Landscapes

Alright, you remember a little while back when I wrote that "Out-of-Doors" post about how terrible the outdoors were? . . . Yeah, see, I was actually lying, I love the outdoors.  (Well, not so much "lying" as being ironic, but for some people I guess that's the same thing.)  Anyway, today I'd like to commentate on some really gorgeous pictures and hopefully encourage everyone to go outside more.  Because the world is a beautiful place where people don't pave over it.

Mount Fuji!  Ahhh.  I know, I used this one before, but it is really pretty.  I just like the sense of depth, the light hitting the snow, and the striking color in the foreground, even if the flowers are a bit blurry.

And then we have an illustration by Ted Naismith from Tolkien's Silmarillion.  I adore the lighting and the crisp, clear look of the water.  (A little line-y on the mountain slopes, though.)

I'm not sure where this is.  But I love the lighting and the depth even though the foreground is sort of colorless.

Holy cow the COLOR in this one!  Hints of red, a surprising and awesome amount of purple, and plenty of green.

This may well be my favorite painting ever, though the photo doesn't do it justice.  Every time I find a photo where the volcano is orange enough, the moon isn't blue enough, and vice versa.  Just try to imagine this with a little more orange and a little more blue.  I love the still, peaceful blue of the blue shining behind the vivid light of the lava, plus the depth provided by foreground.

This isn't a landscape per se.  But I like the color balance—I love the blue!—I like the balance of negative and positive space, the rocks are aesthetically shaped, and the glimpse of the stones under the shallow water.

Another painting from the Silmarillion.  Gosh, I love the starlight, the depth . . . Really love how this just captures twilight.  I'd lose the people, though.  And even though the color is pretty it doesn't vary that much.

. . . Ahhh, yes, this is from Bambi.  In my defense, that movie has some of the most beautiful backgrounds ever used in an animated film.  And I just realized choosing this picture how much I like willow trees . . . I mean, I like trees in general—they're awesome—but willow trees have the potential to be so pretty.  I also like the color in the image.

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find an image from the scene depicted here that really captured the aesthetic I was looking for—that is, the bit where the wind creates a wave of light rolling over the grass.  The overall color and moonlight is deliciously atmospheric.

The artists did such a good job depicting winter in all its subtleties.  (sighhhh . . .)  Crisp, clean branches poking out of the soft bluey blend of snow shading.  Snow in the morning?  Meh.  Snow at twilight?  Ahhhhh . . .

Out-of-Doors

As I begin the first draft of this post I find myself, inexplicably, outside.

You remember "outside," don't you?  It's that space between spaces, the forbidding, untamed gap between one building and the next.  An unintelligible mess of glaring sunlight one minute, relentless rain the next, of misty wet mornings, hot, stagnant afternoons, bone-chilling evenings and eerie black nights.  If the bugs don't get you, the climate will.  If the climate doesn't get you, the mud will.  And if the mud doesn't you, the raccoons will.  That's just how it works.

Ew. Nature.

We manage to keep it at bay for the most part, fortifying ourselves in our wonderful warm houses with orderly things like computers and TVs and big cushy sofas where one can sit in peace without having to worry about ugly grass stains.  But that doesn't mean the outside is gone.  By no means.  We live on mere islands in the vast sea of the wilderness.  You can't even step out your own front door without finding it, teeming with all the chaos of savage little lifeforms and fitful weather.  Sure, sometimes when you drive somewhere you can bypass nature by using intermediaries like garages so you don't have to go outside to get to or from your car; but the outdoors is never more than inches away, waiting to close in on us the moment we let our guard down . . . Much the way Kipling describes the overgrowth of a village in "The Jungle Book", in which Mowgli "let the jungle in".

Crater Lake.  It's a lake.  And it's in a crater.

And Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican, actually demanded we preserve this stuff!  Just when society was getting the hang of combatting the outdoors with safe, manmade things like factories and roads and big cities, he ordered the conservation of places like Mesa Verde in Colorado, Crater Lake in Oregon, and the tellingly named Devil's Tower in Wyoming.

