About 11 months after receiving it as a Christmas present, I finally got around to watching the DVD of Holy Grail. In fact I watched it twice, since there are two different commentary tracks, plus I spent another hour-plus watching all the extras. Of course I've seen the movie a zillion times, but the DVD brought out a few things I hadn't noticed or appreciated before. Having watched so many terrible, terrible movies made with similar or even bigger budgets skewered on MST3K, its all the more impressive to see what the Python folks were able to do with not much experience and not much money.



In the early days of PBS, the Peoria station was the closest one to home and the only thing around showing anything worth watching. Among all the British imports at that time were the Monty Python episodes, which they rationed out one episode a week just like a real show. There was one period when they'd do a whole evening of comedy stuff, starting out with some Laurel and Hardy shorts, then Python and then another contemporaneous "Britcom" like the Goodies, which I haven't seen since. And somewhere along the line they also showed the Holy Grail movie, which I can remember watching on the 9-inch black and white tv in the dining room at the time that was the only other tv in the house, so it had to have been not long after it was made.



The movie turned up fairly often on late night tv on other channels, but then it was always sanitized, missing ends of scenes like what comes after "He must be a king" or "We haven't a chance!" and cutting out the Black Knight scene entirely. I don't remember which version I saw first (I do remember the very first Python episode I ever saw was the one that starts out with the "Black Eagle").



In college there were other people who were Python fans, among them was a friends of Ben's named Scott who had the movie recorded on audio tape (which was all there was in 1981), and we'd listen to that periodically. There were a couple of episodes of the series that I had taped off the tv when I was in high school and then transcribed using Dad's dictophone, such that by the time you'd typed it all up you had it memorized from the constant repetition (although there were certain phrases I couldn't make out at all that remained a mystery until I got the "All the Words" books years later). But all through college the series was readily available on PBS, and the movie turned up here and there too, even at the campus theater once in a while.



Like the series, it's hard to watch objectively now because I've seen it so many times it doesn't provoke the laughter as much as it did. Which is why the audio commentary tracks are so interesting, since you can watch along with five of the Pythons and hear what they remember about making the movie. They actually laugh quite a bit, and during the second scene with the Knights who say Ni they get caught up in it and forget to say anything. There's also a feature where Jones and Palin go back to find some of the locations they used in Scotland. Since we're planning on going to the Glasgow Worldcon in '05, it would be fun to check out a couple of those myself. Doune Castle, the principle location, says that half of their visitors are fans of the movie wanting to check it out.



Gilliam tends to overstate the importance of the subversive element in the movie against cinematic conventions, but he does have a point. I think that was part of its charm, and I'm hardpressed to come up with anything more recent that the younger generation would latch on to in quite the same way. Other than being more aware of cinematography, the movie doesn't really do anything that the series didn't already do, but I suppose doing it in a movie was opening up the subversive element to a broader audience. Maybe the MST3K movie would be another example, but its not the same thing, in that I can't imagine that very many quotes from that have entered the college-age lexicon the way all the Holy Grail quotes did for us, from the obvious ("bring me a shrubbery") to those more useful in general conversation ("I'll just stay here then shall I?"). If you made a list of them all, it would be a sizeable percentage of the whole script.



Cleese maybe has the pithiest comments about how movie comedy in general tends to sacrifice the best comedic takes for the ones that come out the best in some other way, noting that with so many people involved in making a movie everyone has their own specialty that they want to see come across the most. With Holy Grail, there really weren't that many people involved, so that probably helped, but apparently there were still some differences of opinion as to which version of a scene to use or whatever. Although the movie took only six weeks to shoot, it was preceded by over a year of scripting and several months of editing and pre-screenings before the finished version was released, so there really was a tremendous amount of work that went into it.



Most jarring on the DVD is the bonus 23 seconds included in the movie. You're watching the scene in Castle Anthrax that you've seen a million times and suddenly in the middle Carol Cleveland steps out of character, looks at the camera and asks if that was all right, followed by quick cuts of other characters or crowds from the movie telling her to get on with it. It's kind of surreal, and apparently was taken out of the original version at the last minute. There must be plenty more footage that wasn't used that you wonder what happened to it, but its not in this edition. The blessing and curse of DVDs is that they can keep re-releasing the same movie every few years by adding more features (which they've already done with Holy Grail since I got this one), so maybe some will turn up later.



This year I'm asking for Life of Brian and Meaning of Life, both of which I've seen on the big screen and on tv nearly as often as Holy Grail, but I'd like to hear what they have to say about those now. Maybe it will inspire a trip to Tunisia or Yorkshire, but I doubt it.

