I didn't see any movies in the theatre over the past few weeks. I did enjoy wonderful delicious air-popped popcorn from my old and semi-reliable popper. But I'm psyched for some of the offerings soon to be offered. It will be interesting to watch The Lord of the Rings to see how Gandalf is played by James Gandalfini (who else?) and how the producers try to pretend there are actually important female characters in the trilogy. Ocean's 11, with the always unforcedly cool George Clooney, looks like a lot of fun, but I missed the first ten in the series so I'm not sure I'll get it. (I haven't even seen the original, which is too bad, since I love the Rat Pack, especially Jerry Lewis. How did the half-dozen guys in the Rat Pack cover twice that many roles? This new version seems to resort to a nepotizing and deputizing a lot of not-very-talented relatives of big stars.) And I've heard that Robert Sean Leonard does a good job in the lead role in The Affair of the Necklace. Oh, that's Hilary Swank? I so often confuse them; it's those cheekbones.

Oh, here's a question. In Monsters, Inc., the Abominable Snowman looks just like the character of the same name in the recent straight-to-video Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys. Was this plagiarism? An amazing coincidence? Duly-paid borrowing, or homage to an unimprovable idea? Product of the same people working on both films (though for different companies?), or an image or archetype resident in the culture, Prof. Dundes? Deliberate reference that we were supposed to get, or only get if we were cool enough? Cause? Correlation? Cause? Symbolic intertextual borrowing (for what it reminds you of in the parallel universe) or aesthetic borrowing (for what it is in the real one?) Correlation? Causelation? Corrause? If you know, please tell me!

Actually, now that I think of it, I did see something in the theater recently; it was while I was preparing the last issue but after my personal "filing deadline" so it sort of fell into the cracks. It's called The American Astronaut and it's hard to describe. It's a sort of science fiction western retro musical, Buck Rogers meets Roy Rogers. I had the feeling that to really appreciate it, you had to be familiar with the music of a band called The Billy Nayer Show, whose frontman, Cory McAbee, directed and stars in the movie, or have seen all the previous episodes in a series (the same feeling you get when watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai), or just be cooler than I am. To excuse the musical set pieces, there is a sort of a plot, which involves the adventures of a spaceship captain executing a series of deals that take him from a bar on the asteroid Ceres, to the mines of Jupiter, to the women-only glades of Venus, while pursued by his evil nemesis who wants to be wished happy birthday. Some of the songs are good and not just weird, and many of the black-and-white images are intriguing and beautiful and not just strange. And it's neat to walk out of the last show of the night of a hallucinatory movie like that into a theater lobby bare of people except the few who watched it with you and the ushers closing the concession stand, then out onto a empty Nob Hill street and walk home under a sky made mysterious by both stars and fog. For a matinee, it might not have been as good. No idea what it would be like on video.

I put these in a slightly different category because I saw them on cable, not on video. What's the difference? In the theater, you watch the movie at the pace "they" want you to. The same with broadcast. (Unless you have TiVo. And the "they" in the cinema is different from the "they" on TV. Though in both cases, both the artistic direction of the film and the commercial producers and distributors have input, in the theater, the former has somewhat more say [am I hopelessly naive?] and on TV the latter has almost total control, except with a few directors.) With video, you can stop and start, when you like, for instance, when the action or drama gets too intense. Now, maybe these are just the moments when the commercial interruptions occur on TV, but the networks, if they are considering the viewers' desires at all (rather than their advertisers'), have to average everyone's together, with no idea what any individual's might be. But then, AUTEURS would maintain that the viewer has no right to pause a movie when he or she feels overwhelmed by it, that the role of film often enough is in fact TO overwhelm. And then there are those of us who recognize that any work of art, like any communication, is a negotiation between the sender/author and the recipient, that as the Marcel Duchamp quote says on the site of the Sundance Film Festival (to which Beth and I hope to go, though this does not, as far as I know, require endorsing any philosophical stances they may take), "It's the viewers who make the pictures." But then, I would like to give the artist the chance to have the effect on me that he or she is trying to. So I always wonder if it's not the smaller screen or duller sound or the lack of encompassing attention enforcement that really differentiates the cinematic and the video experiences, but the lack of continuity. But we don't read books all at one sitting, except for those "I couldn't put it down" thrillers or children's stories. Again, it's all a matter of what the author/artist expects, and what he or she can REASONABLY expect from the experiencer, which can only be determined by the Invisible Hand of the marketplace in which viewers do not so much offer money, though that is a factor, as "pay attention" and "pay heed". Which you, Beloved Readers, are probably becoming less willing to do at this moment...(But hey, wouldn't it be cool to do a series of "economic theory horror films", such as The Invisible Hand, The Malthusian Spectre, and The Spectre Haunting Europe?)