Consider the inconvenience of nature.  Do you know how hard anyone has to focus their eyes just to see across a pond anymore?  Heaven knows the eyes were meant to see only as far as the length of a desk—because that's as far as it takes to watch a computer monitor.  And what about having to physically cross the distances in nature?  Sure, grass, may look soft and springy, but it's full of ugly little sharp surprises like acorns.  It's no wonder our ancestors built roads.  Can you imagine how anyone crossed this nonsense barefoot?  Yes, I've heard rumors of this process called callousing, but I'm pretty sure it's all a myth.  Clearly we were meant by our Creator to hide our soles in shoes or He'd never have made them so pink and soft in the first place.  I mean, what are we—hobbits?

Crazy hole people.
Like the outdoors so much they built houses in it.

Some people actually like to travel just to see more of this 'Nature.'  What are they doing?!  Don't they know how very real and close-to-home this threat is?  All they have to do is walk out their front door and there they are!

And no, don't you do that—don't you call Nature beautiful.  Nature kills.

Kills.

I mean, the very fact that you're reading this tells me you'd rather be sitting here, at a computer, than spending time outside.  Making the noble sacrifice of forgoing fresh air, sunshine, natural beauty and exercise in favor of closed, comfortable things like air conditioning and internet.  Even if you're on a laptop, at least you're not up and moving around in nature, your attention is fixed firmly on the screen in front of you.  And how could you want it any other way?  I mean, what does nature have to offer, exactly?

Scenic views?  You can always look at photographs on the internet.  (It's okay, at the rate your vision is going you'll only be able to appreciate things in 2-D anyway.)

Wild animals?  Please, the only animals you don't find in a pet shop are man-eaters.  Everyone knows that.

Exercise?  Don't make me laugh.  Why go out to run or walk or climb or swim or whatever when you can pay for all that in a nice gym with air-conditioning, tv screens, and hundreds of other people?

Fresh air?  That's what FANS are for.  DUH.

A view of the stars?  That is what a skylight is for.  So once you have gone inside, you can peer up through a tiny hole in your ceiling at a handful of tiny blinking lights no one really cares about anyway.

Snow sports?  Okay, first of all, anything as tedious a lugging a sled back up a hill in thick boots is nothing short of work.  And don't get me started on snowmen.

Dancing in the Rain? . . . People actually do this?

Or how about: Taking time to reflect free of the distractions of everyday media like cellphones, internet and television?

. . .

. . . I know.  Like I even have to tell you how heinous that would be.

Just Google It

It may just be all the WikiLeaks I've been smoking, or the fact that I'm the type of person so opposed to change that I refused to change my clocks for Daylight Savings Time till I was in high school, but I don't trust Google.  It's way too easy to compare it to a virus with late-stage symptoms: Infect everything first, then start charging money.

I would make these observations on YouTube, where it is now compulsory to create a Google+ account for the privilege of posting comments, except that I refuse to create such an account and cannot therefore comment about it.  I know I'm only cutting myself off and have no one else to blame for it.  But I already had to disentangle myself from a Google account to which I hadn't even realized I was signing myself, and now Google has its preliminary hooks in me—which, ironically, is the reason I'm even able to write this blog—and I don't want to get in any deeper than I have to.  Besides, it's a matter of principle.  Or thickheaded stubbornness.  Whichever.

Here's my problem with the situation:  The Internet—bless its terrifying, unfettered disarray of a soul—is the greatest agent of free speech we have in what we call the free world.  And now it's become the necessity of every functioning member of such a society to have access to it.  So if you cut off freedom of speech from the internet it's like cutting off circulation from the heart.

It seems impossible to americans, because our government is subject to our scrutiny (when we take the time to watch it) and because it's supposed to protect the first amendment—and because the internet is already so far along, how could anyone possibly hope to contain it?

But it's not as far-fetched as you might think.  Many countries, like Australia and Germany, have actually tried to pass laws enabling mass censorship by making filters—the kind typically used by parents to protect their children from unwanted content—mandatory.  Once such filters are set up, it's not a huge leap for governments or corporations to pick and choose what "extraneous" material they'd like to see blocked from public view.  (Even, say, blogs that try to point out the hypocrisy of the lists . . .)