Herewith is Laura's update on this month's reading group on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which was nearly two weeks ago, but I've been a little slow lately:

Wow - what an evening! We had a pretty big turnout (14 people, all "regulars") and a discussion that didn't want to end even after 9:00. The surprising thing was that only one person disliked this book and yet we had one of the most lively discussions ever. There was a lot of discussion about Lily's character - some liked her, some didn't, some didn't like her but sympathized with her and/or found her to be noble at core. We debated whether her death was intentional or accidental. We compared Wharton to Austen. We discussed Seldon and how he really wasn't a good friend (most of us didn't like him - with emotions ranging from dismissiveness to significant dislike). We talked about Bertha's motivations for working to destroy Lily, including jealousy over her relationship with Seldon, her role as confidante for Bertha's husband, and her success in Europe. We talked about whether Lily really had options along the way and why she made wrong moves along the way (were they obviously wrong at the time or just in hindsight?). It was such a long and full discussion that I can't even begin to capture all of it here!

I wasn't feeling that well and didn't have much to contribute to the conversation anyway, since this book is about half over before it really gets going, but I think once you're finished with it you can really appreciate Wharton's craft and how she is basically perfect in terms of pacing and plotting. But the reading group doesn't talk about that sort of thing, they focus on characters, who's good, who's bad, what this character probably really thought regarding that incident or that character, some of it insightful but much of it extrapolated without specific citations to back it up. But that's okay, its still a fun time, I think in this case it served to denote just how strong and complex a character Lily Bart is.



The point I tried to make was that Lily is a fish out of water, comfortable in the system but not necessarily that comfortable with it, such that she has these occasional bursts of pushing the envelope that would border on naughtiness in a less rigid society but here are grounds for expulsion and disinheritance. I think its how she proves to herself that she has free will, that there is something significant to existing. I first read this book at NU as part of the Middle American Lit class with that Marxist feminist literature professor I can't remember the name of, and of course this was right up her alley (plus Kate Chopin's The Awakening). Having read a lot more of this kind of book (fin de siecle, that is, not feminist) since then, it has trouble rising above the herd not because of Lily and her various mishaps, but because everyone else in the book is kind of forgettable. I'd like to see the movie, though, can't imagine Gillian Anderson in the part.

Two weeks ago today I went to United Fan Con out in Springfield, not only the first time I had been to this convention but my first attendance at any convention that was primarily focused on tv and movie people rather than sf writers and artists. My expectations weren't that high, but I couldn't pass up the chance to see not one or two but three Doctor Who people at once. Considering I've been watching the show for over 20 years, not once had I ever seen any of the performers in person, and they're starting to drop off, so it was now or never.



This convention has been around for awhile and seems to have the hang of how the whole thing works down pretty well, between a combination of a byzantine pricing structure that allows you increasing levels of access to the "stars" the more you pay, and a long list of dos and don'ts (mostly don'ts) that you can't believe need to be spelled out but obviously are based on past experience. Since I've never been to one of these before, I can't compare it to ones that are more commercially run (like that Expo thing that was in Boston for the last couple of years) but the general consensus among people there (and most of the people there obviously go to these things a lot) was that United Fan Con's set up was better organized. For $25 bucks I could show up for the day and see a bunch of people, most of whom I'd never heard of. But you could pay as much as $300 for the entire weekend including a dinner and cabaret and preferential seating and guaranteed autographs of everybody. They mentioned in the program that this year was an experiment in headlining a non-Trek guest, as interest in Trek people seemed to be waning in the last few years, and it seemed to have worked.



At 10 am people were still waking up, and I was just there for the day, not the whole weekend, so I figured I might as well see everybody I could, even if I didn't really know much about the rest of them. Pretty much all of the guests had done these things before and knew the drill and what to expect, with varying levels of success in keeping the audience entertained. The first two guys were Steve Austin, who had a recurring part on Babylon 5, and Scott Schwartz, who was primarily a stuntman and former pro wrestler.







Austin apparently has a standup comedy gig, so his halfhour was devoted as much to that as to answering questions. Since it was so "early", there weren't that many people in the room, but he managed to keep things going. Schwartz resorted to just pointing people and saying "ask me a question", to which one guy responded "Who are you?"







Things got going in earnest whe the Who folks came on. While it was nice to have them all on stage at once because they could play off one another and didn't need to rely so much questions, it wouldn't have been a bad thing to get to see at least Davison or Katy again later by themselves. Matthew Waterhouse, as it turns out, has lived among us in Connecticut for the last five years (no one thought to ask why), and has started being a little more active in things Who-related, having done some DVD commentaries and such. He was by no means an apologist for the show or his time on it, and is probably somewhat baffled by the continued interest in it after all these years.







