it does all seem to fit together; we like watching these gawky individuals navigate a world full of other people.  The main characters are outlandish, at various places on the spectrum (of clever-idiocy, if nothing else), but likeable.

But mostly I think I like it because physics is in some way at its heart.

However, thinking about the show recently I realised that it has a significant weakness, and an obvious one.  The gang are keen on costumes and media SF, but they don't appear to read fiction.  They don't talk about Pterry, or China or Iain or Robert A.  When they argue over Star Trek or Babylon 5 they don't say a word about the writers.  Never a mention of The City on the Edge of Forever.  They appear to hold no opinion about Dean R Koontz. 

This may be partly because they still have an audience to connect to - there have to be points of contact which aren't too obscure.  Which is why they talk about Batman and the Flash rather than Rorschach or Dr Manhattan.   But the chief reason is more obvious. 

It's because it's on the telly.

Some time back, a fashion started amongst museums and galleries and their ilk to become more open to the public.  To let us 'behind the scenes' to see what they did with our money, and why they ought to be cherished. 

This resulted in lots of new buildings being designed and built to allow this to happen, and the signature element of many of these new ventures was the glass wall.  Physically transparent, it served as the thinnest possible membrane between the public and the behind-the-scenes experts who researched, conserved and curated the displays.  The Darwin Centre is an obvious example in London, but there are many others.

London Zoo caught this fever too.  I recall going to the newly Biodiversity Centre a few years ago, just after it opened.  An attractive, multi-level triangular building towards the southern corner of the site.  And yes, there were these huge glass walls opening on the keepers' offices, so we could see what they did at work.

I only once, ever, saw anyone doing anything in those rooms.

He was reading a book.

Doubtless a worthy and interesting book, about ants or cephalopods or the care and feeding of giraffes, but it didn't make a compelling visual feast.  There was no crowd of happy visitors clustered around the glass wall, watching him turn the pages.

It just wasn't good telly.

And that, I suspect, is ultimately why Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj don't read SF, don't ever compare notes on the Culture or Discworld or Lundun.  Visually, it just ain't got it.  That is why they'll buy a George Pal Time Machine at auction, but never discuss Wells' original novella.

Having all four of them dress as the Flash is just so much funnier.  But that don't make it true.

Balconies

Balconies, I’ve come to believe, are mostly unnecessary excrescences - fragile add-ons to buildings. Bits of ugly frippery, which are in no way essential to the rest of the structure, they are basically pointless accretions.

Now this, of course, isn’t meant to include the wooden balconies at the Globe; they are an integral part of that building, and fulfil a useful function: that of letting the audience safely see the stage. Nor do I necessarily mean the occasional rococo continental balcony sitting comfortably on a plump white building. They just seem to fit.  Especially overseas.

Also, a flat roof covering part of a house such as a kitchen extension, with a balustrade, is not a balcony; it’s just someone using their roof more efficiently.

To help with further explanations, here is a guide from 'artisiticrail'.

Balconies are classified in to 3 styles Faux, False & True. Faux styles are used to decorate a window and are for ornamentation. A False Balcony has a deck projection of approximately 4" to 6" and are mainly designed and installed to block off an open doorway. True Balconies are designed and installed to be walked on and comprised of (sic) a deck and the railing”

So the main targets of my mild aesthetic distaste are those “True” balconies (according to the above analysis) stuck on to modernist, high-rise buildings. Oh, I admit that there is a possible argument in their favour – that people cooped up in horrible high-rise blocks need a sense of the ‘outside,’ and that balconies can in part provide this. And that this is especially true of residential high-rises.

I can also admit that I have a deep and abiding dislike (alright then, fear) of heights and sheer drops that does nothing to endear balconies to me (and stories like this are distinctly unhelpful).

Also, I fear I am coming across all Howard Roark from The Fountainhead (and also like a famously-wooden Gary Cooper in the famously-poor film of the same). Dynamiting the balconies that had been added to his otherwise clinically modern architecture.

Well sorry, but unlike him I see these balconies as part of, and not opposed to, the modernist aesthetic. I really don’t like modernist architecture much either.

And in any case, if a building requires balconies to provide these outside areas, perhaps it is too big already.  And poorly designed, to boot.

And finally, balconies connect in my mind with the waves - I mean the waving - of the powerful. Kings and Popes, leaders to the led.  I bet they waved from a balcony at some point during the recent Royal Wedding farrago (we didn't watch). So balconies are also symbols of dull, earthly overlordship.

And yet...

And yet I can remember when we lived in a low-rise block, and had a balcony.

I can remember sitting out on that balcony at night, and looking at the sky.

I was 14 or 15, and not terrifically happy at school. And the balcony on our flat became for a while (I have to admit through gritted teeth) something of a personal private space.

It was a council flat – but new, and although small it was OK for us. And the balcony was cramped, but it would take me, a chair and my two and a bit inch refractor.

