So there's a new memorial in Washington D.C. and that is the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the famous Civil Rights Leader from the Fifties and Sixties. I have seen pictures of it, and frankly the statue does not do him any justice. Why? Because it just doesn't look like him. I have seen pictures of the statue and I don't like it. It portrays Dr. King as standing with his arms folded and with what is supposed to be a look of determination and steadfastness on his face. The attempt at trying to make him look immovable and steadfast, however, makes him look like a Chinese war god who will kill you if you make a false move. It just isn't him.
Instead of that, why not portray Dr. King with his arms outstretched and looking like he's welcoming the observer to be with him; or show him holding the cross in one hand and the scales in the other. Dr. King was a preacher and a man of deep faith. Why can't we show that? It would do him justice if we portrayed him in the memorial as a man who wanted to welcome people and be his friends. That's what he was fighting for; for people to overthrow racism and love each other as brothers. While this won't be entirely realized until Christ returns, it's a good goal. Why not show that side of him rather than make look like some stubborn creep? And the stature of him is certainly uncanny valley.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Children's Entertainment: TV Shows
A few days ago, I found some videos of a TV show that I loved when I a very little girl. It was called Lamb Chop's Play Along, and it starred ventriloquist Sheri Lewis and her puppet companion, the eponymous Lamb Chop, a ewe lamb with black eyes. Also featured in the show were puppets Charlie Horse (a colt who had buck teeth wore a green t-shirt, pants, sneakers, and a red baseball cap), and Hush Puppy (a little grey-brown dog with floppy ears and wore a blue and red striped t-shirt). The show centered mostly around games, jokes, riddles, and whatever the main story is in the episode. Unfortunately, Sheri Lewis died of cancer in 1998, a year after the show ended. But she was very original in her work. Lamb Chop, Hush Puppy, and Charlie Horse were all very enjoyable characters with lovable personalities. Their jokes, riddles, and games are still awesome even after thirteen years.
These days, kids shows are lame. Their main goal is marketing rather than entertaining children. Dora the Explorer, Bob the Builder, various Disney products, etc., are all lame shows with tie-ins meant to be marketed. Nothing's original; it's all the same sort of idea. And all those tie-ins (*shudder*); toys, party supplies (i.e., paper plates, cups, napkins etc.), even school supplies. I remember when we had to request a cake with Lamb Chop's picture on it for my fifth birthday because it wasn't already available. But the fact that we had to request having the picture on the cake was what made it special. These days the tie-ins are so ubiquitous that I want to wring the necks of those who produce them. I'm sick of seeing Disney Princesses, Dora, SpongeBob, etc., all over the place. In fact, I want tie-ins to go away completely. The fact that tie-ins are everywhere results in the items being mundane. They are not special at all.
Now I happen to own some Barbie dolls and a few Lord of the Rings action figures plus a Legolas poster, but I don't play with the toys much anymore now that I'm twenty, but I gave my dolls their own personalities. I also like Star Wars tie-ins; but what separates Star Wars from the rest is that in Star Wars people actually get killed. I'm not saying I like it when people die; I don't like it at all. However, a lot of marketed kid's stuff does not involve much death unless the character in question is the villain; and then the death usually involves falling to one's death from a great height. In Star Wars you have people getting shot, impaled, blown up, etc., and while there isn't much blood (lightsabers and blasters tend to sear the flesh), there is still an onscreen death, and a lot of kids have seen death up close. I for one, happen to be unfortunate enough to have seen a stray dog shake one of my beloved pet rabbits to death right in front of my eyes―and when I was six-years-old.
There was no talk about death in Lamb Chop's Play Along, but that show was purely about jokes and games. That was different from the adventure/pseudo-adventure items that are popular today.
Producers of children's entertainment, if you want to just entertain, please go back to the old jokes and games deal. Please lay off all the tie-ins and stuff like that. If you want adventure stories, please show some real serious stuff like in Star Wars and Transformers. And quit trying to lightly touch on serious subjects like death. Show it onscreen as a lot of kids have seen death whether it was a pet that died or a relative. Don't dance around those subjects. Teach kids how to cope with it (I'll talk about that later). Lay off the marketing and stick with just plain entertaining or helpful.
