Epic Fantasy still not on the big screen: Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant Trilogies

March 4th, 2010 § 0

I saw a bit of Legends of the Seeker, adapted from Terry Goodkind's books. The whole series while rather entertaining if for nothing else for the constant stream of look-alike blond action babes who trot across the screen. Can anybody actually tell the difference between Denna, Cara, Corlinda, Nicci incarnation two to name just a few? Whoever is casting the series has tunnel vision.

Much of the story seemed to be adaptations of Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenenant novels. In just one example, the Mord'Sith seem a near clone of the Bloodguard but with breasts.

Which set me to asking myself whatever happened to a film version of Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenenant Trilogies (there's three of them)? The Thomas Convenant novels are fantasy for grown-ups dealing with issues such as acceptance and exclusion via physical metaphors like lepresy. The sex lives are also very complex, exploring the breakdown of the physical elements of love over time.

Despite some heavy hitters signing up to develop such a film, no studio signed off on it. Here are Stephen R. Donaldson's own notes on the subject.

"Covenant" film news: it's over. The producers who optioned "Lord Foul's Bane" have tried everything they could think of, without success. Now their option has expired, and they have declined to renew it. Bury it now, folks, 'cause it's dead. 1/29/07

Possible "Lord Foul's Bane" film: bad news. It doesn't look good. So far, the project has been rejected by Fox, Sony, and Dreamworks. "Too dark." "Too much like LOTR." The prospective producers have decided to change their tactics. They are now hoping to get a reputable director "on board." If they succeed, this may increase the project's credibility.

I'll post more news when I have some. 2005

This past week, "The Hollywood Reporter" announced that "Covenant" is coming to the big screen. This is both premature and misleading. Here are the facts to date.

The production team of Mark Gordon ("Saving Private Ryan") and Peter Winther ("Independence Day") is quite serious about wanting to make a "Covenant" film. "Revelstone Development" has a design in place and a screenwriter on board (John Orloff, "Band of Brothers"). What Gordon and Winther do *not* have is a studio (i.e. money); and without a studio little or nothing is likely to happen. Since Hollywood basically shuts down in December, Gordon and Winther plan to start approaching studios in January.

I would like to emphasize that I have no control over any aspect of this process. After all, the film rights are held by Ballantine Books, not by me. I've met Winther and Orloff, and I'm convinced that their respect for and excitement about "Covenant" is genuine: for that reason, I'm starting to get excited myself. And I have no doubt that Revelstone Development will consult with me from time to time, and will take whatever I have to say seriously. But I have no actual power here. Nor do I want any. In fact, I've refused every offer to give me any power. I love movies; I hope a "Covenant" movie (or several) will be made; I hope it will be good; and I hope it will be successful. But I'm simply not qualified, either by experience or by personality, to make the kinds of decisions--and compromises--which are essential to film-making. And I have my own work to do, work which pretty much consumes all of my creative energy. So I'm rooting hard for Revelstone Development; and if Gordon, Winther, and Orloff ever want my opinion, I'll give it to them. But really this is all out of my hands.

More news as it develops....

P.S. I'm just guessing here; but I suspect that peculiar references to "Saturn" in "The Hollywood Reporter" are a confused conflation of "Satan" and "Sauron." I can't think of any other explanation.

As it happens, Russell Crowe has decided NOT to take on the role of Thomas Covenant, no doubt (drum-roll, please) because he considered it too taxing. Imagine my surprise. As you may know, money people typically commit to a movie, not because they like the project, but because a "bankable" star has agreed to participate. Therefore the "Covenant" film remains purely hypothetical.

I'm amazed that the Thomas Convenant series has never been made into a motion picture considering how far near the bottom of the barrel Hollywood scraped for its Lord of the Rings lookalikes in the boom years. Or that it hasn't been picked up for a television series.

Too sophisticated?

Ann McAffrey's Dragon series made it to the big screen on a large scale. Even latecomer to the screen Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy made it Sci Fi channel in 2004. Surely somebody has to get around to the Thomas Covenant Chronicles eventually even if they end up simplifying and whitewashing some of the darker elements.

Paolo Fresu and Ralph Towner at Porgy & Bess: Chiaroscuro tour

March 2nd, 2010 § 0

Superb trumpet play, along with quiet mastery on the guitar. Your ears are there for Paolo Fresu but Ralph Towner makes it all possible.

I bought the Chiaroscuro CD while I was there. Surprisingly the CD is just a shadow of how Fresu and Towner play live together. This is one rare occasion where the live performance clearly outranks what the musicians can do in the studio. I guess you had to be there.

