The story was pretty lousy, but I'm impressed with the believability of the rendered environments, even with all that tie-dyed day glo colour scheming. What I would have preferred though, is if Charles Napier had played the gung ho (wasn't he, just?) colonel.

The thing that offended me most was that cheesy font they used for the subtitles. Cheesy woodland elfin flowerheads-for-hats typefaces incorporated.*

I guess what's really exciting about Avatar is not the movie itself but what might be made next. Imagine what could be achieved by a suitably wiggy Japanese director.*** And a cool US$250million. Hopefully there will be some sort of interface between money and talent and good story at some point in the next decade. However, I'm not sure that's how it works.

* It's the little things, apparently, but it really annoyed me at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring when there was some banner for Bilbo's birthday party and it immaculately calligraphed with olde worlde charme. It came across quite inauthentic, when if someone had just rustically slopped on some paint it would have been fine.**
** And while we're at it, I hate the bit where Gandalf meets up with Shadowfax, and there's some slo-mo white horse action with soaring orchestra, but it's shot standard 24fps, so the slow-mo is very jerky. Come on PJ, where's all your serious bullet-time cameras?
*** Avatar is essentially Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke with loadsamoney. With bits of First Blood. Or Return of the Jedi with real pathos. The list continues, but I'll leave it there.

Phil Oakey: asymmetrical.

Jang Geun Seok: likewise.

The chief interest for me with "You're Beautiful" (and I confess it wasn't that big an interest because I didn't watch it all the way through) was the way the boy band were portrayed as effete, pampered aesthetes. They didn't seem to do much other than lounge around being narcissistic and overly sensitive. They kept talking about being dedicated to their fans. It seemed more like an emulation of Michael Jackson than any Western boy band of the past 10 years. Naturally the "music" was pedestrian and colourless, but the band kept going on about their art. I'm not sure whether any of this signifies a difference in cultural attitudes between K-Pop and western pop, but it was all quite different.

After the contrived foolishness of "You're Beautiful", it was on to the contrived foolishness of "Boys Before Flowers". Despite the disadvantage of not featuring cross-dressing, "Boys Before Flowers" does turn out to be pretty far-fetched. Plucky teenager Geum Jan Di delivers some dry cleaning to the elite Shinwa High School/University and saves a bullied pupil from jumping off a building. As a reward she's admitted to the school(!) where she earns the ire of the elite group of ultra rich boys known as "F4". One is a master potter and saxophonist in the mode of Kenny G (in fact, at one point he "plays" in a night club and an actual Kenny G track comes out of the speakers). Another is the son of a Korean triad leader. The third, Yoon Ji Hoo, is a master violinist and all-purpose tortured soul who was orphaned at the age of 5, lives alone, yet is still fantastically rich. Finally, there's Gu Jun Pyo, whose father is head of the Shinwa Group that not only runs the school, but apparently makes every cellphone in Korea. Jun Pyo is an insufferable brat, but because he's a powerful insufferable brat, everyone adores him.

Being, innocent, sweet, fair, and out and out all-round virtuous, Geum Jan Di finds F4 insufferable, and after witnessing their bullying she assaults Gu Jun Pyo with an ice cream. This makes her a target for some pretty vicious bullying, but Yoon Ji Hoo, despite being an F4 member, keeps saving her. Gu Jun Pyo, at first appalled at Jan Di's rebellion, ends up finding her a Challenge, and not long after Irresistible. He shanghais her and a friend onto a trip to New Caledonia (why not?) and before long a love triangle develops between Jan Di, Ji Hoo, and Jun Pyo.

So cuuute!

By this stage we were up to around episode 4, and really the whole story could have been satisfactorily encompassed in perhaps 8 episodes. However, these soaps are more a method of killing time between adverts for cell phones and beauty creams rather than a vehicle for compelling drama, so come what may there were still 21 episodes to deliver. It doesn't help that episodes of Korean dramas last over an hour, so 25 episodes comes to 33 episodes of an HK or US show. The writers used several plot twists to pad things out, to whit:

• Gu Jun Pyo's mother (the "Witch"!) actively trying to destroy Geum Jan Di's family in order to stop her stealing the affections of her son (after all, she didn't raise him to be borderline psychopathic in order to marry someone from the lumpen proletariat)


• Gu Jun Pyo's mother (the "Witch"!) arranging a marriage of convenience to a ditzy but otherwise kind-hearted girl (whom Jun Pyo calls "Monkey"). This fills up a few episodes.


• Gu Jun Pyo's getting hit by a car and suffering amnesia (!!!!?!?!?) and forgetting who Geum Jan Di was, while another girl makes a play for him!!!!

Additionally, several narrative 'devices' (stallings would be more accurate though) were used, notably:

• Numerous montages featuring the SAME THREE SONGS, recycled over and over


• A lot of flashbacks, some from only 30 seconds previously, to really really emphasise the point


• Long lingering shots of actors, who have to mug the same old expressions over and over again.

And failing all that, there was still the opportunity for the producers to get some money out of international travel bureaux and get extra plot mileage by arbitrarily sending our characters to exotic locations. New Caledonia actually looked pretty good, might be tempted to visit one day, etc, but the "Shinwa" casino in Macau, based on Venice (with "authentic" indoor canal with genuine euro Gondoliers!) was so offensive I vowed never to visit to the former Portuguese port again. For Sally the show jumped the shark when Jan Di was threatened by Macau triads only for three members of F4 (hitherto still in Korea) to appear from nowhere, dressed like dandies, and beat the triads up. "OH COME ON!" Sally bellowed. "THAT'S JUST DUMB."

More egregious than any of this, however, is one crucial flaw: Yoon Ji Hoo is a much more sympathetic suitor for Geum Jan Di than Gu Jun Pyo. Whenever Jun Pyo has a fight with Jan Di, or gets grounded by his mother, or runs off to Macau without telling anybody, Ji Hoo is there to comfort Jan Di. Since they have much more contact with each other, it seems more natural for their relationship to be the one that develops. Unfortunately, however, with the focus of the story being about Jun Pyo's character development from arsehole to gooey-eyed lover, the only acceptable result is that he and Jan Di triumph in the end. Which is a shame, because it never felt like they had earned it.

(If you are sufficiently interested, this page provides background as to how the soap was as it was. Warning: may induce boggling.)

The reader may wonder why we kept watching as this load of old cobblers unfolded. Well, the chief interest lay in the hair styles and clothing of the actors. Seriously, the guys were tricked out in the most amazing duds. Cravats, even. And Kim Hyun Joong as Yoon Ji Hoo, with his ginger-bronze locks and distant, melancholy, and frankly wooden acting, was simply godlike with his unending collection of muted pastel colours, all exquisitely coordinated. All of F4 drove amazing cars, too.

