Ephemeral Isle

All Fool’s Day

Yesterday was one of those days when the column vanished down the plughole. I’d been to see Master and Commander— The Far Side of the World and had a nice little stack of notes ready to turn into the Wednesday Ephemeral Isle. I was all ready to talk about how much I’d enjoyed the film, how Peter Weir did perfect justice to Patrick O’Brien’s novels, how good it was to see a film that was made for men after a long fallow period of ones that cater to women and perpetual adolescents, how wonderfully it captured the visceral feel of living aboard a Royal Navy warship in the Age of Sail. I was also looking forward to chuntering on about my own experiences at sea and how the sailing fraternity can breathe easier now that I’m ashore. None of that came to pass, however, for the simple reason that I never got a chance to actually write it out properly. For some reason, I dislike using films as the starting off point for a column. I suppose it’s because I tend to approach them like a review and that sort of writing needs more thought and detail than a daily column can afford. I find myself glowering over my notes and chew the end of my metaphorical pen nib as I try to figure out what to include and what to leave out.

This head-pounding act of writing is not helped by the fact that my writing schedule has become more and more catch as catch can of late. My wife’s good luck with her career has meant that she’s already working twelve-hour days, which leaves me with prolonged daddy duties. This time element is getting even more pressing because she is gearing up to start rehearsals of my adaptation of The Reluctant Dragon, which will be going up in Puget Sound area parks this summer (check the new theatre page when it comes up for details! Plug over). That eats up more of her time, lumbers me with the home fires more, and trims my Ephemeral Isle time even more because I still have the final draught of the play to complete by next week. Then there is the joyous matter of the web site needing daily maintenance as auctions end; Amazon listings expire; and people actually buy things so I have to deal with packages, labels, and editing the Shop page. I haven’t even mentioned all the behind the scenes work of putting together new site sections. Whenever my wife asks me if I’ve done something, my reply is almost always, “haven’t had the time.”

So far a mad schedule, I think you will agree. I thought you would. Now mix in the fact that Emma is a remarkably intelligent toddler with very strong wants and opinions, but without sufficient vocabulary to get her point across. Add the fact that she has inherited my night owl genes, so rarely goes to sleep before eleven; is at that age when she becomes very attached to Mama and Daddy and gets very worried if I leave the room for more than a few minutes or even pay to much attention to the laptop; and that she is TEETHING AGAIN! And you get some idea of what my day is like. No sitting at my desk with a quill pen, pile of foolscap, and a bowl of roses before me. It’s note book, recorder, laptop, and pray that I can get to the PC long enough to upload before Emma either decides to rewire the network or whacks Mama in the face with a walking stick while playing Superemma.

That’s a normal day. Yesterday was more the end point of several days of concentrated bad days. Emma had had a minimum of three meltdowns per day for nearly week and I was nearly at my wit’s end. Every time I sat down at the laptop and tried to collect my thoughts, some new disaster would explode and you have not seen disaster until you have run into a 20-month old experiencing her fourth major life trauma of the day. Your sympathy starts to go and you start wondering if you can begin life over as a shepherd in Nepal. By the time Emma had finally got her head down for the night, I was exhausted; my nerves were pretty much shot. I looked at what I’d written and found it to be even more of an incoherent mess than usual. I trimmed, shifted, and rewrote, but by 12:30 it was still crap and crap that I couldn’t figure out how to end. So, that was one for the electronic bin.

It looks as though this sort of thing is going to go on until the first week of May, so until then, I apologise for outages and over-reliance on pictorial features. Things are a little crazy around here.

Friday

2 April 2004

Great Moments in Children's Literature

Mr. Banks knew that Mary Poppins had to move with the times, but he still felt that her umbrella had more charm.

Saturday

3 April 2004

Warning! Politics Ahead!

I don’t normally deal with political comment here at Ephemeral Isle. I like to think of myself as a bit like the squire of the manor, looking out over the hills and dales from the Olympian heights, my pen poised over paper as I compose some bon mot; filled with thoughts about the human condition, yet refraining to share my views on Princes and Potentates with the shepherd tending his flock or the stout yeomen of the village out of a sense of gentlemanly restraint. I’m also a horrendous Tory of such an old school that I believe that the House of Lords should be restricted solely to hereditary peers whose titles date back to before the Restoration, that the country took a calamitous turn when members of parliament were allowed to affirm rather than swear the oath, and that the only reason we fought on the side of the French in two world wars was because the Germans were poaching. And seeing as how I travel in theatrical circles where the political spectrum tends to be Left of Centre, Left, and Far Left, I have found politics to be a tiresome topic that tends toward conversations ending along the lines of “Well, if I cannot bring theology into it, then we’re just pretending to discuss this.” I also am firmly of the mind that there is plenty of room for men of good will to agree to disagree and that just because someone has the ideas of a fathead does not prevent him from being good hearted. This makes it hard for me to develop the right kind of hier stehe ich attitude that a political writer has to have if his columns aren’t going to flounder in a sea of qualifiers. Therefore, even though I have strong views on any of a number of political topics, I’m happier dealing with commenting on the absurdities that they give rise to rather than my opinions.