Porgy & Bess artistic director Christoph Huber was very animated after the show as well. It was one of the top five concerts I've ever attended there in five years.

Paolo Fresu on trumpet 3
Paolo Fresu on trumpet
Paolo Fresu on trumpet 2
Paolo Fresu on trumpet
Paolo Fresu on trumpet
Paolo Fresu on trumpet

Paolo Fresu and Ralph Towner at Porgy & Bess: Chiaroscuro tour Continues »

Vienna State Opera Ballet: John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet

February 11th, 2010 § 0

Cranko's Romeo and Juliet fills a peculiar place between the historic pomp of Leonid Lavrovsky's original and the very dancy minimalism of Grigorovich's later classic. The brown and black costumes seem a little dusty and remind me of the seventies. But the seventies unbelievably enough are back in fashion so perhaps the retro brown look is already trendy again.

How does Staatsoper handle this middle of the road Romeo from 1962? With relative aplomb. The orchestra did seem a little undermanned or thin for Prokofiev's magnificent score in comparison to performances I've heard in Moscow and St Petersburg.

On the dance front after two years of Harangozo's whip hand, the corps de ballet handles their part without a false step. Standardising on the Russian norm has left a very svelte and elegant corps.

Rafaella Sant'Anna, Ketevan Papava and Liudmila Trayan are all fun as the Montague good time girls. Thomas Mayerhofer and Alexandra Kontrus were fine as the Capulet parents but not extraordinarily stately. Still when Alexandra Kontrus is carried away with her son Tybald one's heart breaks for the bereaved mother.

Vienna State Opera Ballet: John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet Continues »

Elio Gervasi – Geckos: The Extraordinary Ordinary

February 11th, 2010 § 0

Elio Gervasi is the great master of movement among the Vienna choreographers. His work is usually musical, the light design exquisite and artistic direction provoking. Gervasi has a talent to take simple daily objects and make them special.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl
Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Kenia Bernai Gonzales Leoni Wahl

And so it is with Geckos.

Here we meet in the rehearsal hall on Laxenburgerstrasse. The ceilings are a bit lower than in a full theatre, the seating more limited. But no matter, Markus Schwarz's light makes the space bigger, pouring light through blinds set up between a side room and the main rehearsal space.

Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla
Leoni Wahl Salvatore la Ferla

The décor is a single red armchair which serves as a place for lovers to sit together, for one lover to miss the absent one and for another as a cliff from which she considers self-destruction.

Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Leoni Wahl psychological tightrope
Tanz Company Gervasi Geckos Leoni Wahl psychological tightrope

Gervasi is working with three dancers here, all excellent. The long and handsome Italian Salvatore la Ferla, the compact Kenia Bernai Gonzales and longtime muse Leoni Wahl.

Elio Gervasi - Geckos: The Extraordinary Ordinary Continues »

Kaffeesiederball 2010 | Nokia N97 Mini High ISO Photos

February 11th, 2010 § 1

Warning: schizophrenic weblog post on the way.

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 01
Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 01

The Kaffeesiederball together with the Opernball are Vienna's two best balls. It's a very close call which is better. I'd say the Kaffeesiederball with its 15 live orchestras is more fun, while the Opernball is more glamourous. But the Opernball is fun too, and Kaffeesiederball has glam aplenty. The contrast between both and banal balls like the Artztball (Physicians' Ball) are striking.

Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 02
Kaffeesiederball 2010 Nokia N97 Mini high ISO 02

Usually I have some great shots of the Kaffeesiederball but due to an arm strain back at the Austrian Fashion Week which turned into RSI, I'm off the main camera with full lens setup except for special occasions. Quite nice as it means that I can enjoy evenings without trying to capture fleeing time through a lens. Just for fun for a few minutes in the middle of the evening I pulled out the Nokia N97 mini and tried some snaps with it. Definitely not a low-light camera, but I can see that if one caps ISO at 400, the pictures are not at all bad.

Kaffeesiederball 2010 | Nokia N97 Mini High ISO Photos Continues »

How Aperture 3 Will Make Your Photos Better: Curves

February 11th, 2010 § 2

I always liked the ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) development module. Lots of controls with curves applies at RAW level. After opening a RAW image with a curves adjustment, there was often not much too work left to be done on it to get a great image.

But when the first great Aperture-Lightroom wars broke out a few years ago, I found myself seduced by the great workflow in Aperture. You are always grading your images and can always improve them with a quick flick of a switch. I also had a terrible experience with trying to move a Lightroom library which flat out died on me. Aperture libraries were  more easily portable. I never cared for either Apple or Adobe's attempts to get me to keep my images in their internal proprietary folders. Both companies quickly realised that photographers didn't want their images locked away somewhere and so lightened up on the ingesting techniques.

