Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Un jour un jour

One of my favourite poems by Louis Aragon, turned into a song by Jean Ferrat. After all these years looking for this song… finally there is a youtube video which allows me to hear what the song sounds like… It brought tears to my eyes!

UN JOUR UN JOUR
Poem by Louis Aragon, music by Jean Ferrat

Tout ce que l’homme fut de grand et de sublime
Sa protestation ses chants et ses héros
Au dessus de ce corps et contre ses bourreaux
A Grenade aujourd’hui surgit devant le crime

Et cette bouche absente et Lorca qui s’est tu
Emplissant tout à coup l’univers de silence
Contre les violents tourne la violence
Dieu le fracas que fait un poète qu’on tue

Un jour pourtant un jour viendra couleur d’orange
Un jour de palme un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d’épaule nue où les gens s’aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche

Ah je désespérais de mes frères sauvages
Je voyais je voyais l’avenir à genoux
La Bête triomphante et la pierre sur nous
Et le feu des soldats porté sur nos rivages

Quoi toujours ce serait par atroce marché
Un partage incessant que se font de la terre
Entre eux ces assassins que craignent les panthères
Et dont tremble un poignard quand leur main l’a touché

Un jour pourtant un jour viendra couleur d’orange
Un jour de palme un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d’épaule nue où les gens s’aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche

Quoi toujours ce serait la guerre la querelle
Des manières de rois et des fronts prosternés
Et l’enfant de la femme inutilement né
Les blés déchiquetés toujours des sauterelles

Quoi les bagnes toujours et la chair sous la roue
Le massacre toujours justifié d’idoles
Aux cadavres jeté ce manteau de paroles
Le bâillon pour la bouche et pour la main le clou

Un jour pourtant un jour viendra couleur d’orange
Un jour de palme un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d’épaule nue où les gens s’aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche

Quoi ca?


Still sends shivers down my spine.

First Love

Vous rappelez-vous…?
prouvaire_sj
Jean Prouvaire

(To think I’ve known this guy for 13 yrs now, the time it took for me to become the same age as him)
Image from episode 35 of the anime ‘Shoujo Cosette’

X-Men – some of the art

cyclops_bw

The more I see of X-Men art, the more I like it. As the issues progressed (I’m talking about the main continuity here as it dates from the 1980s, not even of any of the subsiduary universes)… the art got really nice! I like this style of drawing a lot.

psylocke
Psylocke is pretty!

kitty
And I think Kitty is my all-time favourite X-Men character. :) Glad she gets such a big role now in Astonishing X-Men.

More sariafaelwen videos:

And I just finished Mill on the Floss so I can’t help thinking of Maggie and Tom Tulliver while watching, incongruous as it may be! (Wish I could draw like the artist who did the pencil drawings in this one.)

I really like sariafaelwen’s videos! I like the juxtaposition of the images with the lyrics, it’s always very good (like how there are some wounds… that bacta can’t heal!).

Okay. Guys, around 26 hours have passed since I finished watching the new Star Trek movie, my first direct contact with the Star Trek universe. I have had time to do my research, with the aid of Wikipedia and YouTube. Thus, the inevitable has happened. (Yes, knowing me, knowing who I am, this was utterly inevitable.)

SPOCK IS MY DREAM GUY.

The classic public perception of Spock as a man of no emotion -

or is he just hiding it?

I mean, come on lah, Spock is like the SUM of many of my long term major favourite characters. He’s a Stephen Maturin who can disable the enemy with a single Vulcan nerve pinch. How cool is that? Haha. A fighting Maturin, I mean, a proper military second-in-command who not only is very smart and able to kick ass diplomatically, but physically too. A Vulcan and an Alderaanian. Maturin + Algy + Tycho = Joanna’s Dream Guy. (Not to mention he looks like Ip Man!)

Spock is Maturin with sex appeal… haha

Seriously, Biggles and Algy… A Vulcan nerve pinch would have certainly come in handy against Von Stalhein!

The Persuaders!

* * *
And to think that for my entire childhood and adolescence I always left Star Trek alone because I thought it was just some boring sci-fi series with a whole lot of insider info which would be difficult to follow or break into. My goodness, no, from what I can see on YouTube, Star Trek is hugely entertaining. Star Trek is indeed Hornblowerish/Aubrey-Maturinish, but it also reminds me a lot of The Persuaders and of Biggles! It’s exciting, and most of all it’s SO FUNNY. The characters have me wheezing with laughter sometimes. Kirk and Spock… I had no idea Kirk was SO MUCH like Lucky Jack Aubrey. Aubrey-Biggles… Without the angst of either. And all these years I wondered why no one was making any movie or TV series of Biggles. Now I see the answer was: because there was Star Trek!!

This is so FUNNY!!!

And, last but not least,

Comment by viewer TitaniumSeraph: “Oh Spock…so intelligent, yet so clueless. lol <3 "

Spock on youtube

Leonard Nimoy, long-time actor of Spock, explains how the Vulcan hand-gesture came about from his Jewish roots.

Ha, I like this tribute by deepspace :) – and this is the version that the creator subtitled with episode names to show where he got each clip from.

Clearly, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

A nice article which sums up the show quite well, in my opinion
“I often compare Kirk and Spock’s relationship to that of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin..”

A small discussion of the influence of Hornblower and O’Brian on Star Trek:
“Captain Kirk is Capt. Hornblower of the sailing ships. [He] was a great hero, and Hemingway said [Hornblower] is the most exciting adventure fiction in the human language.”
—Gene Roddenberry, from the “Star Trek” 25th Anniversary special, 1991

“If Aubrey fought Hornblower, who would win?”
“I have to wonder if Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry modeled Spock after Hornblower, rather than Kirk. Kirk is more like Jack Aubrey.”