These days, kids shows are lame. Their main goal is marketing rather than entertaining children. Dora the Explorer, Bob the Builder, various Disney products, etc., are all lame shows with tie-ins meant to be marketed. Nothing's original; it's all the same sort of idea. And all those tie-ins (*shudder*); toys, party supplies (i.e., paper plates, cups, napkins etc.), even school supplies. I remember when we had to request a cake with Lamb Chop's picture on it for my fifth birthday because it wasn't already available. But the fact that we had to request having the picture on the cake was what made it special. These days the tie-ins are so ubiquitous that I want to wring the necks of those who produce them. I'm sick of seeing Disney Princesses, Dora, SpongeBob, etc., all over the place. In fact, I want tie-ins to go away completely. The fact that tie-ins are everywhere results in the items being mundane. They are not special at all.
Now I happen to own some Barbie dolls and a few Lord of the Rings action figures plus a Legolas poster, but I don't play with the toys much anymore now that I'm twenty, but I gave my dolls their own personalities. I also like Star Wars tie-ins; but what separates Star Wars from the rest is that in Star Wars people actually get killed. I'm not saying I like it when people die; I don't like it at all. However, a lot of marketed kid's stuff does not involve much death unless the character in question is the villain; and then the death usually involves falling to one's death from a great height. In Star Wars you have people getting shot, impaled, blown up, etc., and while there isn't much blood (lightsabers and blasters tend to sear the flesh), there is still an onscreen death, and a lot of kids have seen death up close. I for one, happen to be unfortunate enough to have seen a stray dog shake one of my beloved pet rabbits to death right in front of my eyes―and when I was six-years-old.
There was no talk about death in Lamb Chop's Play Along, but that show was purely about jokes and games. That was different from the adventure/pseudo-adventure items that are popular today.
Producers of children's entertainment, if you want to just entertain, please go back to the old jokes and games deal. Please lay off all the tie-ins and stuff like that. If you want adventure stories, please show some real serious stuff like in Star Wars and Transformers. And quit trying to lightly touch on serious subjects like death. Show it onscreen as a lot of kids have seen death whether it was a pet that died or a relative. Don't dance around those subjects. Teach kids how to cope with it (I'll talk about that later). Lay off the marketing and stick with just plain entertaining or helpful.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Jaws: What Inspired It?
I'm going to assume that most people in America have probably heard of Steven Spielberg's classic film known as Jaws. This story is about a great white shark that terrorizes a sea-side community in the Northeastern United States. Brody (the chief of police), Hooper (a scientist), and Quint (a fisherman), go out to hunt this animal and succeed in killing it.
But how did we get such a famous fish story? Well, Peter Benchley, the man who wrote the novel that the movie was adapted from, read about the 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks. At this point in time, no one knew that shark could randomly attack humans and so many were making up strange ideas as to what really occured.
Here's what happened: In the summer of 1916, a shark, apparently a great white, somehow left the gulf stream. It was unable to catch its natural prey for an obscenely long time. Now great whites can go for months without eating; however, even they reach a point where they just can't go for much longer. That happened to this shark. So when it got to the New Jersey coast, it was so hungry that it attacked a swimmer, Charles Vansant, and killed him. Naturally, this caused a lot of panic. Some people denied it was a shark that attacked Vansant. Some thought it was a torpedo attack, others thought it was a mackerel. A few days later, the shark killed Charles Bruder and severed his legs. Beaches were closed as a result.
The shark also moved into a tidal inlet. Great whites don't usually do that; it's primarily bull sharks that can survive in fresh water. However, there had been a full moon at the time which made the creek saltier than ever. It attacked and killed Lester Stillwell and Stanly Fisher. It also attacked Joseph Dunn but he survived.
So that's where the Jaws story comes from. I read a book on the subject called Twelve Days of Terror. It's a good book, and the story is very interesting.
But how did we get such a famous fish story? Well, Peter Benchley, the man who wrote the novel that the movie was adapted from, read about the 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks. At this point in time, no one knew that shark could randomly attack humans and so many were making up strange ideas as to what really occured.