And then in the case of Google, it is not the government but a corporation taking control.  And let me remind you, corporations recognize no laws save the law of Supply and Demand.  Not in this country.  Okay, yes, we do have things like rules about minimum wage and such, but for the most part we're a pretty straightforward capitalist nation.  —Which, by the way, I pretty much agree with:  Just as the freedom to say what you want is important, so is the freedom to spend what you want.  But now we have this interesting dilemma on our hands, where one might actually infringe upon the other.

And I find it somewhat ironic, if not directly intriguing, that the corporation in question is Google, famous first and foremost for its search engine, the search engine so widely used that the verb "google" had to be added to the dictionary.  The same company that informs millions of people about what the internet has to say is now the company that decides who gets a say on YouTube, one of the most popular websites in existence.  The common man, having become virtually helpless to learn anything without Google, could potentially become dependent on Google to say anything as well.

Imagine a world where everyone has to pay a fee and provide personal information to a faceless organization, just for the privilege of adding their thoughts to the only media pool anyone really consults anymore.  Imagine if this faceless organization accepted money from other companies in exchange for access to personal information.  How far might it go?  What if the organization started taking money for censoring comments that displeased its clients?  . . . Frankly, I think a better question would be, How far have things gone already?

Who has your personal information?  We already know the government enjoys its internet surveillance (thank you, Snowden) and now we see freedom of speech limited by our willingness to cooperate with Google!  We don't have to pay for it yet, but what happens when we do?  If anyone knows how to stop this from happening I'd love to hear about it.

(. . . And, while you're at it, could you also tell me what it is exactly that Google provides, besides a massively popular search engine, that has made it so indispensable?  Because I seem to remember having an email, social network, and YouTube account long before Google came along and produced worse versions of all of them.)

We think of the internet as an autonomous, objective network of organized chaos—"the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had"(Eric Schmidt).  At the moment, it is.  But even as it provides us with near-infinite freedom of speech it also swiftly becomes our only effective outlet for that freedom, and under such circumstances we become enslaved to it.  We become a society that has no choice but to accept what it googles.  So we can either learn an innovative new form of mass-communication that doesn't involve Wi-Fi, or we can find some way of keeping our internet in a state of glorious and unbridled anarchy, free of censorship.  It's our choice.

Happier Concessions

Okay, I'm done ranting about Moffat's Who!  I want to talk about what I do like.

I like the story behind Amy's initiation as the Doctor's companion.  True, the idea of a little girl growing up with the Doctor for an imaginary friend is an idea reused from Moffat's The Girl in the Fireplace, but I don't mind, it's still endearing.

I like—no, love—The Doctor's Wife.  (I was surprised, initially, to find out it was written by Neil Gaiman, and then couldn't believe I hadn't seen that coming:  It's got Gaiman's fingerprints all over it—dark, disturbing, yet moving fingerprints . . .)  I love the chemistry between the TARDIS-infused Idris and the Doctor and the delightful, quirky little profound statements she makes:  "Are all people like this?  So much . . . bigger on the inside?". . . "Borrowing implies the eventual intention to return the thing that was taken.  What makes you think I would ever give you back?"

I like the Silence.  They seem to be grown out of the same theme as the Angels in that they too have a "perception filter".  (I call bonus points for two Who references in one go.)  You can only see the Angels while they're inconspicuously inert, and you never remember seeing the Silence regardless of how conspicuous they are.

I like Let's Kill Hitler, even if I don't understand how or why Melody wound up back in time growing up with Amy.  Though I'm still unconvinced that the Doctor and River have marital chemistry, I love the fact that her devotion to him stems from watching him trying to save her life even after she's sentenced him to death.

I like Asylum of the Daleks.  It's intricate, compelling, scary, resolves some unspoken issues between the Ponds that I was glad to see come to light (such as Rory's statement that it's always been obvious he loves Amy more than she him) introduces a fun new character and contains a crazy awesome plot twist.

