And then… well…

Is it just me, or are the annual holiday episodes turning into something to be endured rather than enjoyed? Granted, Moff hasn’t given us anything as stomach-churningly buttock-clenchingly piss poor as “The Next Doctor”, but I feel compelled to qualify that with a “…yet.”

Last year’s “A Christmas Carol” and even moreso this year’s “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe” are plumbing unpleasantly maudlin and mawkish depths.

Actually, “A Christmas Carol” would’ve been okay if it hadn’t had flying sharks — the story wasn’t too bad, and the premise (the one-day-a-year visits) and payoff (confronting old Sardick with his younger, still-innocent self) worked, but the flying shark just made it ridiculous. It wasn’t quite painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa, but it was that kind of awkward fit.

This year’s special completely lost me at the get-go, with the Doctor’s escape from an exploding spaceship, about which more will not be said in the interest of maintaining spoiler-safe commentary. But suffice to say that after that, my taste for the whole episode was completely ruined — it would have taken something special to get my attention back, and something special was not delivered.

Meanwhile, listening to Tom Baker reading ‘The Pyramids of Mars’ on BBC Radio 4 online reminds me of what Doctor Who is all about. The mistake the new series is making is overemphasizing the relationship between the Doctor and his Companions, to the detriment of the premise of the entire series. Certainly that relationship is important, and the companions’ roles have progressed well past the Brigadier’s comment to the Third Doctor that they’re there to “pass you your test tubes and remind you how brilliant you are”, but that’s not what built the show. Doctor Who is science fiction first and foremost, not soap opera. And if they want to make it a SF soap opera (or, to be fairer, SF with a strong emphasis on character development and relationships), they need to take a few pages from Straczynski and Whedon, not from Coronation Street.

Way back in the mists of time, four- and five-year-old me was firmly addicted to one of the earliest animes to make its way over here: a show called ‘Marine Boy’ that no one else seems to remember. It was on just before I had to leave for kindergarten (back then, if you turned 5 before the midpoint of the school year, you could start kindergarten… I guess now you have to be 5 on the first day of classes), and if it had been on later, I would have cheerily skipped school as often as possible to see it. I remember making up new stories — proto-fanfic for the pediatric set.

Well, I recently found the series on line, and watched it again. And while it provided the warmth that only nostalgia relived can do, I gotta admit that it really hasn’t aged all that well. Certainly not aged like a fine wine–although it hasn’t aged as poorly as a fine mayonnaise would have. It was… well, it was a cartoon for kids. It made no pretensions of aiming for an adult audience. It was nice to see again, sure. It was probably even formative to my creative streak.

However, some dumpster-dives into the past turn up unexpected treasures. There was another show back then that I remember watching, that aired in the 1969-1970 season and was cancelled for no really good reason. Five- and six-year-old me was enchanted by the animation, the silliness, the sudden swerves into pure fantasy. It was “My World and Welcome To It“, based loosely on the work of James Thurber. And I recently tracked down a few episodes of it. And forty-*mumble* year old me is even more entranced by the animation, the silliness, and the sudden swerves into pure fantasy.

It’s a pure paean to the joy of the uninhibited imagination, and William Windom’s slightly curmudgeonly Thurber stand-in is absolutely pitch-perfect, whether dealing with his daughter and the death of the family dog or daydreaming his rail commute to NYC into a spy-laden journey on the Orient Express.

Most of all, it’s intelligent, something sorely lacking in this age of “reality” TV (sorry, living on a tropical island competing for a million dollars isn’t part of any reality *I* ever heard of) and celebrity for the sake of celebrity and five hundred channels of focus-grouped, watered-down, committee-approved, completely unwatchable shit.

It demands your attention rather than just filling the air with background noise — if you don’t pay attention, the shifts into and out of Windom’s fantasy life will only leave you confused. It’s a show you put on to watch, and genuinely watch, not just to have something on to fill the room with light and noise while you do other things.

I’ve really taken to radio over the last several years, especially BBC Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra. Why? Because you interact with radio, creatively. They provide the description while you provide the mental image. A really well-done radio production — even a reading, not a full production — is the soundtrack that pushes you to create your own Cinescope movie, all inside your head.

“My World and Welcome To It” is one of the few TV shows that actually delivers visually. It skips back and forth between mundanity and fantasy, and both are often obtruded on by Thurber-inspired animation. It’s also one of the few TV shows that does things that can’t be done on the radio: the visual interplay is just as important as the verbal. A radio program that tried to provide an equivalent word-picture would lose all pacing and become dragged down by its own prose, however well written. So much easier to simply see him talk with his (imagined version of his) wife, she appearing as a huge animated face off the back of their house!