Here's what happened: In the summer of 1916, a shark, apparently a great white, somehow left the gulf stream. It was unable to catch its natural prey for an obscenely long time. Now great whites can go for months without eating; however, even they reach a point where they just can't go for much longer. That happened to this shark. So when it got to the New Jersey coast, it was so hungry that it attacked a swimmer, Charles Vansant, and killed him. Naturally, this caused a lot of panic. Some people denied it was a shark that attacked Vansant. Some thought it was a torpedo attack, others thought it was a mackerel. A few days later, the shark killed Charles Bruder and severed his legs. Beaches were closed as a result.
The shark also moved into a tidal inlet. Great whites don't usually do that; it's primarily bull sharks that can survive in fresh water. However, there had been a full moon at the time which made the creek saltier than ever. It attacked and killed Lester Stillwell and Stanly Fisher. It also attacked Joseph Dunn but he survived.
So that's where the Jaws story comes from. I read a book on the subject called Twelve Days of Terror. It's a good book, and the story is very interesting.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Christian Bookstore Weirdness
I had to get a pair of shoes for working in the Culinary Arts kitchen at MATC. It turns out that the shoe store my dad and I went to on the East Side of Madison is right next to a so-called Christian bookstore. So when we finished my errand (it took about fifteen minutes to do so), we went to the bookstore for a little while. Unfortunately, merely sticking a Christian label on something doesn't automatically make it Christian. If I may quote Abraham Lincoln on the subject, "If you call the tail a leg, how many legs does a cat have? Four; just because you call the tail a leg does not make it one." Likewise, calling something Christian that looks like it doesn't necessarily make it such.
While I like this particular bookstore's plain Bibles and greeting cards (the cards with the sheep theme are my favorite), their book and music selection leaves a lot to be desired. I'm going to explain why I say this, although I'll leave out the children's stuff because I didn't look in that spot.
Some of their Bibles looked a little odd. I found one that was apparently aimed at girls under the age of seventeen. It hand sequins and beads on the cover. While I like those sorts of sparkly things, I don't like them being used to decorate a Bible. First off, it makes Christianity look cute and fuzzy (which it is not), and number two, if you're going to decorate a Bible, why not use the old Medieval illuminated style? It may look pretty, but a lot of illuminated scripts tackle such painful issues such as Punishment and Hell.
The music selection is ridiculous. It is all contemporary; no Bach cantatas, no Mendelssohn's Elijah, no sacred works by Handel or Beethoven, no Verdi's Requiem, no Vivaldi's Gloria, not even anything by John Rutter. Don't get me wrong; a lot of contemporary Christian music is great (I myself happen to be a fan of the Newsboys and some of Casting Crowns songs), but a lot of Classical Music is sacred works. In fact, for many years and particularly during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, most of the music written was for church/mass. Why not sell recordings of some of the older stuff? There was also no Michael Card music. Michael Card, the Christian singer that I grew up listening to, who wrote mostly his own original tunes, and who never glossed over anything about the Bible: Listen to his song The Basin and the Towel. This was the second tune of his that I heard (The first one was "Poem of Your Life". I first heard both when I was a little girl).
Their video selection was—to put it mildly—dumb. While I haven't seen most of the movies they had on sale, there was a DVD set of movies about the Apocalypse. If there was ever a subject that people couldn't be more annoyingly presumptuous about, it's this. I first saw a film about it when I was in eighth grade. It was so ridden with glitches I have refused to watch another video on the subject. The Bible clearly says that we don't know the day or the hour, or even so much as to how it will precisely occur.
Their book selections are the worst. Most of the books were feel-good, happy-perky, stego-brained glop. Books with titles like Get Out of the Pit, Good-Bye Insecurity, etc.. No Pilgrims Progress, no Beyond the Gates of Splendor, no Let the Little Children Come, nothing about how Christians suffered for the LORD. Whenever it wasn't feel-good dumbness, it was God-Wants-You-To-Always-Be-Happy heresy. And I mean heresy. My dad spoke of this one "preacher"man whose books were being sold at this bookstore. There was a passing reference to salvation in it, but nothing about sacrifice or the cross. This man, who preaches only feel-good stuff, is a heretic. There was a book called Prayers that Activate Blessings. Just by reading the title I can tell that this is something that would make even my Pentecostal best friend Stiffelio roll his eyes. The whole idea that following Christ would result in only happiness for a person and never suffering completely ignores the fact that Jesus said that we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses every day. It's not pleasant, and crucifixion was hellish way to die, but Jesus said that we must be willing to suffer for the faith. I struggle with the concept myself, but I can't argue with it.
