So awhile ago I wrote a post in response to some nasty criticism of the show, Doctor Who, on the Daily Breakfast podcast. (I used to listen to said podcast religiously, but just got out of the habit.) The podcast link in the original post got changed when they changed their database. The correct link to the response in the podcast that provoked my rant on Doctor Who and Catholic social justice is here.

Now there will be spoilers. If you aren't current on Doctor Who to the episode that aired yesterday ("Planet of the Ood") or last season and you don't want things spoiled, you really don't want to read any further.

Still here? Sure? There are gonna be spoilers. Big ones.

Last chance.

I mean it.

So. The criticism was that it wasn't a good "family" show because of a five second kiss between Captain Jack and the Doctor. Now, this was the most unsexy kiss ever in the franchise. The characters were, in all likelihood, going to their deaths at the tentacles of daleks. If you want sexy kisses, go watch Torchwood.

Time after time (pardon the pun), there are strong pro-life themes in Doctor Who, and I'm not just talking about what passes as "pro-life" in some circles. For instance, in the weakest of the episodes in season 3, the Doctor offers to help save the daleks at the end of "Evolution of the Daleks," a race that almost wiped out his. Then at the end of "Partners in Crime," the Doctor makes the statement about the alien Adipose children that they're just kids and can't help where they come from. (They come from people's fat and were harvested off of humans.) In "Planet of the Ood," the Doctor and Donna (who I think seriously rocks as a companion) save a race from slavery (the Ood's situation echoing the Holocaust or Exodus--ironic, since it aired yesterday, during Passover.) Not to mention in the same episode a line by the Doctor snarking at humans in our century for the use of slave labor in clothing. (At which Donna snarks back, asking if he takes humans along to feel morally superior. She injects a lot of humility into the show.)

And did I mention the fact that an ongoing theme of the series is that violence never solves anything? The times when violence is used, it backfires miserably at the Doctor. ("Resurrection of the Daleks" or the ongoing story arc relating to the destruction of his planet at the end of the Time War.) And if Doctor Who isn't a good family show, then I guess it doesn't matter that the Doctor defeats the Master (a long-term nemesis from the Jon Pertwee years) by forgiving him.

The times in which someone dies, or someone gets punished, it's usually because there's no other alternative. The Family in "Human Nature" gets punished in such a way that they can't ever harm others. The Racnoss were offered a chance to live somewhere else peacefully, but brought destruction upon themselves (see also violence causing violence.) In every case I can think of since the series restarted in 2005, the Doctor either gives the bad guys a chance to leave or he offers to help them.

(As an aside, I subscribe to the view of the Time Lords in the Big Finish Audios: they aren't corrupt bureaucrats, but more evolved beings, who're a lot like Tolkien's elves: world-weary and just want to be left alone by lesser-evolved races. In the Big Finish Audios, they're mostly peaceful, do hold life to be sacred, but also are forced into making extremely difficult decisions--even at the sacrifice of their own lives--to keep time lines intact.)

My sci-fi heroes uphold Catholic social justice. How cool is that? (I'd love to see an episode with Dorothy Day or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin--would be a good excuse to have a period episode in 1920's China. I think an encounter with the Doctor would explain a lot of the trippiness and cosmic orientation of a lot of Teilhard's writings.)

if you don't listen already, Radio Boston is doing a great special on the Boston Archdiocese, and it's really well done. You can find the show here.

The podcast isn't up yet, but all the podcasts are linked off of WBUR's site. It's way more balanced than I thought it was going to be.

So I got tagged for the "your life in six words" meme. Right now I'd have to say it's "Ugly code makes Baby Jesus cry." For instance:

a1      granule p4*k1,p5,p6,p7,p8,p9,p10,p11,p12,p13,p14,p15,\
     p16,p17,p18,p19,p20,p21,p22,p23,p24

What we have here is a mess. It's the code for a csound unit generator straight out of the manual. Look intelligible? Good! It does to me, too. Now if I were looking at that code, I'd have absolutely no clue what any of the various parameters are. The "a1" is a specific instance of that unit generator. (Csound isn't really object-oriented, nor is it functional.) Granule is the name of the unit generator (pretend it's like a function), and all the bloody p-things after it are p-fields, or specific parameters that unit generator needs. (Those are set in the score file, when the actual instrument you build in the orchestra file is called.)