There is only one exception to this and that is the war. I firmly believe that 11 September 2001 was a turning point in history. I believe that this was a day on which the West, what used to be called Christendom, was brought face to face with evil men who desired nothing less than the destruction of our civilisation and to kill as many Christians, Jews, moderate Muslims, and anyone else who got in the way as possible. The fact that these barbarians are backed by a clutch of nations ruled by maniacs fixated on getting their hands on nuclear weapons only makes things worse. They certainly see this as war to the knife, and if we don’t, then we are in for many, many years of suffering.

Now, I am well aware that even on the war there are two sides to every issue, that there are reasonable grounds for disagreement, and not everyone who has reservations about the Iraq campaign is an “AmeriKKKa is the Terrorist and Blair is a Capitalist Poodle!” button wearer. But this is a war that, for it’s kind, is every bit as deadly as the one with the Nazis or the Communists. I don’t want to see Seattle turned into radioactive ruins, London strewn with gassed corpses, or worry about my daughter catching a nail bomb every time we get on the Monorail. So, I have little truck for any course of action that does not involve a lot of dead terrorists and dictators being winkled out of spider holes.

That is the reason why the news from Spain is so apt an example of what we can expect if we don’t take the terrorists and their sponsors seriously. This morning I read that they found another bomb on the rail lines in Spain. It was the same make and of the same materials as the ones that killed so many people on 11 March and which prompted the newly elected prime minister to surrender to the terrorists and withdraw from the coalition. Fortunately, it was disarmed and no one was hurt, so I allowed myself a moment of grim satisfaction. Here the government elect in Madrid gave in to those murdering bastards and appeasement bought Spain only three weeks before the next bombing.

If that hasn’t given Zapatero the biggest case of buyer’s remorse since Munich, I don’t know what will.

Sunday

4 April 2004

Burning Issues of Our Times Department

If these idiots do not put a sock in this stupid Kirk versus Picard argument I am going to go ballistic.

Monday

5 April 2004

Folding Their Tents and Stealing Off into the Night

I despise change of address forms. I can’t stand the sight of the little bleeders with their smug typeface on their self-satisfied paperboard. Whenever one appears on my breakfast table I treat it like an unwanted letter and poke it away with the butter knife as I try to postpone the inevitable. It’s not that I just dislike the forms themselves, which I do, but it is the fact that change of address forms only come into my life on one occasion: when I am moving.

I hate moving. I suppose its because I spent a good seven years of my life living out of a rucksack and a number more living on a boat. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve pulled up stakes and relocated, but every time I did I became less enchanted with the prospect. Having moved about so much, I have come to the firm conclusion that though I love travel, when it comes to my home I’d be happier with an English country house that had been in my family for generations or a pied a terre in London that I can wear into until it fits like a pair of old shoes than shifting from flat to flat like an urban gypsy.

No such luck, however. Whenever I get used to a place circumstances force me to shift digs again and I begin to envy the days when moving involved little more than balling up my socks and slinging my rucksack on my shoulders. Now that I’m a family man with all the bric-a-brac that that implies, the prospect is singularly uninviting. When I look at Zen, which no longer resembles a computer so much as several processors strung together by enough cables, wires, boxes, and wireless links to make Doctor Frankenstein green, I start crying.

In the heyday of Empire, the London shops that catered to army and colonial officers featured what was known as “campaign furniture.” These were all manner of chairs, dressers, dressing tables, etc. that were designed to fold up for easy transport when Major Caruthers got transferred from Delhi to Cape Town. No need to unpack the dresser. Just have your batsman fold up the legs, slide the lid over the drawers, apply the straps and call P&O to pick it up. These were immensely popular in their day and untold thousands of pieces were built between 1740 and 1920. Why? Because the Age of Empire understood one universal truth: most furniture is NOT PORTABLE! Easy chairs, sofas, armoires, and the lot are not designed to be carted all over the countryside. They are designed to sit where they are. I have a desk, for example, which has been shifted a good eight times. It was a good desk when it was first put together, but it’s such a large thing that it can’t get through a door in one piece and every time it’s moved it has to be disassembled, moved to its new location and reassembled. It is now a very tired, rickety looking thing that has the air of something that has been lightly massaged with a sledgehammer.

Even the stuff that can be shifted in one piece takes on a wan expression after it’s been struggled up and down several narrow flights of stairs in buildings designed by steaming nits who thought that the tenants would spend their lives sitting on lawn furniture and sleeping in hammocks. Everything has to be emptied, wrapped in plastic to keep the cabinet doors from smashing open, and even then you wonder in mute horror whether the screws holding the sections together will hold. Then you get it to the new location, set it up and find that the doors now stick and that it has an alarming wobble that was never in evidence before.

The reason why I’m bringing up this whole litany of woe is that we are moving the flag of the Szondy family to a new location in Seattle. It’s only three miles, but then shifting three miles on the Isle of Lundy puts you smack in the Irish Sea. My wife, who has much more of the nomad about her, is excited by the prospect, but though I can see the necessity of the move, I take a more jaundiced view at the moment. Oh, I shall probably grow wonderfully pleased with being closer to the Sound and will come to love the coffee house nearby and the park, but right now all I can think see are the low ceilings, swapping the gas cooker for electric, the tiny bath, and giving up my view of the canal.