This is a show that genuinely deserves a proper DVD release — far more so than most. This show really is an argument in favor of TV and what it can do.

It started in the party in the parking lot and the Bazaar of the Bizarre, with a nice spiced hot cider spiked with rum and just got better from there. My seat, which looking at the map appeared to be nosebleed and obstructed view, turned out to be excellent — even with the stage with a terrific (and unblocked) view across it.

This was one of the best damn Dead shows I’ve ever seen, period. Even if it’s technically a Furthur show.

Many, *many* moons ago, I wrote a story (unfinished and now completely lost) that involved a Grateful Dead concert going on about 150 years from now, on the theory that as time goes on, so does the band, bringing in new members as needed. The personnel aren’t as important as the experience. And while I would never minimize the talents of any member of the Dead, past or present, I’m starting to think this is actually a possibility. Kadlicek and Chimenti have decades ahead of them; eventually they could be the elder statesment–as Weir and Lesh are now–when it’s time to bring the new generation up to speed.

Speaking of: I was amazed by how many people there were young. As in, too young to have possibly seen a pre-’95 show, unless they were lugged to one by a Deadhead mom and/or dad. This is the other reason my old vision of an eternal Grateful Dead could happen: the fandom is also self-replacing. We are not only everywhere, we are everywhen.

Anyway, the setlist, which included several surprises:

I
Deal
BIODTL
Easy Wind
Black-Throated Wind
Ramble On Rose
High Time
Cumberland Blues
The Mighty Quinn

II
Lost Sailor ->
Saint of Circumstance
You Never Give Me Your Money
He’s Gone ->
Scarlet Begonias ->
Fire on the Mountain
Eyes of the World
Black Peter
The Wheel
Casey Jones

::Touch of Grey

o/` Nothin’ left to do but smile, smile, smile… o/`

I figured, “Hey! I’m staying at the hotel this year! I can lug the theremin along, I’ll have a place to stash everything!” And so I did. Pity I didn’t also lug along its power supply… so poor Sergei sat silent. I suppose I could’ve set it up and whistled while waving my hands at it, but it wouldn’t really have been the same. It would’ve sounded too much better than I normally play.

Now, I can’t say I didn’t know that my amp had a fuse… but it had been in there so long, I had forgotten it had one, which made it problematic when my amp went silent in the middle of the Farewell Jam and I had to figure out what happened. Fortunately, the drummer from Toyboat let me plug in to his amp, so I could raise up a joyful noise. Then another musician whose last name is lost to my sieve-like memory lent me his acoustic — all I recall, unfortunately, is Douglas McC. If you’re reading this and are him, thank you!!

Anyway, I had a great time, and the post-con comedown is all but non-existent this year. And I had the con crud two weeks ago, so I didn’t pick anything up to get over!

It’s still weird to walk into the dealers’ room and not see Juanita at her table, though.

So imagine my surprise while gazing off in the general direction of Orion and had a meteor flash through my field of view! Beautiful golden thing with a delicate smoke trail. It may have been an erratic since it was not coming from the radiant of the Draconids. But it was astonishingly beautiful and exceedingly rare to see one under magnification.

I recommend, in honor of his passing, that you read a book. Online.

It was pre-loaded with a lot of stuff from Project Gutenberg, some of which I’ll be keeping, and some of which I’ve already deleted. The Holmes stuff stays, let there be no doubt about that. And it’ll be neat to have digital editions of our old ‘zine/APA in there as I convert them all slowly to digital format.

Anyway, I was sorting through the files, a lot of which is in the “classic literature” category that has never really appealed to me — Dickens, Austen, Melville, that sort of thing. The stuff they make you read in high school lit classes.

And in there is a translation of Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”.

Now, I’ve never read Dostoevsky, in Russian or English — and my Russian is too far gone now for me to do anything more than clumsily sound out each incomprehensible word. So I opened the file, thinking it monstrously unfair to nuke it unread.

And read the whole thing (it’s not that long to begin with) in one sitting, even though I had a blazing headache.

That’s how classic literature becomes classic literature, isn’t it? It’s so damn readable!

Anyway, I’m still sorting through what to keep and what’s to go, and what my ‘permanent library’ should be. I’m keeping the Conan Doyle, Twain and Carroll and nuking the Dickens, Austen and Melville — everything else, I haven’t decided yet. I think I’m probably keeping The Art of War — I dipped into it and found it intriguing. And then I need to go to Gutenberg and get Jekyll and Hyde, and some ERB.

My dear baroness, I couldn’t agree more.