Now, for the sake of the Poor Souls in Purgatory, you don't have to leave your p-fields looking like that. It's largely preferable if you don't. I mean, think what it would be like, if you wrote that instrument one year, put it aside, and then came back to it years later. Or, God forbid, someone else would have to do something with it.

So here's another snippet of csound orchestra file, this time written by my chair. (Email me if you want a link to the original. It's about as elegantly-written as csound can be.)

;  fm portion

;  ratio sweep
if iratdif == 0 goto noratiomod

 kratio oscil   iratdif, iratcps, iratfn
 kratio = kratio + iratio2

 kcpsmod = icpscar*kratio   ; ratio is M/C 
 krange = abs(idif * kcpsmod)
 kdev = abs(ifmi1 * kcpsmod)

 ; fm

 kampmod oscil1 0, krange + kdev, idur, idevfunc
 amodout oscil kampmod, kcpsmod * aglfac, 1
 goto aftermod

Now, this is legible, if a lot more complex than the other example. Everything is insanely well documented, all p-fields are assigned to variables (except a few that are csound idioms, so to speak.) He's doing some fairly complicated things, but everything is defined (even the p-fields which are just csound convention: p1 is always instrument number, p2 is always start time, p3 is duration, p4 amp, and so on.) Sure, you'd have to know how fm synthesis works, but it's legible. It's got comments, and things are clearly defined. The mind boggles.

Group hug^H^Hblog?

OK, so the issue was raised about some sort of group blog. I think it's an interesting idea, so I'm opening up this post to discuss it.

1.) I think the weekly theme thing is a good idea. (Monthly?)

2.) Deadlines might be hard, when two of us are grad students.

3.) How do we keep content coming? Signups? We could get some sort of calendar set up with the google mail we'd need for it. If people volunteer to write something, then the grad students would be able to adjust for when our lives aren't so busy.

4.) What about haloscan for comments? I personally like it, and one is able to ban according to a range or by specific IP. (Which is logged every time someone makes a comment.) There's also Jeff's IP blocking code, which I think is a necessity, given some of the bloggers out there.

5.) What about divisive subjects? I don't think I'd mind seeing the occasional post on such things, but--as a big for instance--certain subjects seem to dominate the blogging world already (sex, NFP, abortion). If there could be an interesting take on the subjects, I wouldn't mind it, but all too often, it becomes a rehash of something that we've all read before.

6.) What about non-Catholic bloggers? There are a number I'm thinking of, who might have really interesting things to say (Rev. Mommy, Sandalstraps, etc.)

7.) What would differentiate our blog from our personal blogs? The best blogs I've seen--especially group ones--are those that have some sort of theme.

You can't go home again...

So I opened up my CalArts email the other day, to find a notice from the alumni organization that the music department landed a grant that exceeds $125 million and will start a DMA program, although limited in scope. While I'm elated for them, it wasn't helping my out-of-sort-ness as of late. (I get SAD...but it tends to hit when the days start getting longer.)

And then I find another blog post about how the music critic, Alan Rich, has been ousted from the LA Weekly. He's a fixture. While I may not have always agreed with his writings, I can't deny that he'd been on the LA music scene for longer than anyone. Having him in the audience, when a piece was being performed could either be a godsend or a curse, but you were guaranteed to get a review, not a bunch of platitudes. That's not to say that he wasn't opinionated against certain genres--minimalism and modernist composers, except for a select few. But you rarely find such brutal honesty--even if it hurts--in modern critics.

I was playing in a concert in which he booed the work. On the one hand, it really hurt. On the other...it was nice to have my opinions about the piece validated. (That having been said, it was the same night that I almost ripped a tendon in my arm, so my opinion of Robert Ashley's music is biased.) If you want to read Rich's review of that concert, it's here.

food for thought...

New office person brought up the point that she thought music was a forgiving art, in that it led to reconciliation between people. Need to think about that some, but didn't want to forget it.