So I watched these two holiday classics of the 1940's, which I had, believe it or not, never seen before. (Must be that I never celebrated that holiday?) I actually missed large chunks of Miracle, but saw enough, especially the trial at the end, to get the point. It was interesting to follow the legal argument, that conceding that there is A Santa Claus does not mean the accused Kriss Kringle was THE Santa Klaus. (The real Santa Claus is my high school homeroom teacher, Mr. J.P. Mullin.) I liked the idea of the Postal Service saving the day, and of the judge being under strong political pressure, and the revelation that our entire economy is based on a lie. (It's just another example of the way we can't look too closely at life or we'll see how meaningless it is and not go on.) But how was he going to walk at the end without his cane?

As for Wonderful Life, I'm always big on alternate universe stories. This one reminds me of how I was considering discontinuing STOLERN MOMENTS a few months ago, but then this angel came to me and showed me what the world would look like without it, how much better organized but boring it would be, and when I got back to this universe there was all this MONEY sent in by all the PEOPLE whose LIVES I had IMPROVED through STOLERN MOMENTS, including lots and lots of people I had never even met but to whom my known readers had recommended STOLERN MOMENTS! I went running through my apartment shouting, "It's a wonderful site, Beth!" And I said, "Every time a CHURCHbell rings, anOTHER angel gets his wings", because the version they use in the movie DOESN'T SCAN!

Now, questions. Is it generally established that Bert and Ernie, the policeman and the taxi-driver in this film, were the source of the names of the Sesame Street characters? I guess that in the pre-ADA era, it was typical that this movie used disability and wheelchairs to indicate an evil nature, but was it really allowed to make left-wing condemnations of rich people like Mr. Potter? Was it condemned by redbaiters a few years later? (But then, where did George Bailey get the money for Bailey Park?) And what about depicting the voice of God -- wasn't that who was narrating the story to the angel? Couldn't this movie have been shorter? (I kept looking at my watch as it dragged on and on, thinking, those hard-boiled studio heads didn't let self-indulgent directors make three-hour movies in 1946, did they?) And did Jimmy Stewart really talk as if he had a mouthful of hot mashed potatoes, or did he carefully cultivate that? And why can't it snow like that in San Francisco, just once a year?

And then, a few nights later, they had -- OK, just once, I'll say the whole name -- Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace. I only caught the second half, from the rather neat scene in Parliament on, though I had seen parts of the first hour before. Can one voice a complaint about this film that hasn't been aired already? The dialogue was idiotic. The "comic relief", the dancing reptilian Gungans, was insulting to African-Americans and the intelligence of anyone above the age of four. The acting was awful. What was going on with Queen Amidala's accent? (Maureen O'Hara adequately masked her brogue, and Donna Reed her Iowan, though they might not be as facially flawless as Natalie Portman.) Did she only talk like a robot when she was really her stand-in? And the kid, Dennis the Phantom Menace, hey Mr. Wilson, I just blew up your spaceship, was worse than either Natalie Wood or Karolyn Grimes. I never understand how child actors get their start, since most of them can't act and aren't particularly remarkable looking either. It must be a matter of being the offspring of established actors or pushy parents. But once they start, they build up all this momentum and become unstoppable, using their "experience" to get part after part, until they collapse into alcohol or security guarding. The retro art direction looked cool, but are you really going to wear a leather helmet in a spaceship? Here's what really bugs me: little boy Anakin destroys the orbiting robot control ship by flying inside it in his little fighter and blowing up its central power supply, causing a chain reaction that explodes the entire vessel. Now, if he then became Darth Vader, didn't he remember his previous exploit when the Rebels were attacking the Death Star in Episode IV (that's the original Star Wars) and think, uh oh, maybe they're trying to fly inside and blow up our main power supply? Or was it supposed to be some kind of trap? Also, the former beauty of Yoda was that he didn't talk too much. He just DID stuff like lifting X-wing fighters out of swamps. In this, all he did was talk, and so you noticed that what he was saying was stupid and that he sounded just like that other character voiced by Frank Oz, the Muppet Grover. The obligatory light saber duel was the best yet, but the fact that two Jedi couldn't defeat one Sith Lord must say something about the training methods of the respective sides. This is one of those movies, like Dune, to be watched for the visuals alone, with sound, and the brain, turned off.