Kim Hyun Joong: quite handsome.

Boys Before Flowers started life as a Japanese manga, which explains a lot. The first soap adaptaion was in Taiwan in 2001, with the Japanese version in 2005. We inadvertently saw an episode of the Mainland Chinese version a few months back, and it was so bizarrely awful we gave it up straight away. As an example of its weirdness, the set designers saw fit to convey the opulence of the school by hanging an antlered deer's head in the boy's toilets. Baffling.

If you're interested in viewing the Korean version, you may do so here.

Red Cliff 1 and 2

When I heard John Woo was going to do a Chinese historical film, I wasn't convinced. I couldn't see how slow-mo, diving two-crossbow action was going to work. Consequently, when Red Cliff 1 came out last year, I didn't pay much attention. This meant that on our flight to Rome we ended up watching a good 5 hours of Red Cliff action.

Red Cliff is based on a chapter of the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a semi-historical account of the shenanigans during the several decades between the collapse of the Han dynasty and the commencement of the Tang, during which China was split in three and there was constant war.

The film pits the good guys, principally velvet-voiced Tony Leung Chiu Wai and velvet-voiced Takeshi Kaneshiro, versus the ruthless Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi).* I could go into details, but our velvet voxed friends and numerous other heroes are defending Red Cliff against invaders from the north.

Typical for Woo, the highly homoeroticaly subtexted bondings between Leung and Kaneshiro is the most vivid relationship in the films, although much effort is put in to the semi love triangle between Leung, his wife, and Cao Cao. Also worth a mention is Vicky Zhao doing her comic shtick as the local princess determined to get amongst the action.

As for the action, well, it's certainly muscular and sanguine. Blood sprays at satisfyingly regular intervals, while full-on gore is politely avoided. Fun for the whole family! The CG is typically second rate for Chinese flicks, but it's an improvement on the second rate CG in other films. The best bit for me was all the jolly bravado of the Iliadish heroes having at each other. At the end of course, it's decided war is hell, but it's a highly entertaining film. Woo's best work since... Hard Boiled (1992)!

* Incidentally, Woo's old pal Chow Yun Fat was initially slated to be in the movies; I imagine he would have played Cao Cao. I think he would have been terrific, all bluster and hubris; that said, Zhang Fengyi, playing the role with a certain amount of vulnerability, is probably more interesting. If you do want to see Chow at his most demonic, see Curse of the Golden Flower.

C'est La Vie, Mon Cherie (1994)

I hit the jackpot in Cathay's 'classic' collection, which featured this charming film starring Anita Yuen Wing Yee and Lau Ching Wan, favourite actors of mine. Yuen sings in her mum's busking Chinese opera group. Lau's a down at heel saxophonist. She's ubelieveably quirky and lovable. He's a brooding muso, trying to get over his ex. Everything unfolds exactly as expected. Then, with everything going swimmingly, Yuen's hitherto unmentioned bone cancer returns and she dies. The end. Even so, a delightfully Hong Kong film, both in atmosphere and melodrama.

Ip Man (2009)

Here Donnie Yen plays Ip Man, a Wing Chun practitioner who was Bruce Lee's sifu (in real life - I shit you not!). The historical fact underpinning this film is that Ip Man refused to teach the Japanese forces his kung fu. This fact provides the film makers an opportunity to remake Fist of Fury. Ip Man gives the Japanese occupiers righteous hell, at great length. In recent years, Yen's flicks have tended to be very much about Yen, but in this one he keeps it fairly understated. A slight film in comparison to Yen classics like Iron Monkey or Wing Chun, but not as embarrassing as anything Jackie Chan has done in the past 10 years.

Lady Cop & Papa Crook (2009)

A contemporary film - possibly a satire, although the tone is so uneven it's hard to tell - in which Cantopop superstar Sammi Cheng reprises her kooky comedy persona, playing a cop trying to rescue a kidnapped boy. Eason Chen play's the boy's Triad father. Meanwhile rival triads are trying to double-cross each other, and mainland police are trying to get Eason because one of his rackets got innocents killed. This film was ok, funny at times, baffling at others. Probably not worth a look. I kind of prefer straightforward films like C'est la vie, mon cherie over this sort of thing.

Switching back to TVB land, saw a TV special for Wong Cho Lam, a rising star. The extremely diminutive Wong is a comic, singing, acting sensation who deserves to go on to big things. Over the past 20 years Stephen Chow has patiently seen off contenders to his throne; or rather, he's kept doing his thing while others have risen and sunk without trace (Eric Kot - too loud, Nick Cheung - not that funny, Ronald Cheng - too goofy). But Wong is in Chow's league. I just hope there's enough HK cinema left to give him an opportunity. For now he's doing just fine working at TVB.

Fra Lippi, Madonna and Child with two angels, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The Uffizi, art palace of the Medicis, is obviously a holy grail for Renaissance art lovers, but I found it a bit of a trial. The place was packed (just our luck to be here on a free museum day!), I was sporting a stylish new head cold, and I was busting for a piss with no facilities in sight. Ok, so the Botticellis blew my socks off, and Michelangelo's Doni Tondo was good, but the painting that I most like was this one by Lippi, an earlyish Renaissance master, mainly because I was informed by our guide that the Madonna was actually Lippi's wife and the cheeky cherub whom the Madonna is smiling at, (completely ignoring Our Lord Jesus Christ), is actually a portrait of Lippi's young son. That Lippi uses a standard painting form to do a family portrait is outrageous enough, but Lippi has the boy staring at us with a kind of 'aw shucks' expression.

I guess what made this painting most memorable is that under the heavy weight of all the monotonous Christian art in te Uffizzi and indeed everywhere we went in Italy (St Sebastian full of arrows, St John the Baptist looking like Catweasle, and - occasionally - some saint with a meat cleaver stuck in his head) it was nice to see a bit of charming humanist subversion. Good work, Lippi!

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Villa Borghese, Rome

The most depressing aspect about the Uffizi gallery was an endless parade of undifferentiated marble statues in the main corridors. Were they antiquities or copies of antiquities? And even if they were antiquities, were they Roman originals, Roman copies of Greek originals, or Greek originals? (Ok, they were unlikely to be Greek originals, but, you know.) Faced with all this bland statuary, it was hard to care about any of them. It reminded me, closer to home, of the identical sequencing of a million bedroom electronica producers.

Now Bernini's in the same sort of game - marble sculptures with classical themes - but he's certainly not generic. Sure the agonised expressions of the figures are reminiscent of the famous Laocoon group from Hellinistic Greece, but the sheer bravura of his work, capturing as it does Daphne's salvation from the predations of a randy Apollo by her father (via the unusual means of turning her into a tree; thanks Dad...) is beyond anything Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Mannerist, Rococo, or otherwise. Walk around the sculpture and from one angle Daphne's a woman, and from another she's a tree. Apollo's still randy from whatever angle, but he looks a bit apologetic about it.