We were on the first floor, and the balcony looked South towards the Seven Sisters Road, over a featureless, flat, muddy green playing field – and to the right, in the small industrial estate, was the bakery that Mum hated (the Jewish Grodzinski’s, which she insisted on calling 'Grodstinksy’s' because of the perpetual smell of baking bread).  At the time there were a lot of small businesses around that area - once my brother fell through the roof of one  of these while he was out larking about with a gang (resulting in just a busted arm and being grounded, thankfully).

But it was South facing. Which meant in the Winter I could see the Orion nebula (M42), Saturn's rings and Jupiter with his moons. The telescope was just big enough to resolve the rings and hint at one of the divisions, while Jupiter’s Galilean satellites, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, appeared as tiny pinpoint flecks of light. (And looking them up, I’ve just spotted that last year was the 400th anniversary of their discovery. Amazing!).  I never did repeat what Galileo did, and estimate the periods of the moons, nor did I polish my own mirror and build my own relfector.  But Mars, when it was visible, still appeared as the tiniest of red discs in the telescope I did have, and I gazed at that.  And I moon-gazed too, concentrating (like I was told you should) on the terminator to get the most starling view.

I had books on space and spaceflight by Patrick Moore, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, and a cheap star atlas, but mostly I just enjoyed looking at the sky.

In my head this is all connected to the Astronomical Society of Haringey, the moon landings, reading SF (this was all pre-Star Wars, pre-Hitchhiker and pre-Neuromancer, of course) and learning (some) science.  But   it is connected not so much by content, as by a common feeling of astonished awe and pleasure in the numinous (as I wrote earlier this year). And I could look out at all that stuff from our balcony.

I suspect I should reflect upon language, too. I wouln't have said 'numinous'.  Because in all important aspects the numinous is the same as sensawunda.  And the Keats poem is also about sensawunda, (and not only because of the "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken" - although he does help to illustrate it)  - just as Patrick Moore’s 700th episode is, because he too tapped into the numinous in his own gruff, crotchety way.

So I suppose that there are balconies, and balconies…

More Wars

I'm not going to witter on about every crossword I manage to do (honest!) - that would either be too many posts or far too few.

However the 'Star Wars'-themed puzzle from Paul earlier in the week was good fun - if a little easy... (don't say that don't say that!)... once you got the theme.

Reboots

Well. We have had a few reboots of venerable SF series over the last few years. From Dr Who with Christopher Ecclestone to Batman (I mean on film; The Dark Night graphic novel is too old to fit into the timeframe). If you count the prequels, then even that most clunky of franchises, Star Wars, has had a little of the makeover treatment.

And in the last few weeks we have had two more arrive.

Red Dwarf, which disappeared for reasons I don't understand some years back, but which had in any case become more something to watch late at night after the pub than anything akin to event TV (the SF equivalent of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps), has had a new episode air over several days on Dave. Presumably as a taster for Dave repeating all of the series over the next few weeks.

This was all vaguely unsatisfying. The actors had aged, the story in theory should have worked (about the Red Dwarf characters discovering they were fictional - at least in our universe - and with a relatively playful sideswipe to Blade Runner), but I ended up feeling short changed. It wasn't just that the scenes where the main characters met their fans had been somewhat better done in Dr Who, but that they over-egged them. It seemed very, very slow. Also it was more self indulgent than I felt was justified by the material. Rather like the end of the most recent Dr Who series. And I've always felt Blade Runner to be a vastly overrated movie, so that annoyed me a tad also.

And now we have a Star Trek reboot. This is a franchise that you could argue has lived only by periodically refreshing itself. Yet this film is a far more major rewrite of the history of Federation space and time. Without giving away too much of the plot, a Romulan travels back in time and changes Kirk's early life, and with it much of Federation history (the backstory) as we knew it from all the other stories. And by the end, some of the changes that occur in the alternative past/future stay changed.

All of which means that some of the events in the stories from the so-called 'canon' (other films and the various TV series) now cannot happen. They come from a universe that no longer exists because of the events in this story. Which I think is wonderful, but has lead to a little confused handwringing amongst some of the fanbase. This is a far more radical plot development than anything in (what I remember of) Red Dwarf - who would always reestablish the true plotline at the end of each story.

And is it any good? Well, I enjoyed it. Smashing. A real success. Also hugely self-indulgent - much more so than Red Dwarf (especially when watching the crew of the original TV show slowly assembled from a bunch of rookies). But somehow this indulgence is something you, well, you indulge. They get away with it. And with some good jokes too (like the voice-activated computer which doesn't understand Chekov's Russian accent).

This seems like something of a reversal. I can recall, say fifteen years or so ago, arguing that Red Dwarf was so much more fun than the bloated franchise that Star Trek had become because it had more agile plots, could properly use SF tropes and had genuine humour. I think this was probably around the time of Star Trek: Generations.

Oh well.

What I now wonder is whether the Star Trek lot intend to stick with this new timeline, or whether they'll return to the original, seeing this as a sport.