Theme number one: humans reach for outer space, despite obstacles. Possibly inspired by watching The American Astronaut or The Phantom Menace? In October Sky, Donnie Darko himself (OK, Jake Gyllenhaal, with one of those official boys' haircuts), plays another alliterator, Homer Hickham, the West Virginia coal country kid who, with the help of his friends (including the Sherminator from American Pie), his schoolteacher (Laura Dern -- of what subject, it wasn't quite clear -- why couldn't he have had Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle again?), and various guys at the mine, built the rockets that won the 1958 National Science Fair and showed a thing or two to the Russkis with their Sputnik (is there no one in the country who understands that it's "spoot-neek"?) about good old American know-how. (As provided, as Tom Lehrer put it, by good old Americans like Dr. Werner Von Braun. Who shows up in this film as the idol of young Homer and addressee of his fan letters. "Dear turncoat war criminal...") Chris Cooper, who seems to have aged a lot and become very conventional since his unconventional performance in the unconventional Lone Star, plays Homer's dad, who is too busy managing the mine and cheering on Homer's football star older brother to give any positive attention to Homer (until he himself gets injured while heroically rescuing another miner, and Homer quits school and rocketry to dig coal. He respects Homer for that, but Homer still desperately wants to finish high school and go to college and build rockets and compose epic poems and eat donuts. Working in a coal mine looked like the very standard of awfulness, except that you get to wear those cool helmets with lights on them.) At least he's not as mean and psycho to his dark-haired teenager as he was in American Beauty, but why couldn't he be as nice as in Great Expectations?

Anyway, I'm glad that the movie is based on the true story of NASA Engineer Homer Hickham, Jr., as told in his memoir "Rocket Boys" (why didn't they keep that title? only a little of the movie actualy takes place in October) because otherwise it would have been so unbelievably sappy I never could have believed it. There's an African-American worker who is treated with no sign of discrimination. The principal, like Dad, thinks Homer and co. are wasting time and starting forest fires until he's won over with a physics proof and becomes a big rocket booster. There's even a snobby girl who won't give the admiring Homer the time of day and a nice girl who likes him even when he ignores her, but she doesn't end up doing much in the movie. Maybe Homer married her eventually so they had to pretend she was important even back then. In the end, everyone comes out and cheers for the Rocket Boys, except for Laura Dern, who can see the launch from the hospital bed where she is suddenly and beautifully dying of cancer. Even Dad shows up, leading to teary reconciliation! I can't dislike this movie because of its cast and apparent veracity, but it's so sappy that I had to keep averting my weeping eyes until Beth slapped me and made me stop. Call it "The Right Fluff".

Jodie Foster is an astronomer who wears glasses because she's searching for her lost Contact. Her last name is Arroway, which seems to describe her very pointy nose. Man, she must really be holding it to the grindstone. But that's Jodie Foster for you. Her character has the same backstory as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (she was orphaned as a child when her beloved father died), and even the same accent, which is odd considering that she's from Illinois and middle class. Anyway, Arroway is scanning the sky with radio telescopes trying to pick up alien signals, a pursuit which everyone outside the delightfully nerdy few members of her team consider useless. Until she actually finds one coming from the star Vega in response to our TV broadcasts that have gone out into space, at which point everyone is trying to control her work either in the interests of "national security" or their own careers. But, like the Rocket Boys, she never gives up, and eventually, despite not believing in God and thus not being fit to represent the 95% of earthlings who do, gets to ride this funky looking machine built from plans sent by the extraterrestrial intelligence (at first I thought it was a sort of rotisserie, but the aliens are Vegans) through tunnels in space (or was she in a coal mine too?) to see a simulation of her Dad on a simulation of a beach and reconcile with him. (The aliens considerately considered that appearing as they really were would freak her out too much.) When she gets back, it appears her spacecraft has malfunctioned (she should have had the Rocket Boys build it) and she's only been gone an instant, and the electronics she wore on her head didn't work, so the officials don't believe her. They accuse her of being either a pawn or a part of a scam perpetrated by the dying superbillionaire who funded her researches out of possibly ulterior motives. But the masses turn her into a heroine and saint, and she knows what's true and important.