Brothers Judd Blog
“The characters are who and what they are, fated to grow in some ways, contract in others, but never to suffer essential change. / This is, oddly enough, one of a number of similarities between the Aubrey/Maturin books, and Star Trek, which was loosely based on the Horatio Hornblower books. Genre demands that Aubrey be kept in frigates just as Kirk must be kept on the Enterprise. The familiar members of both crews must be preserved, though red coats and red shirts can both be killed off promiscuously. “

Master and Commander review by Kent Williams
“Stephen Maturin — Spock to Aubrey’s Kirk, except that, with all due respect to “Star Trek” fans, Aubrey and Maturin are the richer characters. They’ve been assigned their roles: Aubrey’s the warrior, Maturin’s the worrier, Aubrey the man of action, Maturin the man of intellection. But they also have a way of meeting in the middle, as when they play duets in the captain’s quarters, Aubrey on violin, Maturin on cello.”

Blog entry by Thomas Nephew – “Give you joy of it”
“One of the main satisfactions of these stories is experiencing the friendship of the different, complementary personalities of Aubrey and Maturin. It may be that this is one of the main paths to succeeding with extended narratives, so that we have Spock and Kirk, Holmes and Watson, Maturin and Aubrey. / Yet for all that I’m a devoted Star Trek viewer and Sherlock Holmes reader, O’Brian’s accomplishment is deeper, because the two are more completely realized characters… “

* * *

It’s a well-known fact that the creator of Star Trek was partly inspired by the Hornblower books (written 1937-1967). The movie, however (being my first real encounter with the Trek universe), had me thinking – Actually, it’s Spock who is Hornblower, and Maturin both; Kirk is Aubrey. I went to check, though – Star Trek started in 1966 (picking up exactly when the Hornblower series ended), whereas the Aubrey/Maturin series started in 1970. :) Both continued for decades though. Who knows how much influence each one owes to the other!

This is why I’ve never needed to be a Star Trek fan; I have everything in that universe by proxy already!

After a weekend of thinking far too much about Scott Summers and catching up with developments in the X-Men universe(s) during the last 6 years (a great deal of them! the graphic novel industry has been revolutionised!), all because of the Wolverine movie (the reverie was quickly brought to an abrupt end by the start of working life), I remembered the original reason that I stopped being too passionate about X-Men. (I used to like it a great deal – enough to have 2 volumes of the original, YES the old old comics, plus Mutant Massacre, and I’d dipped a little into Ultimate X-Men also, in the first days of its conception. I’ve also watched nearly all of Evolution.).

It’s because X-Men is actually very sad, too sad for me to dwell in it for too long. I’d forgotten just how sad. The deeper one goes into it the more obvious it becomes that there can never be a happy ending, because it is based on the premise that the mutants are people who’ll never fit into society. The series starts in the 1960s – as of now, in the main continuity, then, it’s 40 years later, and nothing has been achieved – characters who have stayed the course have simply been put through the mill of suffering and loneliness, broken on the wheel of moral failure, had the best ideals but could not hold to them or carry them out – again and again and again. It’s Le Morte D’Arthur, without being able to die. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

They’ll always be fighting the humans and each other, ranged variously on the sides of good and evil, and even the most iconic ‘good guys’ will have endlessly messed-up personal lives (Scott himself being one of the most depressing examples). There’s no “light at the end of the tunnel”. Like the two heroes of the Mabinogion doomed to keep a rendezvous to fight a duel with each other every May Day till the world ends, there will never be an end to the battles in X-Men, whether the epic showdowns or the personal vendettas – Scott and Wolverine, Wolverine and Sabertooth, Magneto and Xavier, the Brotherhood, the Hellfire Club, etc etc. Doomed to tread the same weary track, not just till Judgement day – but in all the different universes too! And never being able to settle into any relationship permanently, to boot. Jean, Madelyne, Phoenix-Jean, Jean again, Emma Frost… Argh… Betrayals and betrayals, and this is Scott himself, these are the ‘good guys’. I find it very depressing!

And for the same reasons I was drawn to it, just as I was drawn to Le Morte and to the French Revolution in various phases of my life – the best of ideals (it’s no coincidence that “The Once And Future King” plays such a big role in the movie X2 – it’s a perfectly fitting stroke of poetic GENIUS!), let down by human nature (and even by superhero nature). In some ways it’s even sadder when it’s superheroes who fail, and superheroes who die, and superheroes who sleep around. And of course, because X-Men are a lot harder to kill off even than knights etc, storylines play out in greater dimensions – and the emotional fallout (for both characters and readers) is a lot worse. No – who am I kidding? REAL LIFE is a lot worse, but this is simply a fictionalisation of real life – a documentary (coded as fantasy), and a warning.

Ultimately, what makes X-Men stand out as a series (or rather, a series of alternate realities) that people can identify with a lot – namely, the fact that its heroes are all ‘real people’ with flaws and failings – is also what makes it a dark series – simply because not only does it reflect a lot of the evil in the world (prejudice, rejection, the seduction of power, hate and intolerance), it also showcases the evil within people – the breakdown of communication and trust, loneliness, lust, unfaithfulness, despair and jealousy – reflected even more so in the relationships of the “good guys” – the X-Men themselves – than in those of the bad guys. It has a great deal of the ugliness of life and human nature in it – metaphysical struggles anthropormorphised – and I cannot hope not to be troubled by this. So – once again, I will have to limit my contact with it to small quantities at a time – as I did too with King Arthur, and la Revolution.

* * *
I suspect heroes like Hornblower, of course, would have gone much the same way, if he’d had the lifespan and supernatural attributes of an X-Man.

Older Posts »