Now, the subject matter isn't really my thing, and the exaggerated style isn't very subtle, but the execution is out of this world. This isn't just Paganini "look at me!" showing off, this is an otherworldly act of skill. Dude knows how to work stone...

Alexander Calder, Mercury Fountain, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

What got me excited was the use of mercury, kind of like water but with the viscosity all wrong. Dangerous stuff, too.

Actually, Miró's work was great too, but for the first twenty minutes I wasn't sold and the mercury fountain was the clear winner. The first Miró stuff you see in the museum is late sculptures and textiles. The sculptures with the dangling genital bits, and the textile hangings looking like someone had eviserated a shag pile carpet, left me a bit cold. Further in I was much happier with the constellation paintings of the 40s. I have to say I'm a little suspicious of abstract art, but with Miro you really feel that your kid couldn't have painted it like that. And I got it, for a change. Take this example, the Azure and gold one.

It's not that complicated, but somehow the elements are in perfect poise. Dude knows what he's doing. It's also much more impressive in the flesh.

Too often I found Miro's stuff being all about the dangly genitals, but he saw clearly something we like to forget: humans are mostly about nads. That said, there's not much more to communicate in this than that simple fact, so it would be better to give it a rest, now and then, surely. Then again you get the impression from Miro (and indeed Picasso and Dali), that as truly great as he was, much of what he did he did was about trying to piss off the religious and the bourgeois. Come on man, grow up!

Palau de la Música Catalana

The Palau de la Música Catalana is a concert hall with a lot of stained glass bravado. We read that the best way to see it was to go to a concert there, so we went and saw David Byrne, who happened to be there when we were (he was in Wellington in January, but I didn't see him then). Anyway, the Palau was amazing. All that colour and geometry, could have been a bit OTT, like an acid-head's migraine, but somehow it worked.

As for David Byrne and co., he was doing a retread of Stop Making Sense-era Talking Heads, without the hassle of hanging out with his old band mates. The show was high energy, but the energy of the crowd was higher still. I was seated with the band to my right and the audience to my left, and I was resigned to deafenment in my right ear. However by the end of the fairly short show, the left ear was worse off from the frenzied appreciation of audience, largely comprised of the Barcelonan equivalent of ageing thirty- and forty-something hipsters. Great fun!

Gaudi stuff everywhere, Barcelona

Well, I'm not qualified to pass comment on Gaudi's melted icecream facades, tile fantasies and stone chameleons, but I have to say that coming from a town largely comprised of characterless Brutalist buildings and (more recently) green glass monstrosities, it's nice to see buildings where people have put in a bit of effort, and where the architect had enough money to play with that he could make it look good.

Cycladic idols, Brera Gallery, Milan

We had 3.5 hours in Milan and we managed to get in the Cathedral, the Castello Sforzesco, and the Brera gallery. It was all a bit of a blur. At the Brera we saw Artegna's foreshortened Christ (Christ apparently had stumpy legs like Toulouse Lautrec), and a thousand pieces of crap mannerist art. I tell you, when you've seen one 16th century painting of limbs splaying everywhere in contorted poses, you've seen them all. That post-Caravaggio, every subject ended up being painted in the dark (apparently), isn't much of an improvement. In a side gallery we saw a display of ancient and primitivist art from the collection an eccentric 20th Century Italian collector. In this room we saw some Cycladic idols, like I'd studied in Greek Art at university. They were bigger than I expected. After all these fiddlededee oil paintings it was good to see something a bit more straightforward. In this room there was also a Roman mummy portrait, and other bits of slightly wonky late Roman and mediaeval art. Good call!

Michelangelo's unfinished pietà (Rondanini Pietà), Castello Sforzesco, Milan

I've never thought much of Michelangelo's David. His head and hands are too big. In fact the whole sculpture's too big. I saw the fake one in the big town square in Florence (couldn't be arsed paying to see the real thing) and went, 'nah'. I also saw Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peters, and while it was absolutely splendid, all shiny and otherworldly, it was a bit lost amongst all the clutter of that vast and fairly excessive cathedral. We did of course see the Sistine Chapel, and that did impress me, especially the panel showing God creating the Sun (take that, Sun!) and moon before hooning off to do some more creatin', somewhere else in the cosmos. Michelangelo renders God's bum, allegedly for the first time in Western art. Comedy gold.

The problem with the Sistine Chapel is, what with everyone looking up, you forget there's some pretty good stuff on the walls where you can see stuff properly. Raphaellian tapestries, or copies of the same, plus a lot of Botticelli.

Anyway, to the Rondanini Pietà. It might be the handsome way in which this sculpture is set and lit, but it felt to me to be the most dramatic of the sculptures I'd seen by him. Also, because of the unfinishedness, the sculpture felt kind of modernist. You could see Michelangelo's chisel marks on the back, and a remnant arm from a previous attempt is just stuck on. The whole thing was ambiguous, and had wonderfully enigmatic appearence, moving me much more than the finished article would have, probably.

Bronze horses, Saint Mark's Basilica, Venice

This was probably the highlight of the trip for me, art-wise. The four bronze horses are of late Hellinistic or early Roman origin (the technique used in casting suggests they are Roman, but probably copies of Greek originals). They were probably dispatched to Constantinople by Constantine himself. Then, when Venice sacked Byzantium the horses were duly swiped and placed on Saint Mark's Basilica. Similarly, when Napoleon conquered Italy, he sent them to France. When he got done they returned to Venice. Suffice it to say that these horses have some history...

The animals are strangely affecting. They're not only pretty good representations of equus ferus caballus, but they have (to me at least) a lot of character. They seem almost soulful. Anyway, it was good to get a gander at several soulful and historical bronze horses.

Peggy Guggenheim Gallery, Venice

This modernist gallery is housed in a modern (50-60s) building. In this setting you kind of forgot you were actually on a dodgy esturine island on the Adriatic. Everyone was there: some suitably obscene Ernsts, some Pollock spatterings, Magritte's weird grey levitating spheres, and Italian Futurists. Probably a bit of Picasso in there as well. Look, I can't quite remember. Anyway, after the stodgy ceiling frescoes of the Doge's palace it was quite good to a bit of modernism in. The stuff I enjoyed most was this exhibition of this Scottish artist who did weird things with resin. Hanging around in the sunny garden outside the gallery was equally delightful. The ridiculously pretentious American art students manning the place were a bit over the top, but I guess they were just continuing Peggy's tradition.

This photo is of us as reflected in an odd sculpture in the gallery's garden. Priapic Dude on a Horse not pictured.