Anyway, the next month is going to be one of those where my life resembles that of a burst mattress, which can't be other than monotonous, what with all that horsehair and all. As my home disintegrates into tea chests and piles of rubbish destined for the jumble sales, I think that I shall decamp for some coffee house with a WiFi connection to put the madness at some length. In the meantime, I’ve got these forms to fill out.

Next: Transferring telephone and cable or My Personal Hell.

Tuesday

6 April 2004

When Consumer Testing Goes Wrong

I think you will agree, Miss Hodgekiss, that Phallio brings a whole new meaning to "User Friendly. "

7 April 2004

Tony Blair Reacts to Immigration Charges

I am shocked, shocked that there are abuses going on here!

Thursday

8 April 2004

Farscape Returning to Television

I saw on the Internet today that they are going to do a four part miniseries to finally finish off the Farscape saga. I cannot imagine where this incredible burst of good sense came from, but I sincerely hope that it continues. It fills me with optimism that the human race is not entirely devoid of rational thought, taste, or a sense of enlightened self-interest.

Farscape was one of those wonderful little gems that you don’t so much find as stumble over. There wasn’t much fanfare for it, nor any buzz that I could recall when it premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel, but from the moment that our hero John Crichton blasted his tiny ship through that wormhole I could tell that this was going to be something special.

The idea was not that original a one for science fiction. Basically, it was Flash Gordon, only instead of being catapulted to the planet Mongo, Crichton was blown to some distant corner of the universe, where he teams up with a rag tag band of fugitives on the run from a crazed military dictatorship and other assorted baddies. Such a premise could have made for a forgettable hour of standard television fare, but Rockne O’Bannon and Henson Associates were able to create a world that wasn’t just alien, which is relatively easy to do, but exotic. It was like something out of the Arabian Nights crossed with Alice in Wonderland and a strong dose of Captain Blood thrown in for seasoning. When you have a bunch characters travelling around aboard a living spaceship being pursued by a guy in a leather fetish outfit with rotating cooling tubes in his head, you have got to admit that things are a little odd. The fact that many of the aliens spoke in a very offhand colloquial English only seemed to accentuate the strangeness of it all rather than fight against it.

O’Bannon was also not afraid of taking chances. He was willing to jump over the cliff that most other producers shy away from. He had one of the regulars betray the others. Not seem to, mind. He really did sell his friends down the river. When Crichton first showed up, his shipmates regarded him sincerely as a low-grade moron and it was an opinion that they held on to for most of the first season. I can’t think of many space adventures that would go down that path. Heck, O’Bannon even killed Crichton off, really killed him, and yet managed to keep him very much alive in a way that completely screwed up his love life. Crichtons, not O’Bannon’s.

What I particularly loved about the show was how they managed to short-circuit that most deadly of late-‘90s television ills: Irony. I cannot count the number of otherwise promising television shows and films that were shot down in flames because of that impossibility of writers to avoid the temptation to wallow in hip, self-aware commentary that cut the premise of every story off at the knees. That’s one of the reasons why I was never a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That and the fact that Sarah Michelle Geller kept getting deep angst and bummed out mixed up. I never knew how to take Buffy. Was it supposed to be horror? A comedy? Adventure? A Romance? A musical variety hour? What? Every time I started to get into a Buffy story someone would make a blasted Scooby Doo joke and the whole thing would be cut off at the knees. This sort of thing can kill any script and I have seen more than one story auger into the ground because the writers felt obliged to include some sort of ironic commentary. Farscape would have been destroyed by the first commercial if that sort of thing had been allowed to run rampant. They managed to avoid this by a very clever manoeuvre; they short-circuited it. The writers made John Crichton into a product of his age; a son of pop culture who was so steeped in popular references that he spouted them like a classical scholar does Cicero. He never made wry, self-referential comments. He was simply trying to express himself in the only way he knew how (“That’s your plan? Wylie Coyote had better plans!”). The advantage of this was that before the audience had a chance to make an ironic crack, Crichton would beat them to it and they could get on with the story.

Farscape came up with so many wonderfully inventive, character-driven stories with production values that bordered on the cinematic and was so successful in its niche that I should have seen it coming that the Sci-Fi Channel would cancel it at its height; and after a cliffhanger season finale at that. There are any number of stories given about how this came about, but they all share in common that it was an incredibly stupid decision and heralded the Sci-Fi Channel changing from a cable offering that swayed my decisions about which part of town to live in to something that I rarely watch any more.

Still, I will at least give the furry-legged executives of the Sci-Fi Channel some credit for ponying up for the miniseries. There are some who say that the time is past for such thing and that the momentum for people to want to watch it has dissipated over the past year or so (the overpriced DVDs haven’t helped any either), but having lived through the dark Irwin Allen days when science fiction series’ were never resolved, it is good to see a fine tale come to a proper ending.