See, this movie is about Jodie wrestling with Big Issues like science versus faith, as she wrestles with Big Studs like Matthew McConaughey or however he spells it. He's the charming but untrustworthily doubly-surnamed Palmer Joss, a seminary dropout and author of a popular book on how science is taking the meaning out of life. Now, I was glad to see a movie with a message on this subject, but it did not come through as clearly as the aliens' transmission. I've spent far more time than either Tim Walters or I would really like to admit arguing about whether the scientific outlook is better than the religious one. The argument usually runs like this: religion is based on faith, science on proof. Religion is more complicated because it requires a supreme being, another layer of administration; science is simpler because it dispenses with all that. Often, and in this film too, "Occam's Razor" will be brought up, the idea of an 14th-century churchman that in science, Entia non multiplicanda, that if there are two equally good explanations for a phenomenon, go with the simplest. Now, of course, there was no experimental science in William of Occam's day, only theology and philosophy. But let's try to apply the principle to science anyway.

First of all, if two explanations for a phenomenon seem equally good, it's because we haven't done enough precise observations to falsify one of them. For instance, the geocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe worked well enough until errors built up and instruments were good enough to measure them, and Newtonian mechanics works as well as relativity at low velocities. And whether a theory seems "simple" or not is dependent on how well it accords with the assumptions we've already made, which may or may not be correct. Science can't prove that science is true any more than any other formal system can prove itself, as Gödel showed. Science depends on assumptions, e.g., that things in the future will be as they have been (despite numerous cases in which they haven't), and that we can trust the evidence of our senses and instruments (despite so many cases in which we clearly cannot.) So these assumptions are just as much based on faith, on something unprovable, on an inexplicable feeling based only on conditioning or some powerful experience, as an any spiritual belief. Now, the movie makes this point, with the only proof Arroway being able to give for her experience being her personal certainty, paralleling the explanation Joss gives for his religious faith. But the point is somewhat blunted. And I wonder if Carl Sagan's original book had a very different slant.

Another argument is that science is more successful than religion at predicting what is going to happen in the world, curing disease, building bridges, etc. Possibly. But maybe religion doesn't care about such things. And science has absolutely nothing to say about what happens when you die, which is understandably a big worry to a lot of people. As to whether science takes the meaning out of life, physicist Steven Weinberg is famous for his statement that "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." But then, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us. The universe's consituents -- not just in the sense of "component", but in that of "the people who elected you, whom you have to please" -- are elementary particles, not living beings. The universe is completely fair -- to atoms.

I shouldn't be too mean to this movie. Jodie looks very very pretty with her perfect bone structure and nice clothes and even got to crack through her icy seriousness into a smile on occasion. The carnival that breaks out at the communications site, with alien worshippers and Elvis impersonators, seems like something I would have scripted. The spectacular domino-effect collapse of the first huge interstellar transporter machine due to a small terrorist bomb reminded me painfully of the way an entire web page can load and run haywiredly because of one missing angle bracket. The space-tunnel trip sequence is trippy enough, though not at all in a class with that of 2001 or one of Beth's Flash videos. James Woods and Tom Skerritt are adequate White Male Jerks. Jena Malone, not TOO terrible a child actor, is the Donnie Darko vet in this one. Rob Lowe shows up briefly and perfectly cast as a preternaturally boyish looking Christian organization leader with the initials RR, Bill Clinton has a number of cameos as the president of a large North American country, and lots of otherwise respectable journalists play themselves. (Isn't that terrible, for supposedly trustworthy bringers of news to portray characters only based on them?) Angela Bassett plays a highly effective Presidential assistant (at first I thought she was in charge -- wouldn't that have been great?) And William Fichtner, who usually plays lean, mean, military and police types, does a nice job as Arroway's gentle visually impaired, but aurally and olfactorily hypersensitive colleague. In sum, not a bad film, certainly better than First Contact, but not as weighty as it thought it was. Call it "The Light Stuff."