Once upon a time all this used to offend me. Surely I had genius just waiting to pour out of me. However, after reading The Time-Traveller's Wife (hereafter TTW) I feel strangely comforted. After all, trying to write a novel when you can't really write is like going out so sea in a dinghy without a life jacket with a storm front bearing down on you head on. HEAD ON.

You see, at about the time the TTW came out I too had an idea in mind for a similar story. It would be about a guy who did not actually time travel, but lived his life out of sequence, each day being randomly jumbled about. As an extra twist however, the guy's brain would however develop sequentially. So he might wake up in the body of himself as an 85 year old, but only be experientially a few days old, and would behave like an 85 year old with the mind of an infant.

Of course, there would also have been romance at the heart of the story, but it soon occurred to me that if someone's life was scrambled in this way they would probably spend most of their days in a mental institution, and the chances for romance would be somewhat limited.

Anyway, TTW came out and I had to give the idea up. I was curious about reading TTW but the cover made it look kind of literary (which is funny, in retrospect), so I figured it wouldn't be much fun. A couple of weeks ago a friend recommended it and made it sound pretty cool. Now, having read it, I can confirm that it certainly is a compelling read. Alas, plenty about it also angers me:

• The protagonist is the author. Audrey Niffenegger's day job involves paper-making and book-binding. Her heroine Clare is a sculptor who works with paper. Hero Henry works at a library. Write what you know. Sure, but this is getting a little bit too specific, surely?


• The protagonists are so fucking cool. Henry's a time-travelling librarian. But he also loves all the right bands in the early 1990s, speaks German, takes drugs, is self-confessedly alcoholic and likes getting into street fights. Sounds a lot like every librarian I've ever met... Their friends are even more insufferably cool. I would have been quite happy if he was a bit dopey and had a soft spot for the Osmonds.


• The protagonists fuck incessantly. We get the idea already!


• Tedious class comedy. Clare's family is rich rural Catholic. Sounds a bit like Brideshead Revisited. There is much sneering observation about the follies of wealth. There's a black cook who talks sassy. Who gives a rat's arse?


• It's twice as long as it needs to be. There's something to be said for going in depth to tease out subtle character traits and giving out clues like cards being spread out on a table. And then there's just meandering along slowly. Use a typewriter, for Christ's sake. That'll give your editing a bit of focus.


• Every event in the story is foretold in advance. It's true that time-travelling back and forth will lead to considerable fore-knowledge. But must our characters gossip like fish-wives about it, incessantly? Some of the most effective passages in TTW were those that weren't revealed until they actually happened.


• The author is American. I'm sure it would have been better if it had written by a pom. And, frankly, a man.*


• Fatalism. Niffenegger clearly subscribes to the space-time relativistic view of Einstein - space and time is fixed, events only happen once. What about Many Worlds? Imagine what you could do in a playground like that?! Come on, Niffenegger, expand those horizons!


• Where's the grand vision? Oh sure, it's a love story, but when you're dealing with something cool like time travel, couldn't you add in a bit of epic scope? Why confine it to such a small cast? Keeping it intimate might appeal to Oprah's book club types, but for me, well, *yawn*.


• Time travel being "genetic". Perhaps I've been made a bit grumpy after years of the TV Heroes talking cobblers about how certain gene sequences can allow people to VIOLATE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, but this is perhaps the worst aspect of all. You can't explain something like this - not with technobabble and horseshit - don't bother! Make it an ineffable mystery. It's okay...** Also, it might seem like a good idea to give the hero a hope of a "cure" for his afflication, but why not just have him man up and accept his fate without toying around with him. Have a heart, Audrey!


• Nudity - so whenever Henry time travels he turns up somewhen else naked, Terminator-like. Fair enough. But after a few dozen tedious descriptions of the fact he's naked and that he needs to find clothes it gets a bit repetitive. Just give him some pants.

Now to be fair there were plenty of good moments in TTW and the premise was excellent. It's just a shame that the delivery was so contrived and well, low-brow. And this from someone who quite enjoyed watching Twilight on the plane!

In fact, the (inevitable) movie adaptation coming out this year, (inevitably?) starring Eric Bana could potentially be a lot better than the book, if it keeps the story taut and sticks to the good bits. But then, after that whole Benjamin Button nonsense perhaps the movie-going public are a bit sick of these gimmicks.

* Preferably a man who wrote it in the 1950s. As a subtle satire on Cold War politics.
** Although resolving a certain plot point in a certain SF show by explaining that they were in fact an angel is not okay.

Takayama Spring Festival

In the small Japanese town of Takayama (pop. similar to Wellington) they do two festivals each year in the spring and the autumn. The festivals involve numerous men dragging around huge 200 year-old wooden floats containing waving children and flautists. As a sideline there's also, processions of people banging pots and paired dancers dressed up like the sun. I believe it's all about venerating the local god.

Best moment was when we watched one of the floats being stowed back in its shed and we chatted to one of its haulers. We asked if we could take a photo with him and the guy put his hat on my head. This photo captures something of the delight I felt.

Alleyways of Vernazza, Cinque Terre

The Cinque Terre are five sea villages in the north-western coast of Italy. With its multi-coloured buildings stuck together the villages scream "Mediterranean tourist magnet", so I wasn't too fussed by the picture postcard views, loud Americans, and incessant souvenir touting. What I did like was the meandering alleyways between buildings. Narrow and dark, these alleyways lead everywhere. I felt quite elated because unlike at home, where a path normally ends up at someone's house or a dead-end, following these alleys would get you anywhere you wanted to go. The unimpeded egress was strangely liberating. Also, I felt like I was in an Escher lithograph.

Baptistry, Pisa

Before we lined up for the inevitable climb up the Leaning Tower, we went into the Baptistry in Pisa. The acoustics there were amazing. It was like a chapel of Reverb.

San Jordi, Barcelona

Saint George's Day in Barcelona is a sort of Saint Valentine's Day everywhere else. There's an odd twist - the guy buys the girl a rose, and the girl buys the guy a book. A book! How civilised!

San Jordi was our first day in Barcelona and in Spain. We wandered into the main shopping precinct for a gander and found about a million people (seriously) milling around buying books and roses. After a while the sheer crush of people started to become a bit frightening, but we did as the Barcelonans did; Sally got her rose and I (well, we) got a book about Gaudi from the souvenir shop in La Pedera.

Train across Andalusia

Oddly, I'd always thought of Spain was very dry. Or perhaps I'd conflated Spain with Spanish-speaking countries like Mexico. Anyway, finding the snowy expanse of the Sierra Nevada in the south of Spain certainly shattered a few illusions. Then, travelling from Grenada to Seville by train I found this huge, lush land with crazy hills and a crazy sky. Despite the ruralness of it, the wind and solar farms suggested that Spain is a pretty with-it country. Also, listening to the Malty Media Show Michael and Pearce had put together was pretty mind-altering. Extremely memorable, and highly recommended - both Andalusia and the Malty Media show.