I like seeing Rupert Graves as John Riddell.  Mostly because he represents a Sherlock crossover, but also becomes he's awesome on the show.  As on Sherlock.  He's just awesome overall.

I like The Angels Take Manhattan.  The Weeping Angels are inherently cool, and I'm glad that in this episode, as opposed to Flesh and Stone, we go back to never seeing them actually move.  The story is complex without leaving any loose ends (except, perhaps, how the Angels "get into" other statues, set up a whole building in the middle of New York City without anyone noticing, or feed their aging victims, but whatever) and it's morally and emotionally engaging as well.  It's funny, how for so many episodes I kept anticipating a change of companions, and then when the Ponds finally leave, the episode sort of makes me wish I'd seen more of them.

I like Jenna-Louise Coleman.  Some people have complained that she's too pretty; I'm guessing this is gender politics again.  I know some women are cast over others because they're more attractive, but that doesn't make beauty a cheat in and of itself.  My favorite actress happens to be Catherine Tate (lovely, sure, just not an obvious hollywood beauty) but before I knew about her I might've picked, say, Natalie Portman.  Drop-dead gorgeous, but also very talented.  So yes, Coleman is adorable, but that's not a crime in and of itself and I think she's got great chemistry with Matt Smith.

I like the mythos Moffat builds around the Doctor's real name—something he's been cooking as early as the second series, when Rinette reads 10's mind and says, "Doctor—Doctor Who?  It's more than just a secret, isn't it?"  I doubt the secret can live up to its wind-up, so a large part of me hopes there will never be a complete reveal, but I enjoy how it's played out so far.  Especially the bit about the Question that must not be answered, the Question hiding in plain sight—Doctor Who?  Ahhh, ironic fourth-wall riddles.  I love it.

—

So, there's my list.  I doubt if Moffat ever reads my earlier post I stand any chance of getting into his good graces—which is a real shame, because he's still my hero and a genius writer—but still!  I'd like to even things out if only for fairness' sake.

An Unhappy Confession

Alright . . .

(sigh . . . )

I understand what I'm about to say isn't going to make me very popular.  I honestly don't mind, though.  I know there are a lot of people who will disagree with me, but I fully respect their opinions.  I myself have tried to mirror those opinions for a long time, but I can't keep fooling myself.  I've exhausted all avenues trying to reconcile my taste to my will, and now that I've given up I'd like to make a statement to reflect my point of view—just to encourage others of the same mind that they are not so alone as they think they are.

The last thing I want to do is bum anyone out or disparage something near and dear to their heart with a scathing critique; so if you disagree with what I have to say, you can either leave this post unfinished or keep reading if you'd like to see things from a different perspective, which is greatly appreciated.  —So! without further ado, I must confess . . .

. . . I miss the 10th Doctor.

. . .

. . . Okay, that wasn't all that groundbreaking.  I'd get a whole lot more jeers if I said I was glad he was gone.  (Toss objectivity, I know I'd jeer anyone who said as much.)  But I'm not finished.  What I'd really like to say, is that . . .

. . . I just can't get into the 11th Doctor.

I know, I know!  Just because he's not David Tennant doesn't give me the right to throw mud at him!  But I don't want to throw mud at anyone, least of all Matt Smith.  When I saw him first appear in the TARDIS, honestly, I thought he had great potential.  It's . . . it's Moffat I'm upset with.

And confused as much as upset.  It took me so long to admit my disappointment with the new Doctor Who mainly because I was such a fan of Moffat's other work!  Sherlock is by far my favorite television series yet, and my two favorite episodes happen to have been written by Moffat.  Even his early Doctor Who episodes were my favorites of the show—The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, and the Library two-parter.  (Okay, I also loved Doomsday, The Runaway Bride, Partners in Crime, Journey's End, The Next Doctor, The Waters of Mars and anything with the Master, but as complete episodes and not just for select scenes within those episodes I liked Moffat's the best.)  You'd think I'd be all over a Doctor Who series lead by this guy.  So why can't I make myself keep watching it?

Why???