Katy Manning was hilarious, and sporting an eyepatch, not as a homage to "Inferno" but because of contact problems while in transit from the UK. She comes across as very expansive, constantly "dahling" everyone, jumping up and acting things out, much more like her new Iris Wildthyme character than like Jo Grant. Peter Davison was equally funny, answered a lot of questions about his other series appearances outside DW, and they both were quite gracious in answering questions that I'm sure they'd already answered a million times (what's your favorite story, etc.). One interesting answer from Davison was in response to the question of which was his favorite Big Finish audio that he'd participated in, and he admitted that because most of those are done in only a day or two, he didn't remember them well enough to be able to choose one. Katy of course took umbrage and said, "what about the one with me in it, dahling?" They could've gone on for hours, and I would've stayed for it all.







It was lunchtime already, but next on the bill were two Trek guests, Gary Graham, who's been popping up on Enterprise recently as the Vulcan, Sorok I think his name is, and Alan Ruck, whose only Trek connection is as a captain in the Star Trek Generations movie. These guys were happy to answer questions, but not surprisingly did not possess a deep knowledge of the show. Somebody asked Graham about whether he'd like his character to appear the next time Tupal was in whatever the Vulcan word is for that thing they go through, and Graham had no idea what he was talking about ("I'm paid to hit my marks and say my lines"). Someone finally shouted out "Sex!", but then they thought it was just somebody yelling that out for no reason, and played off that for a few minutes before it was explained to them what that whole Vulcan word thing meant. There was much enlightenment, but that didn't stop either of them or someone in the audience from yelling out "Sex!" again at any point that the conversation lagged or a non sequitur seemed called for.







After lunch and a trip through the dealers room, I sat in on part of Mercedes McNab's session, and as a fairly young actress you have to give her credit for wanting to do these kinds of shows and getting this close to her public, some of the questions were badly phrased ("why was the Fantastic Four movie such a dud?") but none were inappropriate. I guess I've probably seen her on Buffy, but couldn't picture it, and I don't watch Angel, but after seeing her maybe I should.







The headline guy this year was Michael Shanks, one of the stars of Stargate. I confess to have never watched an episode of Stargate prior to this, so I knew nothing about him or the show. In the last couple of weeks I've watched a few episodes and I have to say its pretty good, some fairly well-scripted plotting, a lot of accumulated backstory to sink your teeth into, and some good chemistry amongst the main characters. Shanks was entertaining, told some good stories, none of which I can think of offhand, said he enjoyed giving Richard Dean Anderson grief about the hairstyle he had in MacGyver.



More interesting to me was a panel about the future of Doctor Who, which started out being moderated by a couple of fans who were just regurgitating what they'd read on gallifreyone.com, but fortunately the discussion was soon taken over by some softspoken middle aged anemic-looking English guy who turned out to be Andrew Beech, uberfan, conrunner of Pantopticon, one of the big UK DW conventions, and now cardcarrying employee of BBC Worldwide. He set the record straight that there's absolutely no truth to any rumor about any particulars regarding the new show because the people who are going to make it haven't met each other yet. Who pandemonium has set in throughout Britain, apparently, as a result of the news, both within fandom and in the general public. The weekly Doctor Who pub nights had to be temporarily suspended because so many people started showing up to pitch ideas for scripts and such. Russell Davies had to get an unlisted e-mail address, etc., etc. He was flying back to Britain the next day to help organize some sort of Doctor Who reception for BBC Worldwide that was taking place at the houses of parliament.



The new show can't possibly live up to its advance billing (this is me talking now), but I think there would be general agreement that if they can't make a success of it this time around, it won't be for lack of trying, and maybe that should be the end of it. That was it for me for the day (wasn't much going on after that except the banquet and showing some movies), but it was well worth it.

Been away for a couple of weeks, but this time its partly attributed to the fact that the computer was in pieces around the house while I assembled a new desk for myself. Finally there's some elbow room around the computer (moreso than at work, as a matter of fact, but I'll rant about that some other time). Unfortunately there's now barely any space for anything else in the room, so it'll take a while to get the hang of the new configuration.



Just loaded up the pictures from October, including Chloe's birthday party, a small intimate gathering with 20 or so of her closest friends. The b-list had another 10 names on it, but only one of the original batch of invitees couldn't make it, so the rest lost out. The noise level was comparable to the Concorde taking off, except it lasted for two hours. The McDonalds employee who was officiating the whole thing seemed suspicious when we paid for the party with those new orange twenties. Chloe made a good haul (like she needed more stuff), and now is looking forward to Christmas and getting even more stuff.

This afternoon was the first concert of the season for the Chorale, Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ. It's the only full-length work we've ever done in French in my tenure, and when we did it last in 1991 or so Allen swore we'd never do another piece in French again. But I guess he still kept his word, because we didn't do another one, we did the same one again. The chorus had enough people this time familiar with the work that that part went reasonably well, although I think he worked us harder in '91, and since there really isn't a whole lot of choral singing, you end up going over the same sections a million times in rehearsal.