April Ferrier, Seville

We came to Seville with the intention of seeing the Alcazar, a sort of Christian version of Grenada's Alhambra, but there was also this thing, the April Ferrier, the flamenco festival. When we learned it didn't start properly until midnight, I was all ready to head to bed. But Sally insisted, and I'm glad she did. We followed large numbers of well-dressed people across the river and to this huge area containing marquee tents. It was nominally one tent per family, but it was really one tent (with bouncers, in many instances) per wealthy family - the poor and the young sort of floated around with plastic bags filled with bottles of booze. Everyone was impeccably behaved however, unlike how it would be in New Zealand in the same situation.

We wandered about but it was only 10:30 and not much was happening. Continuing further we came to an amusement park for the young that certainly put the 1983 Wellington Winter Show to shame. We took a few snaps of women in their flamenco outfits, and, becoming quite tired, we returned across the river to our hotel, where, randomly and nearby, we ate Japanese at a not-quite Japanese restaurant. At 11:30pm.

CERN, Geneva

CERN wasn't quite the highlight I'd been hoping for - I'd been meaning to check it out for about 5 years. Now the Large Hadron Collider is complete the underground is no longer accessible to the (free) tour parties. However, the tour we did was pretty good. For starters, it was conducted by a genuine physicist. We got to see the workshop where they're fixing segments of the accelerator that broke down last year. We stared in at the control room of the Atllas detector, and down the hundred meter pit to the mighty chamber holding Atlas. Also, we secured t-shirts at the souvenir shop. Victory!

Walk from Broc-Fabrique to La Gruyeres

At Broc-Fabrique there's the Callier Chocolate Factory. La Gruyeres is the home of Gruyere cheese. After doing the chocolate factory in the morning, we walked for an hour and half between the villages along a river bank that would have suited a gingerbread cottage. We crossed a weird bridge with a roof on it (how... European). We walked beneath a castle. Down the hill there were cows wearing bells. It was all so utterly everything we'd ever dreamed about Switzerland. So authentic!!!

Venice

I hadn't expected much of Venice. I assumed it would be touristy (it was), expensive (it was), grubby (it was), and crowded (it definitely was). However, it was probably the highlight of my time in Italy. I think this is largely because there were no cars, and because, similar to the Cinque Terre, the geometry of the place was so interesting. You could wander around at night and not a few blocks from St Mark's Square with its cacophony of competing restaurant bands, you'd find yourself in an intriguingly empty plaza.

The Dolomites

Not to be confused with the blaxploitation flick of the same name (there's 80 or so minutes I'll never get back - thanks, Bruce!), the Dolomites are a range of hills (more mountains really) in Italy north of Venice. Crazy-arse geology that made for some great photos. We did a day tour with a couple of poms, a couple of Irish, and couple of Americans. It was very pleasant. Still, you can't beat New Zealand on a good day. Pity we haven't had a good day since we got back.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is where I throw in the towel. It's all over, we're fucked! It would actually be better at this point to be a climate change denier, because that would be more optimistic.

Where's me hair shirt? Etc.

To continue with yesterday's theme of humans as animals, I don't see our inevitable collossal fuckup of the planet as particularly alarming. Well, of course it is alarming, contemplating how everything I hold dear will be lost in the shock of displaced millions roughing up the country (how are the iwi going to cope with that?). That said, a lot of what I don't hold dear will be lost too, which is a plus. Certainly puts into perspective the overall worthlessness of anything I achieve in this life, good and bad.

But you know, humans aren't evolved for long term planning. Depending on how badly the next few hundred years go, we may well be. While I lament the fact that everyone isn't like me, because I'd sure as hell be voting for planet saving measures, we can only make do with the people we have, not the people we'd lack to have.

And as far as the history of the planet goes, well at least it's something different.

It took me a while to realise that actually evolutionary psychology is actually an excellent tool for busting through some of the topics that make me angry. Take for example the vexed issue of gender inequality. Is gender inequality in our society the result of a) the patriarchy, a multi-generational manocentric conspiracy against women, or b) adapted behaviour patterns in both men and women that made sense in small hunter-gatherer groups, but are today a bit crass and hopeless? Naturally, I vote for B.

Obviously, there is a danger that evolutionary psychology can be used as a weapon for old-fashioned conservatism (but only if said conservatives aren't so conservative they're can't abide the thought of us being apes) but I find it more that it provides a comforting sense of human limits. When I trip over something and have the irrational desire to kick it back, it's just the irrational ape coming out.

Or, to quote George Clinton:

"Why must I be like that
Why must I chase the cat?
Nothing but the dog in me"
Clinton, G, Atomic Dog, 1983

In the past few weeks I've been reading The Art Instinct, a book on evolutionary aesthetics by noted sceptic, libertarian, neo-con and - perhaps worst of all - Canterbury University Philosopher Denis Dutton. Dutton's book takes us through the arts and explains, fairly patiently and clearly, how most of what we think of as stylistic and cultural attributes have their roots in evolved adaptations. In his survey Dutton leans heavily on Steven Pinker and Tooby and Cosmides, but he isn't afraid to break ranks (especially with Pinker, who believes our arts are mere byproducts of our evolution rather than crucially important adaptations). Audaciously, he even attempts to rehabilitate that mad Swiss bastard Carl Jung, by framing his archetypes in terms of their adaptive usefulness in stories (stories themselves being a kind of extra-experiential training).

The best parts of the book for me is when Dutton (predictably) gets stuck into the literary theorists and social constructivists who have dominated academic thought in the past 50 years. Against the idea that aesthetic tastes can be moulded however you like, and that everyone can (and perhaps should?) appreciate "Piss Christ" as much as a nice landscape painting like your aged aunt might have on her living room wall, Dutton piles up more than adequate evidence to the contrary.

But we knew that already, right? And when the dust has cleared, where does it all leave us? I vote for a swift purge of the Humanities. But beyond that, for me anyway, there is a sense of answers found. Never categorically, mind you, and there is the certainly the god-awful potential for the application of evolutionary psychology in academia to be just as hopeless as old school Theory ever was. But still... well all I can say is that it just feels more like the truth to me, more than any of that other horseshit ever did.

* Ok, apart from Sociology.

Miu is one of TVB's Five Tigers, an apellation given to five up and coming actors back in 1983. Somewhat more famous alumni of the Five Tigers are Andy Lau and Tony Leung. Miu's career had something of a reboot on rejoining TVB in 2005.

