Origami Unicorn

Prince Caspian Update

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe having grossed more than $530 million worldwide in five weeks, Prince Caspian is now tentatively scheduled for a Christmas 2007 release. I bet Walden Media and Disney are sorry they didn't have number two ready to go into production immediately, since the child actors will be growing with every passing million—moment.

The Wild Things Onscreen

Purchased by Warner Brothers for production by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, John Carls—annnnd—Maurice Sendak himself. Universal ran out of chances to renew the options on the screenplay by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers. Jonze will direct the combination of live action and CGI effects.

Philip Jose Farmer

Philip Jose Farmer turned eighty-eight on January twenty-sixth. Farmer's most recent release, a best of collection, was on December 31, 2005. Farmer's official webpage is a sweeping survery of his career and ongoing SF fan activities. And, yes, the Sci-Fi Channel will be showing the Riverworld pilot film yet again soon...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Had he lived so long—and someday people may—today would have been Mozart's two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

In a new biography, Mozart's Women, conductor Jane Glover offers a different take on Mozart, who is traditionally viewed as having been molded by his father, Leopold, who exhibited his son and daughter at the courts of Europe.

The National Public Radio website has music written for some of the important women in his life. One of which is the Presto from Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 358, that he wrote when he was seven or eight—to play with his sister. They were into competative speed playing at the time. Go and listen for two minutes or so...

If you play a keyboard instrument you are now thoroughly intimidated. Relax.
Mozart, for all his genius, had little luck in finding a steady job, something absolutely essential in a time when there were no royalties from records or performances. Many of his best-known pieces were written in futile efforts to woo this or that prospective patron.

The first opera many children encounter is The Magic Flute, which is can be unfortunate, for, although the piece is full of fairy-tale elements, it is musically demanding, and few performances reach the standard the composer expected. Children, who are less liable to pretend that culture is good for them, rapidly tire of a bass with weak lower notes, a shrill soprano, and especially of the fact the whole things is in German. Try Where the Wild Things Are for younger listeners.

For the rest of us, the 1991 Metropolitan Opera performance combines fine singers with staging by David Hockney to produce something that Mozart might have enjoyed or at least hoped he could whip into shape with a few more days' rehearsals.

I am always disappointed the the Queen of the Night is, finally, reduced to her properly humble female status, but Mozart did not live in enlightened times and the Freemasons, whose iconography figures largely in the work, only admit men anyway. Indeed they are rumored to have shown displeasure to the composer for revealing so much of their mysteries.

But that, as well as the tale of the Requiem and Mozart's death, are stories for another time.

2: The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera is now in DVD release, along with a posh website to support it. Welcome though DVDs are, I occasionally wish that they would refrain from showing me how they made movie magic. As it is, curiousity renders me helpless to resist viewing their revelations, but, Movie Magicians, I still think it all may be a mistake...

In 1979 Peter Sellers made a movie called Being There in which he plays a hapless man of low intelligence who is forced out of his sheltered environment into the real world. It contains gems like the moment when Chance the Gardener attempts to remove two thugs from his path by using a television remote control.

Struck by a limousine, his former employer's cast-off but expensive clothes lead to its being assumed he is a wealthy man and his commonplaces are taken for cryptic wisdom. He is accepted into the Halls of Power, a man able to speak directly to the President. His lack of background is assumed to mean his is very powerful indeed—theme from 2001 up and under—and only the doctor attending as his new friend/protector dies is savvy enough to ask if, perchance, Chauncy Gardiner really is a gardner.

At the end of the movie, some outtakes were run under the titles—an unknown practice at the time—and Sellers bitterly objected, feeling it destroyed the world the movie had created. Indeed, he felt it cost him the prize for Best Actor at Cannes that year, which would have been a crown to his career.

Sellers read the book, was captivated by the character, and campaigned for years for the role. It was, as it happened, very nearly his last performance—his heart was failing—and Being There one of the few films in which you can see Sellers acting in a less-than-frenetic role.

But back to the Phantom...

(to be continued)

3: copper and its cousins

Cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels are all part of a developing way of presenting ideas and stories to people, and, as the age of live movies began, so did the age of animation. Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, was also the creator of one the first, if not indeed the first animated films. It is with a certain sense of the fitness of things—they being popular subjects for the medium even today—that this first short film was "Gertie, the Dinosaur."

The story began with a bet between two newspapermen that McCay could not make a dinosaur "live" on film...

Gertie was a member of the now-discredited brontosaurus clan. She was shy, even coy, but—although early animators soon settled for standardized three-fingered hands and pipe-cleaner arms and legs—Gertie was realistic in her form and movements—or at least as much so as the scientific knowledge of the times allowed, plus several touches of whimsy, some of which proved prophetic.

Her models, the brontosaurs, suffered from several problems, one being that the type specimen had the wrong skull assigned to it, so that instead of the correct tapering neck and narrow head Gertie has a thicker neck surmounted by a blocky head. Also scientists of the times believed that heavy brontosaurs spent most of their time in water and that their tails dragged on the ground, so Gertie has these defects. too.

She's a sprintly dino, none the less, who ambles onto the land, eats an entire tree effortlessly, executes a dance on her hind legs on request, and then takes her creator, Winsor McCay, for a ride. This being before movies had sound, the artist toured with his film, interacting with his creation much as does John Hammond when he chats about how dinosaurs where recreated in the opening of Jurassic Park, except McCay appeared in person with the film, rather than being on the film. When the time came to "ride" Gertie, he would walk behind the screen instants before his animated image walked into the projection.