So after losing ratings on a few thousand images in Lightroom, I ended up using Aperture and really enjoying the interface which was very similar to Final Cut Pro. Still almost every edit session I used Aperture I would be frustrated by the absence of curves. Sure I found ways to work around no curves by getting very good at manipulating Apple's excellent exposure and enhance features. One could get very close to curves by working with exposure, black point and contrast. In an extreme case, I could always take an excursion to Photoshop.

But the absence of curves was always a wrench in speed and precision of editing. Curves are the single holy grail of subtle and powerful colour and tone editing. Just set your white balance and start working on your curves. By the time curves are set right, there should be very little left to do in a photograph, as long as you are staying in the realistic category.

Adobe knows the importance of curves too, which is why Adobe Photoshop Elements didn't include curves at all until the latest version and why even now curves in PS Elements are crippled. Curves cannot be applied as an adjustment layer (i.e. non-reversible) like Levels, nor do you have direct control over the S curve. At $700 for Photoshop with $300 updates almost every year, working curves are a very expensive proposition with Adobe.

With Curves now in Aperture, there is a pro level alternative to Adobe and the Photoshop world. You can do all your development in Aperture and only need resort to a bitmap editor for minor tweaks. Workflow is much faster with non-destructive curves built right into Aperture.

Time for some show and tell. Here's a couple of sample images to show you just how much curves can do for you.

Version one: developed using the Aperture 2's Exposure and Enhance. Lots of issues with digital noise due to pushing too hard. I ended up having to make the left side of the picture too hot to get enough light on the dancer's face.

aperture 2 no curves no dodge
aperture 2 no curves no dodge:
(dancers Salvatore La Ferla, Leoni Wahl, Kenia Bernal Gonzales
in choreographer Elio Gervasi's Geckos, November 2009)

This picture has an exciting look but the middle dancer's face is much too dark and there is a lot of noise on the wall in the other dancer's shadow. The male dancer's pants end up becoming the center of interest.

aperture 3 with curves dodge
aperture 3 with curves dodge

In Aperture 3, with a quick non-destructive dodge and burn, I am able to brighten the middle dancer's face and cool off the male dancer's pants. The curves allow me to improve contrast without turning the photo cartoony or generating large patches of image noise.

Apple Aperture Exposure Enhance
Apple Aperture Exposure Enhance

Curiously, the first result required a lot more tinkering. There are eight separate variables in play in the Exposure and Enhance panels to get close to the single intuitive panel of Curves.

Apple Aperture Curves
Apple Aperture Curves

Here's another example. In this case the first image is the unprocessed RAW image (just use the M button for Master to see it). The second image is modified only with curves. Well not quite, I liked what I was seeing so I cheated a bit and added a quick vignette and burned the sky out behind the model to keep the center of focus on her eyes.

Canon 5D image unprocessed Apple Aperture
Canon 5D image unprocessed Apple Aperture

The unprocessed photo is attractive enough but pale and bled out. The sky is too bright and there is too much to distract from the model's face. Her eyes and skin don't have as much pop as one would wish.

Image after curves Apple Aperture
Image after curves Apple Aperture

Here's how simple that fantastic effect in curves is, with just a big of vignette and burn to improve the core enriching contrast from curves.

Curves Vignette Burn Apple Aperture
Curves Vignette Burn Apple Aperture

How was performance in Aperture 3 on a Macbook Pro 17" 2.5 GHz with Nvidia 8600 512MB graphics card on a 30" monitor?

My photos were on an external FireWire 800 drive with the library kept on an internal 7200 RPM drive with 300 GB of free space. My library includes about 13,000 images and is 50 GB by itself, i.e. mid-size.

  • Throughout the import and upgrade process, terrible.
  • With full-size previews on, terrible.
  • With previews and the absolutely foolish Faces function* completely turned off (generated once at project import), great.

Apparently people who have the integrated graphics chips like the 9400 are suffering now. Typical Apple marketing tricks - stay away from the low end computers if you want to use their pro apps. If you want to save money buy the previous generation high end at end of line, as they will have to support the flagship computers for a few generations (those computers belong to their best customers).

Apple's Aperture 3 can turbocharge your turnaround as you can get much better images much faster with curves than any other control. Unlike Adobe, pricing as usual with Apple software is very reasonable. $200 to join the game, $100 to continue if you've already been playing.

Additional Resources

For another take on Curves for natural light photographs and the new tools in Aperture be sure to watch Apple's video interview with Chase Jarvis.