Anita Yuen was Miss Hong Kong 1989, and dominated HK cinema in the early to mid 1990s with her quirky comedy roles (most notably for me she was Stephen Chow's slightly treacherous offsider in From Beijing with Love (1994). Her career sank without trace around 1997, and she spent a lot of time in Taiwan with her boyfriend Julian Cheung.

Fastforward all the way to 2008, and Yuen's returned to HK screens in Love Exchange. She plays a pretty boring housewife whose husband is found dead in a car with someone who is apparently his mistress. The official verdict: suicide. Yuen however doesn't believe her hubby is capable of philandering, and suspects foul play. Equally suspicious is Miu, who is the husband of the dead woman. He happens to be a senior security consultant, and he moves in to the flat next to Yuen to spy on her and see if he can find out more about his wife's death.

Meanwhile Yuen, living with and having to support her mother in law and brother in law, is finding things tough; not least because her mother in law is a harridan of the highest order. This brought to mind a terrible movie I saw Yuen in called Tragic Comitment, which has a similar scenario, but luckily this aspect of the show wasn't milked for all it was worth.

In the early episodes, Yuen didn't seem sure how to play her role, oscillating between dramatic and maudlin, with some "Whoops, I've forgotten how to act" moments in there for good measure. By contrast, Miu, who sometimes comes across a bit wooden, fitted into his role quite comfortably.

Over time Yuen worked herself back into her whacky schtick as a housewife who's quite righteous and 'louh touh' (old fashioned), but still her own person. It's a fine line being a doormat for your hysterical mother in law and an Independent Woman (TM), but Yuen managed to convey both angles successfully.

Yuen's character ends up working as an insurance agent in her husband's old company (as you apparently do). Hints around the mystery of her husband's death surface from time to time, but the bulk of the 20 episodes is given over to her coworkers' affair, her mother in law's feuding with her ex-husband and his new wife, her brother in law's attempts to start a career (drawing comics!) and Miu's attempts to reconcile with his petulant teenage sister in law. And everyone has dinner together together every night, Hong Kong soap style.

There's also time for ample demonstrations of chemistry between Miu and Yuen, and there's a considerable will-they-won't-they thing going on. They don't, perhaps in deference to their dead spouses, or more likely to Chinese social mores.

Love Exchange was really a middling sort of soap, with the bulk of our enjoyment of it driven by the cosy familiarity of its stars. Yuen is to feature in another soap this year, so hopefully this is the start of a significant career recovery for her. As for Miu, he's sure to keep plugging on until middle aged housewives stop swooning over him. By then he should have graduated into "dad" roles.

Nice rousing theme song too.

Deutsch's ambitious book is an attempt to synthesize a model of reality using four seemingly disparate but (to Deutsch anyway) interrelated strands: Quantum Theory, (Popperian) epistemology, Virtual Reality (by way of Turing machines) and Darwinism via Richard Dawkins.

I bought the Fabric of Reality in 2002 but gave up after the second chapter, which goes out to prove the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by arguing that the results from the famous double-slit experiment demonstrates many worlds in action. At that time all the run of the mill science books I had read basically painted the Many World business as unjustified and mad. Deutsch tackles this head on by pointing out that positivism is the bane of science is that it favours predicting and measuring experimental results over the working out explanations for those results. Hence the primacy of the shrugging Copenhagen interpretation. As it was I felt Deutsch might be a bit of a nutter, and his prose style was a bit irritating, so I left him there.

In late 2008 I bought Lockwood's book of a whim. Time Travel, awesome! The Labyrinth of Time takes us on a seesaw survey of the physics, from general relativity to entropy (something new to me and probably the most valuable part of the book). There was also plenty of space given to the grandfather paradox and the epistemology of time travel, and of that whole tensed time jazz.

There were times when I found Lockwood's carefully boffinish language quite entertaining but the book was somewhat lacking in cohesion and ended abruptly after a short chapter on a comparative analysis of time perception in humans and bats. Having gone through such a long journey through so many disciplines you would think there would be a conclusory chapter outlining where all this left us.

Lockwood mentioned David Deutsch several times in the book, especially with relevance to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory. Knowing a bit more about Deutsch's (legitimate) standing in the world of physics with his research into quantum computing, and after reading the iconoclastic efforts of Lee Smolin and Peter Woit, I gave the Fabric of Reality and actually read it all the way through.

Deutsch still strikes me as a bit mad, but with the mad sort of synthesizing genius of someone like Einstein. Rather than paddling about in a single domain of expertise, Deutsch wanders forth and tries to envision a reality where universes and virtual realities are interchangeable, where the information contained in life forms persists across multiple universes, where time travel is possible and free will actually exists.

It's heady stuff, but I bought all of it. As a teenager I used to routinely ponder the existence of multiple universes, so I'm a lot more comfortable with this 'spooky' idea than others.

However, on reading the book's reviews on Amazon I found the Fabric of Reality had plenty of detractors. Distressingly most of them seemed to actually know stuff about physics, whereas the supporters were laymen like me who had bought the argument.

For me the most crushing of the detractors' arguments was one where Deutsch had not gone through a careful analysis of Many Worlds against other quantum interpretations. Instead he had only compared it with the Copenhaged Interpretation, the one most in keeping the positivist scientific bent that Deutsch is most pitted against. Some critics objected that Deutsch's four strands were more analogies than interrelated ideas. For my own part, the final chapter, a serious examination of Frank Tipler's crazy highly speculative Omega Point Theory* was a bit much.

Certainly Deutsch's writing was more of a 'Here's the deal' variety, than say the exceptionally carefully considered, counter-argument anticipating effort of Charles Darwin with Origin of Species.

All up though, I still feel I should give Deutsch the thumbs up, if only for paragraphs like this:

When a quantum factorization engine is factorizing a 250-digit number, the number of interfering universes will be of the order of 10⁵⁰⁰ ... this staggering large number is the reason why Shor's algorithm makes factorization tractable. I said that the algorithm requires only a few thousand arithmetic operations. I meant, of course, a few thousand operations in each universe that contributes to the answer. All those computations are performed in parallel, in different univserses, and share their results through interference.

As for Many Worlds, while it strikes me as the best explanation of quantum theory I've read, the real clincher for Many Worlds would be a genuinely working quantum computer. If you end up with an answer to an otherwise intractable problem, a problem that could not be conceivably solved given the conventional resources in our universe, but could if given the resources of say 10^500 simultaneously entangled universes (entangled, should I say, as far as the computer is concerned), then Many Worlds looks much better as an explanation of what the hell is going on than simply saying that the entangled qubits merely start acting like they were going through all possible permutations before settling on the answer you want. That would be unbelievably spooky, and this is perhaps why Many Worlds fans seems to be predominantly in the quantum computing arena, where other interpretations seem more obviously bollocks.