Audiences loved it, and McCay toured long enough that his principal employer, William Randolph Hearst, had to threaten him with unemployment to ensure a sufficient supply of comic strips for his papers. Winsor McCay went on to make many more animated films at a time when the entire scene was redrawn by hand for each frame—"Gertie, the Dinosaur" has over ten thousand drawings and took almost two years to make. These days, they draw the background once, and then do the characters on cells—transparent sheets—and that's when the whole thing isn't done in computers.

(to be continued)

1: The Phantom of the Opera

Monday, January nineth of this week, The Phantom of the Opera had a gala celebrating its becoming the longest running Broadway musical, surpassing the previous record-holder, Cats, by the same author. Andrew Lloyd Webber professed surprise, which was a little hard to believe, given the basic premise of the story, the beauty and the beast, has been well-tested over time.

The sumptous movie website reflects the elaborate staging of the screenplay. Some reviewers and commentators dispute the casting—for the most part the voices are not operatic in training or quality—but they are Andrew Lloyd Webber's choices. He wanted a "rock" voice for the Phantom, rough and male; a "light opera" voice for Christine; a light, bright "musical" voice for the Vicompte.

Experienced opera fans merely have to listen to the vocal ranges of the singers to know the moral state of the characters: The higher and clearer the voice for the sex of the singer, the closer to purity. Which is one of the things that make the duets between the Phantom and Christian exciting. The similarity of Christian and the Viscount's voices also works well, although he seems so intent upon the object of his affections and on producing the correct notes that the Viscount seems, by contrast with the Phantom, stiff.

This is often the fate of virtuous characters.

(to be continued)

1: Philip Pullman and The New Yorker

He wears red socks when he teaches, and does not like either J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, although what is likely to prove to be his great work—the trilogy collectively entitled His Dark Materials is following a course rather simlar to theirs in finding an adult audience. It is also making its way to screen via New Line Cinema, the company that brought us Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

There the resemblance pretty much ends, for where Tolkien and Lewis were devout Christians, Pullman is an avowed aethist, albeit one with a solid Angelican background in both his family and his upbringing. Up and coming on the roster, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, fantasy with its roots in the twentieth century and its crown in the twenty-first.

Pullman was interviewed in the "Dec 26, 2005 & Jan 2, 2006" of The New Yorker, and that will be the starting point of a survey of his life, times, and work.

(to be continued)

2: copper and its cousins

Although "The Yellow Kid"—which lent its name to "yellow journalism"—is sometimes cited as the first comic, it was a single panel with a comment, a form that had been seen before, although not necessarily with continuing imaginary characters. It resembled political cartoons, which had been a mature form for some time, and looked even more like the attention-getting ads that sprang up when printing drawings began less expensive.

Probably the first true comic of lasting quality was Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, even though each page was a self-contained episode most often with a frame of "going to bed" and "waking up." The story did not necessarily advance, although there were continuing sequences in the later strips. In any case, the artwork for the strip was so dramatic that artists "quote" it today, and the entire run is available in reprint.

The premise was simple. A little boy, named 'no one' in Latin, goes to bed each night and dreams. His bed gallops off across the cityscape on its long, rubbery legs, or he finds himself in a surreal kingdom governed by rules he does not understand, and things go from pleasant to sinister before he "wakes" from his nightmare regretting something that happened the night before.

McCay worked on various other strips, the most simlar being Dreams of a Rarebite Fiend, which also involved weird experiences—in this case brought on by indigestion—and the complete, correct title of the strip we call Little Nemo changed as the story moved from publisher to publisher in the newspaper baron conflicts of the early twentieth century.

The strip was heavily merchandised, and the products are highly collectible today, although you will seldom find them on the open market, some—like children's clothing—having been been lost to time, and others—like books—having long since vanished into the fearsome darkness where specialty collectors trade their favorites using secret hand signals that they alone know. Nemo also appeared in animated form, but that is part of another story...

(to be continued)

15: "In a Hole in the Ground..."

Until I did a little research I had no idea how extremely popular Frank R. Stockton was. Some have proclaimed him the first great American voice in fantasy, which seems seems extreme, considering that Mark Twain dabbled in the same waters, although Twain suppressed his great fantastic pessmistic work, The Mysterious Stranger, until after his death. Hawthorn, Poe, and their kin are not considered for the title because their work is firmly rooted on European traditions.

Even today, most people know Stockton's work, although they may not know his name. He is the author of "The Lady, or the Tiger," in which a princess directs her unfaithful beloved to one of two doors in an arena. Behind one is lady, who he must immediately marry. Behind the other is a hungry tiger, for whom he will immediately become dinner. The story stops at this point, leaving the question of which fate the princess has chosen for her former suitor as undecided as that of Schrodinger's Cat.

Naturally people longed to have an authoritative answer to the question, and Stockton always declined to give one, even when the query was put very subtly, as in the case of one hostess. It being the fashion to serve ice cream molded into individual shapes, she had that part of dessert made in two forms—a lady and a tiger. Stockton declined ice cream, much to her chagrin.

"The Griffin and the Minor Canon" opens with the description of a town with the usual number of pleasant people and the usual number of those less so. A very ordinary place, in fact, except for its church, which is adorned with one large sculpture of a griffin over the main door, as well as numerous small ones along with other, more conventionally grotesque, figures cut by the builders.

In the town lived a Minor Canon who does most of the work for the church, including giving the sermons, running the school, and visiting the sick and the poor. He is an exemplary figure, and so not much thought of by the rest of the population, who, at best, take his presence and his works for granted and, at worst, think him a trifle beneath them.

At a great distance away, in the wilderness, lived a Griffin. The very Griffin, in fact, that was the models for the sculptured ones on the church. In time, he comes to hear of the church and its likeness of him, and—never having seen himself, for there was no still water in the wilderness where he lived that might reflect him—he wished to see what he looks like. The Griffin took flight, to the terror and astonishment of those along its way.

(to be continued)