I think I've isolated the main reasons.  First of all, there's the female characters.  (Warning:  Angsty Opinions Ahead.)  There's the lifeless, domineering Amy dragging her husband behind her to adventures in which she mainly huffs impatiently at the Doctor, and the over-smug River Song with an inscrutable and grating crush on Matt Smith, to name the first.  And other women who appear on the show seem to enforce, along with these two, a single-minded approach to femininity—namely, feminism.  Gone is the sweet yet adventurous Rose, the curious and enduring Martha, the lovably passionate Sarah Jane and the fiery yet tenderhearted Donna:  The new women of Doctor who are headstrong, recalcitrant, and proud of it.  Which should keep those in favor of promoting sexual equality pleased, sure, but . . . all the women?  Really?  That should be deemed sexist purely on charges of generalization.

Interestingly enough, such is not the case with Sherlock, which might seem pretty male-dominated to some.  Personally, I don't care.  I don't need instructions for my own independence (especially if it involves treating my husband like my personal valet) and I think the female characters of the show are as varied, likable, well-rounded and un-objectified as the male ones.

—Well . . . actually less objectified than the men, if you recall the scene in Buckingham palace . . .

Ugh . . .

You've got Molly Hooper, the mousy mortuary assistant who handles her crush on Sherlock with remarkable dignity; Mrs. Hudson—the best Mrs. Hudson ever—an adorably maternal landlady; Sally Donovan, the police sergeant who exists in a state of eternal irritation with the title character; Soo Lin Yao, the surprisingly resourceful antiques specialist from The Blind Banker; and, of course, Irene Adler, the dominatrix/mastermind who literally brings Sherlock to his knees.  (Thank you Moffat, Thompson, Gatiss, McGuigan and Pulver for producing the best Irene Adler of all TIME!)  Even John's girlfriend Sarah, from the first series, was a nice addition to the show and I was sad to see her leave, even if it did make room for Mary Morstan.

"Wait, I'm still not convinced we're equals.
"Maybe if you beat me up again?"

(I wonder, though, if criticism of Irene Adler may not indicate some of the interest in making the Who women the way they did.  If you don't know already, A Scandal in Belgravia was actually denounced by some as sexist because the protagonist, who happens to be a man, is in fact allowed to defeat the antagonist, even when he knows full well that she's a woman.—Oh so disturbing.  Granted the episode was written long after the creation of Amy Pond, but still, I can't help but hypothesize about the pressures of gender politics on the scriptwriters.)

—

Okay, enough about the women.  Another problem I have with the show is . . . well, the Doctor himself.  I know I said I didn't take issue with Matt Smith, and I don't, I just think Eleven could've stood a little more revision in the writing room.

I have the impression that Eleven's character premise is that of a very powerful being who deigns to indulge in human silliness because he understands the value of good fun and of keeping things lighthearted.  So while he is humble enough to joke around with "the little people", when the chips are down he rises, like Gandalf the Grey, in the spirit of the quote:  "Do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks."  And I love this idea!  I think Matt Smith is a great person to play it out! . . . It's just that, for me, the writing never lives up to this premise.

The Doctor is lighthearted, but he's also insensitive.  And sometimes his joking around spills over into times when he should resort to a more serious tone, so the results can be rather obnoxious.  Where I would hope to see the warmth and affection of an old, old man bubbling to the surface of the young-man façade, I see instead smug dismissals, petty jokes, and a failure to take criticism.

It occurred to me that many of the problems I had with the Doctor were the principle vices of another character, one even further gone, except he had won me over completely in one episode.   But why?  What made Sherlock Holmes so appealing and the Doctor so irritating?  After some thought, I comprised a list of possible reasons:

This.  Just . . . This.

One, Sherlock does not set the moral standard for the show.  John does.  Sherlock's callousness and superiority are always put into perspective by someone, be it John or Lestrade or even Molly, whereas the Doctor, who's been all over the galaxy, seen everything, and possesses hundreds of years' worth of knowledge, shouldn't have to be told he's behaving like a child.