* Faces is a junky gadget and should not be included or even turned on. Most pictures do not show a face full front-on. And if you can't recognise the faces in your own pictures, your problems are more serious than not having the latest version of Aperture. Time to see a senility doctor.

La France: Liberty, Fraternity, Egality or Totalitarianism, Fratricide and Genocide

December 16th, 2009 § 2

French like to make themselves out as the home of liberty, fraternity and egality.

Alas, a short delve into their history indicates more totalitarianism, fratricide and genocide.

Let's start with the Huguenots. At the wedding of the Huguenot King Henri Navarre (later Henri IV) with the sister of the French king Margaret Valois, the Huguenots were lured into Paris in August 1572. There the queen mother Catherine de Medici set the mob on them after the royal wedding. Several thousands murdered in the streets and drowned in the Seine within days. Twenty thousand protestants murdered in Paris, another fifty thousand in the rest of France within the next two months. Nice way to celebrate a marriage.

Subsequently the Protestantism were outlawed by King Louis XIII in the Edict of Fontaineblue in 1685. Persecution carried on until 1787, by which time there were only 200,000 from an original peak of 2 million Huguenots left in France. In fairness, they weren't all murdered or forced to convert to Catholicism. Many Huguenots managed to escape into exile.

With hardly a chance to catch their breath, the Parisans organised the French Revolution which resulted in up to 40,000 deaths by guillotine alone. The number of innocents to perish in that number is likely in the range of 90%.

But they weren't done yet. After the Revolution, the seaboard province of Vendée refused to give up Catholicism and to participate in conscription rose against the Revolution in 1793. (Ironically enough the cities of the Vendée like la Rochelle were Huguenot free cities and strongholds before the Huguenots were all starved and murdered in La Rochelle, a city of 27,000 reduced to 5,000 in 1627 by Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII.)

In the Vendée, the Republican French decided to raze the place. At Nantes, mass drownings took 4000 lives in 1793. Another 200,000 of a population of 800,000 were to die at the hands of the Republicans. General Westermann reported to the National Convention in 1794:

There is no more Vendée, my republican fellow citizens! It died beneath our sabers along with its women and children. I have just buried them in the swamps and woods of Savenay. According to your orders, the children were trampled to death beneath the hoofs of our horses; their women were slaughtered so that they couldn't bring any more soldiers into the world. The streets are full of corpses; in many places they form entire pyramids. In Savenay we had to make use of massive firing squads because their troops are still surrendering. We take no prisoners. One has to give them the bread of freedom; however, mercy has nothing to do with the spirit of the revolution.

Curiously, the Israelis argue that the measures they are taking against the Palestinians are no different from the French did to one another and the British and Americans and Spanish to the Native Indians.

If the Israelis had gotten back to Jerusalem a hundred years earlier, they would have had a point. But apparently, Israel was created in response to save people from genocide not to advance its cause.

Surely we can do better now. Apartheid in South Africa was dissolved with a minimum of bloodshed.

The Romans were constantly murdering one another's armies and razing the southern cities of Italy.

Civilisation seems to be another word for mass bloodshed.

It is a blessing to live in decades of relative peace, within secure countries and set borders. We should appreciate it more. It isn't often this way. Bloody wars, civil and external, appear to make up about half of human history.

Staffordshire Hoard: Not a Mercian Mystery but the Treasure of Treachery

December 15th, 2009 § 2

Amazing what historians can't figure out. The guys who wrote the Keys to Avalon would like to attribute the construction of Offa's Wall to Romans despite all evidence to the contrary. Offa was the king of Mercia which has since become Middle England. He built a wall between Wales and his realm.

A more recent discovery from the Mercian period is the magnificent Staffordshire Hoard. Historians can't figure out why such a rich deposit was buried in the ground and forgotten. In the deposit, there are largely purely martial items. Sword pommels, sword hilt fittings, shield fittings.

The blades and shields themselves are not among the treasure.

staffordshire hoard treasure
staffordshire hoard treasure

It's pretty clear what happened here. It was a band of soldier assassins, probably sent from a rival duke who wailaid the bodyguard of another thane. Their mission was covert - they could not be seen with items which identified them as the murders. So they immediately removed the fittings, stuck them in some kind of bag of cloth or leather and buried them in the ground. They marked the spot to come back to recuperate the items much later, when their identification as the murderers would cause no grief.

Staffordshire Hoard: Not a Mercian Mystery but the Treasure of Treachery Continues »

Tea, Wine and Tannins: Drink Tea and Rejoice

December 9th, 2009 § 0

Over the years, I've been blessed with not often being ill. My endurance levels have been high.