I kept expecting a David Bowie song on the soundtrack of Starman - excuse me, John Carpenter's Starman -- my god, how the hell does he pull off this possessive name before the title stuff for every procuction? This 1984 film is a lot like Contact. The aliens hear about us from our outgoing messages (though in this case it's not our TV noise, but the "Sounds of Earth" disc sent on Voyager 2, with greetings in lots of languages and songs like "Satisfaction".) But instead of sending us directions on how to reach them, they actually send a spaceship, which we promptly shoot down. It crashes in rural Wisconsin, right near the house of Karen Allen! Yes, the woman who helped make Raiders of the Lost Ark the greatest film ever shot! She's still mourning her husband, recently dead in an accident, and in order not to freak her out, the spaceship pilot zoops himself into an instant clone of the deceased (genetic blueprint courtesy of hairs in a scrapbook.). He morphs from a baby into a fully formed and muscled Jeff Bridges -- call it "The Tight Buff". He has these little glass spheres that give him super powers (like the ability to walk through fire unscathed, resurrect the dead, and make Vegas slot machines hit the jackpot every time), but he speaks little English and that with a robotic (or developmentally disabled) intonation, and he doesn't really have the hang of most other aspects of human behavior. Still, he persuades Allen that she has to drive him to Arizona or he'll die. Actually, he forces her to. But she comes to like him more and more (his resemblance to her dead husband certainly helps) and abets him in avoiding the police and military dragnet thrown in their path by the evil National Security Adviser (are they always bad? it is because they're neither elected nor confirmed by Congress but have so much power?) and the gee-whiz nerd scientist played by Charles Martin Smith. (Hmm. Smith's character works for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, like Ellie Arroway, and is on loan from Cornell. Any guesses as to who he's supposed to be?) Smith is actually a good guy; when he finds out his boss just wants to blow the alien away, he facilitates his escape. Yay. He's good in The Untouchables too.

Meanwhile, the alien is a also a scientist, and studying all the characteristics of those primitive-yet-amazingly-resilient humans, including -- reproduction! Yes! Bridges and Allen do it, and afterwards he has that same dopey satisfied grin he wore after losing his virginity with Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show, and he tells her that even though she was previously medically infertile, she's going to have a child, which will have all his superior knowledge, too! In the end, he learns what is true and important ("Define 'love'") and gets to Arizona and gets picked up by his alien buddies. He'd better not be gloating to them about scoring with Earth chicks.

Not too much to pick at in this one; it was what it was, with all the obvious Jesus symbolism. Beth kept wondering why Bridges kept wearing the same readily identifiable red shirt the whole time thousands of people were looking for him. It occurred to me that if the aliens can father children in this movie, maybe they did so in Contact as well, and that might explain Jodie Foster's two offspring better than my alternative theories, parthenogenesis or cloning again. Though that lab in Massachusetts has been able to do it...

Another movie in which a alien flies to a very different world and learns about the life and sexual practices there, but in a wicked frightening way, is The Wicker Man. Edward Woodward plays a straight-arrow British police officer sent to investigate the disappearance of a girl on an island off the Scottish coast. There he finds the inhabitants frustrating his inquiries and following a pagan religion that involves a lot of singing, dancing, running around naked, and, he begins to suspect, human sacrifice. This makes Woodward wicked angry, because he is not just a law-enforcement officer but a religious Christian. Which is exactly why he's been brought to the island...(Odd that by Breaker Morant, only a few years later, Woodward was refusing the Last Rites and professing himself a pagan.) Christopher Lee is wicked charming and spooky, as always, as the Lord of the island, whose grandfather introduced the cultivation of the specialty fruits for which it is famous, as well as the return to the old religion (which he might really have believed, or might have found a convenient way of keeping the people in line.) The ending is wicked...wicked. Now, I don't know if pagans are really like this. There certainly are plenty of them around here in Bayarea; I walk past one of their centers almost daily, and I know some personally. They seem nice enough, and since they ARE in fact spiritual they are better off than Jodie Foster. I just hope they're not really as presented in this movie. At least with the human sacrifice. The sex and nudity I have no problem with.

Considering the general theme I've been developing, you may think that Starstruck is another alien visitation film, or maybe an Armageddon or Deep Impact disaster epic. It isn't! Instead, it's an early (1982) Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, High Tide, Oscar and Lucinda [well, that wasn't so great], the upcoming Charlotte Gray) work, a new wave rock musical! It's about a young woman who works at her family's pub in Sydney, Australia, and years to be a singing star fronting her boyfriend's band, and her fourteen-year old male cousin who'll do anything, attempt the most improbable schemes, to help her succeed. You won't recognize any of the people in it because they never went on to much except maybe Down Under soap operas, but there are great early-80's costumes, great early-80's hair, and great early-80's music and dancing! Anyone have the soundtrack? Thanks so much to Laura Deal for tipping me off to this!