Unfortunately the orchestra doesn't get the same luxury, and this was definitely a concert that could have benefited from a little extra time with the orchestra beforehand. The orchestration has a lot of layers to it, there's a fair amount of recitative that is always hard to keep together, and Allen sometimes had to stop conducting and just play traffic cop. The cellos lost their way at one point and like to never got caught up. Some spots the timing was ragged between soloists and orchestra, with different parties at fault each time. Allen kept up with everything to an amazing degree, but I think sometimes even he was surpised by which instruments came in when he'd give a particular downbeat. Because he doesn't know this piece inside out like most of the standard rep, I think the performance comes off a little conservative, and definitely a little on the slow side. He did let loose in the men's chorus in the first half, which we sang faster than we'd ever rehearsed, but it all stuck together well enough. The "O mon ame" at the end kept the pitch up a lot better than in '91, and the audience seemed enthusiastic at the end, but its hard to know without hearing the recording what the overall effect really was. The saddest thing was that Sanders was about half full, between the weather and competition from a hundred other events and the fact that this piece doesn't have the warhorse status that it deserves. There are really some great bits and a ton of catchy tunes. I'm tempted to hear the BSO do it in January just for comparison, since they're casting a different person for each solo part, plus of course an orchestra about three times the size of ours. TFC doesn't get to sing in French much, either, so I wouldn't expect there to be much difference there.



This concert by itself isn't enough to pass judgment on the current state of the Chorale and whether it's better or worse than it was before. Certainly the acapella section at the end came together and stayed in tune much easier than it did before, and the French as I say was less of an impediment. In '91 we were still in the era of a lot of baritones doubling tenor in the more exposed sections, so that of couse has improved as well. We even sang this time in a mixed arrangement, where I doubt we did that before. Now it's a few weeks off since I'm not doing the Christmas concert, and then back for Carmina for the February concert. That should really show off the Chorale's strengths, and hopefully there will be a full audience to hear it.

Every third or fourth post here seems to be a eulogy, and this is one of them. I was quite surprised to see in the paper yesterday that Hal Clement had died. He was no spring chicken, of course, but I saw him last at Worldcon in Toronto and he seemed pretty much the same as ever, so whatever ended up doing him in must have happened fairly suddenly.



Clement was the elder statesman of Boston area sf, and a fixture at just about every convention I've ever been to. The first couple years of my con-attending he was always seen with a big old SLR camera around his neck, although I'm not sure what he took pictures of. His slide shows on various astronomical topics were always entertaining, even with his relatively crude hand-drawn or -painted graphics. He seemed intent on using them as forum to provide story ideas for the would-be writers in the audience, although I'm not sure how many would be able to keep up with him. He was the quintessential Campbell author in that he wrote clanky hard sf stories from the get-go, and seemed both unwilling and unable to write about anything else. As a result, his prose is extremely wooden, sometimes in his lesser works nearly unreadable. But if you read one of his better stories you can hear Clement actually saying those words, that was really the way he talked, probably from his decades teaching chemistry at Milton Academy. In the last 25 years or so he'd fallen out of favor, with very little published work of note, but seemed to be going through a late renaissance in the last few years, much like Jack Williamson, riding on the coattails of the resurgent interesting in hard sf. There will always be a subset of sf fans who revel in his type of story, the "my problem and how I solved it" plot, the characters acting strictly as mouthpieces to the science involved, but the workings of whatever astronomical or biological idea he was trying to convey carefully thought out.



When the SF reading group was still going on at the B&N in Braintree, I suggested they bring in Clement as a guest, since he lived the next town over, and they actually did. Unfortunately his only book in print at that time, around 1994 or so, was Fossil, one of his less inspired efforts. He brought along a couple of groupies to help keep the conversation going (there were only about five of us in the group). Unlike a lot of sf authors who can ramble on about anything for hours, Clement was always good for a story, but they were usually very concise and to the point. Any amusing anecdotes clocked in at about 30 seconds, then he'd look up at the guy that ran the group as if to say, "now let's talk about something else". I came up with a few questions, hitting upon his modus operandi that he tends to think of a planet and it's unique ecology first, then build the story around that.



It'll be weird to go to conventions and not see him there, talking about the old days, doing slideshow presentations. He even liked Star Trek conventions, and he apparently entertained attendees there with talks about the real science that Star Trek ignored. Things like exterior shots of the Enterprise whooshing through space with tons of stars flying by. He said at Boskone once, "If you figure the sun is about the size of one of the lights in that chandelier up there, and the earth is about the size of one of the flecks in that ceiling tile a few feet away, then the nearest star is a tennis ball and two golf balls in St. Louis, Missouri!" I think Clement deserves as much credit as can be bestowed on one person for instilling the idea of scientific rigour in good sf. Without him on the local scene, now we have to look around for someone else to assume the mantel of dean of New England science fiction, and who's that going to be, Allen Steele? So long, Hal, thanks for sticking around a while.