Lately, a dear friend of mine has been trying to persuade me that too much tea is unhealthy, especially overly steeped tea. During nearly a decade in Moscow, I became accustomed to good Indian tea Russian style: that is to say, you create a tea concentrate which you drink all day long. Each cup you dilute to taste.

In short, over my life, I've drunk a lot of tea, much of it strong and filled with tannins. I've also always liked red wine especially cabernets (full of tannins) and natural apple juice (filled with tannin). I think it was my way of my body protecting itself.

My friend has gone so far as to say that tea drunk does not count as liquid, as it is a diuretic and actually dehydrates. To my relief, the British Nutritional Foundation insists tea is not:

"In terms of fluid intake, we recommend 1.5-2 litres per day and that can include tea. Tea is not dehydrating. It is a healthy drink."

Indeed, tea might have played a principal role in keeping me healthy and wealthy. Well at least healthy.

One shouldn't cite Wikipedia too often in regards to health, but here we go this once on the subject of tannins:

Tannins may be employed medicinally in antidiarrheal, hemostatic, and antihemorrhoidal compounds

The anti-inflammatory effect of tannins help control all indications of gastritis, esophagitis, enteritis, and irritating bowel disorders. Diarrhea is also treated with an effective astringent medicine that does not stop the flow of the disturbing substance in the stomach; rather, it controls the irritation in the small intestine.

Tannins not only heal burns and stop bleeding, but they also stop infection while they continue to heal the wound internally. The ability of tannins to form a protective layer over the exposed tissue keeps the wound from being infected even more....

Tannins can also be effective in protecting the kidneys. Tannins have been used for immediate relief of sore throats, diarrhea, dysentery, hemorrhaging, fatigue, skin ulcers and as a cicatrizant on gangrenous wounds. Tannins can cause regression of tumors that are already present in tissue, but if used exessively over time, they can cause tumors in healthy tissue.

They have also been reported to have anti-viral effects. When incubated with red grape juice and red wines with a high content of condensed tannins, the poliovirus, herpes simplex virus, and various enteric viruses are inactivated.[36]

Tannins can also be used to pull out poisons from poison oak or from bee stings, causing instant relief. The tannins help draw out all irritants from the skin because tannin is an astringent that tightens pores and pulls out liquids.

Tea gets even more credit, with lowering stress levels, reducing cognitive impairment, inflammatory bowel disease, bactrial and fungal infections, anongenital warts, stroke, depression and even bad breath. I want some of that.

Apparently green and white tea have a lot more of the good effects of tea with fewer of the side effects. So I will try to stick to a cup or two of black per day but as many cups of white and green as I please.

What is true is that as tasty as coffee is, it's more or less an amphetamine, with very few long term beneficial side effects. I will start to avoid coffee again (I've only given in to coffee in the last few years as the coffee is so good here in Vienna, but it will be considered an unnecessary and occasional luxury again, while tea will take the place of beverage of honour.)

So I'm going to enjoy not having a heart attack, reduced stress levels and lots of good cups of tea and great glasses of wine. It's wonderful when it turns out the things you enjoy are things which keep you well.

SND Premiere: Everest from Mario Radačovský

November 12th, 2009 § 0

The first thing you see these days when you walk out on the main alleé in Bratislava, is a huge advertisement across the front of the opera house for an ultra modern show. The image is of a woman looking up, surrounded by what appear to be mystical creatures. The name of the show: Everest.

I was certain that the very sexy poster - all over Bratislava - was for a visiting performance, an updated Lord of the Dance. But I was very wrong. Everest is home grown.

After two years in Bratislava, Slovak National Ballet Director Mário Radačovský has staged his second full length evening work. His first Warhol was a strangely mainstream look at an artist who was a determinedly avant garde. I'm not sure if others ever made more sense of it than I was able. Warhol was one of the first productions to grace the new stage of the Slovak National Opera (SND) and did properly fill the grandiose new space with its three story decorations.

Solists And Choir in Everest Ballet of SND

Soloists and Choir During Everest Ballet of SND in Bratislava:
multimedia plays a huge role: notice the large projection

photos: Ctibor Bachratý for SND

With Everest, Radačovský has set his sights far higher. Everest seeks to communicate four stages of existence: life, death, after-life and resurrection. But the theology is definitely more pagan than Christian. Everest begins with the crawling and fluttering of Lemurans, the half-animal half-man inhabitants who antedate Atlantis.

SND Premiere: Everest from Mario Radačovský Continues »

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