Here's where the fun begins

I celebrated my 46th birthday on Wednesday, the high point of which was sitting down to watch A New Hope. I had decided that since it was my birthday, I should feel free to do something that was special, just for me, and thought a viewing of New Hope fit the bill nicely.

I couldn't have been more right. I was joined by my youngest padawan, who is beginning to see things in the movies that she missed a year ago. After, we looked through a Star Wars popup book that was a Christmas present from her and her mother. She still has much to learn, but she is growing stronger in the Force, and is taking her first steps into a larger world.

Since then, she has enthusiastically joined me as I watched the remaining Original Trilogy movies on successive nights. We also have plans to watch Episodes I and II before the premiere of The Clone Wars.  As my apprentice Veiltender is no doubt discovering, and as my other former padawans will one day learn, one of the great joys of parenthood, and of life in general, is sharing things that you love with your offspring.

Happily, it seems that there will be much more of that sort of things in the future. I interrupted our viewing of Jedi last night to watch a 30-minute preview of Clone Wars on Cartoon Network. Sure, it's for kids; what did one expect? But it looks like fun, both to my kid, and the kid in me. As a result, we are both looking forward to the debut this Friday (which will naturally be followed by a post on our reactions).

What are my expectations for the series? I do not expect it to be great, I do not expect it to live up to the lofty standards of the Original Trilogy. But I do expect it to be good, overall. If all goes well, it should be a fun little half-hour in the Star Wars galaxy, delivered fresh to my door every Friday night. Some of it will be funny, some of it will be bad, or juvenile, and some of it will simply be so-so. But overall, I am very happy at the prospect of getting to know a new Star Wars creation.

I must admit, I've had some help in nurturing my fandom. In the past few weeks, I have been listening to the podcasts on TheForce.Net once again. I once derided this podcast as being too much about collecting and conventions, and with a little too much name dropping.

To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, "I was wrong." I fully retract that premature judgement. The people who do the Force.Net are sincere fans, who are obviously thrilled at the prospect of new Star Wars. And their excitement is starting to fuel my own.

As a result of my current fan focus, you can expect more posts on Star Wars in the coming weeks. In addition the aforementioned review of the series premiere, I plan to follow the example of my Fellow Travelers, and throw out a few lists of my own for consideration — Saga based, of course.

I expect the next few weeks to be great fun.

Old and busted; new hotness

Anybody who knows me knows that I am an iPod freak. I love the little things. The ability to carry my entire music library with me is one of the miracles of the modern age. Forget cell phones, TIVOs, and GPS navigation — iPods are the great technological breakthrough of my lifetime.

Okay, okay — maybe they're not all that. But it used to drive me nuts when I wanted to hear a song in the car, and I didn't have that cassette with me — if I'd even made a cassette of that album yet. Now, thanks to a device the size of a deck of cards, if I want to hear something I own, I can, right then, no questions asked.

Better yet, I can use the shuffle function, and let it surprise me with songs I had forgotten about, had never heard, or didn't even know I had. This becomes important for people who, like me, tend to get stuck in musical ruts. And I don't even get me started on being able to buy just one song if I don't want the whole album, or make different playlists to suit certain moods.

But, as my niece-in-law Aleatha (whose artful blog fisticuffs versus the guards still stubbornly refuses to let me link to it in my Fellow Travelers section) put so well a few posts ago, having all this power changes things. iPods can lull you into relying solely on the shuffle mode, or just buying a song here, or a song there. People don't listen to CDs anymore as entire artistic creations; instead they take pieces her and there to suit them. Worse yet, the hidden gems you might hear on a CD you bought for one song are lost to you if you bought just that song off iTunes. Musically, the iPod can discourage exploration and patience in some ways — both crucial traits for music listeners.

But, as Spock once observed, just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do a thing. For that reason, I have resolved to return to my old ways of listening whenever I can. Lately, when the the mood takes me for a specific song, I try to listen to the entire album instead. When I became obsessed with the song "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan, I spent days listening to the entire Fumbling Towards Ecstasy CD, enjoying once again the process of cramming an entire new album and artist into my head. And most recently, when we had a little money in the family budget for luxuries like iTunes shopping, I used my cut (at my dear wife's subtle suggestion) to buy the 9 remaining tracks from Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless that I lacked (I'd bought "Airwaves," one of my favorite songs, as one of my first iTunes purchases). It is, I think, a change for the better. It certainly feels more like the natural order of things.

A final note on the subject of blog upkeep and maintenance; I enjoy posting whatever media (books, film, CDs) I happen to be enjoying at the moment, as a way for my readers to know where my head is at artistically, even if I don't have time to post. When I started, I would link these lists to sites with more information about that title; amazon.com, the Internet Movie Database, etc. I plan to continue posting the list, but I'm going to stop adding the links. They're a little more work than I like, and you guys can use Google at least as well as I can...

As usual, any thoughts, agreements or disagreements are most welcome. And, as always, may the Force be with you.

In pace requiescat, Beren

Thirty-five years ago today J.R.R. Tolkien left us. I hereby raise this virtual glass to his memory, and to the "beauties that pierce like swords, or burn like cold iron" that will be his legacy for generations yet to come. All hail!