So to the owner of the Christian bookstore on the East Side of Madison I say this: Cut out the con job. Start selling the real serious stuff and no more of the How-To-Live-A-Happy-Life stupidity. That is, quit telling people that the Christian life is a soft fluffy pillow and start teaching about how to really live for God. And while you're at it, can you also start selling Dante's The Divine Comedy? People should really start learning about what sin looks like to God.
While I like this particular bookstore's plain Bibles and greeting cards (the cards with the sheep theme are my favorite), their book and music selection leaves a lot to be desired. I'm going to explain why I say this, although I'll leave out the children's stuff because I didn't look in that spot.
Some of their Bibles looked a little odd. I found one that was apparently aimed at girls under the age of seventeen. It hand sequins and beads on the cover. While I like those sorts of sparkly things, I don't like them being used to decorate a Bible. First off, it makes Christianity look cute and fuzzy (which it is not), and number two, if you're going to decorate a Bible, why not use the old Medieval illuminated style? It may look pretty, but a lot of illuminated scripts tackle such painful issues such as Punishment and Hell.
The music selection is ridiculous. It is all contemporary; no Bach cantatas, no Mendelssohn's Elijah, no sacred works by Handel or Beethoven, no Verdi's Requiem, no Vivaldi's Gloria, not even anything by John Rutter. Don't get me wrong; a lot of contemporary Christian music is great (I myself happen to be a fan of the Newsboys and some of Casting Crowns songs), but a lot of Classical Music is sacred works. In fact, for many years and particularly during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, most of the music written was for church/mass. Why not sell recordings of some of the older stuff? There was also no Michael Card music. Michael Card, the Christian singer that I grew up listening to, who wrote mostly his own original tunes, and who never glossed over anything about the Bible: Listen to his song The Basin and the Towel. This was the second tune of his that I heard (The first one was "Poem of Your Life". I first heard both when I was a little girl).
Their video selection was—to put it mildly—dumb. While I haven't seen most of the movies they had on sale, there was a DVD set of movies about the Apocalypse. If there was ever a subject that people couldn't be more annoyingly presumptuous about, it's this. I first saw a film about it when I was in eighth grade. It was so ridden with glitches I have refused to watch another video on the subject. The Bible clearly says that we don't know the day or the hour, or even so much as to how it will precisely occur.
Their book selections are the worst. Most of the books were feel-good, happy-perky, stego-brained glop. Books with titles like Get Out of the Pit, Good-Bye Insecurity, etc.. No Pilgrims Progress, no Beyond the Gates of Splendor, no Let the Little Children Come, nothing about how Christians suffered for the LORD. Whenever it wasn't feel-good dumbness, it was God-Wants-You-To-Always-Be-Happy heresy. And I mean heresy. My dad spoke of this one "preacher"man whose books were being sold at this bookstore. There was a passing reference to salvation in it, but nothing about sacrifice or the cross. This man, who preaches only feel-good stuff, is a heretic. There was a book called Prayers that Activate Blessings. Just by reading the title I can tell that this is something that would make even my Pentecostal best friend Stiffelio roll his eyes. The whole idea that following Christ would result in only happiness for a person and never suffering completely ignores the fact that Jesus said that we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses every day. It's not pleasant, and crucifixion was hellish way to die, but Jesus said that we must be willing to suffer for the faith. I struggle with the concept myself, but I can't argue with it.
So to the owner of the Christian bookstore on the East Side of Madison I say this: Cut out the con job. Start selling the real serious stuff and no more of the How-To-Live-A-Happy-Life stupidity. That is, quit telling people that the Christian life is a soft fluffy pillow and start teaching about how to really live for God. And while you're at it, can you also start selling Dante's The Divine Comedy? People should really start learning about what sin looks like to God.
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