Two, Sherlock will actually listen to John.  You can tell he doesn't always like to hear that he's gone too far, but he accepts the criticism and doesn't resent John for it.  He clearly has room to grow and the show maintains the promise that he will grow.  "Sherlock Holmes is a great man.  And I think one day—if we're all very lucky—he may even be a good one."(A Study in Pink)  In other words, he's allowed to be flawed.  With the Doctor, even though there are rare moments where he accepts rebuke, he only applies the lesson to the incident in question and there's no indication that he plans on bettering himself as a whole based on what other people say.  After all, what do they know? they're barely half a century old, the little toddlers.

Three, Sherlock is his own shock-and-awe campaign.  Selfishly, part of the reason I prefer the detective is because he is so dang smart.  You don't see the Doctor walking into a room and deducing all the significant details of its inhabitants' lives before he even blinks.  Or running his mouth at light-speed to make his point.

—And I won't put it on the official list, but there's no getting away from this final point—Sherlock is played by Benedict Cumberbatch.  I didn't want to get into the acting so much as the writing because, again, I don't have a problem with Matt Smith, but yeah, there it is.  (Besides, it really shouldn't qualify as an insult to be told you're not as accomplished an actor as Cumberbatch; do you assume someone thinks you're an indifferent snob because they say you're not as humanitarian as Ghandi?)  Among other things, Cumberbatch excels at humanizing a wide variety of extreme roles, and Sherlock is no exception.  From out the cracks of the character's impatience the actor allows various shades of childlike frustration, suppressed attachment, and vulnerability to seep through.

And Sherlock is also awesome because—

—Wait . . . was I talking about something else?

. . . Ahh.  Doctor Who.  Right.

No, no, I'm not distracted at all . . .

Okay, one more complaint and then I'll wrap up:  The Plot.

What was up with the whole The-Doctor-invites-Amy-aboard-so-he-can-monitor-strange-signals-coming-off-her-that-turn-out-to-be-signs-she's-actually-pregnant-somewhere-else-despite-all-other-evidence-to-the-contrary-and-then-her-baby-turns-out-to-have-absorbed-so-much-TARDIS-energy-(even-though-pregnant-Amy-wasn't-on-the-TARDIS)-that-it-magically-winds-up-half-timelord-so-some-people-want-to-use-it-to-kill-the-Doctor-and-somehow-get-ahold-of-it-and-send-it-back-in-time-to-grow-up-alongside-the-Ponds-for-some-reason-and-it-turns-out-to-be-River-Song-who-then-has-to-be-inside-an-astronaut-suit-while-she-kills-the-Doctor-even-though-her-obvious-reluctance-means-the-suit-could-have-done-it-automatically-without-her-so-what-was-even-the-point plot?

???

Really?  Just . . . Really?

Or is it just as absurd and convoluted as it looks reading it back?

I'm probably missing something.  I'm sure I'm missing something.  I have to be.

—

Okay, yeah, so the plot twists irk me.  My main problem, though, is the soul of the show.  Davies' Who had Heart, and it had it in full.  Moffat's Who has—in my eyes—Attitude.

That's it, really, I just don't like the attitude.  That's big talk coming from someone who just spent the last dozen paragraphs sniveling about a show that plenty of people love, I know.  I'm sorry.  I'm just being honest.  I don't get the warm fuzzies from Eleven; I perceive his approach as more arrogant and even obnoxious than anything else.  I prefer it when characters who are asked to perform admirably under the duress of high adventure nurture good feeling between each other in peacetime, because in real life people who can't handle trivial interactions rarely handle the hard tasks well.  But with the latest Doctor's crew mostly I just see a lot of quibbling, smart remarks and eye-rolling.

Eh, maybe that's it, I'm just imposing my personal philosophies onto the situation.  But I do think fiction is one of the most wonderful forms of art available to humanity, and its pervasive influence should be respected, used to be both moral and true to life, to spread good thoughts and good feeling.  There are some shows where the vices of the characters don't affect me personally and some where they do.  Moffat's Who happens to fall into the latter category.  I won't judge you if you say you enjoy the show free of these qualms.  But there may be others less lucky than you, myself among them.