Ray Bradbury: The last of the sci-fi ABCs departs
posted 6-8-2012 - 8:16 pm

 
There is a scene in the middle of The Martian Chronicles wherein a human and a Martian accidentally meet. Each has left his settlement, distracted, and wandered out in search of solitude, quiet, a chance to think. In a strip of Martian desert, past boulders in a narrow place where no one should be, a thin veil separating two realities dissolves, and they suddenly see each other. The thing is, the Martian civilization has been gone for thousands of years. Dead. To the human, the Martian is a ghost of the planet’s past; to the Martian, who is quite alive, the human is a ghost of its future. Surprised, they encounter one another, connect. And marvel.

Whenever I think of The Martian Chronicles, the first thing I remember is that scene: two intelligent beings confronting The Other in the vastness of space. It was breathtaking to me then, and still is. I thought of it again last week when I heard that Ray Bradbury had died.

I grew up reading the ABCs of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Isaac, Ray and Arthur C. I encountered them by accident at a time when I was first being introduced to real science in school, and the space race was on television for everyone to see. It was all of a piece to me then: I watched the Mercury and Gemini launches on television before I got on the bus to school. I read science in class in SRA reading supplements (one of IBM’s projects) whenever I got my classwork or homework done half an hour before everyone else did, which was daily, and ran out of other things to do. In truth, I hurried to finish my own work so that I could read the SRA materials: I’d quickly run out of things to read in the school library, which was geared to babies, I thought (even in first grade, I was way past the appalling Dick and Jane, which I’d concluded was written for idiots).

The Twilight series: Parsing images in the arts
When providing politically correct criticism really doesn’t help
posted 11-19-2011 - 7:45 pm CST

 
I got an e-mail yesterday from the Women’s Media Center. I’m on their list for a reason: they have a program called Progressive Women’s Voices that spends decent money to train women like me to be op-ed writers and opinion shapers and gives them the necessary connections. E-mail from the WMC is one of the very few ways to learn when the next class term will be scheduled so that I can apply. So when I get an e-mail from them, I usually glance at it right away.

This one arrived the very same day that the Twilight film franchise’s latest installment, “Breaking Dawn, Part 1,” debuted at movie theaters nationally. The digital missive came with a link and a provocative headline: “Exclusive: Breaking Bella – When Love Equals Violence.” That raised an eyebrow.

Like many other women, I’ve read the books, and that wasn’t exactly the impression I got from reading them. Yeah, they have some serious flaws, but they’re not dangerous or evil. The premise of that headline struck me as too simple minded and not a little blindly PC, but I reminded myself that headlines can be misleading. So I figured I ought to read the column before drawing conclusions.

Eliot Porter, Big Sur, and iconic images:
At what point does a copy of a famous image become visual plagiarism? Or does it?
posted 6-25-2011 - 6:45 pm

 
There are some images that make such a deep impression on us that they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Often, that persistent image may be of a historical event or where we were and what we saw at that moment. If you’re old enough, you probably remember where you were when you learned that JFK or Martin Luther King was shot, when Nixon resigned, when men walked on the moon, when the twin towers came crashing down in New York, or when the Challenger or Columbia space shuttles exploded. In every one of those instances, I have a specific image of the place that I was in and what my surroundings were like – a Policywonk's-eye view, if you will – and when I recall one of those events, it’s always the same image that comes to my mind’s eye first, unbidden.

An image can also become fixed in the mind because of the meaning it has to you personally. But sometimes, an image sticks with you simply because it so accurately sums up precisely what it represents that it becomes the definitive image for thousands, if not millions or billions, of people.

So it is for me with a photo of the Big Sur coastline by the late Eliot Porter: Mist on Coast, Big Sur, California, September 25, 1975. It is a view of the ragged, stepped coastline iced with layers of fog, looking south, as if pulled out of time, and it has become the definitive image of Big Sur, iconic because it sums up in a way that words fail the very essence of the place. From the very first moment I saw it, I fell in love with that image, both stark and soft, with its power and its subtlety, and with the place it represented. It conveyed meaning in ways that I cannot define and became indelible in my mind. There was something about it that simply pulled at me. It continues to do so even today.

Architecture: the face of a city
In Chicago, everybody has an opinion about which buildings matter
posted 9-17-2010 - 11:25 pm

 
It was inevitable that architecture would matter to me. I am the daughter of an architect (my mother) and the goddaughter of an architect (my mother's best friend). My father and nearly all my uncles were engineers; many of my parents' friends were architects or engineers. I grew up surrounded by art and architecture books: H.W. Janson's History of Art and the remarkable, now out-of-print book series on the Masters of Modern Architecture by publisher George Braziller were my wish books. Out-of-date Sweet's catalogs and spec samples were my playthings. I've been to more architecture lectures and tours than some people have movies.

I prefer Architectural Record (professional) to Architectural Digest (pretentious). I redesign rooms in my head all the time and have a project box full of floor plans and ideas for changing the place where I dwell, if ever I get the funds. And I have lived virtually all my life in Chicago, the city where modern architecture got its start and where the residents take a more than customary interest in buildings both modern and historic, and in how their city looks.

So of course, when Chicago magazine published its list of the top 40 buildings in Chicago, I had to read it. And formed opinions almost immediately, which led to comment. Unlike most people, however, I talk (and think) in paragraphs – so my comments are usually more than the customary few lines. That might bother me if I thought online editors should cater to readers with short attention spans, but I don't. I remain one of those people who still thinks the Internet is there to give you more context and background that you'd get in a newspaper's or magazine's tight news hole, not less. After all, if you decide you don't want that much, you're free to ignore it; but if you do want that much and the writer skimps instead, you're out of luck. Occasionally, it strikes me that there's no reason a longer comment of mine should go to waste by languishing at the end of someone else's article. And it is my comment, so I ought to be able to reproduce it here. Which I've done.

To Jolie, Or Not To Jolie:
The perils of bringing Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta to the screen
posted 8-12-2010 - 12:50 am

 
I love a good mystery. Always have. My affair with Agatha Christie novels began in sixth grade, right around the same time that I discovered Stan Getz records and James Bond films. Christie made Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason look simple and Mickey Spillane look rude and dumb. I favored Hercule Poirot over Miss Marple, but not by much.

It wasn’t long before I discovered Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and British mysteries on public television. It was all downhill from there; I became a mystery reader for life. In time, I ran across crime novelist Patricia Cornwell’s work and became an avid reader of that, too. And a fan of her character Kay Scarpetta, the fictional chief medical examiner of Virginia. It wasn’t hard to identify with her: when I began in journalism, I, too, was the rare woman in a man’s profession and just about as welcome (meaning: not very).

So when it was announced last February that Scarpetta might finally be brought to life on the big screen, naturally, I was interested. Until I learned that Angelina Jolie would probably get the role.