People like Deutsch, and that admirable nutter Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, who is now examining the idea that we define our own cosmic past by observing it (COLOSSAL TOKE), strike me as the sort of scientists we want: people who get crazy ideas and pursue them, rather than careerists going nowhere with the rest of the herd.

Speaking of crazy ideas, from the people who brought you loop quantum gravity, there's a newish idea out there called Causal Dynamical Triangulation, which reveals the fundamental nature of space to be 2-d, with a fractal nature. Now that sounds fun!

* Where, should there be a Big Crunch, and if some sort of intelligence survive to that point, the contracting universe could be manipulated into being a gigantic computer whose capacity can, beyond an 'Omega' point, be infinite. INFINITE!

6 Marriage of Inconvenience (2007) - Not a great piece of art, but hugely entertaining. And we have to get the infinitely genial Bobby Au Yeung in the list somewhere.
5 Devil's Disciples (2006) - Apart from the ropey ending and ropey effects all the way through, it was cheerfully tongue in cheek. Swooning loveliness with Kevin and Bosco.
4 Under the Canopy of Love (2006) / The Seventh Day (2008) - Actually two soaps but with much the same cast so it really feels like the same one. Swooning loveliness with Bosco and Kevin.
3 1st Shop of Coffee Prince - In terms of sheer enjoyment, this Korean nonsense tops the list. But we rate class over sentimentality. Still, never has a story of love and transvestive deception been so... touching.
2 Gem of Life - Still going strong 70something episodes in. Oddly enough it's the first time I've got a sense of the sort of weird, rarefied world that rich people live in. Definitely the best HK soap opera I've watched in terms of intelligence and coherence.
1 Battlestar Galactica - What? BSG a soap? Of course! The latest episodes have gotten a bit Lost. In space. Always gripping, though. Unlikely to be equalled.*

On Sally's top list, but definitely not mine, was the Taiwanese entry Fated to Love You.

As for movies, the only HK movie I remember seeing this year is Johnnie To's Sparrow, a lyrical evocation of HK in a French film style (with a genuine French jazz score). Essentially fluffy visual style over substance, but I enjoyed greatly over other recent To films I've seen, where there's been a predominance of triads bludgeoning each other to a pulp.**

* Though it is tempting to consider what TVB would come up with if they attempted to do SF. Odds are there would be numerous uncles and aunties and restaurant scenes.
** A lot of people rate To very highly, but he's struck me as a bit second tier - or first tier in the absence of anyone better. True, he's done an immense service to HK's "indie" scene through his Milky Way production company, but often his lauded flicks (eg the Election series) feel like they're hanging on the coat tails of better HK films of the past (eg the Infernal Affairs series, all that 80s heroic bloodshed jazz).

I was delighted that they started making Futurama again, but wasn't sure about the whole 4 movies to DVD/16 broadcast episode format. Futurama doesn't really suit a longer format, and also having to wedge in different sub-plots for cutting into four episodes seemed a bit of an ask.

The first film, Bender's Big Score, was a bit hit and miss. The general tenor was "OMG, we're actually back!", but they really should have worked on the story. Nudist internet scamming aliens with 'information sniffing noses' taking over Earth... wha?

The second movie, The Beast With a Billion Backs, was marginally better - for the first 15 minutes it didn't suck! - but then the main plot about polyamory(!?) got started and it all seemed a bit crass, actually. There was a great a line that summed up the feeling: Bender decides he wants to be something, and Hermes says something like "Isn't that like the time you already did that?"

With Bender's Game, however, things are much better. The plot, around skyrocketing energy prices, is much more grounded (and, had there not been that writer's strike, it would have actually been topical), and even if the random if titular interlude in a Dungeons and Dragons parallel universe was more than a little contrived, it is at least very funny. Tellingly, it's also completely new territory for Futurama, and it felt like a return to the best episodes of the original season 3 and 4.

There's one DVD movie to come, and then perhaps, if sales work out, maybe, possibly, a further broadcast season. When Futurama got cancelled I railed at the injustice of it all. 15 seasons of the Simpsons, but only four of this??? To a large degree these DVD movies have proved that perhaps four seasons was sufficient, although it would have been interesting to consider how a fifth season, sans DVD shackles, might have turned out.

As for the Simpsons v. Futurama, I have to say I prefer Futurama. I know the Simpsons is more culturally important, and without the Simpsons there'd be no Futurama, but Futurama is pound for pound funnier, and has, even now, less baggage. And no Lisa. Perhaps Futurama shouldn't have been resurrected, but it's nice that it's still around.

Normally I prefer 20 episode soaps because they tend to be more focussed plot-wise. Longer soaps tend have what I call character drift, where in an attempt to keep things going characters morph until for example, a character who started the soap mild and easy going, may - through a series of cumulatively implausible events turn into a psychopathic axe-wielding maniac. This is the sort of trap that perpetual soaps (Shortland Street, *shudder*) fall into big time. Another consequence is that such longspan dramas end up a good deal more hysterical than is advisable. Good (or rather bad) examples I've seen of this are the first 40 episodes (the extent of our VHS supply) of 1999's mammoth At the Threshold of and Era (150 episodes all up), and 2007's unintentionally hilarious The Drive of Life.

The Gem of Life (notice a pattern here?), however, is actually extremely poised. We're now 40something episodes in and the drama has remained largely plausible. The story focusses on the three daughters of the Hong family: the eldest, Sylvia (played by Maggie Siu), is sensible but hot-tempered; the second, Constance(!) played by Gigi Lai, is virtuous but naive; and the youngest, Jessica (played by Ada Choi) is somewhat money grubbing.

Conveniently in the first few episodes, our thirtysomething trio lose their husbands (one is only using her for money, one is bored and has started a secret second family, and one has run off with the family silver to Taiwan). Their scheming mother then takes it upon herself to find new men for them, to somewhat mixed results. Sylvia briefly ends up with her boss, the somewhat shifty but generally hilarious Calvin(!) played by Bowie Lam[1]. Constance ends up with the rich and strikingly equine Terrence(!), played by Moses(!) Chan. That's all good, except younger sister Jessica has secretly married Terrence's dad Martin! Their father (played by the infinitely good-natured looking John Chiang) is offended by this latter twist, since Martin is older than him, and he doesn't really want someone older than him calling him Dad!

This chart may clarify things for you. Or perhaps not.

OK, so on the face of it this seems convoluted and silly. HOWEVER, if you were privy to some of the bizarre goings on you read, or in my case have translated for you, in HK gossip mags, all this actually seems quite reasonable.

As I say, this is the core plot, but there are numerous supporting plots that make for a fun ride, not least Terrence's insistence in rubbing up his dad's mistress-heavy magnate mate Philip Soong (the perpetually angry-looking Chan Hung Lit) up the wrong way, and Philip's unbelievably bitchy granddaughter Elise (Linda Chung) keeps haranguing the Hong sisters for being money-grubbers (which on the face of it is fair enough), and doe-eyed Bosco Wong turns up in episode 30something to win the HK version of The Apprentice!