I was bored one evening, and had forgotten to rent anything, so I looked over at my small personal collection for something I hadn't seen in a while, and noticed, all but forgotten on the end of the shelf, the classic Video Head Cleaner. Somewhere between David Cronenberg's Videodrome, the Tim Robbins/John Cusack comedy Tapeheads, the Schwarzeneggar shootemup Eraser, The Professional with Jean Reno, and Innerspace, it's the story of an ordinary guy who finds he can miniaturize himself to creep into people's VCRs with a Q-tip that's bigger than he is and give them better pictures. The cast are all members of the famous Uruguayan comedy troupe, Monte Video, and their motto, in an interesting reversal from that of Traffic, is "Everyone gets away clean." Head out and get it today.

Let's see, what does B. Monkey have to do with any other movies I watched this week? Its star, Asia Argento, who is from neither Asia nor Argentina but Italy, is the daughter of that country's equivalent of John Carpenter in the horror department. (I don't know if he prefixes "Dario Argento's" to all his titles.) Part of it is filmed out in the English countryside that looks a little like The Wicker Man. I guess the aliens think of us as monkeys, right? That's the best I can do. This is the dark, moody story of a gorgeous young armed robber/graffiti artist named Beatrice (she likes to pronounce it with four syllables, Italian style), known for her ability to clamber into buildings. She lives in a sort of family with her dark, moody partner in crime Bruno (Jonathan Rhys-Myers) and their dark, moody older fence Paul (Rupert Everett) who is also Bruno's lover. But worn out with Paul and Bruno's fighting, and her life of crime, she decides to go straight, and gets a nice job and a nice boyfriend, gentle primary school teacher and hospital night deejay Alan (Jared Harris, Richard's son.) But she can't quite seem to escape her past...Argento shows off her nice tattoos (though cool people keep their best tattoos hidden) and her nice body and generally pouts and purses her lips like Winona Ryder. The same director also brought such varied fare as the Richard Burton/John Hurt 1984(one of the few movies I own), White Mischief, and Il Postino, so this would be a change of pace if he had a pace. The action isn't too boring. The wrapper copy compares its plot and look to La Femme Nikita; I'd say it's infinitely better than the American version (Point of No Return) but nowhere near the French original. In other words, it's not C. or D. Monkey, but it's not quite A. Maybe B+.

Wait, I found a trend: movies whose initials are B M! The Brothers McMullen is the first picture by Edward Burns, and it's one of those great filmed-in-your-parents-attic-with-the-money-they-lent-you-to-fix-your-car stories. So there are these three varyingly Catholic Irish American brothers, one married, another playing the field, another graduating from college and his college relationship, and they walk into a bar. No. They meet various women and have affairs with them and then spend a lot of time talking to each other about them as they drink beer at home. Burns's character is annoying, doubly so because one suspects he's supposed to be written to show what a cool guy Burns himself is; the other two guys are just uninteresting. The women have a lot more going for them: we have the attractive wife on whom the oldest brother inexplicably cheats, the drop-dead gorgeous actress (Maxine Bahns) for whom Burns falls onscreen (as in real life), and the youngest brother's car-fixing high school classmate whom he rediscovers when he moves home from the dorm. It's not enough to make me see She's the One or Sidewalks of New York, Burns' latest. But for a while I had resolved always to dress like the main character in the last movie I had seen, the way European armies of centuries past would adopt the uniform of whichever country had won the last major war, so I was sporting Burns' turtlenecks and sportsjackets. Otherwise, the movie didn't affect me much; I soon found new sartorial guidance.

I'm managing to continue my readings on big concepts in history and science, with "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy, and "The Bit and the Pendulum", by Tom Siegfried, only I can't write about them yet because the Kennedy book is really long so I haven't finished either one and my dog ate my book report.

And because I was reading comic books instead.

Guess who's not going to graduate school!

In 1986, Frank Miller almost singlehandedly revived the flagging fortunes of DC Comics and in fact the entire medium of superhero comic books with his four part "graphic novel", "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns". This was not the silly Caped Crusader of Adam West, but an aging, slowing mortal who hasn't warn his cowl since his sidekick Robin was killed ten years before. And this was not a cartoon Gotham City, but a nightmare dystopia dominated by bloodthirsty gangs and the bleeding-heart doctors and lawyers who love them and let all the supervillains Batman sacrificed so much to defeat back onto the streets. Miller's exaggerated drawing style, his figures either stocky and hulking or stalkily skinny, with dramatic full-page spreads and cinematic framings, reinforced the message of foreboding and revolutionized comics technique, redefined a classic character, and largely inspired the look of the 1989 Batman movie. He put new spins on old characters, using their familiarity to portray a different sort of hero/villain confrontation where it was hard to tell which was which. One demigod who's taken down a peg is Superman.

I'd be interested to know why Miller has chosen to do a sequel now, but I'm certainly not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I recently bought the first of three issues in the new series, "The Dark Knight Strikes Again" (I guess they are following the titling pattern of the "Pink Panther" films?) It was $7.95 -- anyone remember comics for a quarter? -- but it's eighty pages of beautiful iridescence (the colorist, Lynn Varley, truly deserves the unusual amount of billing she gets), and it's great. Once again, things have gone to hell, and once again, it's up to Batman to determine who's responsible and make him pay. The very idea of superheroes, people of earthshaking abilities who are willing to risk their lives to insure the safety of us little people, fascistic as might ultimately be, brings tears to my eyes. I can't wait for the next issue to cry some more.

For years, I've heard people talk about this book "Goodnight Moon" as the acme of literature for toddlers, but I had grown up deprived of it, and worse, unaware of what I was missing. So when I noticed it on a display at Barnes and Noble, I thought, wow, finally, I can find out what all the fuss is about. But what's all the fuss about? It takes thirty seconds to read. The illustrations aren't terribly creative. The "goodnight, moon" part is in the middle. There's no plot. I don't know; maybe if I had experienced it as a child, I'd have appreciated it then and still appreciate it now. Maybe I'd have come out a completely different person. (Well, I am a pretty different person, I like to think.) But give me "Green Eggs and Ham" or "Go Dog Go!" any bedtime of the week, and twice on Sundays.

So, you may have heard that former Beatle George Harrison died. It's always sad when someone dies of cancer in his 50's. Now, I was never a huge Beatles fan; they split up when I was two, though certainly their music was still all over the AM radio when I was growing up in the 70's, and my sister had most of their albums. But though I generally can tell pre-Sgt. Pepper stuff from post-, I don't know what's on the White Album and what's on "Revolver" and what's on "Abbey Road". My favorite Beatles are Pete Best, the drummer who didn't make it, whose tragic story has meaning for us all, and the drummer who did make it, Ringo Starr, who made just as much money as the others while sitting down and using a fake name, things I like doing. And I can't say that I'm actually that fond of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "My Sweet Lord", or "Here Comes the Sun", which, judging by the way every station played them in its obituary, were the only songs he ever wrote. (Oh, and the sitar solo in "Norwegian Wood".) But Harrison certainly seemed like a nice guy, if a little goofy about that Indian religious stuff, and I'm certainly glad about his help in getting the Monty Python films made.

So I thought a more appropriate person to have comment about this milestone would be my friend Carolyn who actually was around to have a favorite Beatle for real. Here's what she has to say:

"John was my favorite, being the most weird. OK, you can quote me: No matter how optimistic a person you might be, you cannot look at the Beatles' cup as half-full. It is depressingly-gaping-half-empty...or more. May George and John be rockin' and rollin' together in the great beyond."

But wait. Everyone knows that Paul is dead. There are clues in all the albums. And one of the original band members, John Lennon's friend Stu Sutcliffe, died in 1962. So assuming they are all in the same place, they should have a quorum to perform, and even record. Funny though that the drummers have both survived; it's the very opposite of the Spinal Tap experience. But the fact that they've survived is another reason I like them.

Also, I don't know if I should thank Harrison for this, or take credit, but isn't it interesting that a week and a half after I issued it, Time magazine responded to my challenge to do an entertainment cover instead of another on the war against terror?

And did I mention that I went a little wild at Amoeba Music and bought twelve one-dollar clearance tapes (actually nine, and they gave me three free) of 80's music? They might be looking to get rid of the stuff to have more room for CDs, but I know analog media are the way to go. And did I mention I'm saving all my downloaded MP3s, not onto CDs, but onto cassettes that I can play on my Walkman? Am I defeating the purpose of digital recording or what? Tune in next time to see what further blows I strike for continuousness, infinite-dimensionality, and, most important, holy, divine analogy.