The cast is excellent. With Siu, Lam, and the endearingly hang dog Wong Hei, it feels like a reunion for my all-time favourite soap CIB Files (2006). The script also has a similar feel to that off-beat, sophisticated soap.

The Gem of Life is supposedly TVB's most lavish, expensive soap ever, costing HK$100 million to produce. A few calculations, however, indicate that with the per-episode budget of Heroes (US$4 million), you could make 27 episodes of The Gem of Life, which seems pretty reasonable to me.

The only odious aspect of the soap is the relentless product placement. Sony Ericsson have all the phones, while jewellery shop MaBelle (got the Ill Communication?) is egregiously pushed, with the plot having Constance actually designing one of their rings! This sort of thing wouldn't cut much ice with Western viewers, but apparently Chinese shoppers are more likely to think "I gotta get me one of those!".

I have to concede though that there is a certain ingeniousness to this method of advertising. With HK soaps being assiduously YouTubed, MySpaced and BitTorrented these days (how else could I be watching a soap currently airing in HK?) your ads need to be in the screenplay itself. But even if it's good business sense, it's certainly distracting. Still, Jackie Chan had a very obvious endorsement of Mitsubishi sports cars in the mid 80s, so it would seem the Chinese entertainment industry crossed this particular Rubicon ages back. All the same, every time I see an egregious example of product being placed (prominent restaurant logos, Hotel frontages in Chingdo, casinos in Macau, etc) I still groan at the bluntness of it.

Despite the high quality of this soap, it hasn't rated very well in Hong Kong, being easily outstripped by the decidedly second rate[2] supernatural detective caper D.I.E, starring the smooth toothed Roger Kwok. I believe HK soaps are completed in advance of screening, so there's no chance of The Gem of Life being unceremoniously canned, but it certainly seems to have left the older generation of HK viewers cold - though I expect/hope younger viewers may be catching up with it in their own time online.

[1] His Chinese name is Lum Bow Yee. He has no visible similarity to the Thin White Duke.
[2] Any soap in which ghosts have slapstick comic roles has to be second rate!

It's a weird business. A lot of the stuff I'm downloading is 30-40 years old and stuff you just can't get in shops here, or would get reamed trying to purchase online (esp with the plummeting exchange rate). Also, having heard it once, there's a good chance I'll never listen to it again. So... how does that make it any different from borrowing a CD from a friend and listening to that once. Or for that matter, taping a CD borrowed from a friend and listening to that forever...

Ok, so none of this really gets away from the moral point: I'm consuming stuff that costs money to make for free, and I do believe people should be able to make money for their music.*

I tell you, things were a lot easier when the record companies owned the means of production. Well, the means of distribution, anyway.

On the plus side, I think this year I've listened to more music I haven't heard before than I have in the past 10. And there's a good chance that if I do come across CDs of stuff I have heard that I like, I will buy them. Now if only I still had a reason to go to a CD shop...

* Did I mention before how much I hate the creative commons "go on, why not allow us to take and use your creative works without you ever getting a cent for it, ever" movement? Now as a sampler, I'm all for pulling bits out of other peoples' work. But I still think they should get royalties for that. The creative industry isn't the same as the free software industry. Your work in free software will probably have benefits to your normal job as in software development. But if you work as an artist and you elect to give away your having all your stuff used for whatever, you get nothing. Creative commons, from a creator's perspective, only makes sense if your creations are not collected to your livelihood. And even if they aren't, as they aren't for me, giving away your rights makes no sense. But perhaps that's because I'm not a giving kind of guy.

Given the "re-imagining" of BSG has been for around five years you have to wonder what's taken me so long. Well, at first I thought the remake idea sucked. The original BSG, for all its velour disco charm (I remain to this day strangely attracted to the combination of brown and fawn) was a bit shit and I figured that it would be much better to build a whole new space opera from the ground up. I had heard good things about it though, so I knew eventually I'd have to give it a go, when the opportunity presented itself.

New BSG's genius lies in Ronald D. Moore, a writer who spent 15 years working on various Star Trek shows. If anything is going to teach you about the right way to make a space opera, it would have to be that sort of purgatory. Taking the somewhat flimsy plot of the original, Moore has turned it into an allegory for contemporary America - 9/11, Gauntanomo Bay, Iraq, assaults on the constitution, etc. In some ways this allegorical nature overtakes the SF element. Never have I watched a show so riddled with blatantly obvious 'our world' props (including humvees, for goodness sake!) without forgiving it as 'it's all just a metaphor anyway'.

The obvious point of comparison for BSG 2.0 is Babylon 5, a show I spent the late 1990s obsessing over. I should just spit it out BSG 2.0 is considerably better than Babylon 5*. However the tone of the new BSG and even some of the plot elements do owe a significant debt to B5. Admittedly Moore worked on Deep Space Nine, which was the Trek version of B5, but I think it would be fair to say that B5 is more similar to the new BSG than DS9 is (DS9 was essentially TNG but with coworker bitchiness).

Of course, it could equally be said that 2000s dramas like The Sopranos and Lost (neither of which I've watched, actually) may have been equally influential, providing an audience for BSG's new paranoid style.

Although I've only seen the first two seasons, I think it safe to declare BSG 2.0 to be the 'Citizen Kane of Space Opera'.

Speaking of operatic, Heroes is getting increasingly Wagnerian. The first few episodes of season 3 felt depressingly like the continuation of the truncated, rudderless season 2. Things have improved somewhat, but there's still an overarching feeling of 'baggage'. Too many characters, too much history. Series creator Tim Kring and co have tied themselves up with too many characters and too much plot. Funnily enough the best episode of the season so far was another flashback episode where everyone was behaving more normally. The charm of the first season was its grounding: ordinary people find they're extraordinary. Now everyone's extraordinary and the mundane world never gets a look in. It's got to the point that if characters started breaking out the lycra costumes, you wouldn't bat an eyelid.

Heroes is still intelligent and worth a squizz, but it's certainly not the 'Citizen Kane of superhero sagas'. Speaking of which, I've heard vague rumours that a cinematic adaptation of the Watchmen is coming next year. Not particularly excited about it, though. May watch it in 5 years' time if I hear good things about it...

* Not least the acting. I have a soft spot for Bruce Boxleitner, but Edward James Olmos, despite really only doing 'grave' and 'furious', wipes the floor with him. Mary McDonnell, likewise trounces Croatian ham Mira Furlan. And even Richard Hatch, Apollo of the old series, does much better work in his supporting role than he ever did in the original.